Saturday, December 12, 2009

On the Shelf: Seeing Like a State

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

First, let it be said that Scott's book is brilliant. Second, this is a book that has been reviewed numerous times before, so a lot of what I say won't be anything new.

Seeing like a State
is a wide ranging and very convincing analysis of the shortfalls of state-initiated plans for development. It begins by setting forth what Scott views as the significant common features of several major disasters in 20th century development projects. It proceeds to examine specific cases, such as the construction of Brasilia (and modernist city planning generally), Soviet collectivization, and villagization in Tanzania. As a point of departure, Scott posits two key points: that these projects were motivated largely by genuine humanistic and egalitarian impulses, and that they were horrific failures on both human and economic terms. It was refreshing to read a text on the failures of state planning that didn't degenerate into either tortured left-wing apologetics or an exultant paean to unrestricted capitalism. However, like other reviewers, I feel that there are definite flaws with the book that a responsible reviewer should address.

Scott asserts that the four key ingredients in a truly disastrous development project are:

  1. A modern state with the administrative capability to monitor its population, including their wealth and patterns of land distribution.
  2. A state motivated by a high modernist ideological framework that posits a linear view of social/technological progress ultimately leading to a rationally ordered society
  3. An authoritarian state that is capable and willing back up its high modernist vision with force
  4. A moribund or otherwise inert civil society that is incapable or unwilling to challenge these designs.

The initiators of such large scale development projects (in either their colonialist, nationalist, or socialist forms) tended to have an unshakable faith in technocratic solutions to human problems, a faith that leads to a rather dim view of local forms of knowledge. Indeed, for enthusiastic modernizers such traditional folkways are "the father who must be killed:" ridden with backwardness and inequalities. Though some, like Mao, might praise popular initiative ad nauseum, it was mainly for initiative shown in carrying out projects mandated by specialists in the central government.

Such disregard for the existing social capital of the very people they were trying to uplift is, in a large part, responsible for high modernism's tragic downfall. Rather than building upon popular knowledge and resources, typical high modernist solutions attempted to start fresh with new collective farms, cooperative villages, or model neighborhoods/workplaces. The problem inherent in such solutions is that they are usually based on radical simplifications of what human communities need in order to function, reduced to criteria easily measured by state authorities. And while such criteria (nutrition, sanitation, shelter) are vitally important, huge components of communal solidarity and social bonding exist outside its scope. Finally, top-down development projects usually overlap significantly with classic government concerns such as tax collection, conscription, and census taking and when push comes to shove these bureaucratic interests take precedence over the plan's democratic or egalitarian aspects.

There is a great deal more to this tome; more than I can realistically cover in a single entry. I'm planning on hitting a few other points in a later entry. But before ending I wanted to note what I saw as the book's flaws. Due to the book's staggering breadth, coupled with its relative brevity, it sometimes read more like an extended polemical essay rather than a scholarly text. And while I appreciated its multidisciplinary focus, the jumps between topics were sometimes disorienting, and the analogies connecting them somewhat lacking. The comparison between diverse urban communities and polycropped agricultural practices, for example, was evocative but somewhat insubstantial. Given the book's focus on agrarian policies, the chapters on urban planning (though fascinating!) seemed almost extraneous.

Those caveats aside, this is a fucking awesome book that I would recommend to anyone with a significant interest in 20th century history, public policy, economic development, or agriculture. Whatever your intellectual beverage of choice, you are likely to find something to your liking within.

When I told one of my professors about the premise of Seeing Like a State, she asked me to see if I could apply its analysis to No Child Left Behind. In my next entry I will attempt to do so.

Friday, December 4, 2009

OLD ITINERARY; SCRAPPED OR ON INDEFINITE HIATUS

Which, to be honest, it already was. Given, I mean, that I hadn't updated it for a couple months.

So, in the interest of ultimately getting a master's degree in teaching, here is a new itinerary connected to my Holes and Goals project for my Content Investigations class. There is some overlap with the previous itinerary.

100% official new reading itinerary:

1) The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control -- Ted Allen
2) The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo America -- Ted Allen
3) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism -- Benedict Anderson
4) Planet of Slums -- Mike Davis
5) We are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa -- Ashwin Desai
6) Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream -- Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck
7) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison -- Michel Foucault
8) Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar -- David Graeber
9) The Death and Life of Great American Cities -- Jane Jacobs
10) The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution -- C.L.R. James
11) The Image of the City-- Kevin Lynch
12) Township Politics: Civic Struggles for a New South Africa -- Mzwanele Mayekiso
13) Dialectical Urbanism: Social Struggles in the Capitalist City -- Andrew Merrifield
14) Culture and Imperialism -- Edward Said
15) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed -- James C. Scott
16) Gender and the Politics of History -- Joan Wallach Scott
17) The ANC Underground in South Africa, 1950-1976 -- Raymond Suttner
18) Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing -- Michael Taussig
19) The Making of the English Working Class -- E.P. Thompson
20) The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces -- W. H. Whyte


Currently, I've read a few of the books on this list, and hope to continue to make plodding progress toward reading them all. The selection might seem arbitrary; why are these books different from all other books? Several of them relate to my growing interest in urban theory: an interest in how urban spaces work both from a spacial/personal perspective and a political/economic perspective. Others are about South Africa: I have not studied African history very extensively, and South Africa seemed like a good place to start. Others are classic historical works which I either have not read or could stand to be more familiar with. There are continuities (which I will elaborate on) between these books and those I read over the summer.

On another level, I generally find a broad and eclectic survey of books more fun than a focused study of a single topic. In reading such a jumble of books, intersections and commonalities inevitably emerge that would not have been immediately apparent. It is precisely these sorts of intersections that are the most intellectually rewarding.

Next Entry: "Why these books?" continued

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Itinerary #1, Draft One

On Critical Theory:
Rabelais and His World -- Mikhail Bakhtin
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections -- Walter Benjamin
Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, and Autobiographical Writings -- Walter Benjamin
Ways of Seeing -- John Berger
Society of the Spectacle -- Guy Debord
Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary -- Samuel Delany
Longer Views: Extended Essays -- Samuel Delany
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison -- Michel Foucault (Reread)
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity -- Michel Foucault
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed -- Paulo Friere (Reread)
Selections from the Prison Notebooks -- Antonio Gramsci (Reread)
Empire -- Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri (Reread)
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire -- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center -- bell hooks
History and Class Consciousness -- Georg Lukacs
Theory of the Novel -- Georg Lukacs
Women, Resistance and Revolution -- Sheila Rowbotham
Culture and Imperialism -- Edward Said
The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays -- E. P. Thompson

On Cities:
The Arcades Project -- Walter Benjamin
Planet of Slums -- Mike Davis
The Death and Life of Great American Cities -- Jane Jacobs
The Image of the City -- Kevin Lynch
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed -- James Scott
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces -- William H. Whyte

On Villages:
Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village -- Paul Friedrich
Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance -- James Scott
Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing -- Michael Taussig
Europe and the People Without History -- Eric Wolf

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Tentative Notes toward an initial itinerary

Rabelais and His World -- Mikhail Bakhtin
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections -- Walter Benjamin
Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, and Autobiographical Writings -- Walter Benjamin
Ways of Seeing -- John Berger
Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary -- Samuel Delany
Longer Views: Extended Essays -- Samuel Delany
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison -- Michel Foucault (Reread)
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity -- Michel Foucault
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed -- Paulo Friere (Reread)
Selections from the Prison Notebooks -- Antonio Gramsci (Reread)
Empire -- Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri (Reread)
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire -- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center -- bell hooks
The Death and Life of Great American Cities -- Jane Jacobs
History and Class Consciousness -- Georg Lukacs
Theory of the Novel -- Georg Lukacs
The Image of the City -- Kevin Lynch
Culture and Imperialism -- Edward Said
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed -- James Scott
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces -- William H. Whyte

Basically, right now it's just a grab bag o' theory. If ya got suggestions, leave them in the comments.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Summer Reading: The Initial Foray

Goals: Expand my knowledge base in several areas deemed deficient, including contemporary Middle-Eastern literature, urban theory, Marxian anthropology, and US History. Also, I like science fiction.

Results: This summer, I read the following books:

Bodies of Work -- Kathy Acker 
The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States -- Paul Avrich
The Last Unicorn -- Peter Beagle
The Mafia of a Sicilian Village: 1860-1960 -- Anton Blok
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles -- Mike Davis
Neveryona -- Samuel Delany
Time Square Red, Time Square Blue -- Samuel Delany
Four Novels of the 1960s -- Philip K. Dick
Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che -- Max Elbaum
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 -- Eric Foner
Neverwhere -- Neil Gaiman
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a 16th Century Miller -- Carlo Ginzburg
The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist -- Emile Habiby
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression -- Robin D. G. Kelley
The Story of O -- Pauline Reage
Salvation Army -- Abdellah Taia

Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia -- Michael Taussig
Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century -- Eric Wolf

Evaluation: I read a lot of books. No huge revelations, but I feel much more informed about past attempts to create interracial left-wing political movements in the US, the social structure of peasant societies, and why certain cities are the way they are. I'm thinking about posting my thoughts on some of these books later on. If you have a request for a review of a particular book, holla at yer boy.