Continuing his career-long project of exploring domination, resistance, and the conceptualization of the state, James Scott again raises critical questions, introduces new phrases to the scholarly vocabulary (for those who've grown tired of "hidden transcripts"), and brings a fresh reading to the very idea of improving the human condition in Seeing Like a State. This work journeys into the mind of the high modern state, implicitly reinforcing Scott's longstanding assertion that the state can be meaningfully understood as a power situated in opposition to clearly-dominated subjects. The book moves carefully through concepts of state simplification and legibility, high modern histories of social engineering, and a concluding discussion of the nature of knowledge and governance. In often flawless scholarship, Scott reminds his reader of the human and material consequences of state simplifications and the vast social experiments conducted in the name of improving the human condition. While I find Seeing Like a State an engaging, meticulous, and characteristically provocative work, its methodological assumptions and approach raise fundamental questions about knowledge and state power, and the endeavor of historicizing them.
Scott's characterization of the interplay between scientific knowledge and what he calls metis - practical, experiential, local knowledge - is important, but incomplete. Scott observes that authoritarian high modernism undermined the dialectic between these two categories of knowledge and links this undermining to a political struggle for hegemony by scientific experts and their institutions. This is not a particularly new observation; innovations in the philosophy and practice of science are a direct response to such critiques. An assumption that extensive informal, metis-like (or in ecological terms, "chaotic") processes underlie both social and non-human systems is increasingly accepted as a starting point for social and natural scientific inquiry. In this sense, a growing recognition of metis is fundamentally transforming "science" itself, blurring the contemporary science-metis dialectic that is much clearer in Scott's historical lens. It is critical, though, that in recognizing and articulating the historic and contemporary interplay between codified, scientific knowledge and non-quantifiable ways of knowing - metis - one is sensitive to the form of the dichotomy Scott sets up; I find this dichotomy somewhat lacking:
Scott's notion of metis is the wisdom of the naturalist posed to the ecosystem ecologist; it is the sense of one whose everyday life is at the center of knowledge and practice as compared to the outsider who would intervene based on universalist assumptions and laws. I do not disagree with Scott's illustration that authoritarian high modernism systematically neglected metis by ignoring it or relegating it to a realm of superstition and backwardness. I take issue, rather, with the implied and explicit historiocity of the concept of metis as a form of knowledge, particularly as it relates to human interaction with an environment: in order to gain the "practical wisdom of long experience" that characterizes metis, a prior longstanding relationship with a particular place or landscape is required. In this way metis seems necessarily deeply place-based. In an era of explosive human mobility, migration, displacement, and resettlement, I wonder where to place the non-scientific knowledge of geographically shifting social groups. I fear that a close reading of Scott's metis denies practical knowledge, at least in terms of landscape interaction, to mobile people. This is particularly striking in the many cases where ecological reasoning is employed to erase migrants, squatters, or nomadic people from a landscape they are argued to be incapable of "sustainably managing." Scott could be clearer about the historiocity of metis and its implications for those he discusses elsewhere as "people who move around." This point relates to a common observation that Scott's characterization of metis echoes perhaps too closely Spencerian notions about human beings and survival.
As Scott himself predicts early in the book, I find it difficult to read this historical work without extending its conceptual framework to late modern capitalism. The analogy is almost too clear: global capitalism can be read as an agent of homogenization and standardization of markets, its purposes served by legible societies of consumers whose locality is secondary, unimportant, and even an obstacle. An unfettered free market is shrouded in the language of progress, represented as the ultimate savior of the human condition; yet, counter voices charge that capitalism and its agents are behind significant human miseries erased, unheard, or accepted as the price of material progress. It is in this frame of mind that I find Scott's concluding vision - a liberal democratic state upheld by metis-friendly institutions - disappointing. In separating economy and politics, Scott leaves consumer society unproblematized. The ideal political structure he describes is legitimized mainly because it borrows from models that are already familiar, easily digested, and accepted. The possibility that a political economy that truly supports metis-phyllic institutions has yet to be imagined is rather disappointingly sidelined.
From an anthropological perspective, it is impossible to ignore that Scott has presented his own deeply totalizing critique, making history legible to the reader while losing the nuance, complexity, and "chaos" that underlie processes like the rural social engineering discussed in Part 3. Why, for instance, does Scott admittedly bracket many of Lenin's writings? One wonders at the flattening of history that goes into the very enterprise of describing the flattening of society.
Perhaps the most important criticism that has been raised about Scott's work - both past and present - is the problematic distinction between the state analyzed as an entity "out there" and the complex set of historical and cultural processes that bring a state into being in the first place. In beginning his inquiry at the point where the state is an established Other to clear subjects, the evolution of state structure and the complicit actions of agents creating it get lost, blurred, or distorted. The state as a historicized problem of complicity and compliance - a cultural idea - is a very different entity (process) from the state as an a priori machine. While Scott's work - the current book and several important works that preceded it - has been integral to our understanding of the multidimensionality of domination and resistance, it nevertheless adheres to a rather one-dimensional meta-script posing the repressive state at the top and the oppressed at the bottom. A more nuanced theorizing of history and the state recognizes repression as contingent and wobbly, and agency as central to experience and engagement with power. Philip Abrams' work on "structuring", as a response to the more structural equation Scott outlines, speaks rather directly to this conceptual problematic.
James Scott clearly illustrates the power of the state as machine; his conceptualization, however, limits our capacity for understanding the state as social process created in human action and sustained through complex networks of power, negotiation, and constant refashioning. It is this latter model that acknowledges the human capacity to both see and be seen 'like a state.'
