Legibility as a Paradigm

I.

Thomas Kuhn’s contributions to Philosophy of Science revolved around the idea of paradigms: operating structures within which a particular scientific field performed “normal” science until or unless the paradigm began to run into a growing number of insurmountable problems to its ontology. The field would enter into a crisis and could then only be saved by a paradigm shift into a new paradigm, under which normal science could once more thrive. 

The relevant part of Kuhn’s work to my thoughts here is the difficulty, perhaps even impossibility, of talking across paradigms. Within a particular paradigm, science proceeds as a matter of “puzzle-solving”, where pieces are arranged and fit together in an attempt to construct a coherent understanding. What’s important is the local connectivity of the pieces together as well as the “correctness” of the global picture that emerges: any new addition must align with established components of the paradigm and simultaneously fit into the broader structure of the paradigm. The problems that crop up in the course of normal science map onto the idea of puzzle-solving: either you have missing pieces, or pieces that you haven’t found a place for, or pieces that you’re quite certain don’t fit anywhere (these are potentially anomalies that can accumulate into a crisis for the current paradigm). But the problems of any one paradigm often fail to refer once we have a new paradigm. Kuhn calls this the phenomenon of incommensurability: a Newtonian physicist who struggles with the behavior of objects moving near the speed of light doesn’t have the language or background that a modern physicist does with his understanding of relativity. Even in cases where both paradigms make similar claims about what we should observe about reality, they have different ontological commitments that often differ in incomparable ways.

II.

James C. Scott famously introduced the concept of legibility in his book, Seeing Like a State. The book explains how various “high modernist” thinkers are inclined to shave down the complexity of the world around them, finding and enforcing “legible” patterns that fail to function as well as the previous emergent and natural order.

Here’s an illustrative example, accompanied by explanatory exposition from Lou Keep (apologies for the long quote!):

The urban center of an old city is a hopelessly chaotic slum. The denizens can navigate it without trouble, but without proper street names (or even streets) it’s much harder for the state to get a proper reading. Now, the government was elected on the promise of better healthcare for all, and they’ve partially delivered. There are more hospitals, and they’ve increased the number of ambulances. But people in the densely packed center still aren’t getting proper aid. Ambulances keep getting lost, or they’re losing critical minutes because of the labyrinthine old streets, or unmarked buildings and houses make it impossibly difficult to determine who is actually in need and which apartment they’re in.

The citizens themselves don’t understand this – they grew up in there, so it’s obvious who’s where. They try and explain this to the city, but it’s based in highly specific information and historical details that don’t make sense to outsiders (go left at Greg’s place, right at the spot of the Best Marble Game of All Time, straight through to what-used-to-be-the-old-pool-hall-but-isn’t-now, etc.). But the ambulance dispatch and the state use a different model: they view things from the perspective of a map, which is only reasonable given that they have a much wider area to concern themselves with. They need some ordering mechanism that will mesh with those of other districts.

At first, the state just puts random names on the streets. This helps some, but the residents still colloquially go by the old terms they know, which causes problems for dispatch. Moreover, most of those alleys are still too narrow for ambulances to get through. The state decides on a more radical project: it’s going to plow through what it can and build new, ordered streets based on a grid. While they’re at it, they decide to make one commercial district and one residential district – it’s just a better system.

Now you have a pretty resentful populace. “But why?” The local economy has been disrupted, for one, even if no one else sees it. Turns out that a lot of the interweaving between commercial and residential was actually necessary for those local businesses – not to mention the young people who hung around getting paid to help move a thing here or there when the shipment arrives. But that’s a State’s reason. More pressing to the residents is the loss of their local knowledge, what we might call “folk monuments” that create senses of identity. Most pressing is their loss of power.

This last one is important in two ways. The first is both obvious and not. A large part of our powers lie in our familiarity with surroundings. When those have changed, we lose a lot of the familiarity that brings us that. Here’s an example: an old man has occupied an apartment for his whole life, and he’s maintained his self-sufficiency due to familiarity. He’s always been able to hobble to the store (right down the way) without aid, and when he does need it the same neighbors are always there. But the new plan places a commercial zone some ways away from the residential, and the new neighbors aren’t familiar to him. Moreover, the old store would always stock [thing] because it knew the old man and expected his business. But the new one has to deal with everyone, so it diversifies in a way that can’t suit his needs. The old man has suddenly become dependent on someone else (in this case, probably the state itself). Weird, small effects like that happen all over. “Small” is the key word, because they do look meaningless in the grand scale.

The second only reveals itself when things get really bad, so let’s work up to it.

To fund the ambulances you have to tax. That’s always been a problem in the slums (who lives where? how do you tax?) but suddenly you find that it’s much easier to get quantification. It’s a small amount, but people unused to paying taxes are suddenly hit with it. Not to mention, many of them are poorer in total because the local economy was interrupted. At the same time the district looks wealthier on average, because the few who successfully transitioned to the commercial zone now have a larger (alien) clientele. They employ less from the neighborhood, and the money is shared less often (the old man no longer has anyone to tip a dollar for helping up the stairs), but from the outside everything looks better. Either way, the citizens get angry, and they still aren’t seeing the benefits, and all of their local knowledge has been messed with, so they riot.

We all know the cliched MLK quote: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” I think this is true, but a better way to phrase it in Scott’s terms would be: “A riot is the language of the unintelligible.” The citizens may be rioting over taxes, but it’s not really that, and if they could even explain “why” they were rioting, it wouldn’t make sense to outsiders. “They tore down the old-pool-hall!” is actually a better summation of it than “taxes”, but that just seems… well, weird and petty. After all, to understand why that’s important, you need to have an intimate knowledge of the history and economy of the society that no one outside it has. Even that old man’s complaints look odd. He lost autonomy, but he’ll probably live longer because of the ambulances. A statistician might be able to look at all the confounders and draw out these explicit economic effects to determine what side they fall on, but even that wouldn’t really get to the heart of it. The heart of it is a lot more psychological, to use a word that mostly fails to capture it.

Either way: the slums riot. Suddenly you find that your ambulance routes are highly efficient for combating these riots. In the old slums, citizens had all the power. They knew where to run, and how to dodge out of the light, and who would hide them, etc. Now it’s in the hands of the police. And, of course, the police force costs money, but luckily the new names and addresses make it much easier to tax the citizenry, so taxes go up to combat the riots from the taxes going up. But to ensure that citizens pay those taxes…

One wanted to establish efficient healthcare, but to do that you had to create a state apparatus that was able to control people enough to develop it around them. It’s about ambulances, technically, but somehow ambulances and cops and increased taxes and housing development all blended into one process, and every single part is required to make the others work. If you stopped just one, the whole project is lost, and all you did was cause damage with no benefit. At a certain point, it starts looking weirdly humane to accelerate it, if not just to finish and get to the benefits. But, of course, accelerating it can mean exacerbating the bad effects. And it definitely means removing more power from the hands of the populace.

Now, I intentionally chose (what looks to me) to be a highly ambiguous example. You have a statistically wealthier and healthier populace, but it’s also somehow more immiserated. And a lot of that immiseration was do to these weird cadastral surveys that failed to account for how the location actually worked, and even more had to do with the way that implementing that synoptic knowledge deprives people of their own powers. But still… I can easily see arguments for both sides.

Scott is not writing anything as simple as “Big Government is always awful“, and he’s not a libertarian (well, not in the way we commonly use that term). But let’s imagine that we were debating this: very quickly it would turn into a numbers game (number of lives saved by ambulances vs. economic displacement effects vs. cost of development vs. tax burden vs. [etc.]). Make no mistake: that’s the language of the state. It might be right in this instance (depending on your politics, of course), but it’s not something that a rioter would understand. There’s a much more ambiguous power disparity that isn’t getting mentioned, because how would you put that in state language? Moreover – that doesn’t seem to be very relevant here.

This is all, in a nutshell, a process of legibility. That word is going to come up a lot – it’s Scott’s answer for why things always seem to go awry. Everything from naming the streets, to assigning numbers for taxes, to replanning a city to be intelligible to an outside eye (how the state sees, of course), is part of it.

Legibility is a way of viewing things, but it’s also a tool to change things. That tool is essential in state craft, for reasons that should be obvious, and its necessity is the reason it keeps happening.

III.

Society today seems to be operating under the paradigm of legibility. We approach complexity with the goal of conquering it and creating legible models to approximate thorny reality. Whenever we encounter a portion of the territory we can’t understand (yet), we make an imperfect map of it. 

I don’t really see a huge problem with this, so long as we recognize that these maps can be improved to more closely match reality. Legibility seems to primarily be a problem when the people trying to make things legible fail to recognize that reality is not as simple, or cannot be as made as simple, as their preliminary understanding of it.

If we view legibility as just one paradigm, we might wonder what paradigm might follow. I think the goal of understanding the world is so baked into humanity that that aspect of the legibility paradigm will likely accompany any paradigm shift, but it’s very possible we grow to embrace more bottom-up attempts to arrive at better maps of the territory.