Themes

Raw Notes

• The state always tries to make a society legible, or arrange the population in ways that simplify the typical state functions of taxation and conscription.
• Making something more legible allows it to be more manipulable
• Forestry example:
  • The state used to view forestry from only one lens, the revenue it could generate from timber. But forests had many other uses, and even other ways to generating revenue. But it was only valued as a timber generating machine. What about all the other life that was there?
  • We use vocabulary to indicate how we value things in the natural world and their legibility to us. Plants that can be used in commodity markets become “crops,” and those that don’t become “weeds”
  • Trees that can become sold become “timber” and those that can’t become “underbrush”
  • The state imposed the logic of the vocabulary on the reality of what was observed of the forest. But it narrows the scope of the view for a specific purpose
  • Then we get better at understanding a standardized tree size and timber yield to accurately predict revenues of a forest. By narrowing the view to just the value of timber, the state paradoxically is able to take broad view of conclusions about the entire volume of the forest
  • Then we tried to create by planting and operating, a forest that was easier for state employees to assess. Then this abstraction of what the forest was became the reality.
  • The state didn’t even have to see the forest then, all they had to do was read the charts and they could understand what it was.
  • Systematizing also made it easier to sell timber to logging companies
  • And the simplicity of the new forest also allowed it to be easier to experiment on, altering elements like different gears of a machine
  • Obviously, this couldn’t be completely systemized. The human and natural factors intervene
  • But the forestry did increase timber output of Prussia, and became the standard for forestry across the world
  • Obviously the lack of diversity ultimately destroyed the ecology and made it vulnerable to certain pests. As a result, forest hygiene was created to bolster diversity and work around the impoverished habitat of the monocrop forest
• The lesson here also is in the danger of dismembering an exceptionally complex and poorly understood set of relations and processes in a system in order to isolate and enhance a single element of value, in this case the commodity of timber
• Absolutist France in 17th C mostly taxed indirect taxes, that is excise levies on salt and tobacco, tolls, license fees, and the sale of offices and titles were favored bc they were easy to administer and required little to no info on land holdings and income. And since gentry and clergy were exempt from tax, most land was just not taxed at all. So wealthy commoner farmers and the peasantry shouldered the burden. The main direct land tax was rarely paid at all and most that did pay only paid 1/3 of what was owed. So the state often had to rely on extreme measures for revenue to cover shortfalls for wars.
• Local practices of measurement and landholding were illegible to the state in their raw form. They could not be assimilated into an administrative grid and would have to either be transformed or reduced into a convenient shorthand
• Local units of measurement - how long until the next village? Instead of miles, it’s 3 rice cookings. A vague measurement can sometimes convey more info than a statistically precise one. Farmland measured by “days of work” rather than exact acreage
• Metric revolution rly came about bc 1) increased market based commerce required clearer standards, 2) the enlightenment in France made standers and measurement culturally desirable, and 3) Napeoleon’s empire building basically enforced the metric system across a large area of Europe
• The illegibility of food supply was probably the greatest barrier to the early modern state. Bc they had poor measurement, the govt often acted slowly or in appropriately in the event of a food shortage
• The third estate argued for centralized units of measurement and weight in their grievances during the French Revolution. Interestingly the first and second estates aired no such complaints
• Metric system became a means of administrative centralization, commercial reform and cultural progress. Culturally it expanded rational thinking and commercially it made land more productive and created a tax code
• Local practice never fully conforms to state theory
• Reconstruction of Paris was also a public health measure. 37000 horses were in Paris in 1850 and their collective shit as well as antiquated sewers and unreliable water supply made the city a cesspool for pestilence. The city had the highest death rate in France and was most susceptible to virulent epidemics of cholera, which killed 18,400 people in 1831, including the Prime Minister. The new city was definitely healthier, at least for those that weren’t kicked out.
• Creating surnames was another method of the state to create legibility, specifically of its people. China’s Qin dynasty did it as early as 4th C BC.
• But for the most part, the surname is a particularly modern phenomenon
• Western European Jews had no tradition of last names. Napoleonic decree in 1808 mandated last names. Austrian legislation of 1787 as part of the emancipation process required Jews to choose last names. In Prussia the emancipation of the Jews was also contingent on adopting surnames.
• Many people to immigrated to the US did so without surnames, Jew or non Jew
• One of Jane Jacobs’s breakthrough observations was that visual order (in the form of specific building types and designs) in city planning didn’t translate to functional order. To see complex systems of functional order as order and not as chaos takes nuanced understanding that Jacobs elucidated in her book. Jacobs was a functionalist. She asked, what function does this structure serve and how well does it serve it. The order of a thing is determined by the purpose it serves, not by a purely aesthetic view of its surface order. This is in stark contrast to Le Corbusier who firmly believed that the most efficient forms would always have a classical clarity and order. The physical environments he designed had a simplicity of form but didn’t actually serve the needs of his inhabitants, like in Brasilia. Visually, Jacobs’ mixed use streets look like chaos, but their surface chaos is actually the order of a complex system