The (Il)legibility of Smoke
(Some more thoughts on two books I talked about in this post.)
James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State and David Stradling’s Smokestacks and Progressives, while tackling related topics, could not be more dissimilar in approach. Scott’s book is a sprawling history of a type of phenomenon—an account of different iterations of a problem that covers multiple continents and the entire modern era, using a strong theoretical base to tie seemingly unrelated events. Stradling, on the other hand, limits his scope, limiting his book to popular smoke abatement movements in the US between the 1890s and 1940s. Stradling’s book is virtually absent of any underlying theoretical base—his book is primarily a chronicle of the periodic and seemingly unrelated interruptions, upsets, and setbacks that the movement suffered over that time. Despite their widely divergent approaches and subject matter, the two books can be seen as working quite well in dialogue, each book shedding light on what may be perceived as deficiencies of the other.
Stradling’s book is an excellent chronicle of events, thoroughly researched, and gives the reader a good understanding of the history of the argument for the abatement of coal smoke. The question he often ignores, however, is why—why do the leaders of the movement for smoke abatement change over time, from progressive women’s organizations to public health experts to engineers? Why was the movement, in all its various forms, ultimately so unsuccessful—unable to abate coal smoke right up to the time that coal lost dominance and primacy as a source of fuel? Why were certain popular movements for abatement at least initially successful, while others were so quickly struck down by courts and local governments? Why were cities willing to manage sewage and drinking water, but unwilling to see smoke similarly, as a health concern that needed to be managed by governmental works and interventions? Where any answer to these questions can be found in Stradling’s account, they are singular, contingent, and local. Stradling demurs from proposing any great unifying themes that connect these events, or to give a systemic logic to it all.
This is where the strong theoretical basis of Seeing Like a State becomes a very useful tool in deepening one’s reading of Stradling. One of the key concepts in Scott’s book is that of “legibility.” As the needs and duties of the state become larger and more complex, the state necessarily begins rationalizing. The subject, the land, and the state’s resources all must be structured and reordered according to some rational method. In doing this, the state must put primacy on some things, and ignore others. Simplifications are born. The next logical step is to transform reality to more closely conform to the cartographic/statistical simplification, in order to better measure and increase efficiency. In examples from early scientific forestry to the reordering of land use within villages, Scott demonstrates that this pattern is reiterated as the modern nation state is born. Early scientific forestry purged the forests of elements that were not seen in terms of economic value, preferring single-crop forests where the trees were lined up like soldiers, and robbing the environment of necessary biodiversity. Land tenure patterns were completely reordered in order to make them more easily comprehensible from great distances—ensuring more accurate tax collections, perhaps, but also removing localized patterns that tended to be more diverse, productive, and sensitive to the local terrain.
This is the process of the state rendering the illegible legible. Illegible groups, institutions, and patterns are localized, contingent, and lack uniformity, and are thus confounding to modern statecraft, which requires a large economy. The process of rendering legible—of simplifying, ordering, and making uniform—allows the state to rationally tax, assess, and predict its assets and its subjects. It is this process that is the essence of “seeing like a state.”
Of course, it’s not just states that see in this manner. In fact, Scott’s Yale colleague John Lewis Gaddis, in his book The Landscape of History, has noted that the process of simplification, rationalization, and rendering legible is actually quite close to the work of Historians. More to the point, any large organization or corporation must do essentially the same work in order to maximize profit or efficacy. In the era that Stradling is analyzing, the great industrial oligopolies of the time certainly sought to rationalize and make uniform the resources within their domain, including their employees. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s notion of Scientific Management is quite similar to early Scientific Forestry as Scott describes it. The movements of the bodies of workers, like the forests of eighteenth century Germany, were seen as unnecessarily complex and therefore wasteful. Taylorism was an attempt to rationalize the process of production, to simplify it. The worker was the subject of the corporation, almost as much as he was the subject of the state. And the gaze of both sought legibility.
We can see, then, that there were multiple “states” viewing the problem of coal smoke. While they have different and sometimes competing interests, they were united in a modality of seeing, in their inability to comprehend multifaceted complexity and preference for the legible. The problem of coal smoke in the progressive era into the 1940s, however, was multifaceted and complex. The propensity of the progressive women’s groups who began the campaign for smoke abatement to intermix health, ecology, economic cost, and quality of life concerns in their rhetoric, while it probably came closest to the complex truth of the issue, likely only served to undermine their arguments. Likewise, while it is always hard to put hard numbers to environmental health concerns, the disagreements among the medical community as to the effects of smoke on health, positive or negative, undercut the arguments of medical “experts” who took up the issue. In a particularly unfortunate irony, the discovery of the bacterial origin of tuberculosis seems to have been a blow to this movement that sought goals that would have only contributed to overall respiratory health.
Looking at the issue of coal smoke like a state—or like a corporation—the maneuvers made to counter and set back the smoke abatement movement were quite rational. Discounting the unquantifiable (illegible) moral and quality of life issues, and setting aside the still-debated public health concerns, smoke abatement didn’t seem to warrant the same type of radical intervention as the issues of sewage or potable water had not long before. The economic cost of the “smoke tax” on cities with high levels of coal smoke in no way matched the economic benefit brought by coal-based industry. Legislation enabling cities to regulate emissions and fine the worst polluters allowed for the potential of an offset of sorts to the (legible) cost of over-pollution. Likewise, the gradualist approach toward decreased emissions—and thus increased efficiency—made the most economic sense, as it led to eventual improvement and greater productivity without overburdening industry with regulation to a degree that it would harm the overall economy. As Scott repeatedly illustrates, the simplifications implicit to the process of rendering activities and processes legible often leads to lacunae in comprehending those activities—omissions that can cause changes in problem-solving strategies, and horrible miscalculations.
If Scott’s book can be used to provide a richer theoretical understanding of the events Stradling describes, what can Smokestacks and Progressives tell us about Seeing Like a State? Briefly, I think that there are three main insights that can be made about Scott from reading Stradling.
First, as I discussed before, you don’t have to be a state to “see like” one. Scott limits his discussion to the modern nation-state. While this suits the purposes of the book well, the insight into the manner in which the leaders of large, complex institutions render complex events legible can certainly be applied to corporate management. In Stradling we see the state frequently siding with corporations, even allowing corporate-appointed overseers to police corporate activities. There is an ontological symmetry at work here. The economic mode of perception that favors legibility and rationality is at work in both the state and corporate interests.
This leads directly to the second issue raised: one of the four conditions Scott contends are present in all the worst examples of state-sponsored social engineering is the inability of civil society to resist such plans. Stradling’s account of a popular movement repeatedly thwarted by state and corporate interests brings to mind a rather harrowing question: in our current state of late capitalism, with the multiple and multivalent forces of the state and corporations both “seeing like states,” as it were, is there any hope for civil society to actually force change when necessary? Do we possess the ability to resist social engineering that has the power and money of both state and corporate interests behind them? Stradling’s agents, the proponents of smoke abatement, don’t offer much hope. But it begs the question.
Finally, and on a similar note, as we watch the futile struggle of the smoke abatement activists, one must ask about the efficacy of the sort of “metis” that Scott celebrates in confronting the state, which is incapable of such fluid, contingent modes of knowledge. While the progressive women’s groups rhetoric proved ineffective, it was so in part because it reflected the sort of complex reality that the rationalist mode of seeing preferred by the state and the corporate interests. We watch the movement’s proponents snake, parry, and dodge—practicing a discursive metis, as it were. Ultimately, however, this constant movement only resulted in a repeated reframing of the discourse into terms that more and more closely resembled that of the state—and even still, it was ultimately not effective. Once the ontology inherent to “seeing like a state” reaches a sort of critical mass, are contingent, complex modalities of knowledge simply outmoded and ineffective?
Historical Atlases a Go-Go
I've looked at a bunch of Historical Atlases over the last couple weeks. I'm just going to comment on four that seemed especially worthy of comment, for good or ill.
The first one I looked at was an atlas I discovered this summer-- Donald Cole's Atlas of American History. Published in 1963 and created by the head of the History Department at Phillips Exeter, the book has a lot to recommend it. It's a great account of major events in American History, and has a decent amount of textual explication of events-- I'd say the book averages about 65% text and 35% maps. In this way, the book was the easiest of those I looked at to "read" in a traditional, linear prose manner. It reads like a traditional introductory American History textbook, with a strong eye to the geographic. Given the author's profession, working at a prep school, I'd guess that's exactly the text's goal. And it works quite well.
For those of us who may be somewhat past the need for a high school History text, however, the book still works. The very strictly chronological ordering of the book and the clear, easily legible maps make it a useful reference when you want to re-orient yourself within a particular area of the US at a particular time. It's also, given its age, a primary source of its own: I found it fascinating to look at the "contemporary issues" at the end of the book and find the partitioned nation of Vietnam and maps of states that had integrated public schools.
A note on design: this book is straightforward with few embellishments and a very limited palate of black, white, grey, salmon, and brown, which makes it quite nice as far as quick reference and fast comprehension of visual data. There is one embellishment that I really enjoyed, however: the edges of each page that contains a map are scored with a grid, much like on a map, with A, B, C, etc. along the top and 1, 2, 3... along the side of the page. While not strictly functional, I really like this small stylistic embellishment, as it seems to me to serve to remind the reader to place primacy on geography and space: this is not merely a heavily-illustrated textbook of American History, it's a book that places History within geographic context.
The next book I'd like to discuss is Dan Bahat's 1983 Carta's Historical Atlas of Jerusalem. What really struck me about this book is the use of scale. While the book covers 4000 years of history, it is limited to one relatively small city. Because of this, the book is able to give street maps of the same area over time, and to provide floorplans of buildings of note. I found this especially cool, because it comes closer to the everday understanding of space and place that I think is so important when looking at the experiences of historical actors. You learn a lot more about everyday life from looking at the layout of a particular city and its inhabitants than from looking at a map of the US where each state is colored according to its percentage of black mayors.
The book is easily the wordiest of those I've looked at, when you look at the use of page-space, it's hard not to notice a 75/25 word-to-picture ratio. And while the clean, sparse visuals of Cole's American History felt simple, clean, and utilitarian, this atlas felt dry, dull, and sparsely illustrated. On the positive side, however, one thing I appreciated was that the maps of the city in different ages were overlaid on a topographical map, creating a good sense of changing urban geography over the (comparatively) unchanging landscape.
By far the weakest atlas I looked at was the 1986 Harper Atlas of World History. The book manages to be visually overloaded yet dull-- I can't quite account for how they managed that paradox.
The bottom quarter or so of the book is a timeline, which reflects an incredibly incongruous view of time, as something that skips back and forth and constantly slows. the same amount of space that accounts for 500 years in the early sections of the book accounts for maybe twenty years toward the end.
Likewise, there are strange lacunae in space and time all over the place. Virtually everything before the Common Era takes place in the middle east, a region that then disappears until the late nineteenth century. Chinese history takes the form of eruptions in the fabric of time, always requiring the reader to jump back five hundred years and get caught up to the present, before panning back to the West for another hundred pages. Native Americans are seen migrating to this hemisphere in the earliest maps, which are more "natural history" than history proper, accounting for the origin of man and the like, and then nothing happens on this hemisphere until 1492. The only maps of Indian lands are those that depict them in retreat from arriving Westerners. Apparently nothing happened outside of Egypt on the continent of Africa until the rise of European colonization.
Maybe "World History" is too broad a topic for a single-volume atlas. I don't doubt that. But that's just an unforgivable design flaw, not an excuse. And it's hardly the only design flaw.
Finally, I'd like to talk about my favorite of the bunch-- Derek Hayes's Historic Atlas of the United States (With Original Maps).
Where the first two atlases I've discussed were rather colorless, and the Harper atlas was eye-bleedingly badly designed, Hayes has obviously paid the most attention to design. Each page is colored a muted tone, giving the entire experience of reading this book a more aesthetic feeling. Where the other books used contemporary maps to show historical data, this book uses the maps from the historical moment being discussed, allowing you to look at the impact of cartography and historical actors' understanding of geography. Competing land claims in Colonial America look, in Cole's book or the Harper atlas, like simply conflicts over domain. Hayes's use of historical maps reminds us that part of the issue was that these colonizers didn't fully understand the land, that they didn't completely know what they were claiming.
The use of colored pages, the careful attention to legible page layouts, and the use of historical maps all come together to create a very different "reading" experience-- one that is closer to the experience of entering a salon-style gallery than the prose-reading style of the first two atlases above, or the visual confusion of the Harpers disaster. The eye scans, goes from map to map, settles here and there. It is a book that rewards browsing, flitting about, leafing through time and space.
This is not to say that the book is all style and no substance, or that it represents an aesthetization of map at the expense of real information. First off, one must repeat the constantly-heard but only occasionally heeded maxim that visual data is still data, and that a preference for visual data over the written word can still be information-rich. But the design also does something quite clever to overcome such logocentric critiques. The captions to accompany the images are much longer and more in-depth than those in any other historical atlas I looked at, and are positioned near, but not simply below, the maps in question.
Thus the experiencing of reading the book takes on an almost fractal quality. One's eyes at first flit about, finally settling on some map that possesses some eye-catching quality-- a "strange attractor" if you will. From there, curiosity piqued, they quickly land on the caption, and are given a contextualization of the image. With that new information, you may go back to the image, and your eyes eventually move onto another nearby image-- one that is related in some way. You read the caption to this new map. Eventually, your curiosity may be satisfied, or you may move on to reading the prose essay that is woven throughout the section.
The effect is nonlinear, and quite pleasing. It's a choose-your-own-adventure atlas, made up of three nested layers of "essays," in a specific hierarchy. First is the visual essay made by the juxtaposition, relations, placement, and contents of the maps. The secondary level is a micro-essay of commentary on the visual data, which takes the form of the maps' captions. Finally, you have the layer of the prose essay within each section.
A section that embodies this reading experience quite well is the two-page spread on "Seas Where They Ought Not Be." The title of the section is superimposed over a map of California as a large island-- a persistent and curious phenomenon I'd definitely noticed on old maps before. From there the eye sails down to the Hudson Bay Company's map of the continent as almost a large archipelago, then diagonally up to the depiction of the Sea or Bay of the West, a large inland sea that consumes most of the Pacific Northwest. One then begins to wonder what's going on here, and reads some of the captions, followed by looking at the less visually striking maps, going to their captions to see why they're included, and finally settling on the interspersed essay for a broader view.
The fonts of the captions and the prose essay are significantly different enough to easily distinguish between the two, and the subtle cream color of the pages compliments the colors in many of the aged, yellowed maps. Certain images bleed off the page, creating visual interest before allowing the eye to move on to the next image, and also creating a method of cropping to the most interesting elements that has a bit more flare than a simple square crop. The placement of the maps is not a simple grid, thus creating visual interest, but remains simple enough to avoid the confusion engendered by the Harper atlas's cartographic and pictorial clutter.
I really like this one, if you can't tell.
Finally, while I've limited my discussion to books with "Atlas" in the title, I'd like to mention Whitehall and Kennedy's Boston: A Topographical History, a book that uses a lot of visual data to compliment a textual interpretation of the changing topography of an urban landscape. It doesn't fit neatly into the tradition of the Atlas, as the images are secondary to the text, but it integrates both quite well, and is a great example of how geography itself can have a history.
There's always good news coming outta Google…
Online citation techniques are a pain. None of them work perfectly, they often require special html hacks or the like, and getting shiny things like rollovers to work for that mythical little old lady out in the middle of nowhere who still uses dialup and IE 2 is pretty much impossible.
But hope springs eternal for those of us who hang on every word that Google Labs decide to put out into the ether. The newest bit I've come across is especially exciting-- a way to include direct HTML links to scans of out-of-copyright books using Google Books.
This is great. You want to encourage people to check your quotations and assertions? You can now provide a quick and painless link. I think there's a lot of possibilities for teachers who use class-based blogs with their students, too.
I'm a little reluctant to get too happy, as Google's not been the best at recognizing the out-of-copyright status of certain texts, especially (and especially annoyingly) things that were written and published initially to be in the public domain, but may not be 100 years old, like certain government documents, or things published by those who eschew copyright on moral grounds. But it's good news, nonetheless, and I can't wait to play with it and see what I can get out of this improved functionality to Google Books.
(Thanks to the folks over at Blogging Pedagogy for making me aware of this...)
Backdating…
I've been neglecting my poor blog. I feel bad for it.
As I intend to keep this blog going for a while, I've decided to import my posts on different readings for my Historiography course last semester. They may not represent my finest work, but I hope that-- at the very minimum-- keeping them somewhere easily findable will be helpful come oral exams.
Steve Stern, The Sectret History of Gender
I have to say, I’m somewhat surprised that this book didn’t seem to invite more controversy in my historiography class...
The issue of agency among the oppressed is one that has come up several times in discussions for this class, and has proven quite contentious each time. Some in the class welcome models that give agency to those in oppressive situations or in states of subjection, and others find it to be overly optimistic, pie in the sky thinking, that can be used as justification to blame the victim.
Given that, when I realized that our reading for this week was a book about gender relations in which the author discusses domestic violence at length, and that Stern posits that degrees of contestation and complicity can be found on both sides of the gender line, I expected a flurry of responses to show up on WebCT on the
topic.
Maybe it’s a stroke of good fortune that this book comes on the reading list in the midst of the end-of-semester crunch. I wasn’t really looking forward to a tempest in a teapot. That said, I feel that Stern, throughout this book, presents through his example a very well-made argument for the position that even in the face of oppression, violence, and denial of many civil or human rights, people find ways to exercise their own agency and negotiate their situations.
These negotiations don’t end in ideal solutions—indeed, in the very first case study offered in the book, it ends in manslaughter. Nevertheless, the book’s thesis is founded on the belief that infrapolitical response and
negotiation can be found even in dire circumstances—and that in some examples at least, these resistances and contests for the meaning of hegemonic discourse can lead to favorable (if contingent and based on compromise) results.
Perhaps the argument being couched in domestic relations is part of the reason for the lack of controversy—people may be more comfortable understanding that certain degrees of negotiation occur within the family or household, where they may be less comfortable ascribing agency to (to use examples from a previous conversation) black slaves or people in concentration camps. However, if this is the case, it’s somewhat surprising as the book is throughout haunted by the specter of violence against women.
Another possibility is that it’s simply the strength of Stern’s argument, coupled with his seemingly exhaustive cataloging of case study after case study. I think this is one of the book’s main strengths. It becomes much harder to dismiss the notion of agency among subjugated women when the author couples strong theory with powerful, personal accounts of various individuals and the ways they dealt with, contested, toed the line of, challenged, or even rejected dominant notions of masculine superiority and the power of paterfamilias.
In doing so, he was also able to carefully avoid ascribing to these women any sort of anachronistic overt (or even proto-) feminism. They didn’t reject the basic ideology of patriarchy, but asserted themselves in contests over its meaning, its limits, and its extent.
Despite the rather grim subject matter, I was so impressed with Stern as both a writer and a scholar that I found this book to be one of the most enjoyable we’ve read all semester.