Seeing like a State - James Scott (1998)

James Scott is a professor from Yale University, Agrarian Studies. He is particularly famous for his work with Weapons of the Weak (1985) on everyday forms of peasant struggle and moral economy in southeast Asia. Currently I'm reading his book, Seeing like a state, where he critiques (and explains) the failure of certain schemes that were meant to improve human conditions. In this work, he argues that there are four main issues at play why these schemes went wrong:

1. First one is the administrative ordering of nature and society. The transformative state simplifies the relations between people and their surroundings
2. There exists a high-modernist ideology that thinks about people more than they do for themselves. In this vision, Scott argues that there often happens a miniaturization of modernity when larger scale attempts fail. Thus these miniature high-modernist plans in micro-spaces create further surveillance and control for the people. It shapes their aspirations for their lives.
3. Scott sees it inevitable that some sort of an authoritarian state is existent and willing & able to use coercive power to bring these high-modernist plans to life.
   
4. Last but not least, there often exists a "prostrate" civil society which lacks capacity to resist. Here at this point it might be useful to talk about Swyngedouw's "Communist hypothesis and revolutionary capitalisms" article. Swyngedouw argues that "Fear of failing has become so overwhelming that fear of real change is all that is left: Resistance is as far as our horizons reach - transformation, it seems, can no longer be thought, let alone be practiced."

Scott argues that in sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high modernist ideology provides desire [ps. an analysis of Lacan would fit here, Bjorn Sletto (2006) reports that - drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis- desires are important determinants of institutional processes of place-making that is the social and material production of space occuring thru the fantasies of planning institutions and the material sources (economic power, exclusive right to violence and equipment) of state agencies.], authoritarian state provides determination to act on desire, an incapable civil society levels the social terrain on which to build.