Political optics and the occlusion of intimate knowledge

Abstract

In Seeing Like a State (1998), James Scott provides a comprehensive understanding of the optics of state power. He also shows how the bureaucratic logic of high-modernist official planning occludes the social and cultural worlds both of marginalized citizenries and of the bureaucrats themselves, and accurately pinpoints the pernicious reductionism that has accompanied the modernist state's self-proclaimed "cult of efficiency." As in his earlier work, however, Scott overgeneralizes the idea of "resistance"; he also, and concomitantly, underestimates bureaucrats' complicity with local populations and the consequent modification of bureaucratic schemes (including the construction of national he..