Ways of Seeing: Abstracting You, Me and the City in Numbers

“Quantitative methods reveal a way of seeing”. This passage made me think immediately of James Scott’s (1998) Seeing Like A State — A book that I absolutely love.  Luker (2008, p. 27) makes a passing reference to Scott’s text in referencing Foucault’s notion of governmentality. Modern nation-state governments employ techniques to render citizens visible and objectify them via enumeration in order to serve the needs of governance and to establish that state as object in and of itself that is constituted through social processes (see Foucault, 1991). This way of seeing “…renders phenomenon at the centre of the state’s field of vision susceptible to measurement, calculation, codification thus making possible schematic knowledge, control and manipulation" (Scott, p. 11).

Drawing on the work of Griffths et al. (1979, p. 366), Leyder and Davidson (p. 79) imply that being critical of dominant ideologies and the apparatuses of governmentality may in fact not be enough to address the research questions that aim to contest them. Griffith et al. suggest that official statistics can be used to undermine the validity of dominant ideologies; develop radical theory; and to apply these theories in political struggle (ibid.). In other words, we can use official statistics to be critical of social facts. I couldn’t agree more with this logic and am trying to do the same with my research project that attempts to measure the multiplier effect of cultural planning schemes. Following from this call for a new way of doing critical scholarship, Scott’s historical case studies use quantitative data and methods to present a critique of their applications in order to show us how nature and society have been transformed through large-scale social engineering projects to uniformly resemble the administrative grid of state techniques in an attempt to strategically transcend illegibility in order to suit the needs of the state. 

On the note of large-scale social engineering projects, I’m fascinated by what you could call “old school infographics” — particularly, post-WWII era analog forms of urban planning documents (or pseudo-propaganda) that attempt to create social facts through visual representations of projected growth across different metrics. I came across many of these visioning documents at the City of Montreal archives a few years ago. I’ve included one of these infographic pieces from a 1965 planning document from the METROPOLE series that make projections about expected demographic growth and percentage of households with cars in Montreal. The city planners expect sustained growth across all categories for roughly the next 20 years until 1981... Or, is that they are hoping for sustained growth and consumption for the next 20 years and the tax revenue that goes with it to support grandiose urban projects?

Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state : how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality, eds. G. 

Burchell., C. Gordon and P. Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 87-104