Legibility

tags
Administration Privacy James C. Scott

Legibility (per Scott) refers to a quality that states endeavour to produce in their populations, that of being easily understood by those at the centre, which facilitates centralized administration and prediction.1

Tensions with privacy. See Halberstam on the deliberate refusal of legibility in queer politics, Glissant on the right to opacity.2

cf Rationalization, Biopolitics

Footnotes:

1

James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Agrarian Studies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2008).

2

Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

Notes that link to this note