Lockdown (2)

Halberstam opens the second paragraph of the first chapter, entitled 'undisciplined' with an epitaph taken from James Scott's Seeing Like a State:

"Illegibility, then, has been a reliable source for political autonomy."

On page 9, Halberstam summaries Scott's book in the following terms: "Seeing Like a State (2008) began as a study of "why the state has always seemed to be the enemy of 'people who move around,'" but quickly became a study of the demand by the state for legibility through the imposition of methods of standardisation and uniformity."

The ultra-surveillance situation of the current Lockdown has made it all clear to us that moving around is, indeed, something that is taken as a hostile gesture. And now we're awaiting the arrival of new surveillance apps it has become unclear whether we can still opt for illegibility.

Indeed, in his 2017 book, Against the Grain, A Deep History of the Earliest States, Scott seems to suggest (in a chapter on zoonoses) that the state apparatus itself was the product of attempts to contain the spread of infectious diseases. (This is, in a sense, a point that was already made by Foucault, who suggested at several points that the whole biopolitical apparatus emerged out of attempts to control the spread of viruses and bacteria.)

Anyway, if we believe that the spread of the virus is necessary - what space is their left for a politics of illegibility?