1
James C. Scott's Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts might be the worst titled book I own. It somehow sounds like a PUA seduction guide, bad fanfic, and a martial arts guide simultaneously.
But thankfully it's none of those things, unless teaching serfs how to woo each other into insubordination counts as seduction.
There's a pretty reliable formula for writing a nonfiction book I will enjoy (publishers focusing on a demographic of exclusively me, take note):
I. Pick an aesthetic or moral principle that I'm mostly on board with
II. List interesting historical anecdotes. A lot of them.
As I see it, Scott's main thrust is that oppressed peoples throughout history (slaves, peasants, serfs, etc) never stop subversively communicating. If you only look at the public record of history you get the wrong impression; dominated groups are coerced into quiescence, either through direct force or cultural hegemony that suppresses rebellious action, until a revolutionary moment occurs.
But really, the whole time they were scheming, mocking, fomenting revolution, and just generally getting up to subversive hijinks in clandestine or disguised discursive spaces. The "Hidden Transcript", is the real history of the oppressed, and the chunks we manage to uncover enlighten the experience of those who are dominated.
The majority of the book explores distinct dominated groups and how their backstage resistance manifests. Since a good hidden transcript is, uh, hidden, Scott focuses on what we see leak into the public sphere; he highlights disguised public action, folk tales, and the revolutionary moments when hidden transcripts spill out into the public. These tactics enable an always present resistance and may or may not build to revolution.
2
It's really really hard to achieve hegemonic incorporation.
If you're an authoritarian who already institutionalized the material appropriation of their subjects, you can do some obvious things. Some beheadings would probably put a dent in public insubordination. Nevertheless, you'll be left with a feeling that your peasants don't think their position is inevitable and your power absolute.
Linguistic control seems to be important. Maybe isolating subordinates through language will help.
To minimize communication plantation owners preferred to bring together a labor force of the greatest linguistic and ethnic diversity. When a dialect of pidgin developed that was unintelligible to the planters, the slaves were required to converse at work only in a form of English their overseers could understand.
That didn’t work. Also bad is when they start fiddling with intentionally obscure onomastic conventions.
How are we to interpret the fact, for example, that lower-caste men in the pluralistic culture of the Punjab are likely to use any of several names, depending upon whom they were speaking to? Confronted with a Hindu, they called themselves Ram Chand, with a Sikh they called themselves Ram Singh, and with a Christian, John Samuel. The frustrated British census takers wrote of the "fickleness" of the lower castes with respect to religion, but it is not hard to recognize the evasive adoption of protective cover
[...]
We also learn that black miners in Southern Rhodesia had several names which arose not simply from the confusion of languages but because the confusion could plausibly excuse a delay in responding to a summons or an otherwise unexplained absence.
Maybe commoners will accept your natural superiority if they think... you only drink fluids? (spoiler: probably doesn't work)
Thus, for example, the pastoralist Tutsi, who were feudal lords over the agriculturalist Hutu in Rwanda, pretended publicly that they lived entirely on fluids, from their herds — milk products and blood —and never ate meat. This story, they believed, made them appear more awesome and disciplined in the eyes of the Hutu. [...] One would be astonished if, in their own quarters, the Hutu did not take great delight in ridiculing the dietary hypocrisy of their Tutsi overlords.
Oh, and what to do about the public insults!
As the conflict [the Peasants' War] became open and violent, the imagery became more direct: a Lutheran cartoon showed a peasant defecating into the papal tiara.
Europeans were into broadsheets showing an inverted world order.
In 1842 czarist officials seized all known copies of a very large print depicting an ox slaughtering the butcher. Its seditious import, apparent to those in charge of preventing protest, would not, we must imagine, have been lost on the wider public who came across it.
It's not just broadsheets though. Folk tales, songs, rumors, gossip. Good luck trying to figure who to behead for those.
A collector of Serbian folk songs thus complained, "Everyone denies responsibility [for having composed a new song], even the true composer and says he heard it from someone else."
Also ghosts.
I. M. Lewis, for example, argues persuasively that spirit possession in many societies represents a quasi-covert form of social protest for women and for marginal, oppressed groups of men for whom any open protest would be exceptionally dangerous. [...] In the case of spirit possession, a woman seized by a spirit can openly make known her grievances against her husband and male relatives, curse them, make demands, and, in general, violate the powerful norms of male dominance.
Peasants aren't even above using "you wouldn't hit a girl".
In their desperate efforts to resist Stalin's collectivization program, the peasantry realized that if women took the lead in public opposition, the worst forms of punitive retaliation might be avoided. Men might then intervene with more safety on behalf of their threatened women.
(Also, see the Rebecca riots. Also, see the War of the Maidens.)
Maybe it's at least possible to keep close tabs on subordinates?
an entire ersatz facade may be erected in order to shield another reality from detection. Hill villages in colonial Laos, for example, were required by the occasionally visiting French officials to have a village headman and elders with whom they could deal. The Laotians responded, it appears, by creating a set of bogus notables who had no local influence and who were presented to colonial functionaries as the local officials. Behind this ruse, the respected local figures continued to direct local affairs, including the performance of the bogus officials
It's enough to drive an eighteenth-century Japanese landlord to wonder, 'Does anyone lie as much as a peasant?'
Surely if peasants are not only repressed, but put down rebellion after rebellion, they'll start to internalize the order of things.
What is remarkable about that period, surely, is the frequency with which peasants were seized with a sense of historical possibilities on which they acted and which, it turned out tragically, were not objectively justified. The thousands of rebellions and violent protests from Wat Tyler's Rebellion in the late fourteenth century, through the great Peasants' War in Germany, to the French Revolution are something of a monument to the tenacity of peasant aspirations in the face of what seem, in retrospect, to have been hopeless odds.
Okay, fine. Just for fun, suppose one can get some false consciousness going, such that subordinates cannot even conceive of an alternate societal structure. That's got to do something, right?
what we know of the demands from the factory committees formed spontaneously throughout European Russia in 1917 leaves no doubt that what these workers sought "was to improve working conditions, not to change them" and certainly not to socialize the means of production. And yet, their revolutionary actions on behalf of reformist goals, such as an eight-hour day, an end to piecework, a minimum wage, politeness from management, cooking and toilet facilities, were the driving force behind the Bolshevik revolution.
[... ]
subordinate classes to be found at the base of what we historically call revolutionary movements are typically seeking goals well within their understanding of the ruling ideology
Though, of course, Scott will go on to argue that this is not because workers couldn't conceive of revolution but instead a strategic selection of goals to maximize their odds of success.
You get the picture. There's a lot of "tricks" that show resistance short of a full revolution. Sometimes those tricks coopt public imitations of consent or subordination and work within the confines of the dominant order. But there are always ways that a subordinate class can resist the prevailing social order.
3
I'd say the novel guiding principle in Domination is that subordinate groups are given a lot of credit. Well not so novel, since arguments that the poor, oppressed, or primitive are smart actually is sort of James C. Scott's standard agenda. But specifically, he's arguing against a body of sociological work that doesn't attribute much conscious agency to the oppressed.
Rather than a historical perspective where the oppressed act servile due to the naturalization of power structures through ideological hegemony, Scott will prefer the view that the subordinates are astutely biding their time. Theories of false consciousness, cultural hegemony, and vanguardism all seem to rub him the wrong way. The oppressed are not dumb, just oppressed, and resist in what ways they can.
Why does the working class in a democratic society agree to an economic system that is against their interest? This is a major preoccupation of sociological research on power. If you assume there is not explicit coercion, and that this quiescence is an actual thing, most sociological theories boil down to some form of hegemonic incorporation.
Hegemonic incorporation, cultural hegemony, false consciousness, etc. are theories where the ideology of the dominant class is imposed upon the subordinate class. It varies from theory to theory, but the dominant class can use a mix of propaganda, controlled institutions (schools, churches), and displays of power to induce the subordinate class to accept the values and beliefs of the dominants.
Scott breaks down theories of false consciousness into two types:
Thick version: The subordinate group is persuaded to actively believe in values that justify their subordination
Thin version: The subordinate group is convinced that the social order in which they live is natural and inevitable
Or "The thick theory claims consent; the thin theory settles for resignation".
One problem: even with thick hegemony, is that it isn't clear that it prevents any social conflict. When subordinates accept the prevailing social order, they seek modest reforms that don't require a change in ideology to argue for: "some of the most striking episodes of violent conflict have occurred between a dominant elite and a rank-and-file mass of subordinates seeking objectives that could, in principle, be accommodated within the prevailing social order." And that's giving the thick version the benefit of the doubt — the Scott view is that the reformer is being strategic in making only modest demands.
And thick hegemony really does feel like a much stronger claim than the thin version. Despite some armchair psychology that says otherwise, "what is or appears to human beings unavoidable must also somehow be just", inevitability doesn't seem to be sufficient grounds for legitimization.
Peasants don't even accept the legitimacy of the weather, "traditional cultivators actually attempt to denaturalize even the weather by personifying it and developing a ritual repertoire designed to influence or control its course", what are the odds would they accept the legitimacy of tithes?
What about the thin version? After enough defeat, it must seem that there are no other societal possibilities are available. Scott argues even if the subordinate class doesn't know about other societal arrangements, they still imagine simple things like the reversal of the social order or the destruction of society.
Historically, the thing that needs to be explained, if anything, is the opposite of the effect described by these theories. Peasants revolted and failed a lot. Like enough that some basic empirical reasoning would have overwhelmingly told them to not revolt.
I do not by any means wish to imply that the history of peasants and slaves is a history of one quixotic adventure after another or to ignore the chilling effects a crushed insurrection certainly had. Nevertheless, since slave and peasant uprisings occur frequently enough and fail almost invariably, one can make a persuasive case that whatever misperception of reality prevails was apparently one that was more hopeful than the facts warranted.
But, more importantly, what if you don't need to explain the subordinate class's quiescence, because they aren't quiescing? Since subordinate groups aren't idiots, they aren't going to go around publicly expressing their internal beliefs. So when you analyze subordinates, "public action will provide a constant stream of evidence that appears to support an interpretation of ideological hegemony".
And of course, the "official" transcript will enshrine the dominant power relationships. The dominant order will exert influence to maintain their preferred public image, and that's fine with the oppressed who would generally prefer not to be beheaded for public insubordination most of the time.
Thus the peasantry, in the interest of safety and success, has historically preferred to disguise its resistance. If it were a question of control over land, they would prefer squatting to a defiant land invasion; if it were a matter of taxes, they would prefer evasion rather than a tax riot; if it were a question of rights to the product of the land, they would prefer poaching or pilfering to direct appropriation. [...] On the open stage the serfs or slaves will appear complicitous in creating an appearance of consent and unanimity; the show of discursive affirmations from below will make it seem as if ideological hegemony were secure.
Scott offers two concessions. He's willing to accept a hegemonic interpretation of a society if either
There's a good chance a subordinate could attain a position of power
Subordinates are kept in total surveillance and isolation
He calls this the "paper-thin" theory of hegemony. I think this is a way bigger allowance than he lets on though (more on that below).
Though he spends the most time dismissing false consciousness, his skepticism extends to any theory with a similar vibe. He takes all opportunities to pull out a Lenin or Gramsci quote where they condescend to the working class and contradict them with an alternate interpretation.
For example, take Lenin's notion that naive monarchism — "The 'myth' of the Czar-Deliverer, who would come to save his people from oppression" — stopped peasants from rebelling. In reality, peasants used this flexible myth for a variety of political agendas.
the peasants who joined the banners of a rebel claiming to be the true czar would be demonstrating their loyalty to the monarchy. Under the reign of Catherine II there were at least twenty-six pretenders. Pugachev, the leader of one of the greatest peasant rebellions in modern European history, owed his success in part to his claim to be Czar Peter III — a claim apparently accepted by many.
If a monarch was being oppressive, they must not be the true monarch. If an agitator impersonating an official was being generous, that’s a dead giveaway that they can be trusted. And if a peasant gets caught on the wrong side in the end, who could blame them? They’re notoriously gullible.
"Naive or not, the peasants professed their faith in the Tsar in forms, and only in those forms, that corresponded to their interests.” The view that peasants publicly accepted "naive monarchism" doesn't account for the complex use of the concept for not so naive purposes. And, so the argument goes, perhaps the naivety lies with Lenin rather than the peasants.
4
In "Last Exit to Springfield" newly minted union president Homer is trying to negotiate a labor contract with Mr. Burns. Fortunately, Burns interprets all of Homer's bumbling as intricate and subtle political maneuvering. When Homer rejects a bribe because he misinterprets it as a sexual advance, Burns thinks he's steadfast. When Homer leaves the negotiation table and can't find the bathroom, Burns is impressed by his tactics.
The problem, if there is one, is to what extent is James C. Scott is acting like C. Montgomery Burns? For the most part, the claims in Domination are measured. But the larger aesthetic principles that drive most of the analysis are stronger. That the oppressed are subtly and strategically hiding their ideology is a claim where the absence of evidence is evidence, it's somewhat unfalsifiable.
Scott claims an empirical approach but it's hard to imagine that if subordinate cultures were always mostly hegemonically incorporated that he wouldn't still be able to make the same argument. He seamlessly drifts between symbolic analysis of parades, quoting Middlemarch, interpreting artwork, and concrete rebellious actions. The degree to which I'm willing to accept these as evidence varies considerably.
The absence of visible resistance indicates hidden resistance, public quiescence can be warped into subtle strategic resistence. It's sort of a “you don't understand, peasants are playing 4D chess” style argument.
It really does feel like people act against their interests sometimes. If you're willing to accept that the working class is getting a raw deal under capitalism, I'm skeptical I can find a Scott style argument that people defending billionaires on twitter are being strategic. And while I buy the anti-pluralist take that your options might be directly limited even in a democracy, it doesn't explain why people seemingly vote against their own interest with enthusiasm (this depends on whether you think the working class votes against their interest, but I bet you can craft a similar argument for whatever you think people are voting wrong on). I think an impressive level of normalization of prevailing dominant ideology occurs in democratic societies.
I think Scott's arguments are more effective for slavery and serfdom than capitalism (though, this is dangerously close to an "end of X" statement). Public acquiescence in slavery doesn't need ideological hegemony to make sense. I mean there's probably some, but the thing that gets naturalized is the coercive power of the dominant class (i.e. repeated failure of rebellion). Slaves are kept slaves through direct application of power, so yes it makes sense to explain apparent consent in the public transcript as manipulation. But who's to say that there can't be more than one cause for public consent?
I think, at times, Scott concedes a bit in this direction. His account of "paper-thin hegemony", is thick enough in the context of modern capitalism. One of the two (supposedly rare) conditions in which ideological hegemony can be achieved is when there is a "strong probability that a good many subordinates will eventually come to occupy positions of power". I don't think capitalism all the way meets that, but it provides a strong perception that one may come to occupy a position of power.
5
Maybe Scott would reply that his claims are weaker than I have stated. He could just be saying: go ahead and be a Marxist, but stop analyzing pre-capitalist societies with your Marxist lens. Which is fine.
Or, and I think this is closer, he's only saying if you look at the past it's obvious you can't just accept people's public behavior as a candid representation of their thoughts. So it's not that there isn't ever ideological hegemony, just that basing evidence for the phenomenon on the public record is woefully inadequate. All else being equal, if you are figuring out if an action is due to ideological manipulation or calculated strategy, it's probably calculated strategy. I'm pretty much on board with this and have been convinced that hegemonic incorporation is probably harder than people typically claim.
In this reading, the book isn't an attempt to compile evidence that subordinate groups are always ideologically untainted. Instead, it's more like a list of relevant historical tidbits, and a display of the depth that a charitable interpretation of subordinate groups provides.
Yes, all the fun anecdotes are viewed through this specific peasants-are-sneaky lens, but I don't think this is a bad thing. I found it insightful, usually plausible, and sometimes intensely compelling. The book is better for claiming hierarchical diagrams reflect the dominant ideal that there are no lateral relationships between subordinates. Or for contrasting duels among the elite with the dozens among the oppressed, the former responding to insults with mortal combat, the latter an intentional exercise in showing restraint in response to insult. Or for examining the symbolic meanings in parades as "a privileged pathway to the 'official mind'," conceptualizing the structure of a Laotian parade as an embodiment of Lennisnist Vangaurdism.
Whatever the claim, Scott has a strong inclination that academics and intellectuals underestimate the contemporary exploited class, and it would be better to adopt a more charitable view.
Never attribute to false consciousness that which is adequately explained by scheming.