I feel this constant tension between what *I* prefer/what is good for me specifically, and what is good for women/families in general. I understand the general need and desire for better childcare options, but years ago, there was talk about mandatory pre-school as the best option for childcare. As a homeschooling, stay at home mom, that sounds absolutely terrible! I can do a better job raising my kids than the state or a teacher who is also caring for 30 other children. But a mom who is itching to get back to work, or a single mom? It could be a very different story.
I just want to be left alone by the state. I don't really want to be seen...but I'm not comfortable saying that's what's best for all of even most women. Someone else left a comment about the abuse women can endure when they're less legible, yet I find myself thriving in a mutually respectful marriage where my husband holds all the "visible power" of a prestigious degree and job. I don't feel any less a person for my lack of formal higher education (though I will finish one day!) Or my zero economic contribution. As Tasha Tudor said, "you can read Shakespeare while stirring the jam". (In my case, it's currently Boethius.) Yet usually it's the conversation about efforts to make women like me more legible that makes me feel "less than."
I don't really know where I'm going in all of this, but just feel really grateful for the conversation and perspectives I see here!
“Ask yourself: Will this satisfy/ A woman who is satisfied to bear a child?”
I wonder if the benefits of illegibility are really useful-- or even attainable-- for us as individuals? or if they only emerge in relationship, in interdependence; in community. Much of this, as you argue on this Substack, is in the purview of women. And in his poem, WB contends that the legible, civilized, official, economic world is simply *incapable* of seeing-- much less satisfying-- much less valuing-- the deeply human needs and joys that an idiṓtēs might name as essential and primary.
I think homeschooling might be one of he most illegible things I do. It's not only about removing education from the public governmental sphere, it's about spending time together as a family. The cornerstone of our homeschool day is when we gather together and I read aloud.
I love: "The hidden surplus of a bumper crop of untaxed tubers isn't a bunch of tubers. It's the freedom to spend time with your family without worrying about your next meal. It's less time working a field and more time to enjoy your life and the lives around you." I do not have a green thumb nor am I ever going to be a great gardener growing much of my own food, much less a self-sufficient homesteader type. But I see the value in hoarding my time to spend with my family enjoying the good and the beautiful and the true. And I value being able to let my special needs kids learn at their own pace and not have to jump through hoops to access programs that were never designed for them and are a poor fit for encouraging their human flourishing.
Feb 14, 2023·edited Feb 14, 2023Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant
>Of course, it doesn’t feel like you’re getting away with something when you cook dinner or change a diaper in the way it might when you head out to your still or your tuber patch.
Well, it should! Cultivate an awareness of when you are doing something radically subversive.
I'm reading this newsletter while drinking tea. I had literally just put down my copy of Scott's Two Cheers for Anarchism, next to Emily Oyster's Expecting Better. Funny not-coincidences.
Scott is always such a fascinating read. States are bad, but illegibility can be terrifying as well. And ripe for recuperation.
Dancing around Scott's ideas and your point:
- Illegibility is half-compliance. It's pilfering and poaching. It's plausible deniability – a fruitful angle for any dating discourse. Of course wedding rings are legible – flirting might require taking it off, which is visibly suspect (and can guilt a cheater away from going forward).
- "Yeah, I'm doing it now, I'm sending it soon" is workplace illegibility than I'm... using right now haha.
- In the Catholic church, women aren't officially allowed to... have any kind of power, really. They might benefit from illegibility. Hard to say, of course (it's illegible! can't be seen from far away! But women are often the most dynamic gender in a parish.)
My main story here is about a recent controversy here in France. I'm not sure how it started, but there was a feminist discourse vs official church pushback regarding "les servantes d'autel" (altar girls), with the church limiting girls' options to "servantes d'assemblée" (congregation servantes, a made-up position where girls wouldn't go near the altar.) Now, the fun thing is, many churches used to have altar girls without any problem – but now that the issue has been pushed, and the official position been reaffirmed, these churches could no longer remain hidden by illegibility. So they stopped having altar girls.
I appreciate this post so much because I’ve always felt so ambivalent about the idea of legibility. On the one hand, all the problems James C. Scott, you, and others observe. On the other hand, increasing legibility is often the ticket to protection and justice for those who need it most.
Among many (many!) examples, one that comes to mind is the role of religion in state-run schools. While not exactly the same, I feel a similar ambivalence: on the one hand, as a deeply religious person as well as a scholar of religion, I am disappointed at the way human religions are often made completely invisible in school curricula. On the other hand (and also because of my own religious convictions!), I am distrustful of what often happens when religion is brought into the school curricula: either a single religion is co-opted into the service of the state (à la civil religion), or religious differences are watered down and made more palatable in the name of tolerance. Either option for school inclusion ends up distorting religion, in my view. But is the only alternative continuing to remain invisible?
> 'The bright dividing line between politics and home life would vanish. In practice the “separate spheres” remained separate for a little while longer, but both spheres would now be political.'
This calls to mind two examples... more looking at "interpersonal" interactions than the (mostly) wide-ranging policy-themed ones you mentioned by Helen Andrews above!
1. I have a friend whose partner angrily quarreled with her when she didn't want to answer his inquiry as to which presidential candidate she cast her vote for.
2. Similarly, I was once in a convo with a member of my family-of-origin who was expressing horror that a TV personality (?) spoke positively about Trump. "How could he not have changed his mind?" was the core question by which she was aghast. As the convo progressed, when it became clear I was deliberately not self-identifying to her (RE: who I had voted for in 2016), this family member sent some of the most intimidating anger I have ever received to me across the phone line. (However, it was 2020, a terrible year. When we were talking... and it was beyond the spring of lockdowns: it was summer of explosions of violence or the autumn before the election.) I stopped running my social experiment of reticent silence, caved, and confirmed I had not voted for him.
[Note: I'm requesting you not reference the content of this comment in a follow-up post, Leah. Ironically!! :) ]
I don't feel like I'm getting away with something when I change a diaper. But I would if the state were trying to tell me which diapers were ok to use and I preferred something else. People who co-sleep or let their babies sleep on their bellies or who leave their kids in the car to run into the store often do feel like they're getting away with something. Or who drink raw milk from their own cows.
It's possible that if our society valued kids and homes, we'd try to legislate more, because that's often how we respond to things we care about. If you think about anything our society cares about - gun laws, abortion, marriage - it's hard to get the conversation to be anything but "what laws should we have?"
So maybe there is a certain value in our society not caring about kids and homes.
One way I'm pretty illegible is by being self-employed. I tutor math, and work for myself rather than a tutoring company. I report all my income and pay estimated taxes quarterly, so I make myself legible by doing that. I only have about ten students at any given time, so the government would probably not notice me if I didn't send them money like I do. I'm paid many different ways, some cash, some electronic, so again I could probably fly under the radar if I chose to. I believe, though, in rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's, and I believe in the good that can be done with the income I share.
> Do you recognize patterns of your own life in Psmith’s description of barbarism?
Ummm, I think choosing "Discord Cozy Culture" versus the "Twitter-Connected World-Exposure" lifestyle counts? I gain much, and the only thing I am disappointed at missing out on is the ability to post a story I wrote to Margaret Atwood's twitter feed.
ALSO--this brings to mind a low-epistemic-status hypothesis I'm curious about. Interestingly, at least a decade ago, my husband got us tamping down on Youtube ads. We would turn off the audio, sometimes cover them up with another window (not something YT could measure). But these disciplines led to us engaging in measurable-by-YT advertiser avoidance... clicking IMMEDIATELY on the "skip ad" button, and NEVER engaging the content advertised. (not even Grammarly!)
Today, I feel like we seldom get ads on Youtube. (What are other ppl's ad-per-video frequencies? question for any quantitatively-minded folks in this community, if they see this...) I wonder, is it because of our tendencies? I mean, they were measuring us... did they decide we would use Youtube more if we got less ads? (And we still used the same Google accounts the whole time, same ISP.)
We also mainly switched from Google to Duckduckgo. This sounds like a thing hill people are SUPPOSED to do in this tech-saturated age? (if my 1 month of seeing the ads that run on Fox News last summer counts for anything, data-wise.)
But that's not what hill people ACTUALLY do in response to technology? Maybe it's because with FAANG (MAANG?), you dont get '"G"-men, "T"-men, revenuers too / searchin for the place where he [Pappy] made his brew /"lookin', tryna' book 'im." No, you get a nice, polite seemingly-absentee landlord: someone who does not force you to look into their eyes and who does not intimidate you with stacks of (paper!) official documents you need to sign. They are offering you a conveniently free service!! The consequences of the digital monitoring you agree to (who reads those things before you click "I accept", anyway? YES, I am over 13--sign me up!), I think, are that changes are made to the environment you navigate SILENTLY, according to your usage. Some of them happen to you specifically, and some of them seem to only happen in the aggregate. You think you can game the system.
As a 42 yr old never married, no kids queer cis woman (esp currently living in the Midwest), I often feel my life is illegible. I benefit from this illegibility by existing outside of the relentless pressures of “ideal” (read: white, middle-class, ever-optimizing, work-outside-the home-for-pay-and-in-it-for-no-pay, etc.) motherhood and relatedly, compulsory heterosexuality with its entrenched gender norms. A side curiosity I have is this: I’m hyper educated and part of my job is researching (and critiquing) these very gender norms. I think folx try to “make me legible” bc of those facts. “Oh, it makes sense that you aren’t married and don’t have kids and aren’t into men…you were busy doing school and you think about how crummy those norms and specifically how crummy dudes are all day-I get it!” Which a) we are meaning makers, so I understand b) gross. I should be able to have any level of ed and not place my time/energy/value on “landing a man”/having kids c) (vulnerably)possible chicken or the egg situation over here (does it subconsciously allow ME to make my life legible to myself when maybe my authentic being is trying to exist “barbarously” and this is a “civilized” way to do that)?!
I think we need to recognize that the private, insulated, and illegible isn't necessarily barbarous. Instead, it can be a haven from the barbarity of the greater world.
I felt this the most when we lived in Big City, where insanity seemed to reign all around us.
The pandemic pushed us to reinforce our need for privacy, and especially when life outside our house seemed crazier during the pandemic's height and afterwards.
A life grounded in quiet domesticity felt like a haven from all of it. Our current Small City lifestyle really reinforces that, and we are truly appreciative.
Beyond that, I live a lifestyle that makes me very illegible. I work from home, so I'm not out in public as much, yet I have a position in my church that can make me very legible, if I choose to exercise that legibility, but I won't.
I go to church on Sundays, but I prefer being illegible, because my church has been dealing with lots of upheaval and I'm not so arrogant as to believe I can be a savior. I'd rather focus on myself, my family, and the places where legibility makes sense to me.
I think ‘illegibility’ is always harmful for women. The only one who benefits in a relationship between a man and an ‘illegible’ women is a wife-beater, who can assault his punching bad with complete impunity. The only reason anyone wants to hide from the government is to hide from the consequences of breaking the law. In a democracy, the people can and should change bad or burdensome laws. If large numbers of people want to hide from a law — think cannabis or alcohol prohibition — we should reconsider the law, not encourage hiding from it.
I hate to bring up AI, but while we're being paranoid, it's worth asking how the pros and cons and tactics of being illegible to AI are different from the pros and cons and tactics of being illegible to other powers.
Pro of illegibility: AIs will facilitate a proliferation of sophisticated scams. Being illegible means these will be less tailored to you and therefore less convincing. More here:
Con of illegibility: AIs are currently trained on large data sets often including Wikipedia. It has crossed my mind that cramming some of our illegible stuff into legible Wikipedia articles and edits, even if it ends up being more Procrustean than we'd like, might be a way to preserve some of our culture rather than being increasingly marginalized in ways we currently can't even imagine.
"The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." — George Eliot
I feel this constant tension between what *I* prefer/what is good for me specifically, and what is good for women/families in general. I understand the general need and desire for better childcare options, but years ago, there was talk about mandatory pre-school as the best option for childcare. As a homeschooling, stay at home mom, that sounds absolutely terrible! I can do a better job raising my kids than the state or a teacher who is also caring for 30 other children. But a mom who is itching to get back to work, or a single mom? It could be a very different story.
I just want to be left alone by the state. I don't really want to be seen...but I'm not comfortable saying that's what's best for all of even most women. Someone else left a comment about the abuse women can endure when they're less legible, yet I find myself thriving in a mutually respectful marriage where my husband holds all the "visible power" of a prestigious degree and job. I don't feel any less a person for my lack of formal higher education (though I will finish one day!) Or my zero economic contribution. As Tasha Tudor said, "you can read Shakespeare while stirring the jam". (In my case, it's currently Boethius.) Yet usually it's the conversation about efforts to make women like me more legible that makes me feel "less than."
I don't really know where I'm going in all of this, but just feel really grateful for the conversation and perspectives I see here!
Oh! See how Wendell Berry makes the case for “the benefits of the insulation of illegibility” in this poem:
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front:
https://cals.arizona.edu/~steidl/Liberation.html
“Ask yourself: Will this satisfy/ A woman who is satisfied to bear a child?”
I wonder if the benefits of illegibility are really useful-- or even attainable-- for us as individuals? or if they only emerge in relationship, in interdependence; in community. Much of this, as you argue on this Substack, is in the purview of women. And in his poem, WB contends that the legible, civilized, official, economic world is simply *incapable* of seeing-- much less satisfying-- much less valuing-- the deeply human needs and joys that an idiṓtēs might name as essential and primary.
I think homeschooling might be one of he most illegible things I do. It's not only about removing education from the public governmental sphere, it's about spending time together as a family. The cornerstone of our homeschool day is when we gather together and I read aloud.
I love: "The hidden surplus of a bumper crop of untaxed tubers isn't a bunch of tubers. It's the freedom to spend time with your family without worrying about your next meal. It's less time working a field and more time to enjoy your life and the lives around you." I do not have a green thumb nor am I ever going to be a great gardener growing much of my own food, much less a self-sufficient homesteader type. But I see the value in hoarding my time to spend with my family enjoying the good and the beautiful and the true. And I value being able to let my special needs kids learn at their own pace and not have to jump through hoops to access programs that were never designed for them and are a poor fit for encouraging their human flourishing.
>Of course, it doesn’t feel like you’re getting away with something when you cook dinner or change a diaper in the way it might when you head out to your still or your tuber patch.
Well, it should! Cultivate an awareness of when you are doing something radically subversive.
I'm reading this newsletter while drinking tea. I had literally just put down my copy of Scott's Two Cheers for Anarchism, next to Emily Oyster's Expecting Better. Funny not-coincidences.
Scott is always such a fascinating read. States are bad, but illegibility can be terrifying as well. And ripe for recuperation.
Dancing around Scott's ideas and your point:
- Illegibility is half-compliance. It's pilfering and poaching. It's plausible deniability – a fruitful angle for any dating discourse. Of course wedding rings are legible – flirting might require taking it off, which is visibly suspect (and can guilt a cheater away from going forward).
- "Yeah, I'm doing it now, I'm sending it soon" is workplace illegibility than I'm... using right now haha.
- In the Catholic church, women aren't officially allowed to... have any kind of power, really. They might benefit from illegibility. Hard to say, of course (it's illegible! can't be seen from far away! But women are often the most dynamic gender in a parish.)
My main story here is about a recent controversy here in France. I'm not sure how it started, but there was a feminist discourse vs official church pushback regarding "les servantes d'autel" (altar girls), with the church limiting girls' options to "servantes d'assemblée" (congregation servantes, a made-up position where girls wouldn't go near the altar.) Now, the fun thing is, many churches used to have altar girls without any problem – but now that the issue has been pushed, and the official position been reaffirmed, these churches could no longer remain hidden by illegibility. So they stopped having altar girls.
I appreciate this post so much because I’ve always felt so ambivalent about the idea of legibility. On the one hand, all the problems James C. Scott, you, and others observe. On the other hand, increasing legibility is often the ticket to protection and justice for those who need it most.
Among many (many!) examples, one that comes to mind is the role of religion in state-run schools. While not exactly the same, I feel a similar ambivalence: on the one hand, as a deeply religious person as well as a scholar of religion, I am disappointed at the way human religions are often made completely invisible in school curricula. On the other hand (and also because of my own religious convictions!), I am distrustful of what often happens when religion is brought into the school curricula: either a single religion is co-opted into the service of the state (à la civil religion), or religious differences are watered down and made more palatable in the name of tolerance. Either option for school inclusion ends up distorting religion, in my view. But is the only alternative continuing to remain invisible?
> 'The bright dividing line between politics and home life would vanish. In practice the “separate spheres” remained separate for a little while longer, but both spheres would now be political.'
This calls to mind two examples... more looking at "interpersonal" interactions than the (mostly) wide-ranging policy-themed ones you mentioned by Helen Andrews above!
1. I have a friend whose partner angrily quarreled with her when she didn't want to answer his inquiry as to which presidential candidate she cast her vote for.
2. Similarly, I was once in a convo with a member of my family-of-origin who was expressing horror that a TV personality (?) spoke positively about Trump. "How could he not have changed his mind?" was the core question by which she was aghast. As the convo progressed, when it became clear I was deliberately not self-identifying to her (RE: who I had voted for in 2016), this family member sent some of the most intimidating anger I have ever received to me across the phone line. (However, it was 2020, a terrible year. When we were talking... and it was beyond the spring of lockdowns: it was summer of explosions of violence or the autumn before the election.) I stopped running my social experiment of reticent silence, caved, and confirmed I had not voted for him.
[Note: I'm requesting you not reference the content of this comment in a follow-up post, Leah. Ironically!! :) ]
“If I were to put her and Psmith into conversation on this topic” — you could also just go to coffee hour at St. John’s.
I don't feel like I'm getting away with something when I change a diaper. But I would if the state were trying to tell me which diapers were ok to use and I preferred something else. People who co-sleep or let their babies sleep on their bellies or who leave their kids in the car to run into the store often do feel like they're getting away with something. Or who drink raw milk from their own cows.
It's possible that if our society valued kids and homes, we'd try to legislate more, because that's often how we respond to things we care about. If you think about anything our society cares about - gun laws, abortion, marriage - it's hard to get the conversation to be anything but "what laws should we have?"
So maybe there is a certain value in our society not caring about kids and homes.
One way I'm pretty illegible is by being self-employed. I tutor math, and work for myself rather than a tutoring company. I report all my income and pay estimated taxes quarterly, so I make myself legible by doing that. I only have about ten students at any given time, so the government would probably not notice me if I didn't send them money like I do. I'm paid many different ways, some cash, some electronic, so again I could probably fly under the radar if I chose to. I believe, though, in rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's, and I believe in the good that can be done with the income I share.
> Do you recognize patterns of your own life in Psmith’s description of barbarism?
Ummm, I think choosing "Discord Cozy Culture" versus the "Twitter-Connected World-Exposure" lifestyle counts? I gain much, and the only thing I am disappointed at missing out on is the ability to post a story I wrote to Margaret Atwood's twitter feed.
ALSO--this brings to mind a low-epistemic-status hypothesis I'm curious about. Interestingly, at least a decade ago, my husband got us tamping down on Youtube ads. We would turn off the audio, sometimes cover them up with another window (not something YT could measure). But these disciplines led to us engaging in measurable-by-YT advertiser avoidance... clicking IMMEDIATELY on the "skip ad" button, and NEVER engaging the content advertised. (not even Grammarly!)
Today, I feel like we seldom get ads on Youtube. (What are other ppl's ad-per-video frequencies? question for any quantitatively-minded folks in this community, if they see this...) I wonder, is it because of our tendencies? I mean, they were measuring us... did they decide we would use Youtube more if we got less ads? (And we still used the same Google accounts the whole time, same ISP.)
We also mainly switched from Google to Duckduckgo. This sounds like a thing hill people are SUPPOSED to do in this tech-saturated age? (if my 1 month of seeing the ads that run on Fox News last summer counts for anything, data-wise.)
But that's not what hill people ACTUALLY do in response to technology? Maybe it's because with FAANG (MAANG?), you dont get '"G"-men, "T"-men, revenuers too / searchin for the place where he [Pappy] made his brew /"lookin', tryna' book 'im." No, you get a nice, polite seemingly-absentee landlord: someone who does not force you to look into their eyes and who does not intimidate you with stacks of (paper!) official documents you need to sign. They are offering you a conveniently free service!! The consequences of the digital monitoring you agree to (who reads those things before you click "I accept", anyway? YES, I am over 13--sign me up!), I think, are that changes are made to the environment you navigate SILENTLY, according to your usage. Some of them happen to you specifically, and some of them seem to only happen in the aggregate. You think you can game the system.
As a 42 yr old never married, no kids queer cis woman (esp currently living in the Midwest), I often feel my life is illegible. I benefit from this illegibility by existing outside of the relentless pressures of “ideal” (read: white, middle-class, ever-optimizing, work-outside-the home-for-pay-and-in-it-for-no-pay, etc.) motherhood and relatedly, compulsory heterosexuality with its entrenched gender norms. A side curiosity I have is this: I’m hyper educated and part of my job is researching (and critiquing) these very gender norms. I think folx try to “make me legible” bc of those facts. “Oh, it makes sense that you aren’t married and don’t have kids and aren’t into men…you were busy doing school and you think about how crummy those norms and specifically how crummy dudes are all day-I get it!” Which a) we are meaning makers, so I understand b) gross. I should be able to have any level of ed and not place my time/energy/value on “landing a man”/having kids c) (vulnerably)possible chicken or the egg situation over here (does it subconsciously allow ME to make my life legible to myself when maybe my authentic being is trying to exist “barbarously” and this is a “civilized” way to do that)?!
I think we need to recognize that the private, insulated, and illegible isn't necessarily barbarous. Instead, it can be a haven from the barbarity of the greater world.
I felt this the most when we lived in Big City, where insanity seemed to reign all around us.
The pandemic pushed us to reinforce our need for privacy, and especially when life outside our house seemed crazier during the pandemic's height and afterwards.
A life grounded in quiet domesticity felt like a haven from all of it. Our current Small City lifestyle really reinforces that, and we are truly appreciative.
Beyond that, I live a lifestyle that makes me very illegible. I work from home, so I'm not out in public as much, yet I have a position in my church that can make me very legible, if I choose to exercise that legibility, but I won't.
I go to church on Sundays, but I prefer being illegible, because my church has been dealing with lots of upheaval and I'm not so arrogant as to believe I can be a savior. I'd rather focus on myself, my family, and the places where legibility makes sense to me.
I think ‘illegibility’ is always harmful for women. The only one who benefits in a relationship between a man and an ‘illegible’ women is a wife-beater, who can assault his punching bad with complete impunity. The only reason anyone wants to hide from the government is to hide from the consequences of breaking the law. In a democracy, the people can and should change bad or burdensome laws. If large numbers of people want to hide from a law — think cannabis or alcohol prohibition — we should reconsider the law, not encourage hiding from it.
I hate to bring up AI, but while we're being paranoid, it's worth asking how the pros and cons and tactics of being illegible to AI are different from the pros and cons and tactics of being illegible to other powers.
Pro of illegibility: AIs will facilitate a proliferation of sophisticated scams. Being illegible means these will be less tailored to you and therefore less convincing. More here:
https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/its-time-to-worry-about-internet
Con of illegibility: AIs are currently trained on large data sets often including Wikipedia. It has crossed my mind that cramming some of our illegible stuff into legible Wikipedia articles and edits, even if it ends up being more Procrustean than we'd like, might be a way to preserve some of our culture rather than being increasingly marginalized in ways we currently can't even imagine.
"The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." — George Eliot
#herstory