Attempts to Make the Districts Legible

Within a world where The Capital controls every aspect of human life, there is a state fighting for unrestricted power and control. The constant struggle for power and a fight for justice is the underlying theme in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. The Capital sought to simplify the conduct of the Districts to align with the principles they saw fit and, furthermore remain in control of the Districts as a whole. Correspondingly, the states highlighted in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State were also struggling for power and simplification. The concepts such as cities, people, and language are highlighted in Scott’s writing, aligning with several core points in Collins’ The Hunger Games.

The concept of simplifying a city is prevalent in both Seeing Like a State and The Hunger Games, however is portrayed through very different descriptions. Scott describes the literal layout of a city and focuses on simplifying things such as the traffic patterns and the physical placement of cities, whereas Collins illustrates a more abstract view of simplifying a city in showcasing chaos and rioting within the area itself. The focal point of each work is to somehow discover the simplest way to organize and construct the city.

The second, and likely most obvious example of simplification concerns the categorization of people. Scott sought to filter families by surnames in hopes of clarifying groupings of people. He states, “a surname was a way of achieving a social recognition as a ‘corporate group,’ and kin and affines adopted the name as a way of claiming the backing of an influential lineage.” These surnames served as a way to pigeonhole families into a certain class system. Through maintaining a constant family name and category at which they belong, it simplifies the act of telling people apart and distinguishes between higher and lower class families. Similar to the surname movement illustrated by Scott, Collins’ The Hunger Games utilizes the idea of Districts to categorize the people in the state.

Finally, language is simplified in each of these worlds through the restriction of vocabulary. In Seeing Like a State, a uniformed language is established to continue the theme of simplicity and unity, whereas the freedom of speech is something unknown to the citizens in the Districts. Katniss Everdeen was the sole voice for each of the twelve Districts, and was the only person to stand up for the needs of her people.

Each of these aspects feeds into the larger understanding of simplicity and legibility; however, these attempts at uniformity and clearness also propose an unbalance of power. Although the state claims to have the cities’ best interest in mind, it’s hard not to wonder if they have the authority to be the end-all-be-all in any given situation.

In any case, The Capital eventually had to be overruled, didn’t it?