ABSTRACT
As James C. Scott describes it, “seeing like a state” is a visual practice that arrests the dynamic entanglements of place. As a habit of spectatorship, seeing like a state is constructed and maintained by a “high modernist optic” – a technocratic perspective (and orientation) hinged to rational ordering, expert design, and more efficiently managed space. As a view from above, the high modernist optic narrows the ways we might envision, and encounter, who and what belong where. In the case of Tampa, Florida’s Ybor City neighborhood, seeing like a state has situated feral flocks of chickens as messy, discordant fowl that impede harmonic progress. Thus, the law of the high modernist gaze demands the eviction of noisy neighbors who run amok and across Ybor’s city streets. In response to the seeing like a state, this chapter focuses on how more grounded visions of creaturely crossings obstruct, impede, and otherwise make a mess of high modernist perspectives. With the pro-chicken advocacy group, the Ybor Chicken Society, we ask how attention to feet, beaks, and streets might animate a more multispecies perspective. How might a “pedestrian optic” allow us to see fowl ferity in more expansive ways?
