Legibility and Agency

This paper argues that legibility is foundational to human agency. The argument critiques the implication that legibility is exclusively modern or necessarily disempowering. On the contrary, legibility is necessary for the existence of any sociocultural system and for the agency of its members. Using examples from fieldwork in upland Laos and beyond, we define legibility as a relation between agents and environments, both physical and social in kind. First‐order legibility, whereby agents tune their interpretation and action to environments, is distinguished from second‐order legibility, whereby environments are manipulated to guide other agents’ interpretations and actions. The paper explores diverse relations between legibility and agency, covering social deviance, high modernist state control regimes, semiotic interception, preference capture, and preference installation. These phenomena illustrate the mechanisms whereby individual agency may be both enabled and constrained by legibility regimes. The concluding discussion evaluates the relation between legibility and agency in light of social inequalities and imbalances of power. It is found that legibility presents both risks and opportunities for human agency in all social and cultural contexts and at all scales.