Colonial discipline constructed a twofold person corresponding to a divided world.

Evidence

Colonising Egypt, in the broad sense of the penetration of a new principle of order and technique of power, was never merely a question of introducing a new physical discipline or a new material order. In the first place, disciplinary powers were themselves to work by constructing their object as something twofold. They were to operate in terms of a distinction between the physical body that could be counted, policed, supervised and made industrious, and an inner mental space within which the corresponding habits of obedience and industry were to be instilled. But more importantly, this new divided personhood – whose novelty I will be returning to in chapter 6 – was to correspond to a divided world. The world was something to be constructed and ordered according to an equivalent distinction between physical ‘things’ and their non-material structure. Politically, the most important such structure was to be ‘society’ itself, a social order now conceived in absolute distinction to the mere individuals and practices composing it. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 405

Categorization

• XREF: Links Durkheim’s divided social reality to the dualism of body/inner-mind that Foucault’s disciplinary power relies on and that colonial rule imported into Egypt.