Colonial reorganization made the organic body metaphor politically obsolete

Evidence

Even among the writers of the 1870s, however, the body as a metaphor was beginning to show symptoms of stress. The body was spoken of, but usually to say that some vital organ was absent, or that some limb was diseased and should be removed. Teachers were to teach their students in the new government schools that they were the limbs and organs of a body, but if they failed to do so the body itself would fail – the community would not be realised. New political practices were making this image of the body inappropriate. The organisation of schooling, the expanding military order, the rebuilding of the country’s capital and other towns and villages, and all the other new methods of order I have discussed in earlier chapters, were all processes introducing a new imagery of the body and at the same time a new effect of political authority. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the old image of the body was seldom used in political writing. Where the body does appear, it is in a wholly new sense. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 488

Categorization

• XREF: Recalls earlier chapters’ treatment of schooling, military order, and town rebuilding as Mitchell’s interrelated ‘new methods of order’; the organic body metaphor’s decline parallels the rise of the disciplinary/structural body. — connects to: The body-politic metaphor made tyranny a self-injury of the organism — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 340