Discipline and representation are two faces of the same enframing power

Evidence

My own response to this apparent contradiction is that discipline and representation are two aspects of the same novel strategies of power, linked by the notion of enframing. Disciplinary powers acquire their unprecedented hold upon the body by methods of distributing and dividing that create an order or structure in which individuals are confined, isolated, combined together and kept under surveillance. This ‘order’ is, in effect, a framework that seems to precede and exist apart from the actual individuals or objects ordered. The framework, appearing as something pre-existent, non-material and non-spatial, seems to constitute a separate, metaphysical realm – the realm of the conceptual. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 546

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates Mitchell’s central concept of ‘enframing’ as the link between Foucault’s disciplinary power and the earlier chapters’ analysis of representation — a key theoretical apparatus.
• XREF: Directly builds on the world-as-exhibition and enframing argument in chapters 1 and 5, and reconciles it with the Foucault of chapters 2-4.