Examination rituals physically re-staged the entire state hierarchy.

Evidence

Third, examinations provided a particular practice in which schooling presented the new hierarchy of the nation-state. They were events of enormous social, and structural, significance. The Law of 1867 laid down that students in the local schools were to be examined, at the end of every month by their teachers, at the end of every term by the superintendent of the school, government inspectors, and other officials, and at the end of every year by the governor of the district, the local judges, and other government advisors and officials. The same structure was laid down at each of the higher levels of schooling, with officials of the appropriate rank brought in to preside at each ascending stage of the examination process. The year-end exams were to be followed with a prize-giving ceremony, according to the law, and a procession of the students in their uniforms. At the schools of the provincial capitals, military music was to be played. At the top of the pyramid, in the government schools on Darb al-Gamamiz, annual examinations were held in the large amphitheatre within the palace, attended by the Khedive and the highest officials and dignitaries of the state. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 272 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The examination as the fixing, at once ritual and ‘scientific’, of individual differences, as the pinning down of each individual in his own particularity (in contrast with the ceremony in which status, birth, privilege, function are manifested with all the spectacle of their marks) clearly indicates the appearance of a new modality of power in which each individual receives as his status his own individuality, and in which he is linked by his status to the features, the measurements, the gaps, the ‘marks’ that characterize him and make him a ‘case’. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 298 (#complicates, via linked claim)

True, the concept of homo sacer is absent from modern law and is largely forgotten. But having appropriated a monopoly over the means of enforcement and violence, as well as over the means and the prerogative to offer or to refuse the right to live, over the entitlement to control the bodies of subjects, including the right to inflict pain – the state has expanded what used to be an extraordinary category into a potentially universal aspect of its subjects’ existential status: it has thus no need to resort to a special, exceptional category to sustain what has now become a routine prerogative. Concentration camps, also a gruesome invention of the modern world, were a space where what is in other parts of the state realm but a potential was made into the norm and practical rule. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 706 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Examinations staged the state hierarchy through escalating official presiders and ceremony — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 272; School placement physically encoded the hierarchy of the nation-state.; The examination replaces ceremony by making each person’s own particularity a status — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 298 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Examinations staged the state hierarchy through escalating official presiders and ceremony #corroborates (0.96) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 272
• The examination replaces ceremony by making each person’s own particularity a status #complicates (0.74) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 298
• The modern state turned an exceptional status into a universal potential #complicates (0.72) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 706