Medico-statistical language adopted from armies enabled political control of crowds

Evidence

The new methods of power sought to police, supervise and instruct the population individually. It was a power that wanted to work with ‘known individuals’ and ‘noted characters’, who were to be registered, counted, inspected and reported upon. The first census of the population was carried out in 1882. As with the registration of births and the procedures for medical inspection, the concern with the individual body of the political subject was both military and economic. The new medico-statistical practices, moreover, adopted from the armed forces, provided a language of the body – its number, its condition, its improvement, its protection – in terms of which political power might operate. Such language could be used to control and restrict any large movements or gatherings that might be difficult to penetrate and police. It was used in this way, for example, to suppress the popular fairs that marked out the calendar of social and economic life all over Egypt. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 326

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Foucault’s biopolitics and disciplinary power frameworks; also connects to my reading on surveillance and the census as instruments of modern statecraft. — connects to: Mass voter profiling was framed as a modern form of military psychological operations — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 500
• DEFINE: Shows how a ‘language of the body’ (number, condition, improvement, protection) functioned as a technology of rule.