Modern order is mechanical coordination, not cosmic harmony

Evidence

The ponderous warfare of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which ever greater numbers of men were amassed to face each other head-on, was now to seem like the foolish clashing of mere crowds. … The parallel lines and mechanical precision present themselves as a new conception of order. Such order was not a harmony, balance or correspondence between the forces of the world – an older kind of order whose nature I will try to evoke more carefully below – but order itself, a state defined in no other terms than the ordering of what was order-less, the coordinating of what was discontinuous. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 139 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The order of the Kabyle house, or what we would call the organisation of its space (none of these terms is sufficient or appropriate) can better be thought of as this kind of attentiveness to the world’s fertility or potential fullness. Such potential or force plays as the rhythm of life, a life made up not of inert objects to be ordered but of demands to be attended to and respected, according to the contradictory ways in which they touch and affect each other, or work in harmony and opposition, or resemble and oppose one another. Thinking of the life of the house in these terms, which have little to do with magic or myth in the pejorative sense of such words, enables us to begin to see the limits of the French engineers’ provocative technique of order, and the political mythology to which it gives rise. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 180 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The organic cosmos gave way to a mechanical order where power meant active intervention — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 758; Modern military order is coordination of the disorderly, not cosmic harmony — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 139; Order emerges from relations between things, not from an external observer’s frame — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 538 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern military order is coordination of the disorderly, not cosmic harmony #corroborates (0.97) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 139
• The Kabyle house’s order is attentiveness to force, not arrangement of inert objects #complicates (0.76) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 180
• Modern power lacks an organizing logic as one of its defining features #complicates (0.71)