Modern political power worked by creating the appearance of an abstract order framing reality

Evidence

In chapters 2 and 3 I am going to begin by examining parallels between three characteristic practices in which a modern political method came into being: the formation of a new army, the introduction of organised schooling and the rebuilding of Egyptian villages and towns. The new processes that I examine – taking peasants for the first time to be drilled and disciplined into an army, pulling down houses to construct model villages or to open up the streets of a modern city, putting children into rows of desks contained within schools laid out like barracks – all replicated one another as acts of what was now called nizam, order and discipline. Such acts of order, which I contrast with other, older notions of order, all worked to create the appearance of a structure, a framework that seemed to exist apart from, and prior to, the particular individuals or actions it enframed. Such a framework would appear, in other words, as order itself, conceived in no other terms than the order of what was orderless, the coordination of what was discontinuous, something suddenly fundamental to human practice, to human thought. This effect was something new. It was the effect, I will argue, of a world that would now seem divided in two, into the material realm of things in themselves, as could now be said, and an abstract realm of their order or structure. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 85

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘world divided in two’ between material things and abstract order resonates with the Cartesian subject/object split and with Foucauldian analyses of discipline — connects to the implicit frame used in scholarship on colonial governmentality. — connects to: Ordinary daily experience is shaped by the political powers that rule it. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 667; Modernity’s institutional framework has itself been set in motion. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 552
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘nizam’ (order and discipline) and the distinctive claim that modern order appears as a framework prior to and apart from the individuals it enframes.