Modern state imagery made society an interior bounded against an exterior world.

Evidence

Although the body in this image still seems to refer to the way in which parts are interconnected, it has become something utterly different. The connection it refers to is not the interaction of separate members that form a whole, but the relationship of an exterior to an interior. Previous images of the parts of the body never referred in this way to an outside, and hence the body was never an inside. The body has now become not only a mechanical object, but an object with an outward surface. Its relationship to an exterior makes it into an interior. This interior forms a political apparatus, whose furthest extension is the school. Seeming to exist apart from a world ‘outside’, the apparatus of politics and schooling must touch this exterior world, send back messages about it, and work upon it. Notions of this sort the old imagery of the body was never thought to express. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 492

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that representing a system as having an ‘outside’ is what first manufactures the inside/outside split — foundational to how colonial governance constructed its object — is genuinely paradigm-shifting for thinking about institutions.
• XREF: This is the analytical core of Mitchell’s whole project, extending his earlier argument about representation and the ‘world as exhibition’ in chapter one; also resonates with Foucault’s panopticon and the exterior/interior logic of discipline.