Modern subjectivity is a constructed architectural effect, not a natural condition

Evidence

Haussmann laid out the boulevards of Paris to create a precise perspective in the eye of the correctly positioned individual, who was given an external point of view by the enframing architecture. The observer ‘perceives himself at the centre of the city’, wrote a Tunisian visitor, ‘surrounded by its buildings, its streets and its gardens’. But it was not just the particular position that was new; it was the very effect of having a position. Its strange novelty was the novelty of modern subjectivity, which is not a ‘natural’ relation of the person to the world but a careful and curious construction. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 202

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Architecture producing the very position of subjective observation — a dense, paradigm-shifting claim about how the modern self is made.
• XREF: Connects to the enframing concept from chapter 1 and parallels work on panopticism and the constructed modern observer. — connects to: Subjectivity forms itself across plastic sites rather than pre-existing them — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 289; Human deformation is a social product, not a damage to an underlying essence — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 939; Structure is a historical stage of group self-making, not a timeless property. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 532 (+1 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 202