Nineteenth-century thought defined the person as a detached observer who self-controls like a machine.

Evidence

The person was now thought of as something set apart from a physical world, like the visitor to an exhibition or the worker attending a machine, as the one who observes and controls it. His own nature (I will say ‘his’ when dealing, here as elsewhere, with male-centred notions) was realised in being ‘industrious’ – in maintaining the same steady observation and control over his own physical body and will. In the labour process, wrote Marx, the worker ‘opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body … and compels them to act in obedience to his sway … This subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention.’ Separated in this way from a physical world and from his own physical body, the true nature of the human person, like that of the observer at the exhibition, was to learn to be industrious, self-disciplined, and closely attentive. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 99

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s material on attention and self-surveillance — the industrious autonomous subject as an internal discipline project.