Surveillance and scheduling produce the modern illusion that structure preexists individuals

Evidence

The precise specification of space and function that characterise modern institutions, the coordination of these functions into hierarchical arrangements, the organisation of supervision and surveillance, the marking out of time into schedules and programmes—all contribute to constructing a world that appears to consist not of a complex of social practices but of a binary order: on the one hand individuals and their activities, on the other an inert structure that somehow stands apart from individuals, preexists them, and contains and gives a framework to their lives. Such techniques have given rise to the peculiar metaphysic of modernity, where the world seems resolved into the two-dimensional form of individual versus apparatus, practice versus institution, social life and its structure—or material reality and its meaning. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 30

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Foucault’s disciplinary power and the reader’s notes on how institutions create perceived binaries; also resonates with Zamyatin’s We where the state’s schedule-erasure of the individual is literalized.