The concept of society required new embodied practices to be imaginable

Evidence

The neologism was explained but the Pasha’s confusion concerning the new order remained – ‘that people should be ruled over by a peasant, the community represented by a ploughboy!’ His confusion reflects the difficulty of imagining this new object called society. It was new in several respects. Its order was not a hierarchy of personal status, for peasants now appeared as equal members with gentlemen. Its membership was not a pattern of kinship extending outward, however distantly, from one’s own connections. ‘Society’ was something encountered above all in the form of crowds. Somehow the strangers crowded together in the courtroom were to be conceived as parts of a social whole to which one belonged, even though nothing seemed to connect the Pasha to the crowd except their occupying the same space at the same moment. To conceive of these connections, and to construct them into a social whole was not necessarily a matter of extending one’s horizons or enlarging one’s imagination. It was more a matter of adopting new political and social practices, which brought a new set of assumptions. Certain practices involving self and space, order and time, body and mentality were to be adopted, of the kind I have been describing in this book, so that the dimensions of space and time and mentality appeared to stand apart as a conceptual structure, a whole; and it was to be forgotten that they were mere appearances. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 387

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that society is not imagined through enlarged imagination but through adopting embodied practices whose artificiality is then forgotten — that ‘the appearances’ are constructed and then forgotten as constructed — is a dense, paradigm-shifting idea about how conceptual objects come to seem natural.
• SEED: Article angle: how the idea of ‘society’ had to be physically practiced — space, time, bodily discipline — before it could be believed in, and what modern concepts might be awaiting similar embodied construction.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Forge and the Other: How Power, Discourse, and Encounter Cast the Self”