The experience of structure is produced by repeated acts of distribution

Evidence

As with the architecture of the model village or the layout and timetable of the model school, this is the essence of what is now going to be seen as ‘structure’: that it is separate from the ‘content’ distributed within it. Creating the impression of a structure separate from its contents – constituting reality in terms of this separation – is precisely the effect of acts of regulated distribution. The act of distributing and fixing in place, repeated again and again in a sequence of exact and equal intervals, creates the impression that the intervals themselves are what exist, rather than the practices of distribution. The repetitive ordering creates the impression that the gaps between things are an abstraction, something that would exist whether or not the particular things were put there. This structural effect of something pre-existent, non-particular and non-material is what is experienced as ‘order’, or, the same thing (since it seems to exist apart from the material realisation), as the ‘conceptual’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 277

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting reframing: ‘structure’ is not a pre-existing container but an effect manufactured by repetitive equal-interval distribution — this reverses the commonsense relation between form and content.
• XREF: Connects to the author’s earlier chapters on the model village and model school in this same book, and to Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary spatial grids. — connects to: The human project organizes the environment as a totality that reveals its own inertia — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 464; Iterability names the process by which repetition both enables and corrupts identity — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 721; Random affect-collages become necessary through repetition and desire — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 130
• SEED: An essay angle: how modern ‘neutral’ interfaces (grid layouts, standardized forms, whitespace) manufacture an illusion of structure that hides the social practices of distribution behind them.