The Kabyle house’s order is attentiveness to force, not arrangement of inert objects

Evidence

The order of the Kabyle house, or what we would call the organisation of its space (none of these terms is sufficient or appropriate) can better be thought of as this kind of attentiveness to the world’s fertility or potential fullness. Such potential or force plays as the rhythm of life, a life made up not of inert objects to be ordered but of demands to be attended to and respected, according to the contradictory ways in which they touch and affect each other, or work in harmony and opposition, or resemble and oppose one another. Thinking of the life of the house in these terms, which have little to do with magic or myth in the pejorative sense of such words, enables us to begin to see the limits of the French engineers’ provocative technique of order, and the political mythology to which it gives rise. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 180

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘grafting as narrative metaphor’ theme in your essay on trees as infrastructure — both treat built/planted structures as living force-field relations rather than inert frames.