Treating modern order as a historical practice exposes its naturalness as an effect

Evidence

The exhibition, I hope, can serve as a motif for the kind of order and certainty we consider natural and commonsensical while remaining oblivious to its mysterious nature. With the help of this motif, such order can be seen no longer as something natural but as a particular historical practice in which we are still caught up. My aim has not been to describe its history, even in relation to the Middle East, but to isolate it and understand its peculiarity and power. To assist in its isolation, in chapter 2 I tried to suggest what other kinds of order there may have been, in the case of the Middle Eastern or Mediterranean world, which the order of the exhibition sought to replace. I did so with the reservation that such other kinds of order risk seeming, as a consequence of this sort of analysis, simply the opposite of our own; and as such, something total and self-contained. These consequences, as I said then, are unintended. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 537

Categorization

• SEED: The methodological caution — that analyzing alternative orders risks making them appear merely the opposite of one’s own — is a useful note for anyone writing about non-Western epistemologies.
• XREF: connects to: Established orders reproduce themselves by naturalizing their own arbitrariness — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2149; Harvey endorses a becoming-oriented rather than being-oriented historical stance — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2234