Uniform dress makes the act of ordering invisible behind its effects

Evidence

The gaps are further made to stand forward by causing the objects they are to ‘separate’ to appear as similar to one another as possible – by clothing them, for example, in identical dress (‘the shirt has a single row of buttons, and is dark blue; the trousers are of bright red; the badges, in gilded leather, are attached to the front of the collar; on the head is worn the tarbush; the different schools are distinguished only by the colour of the collar or the lapel, and by the colour of the trouser stripe’). In the uniformity of appearance, the equidistant interval, and the geometric angle, the acts of distribution, if practised quietly, unceasingly, and uniformly, almost disappear from view. As the techniques of distribution create an appearance of structure, the techniques themselves are to become increasingly invisible. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 278

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the concrete visual mechanism by which structure is made to appear self-existing: identical dress, equidistant interval, geometric angle.
• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the author’s own work on social capital — here uniform clothing functions as a low-cost formal signal of group membership analogous to standardized grading certificates in the diamond trade.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 278
• XREF: connects to: Uniform mass-market dress lets young students deny that class differences exist — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 372