Friday's Read: Colonising Egypt

Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)


Timothy Mitchell begins his discussion in Colonising Egypt with several clarifications and disclaimers. Drawing extensively on Foucauldian paradigms, his overarching thesis is that the nineteenth-century transition to modernity involved the use and structuring by polities (e.g., nation-state and colonial governments) of the time and space of their common people. As the work of peasants became viewed as a commodity, time itself became commodified, as did agriculture and labor time; hence the origins of the shift to hourly wages. (Though Mitchell does not phrase it in these terms, he is describing what anthropologists refer to as the shift from polychronic to monochronic models of time; starting in the nineteenth century, time itself became viewed as inherently valuable, as opposed to value being ascribed only to what takes place within time. With this rise in conceptions of time as an external, separably valuable commodity in and of itself came the rise of linguistic references to time as a thing that can be "spent," "wasted," etc.) Mitchell explains that Foucault's now-famous (and theoretically expanded) notion of the Panopticon was historically the brainchild of English colonist and entrepreneur Jeremy Bentham. Under Bentham's persuasive influence, its earliest development as a means of regulating, surveilling, and utilizing the time and products of subjects and citizens came about in the far reaches of the British Empire. In other words, though the Panopticon and other means of regulating the behavior of citizens are the driving forces of modernity, these means were developed in the imperial peripheries, not the center. Egypt is an example of the imperial reordering of conceptions of time and space, and is therefore, Mitchell argues, an excellent staging ground for a discussion of how and why colonisation itself was accomplished. As Mitchell states in the first line of the book: "This book is not a history of British colonisation but a study of the power to colonise" (ix).

The center of Mitchell's argument, and the driving theme of his book, is this:

The precise specification of space and function that characterise modern institutions, the coordination of these functions in to hierarchical arrangments, the organisation of supervision and surveillance, the marking out of time into schedule and programmes - all contribute to constructing a world that appears to consist not of a complex of social practices but of a binary order: on the one hand individuals and their activities, on the other an inert structure that somehow stands apart from individuals, preexists them, and contains and gives a framework to their lives. Such techniques have given rise to the peculiar metaphysic of modernity, where the world seems resolved into the two-dimensional form of individual versus apparatus, practice versus institution, social life and its structure - or material reality and its meaning.

The question of meaning or representation is an essential aspect of this structural effect, and is the central theme of the book. The methods of organisation and arrangement that produce the new effects of structure, it is argued, also generate the modern experience of meaning as a process of representation. In the metaphysics of capitalist modernity, the world is experienced in terms of an ontological distinction between physical reality and its representation - in language, culture, or other forms of meaning. Reality is material, inert, and without inherent meaning, and representation is the non-material, non-physical dimension of intelligibility. Colonising Egypt explores the power and limits of this ontology byshowing the forms of colonising practice that generate it. (xii-xiii)

Mitchell then launches into a discussion of representational practices by the European colonizers of the Orient during the nineteenth century, using the World's Fair as his point of reference. He approaches the problematics of Said's primary arguments in Orientalism (1978) incisively when, at the end of his first chapter, he states:

In claiming that the 'East itself' is not a place, am I saying simply that Western representations created a distorted image of the real Orient; or am I saying that the 'real Orient' does not exist, and that there are no realities but only images and representations? My answer is that the question is a bad one, and that the question itself is what needs examining. We need to understand how the West had come to live as though the world were divided in this way into two: into a realm of mere representations and a realm of 'the real': into exhibitions and an external reality; into an order of mere models, descriptions or copies, and an order of the original. We need to understand, in other words, how these notions of a realm of 'the real', 'the outside', the original', were in this sense effects of the world's seeming division into two. We need to understand, moreover, how this distinction corresponded to another division of the world, into the West and the non-West; and thus how Orientalism was not just a particular instance of the general historical problem of how one culture portrays another, but something essential to the peculiar nature of the modern world. Finally we need to understand the political nature of these kinds of division, by understanding them as techniques both of order and of truth (31, emphasis mine).