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Rebuilding the country

Egypt in the 19th century

[English] Written by Timothy Mitchell and translated by Zhang Yizhe

Life · Reading · New Knowledge Sanlian Bookstore 2022-5

ISBN: 9787108073723 Pricing: 68.00 yuan

[Content Introduction ]

This book is not a history of British colonization of Egypt, but a study of the power of colonization. Although focusing on events in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, it primarily discusses the place of colonialism in the evaluation of modernity. Colonization was not just the establishment of a European presence, but also the spread of a political order that introduced into the social world a new concept of space, a new personality type, and a new way of making real experiences. means. Colonizing Egypt (originally titled Colonising Egypt) dissects colonial power within a metaphysical context through the day-to-day details of the colonial project.

——Timothy Mitchell

The whole book pays equal attention to theoretical analysis and detailed description. The author uses the theories of Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida to start from colonial projects such as military reorganization, rural construction, urban planning and school education, and presents in detail the internal process and process of colonial power penetrating Egyptian society. Logic, and through the analysis of the characteristics of Arabic reading and writing, reveal the complex entanglement of language, meaning, power and order.

Due to the author's creative perspective, this book has been translated into several languages ​​since its publication, and has had a certain influence in different fields such as anthropology , history, law, philosophy, cultural studies, and art history.

[About the author]

Timothy Mitchell (Timothy Mitchell, 1955-), was born in the UK and was educated in the UK and the United States. Princeton UniversityPh.D. in political science and Near East, now Professor William B. Lansford, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University, is a widely influential political theorist and historian. Areas of research include the place of colonialism in the formation of modernity, the material and technological politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other forms of expertise in the management of collective life. He has published several works, which have been translated into Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Turkish and other languages. He has made pioneering contributions in the field of Middle and Near Eastern studies.

[Contents]

Paperback Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 Egypt at the Fair

Chapter 2 Collection

Chapter 3 The Appearance of Order

Chapter 4 After We Controlled Their Bodies

Chapter 5 The Mechanism of Truth

Chapter 6 Philosophy of Things

Notes

Main references

Index

Postscript

[Excerpt]

Paperback Preface (Excerpt)

This book is not a history of the British colonization of Egypt, but a history of the colonial power. Research. Although focusing on events in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, the book is primarily concerned with the place of colonialism in the evaluation of modernity. Colonization was not just the establishment of a European presence, but also the spread of a political order that introduced into the social world a new concept of space, a new personality type, and a new way of making real experiences. means. The book "Remaking the Nation" (the original title of the book is Colonising Egypt - Editor) analyzes colonial power in a metaphysical scope through the daily details of the colonial project.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this book examine the development of colonial power in Egypt. Chapter 2 begins with a description of a new attempt to regulate daily life in rural Egypt in the early 19th century. In the 1820s and 1830s, Cairo authorities issued orders prohibiting village residents from moving outside their hometowns and stipulating the grains they could grow. types of grain, as well as methods for cultivating, distributing, and paying grain, and also set up a hierarchical system of surveillance, supervision, and punishment by which the aforementioned regulations were enforced.Controlling the agricultural wealth of the Nile Valley from Cairo was nothing new, but earlier models of control had always been incomplete and full of uncertainty. Typically, a powerful central ruling family imposed taxes on weaker regional ruling families, who in turn imposed this obligation on even weaker families around them. The benefits flowing to the central government are easily lost in various links, and growth can only be achieved through further expansion of rule, which further increases the number of links lost and in turn weakens the benefit delivery network. The new control model of the 19th century not only attempted to capture a share of agricultural profits, but also attempted to penetrate into the process of rural production activities, control its basic links, and improve John Bowring (a British adviser to the Egyptian government) The country’s “productive powers” ​​as it is called. The effectiveness of disciplinary methods—as Michel Foucault once named these modern modes of power—is not reflected in their strength and breadth, but in their ability to localize, infiltrate, reorganize, and colonize. middle.

Bonin, an adviser to the authorities in Cairo, was a friend and associate of the British reformer Jeremy Bentham, the inventor of the Panopticon, an institution where coercion and command were used to control crowds Giving way to the fragmentation of space, the isolation of individuals, and systematic but invisible surveillance. Foucault saw the geometry and disciplinary nature of the Panopticon as emblematic of the microphysical forms of power that had flourished over the past two centuries and constituted the experience of capitalist modernity.

Foucault's analysis focuses on France and northern Europe, but this form of power based on the reconstruction of spatial order and the surveillance and control of those within it is essentially colonial in terms of its methods. In addition, in many cases, the panopticon and similar disciplinary institutions were not introduced and promoted in France or England, but were established in European colonial border areas such as Russia, India, North and South America, and Egypt. Jeremy Bentham corresponded with rulers in all of these areas—including the ruler of Cairo, Muhammad Ali Pasha—to advocate the panoptic principle and other new technologies. For many Europeans—including military officers, Saint-Simonian engineers, educators, doctors, and others—19th-century Cairo offered the opportunity to help build a modern state based on discipline. On top of the many new means covered by disciplinary power.

As will be explained in Chapter 2, the classic example of the new power model in Egypt was the New Order, the Egyptian military reform of the 1820s, which was characterized by many aspects of controlling and managing armed personnel. Innovative means created an armed force that was four times the size and strength of the previous Egyptian army, and the creation of this force had consequences both at the regional level and within Egypt. At the regional level, it enabled Egypt to build a colonial empire that stretched from Sudan and the Arabian Peninsula in the south to Greece and Crete in the north, and later included Palestine and Syria. Local rebellions and European intervention forced the empire to disintegrate, and its armed forces were subsequently redeployed to establish and defend the geographical boundaries that made Egypt a politico-spatial entity. European commercial and political penetration further weakened the Egyptian regime and triggered the latter's economic collapse, which was followed by the British invasion and occupation in 1882.

Within Egypt, as Baoning commented, the creation of the new army "in itself established a principle of order that extended to the entire Egyptian society." The extension of this principle will be examined in detail in Chapters 3 and 4. In agriculture, new controls on movement, production and consumption were both decentralized and strengthened by converting the country's "productive forces" - villagers and land - into commodities. The same principle of order was also reflected in the reconstruction of Cairo and other Egyptian towns with the aim of creating neat, open street systems, the control of sanitation and public health, and – in particular – the introduction of compulsory education.School education seemed to provide a means of transforming every young Egyptian into an industrious and docile political subject. In the second half of the 19th century, the disciplinary role of schooling came to be seen as a decisive factor in the politics of this modern country, and political order would no longer be achieved through intermittent coercion, but through continuous education, supervision, and control.

Disciplinary means have dual importance for understanding colonized countries and modern countries. Foucault only analyzed the first importance. First, one can move beyond the impression of power as a system of authoritative commands and policies that are underpinned by coercive forces that guide and regulate social behavior. Power is usually regarded as an external constraint, its source is a sovereign authority that is external to society and resides above it. It operates by setting limits on behavior, establishing negative prohibitions, and guiding proper behavior.

Disciplinary power, on the contrary, does not exercise authority from outside the society, but works within the society. It does not act on the whole society, but on the details (of social life). It does not restrict individuals and their behaviors. , but creates individuals in which restrictive, externalized power gives way to an internalized, productive power. Disciplinary power operates within local spheres and institutions. It enters into specific social processes, breaks them down into independent components, rearranges them for greater efficiency and precision, and recombines them into larger productive and more powerful connections. These means created the organized power of armies, schools, factories, and other institutions characteristic of the modern nation-state. They simultaneously created modern individuals within these institutions—isolated, disciplined, resigned, and industrious political subjects. Power relations no longer merely subject these individuals to a series of external orders and prohibitions; the individual personalities formed in the above-mentioned institutions are already the product of those power relations.

We should not exaggerate the coherence of these techniques, as Foucault sometimes did, and the disciplinary means will be ineffective, conflicting, or overestimating their capabilities. They provide spaces of avoidance and resistance and can be diverted against hegemony. Anti-colonial movements often obtained their organizational form from the military and their discipline and indoctrination methods from school education. They were often formed in barracks, campuses, or other institutions of colonial authority. At the same time, having abandoned the image of colonial power as an integrating, centralizing authority, we should also challenge the traditional view of resistance leaders as subjects external to colonial power and rejecting its demands. question. Subjects under colonial rule and their modes of resistance were formed within the organized field of colonial authority, rather than in some social space that was completely external to it.

The second importance of disciplinary power is that by the same means, power relations now become internalized while also seeming to acquire an external structural form, which Michel Foucault did not discuss, but which points are even more important for understanding what is special about capitalist modernity. For example, reforms to the Egyptian military in the early 19th century transformed groups of armed men into something akin to “artificial machines.” This military organizational structure appears to be greater than the sum of its parts, as if the structure exists independently of the people who compose it. The old army suddenly seemed unorganized, composed of "lazy and indolent" men, while the new army seemed two-dimensional, made up of individual soldiers on the one hand, and inhabited by these soldiers on the other. consists of machines. Of course, this organizational structure does not have an independent existence. This is the effect caused by its organized configuration of personnel, coordination of personnel actions, division of space, and hierarchical arrangement of various units. All of these are Special practical activities. This kind of configuration, arrangement and action is the connotation of the new strength of the army, and nothing else. But the order and precision of such activities have the effect that there is an organizational structure external to the people who make up it, and that structure in turn arranges, encompasses, and controls those people.

Similar two-dimensional effects can be observed in other manifestations of colonial power. For example, in the reconstruction of Cairo in the 19th century, the design of the new street layout was to reflect a planning arrangement. Such a planning arrangement was not just a tool to assist urban reconstruction, but a kind of planning that was reflected in the urban street layout and imprinted on it. The principle of order that enters the lives of citizens. Like the old city, the new city is still just a certain distribution of land and space, but the regularity of this distribution creates the experience of something that exists outside the physical streets and as its non-physical structure . The order of the city would now be expressed through the relationship between the physical existence of things themselves (as they are now called) and their invisible, meta-physical structures.

The fine division of space and functions that characterizes modern institutions, the hierarchical arrangement of these functions, the organization of supervision and monitoring, the marking of time into various schedules and plans - all these actions lead to an activity that is not composed of a series of It consists of social practical activities, but a world composed of a binary order: on the one hand, there are individuals and their activities; on the other hand, there is a world that is independent of the individual, exists prior to the individual, contains and The silent structure that gives a framework to individual life. Such technologies create a unique metaphysics of modernity in which the world is broken down into individuals-systems, practices-institutions, social life and its structures—in other words, material existence and its meaning—so that Two-dimensional form.

The question of meaning or representation is a fundamental aspect of the structural effects mentioned above and is a central theme of this book. This book argues that organizational methods and arrangements that resulted in new structural effects also gave rise to modern experiences of meaning, a process of representation. In a metaphysics of capitalist modernity, the experience of the world is ontologically sharply divided into material existence and its representation—in language, culture, or other forms of expression. Real existence is material, silent, and devoid of intrinsic meaning, while representation is a non-material, invisible dimension of understanding. Reinventing the Nation explores the power and limitations of this ontology by illustrating the colonial practices that gave rise to it. This book demonstrates the nature of representational processes using the example of the great nineteenth-century world's fairs that were part of Europe's colonial project. Borrowing from the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, this book refers to this metaphysics of modernity as a "world-as-exhibition."

—END—

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