Colonising Egypt Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of Colonising Egypt by Timothy Mitchell talks about several Egyptian schools that had been established in Western nations in the mid-19th century – for example, Joseph Lancaster's Central School in London and a school in Paris. I don't have anything profound to say, but I'll just try to connect this chapter back to earlier parts of the book and to the discussion we had in class last Wednesday.

I don't really see how commodity fetishism is related to the Egyptian schools talked about in ch 3, unless the schools somehow gained a reputation that was grander than deserved. But Mitchell makes no indication of this either way. However, it's possible that Egyptian education in general may have taken on a flavor of commodity fetishism. The division of schooling into primary, preparatory, and final schooling – with increasing rarity and elitism as you go higher up in education – may have rendered education as a kind of commodity. I personally would argue that we see this in contemporary US culture with higher education (private institution and Ivy League degrees, anyone?).

The Egyptian schools had many strict rules and regulations, often (Mitchell argues) for the purpose of creating order and control itself rather than simply for giving students constructive boundaries (for example: in the school in England during a particular exercise, students had to walk in a line at a regular distance from each other. The line may be helpful for reducing chaos, but the regular distance serves no purpose but to create an additional measure of control (p. 70). The implication is that these schools engage in enframing, talked about in ch 2. By having all these rules, and by having rigid seating and classroom organization, the powerful entity divides up the non-powerful entity for the purposes of enumeration and control, which is clearly seen in the example just given. Enframing is also obviously related to the idea of disciplinary order that we talked about in class.

Mitchell argues that the concept of the "world as an exhibition" is necessarily colonial (p. 13). I wonder if the converse is true: that colonialism necessarily entails the concept of the world as an exhibition. If it is true, then the Egyptian schools (among other things) should somehow demonstrate the concept. So, do they? I think yes, for these reasons (the reasons correspond with the 3 features of the "world as an exhibition" emphasized by Mitchell, p. 13):

-  The schools had "apparent certainty" of ordering and organizing things. Besides the rigid seating, Mitchell lists 22 regulations of the school in Paris and shows us their daily structure, which managed every minute of the students' lives from opening their eyes in the morning to turning the lights out at night (interestingly, there is no free or resting time in this schedule, although Regulation #11 does allow students to venture out into the town during certain hours).

-  The "real world" of the school consisted of further representations of the exhibition. We've already established that the schools' enframing generated power. Mitchell writes that this power was not only a "microphysical" power over the body, but also a "meta-physical" power over the non-physical world (p. 93). So even the meta-physical construct was kind of a façade.

There are probably other reasons/examples too. So if the Egyptian schools in the Western nations demonstrate the "world as an exhibition," then does colonialism necessarily entail the concept? I know that I'm asking a question of backwards logic, but what do you think?

-GGM