Timothy Mitchell - After We Have Captured Their Bodies

Selection from text:

"Politics was to produce and to remedy the individual character. The true nature of this character, moreover, was to be a producer. Ethnography emerged in the early nineteenth century, not just to describe the nature of man, but as part of a larger process of describing man as, by nature, productive" (Mitchell, 1991: 105).

X-Games Video Clip - Ultimate Body Control

This video clip shows how even those with the utmost body control can falter. This individual, who could have been killed doing this stunt was encouraged to participate in the x-games by all his fans/followers. He somehow convinced himself that doing this activity will make him a more productive member of society. The media follows his success, and further entices him to partake in these stunts.

Selection from text:

"Colonising Egypt, in the broad sense of the penetration of a new principle of order and technique of power, was never merely a question of introducing a new physical discipline or a new material order. In the first place, disciplinary powers were themselves to work by constructing their object as something twofold. They were to operate in terms of a distinction between the physical body that could be counted, policed, supervised and made industrious, and an inner mental space within which the corresponding habits of obedience and industry were to be instilled. But more importantly, this new divided personhood - whose novelty I will be returning to in chapter 6 - was to correspond to a divided world. The world was something to be constructed and ordered according to an equivalent distinction between physical 'things' and their non-material structure. Politically, the most important such structure was to e 'society' itself, a social order now conceived in absolute distinction to the mere individuals and practices composing it" (Mitchell, 1991: 126).

My Response:
This image, which I found on Google Images, captivates the colonization of Egypt in a poster form. The selection from Mitchell's article summarizes the event well, explaining that we molded Egypt to fit our needs.

Sources:
Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. After We Have Captured Their Bodies. In Colonising Egypt. Pp. 95-127. Berkely: University of California Press.
http://images.google.com/imghp?tab=wi (Accessed August, 2007)
http://www.youtube.com/ (Accessed August, 2007)