Caroline Cormier

November 21st, 2010

Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (2002)

“We have entered the 21st century still divided by a way of thinking inherited from the nineteenth…
whichever aspect of modern, secular rationality emphasized, everything could be understood as the
development of this universal principle of reason, or a reaction against it, or its failure, delay or
absence” (p. 1)

“Individuals may at times secure control of certain elements, and they may even claim to represent
those elements in the social world. But no individual masters them, or submits the world to their
intentions” (p. 34).

“Techno-politics is always a technical body, an alloy that must emerge from a process of manufacture
whose ingredients are both human and non-human, both intentional and not, and in which the
intentional or human is always somewhat overrun by the unintended. But it is a particular form of
manufacturing, a certain way of organizing the amalgam of the human and the nonhuman, things and
ideas, so that the human, the intellectual, the realm of intentions and ideas seems to come first and to
control and organized the nonhuman” (p. 42-43).

“The world out of which techno-politics emerged was an unresolved and prior combination of reason,
force, immigration, and resources. Ideas and technology did not precede this mixture as pure forms of
thought brought to bear upon the messy world of reality. They emerged from the mixture and were
manufactures in the processes themselves” (p. 52).

Discussion Questions:

1. What are the theoretical and analytical strengths and/or weaknesses of Rule of Experts as a whole?
Would Mitchell’s theoretical framework be transferable to other contexts or histories?

2. How does Mitchell understand techno-politics? How does it relate to nation-making?

3. How does Mitchell articulate modernity? What does he mean when he refers to the ‘failed
modernity project’? Is this a useful tool for analysis?

4. According to Mitchell, what constitutes an expert and what is at stake when such experts are
created? In other words, what work does expert knowledge do? Who does it exclude and how?
Finally, within this context, are we able to identify spaces of contestation of this expertise?

5. How is Mitchell’s work relevant to our own work as academics and, more specifically, as
academics within the field of geography?

Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts forces us to change our way of looking at development policies,
experts from international organizations, the social sciences, Egypt’s history following
independence… Everything is interrelated; nothing is neutral. Mosquitoes are more dangerous than
tanks; the system of land tenure is a war machine; cartography underlies the economy; the CIA
manipulates anthropology; “Egyptian peasants” have been invented simply to justify the West's
“mission” in the Mid-East. To obtain a clearer view, we must de-compartmentalize the social
sciences and draw the natural sphere closer to the social one, and technology closer to politics.
– - excerpt taken from a review written by Michel Callon (2006)