One would like to ask: is there . . . no unequivocal increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time [that a friend has] come through [a] long and difficult voyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded . . . in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man? . . . But here the voice of pessimistic criticism makes itself heard. . . . If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if traveling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. . . . [And] what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer? [Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents]

During the two years prior to Anwar Sadat’s 1981 assassination, the Egyptian government relocated thousands of working-class families from the Bulaq neighborhood along Cairo’s Nile Corniche, to hastily built public housing units on the dusty northeast outskirts of the city. These families joined older waves of migrants flowing into Cairo and others whose urban housing had been razed in the early 1960s. The mud-brick houses on land redistributed to local agricultural laborers after the 1952 revolution were first linked to the city by roads and tramlines and then eaten up by proliferating five-story concrete and brick apartment blocks.

Justifying the relocation—a real estate windfall in which center city land compensated at 30 Egyptian pounds (LE) per square meter was expected to fetch LE 1,000 on the market once it was cleared of its residents—were two complementary desires articulated by the tangle of bureaucrats, businessmen, intellectuals, foreign concerns, and others who shape policy and politics in Egypt. One desire was aesthetic, one moral. The aesthetic goal was “to beautify Cairo’s face” through a “dangerous plastic surgery,” in the words of one newspaper columnist, ridding Cairo’s heart of its drug dealers, peddlers, female dancers, and street entertainers (Ghannam, pp. 33–34) and clearing the way for “modern buildings, luxury housing, five-star hotels, offices, multistory parking lots, movie theaters, conference halls, and ‘centers of culture’ ” on the model of modern cities like Houston and Los Angeles (Ghannam, p. 30).

The moral goal emerged from the humanistic framework that underwrites the social scientific worldview from psychology to economics. Relocating low-income populations from the crowded, inadequate, and unhealthy environment of the urban slum to modern housing in the spacious suburbs would revive not only urban space but also the morality and productivity of the people themselves. “We have terrorism because we have unplanned areas and old narrow neighborhoods, which produce ignorance and backwardness,” in the words of a woman who has internalized this notion (Ghannam, p. 41). If crime, addiction, backwardness, and poverty itself are the results of the environmental factors shaping people’s habits, then these social ills can be addressed through altering and improving their environment, giving them separate kitchens and bathrooms in which they can live modern lives.

Showing the linkages between their experiences and the global and national processes that help shape them—for example, elite pursuit of global investment and tourism revenue—Farha Ghannam’s Remaking the Modern analyzes the way relocated families and their new neighbors have understood and remade their lives in their new neighborhood of al-Zawiya al-Hamra through complex changes in their material, social, and symbolic relationships. Predictably, most families received in their new dwellings no more rooms than they had had in their original neighborhood. But as examples of Michel de Certeau’s “ordinary practitioners of the city” (Ghannam, p. 16), the more fortunate among them have been able to refit the new inadequate spaces that they have been traded for their old, enclosing balconies, removing walls, turning public rooms into bedrooms for children, using courtyards as spaces to buy and sell, socialize, and raise animals, turning apartments into clinics, shops, and offices to compensate for the absence of promised infrastructure, and otherwise integrating work and family life in familiar ways that the relocation had aimed to separate and rationalize.

Older neighbors, who took for granted the government’s labeling of Bulaq migrants as “thieves,” “vagrants,” and “drug dealers,” have been less quick to embrace the accompanying notion that such qualities were changed by the relocation and continue to stigmatize the newcomers in many ways. Ghannam demonstrates how people place themselves and their neighborhoods within an intricate web of ideas about origin and character, popular and upper-class lifestyles, the problems and attractions of consumerism, geographic mobility, the use of time, notions of privacy, gender roles, and family responsibility. In the universe of disruptive modernity, it is, finally, the mosque that offers unity in heterogeneity even as the peripheral neighborhood becomes a new center relative to the even newer satellite cities being established in the desert, and to the lives of its labor migrants working in the Gulf. The transformations of space, time, and labor that Ghannam outlines were not those foreseen by the planners of a globalized and modern Cairo, even though—or perhaps because—it was primarily their interests that were being served in the plans for its transformation.

It is the interests of those technocratic elites—indeed, the very conditions of their creation—that concern Timothy Mitchell in Rule of Experts. In a set of chapters most of which are thoroughly revised and updated versions of articles published previously, Mitchell does for rural Egypt what Ghannam has done for Cairo. He demonstrates in detail how peasants and other villagers have been brought into being as intellectual and practical objects of development through practices that simultaneously constitute new social forms and systems of control—for example, the economy considered as a bounded object—and new disciplinary forms of expertise, observation, and planning (economics, hydroengineering, public health). The language of rationalizing the poor by transforming them either into controllable resources or into an active, healthy national citizenry runs through the cases Mitchell examines, from the mid-19th-century creation of privately owned, barracklike villages in which “the owner imposed on his tenants a plan where everything had its logical place” (Mitchell, p. 68) to the relocation of the village of Gurna in the late 1940s.

Just as the plan to raze Cairo’s Bulaq neighborhood pointed to the embarrassment of elites that the poor were spoiling the Nile view with their degeneracy, so the plan to relocate Gurna resulted from the embarrassment of elites that an ancient necropolis near Luxor was in danger from alleged mistreatment by locals whose backward lifestyle tended to thievery and disease. A model village planned by architect Hasan Fathy was carved from sugarcane fields to showcase a newly developed vernacular architecture “that was pure and undebased, and thus clean and sanitary . . . provid[ing] a means to the recovery of social energy, health, and purpose” for a new peasantry (Mitchell, p. 189). Like the new dwellings at al-Zawiya al-Hamra, though, this planned modernity failed to provide the promised benefits. Most residents had little interest in moving (the new village had no employment opportunities aside from a textile workshop manned by children), and the new domed houses—a misappropriation of sacred elements for domestic use—were expensive, difficult to construct, and unable to expand as families did. Although Fathy’s model village ultimately failed, Gurna relocation projects waxed and waned over decades, their final stages in the 1990s marked, like those earlier in Bulaq, by violence as the state brought in police to crush local resistance (Ghannam p. 35; Mitchell p. 200).

In projects of this sort one sees the difficulties of making the nation. To perform the nation, groups must be included by first declaring them excluded for their lack of civilization, villages destroyed in order to preserve them, pasts declared lost so that they may be recovered. . . . The Gurnawis were to be treated as ignorant, uncivilized, and incapable of preserving their own . . . heritage. Only by seeing them in this way would the architect have an opportunity to intervene, presenting himself as the rediscoverer of a local heritage that the locals themselves no longer recognized or knew how to value. As the spokesman bringing this heritage into national politics, the architect would enable the past to speak and play its role in giving the modern nation its character. [Mitchell 2002:191]

Developing further the thesis put forward in his 1988 Colonizing Egypt (Cambridge University Press), that modern politics rests on apprehending the world as bifurcated into a set of organizing models of reality that represent or display an underlying order, such that understanding those models will allow the more effective manipulation of the world, Mitchell uses his varied Egyptian case studies to formulate a general theory of expertise and technocracy. Expertise as a set of practices originates in the opening of the gap between binaries that organize modern thought: nature and technology, object and value, economy and economics, reality and representation (Mitchell, p. 15). Expertise attaches itself to “these separations [that] allow reason to rule, and allow history to be organized as the unfolding of a locationless logic” (Mitchell, p. 15). The apprehension of this logic, in turn, drove the creation and systematization of social practices—surveys, censuses, legislation—that gave that invisible logic material form. Social thinkers of the early to mid-20th century, apprehending changes in colonial patterns of currency circulation, land ownership, wages and commodity prices, “internal” migration, and so on, transferred their attention from “the city” as a tangible symbol for dense relationships of exchange to a new object, “the economy,” an invisible web of rule-governed connections whose laws could be measured and analyzed statistically. “The statistical information . . . did not simply represent a preexisting sphere of economic activity. It helped to bring this sphere, with its anxious participants, into being” (Mitchell, p. 103).

That similar locationless logics have suffused the thought and practice of other times and places and not just modern systems of governmentality (one thinks most immediately of Plato and his intellectual descendants) does not necessarily detract from Mitchell’s case. For the Middle East specialist, at least, any of the stories Mitchell has “retrieve[d] . . . from the footnotes” of Egyptian history (p. 277) is worth the price of admission. In two of the book’s most critical chapters, “The Invention and Reinvention of the Egyptian Peasant” (ch. 4) and “The Object of Development” (ch. 7), Mitchell shows how enduring mental images structure, direct, and deform thought about local realities. The image of a country whose arable land consists of an intense but narrow thread of green bisecting a heartless desert has resulted in decades of questionable assumptions about overpopulation, resource stress, and “natural” land shortage in Egypt, without attending to the social and political processes through which resources and land have been distributed. The big point, that the operation of hegemony requires the world of expertise to deceive itself into thinking that those local realities exist independently of contemporary interest in and influence over them, is never lost. In “The Character of Calculability” (ch. 3), Mitchell shows how cadastral surveys and trade statistics bring into being not greater or more accurate knowledge, but

a reformatted knowledge, information that has been translated, moved, shrunk, simplified, redrawn. What is new is the site, and the forms of calculation and decision that can take place at this new site. . . . The movement from the field to the survey office was not to be experienced as a chain of social practices, but as the distance between reality and its representation, between the material and the abstract, between the real world and the map. [p. 116]

Just as these specific practices brought into being an “economy” as a system of rules where before there had been only diverse collections of practices of production, exchange, and consumption, so Mitchell’s most impressive claims about the theoretical underpinnings of the rule of experts always emerge from his small-scale investigations of the technics of modernity.

For Mitchell, “social theory” and “social science” as generically conceived and normatively practiced treat material factors like disease, agriculture, chemicals, and technology as passive externals sundered from human agency. Beginning in chapter 1, “Can the Mosquito Speak?” he critiques this generic social theory for categorically distinguishing human agency from the world on which it works, a world that can have no influence over “the very possibility of the human, of intentionality, of abstraction” (Mitchell, p. 29). Practitioners of social, political, economic, and agricultural reform, not to mention public health and engineering, misconstrue the nature of the natural objects humans have helped create in silent partnership with nonhuman forces. “But this misapprehension was necessary, for it was exactly how the production of techno-power proceeded. Overlooking the mixed way things happen, indeed producing the effect of neatly separate realms of reason and the real world, ideas and their objects, the human and the nonhuman, was how power was coming to work . . . in the twentieth century in general” (Mitchell, p. 52). Mitchell views this form of technopolitics as historically stable, extending the argument beyond current practices of international development institutions like the World Bank and USAID. In a larger sense, though, he implies that social science, as such, is inescapably trapped in the restricted logic of the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. The many anthropologists who have produced similarly devastating critiques of development programs might disagree that “social science” is quite so hobbled.

One might, in fact, object that critical scholars in most disciplines have long moved well beyond such blindness with respect both to agency and to the material world. Even the most conventional historians, inspired by Fernand Braudel or William McNeill, realized half a century ago that disease and agriculture are of world-shaping significance, and most anthropology has not been quite so idealist since Edward Burnett Tylor. That few policy makers, financiers, and bureaucrats attend either to historians or to anthropologists does not mean that more sophisticated approaches have not been developed but merely that some disciplines are better than others at producing technicians for the modern world system because their technics work so effectively to benefit their masters. (Whatever else Mitchell’s book is, it is not a good advertisement either for economics or for Mitchell’s home discipline of political science, whose cruder forms of modernization theory stand for him as representatives of the broad spectrum of social thought and against which the entire volume is an extended argument). Mitchell invents and reinvents critiques of social theory familiar from Karl Marx (whom he discusses) as well as Bernard Cohn, Eric Wolf, and Marilyn Strathern (whom he does not) for presentation to scholars in disciplines who do not normally encounter them. He has the tactical advantage over both Marx and Strathern, however, of writing in the language of his targets, marshaling economic statistics and detailed historical reconstruction in generally clear prose to illustrate the systemic failure rather than the generalizable successes of both individual development programs and the intellectual frameworks they generate and in which they flourish.

Watching Mitchell at work, either in writing or in personal presentations, has long reminded me of watching actor Robert Patrick as the liquid-metal assassin in director James Cameron’s 1991 movie Terminator 2. There is a terrible fascination in viewing the focused carnage: swift, sharp, relentless, and utterly without mercy. (In Mitchell’s case, at least, I mean this as a compliment). The strength of Mitchell’s assiduous and brilliant work, like Ghannam’s, is the skill with which he retrieves, assembles, dissects, and uses specific case studies as rebuttals to the universalizing rhetoric of modernity, rational choice, and development. That the theory of the social sciences helps create worlds in which social scientists rule as experts is not very surprising (Marx again, on ruling ideas). But if the usefulness of any particular case study “is not for making any general point about the impact of [e.g.] market reforms but to argue against general points” (Mitchell, p. 261), then this writing against theory joins Lila Abu-Lughod’s writing against culture to induce potential paralysis, to one’s not being able to write anything at all but thick description. Because this idea is built, in turn, on Mitchell’s very general Occidentalist theory about the nature of modern governmentality, and because he so successfully and often articulates general points, his critique of theory loses much of its force.

Lost, also, is the sense that “modernity” in many of its meanings can come to have more positive significance for the people whose lives it transforms and that those significances are distributed not only by class and region but also by gender. This is partly the effect of Mitchell’s documentary sources (“Nobody Listens to a Poor Man,” as the title of ch. 5 says, not to mention a woman) and partly the effect of the differences in power between even the urban and rural poor. It is also, perhaps, the result of what sometimes appears to be a romantic attachment to the notion of the authenticity of an independent rural life unencumbered by outside structures of power: the landlord, the police, the cotton market, the international agency. Mitchell stresses the failure of land redistribution schemes in Egypt ever to go quite far enough, to provide peasants with a sustainable livelihood. This is surely true, but part of appreciating the disruptive effects of modern technopolitics needs to be the recognition that, as restricted as their choices might be, both poor village and city dwellers still have choices to make, a grounded moral reality that the abstract discourse of technopolitics as metaanalysis has difficulty incorporating. If modern technical and administrative systems are essentially the result of a collusive misreading of truth on the part of interpenetrating groups of elites (academic economists, bureaucrats, landowners, bankers, militaries, and others who often fill multiple roles), then little room remains for thinking either about corruption (because the system is itself corrupt) or about the way ordinary people work the system and help initiate change from below.

Ghannam finds that many of the relocated Bulaq residents in al-Zawiya al-Hamra incorporated optimistic statist definitions of modernity but that they contested them, as well, sometimes along gendered lines. Women emphasized technology’s central positive contributions to modernity, whereas men were more wary of its threat to proper moral and social action. “El-tamaddun [modernity] is like a knife with two edges; if not handled carefully, it can kill,” warned one of her interlocutors (Ghannam, p. 135). The “blind imitation” that earlier generations of Egyptian intellectuals identified as a source of their own region’s technological and political weakness relative to Europe is now turned neatly against those who would blindly imitate Western fashion, consumerism, sexuality, and alienated, individualistic mores.

As active social agents, people are able to selectively appropriate certain aspects of what they see as modern. Modernity stimulates desires. It motivates dreams. It causes joy. It causes disruption. It causes pain and suffering. It is struggled over and is reworked and selectively appropriated from specific locations in the social space. [Ghannam, p. 137]

Freud’s modern dilemma of the absent child is lived over and over again in Ghannam’s Cairo as families fragment into dispersed domestic units supported by labor migrants. Some of these families have coped with absence by using the ubiquitous cassette tape. Capturing the voice and something of the presence of loved ones, available to the literate and the nonliterate, taped “letters” back and forth between home and family members working in the Gulf solidify the migrant’s connection with family, neighbors, and friends. They are also links to broader sets of ideas about the organization of local space, as these workers remit both money and ideas for renovating the apartments they have in new neighborhoods in preparation for marriage and the establishment of new families. “Although relocation excluded them from its center, [relocated families] reinforce their belonging to Cairo through the products of their labor. . . . They are making a history of Cairo from their particular location in the social space” (Ghannam, p. 166). The cramped images of Egyptian physical and economic geography to which Mitchell attributes so much misconceived development policy are only one set of images in play. The multiple images of a global Cairo in the minds of Cairenes and in the minds of the experts of all sorts who imagine and manipulate them have their own ways of inducing new forms of exclusion but also new forms of participation.