Belief in a disenchanted outside world is itself the modern enchantment

Evidence

The European visitor arrived in this world, let us recall in conclusion, contained by an unshakeable habit of thought, a habit nurtured in the world of the exhibition. He arrived with a metaphysical belief, a theology, or what Max Weber was to call in his essay on ‘Objectivity in social science’ a ‘transcendental presupposition’, namely ‘that we are cultural beings’. Weber meant by this that we are the kind of beings who ‘take up a deliberate posture towards the world and lend it significance’. Thanks to this peculiar posture, such ‘significance’ can appear as something apart from the ‘meaningless infinity’, as Weber could now say, of the world outside. Significance resides in the space opened up, in the grounds of the world exhibition and in the similar ordering of the world beyond, between a human subjectivity and the world’s inert facticity. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 207

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This turns Weber’s disenchantment thesis on its head: the ‘inert, meaningless’ outside world is not a given but an effect of a specific ordering — the exhibition-like setup that posits significance as a separate ‘culture’ existing apart from the world. This is Mitchell’s central, paradigm-shifting move.
• XREF: Resonates with Mitchell’s whole argument that representation (the exhibition, the map, the text) creates the very division between ‘significance’ and ‘world’ it claims merely to mediate — akin to a Foucauldian reading of representation as productive, not reflective. — connects to: The grey, disenchanted look of the world stems from its commodity character.; All civilization so far is enlightenment trapped within mythic immanence — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1372
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘the disenchantment of the world’ as itself a cultural performance that requires work and staging — what it means that Weber’s disclaimer is itself a posture.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 207