Colonial architecture and commodities re-present a separate realm of social meaning

Evidence

In the colonial age, as Durkheim’s writings indicate, this effect of an abstract social realm is more and more to be built into things. The monuments, buildings, commodities, fashions and experiences of the world-as-exhibition are all to be understood as mechanisms presenting themselves as mere ‘things’, always thereby claiming to re-present a further realm – the realm of meaning, which is to become synonymous with the social. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 406

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘world-as-exhibition’ mechanism where material objects claim to re-present a distinct realm of meaning called the social.
• XREF: connects to: Folk art depended on agrarian or simple-commodity social relations that no longer exist