Colonial cities produced meaning through differential interrelation, not individual structures.

Evidence

In the order of an exhibitional world, such as Lyautey’s Rabat, each building and each object appeared to stand for some further meaning or value, and these meanings appeared to stand apart as a realm of order and institutions, indeed as the very realm of the political. The effect of meaning, however, as we might expect from the discussion of language in the previous chapter, actually arose not from each building or object in itself but out of the continuous weave of buildings and objects in which an individual item occurred. So although ‘Finance’ had not yet been built, it already existed as a ‘logical place’ in the process of intercalation. To create the effect of a realm of meaning, this differential process was to mark every space and every gap. It was to extend across the whole city, as continuous as a system of disciplinary power, to include even the ‘native town’ portrayed on the European postcards. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 507

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the semiotic point (Saussure via Culler) from the previous chapter about meaning arising from difference, applied now to urban space. — connects to: Cultural formations are constituted by sedimented histories, not single colonial moments. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 702
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘intercalation’ and ‘logical place’ — the idea that a building functions within a scheme before and regardless of its physical construction.