Colonial order and the Cartesian mind both rest on a spectator facing a world-show

Evidence

Lyautey, one might say, conceived of the nature of colonial order in the same terms as Descartes conceived of the nature of the human subject. The colonial city was to be constructed, like a world exhibition, as a representation set up before the mind of an observing subject. The Cartesian mind was conceived, in a similar way, as an interior space in which representations of external reality are inspected by an internal eye – in other words, again, like an exhibition set up before an observer. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 547

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘enframing’ and world-exhibition logic of earlier chapters, and to the general theme of the observer/spectator stance so central to the colonial and epistemological critique. — connects to: The Cartesian cogito is the only absolute truth grounding all other knowledge. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 21; Foucault traces the subversion of the Cartesian subject to Modernist literature and philosophy — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 287; 1970s reference theory rejected the self-present Cartesian subject avant la lettre. (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The move from Cartesian interiority to the colonial city-as-exhibition is a genuine paradigm insight about how spatial-architectural order and mental representation are co-constituted — dense and reusable.