Colonial order required subjects believing reality equals what can be represented

Evidence

The exhibition motif can indicate the connections between a Cartesian notion of the mind and the politics of colonial order. The kind of political order epitomised in the world exhibition addresses, and demands, a political subject who must learn that reality is simply that which is capable of representation. Colonial or modern politics will seek to create for this subject a continuous theatre of certainty, unknown to pre-colonial politics. Such certainty rests, as we have seen, on accepting a series of essential distinctions, between mere representations and an ‘external reality’ beyond the play of representation, between models, texts or copies and an absolute ‘original’ to which they refer, and generally between a realm of the conceptual and the ‘real world’ outside. With a Cartesian conception of the subject, these distinctions come to inhabit the very nature of personhood, as something self-evident and unquestionable. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 550

Categorization

• XREF: Directly continues and pays off this book’s earlier exhibition motif chapters on the world exhibition and representation.