Europeans experienced foreign places by reducing the world to pictorial order

Evidence

‘So here we are in Egypt’, wrote Gustave Flaubert, in a letter from Cairo in January 1850. ‘What can I say about it all? What can I write you? As yet I am scarcely over the initial bedazzlement … each detail reaches out to grip you; it pinches you; and the more you concentrate on it the less you grasp the whole. Then gradually all this becomes harmonious and the pieces fall into place of themselves, in accordance with the laws of perspective. But the first days, by God, it is such a bewildering chaos of colours …’ Flaubert experiences Cairo as a visual turmoil. At first it is indescribable, except as disorder. What can he write about the place? That it is a chaos of colour and detail, which refuses to compose itself as a picture. The disorienting experience of a Cairo street, in other words, with its arguments in unknown languages, strangers who brush past in strange clothes, unusual colours, and unfamiliar sounds and smells, is expressed as an absence of pictorial order. There is no distance, this means, between oneself and the view, and the eyes are reduced to organs of touch: ‘each detail reaches out to grip you’. Without a separation of the self from a picture, moreover, it becomes impossible to grasp ‘the whole’. The experience of the world as a picture set up before the subject is linked, as we will see, to the unusual conception of the world as a limited totality, something that forms a bounded structure or system. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 104

Categorization

• DEFINE: Mitchell establishes the ‘world-as-picture’ conception — the idea that grasping reality requires framing it as a bounded, pictorial totality — which becomes the book’s central analytic.
• ADDENDUM: Flaubert’s ‘eyes reduced to organs of touch’ and the collapse of visual distance resonates with the sensory-immersion themes in the ‘Grafting & Growth’ infrastructure piece, though the connection is loose.
• XREF: connects to: Tourism operators substitute globally recognizable ethnicity for local authenticity. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1206