Europeans read the Orient as a picture because they took representation to be universal

Evidence

If Europe, as I have been suggesting, was the world-as-exhibition, what happened to Europeans who went abroad – to visit places whose images invariably they had already seen in pictures and exhibitions? How did they experience the real world such images had depicted, when the reality was a place whose life was not yet lived as if the world were an exhibition? They were confused of course, but perhaps the key to their confusion was this: although they thought of themselves as moving from the pictures to the real thing, they went on trying – like Flaubert – to grasp the real thing as a picture. How could they do otherwise, since they took reality itself to be a picture? The real is grasped in terms of a distinction between a picture and what it represents, so nothing else would have been, quite literally, thinkable. Brought up within what they thought of as a representational world, they took representation to be a universal condition. Thus they set about trying to describe the Orient as though it were an exhibition – a delapidated and mismanaged one of course, indeed an exhibition of its own delapidation and mismanagement. What else could it be taken to represent? — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 105

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the book’s core move: representation is not a neutral universal condition but a historically specific European construction; the colonizer’s confusion arises from assuming everyone lives ‘as if the world were an exhibition’. Dense, paradigm-shifting, resists one-line summary.
• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and to the ‘reality itself is a picture’ thesis that Mitchell develops against the anthropological assumption that representation is a universal category.