Meaning in colonial cities arises from gaps and interrelations, not individual objects

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Chapter 1 discusses several features of the exhibitions that reinforce this modernist experience of the real, by generating what seems an unproblematic distinction between reality and its representation. Physical barriers separate the exhibition from the real world outside. The displays inside are arranged to express the European historico-geographic order of culture and evolution, an order reflected and reproduced in the multitude of plans, signposts, and guidebooks to the exhibition. As a result, the exhibition appears not just to mimic the real world outside but to superimpose a framework of meaning over its innumerable races, territories, and commodities. Made to appear an abstract order apart from physical reality, this framework is an effect of structure analogous to those of military order, urban planning, and other colonising practices mentioned above, produced by similar methods of coordination and arrangement. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 35 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Meaning arises from interdependence in difference, not from data or content. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 622; Colonial cities produced meaning through differential interrelation, not individual structures. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 507; Pre-colonial dwelling treated building and meaning as inseparable, not as plan and material (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial cities produced meaning through differential interrelation, not individual structures. #corroborates (0.98) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 507
• Exhibitions imposed colonial order by making meaning appear to float free of physical reality #complicates (0.75) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 35
• Pre-colonial dwelling treated building and meaning as inseparable, not as plan and material #complicates (0.72)