Modern Europe ordered the world so it could be apprehended as an exhibit

Evidence

This reality-effect, let me provisionally suggest, was a world more and more rendered up to the individual according to the way in which, and to the extent to which, it could be set up before him or her as an exhibit. Non-Europeans encountered in Europe what one might call, echoing a phrase from Heidegger, the age of the world exhibition, or rather, the age of the world-as-exhibition. World exhibition here refers not to an exhibition of the world but to the world conceived and grasped as though it were an exhibition. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 81

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the book’s central coinage, ‘the age of the world-as-exhibition’ — world grasped as though it were an exhibit, not a literal show.
• XREF: Builds on and popularizes Heidegger’s ‘age of the world picture’ concept; connects to Mitchell’s later work on enframing and to Latour’s actor-network critique of modernist representation.