Modern observers grasp the world as a representation rather than as lived reality

Evidence

The curious double position of the European, as participant-observer, makes it possible to experience the Orient as though one were the visitor to an exhibition. Unaware that the Orient has not been arranged as an exhibition, the visitor carries out the characteristic cognitive manoeuvre of the modern subject, who separates himself from an object-world and observes it from a position that is invisible and set apart. From there, as Pierre Bourdieu says of the modern anthropologist or social scientist, one transfers into the object the principles of one’s relation to the object and ‘conceives of it as a totality intended for cognition alone’. The world is grasped, inevitably, as though it were ‘a representation (in the sense of idealist philosophy, but also as used in painting or the theatre)’, and people’s lives appear as no more than ‘stage parts … or the implementing of plans’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 115

Categorization

• DEFINE: Mitchell here defines the participant-observer’s cognitive manoeuvre — objectifying the world as representation — as the defining trait of the modern observing subject.
• XREF: Connects to my existing thought on the world-as-exhibition thesis and to inattentional blindness / the observer’s detached position in later chapters of this same book. — connects to: The reflecting self remains engaged, historical, and worldly rather than detached; Objectifying thought severs us from the world it claims to survey. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 856; For Heidegger, Being-in-the-world means humans serve as a clearing where things reveal themselves — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 591 (+3 more)