Modern production society converts all lived experience into representations

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The contradiction can be resolved, I think, by recalling the paradoxical nature of the world-as-exhibition. The exhibition persuades people that the world is divided into two fundamental realms – the representation and the original, the exhibit and the external reality, the text and the world. Everything is organised as if this were the case. But ‘reality’, it turns out, means that which can be represented, that which presents itself as an exhibit before an observer. The so-called real world ‘outside’ is something experienced and grasped only as a series of further representations, an extended exhibition. Visitors to the Orient conceived of themselves as travelling to ‘the East itself in its vital actual reality’. But, as we saw, the reality they sought there was simply that which could be photographed or accurately represented, that which presented itself as a picture of something before an observer. A picture here refers not just to a visual illustration, but to what stands apart as something distinct from the subject and is grasped in terms of a corresponding distinction between representation and reality. In the end the European tried to grasp the Orient as though it were an exhibition of itself. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 118 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Advanced industrial society’s chief achievement is containing all qualitative social change — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 90; Modern observers grasp the world as a representation rather than as lived reality — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 115; All systems of representation spatialize and thereby distort lived experience — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1293 (+3 more)

Related

• Modern production reduces directly lived life to mediated representation (similarity 0.88)
• Modern observers grasp the world as a representation rather than as lived reality (similarity 0.84)
• The world-as-exhibition framework makes reality itself a series of representations (similarity 0.84)
• Modern Europe ordered the world so it could be apprehended as an exhibit (similarity 0.80)
• Modern society’s objectivity arises from material objects representing a separate conceptual order. (similarity 0.80)
• Under modern production, lived experience becomes representation and spectacle (similarity 0.79)
• Europeans read the Orient as a picture because they took representation to be universal (similarity 0.79)
• Nineteenth-century Europeans could only experience reality as representation, not presence (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Modern production reduces directly lived life to mediated representation #corroborates (0.95)
• Modern observers grasp the world as a representation rather than as lived reality #corroborates (0.82) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 115
• The world-as-exhibition framework makes reality itself a series of representations #corroborates (0.80) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 118
• All systems of representation spatialize and thereby distort lived experience #expands (0.75) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1293
• Modern society abstracts persons just as pre-industrial cultures personified objects #expands (0.72) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2423