Modern society’s objectivity arises from material objects representing a separate conceptual order.

Evidence

Society, thus, was a thing – that is, something that occurs representationally. To the extent that what we call ‘material’ objects were arranged to represent a non-material realm of ideas – whether in the modern machinery of fashion and the accompanying consumer industry, in works of art arranged in exhibitions (and in the objects displayed in museums, no doubt, and in zoos), in the organisation of historical monuments and the rest of the modern tourist industry, in the codification of law and the general codification of behaviour, or in compilations of statistics and the whole machinery of social science – they indicate or exhibit the existence of a shared conceptual order. In the world-as-exhibition, as I suggested in chapter 1, these processes of representation were taken to be the process of order itself. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 404

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the ‘world-as-exhibition’ thesis of chapter 1 — the museum, zoo, monument, and statistic as the material apparatus of social reality. — connects to: Objectivity is constituted in relation to historically situated humanity, not apart from it — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1585