Nineteenth-century Europeans could only experience reality as representation, not presence

Evidence

Their purpose in travelling to the Orient was to experience the reality they had seen so often on exhibit, but what they found there confused them. Although they thought of themselves as moving from exhibits of the Orient to the real thing, they went on trying to grasp the real thing as an exhibit. This was inevitable. To the European, reality meant that which presents itself in terms of a distinction between representation and original; something to be grasped as though it were an exhibit. Unlike London or Paris, however, a place such as Cairo had not yet been rearranged in terms of this absolute distinction and set up as an exhibition before the visitor’s gaze. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 38

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that Europeans could only grasp the real as an exhibit — that representation itself is an ontology rather than a technique — is paradigm-level and resists summary.
• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and to the Paris arcades/exhibition history in Walter Benjamin’s work.