Non-European visitors experienced all of Europe as staged for an observing subject

Evidence

Outside the world exhibition, it follows paradoxically, one encountered not the real world but only further models and representations of the real. Beyond the exhibition and the department store, everywhere that non-European visitors went – the museum and the Orientalist congress, the theatre and the zoo, the countryside encountered typically in the form of a model farm exhibiting new machinery and cultivation methods, the very streets of the modern city with their deliberate façades, even the Alps once the funicular was built – they found the technique and sensation to be the same. Everything seemed to be set up before one as though it were the model or the picture of something. Everything was arranged before an observing subject into a system of signification (to use the European jargon), declaring itself to be the signifier of a signified. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 80

Categorization

• XREF: Supports and extends the book’s central claim that the exhibitionary framework extended beyond exhibitions — connects to the reader’s knowledge of Mitchell’s argument about representation and the world-as-exhibition.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that all of Europe — countryside, Alps, streets — appeared to non-Europeans as models and pictures of themselves is a genuinely paradigm-shifting reframing: the colonized perceive the métropole itself as simulacrum, ahead of Baudrillard by a century.