Non-Western domestic order rejects subject-object and plan-representation frameworks

Evidence

Unlike the order envisioned by French engineers (and the builders of world exhibitions), the ordering of the North African house is not concerned with a relationship between things and a pattern or plan. Using the Algerian example and introducing some historical evidence alongside, I am going to try to characterise this kind of order in a number of ways. First, I will argue, it is not concerned with order as a framework, whose lines would bring into existence a neutral space in terms of which things were to be organised. Second, such ordering does not work by determining a fixed boundary between an inner world and its outside. Third, it is not concerned with an order set up in terms of an isolated subject, who would confront the world as his or her object. Nor, finally, is it concerned with meaning as a problem for this individual subject of fixing the relation between the world and its plan or representation; or with truth as the certainty of such representation. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 177

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what ‘exhibition order’ is by negation — framework, interior, subject, object, and fixed meaning are the taken-for-granted elements it lacks.