The copy-original hierarchy is a distinctively modern (Western) way of constituting order.

Evidence

This vibration of echoes and repetitions always carries the paradox of such repetition – what occurs is always the same as and yet different from what it duplicates. In the face of this paradox, moreover, nothing is decided, no simple hierarchy of truth is accepted. Where everything occurs as the trace of what precedes and follows it, nothing is determined as the original. Nothing stands apart from what resembles or differs, as the simple, self-identical original, the way a real world is thought to stand outside the exhibition. There is no hierarchical order of the imitator and the imitated, as in an exhibition or any other system of representation. Everything both imitates and is imitated. There is no simple division into an order of copies and an order of originals, of pictures and what they represent, of exhibits and reality, of the text and the real world, of signifiers and signifieds – the simple, hierarchical division that for the modern world is ‘what constitutes order’. The order of this world is not an order of appearance. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 206

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the copy/original theme from the book’s opening on the exhibition; connects to Derrida and deconstruction.