The exhibit’s power lay in its claim to an external real world beyond simulation

Evidence

The strangeness, I am going to suggest, did not arise as one might suppose from the ‘artificial’ quality of the endless exhibitions, displays and representations. It arose from the effect of an ‘external reality’ to which such seeming artificiality lays claim. The source of objective truths was the peculiar distinction maintained between the simulated and ‘the real’, between the exhibition and the world. This was a peculiarity which non-European visitors, finding themselves so often not just visitors but objects on exhibit, might have found a little more noticeable. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 65

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the key mechanism of ‘certainty of representation’ — the simulated/reality distinction that grounds objective truth.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — that the strangeness comes not from artificiality but from the claim to reality behind it — is a dense, paradigm-shifting observation about how representation produces truth.