The inert world is a product of its own representation

Evidence

Believing in an ‘outside world’, beyond the exhibition, beyond all process of representation, as a realm inert and disenchanted – the great signified, the referent, the empty, changeless Orient – the modern individual is under a new and more subtle enchantment. The inert objectness of this world is an effect of its ordering, of its setting up as though it were an exhibition, a setup which makes there appear to exist apart from such ‘external reality’ a transcendental entity called culture, a code or text or cognitive map by whose mysterious existence ‘the world’ is lent its ‘significance’. Hence the European visitors to the Middle East, no longer savage but tamed into scholars and soldiers and tourists, as docile and as curious as the millions who visited the exhibition, take up their deliberate posture towards its towns and its life, and implore the spirits of significance to speak. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 208

Categorization

• BMF: The ‘empty, changeless Orient’ as a referent conjured by the very posture meant to observe it — this evokes Home Boy’s protagonist, a foreigner caught between being the observing immigrant and the observed object, always positioned by the representational frame around him.
• XREF: Strongly parallels Edward Said’s Orientalism but pushes further: not just that the West misrepresents the Orient, but that the very category ‘culture’ (as a separable code or map) is an effect of this ordering. — connects to: Representation itself is a speculative act that binds speculative communities together. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 280
• STORYSTEM: A colonial-era tourist or ethnographer who realizes that the ‘inscrutable East’ they document is partly an artifact of their own documentation apparatus — the diaries, sketches, and taxonomies that constitute the inert Orient as an object of study.