The observing gaze is constituted by being set apart from its object

Evidence

Finally, what distinguished the realism of the model from the reality it claimed to represent was that this central point had an occupant, the figure on the viewing platform. The representation of reality was always an exhibit set up for an observer in its midst, an observing gaze surrounded and set apart by the exhibition’s careful order. If the dazzling displays of the exhibition could evoke some larger historical and political reality, it was because they were arranged to demand this isolated gaze. The more the exhibit drew in and encircled the visitor, the more the gaze was set apart from it, as the mind is set apart from the material world it observes. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 70

Categorization

• XREF: Mitchell’s observer construction echoes the panoptic logic of Foucault’s disciplinary gaze — the observer positioned centrally to render the world an object. — connects to: The image is constituted by a nihilating structure, not by revived perception — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 230; Modern science relocates the observer inside the observed system; The being of everyday objects is veiled by their instrumental function (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies the ‘exhibitionary gaze’ — the observer role that Orientalism and colonial knowledge both presuppose and produce.