The representation-original distinction itself is a historically specific technique

Evidence

The complaint to be made about these kinds of descriptions of the Middle East is not that they are distorted, by the ordinary intellectual assumptions of their authors, or that they are misrepresentations. These words imply the simple existence of an original object, of which an accurate representation might be made. They remain oblivious to the peculiar, historical nature of this absolute distinction between representation and original. It is this obliviousness which produces Islam’s so-called paradoxes. The ‘urban order’ or the ‘urban structures’ such accounts find missing are assumed to be order or structure itself, rather than the effects, as we saw in Paris, of a technique of building that seems to divide the world into imaginary structures and their material realisation, into representations and simple originals. There are no such simple originals, but only the process of deciding to pretend that there are, and of forgetting this decision. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 200

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ‘there are no simple originals, only the decision to pretend there are, and the forgetting of this decision’ is a paradigm-level reframing of how representation works — the critical move is not that descriptions distort an original but that the very category of ‘original’ is manufactured.
• SEED: Article angle: the ‘paradox’ as a tell — whenever scholars announce a paradox in another culture, it usually signals an imposed conceptual framework rather than an actual cultural contradiction.