The strange power of exhibitions came from their claim to an external real

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The contradiction can be resolved, I think, by recalling the paradoxical nature of the world-as-exhibition. The exhibition persuades people that the world is divided into two fundamental realms – the representation and the original, the exhibit and the external reality, the text and the world. Everything is organised as if this were the case. But ‘reality’, it turns out, means that which can be represented, that which presents itself as an exhibit before an observer. The so-called real world ‘outside’ is something experienced and grasped only as a series of further representations, an extended exhibition. Visitors to the Orient conceived of themselves as travelling to ‘the East itself in its vital actual reality’. But, as we saw, the reality they sought there was simply that which could be photographed or accurately represented, that which presented itself as a picture of something before an observer. A picture here refers not just to a visual illustration, but to what stands apart as something distinct from the subject and is grasped in terms of a corresponding distinction between representation and reality. In the end the European tried to grasp the Orient as though it were an exhibition of itself. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 118 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Despite these methods of creating the determined distinction between representation and reality, however, it was not always easy in Paris to tell where the exhibition ended and the world itself began. It is true that the boundaries of the exhibition were clearly marked, with high perimeter walls and monumental gates. But, as the Egyptian delegation had begun to discover, there was much about the real world outside, in the streets of Paris and beyond, that resembled the world exhibition; just as there was more about the exhibition that resembled the world outside. It was as though, as we will see, despite the determined efforts within the exhibition to construct perfect representations of the real world outside, the real world beyond the gates turned out to be rather like an extension of the exhibition. This extended exhibition would continue to present itself as a series of mere representations, representing a reality outside. Thus we should think of it as not so much an exhibition as a kind of labyrinth, the labyrinth which includes in itself its own exits. But then, perhaps the sequence of exhibitions became so accurate and so extensive, no one ever realised that the ‘real world’ they promised was not there. Except perhaps the Egyptians. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 73 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Merely viewing a commercial exhibition induced a rebel tribe’s submission; Scholars compare colonial knowledge penetration to staging an exhibition of authority.; World exhibitions constituted a total machinery of representation standing for larger truths (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• The exhibit’s power lay in its claim to an external real world beyond simulation #corroborates (0.97) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 65
• The world-as-exhibition framework makes reality itself a series of representations #complicates (0.86) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 118
• The world exhibition’s logic colonized reality itself, collapsing the boundary between representation and world #complicates (0.85) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 73
• The real world came to resemble an extension of the exhibition #complicates (0.82)
• Art achieves objective revelation through subjective effort only at the cost of illusoriness #complicates (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2742