The tableau form arranged all human learning as surveyable spectacle

Evidence

Dacier’s report, as it was known informally, embodied many of Sacy’s predilections as well as containing his contributions on the state of Oriental learning. Its title—Tableau historique de l’érudition française—announces the new historical (as opposed to sacred) consciousness. Such consciousness is dramatic: learning can be arranged on a stage set, as it were, where its totality can be readily surveyed. Addressed to the king, Dacier’s preface stated the theme perfectly. Such a survey as this made it possible to do something no other sovereign had attempted, namely to take in, with one coup d’oeil, the whole of human knowledge. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 340

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the tableau historique as the dramatic arrangement of learning into a surveyable totality, a key epistemic form of Orientalism’s inaugural phase.
• XREF: The surveyable-everything frame connects to Foucault’s Panopticon and the colonial survey project of making the colonized world legible. — connects to: Sustained collective looking restabilizes meaning amid endless digital reframing — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 447
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 340