The world-as-exhibition framework makes reality itself a series of representations

Evidence

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘world-as-exhibition’ paradox: reality is experienced only as further representations, so grasping reality means grasping a representation of it.
• XREF: Resonates with Baudrillard’s simulacra, Debord’s spectacle, and Orientalism scholarship; also echoes the uncanny in the Cairo street scenes of H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy. — connects to: Shared techniques render the world’s face identical for everyone; Cultural products shape perception so that reality seems to continue the medium’s world. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 98; Modern production society converts all lived experience into representations (+1 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that modernity constructs reality as ‘that which can be represented’ is a genuinely paradigm-shifting framework — it reframes the entire history of European encounters with the colonized world.