The world-as-exhibition is inherently certain, self-undermining, and colonial

Evidence

Third, what I will refer to as its colonial nature: the age of the exhibition was necessarily the colonial age, the age of world economy and global power in which we live, since what was to be rendered as exhibit was reality, the world itself. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 82 (#expands, via linked claim)

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 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Scholars compare colonial knowledge penetration to staging an exhibition of authority.; World exhibitions constituted a total machinery of representation standing for larger truths; The strange power of exhibitions came from their claim to an external real (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• The world-as-exhibition order is structurally and necessarily colonial #expands (0.95) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 82
• The exhibit’s power lay in its claim to an external real world beyond simulation #complicates (0.78) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 65