Tocqueville’s findings about Algiers were effects of viewing it as a representation

Evidence

The problem with this is not that Tocqueville has misread. A misreading implies that there would be a correct reading of what Algiers was built to represent. Algiers, however, like Cairo, was not built according to the easy mythology of representation, and did not offer an ‘architecture’ or external framework pretending to ‘portray’ its interior life. Its understanding would require other gestures than those of the intellectual tourist viewing the city from the sea. But Tocqueville is unable to escape the tourist’s objectifying habit. The characteristics of the life he then sees, so convenient to the colonisation he defends, that it is secretive, suspicious, and without a political or public life, are no more than the effects of reading it as though it were a representation. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 197

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the critique of Western representation of the Orient; also to the France in the Age of Orientalism chapter themes on French colonial observation.