Tocqueville read Algiers’ architecture as a representation of hidden inner Ottoman life

Evidence

From outside and from a distance Tocqueville sees the city as a ‘whole’, which is to say as a picture or representation. He interprets this picture by assuming the city is constructed out of the opposition between an exterior and an interior, the one visible, the other invisible. The visible exterior, or ‘architecture’, is taken to be a representation of the invisible vie intérieure. The architecture ‘portrays the necessities and customs’ of this interior life, indeed of Muslim and Oriental life in general. In a characteristic intellectual gesture, life is read as an invisible internal meaning made visible in an external material form. The meaning is something made visible only to the outside observer, who stands apart and sees the world as a representation. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 196

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the ‘metaphysics of representation’ critique the author develops throughout — that European thought treats material forms as merely the outward sign of hidden meaning.
• SEED: Article angle: how the ‘reading of cities as representations’ by observers from a distance still shapes travel writing, development reports, and photojournalism of the Global South today.