Total visibility without depth was the representational goal of Orientalist description.

Evidence

What prevents narrative order, at the very same time that narrative order is the dominating fiction of Lane’s text, is sheer, overpowering, monumental description. Lane’s objective is to make Egypt and the Egyptians totally visible, to keep nothing hidden from his reader, to deliver the Egyptians without depth, in swollen detail. As rapporteur his propensity is for sadomasochistic colossal tidbits: the self-multilation of dervishes, the cruelty of judges, the blending of religion with licentiousness among Muslims, the excess of libidinous passions, and so on. Yet no matter how odd and perverse the event and how lost we become in its dizzying detail, Lane is ubiquitous, his job being to reassemble the pieces and enable us to move on, albeit jerkily. To a certain extent he does this by just being a European who can discursively control the passions and excitements to which the Muslims are unhappily subject. But to an even greater extent, Lane’s capacity to rein in his profuse subject matter with an unyielding bridle of discipline and detachment depends on his cold distance from Egyptian life and Egyptian productivity. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 412

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names the defining move of Orientalist representation: rendering the Other ‘totally visible’ yet ‘without depth’ — the object is flattened through exhaustive enumeration.
• XREF: This ‘discursive control’ of the passions maps directly to later Islamophobia readings on how Muslim subjectivity is constituted as excess requiring Western restraint.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 412