World exhibitions constituted a total machinery of representation standing for larger truths

Evidence

Chapter 1 discusses several features of the exhibitions that reinforce this modernist experience of the real, by generating what seems an unproblematic distinction between reality and its representation. Physical barriers separate the exhibition from the real world outside. The displays inside are arranged to express the European historico-geographic order of culture and evolution, an order reflected and reproduced in the multitude of plans, signposts, and guidebooks to the exhibition. As a result, the exhibition appears not just to mimic the real world outside but to superimpose a framework of meaning over its innumerable races, territories, and commodities. Made to appear an abstract order apart from physical reality, this framework is an effect of structure analogous to those of military order, urban planning, and other colonising practices mentioned above, produced by similar methods of coordination and arrangement. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 35 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The world-as-exhibition framework makes reality itself a series of representations — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 118; The world exhibition’s logic colonized reality itself, collapsing the boundary between representation and world — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 73; The world-as-exhibition is inherently certain, self-undermining, and colonial (+13 more)

Broader Connections

• Exhibitions imposed colonial order by making meaning appear to float free of physical reality #complicates (0.76) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 35