Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order free essay sample

It is no longer unusual to suggeste that the construction of the colonial order is related to the eloboration of modern forms of representation and knowledge ( This has been examined by critique of Orientalism Best known analysis on Orientalism: Edward Said Orientalist world is defined by: 1. It is understood as the product of unchanging racial / cultural essences/ characteristics 2. These characteristics are always the opposite of the West (passive/ active, static/ mobile, emotional/ rational, chaotic/ ordered) 3. Oriental ismarked by fundamental absences (of movement, reason, order, meaning) ( In terms of these characteristics the colonial world can be mastered 19th century image of the Orient was constructed in Oriental studies, romantic novels, colonial administrations and world exhibitions 1889: Exposition Universelle in Paris ( To demonstrate French commercial and imperial power The new apparatus of representation (world exhibiotions) gave a central place to representation of the non-Western world ( This construction of ‘the other’ was important to manufacture national indentity and imperial purpose What Mitchell speaks about in first half of article: Examines the distinctiveness of the modern representational order exemplified by the world exhibition ( What Arab writers found in the West was the world itself being ordered up as an endless exhibition. We will write a custom essay sample on Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page This world-as-exhibiotion was a place where the artificial, the model and the plan were employed tot generate an unprecedented effect of order and certainty What Mitchell speaks about in second half of article: Examines the connection between the world-as-exhibition and Orientalism through reading of European travel accounts of 19th century Middle-East La rue du Caire Four members of the Egyptian delegation went to the world exhibition in Paris and were disgusted by what they saw when they entered the street that was supposed to represent an medieval street in Cairo This delegation then traveled to Stockholm to attend the Congress of Orientalists where they themselves were looked at as pieces of an exhibition An Object World Middle Eastern visitors found Europeans a curious people with an uncontainable eagerness to stand and stare ( This European curiosity is encountered in almost every Middle Eastern account ( Individuals were being surrounded and stared at like an object on exhibit This curious attitude was connected with a corresponding objectness: The curiosity of the observing subject was something demanded by a diversity of mechanisms for rendering things up as its object, beginning with the Middle Eatern visitor himself Le spectacle: Places in which they represent for the person the view of a town or country or something like that ( Goal: To set the world up as a picture, an object on display to be investigated and experienced by the European gaze Paris Exhibition 1889: For the education of people, natives and artifacts were arranged to provide the direct experience of a colonized object-world ( Arabic accounts of the West became accounts of these object-worlds The World-as-Exhibition The effect of objectness: Not just a matter of visual arrangement around a pectator, but of representation ( The carefull organization enabled them to evoke some larger meaning and reduce the world to a sytem of objects ( The arrangement of things was supposed to stand for something larger (empire/ history/ progress) The Europe one reads about in Arabic accounts was a place of spectacle and visual arrangement, of the organization of everything and everything organized to represent a larger meaning ( Organization of the view The world-as-exhibition: Means not an exhibition of the world, but the world organized and grasped as though it were an exhibition The Certainty of Representation Political certainty of the imperial age: Endless spectacles of the world-as-exhibition were not just reflections of this certainty, but the means of its production, by their technique of rendering imperial truth and cultural difference in ‘objective’ form 3 Aspects of this certainty illustrated from accounts of the world exhibition: 1. The apparent realism of the representation: The model always seemed to stand in perfect correspondence to the external world 2. The model always remained distinguishable from the reality it claimed to represent: Model was always a copy of the original 3. Distinction between the system of exhibits or representations and the exterior meaning they portrayed was imitated by distinguishing between the exhibits themselves and the plan of the exhibition: The visitor would also, besides the objects, encounter catalogs, plans, sign posts, programs, guidebooks, etc. Paradox: It was not always easy to tell where the exhibition ended and the world itself began ( World outside the exhibition began more and more to look like an extension of the exhibition The Labyrinth without Exits Uncertainty of what seemed the clear distinction between the simulated and the real: No clear line between the artificial and the real ( Example: The Egyptian street in the exhibition seemed very real, but it was also commercialised (paying for donkey rides, cafe in the mosque, dancing girls) Exhibitions came to resemble the commercial machinery of the rest of the city Warehouses/ Shopping malls: Products were ordered behind glass, precisely positioned The Effect of the Real This world of representation causes us to lose touch with reality Exhibition does not cut us off from reality, but persuades us that the world is divided into two ralms, the exhibition and the real world, thereby creating the effect of a reality from which we now feel cut off Artificiality of the world gives rise to a lost reality World exhibitions and commercial life of European cities were aspects of a political and economic transformation that was not limited to Europe itself ( Advertising and new European industry of ‘fashion’ cause boom in textile industry ( Egypt: Production of raw cotton for European countries causes an enormous change in infrastructure and communication in this land. It was completely transformed to serve the production of a single commodity The age of exhibition was the colonial age: The age of world economy and global power in which we live, since what was to be made available as exhibit was reality, the world itself The East Itself If Europe was becoming the world-as-exhibition, what happened to Europeans who went abroad to visit places whose images they had already encountered in books, spectacles and exhibitions? Flaubert: Described Cairo itself as a chaos of color and detail that refuses to compose itself as a picture ( He tried to grasp the real thing as a picture By trying to make sense of things, visitors would stand back and take pictures or make drawings ( Finding a good viewpoint to overlook and capture things becomes important To see without being seen: To represent something as Oriental, or to establish the objectness of the Orient, one sought to excise the European presence altogether Participant Observation Desire for the immediacy of the real became a desire for direct and physical contact with the exotic, bizarre and erotic Contradiction: On one hand, men wanted to separate oneself from the world and render it up as an object of representation and on the other hand there was the desire to lose oneself within this object-world and experience it directly ( World exhibitions: Built to accommodate and overcome this contradiction with their profusion of exotic detail and yet their clear distinction between visitor and exhibit