Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History

The World as Exhibition

Author(s): Timothy Mitchell
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), pp. 217-236
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178807 .
Accessed: 10/11/2012 11:47
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Cambridge University Press and Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History are collaborating with
JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Studies in Society and History.

http://www.jstor.org

The World as Exhibition

TIMOTHY

MITCHELL

New York University

The Egyptiandelegation to the Eighth InternationalCongressof Orientalists,

held in Stockholm duringthe summerof 1889, traveledto Sweden via Paris
and paused there to visit the World Exhibition. The four Egyptians spent
several days in the Frenchcapital, climbing twice the height (they were told)
of the Great Pyramidin AlexandreEiffel's new tower, and exploringthe city
and exhibition laid out beneath. Only one thing disturbedthem. The Egyptian
exhibit had been built by the Frenchto representa street of medieval Cairo,
made of houses with overhanging upper stories and a mosque like that of
Qaitbay. "It was intended," one of the Egyptianswrote, 'to resemble the
old aspect of Cairo." So carefully was this done, he noted, that "even the
paint on the buildings was made dirty."'
The Egyptianexhibit had also been made carefully chaotic. In contrastto
the orderlinessof the rest of the exhibition, the imitationstreet was arranged
in the haphazardmannerof the bazaar.The way was crowdedwith shops and
stalls, where Frenchmen,dressed as Orientals, sold perfumes, pastries, and
tarboushes.To complete the effect of the Orient, the Frenchorganizershad
importedfrom Cairo fifty Egyptiandonkeys, togetherwith their drivers and
the requisite number of grooms, farriers, and saddlemakers.The donkeys
gave rides for the price of one franc up and down the street, resulting in a
clamor and confusion so lifelike, the directorof the exhibitionwas obliged to
issue an orderrestrictingthe donkeys to a certainnumberat each hour of the
day.
The Egyptian visitors were disgusted by all this and stayed away. Their
final embarrassmenthad been to enter the door of the mosque and discover
that, like the rest of the street, it had been erected as what the Europeans
called a facade. "Its externalform was all that there was of the mosque. As
for the interior, it had been set up as a coffee house, where Egyptian girls
performeddances with young males, and dervishes whirled."2
After eighteen days in Paris, the Egyptiandelegation traveledon to StockParts of this essay are drawn from the first chapterof a book entitled Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1988). I am indebtedto Stefania Pandolfo and Lila AbuLughod for their comments.
I MuhammadAmin Fikri, Irshad al-alibba' ila mahasin Urubba. (Cairo:
al-Muqtataf,1892),
128.
2 Fikri, Irshad al-alibba', 128-29, 136.
0010-4175/89/2254-2417 $5.00 ) 1989 Society for ComparativeStudy of Society and History
217

2I8

TIMOTHY MITCHELL

holm to attend the Congress of Orientalists. Together with other nonEuropeandelegates, the Egyptians were received with hospitality-and a
great curiosity. As though they were still in Paris, they found themselves
somethingof an exhibit. "Bonafide Orientals," wrote a Europeanparticipant
in the Congress, "were staredat as in a Barnum'sall-world show: the good
Scandinavianpeople seemed to think that it was a collection of Orientals, not
of Orientalists."3 Some of the Orientaliststhemselves seemed to delight in
the role of showmen. At an earlierCongress in Berlin, we are told that "the
grotesque idea was startedof producing natives of Orientalcountries as illustrationsof a paper: thus the Boden Professor of Sanskritat Oxford produced a real live Indian Pandit, and made him go through the ritual of
Brahmanical prayer and worship before a hilarious assembly . . . Professor

Max Miiller of Oxford produced two rival Japanesepriests, who exhibited

theirgifts; it had the appearanceof two showmenexhibitingtheirmonkeys."4
At the Stockholm Congress, the Egyptians were invited to participate as
scholars, but when they used their own language to do so, they again found
themselves treated as exhibits. "I have heard nothing so unworthy of a
sensible man," complained an Oxford scholar, "as . . . the whistling howls

emitted by an Arabic studentof El-Azharof Cairo. Such exhibitions at Congresses are mischievous and degrading."5
The exhibition and the congress were not the only examples of this European mischief. Throughoutthe nineteenth century, non-Europeanvisitors
found themselves being placed on exhibit or made the carefulobject of European curiosity. The degradationthey often suffered, whetherintendedor not,
seemed inevitable and as necessary to these spectacles as the scaffolded
facades or the curious crowds of onlookers. The facades, the onlookers and
the degradationseemed all to belong to the organizing of an exhibit, to a
particularlyEuropeanconcern with renderingthings up to be viewed.
This essay will examine whatthis process of exhibitingcan tell us aboutthe
moder West. I will explore it first throughthe eyes of a numberof Arab
writers, as a mechanismof order and meaning that exemplifies their experience of nineteenth-centuryEurope.Whatthey found in the West, I will argue,
were not just exhibitions of the world, but the orderingup of the world itself
as an endless exhibition. I will then comparethis experiencewith the Western
experience of the nineteenth-centuryOrient-with the images of Orientalism.
As we have begun to see, the Orientwas perhapsthe most importantobject on
display at Europe's exhibitions, the West's great "external reality." Orientalism, I would argue, illustratesnot just the strangeways in which the West
has treatedthe "outside world"; it illustrateshow the Westernexperienceof
3 R. N. Crust, "The InternationalCongresses of Orientalists," Hellas 6 (1897): 359.
4 Ibid., 351.
5 Ibid., 359.

THE WORLD AS EXHIBITION

219

orderand truth,epitomizedin the exhibition, dependeduponcreatingthe very

effect of an "outside," of an "external reality" beyond all representation.
AN OBJECT-WORLD

Middle Easternvisitors found Europeansa curiouspeople, who had an uncontainable eagerness to stand and stare. "One of the characteristicsof the
French is to stare and get excited at everything new," wrote an Egyptian
scholarafterspendingfive years in Parisduringthe 1820s, in the first description of nineteenth-centuryEuropeto be publishedin Arabic.6The curiosityof
the Europeanis encounteredin almost every subsequentMiddle Easternaccount. Towardsthe end of the nineteenthcentury, when one or two Egyptian
writersadoptedthe realistic style of the novel and took the journey to Europe
as their first topic, their stories would often evoke the peculiarexperience of
the West by describingan individualsurroundedand staredat, like an object
on exhibit. "Whenever he paused outside a shop or showroom," the protagonist in one such story found on his first day in Paris, "a large numberof
people would surroundhim, both men and women, staring at his dress and
appearance."7
The curious attitudeof the Europeansubject that one finds in Arabic accounts seems to have been connected with what one might call a corresponding objectness. The curiosity of the observing subject was something demandedby a diversity of mechanismsfor renderingthings up as its objectbeginning with the Middle Easternvisitor himself. The membersof an Egyptian studentmission sent to Paris in the 1820s were confined to the college in
which they lived and were allowed out only to visit museumsand the theater,
where they found themselves parodiedin vaudeville as objects of entertainment for the Frenchpublic. "They constructthe stage as the play demands,"
explained one of the students. "For example, if they want to imitatea sultan
and the things that happento him, they set up the stage in the form of a palace
and portrayhim in person. If for instancethey want to play the Shahof Persia,
they dress someone in the clothes of the Persian monarchand then put him
there and sit him on a throne.'"8
6 Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, al-A'mal al-Kamila. 4 Vols. (Beirut: al-Mu'assasa
al-Arabiyya li-1Dirasat wa-l-Nashr, 1973) II, 76.
7 Ali Mubarak,Alam al-din (Alexandria, 1882), 816. The "curiosity" of the Europeanis
something of a theme for Orientalistwriters. BernardLewis, for example, contrastsit with the
"general lack of curiosity" of non-Europeans. Such curiosity is assumed to be simply the
natural,unfetteredrelationof a person to the world, emerging in Europeonce the "loosening of
theological bonds" had broughtabout "the freeing of humanminds." The MuslimDiscovery of
Europe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1982), 299. See Mitchell, Colonising Egypt
(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1988) 4-5, for a critiqueof this sort of argumentand
its own "theological" assumptions.
8 Tahtawi, al-A'mal al-Kamila, II, 177, 119-20; Alain Silvera, "The First
EgyptianStudent
Mission to France Under MuhammadAli," in Modern Egypt: Studies in Politics and Society,
Elie Kedourie and Sylvia G. Haim, eds. (London: FrankCass, 1980), 13.

220

TIMOTHY MITCHELL

Even Middle Easternmonarchswho came in person to Europewere liable

to be incorporatedinto its theatricalmachinery.When the Khedive of Egypt
visited Paristo attendan earlierExpositionUniversellein 1867, he found that
the Egyptianexhibit had been builtto simulatemedievalCairoin the form of a
royal palace. The Khedive stayed in the imitationpalace duringhis visit and
became a partof the exhibition, receiving visitors with medieval hospitality.9
Visitors to Europefound not only themselves renderedup as objects to be
viewed. The Arabic account of the studentmission to Paris devoted several
pages to the Parisianphenomenonof le spectacle, a word for which its author
knew of no Arabicequivalent.Besides the Operaand the Opera-Comique,the
differentkinds of spectaclehe describedwere "places in which they represent
for the person the view of a town or a country or the like," such as "the
Panorama, the Cosmorana, the Diorama, the Europoramaand the Uranorama."10 In a panoramaof Cairo, he explained in illustration, "it is as
though you were looking from on top of the minaretof Sultan Hasan, for
example, with al-Rumailaand the rest of the city beneathyou.""
The effect of such spectacles was to set the world up as a picture. They
arrangedit before an audienceas an object on display-to be viewed, investigated, and experienced.An Orientalistof the same period, Sylvestre de Sacy,
the greatFrenchscholar, wantedthe scholarlyportrayalof the Orientto create
a similarkind of object-world.He hadplannedto establisha museumthatwas
to be "a vast depot of objects of all kinds, of drawings, of original books,
maps, accounts of voyages, all offered to those who wish to give themselves
to the study of [the Orient];in such a way thateach of these studentswould be
able to feel himself transportedas if by enchantmentinto the midst of, say, a
Mongolian tribe or of the Chinese race, whichever he might have made the
object of his studies." 12
The world exhibitions of the second half of the century were arrangedto
offer visitors the same direct experience of an object-world.In planning the
layout of the 1889 Exhibition, it was decided "before enteringthe temple of
moder life" to set up an exhibit of all humanhistory, "as a gateway to the
exposition and a noble preface." Entitled "Histoire du Travail," or more
fully "Exposition retrospectivedu travailet des sciences anthropologiques,"
the display would demonstratethe history of humanlabor by means of "objects and things themselves." It would have "nothing vague aboutit," it was
said, "because it will consist of an object lesson."13
9 Georges Douin, Histoire du regne du Khedive Ismail, 2 vols. (Rome: Royal Egyptian
GeographicalSociety, 1934), II, 4-5.
10 Tahtawi, al-A'mal al-Kamila, II, 121.
I Ibid.
12 Cited in EdwardW. Said, Orientalism(New York: Pantheon, 1978), 165.
13 "Les origins et le plan de l'exposition," L'Expositionde Paris de 1889, 3 (15 December
1889), 18.

THE WORLD AS EXHIBITION

221

Arabic accounts of the modem West became accounts of these curious

object-worlds.By the last decade of the nineteenthcentury,more thanhalf the
descriptionsof journeys to Europebeing published in Cairo were written to
describe visits to a world exhibition or an internationalcongress of Orientalists.14 Such accounts devote hundredsof pages to describing the peculiar
order and technique of these events- the curious crowds of spectators, the
scholarly exhibit and the model, the organizationof panoramasand perspectives, the display of new discoveries and merchandise,the architectureof iron
and glass, the systems of classification, the calculations of statistics, the
lectures, the plans andthe guide books-in shortthe entiremachineryof what
we think of as representation.
The machineryof representationwas not confined to the exhibition and the
congress. Almost everywherethatMiddle Easternvisitors went, they seemed
to encounter this renderingup of the world as a thing to be viewed. They
visited the new museums and saw the culturesof the world portrayedin the
form of objects arrangedunderglass in the orderof theirevolution. They were
taken to the theater, a place where Europeansrepresentedtheir history to
themselves, as several Egyptian writers explained. The Middle Easternvisitors spent afternoons in the public gardens, carefully organized "to bring
together the trees and plants of every part of the world," as anotherArab
writer put it. And inevitably they took trips to the zoo, a product of nineteenth-centurycolonial penetrationof the Orient, as TheodorAdomo wrote,
"which paid symbolic tributein the form of animals."'5
The Europein Arabicaccountswas a place of spectacle and visual arrangement, of the organizationof everything, and everything organizedto represent, to recall, like the exhibition, some largermeaning. Characteristicof the
Europeans'way of life was their preoccupationwith what an Egyptianauthor
described as intizam al-manzar, the organizationof the view. Outside the
world exhibition, it follows paradoxically,one encounterednot the real world
but only furthermodels and representationsof the real. Beyond the exhibition
and the congress, beyond the museum and the zoo-everywhere that nonEuropeanvisitors went, they found the techniqueand the sensationto be the
same: the countryside, encounteredtypically in the form of a model farm
exhibiting new machinery and cultivation methods; the very streets of the
14 On Egyptian writing about Europe in the nineteenthcentury, see IbrahimAbu-Lughod,
Arab Rediscovery of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); Anouar Louca,
Voyageurset dcrivainsegyptiens en France au XIXe siecle (Paris:Didier, 1970), and Mitchell,
Colonising Egypt, 7-13, 180 n. 14.
15 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia.
Reflections From a Damaged Life (London: Verso,
1978), 116; on the theater, see, for example, Muhammadal-Muwaylihi,HadithIsa ibn Hisham,
awfatra min al-zaman, 2nd ed. (Cairo:al-Maktabaal-Azhariyya, 1911), 434, and Tahtawi, alA'mal al-Kamila, II:119-20; on the public gardenand the zoo, Muhammadal-Sanusial-Tunisi,
al-Istitla'at al-barisiya fi ma'rad sanat 1889 (Tunis: n.p., 1891), 37.

222

TIMOTHY

MITCHELL

modem city with their meaningfulfacades-even the Alps, once the funicular
railway was built.16 Everything seemed to be set up as though it were the
model or the pictureof something, arrangedbefore an observingsubjectinto a
system of signification, declaringitself to be a mere object, a mere "signifier
of' something further.
The exhibition could be read in such accounts as epitomizing the strange
characterof the West: a place where one was continuallypressed into service
as a spectator by a world ordered so as to represent. In exhibitions, the
travelerfrom the Middle East could describe this curious way of addressing
the world increasingly encountered in modem Europe, a particularrelationship between the individual and a world of "things themselves" that
Europeansseemed to take as the experienceof the real. This reality-effectwas
a world renderedup to the individual, accordingto the way in which, and to
the extent to which, it could be set up before him or her as an exhibit: as mere
objects recalling a meaning or reality beyond. In Europe, non-Europeans
encounteredwhatone might call, echoing a phrasefrom Heidegger, the age of
the world exhibition, or rather,the age of the world-as-exhibition.17World
exhibition here refers not to an exhibition of the world, but to the world
conceived and grasped as though it were an exhibition.
THE

CERTAINTY

OF REPRESENTATION

"England is at presentthe greatestOrientalEmpirewhich the world has ever

known," proclaimed the president of the 1892 OrientalistCongress at its
opening session. His words reflected the political certainty of the imperial
age. "She knows not only how to conquer, but how to rule."'8 The endless
spectacles of the world-as-exhibitionwere not just reflectionsof this certainty, but, by their techniqueof renderingimperialtruthand culturaldifference
in "objective" form, the means of its production.They were occasions for
making sure of such objective truths, in a world where truthhad become a
question of what Heidegger calls "the certaintyof representation."19
Two aspects of this kind of certaintycan be illustratedfrom the accountsof
the world exhibition. First, there was the apparentrealism of the representation. The model or display always seemed to stand in perfect correspondence
to the externalworld-a correspondencethat was frequentlynoted in Middle
Easternaccounts. One of the most impressiveexhibits at the 1889 exhibition
16 The "organizationof the view" is describedin Mubarak,Alam al-din, 817, the model farm
outside Paris, Ibid., 1008-42; the visual effect of the street, Ibid., 448, 964, and Idwar Ilyas,
Mashahid Uruba wa-Amirka (Cairo:al-Muqtataf,1900), 268; the new funicularat Lucerneand
the Europeanpassion for panoramasin Fikri, Irshad, 98.
17 MartinHeidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harperand Row, 1977).
18 InternationalCongress of Orientalists,Transactionsof the Ninth Congress, 1892, 2 vols.
(London: InternationalCongress of Orientalists, 1893), I, 35.
19 Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," 127.

THE

WORLD

AS EXHIBITION

223

in Paris was a panorama of the city. An Arab visitor described this as consisting of a viewing platform on which one stood, encircled by images of the city.
The images were mounted and illuminated in such a way that the observer felt
himself standing at the center of the city itself, which seemed to materialize
around him as a single, solid object "not differing from reality in any
way."20

Second, the model, however realistic, always remained distinguishable

from the reality it claimed to represent. Even though the paint was made dirty
and the donkeys were brought from Cairo, the medieval Egyptian street at the
Paris Exhibition remained only a Parisian copy of the Oriental original. The
certainty of representation depended on this deliberate difference in time and
displacement in space separating the representation from the real thing. It also
depended on the position of the visitor-the tourist in the imitation street or
the figure on the viewing platform. The representation of reality was always
an exhibit set up for an observer in its midst: an observing gaze surrounded by
and yet excluded from the exhibition's careful order. The more the exhibit
drew in and encircled the visitor, the more the gaze was set apart from it, as
the mind (in our Cartesian imagery) is said to be set apart from the material
world it observes. The separation is suggested in a description of the Egyptian
exhibit at the Paris Exhibition of 1867:
A museum inside a pharaonictemple representedAntiquity, a palace richly decorated
in the Arab style representedthe Middle Ages, a caravanseraiof merchants and
performersportrayedin real life the customs of today. Weapons from the Sudan, the
skins of wild monsters, perfumes,poisons and medicinalplantstransportus directlyto
the tropics. Potteryfrom Assiut and Aswan, filigree andcloth of silk and gold invite us
to touch with our fingers a strangecivilization. All the races subject to the Vice-Roy
were personified by individuals selected with care. We rubbed shoulders with the
fellah, we made way before the Bedouin of the Libyandesert on their beautiful white
dromedaries.This sumptuousdisplay spoke to the mind as to the eyes; it expressed a
political idea.21
The remarkable realism of such displays made a strange civilization into an
object the visitor could almost touch, yet, to the observing eye, surrounded by
the display but excluded from it by the status of visitor, it remained a mere
representation, the picture of some further reality. Thus two parallel pairs of
distinctions were maintained, between the visitor and the exhibit, and between the exhibit and what it expressed. The representation seemed to be set
apart from the political reality it claimed to portray, as the observing mind is
set apart from what it observes.
There was something paradoxical about this distinction between the simulated and the real, and about the certainty that depends on it. As we have seen,
20 Clovis Lamarre
and Charles Fliniaux, L'Egypte, la Tunisie, le Maroc et l'exposition de
1878 (Paris: Ch. Delagrave, 1878), 123; al-Sanusi, al-Istitla'at, 242.
21 Edmond About, Lefellah: souvenirs
d'Egvpte (Paris: Hachette, 1869), 47-48.

224

TIMOTHY MITCHELL

it was not always easy in Paris to tell where the exhibition ended, and the
world itself began. The boundariesof the exhibition were clearly marked,of
course, with high perimeter walls and monumentalgates, but, as Middle
Easternvisitors had continually discovered, there was much about the "real
world" outside (in the streets of Paris and beyond) that resembledthe world
exhibition; just as there was more about the exhibition that resembled the
world outside. Despite the determined efforts to isolate the exhibition as
merely the perfect representationof a reality outside, the real world beyond
the gates turned out to be rather like an extension of the exhibition. This
extended exhibition continuedto presentitself as a series of mere representations, representinga reality beyond. We should think of it, therefore,less as
an exhibition, than as a kind of labyrinth,a labyrinththat, as Derridasays,
includes in itself its own exits.22 But perhapsthe sequenceof exhibitionswas
becoming at once so accurateand so extensive, that no one ever realized that
the real world they promisedwas not there-except, perhaps,the Egyptians.
THE

LABYRINTH

WITHOUT

EXITS

To explore this labyrintha little further,I will begin again inside the world
exhibition, back at the Egyptian bazaar. Part of the shock of the Egyptians
came fromjust how real the streetclaimed to be: not simply thatthe paint was
made dirty, that the donkeys were from Cairo, and that the Egyptianpastries
on sale were said to taste like the real thing, but thatone paid for them, as we
say, with real money. The commercialismof the donkey rides, the bazaar
stalls and the dancing girls was no different from the commercialismof the
world outside. This was the real thing, in the sense that what commercialism
offers is always the real thing.
As a result. the exhibitionscame to resemblethe commercialmachineryof
the rest of the city. This machinery, in turn, was rapidlychanging in places
like London and Paris, as small, individuallyowned shops, often based on
local crafts, gave way to the largerapparatusof shoppingarcadesand department stores, each, as the IllustratedGuide to Paris could claim, forming "a
city, indeed a world in miniature.'23 The commercial transformationwas
connected, in turn, with the global transformationof the textile industry.At
the other end from the departmentstore, this transformationextended to
include such events as the colonizationof Egypt, whose agriculturewas now
being organized to supply the Europeantextile industrywith raw cotton.
22
Jacques Derrida,Speech and Phenomena, and other Essays on Husserl's Theoryof Signs
(Evanston: NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1973), 104. Derridaonce remarkedthat all of his
subsequentwritings "are only a commentaryon the sentence abouta labyrinth"("Implications:
Interviewwith Henri Ronse," Positions [Chicago:Universityof Chicago Press, 1981], 5). This
essay, too, should be read as a short additionalcomment on that sentence.
23 Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," Reflections: Essays,
Aphorisms, AutobiographicalWritings(New York: Harcourt,Brace, Jovanovich; 1978), 14647.

THE

WORLD

AS EXHIBITION

225

The Egyptian accounts of Europe contain several descriptions of these

commercial worlds-in-miniature,where the real world, as at the exhibition,
was something createdby the representationof its commodities. The department stores were described as "large and well organized," with their merchandise "arrangedin perfect order, set in rows on shelves with everything
symmetricaland precisely positioned." Non-Europeanvisitors would remark
especially on the panes of glass, inside the stores and along the gaslit arcades.
"The merchandiseis all arrangedbehind sheets of clear glass, in the most
remarkable order. ... Its dazzling appearance draws thousands of onlookers."24 The glass panels inserted themselves between the visitors and the

goods on display, setting up the formeras mere onlookers and endowing the
goods with the distancethat is the source, one might say, of their objectness.
Just as exhibitions had become more commercialized,the machineryof commerce was becoming a furthermeans of engineeringthe real, indistinguishable from that of the exhibition.
In drawingthis parallelbetween the exhibitionand the world of commerce,
I do not make the argumentof commodity fetishism. The critique of commodity fetishism uncovers the means of engineeringthe real as a mechanism
of misrepresentation,and opposes to it a representationof the way things
intrinsicallyare. In revealing power to work throughmisrepresentation,such
a critique leaves representationitself unquestioned.It continues to accept the
distinction between a realm of representationsand the externalreality which
such representationspromise, ratherthan examining the novelty of continuously creating the effect of an "external reality' as itself a mechanism of
power. Nor, therefore, am I making the argumentof alienation. The exhibition does not alienateus from the real world;it createsan effect called the real
world, in terms of which we can experience what is called alienation.
Something of the experience of the strangely alienatingworld of modem
commerce and consumersis indicatedin the first fictional accountof Europe
to be published in Arabic. Appearingin 1882, it tells the story of two Egyptians who travel to Franceand Englandin the company of an English Orientalist. On their first day in Paris, the two Egyptianswanderaccidentallyinto
the vast, gaslit premisesof a wholesale supplier.Insidethe building, they find
long corridors,each leading into another.They walk from one corridorto the
next, and after a while begin to searchfor the way out. Turninga corer, they
see what looks like an exit, with people approachingfromthe otherside, but it
turns out to be a mirrorcovering the entire width and height of the wall. The
approachingpeople are merely their own reflections. They turn down one
passage, and then another,but each one ends only in a mirror.As they make
their way throughthe corridorsof the building, they pass groups of people at
work. "The people were busy setting out merchandise,sortingit and putting
24 Mubarak, Alam al-din,
818; Ilyas, Mashahid Uruba wa-Amirka, 268.

226

TIMOTHY MITCHELL

it into boxes and cases. They stared at the two of them in silence as they
passed, standing quite still, not leaving their places or interruptingtheir
work." After wanderingsilently for some time throughthe building, the two
Egyptians realize they have lost their way completely and begin going from
room to room looking for an exit. "But no one interferedwith them," we are
told, "or came up to them to ask if they were lost." Eventually they are
rescuedby the managerof the store, who proceedsto explain to them how it is
organized, pointing out that in the objects being sorted and packed, the
produce of every country in the world is represented.25
On the one handthis story evokes a festival of representation,a celebration
of the orderedworld of objects and the disciplineof the Europeangaze. At the
same time, the disconcerting experience with the mirrors undermines the
system of representationalorder. An earlierEgyptianwriterrecalled a similar
experience with mirrors,on his very first day in a Europeancity. Arrivingat
Marseilles, he had entereda cafe, which he mistook at first for some sort of
"vast, endless thoroughfare."
Therewerea lotof peoplein there,andwhenevera groupof themcameintoviewtheir
imagesappearedin theglassmirrors,whichwereon everyside. Anyonewhowalked
in, satdown,or stoodup seemedto be multiplied.Thusthecafe lookedlike an open
street.I realizedit was enclosedonly whenI saw severalimagesof myself in the
thatit was all due to the peculiareffectof the glass.26
mirrors,andunderstood
In such stories, it seems the world of representationis being admiredfor its
dazzling order, yet the suspicion remainsthat all this reality is only an effect.
Perhapsthe world-as-exhibitionremainsinevitablya labyrinthwithout exits,
ratherthan an interiordistinguishedfrom-and defined by-its exterior.
There are three featuresof this world that I have outlined in the preceding
pages. First, it has a remarkableclaim to certainty or truth: the apparent
certaintywith which everythingseems orderedand organized, calculatedand
rendered unambiguous-ultimately, what seems its political decidedness.
Second, there is a paradoxicalnatureto this decidedness:its certaintyexists as
the seemingly determinedcorrespondencebetween mere representationsand
reality, yet the real world, like the world outside the exhibition, despite
everythingthe exhibition promises, turs out to consist only of furtherrepresentationsof this "reality." Third,there is what mightbe called its "colonial
nature":the age of the exhibitionwas necessarilythe colonial age, the age of
world economy and global power in which we live, since what was to be
made available on exhibit was reality-the world itself.
To draw out the colonial natureof these methods of order and truth,I am
now going to move on to the Middle East.27The Orient, as I have previously
25 Mubarak,Alam al-din, pp. 829-30.
26 Tahtawi, al-A'mal al-kamila, II, 55-6; for anotherexample see Mubarak,Alam al-din,

817.

27 See Mitchell, Colonising Egypt. I have examined in detail, in the case of Egypt, how the

THE

WORLD

AS EXHIBITION

227

suggested, was the great "external reality" of modern Europe-the most

common object of its exhibitions, the great signified. By the 1860s, Thomas
Cook, who had launchedthe moderntouristindustryby organizingexcursion
trainswith the MidlandRailway Companyto visit the CrystalPalace (the first
of the great world exhibitions) in 1851, was offering excursions to visit not
exhibits of the East, but the "East itself." If Europe was the world-asexhibition, what happened to Europeanswho went abroad-to visit places
whose images invariablythey had already seen in pictures and exhibitions?
How did they experience the so-called real world depicted in these images,
when the reality was a place whose life was not lived, or at least not yet, as if
the world were an exhibition?
THE

EAST

ITSELF

"So here we are in Egypt," wrote GustaveFlaubert,in a letterfrom Cairo in

January1850. "What can I say aboutit all? Whatcan I write you? As yet I am
scarcely over the initial bedazzlement . . . each detail reaches out to grip you;

it pinches you; and the more you concentrateon it the less you grasp the
whole. Then graduallyall this becomes harmoniousand the pieces fall into
place of themselves, in accordancewith the laws of perspective. But the first
days, by God, it is such a bewildering chaos of colours . . ,"28 Flaubert
experienced Cairo as a visual turmoil. What could he write about the place?
That it is a chaos of color and detail, which refuses to compose itself as a
picture. The disorientingexperienceof a Cairostreet, in otherwords, with its
arguments in unknown languages, strangers who brush past in strange
clothes, unusualcolors, and unfamiliarsounds and smells, is expressed as an
absence of pictorialorder. This meant there was no distancebetween oneself
and the view. The eyes were reducedto organsof touch: "each detail reaches
out to grip you." Withouta separationof the self from a picture, moreover, it
becomes impossible to grasp "the whole." The experience of the world as a
pictureset up before a subjectis linked to the unusualconceptionof the world
as an enframed totality, something that forms a structureor system. Subsequently, coming to terms with this disorientationand recovering one's selfpossession is expressedagain in pictorialterms. The world arrangesitself into
a picture and achieves a visual order, "in accordance with the laws of
perspective."
Flaubert'sexperience suggests a paradoxicalanswer to my question conmodem means of colonizing a country-new military methods, the reorderingof agricultural
production, systems of organized schooling, the rebuildingof cities, the transformationof writing, new forms of communication,and so on-all rested upon the techniquesof orderand truth
that I am calling the world-as-exhibition.My purpose here is to look more closely at what it
means for the world to be an exhibition, by considering what happenedto the individualnineteenth-centuryEuropeanwho traveled to the Middle East.
28 Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour, Francis
Steegmuller, trans.
(London: Michael Haag, 1983), 79.

228

TIMOTHY MITCHELL

cering what happenedto Europeanswho "left" the exhibition. Although

they thoughtof themselves as moving from the picturesor exhibits to the real
thing, they went on trying-like Flaubert-to grasp the real thing as a picture. How could they do otherwise, since they took reality itself to be a
picture?The real is that which is graspedin terms of a distinctionbetween a
picture and what it represents,so nothing else would have been, quite literally, thinkable.
Among Europeanwriterswho traveledto the MiddleEast in the middle and
latterpartof the nineteenthcentury, one very frequentlyfinds the experience
of its strangenessexpressed in terms of the problemof forming a picture. It
was as though to make sense of it meant to stand back and either make a
drawing or take a photographof it, for which many of them actually it did.
"Every year that passes," an Egyptianwrote, "you see thousandsof Europeans travelingall over the world, and everythingthey come acrossthey make
a picture of. "29 When Flauberttraveledin Egypt on a photographicmission
with Maxime du Camp, the results were expected to be "quite special in
character," it was remarkedat the Institutde France, "thanks to the aid of
this modem traveling companion, efficient, rapid, and always scrupulously
exact."30 The chemically-etchedcorrespondencebetween photographicimage and reality would provide a new, almost mechanicalkind of certainty.
Like the photographer,the writer wanted to reproducea pictureof things
"exactly as they are," of "the East itself in its vital actual reality."31
Flaubertwas preceded in Egypt by EdwardLane, whose innovativeAccount
of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, published in 1835,
was a productof the same search for a pictorialcertaintyof representation.
The book's "singularpower of descriptionand minuteaccuracy"made it, in
the words of his nephew, the OrientalistStanley Poole, "the most perfect
picture of a people's life that has ever been written."32 "Very few men,"
added his great nephew, the OrientalistStanley Lane-Poole:
havepossessedin equaldegreethe powerof minutelydescribinga sceneor a monument, so that the pencil might almost restore it without a fault after the lapse of
years. . . . The objects stand before you as you read, and this not by the use of

imaginativelanguage,butby the plainsimpledescription.33

29 Mubarak,Alam al-din, 308.

30 Flaubert,Flaubert in Egypt, 23.
31 Eliot Warburton,author of The Crescent and the Cross: or Romance and Realities of
Eastern Travel (1845), describing Alexander Kinglake's E6then, or Traces of Travel Brought
Homefrom the East (London, 1844; reprint:J. M. Dent, 1908); cited in The OxfordCompanion
to English Literature, 5th ed. (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1985), s.v. "Kinglake."
32 EdwardLane, An Accountof the Mannersand Customsof the ModernEgyptians(London:
Charles Knight, 1835; reprint,London:J. M. Dent, 1908), pp. vii, xvii.
33 Stanley Lane-Poole, "Memoir," in Edward Lane, An Arabic-EnglishLexicon, 8 vols.
(London: Williams & Norgate, 1863-1893; reprint, Beirut: Librairedu Liban, 1980), V, xii.

THE WORLD AS EXHIBITION

229

Lane did not begin as a writer,but as a professionalartistand engraver.He

had first traveled to Egypt in 1825 with a new apparatuscalled the camera
lucida, a drawing device with a prism that projectedan exact image of the
object on to paper. He had plannedto publish the drawingshe made and the
accompanyingdescriptionsin an eight-volumework entitled "An Exhaustive
Descriptionof Egypt," but had been unableto find a publisherwhose printing
techniques could reproducethe minute and mechanical accuracy of the illustrations. Subsequently, he published the part dealing with contemporary
Egypt, rewritten as the famous ethnographic description of the modem
Egyptians.34

The problemfor the photographeror writervisiting the MiddleEast was not

only to make an accuratepictureof the East, but to set up the East as a picture.
One can copy or represent only what appears already to exist representationally-as a picture. The problem, in other words, was to create a distance
between oneself and the world, and thus to constituteit as somethingpicturelike-as an object on exhibit. This requiredwhat was now called a "point of
view": a position set apartand outside. While in Cairo, EdwardLane lived
near one of the city's gates, outside of which there was a large hill with a
tower and military telegraph machine on top. This elevated position commanded "a most magnificentview of the city and suburbsand the citadel,"
Lane wrote. "Soon after my arrivalI made a very elaboratedrawingof the
scene, with the camera lucida. From no other spot can so good a view of the
metropolis . . . be obtained."35

These spots were difficult to find in a world where, unlike the West, such
"objectivity" was not yet build in. Besides the military observationtower
used by Lane, visitors to the Middle East would appropriatewhateverbuildings and monumentswere available, in order to obtain the necessary viewpoint. The Great Pyramid at Giza had now become a viewing platform.
Teams of Bedouin were organizedto heave and push the writeror touristguidebook in hand-to the top, where two more Bedouin would carry the
Europeanon their shouldersto all four comers, to observe the view. At the
end of the century, an Egyptiannovel satirizedthe westernizingpretensions
among members of the Egyptian upper middle class, by having one such
characterspend a day climbing the pyramidsat Giza, to see the view. The
minaretpresenteditself similarlyto even the most respectableEuropeanas a
viewing tower, from which to sneak a panoptic gaze over a Muslim town.
"The mobbingI got at Shoomlo,"'complainedJeremyBenthamon his visit to
the Middle East, "only for taking a peep at the town from a thing they call a
34 Leila Ahmed, Edward W. Lane: A Study of His
Life and Work (London: Longman, 1978);
John D. Wortham, The Genesis of British Egyptology, 1549-1906 (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1971), 65.
35 Cited Ahmed, Edward Lane, 26.

230

TIMOTHY

MITCHELL

minaret . . . has canceled any claims they might have had upon me for the

dinner they gave me at the divan, had it been betterthan it was."36

Benthamcan remindus of one more similaritybetween writerand camera,
and of what it meant, therefore,to graspthe world as though it were a picture
or exhibition. The point of view was not just a place set apart, outside the
world or above it. Ideally, it was a position from where, like the authoritiesin
Bentham's panopticon,one could see and yet not be seen. The photographer,
invisible beneath his black cloth as he eyed the world throughhis camera's
gaze, in this respect typified the kind of presencedesired by the Europeanin
the Middle East, whether as tourist, writer or indeed colonial power.37The
ordinary European tourist, dressed (according to the advice in Murray's
Handbook for Travellers in Lower and Upper Egypt, already in its seventh

edition by 1888) in either "a common felt helmet or wide-awake, with a

turban of white muslin wound around it" or alternativelya pith helmet,
together with a blue or green veil and "coloured-glassspectacles with gauze
sides," possessed the same invisible gaze.38 The ability to see withoutbeing
seen confirmedone's separationfrom the world, and constituted,at the same
time, a position of power.
The writeralso wished to see withoutbeing seen. The representationof the
Orient, in its attemptto be detached and objective, would seek to eliminate
from the picture the presence of the Europeanobserver. Indeed to represent
something as Oriental, as Edward Said has argued, one sought to excise
totally the Europeanpresence. "Many thanks for the local details you sent
me," wroteTh6ophileGautierto G6rardde Nerval in Cairo, who was supplying him with first-handmaterialfor his Orientalscenariosat the Paris Opera.
"But how the devil was I to have includedamong the walk-ons of the Op6ra
these Englishmendressed in raincoats,with theirquiltedcotton hats and their
green veils to protectthemselves againstophthalmia?"39Representationwas
not to representthe voyeur, the seeing eye that made representationpossible.
To establish the objectness of the Orient, as a picture-realitycontaining no
sign of the increasinglypervasive Europeanpresence requiredthat the presence itself, ideally, become invisible.

36 Muwailihi, Isa ibn Hisham, 405-17; Jeremy Bentham, The Complete Works, John
Bowring, ed., 11 vols. (Edinburgh:Tait, 1838-43), IV, 65-66.
37 Cf. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986). On the panopticon, see Bentham, CompleteWorks,IV; and Michel Foucault,Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 195-238.
38 Murray's Handbookfor Travellers in Lower and Upper Egypt (London: John Murray,
1888), 12. A "wide-awake" is a low-crowned felt hat.
39 J. M. Carre, Voyageurset ecrivainsfrancais en Egypte, 2nd ed. (Cairo: InstitutFrancais
d'Arch6ologie Orientale, 1956), 2, 191; Said, Orientalism, 160-61, 168, 239. The analysis that
follows is much indebted to Said's work.

THE

PARTICIPANT

WORLD

AS EXHIBITION

231

OBSERVATION

Yet this was the point where the paradox began. The Europeanwished to
exclude himself in order to constitute the world as something not-himself,
something other and object-like. At the same time, he also wantedto experience it as though it were the real thing. Like visitors to an exhibition or
scholars in Sacy's Orientalistmuseum, travelers wanted to feel themselves
"transported . . . into the very midst" of their Oriental object-world, and to

"touch with their fingers a strangecivilization." EdwardLane wrote in his

journal of wanting "to throw myself entirely among strangers, . . . to adopt

their language, their customs, and their dress."40 This type of immersion
made possible the profusion of ethnographicdetail in writers such as Lane,
and producedin their work the effect of a direct and immediateexperienceof
the Orient. In Lane, and even more so in writerslike Flaubertand Nerval, the
desire for this immediacy of the real became a desire for direct and physical
contact with the exotic, the bizarre, and the erotic.
There was a contradictionbetween the need to separateoneself from the
world and to renderit up as an object of representation,and the desire to lose
oneself within this object-worldand to experienceit directly-a contradiction
that world exhibitions, with their profusionof exotic detail and yet their clear
distinctionbetween visitor and exhibit, were built to accommodateand overcome. In fact experience, in this sense, depends upon the structureof the
exhibition. The problem in a place like Cairo, which had not been built to
provide the experience of an exhibition, was to fulfill such a double desire.
On his first day in Cairo, Gerardde Nerval met a French "painter"equipped
with a daguerreotype,who "suggested thatI come with him to choose a point
of view." Agreeing to accompany him, Nerval decided "to have myself
taken to the most labyrinthinepoint of the city, abandonthe painterto his
tasks, and then wander off haphazardly,without interpreteror companion."
Within the labyrinthof the city, where Nerval hoped to immerse himself in
the exotic and finally experience, "without interpreter,"the real Orient,they
were unable to find any point from which to take the picture. They followed
one crowded, twisting street after another, looking without success for a
suitable viewpoint, until eventually the profusion of noises and people subsided, and the streets became "more silent, more dusty, more deserted, the
mosques fallen in decay and here and there a buildingin collapse." In the end
they found themselves outside the city, "somewhere in the suburbs,on the
other side of the canal from the main sections of the town." Here at last, amid
the silence and the ruins, the photographerwas able to set up his device and
portraythe Orientalcity.41
40 Cited Lane, Arabic-EnglishLexicon, 5, vii.
41 G6rardde Nerval, Oeuvres, Albert B6guin and Jean Richer, eds., 2 vols. Vol I: Voyage en
Orient (1851), Michel Jeanneret,ed; (Paris:Gallimard 1952), 172-74.

232

TIMOTHY MITCHELL

Said remindsus that EdwardLane claimed to have found the ideal device
for meeting this double demand:to immerseoneself and yet stand apart. His
device was to hide beneath a deliberate disguise, ratherlike the tourist in
colored spectacles or the photographerbeneathhis cloth. In order "to escape
exciting, in strangers,any suspicionof ... being a person who had no right
to intrudeamong them," Lane explained, he adoptedthe dress and feigned
the religious belief of the local Muslim inhabitantsof Cairo. The dissimulation allowed him to gain the confidenceof his Egyptianinformants,makingit
possible to observe them in their own presence without himself being observed. His ethnographicwriting seems to acquirethe authorityof this presence, this directexperienceof the real. At the same time, as Said points out in
a preface to the ethnographyLane carefully explained his deception to the
Europeanreader, thus assuring the readerof his absolute distance from the
Egyptians. The distanceassuredby the deceptionis what gives his experience
its "objectivity. "42

The curious double position of the European, as participant-observer,

makes it possible to experiencethe Orientas thoughone were the visitorto an
exhibition. Unawarethat the Orienthas not been arrangedas an exhibition,
the visitor neverthelessattemptsto carryout the characteristiccognitive maneuver of the modem subject, separatinghimself from an object-worldand
observingit from a positionthatis invisible and set apart.Fromthere, like the
modem anthropologistor social scientist, one transfersinto the object the
principlesof one's relationto it and, as PierreBourdieusays, "conceives of it
as a totality intendedfor cognition alone." The world is grasped, inevitably,
in terms of a distinctionbetween the object-the thing itself as the European
says-and its meaning, with no sense of the historical peculiarity of this
effect we call the thing itself. In termsof this distinctionthe scholarcan grasp
the world as an exhibition, as a representation,"in the sense of idealist
philosophy, but also as used in painting or the theatre," and people's lives
appear as no more than "stage parts . . . or the implementing of plans."43 I

would add to what Bourdieusays that the anthropologist,like the touristand

the Orientalistwriter, came to the Middle East from Europe, a world as we
have seen that was being set up to demandthis kind of cognitive maneuver.
They came from a place, in other words, in which ordinarypeople were
beginning to live as touristsor anthropologists,addressingan object-worldas
the endless representationof some furthermeaningor reality, and experienc42 Said, Orientalism, 160-64.
43 PierreBourdieu,Outlineof a Theoryof Practice (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress,

1977), 2, 96. On "visualism" in anthropology,see JohannesFabian, Timeand the Other:How

AnthropologyMakes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 105-141, and
James Clifford, "PartialTruths," in WritingCulture:The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,
James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds.; (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1986),
11-12.

THE WORLD AS EXHIBITION

233

ing personhoodas the playing of a culturalstage partor the implementationof

a plan.
THE ORIENT THAT ESCAPES

This, then, was the contradictionof Orientalism.Europeansbroughtto the

Middle East the cognitive habitsof the world-as-exhibition,and triedto grasp
the Orient as a picture. On the other hand, they came to experience a "reality" that invariablythey had alreadyseen in an exhibition. They thought of
themselves as actually moving from the exhibit or picture to the real thing.
This was literallythe case with TheophileGautier,who lived in Paris writing
his Orientalistscenariosfor the Opera-Comiqueandchampioningthe cause of
Orientalistpainting. He finally set off for Egypt in 1869 afterbeing inspiredto
see the real thing by a visit to the Egyptian exhibit at the 1867 Exposition
Universelle. In this respect, Gautierwas no exception. Europeansin general
arrivedin the Orient after seeing plans and copies-in pictures, exhibitions,
museums, and books-for which they were seeking the original. Their purpose was always explained in these terms.
Orientalism's contradiction exemplifies the paradoxical nature of the
world-as-exhibition.The exhibitionpersuadespeople thatthe world is divided
into two fundamentalrealms-the representationand the original, the exhibit
and the externalreality, the text and the world. Everythingis organizedas if
this were the case. But reality, it turns out, means that which can be represented, that which presents itself as an exhibit before an observer. The socalled real world outside is something experienced and grasped only as a
series of furtherrepresentations,an extendedexhibition. Visitorsto the Orient
conceived of themselves as traveling to "the East itself in its vital actual
reality."44 But as we have seen, the realitythey sought there was simply that
which could be pictured or accurately represented, able to stand apart as
something distinct from a subject and grasped in terms of a corresponding
distinction between representationand reality. In the end, the Europeantried
to grasp the Orient as though it were an exhibition of itself.
This paradox produced two symptomatic responses. The first might be
called Orientalistdismay. Since the Middle East had not yet been organized
representationally,Europeans, as we have already seen with Flaubert and
Nerval, found the task of representingit almost impossible and the results
disappointing. "Think of it no more!" wrote Nerval to Gautier,of the Cairo
they had dreamed of describing, "That Cairo lies beneath the ashes and
dirt . . . dust-laden and dumb." Nothing encountered in those Oriental streets

quite matchedup to the reality they had seen representedin Paris. Not even
the cafes looked genuine. "I really wanted to set the scene for you here,"
Nerval explained, in an attemptto describe a typical Cairenestreetfor one of
44 Warburton,Oxford Companionto English Literature, s.v. "Kinglake."

234

TIMOTHY MITCHELL

Gautier's Parisian stage sets, "but . . . it is only in Paris that one finds cafes

so Oriental."45 "To create imaginaryEgyptiansas they are usually seen in

the theateris not difficult," wrote the Egyptologist MariettePasha, another
supplierof Orientaldetail for the Paris stage, in this case the opera Aida, but
"to make a scholarly as well as a picturesquemise-en-scene," accurately
representingthe Orient, was almost impossible. "I did not suspect the immensity of the details . . . I am literally losing my mind."46

Nerval's dismay led him to despair completely of finding "real Egypt,"

the Cairo that could be represented. "I will find at the Opera the real
Cairo, . . . the Orient that escapes me." In the end, only the Orient one finds

in Paris, the simulation of what is itself a series of representationsto begin

with, can offer a satisfying spectacle. As he moved on towardsthe towns of
Palestine, Nerval rememberedCairo as somethingno more solid or real than
the faqades of an exhibition or the painted scenery of a theaterset. "Just as
well that the six months I spent there are over; it is alreadynothing, I have
seen so many places collapse behind my steps, like stage sets; what do I have
left from them? An image as confused as thatof a dream:the best of what one
finds there, I alreadyknew by heart."47
The second and more politically importantresponsewas thatthe Orientwas
always a place thatone "alreadyknew by heart" on arrival. "Familiarto me
from days of early childhoodare the forms of the Egyptianpyramids," wrote
AlexanderKinglake in Eothen. "Now, as I approachedthem from the banks
of the Nile, I had no print, no picturebefore me, and yet the old shapes were
there;therewas no change:they were as I had always known them." Gautier,
for his part, wrote that if the visitor to Egypt "has long inhabited in his
dreams" a certain town, he will carry in his head "an imaginary map,
difficult indeed to erase even when he finds himself facing the reality." His
own map of Cairo, he explained, "built with the materialsof A Thousandand
One Nights, arranges itself around Marilhat's Place de l'Ezbekieh, a remark-

able and violent painting. ..." "The attentiveEuropean,"wrote Flaubertin

Cairo, "rediscovers here much more than he discovers."48
The Orient was something one only ever rediscovered. To be grasped
representationally,as the pictureof something, it was inevitablyto be grasped
as the reoccurrenceof a picture one had seen before, as a map one already
carriedin one's head, as the reiterationof an earlierdescription.How far this
went was illustratedby Gautier,the championof Orientalistart, when he was
finally inspiredto leave Parisand visit Cairoto see the real thing by the 1867
45 Gerardde Nerval, Oeuvres, I, 878-79, 882, 883.
46 Hans Busch, ed. and trans., Verdi'sAida: The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents (Minneapolis:University of MinnesotaPress, 1978), 33-36.
47 Gerardde Nerval, Oeuvres, I, 878-9, 882, 883.
48 Kinglake, Eothen, 280; Theophile Gautier, "L'Orient," Oeuvres completes, (Paris:Charpentier, 1880-1903), XX; Pt. 2, 187; Flaubert,Flaubert in Egypt, 81.

THE WORLD AS EXHIBITION

235

ParisExhibition. He then publishedan accountof Egypt, whose first chapter,

entitled "Vue generale," was a description, in great detail, of the Egyptian
exhibit at the world exhibition.49
The representationof the Orient obeyed, inevitably, this problematicand
unrecognizedlogic, a logic determinednot by any intellectualfailure of the
Europeanmind, but by its search for the certaintyof representation-for an
effect called reality. The problem is not the logic itself, but the failure to
recognize its paradoxicalnature.Europeanslike EdwardLane had begun the
drawingup of their "exhaustive descriptionof Egypt," determinedto correct
the earlier work of the French scientific mission's Description de l'Egypte.
Laterwriterswould then take themselves to the libraryof the FrenchInstitut
in Cairo, to draw from and add to this body of description.Gerardde Nerval,
collecting the materialin Egypt he later published as Voyage en Orient, his
life's major prose work, saw more of the library than of the rest of the
country. After two months in Cairo, more than half way throughhis stay, he
wrote to his father that he had not even visited the pyramids. "Moreover I
have no desire to see any place until after I have adequatelyinformedmyself
from the books and memoires," he explained. Six weeks laterhe wrote again,
saying that he was leaving the countryeven though he had not yet ventured
outside Cairo and its environs.50
As a result, the bulk of Voyage en Orient, like so much of the literatureof
Orientalism,turnedout to be a reworkingor directrepetitionof the "information" available in libraries. In Nerval's case, it was mostly from Lane's
Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. Such repetition and rework-

ing is what Edward Said has described as the citationarynature of Orientalism: its writings added to one another"as a restorerof old sketches might
put a series of them togetherfor the cumulativepicturethey implicitly represent." The Orient is put together as this "re-presentation";what is represented is not a real place, but "a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, thatseems to have its origin in a quotation,or a fragmentof a text, or
a citationfrom someone's workon the Orient,or some bit of previousimagining, or an amalgamof all these."5l The "East itself" is not a place, despite
the exhibition's promise, but a further series of representations,each one
reannouncing the reality of the Orient, but doing no more than referring
backwards and forwards to all the others. It is the chain of references that
producesthe effect of the place. RobertGravesremarkswryly on this effect in
Goodbye to All That, when he disembarksat Port Said in the 1920s to take up
a job at the EgyptianUniversity and is met by an English friend. "I still felt

49 Gautier, L'Orient, Pt. 2, 91-122.

50 G6rardde Nerval, Oeuvres, 1, 862, 867.

51 Said, Orientalism, 176-77.

236

TIMOTHY MITCHELL

seasick," he wrote, "but knew thatI was in the East becausehe began talking
about Kipling."52

In claiming that the "East itself" is not a place, I am not saying simply that
Westernrepresentationscreateda distortedimage of the real Orient;nor am I
saying thatthe "real Orient"does not exist, andthatthereareno realities, but
only images and representations.Eitherstatementwould take for grantedthe
strange way the West had come to live, as though the world were divided in
this way into two: a realm of mere representationsand a realm of the real;
exhibitions and an externalreality;an orderof mere models, descriptions,or
copies and an orderof the original.53Whatwe suspectedin the streetsof Paris
concerning this division is confirmed by the journey to the Orient: What
seems excluded from the exhibition as the real or the outside turnsout to be
only that which can be represented, that which occurs in exhibition-like
form-in other words, a furtherextension of that labyrinththat we call an
exhibition. What mattersabout this labyrinthis not that we never reach the
real, never find the exit, but that such a notion of the real, such a system of
truth, continues to convince us.
The case of Orientalismshows us, moreover,how this supposeddistinction
between the interior representationand an external reality corresponds to
anotherapparentdivision of the world, into the West and its Orientalexterior.
Orientalism, it follows, is not just a nineteenth-centuryinstance of some
general historical problem of how one culture portraysanother, nor just an
aspect of colonial domination,but partof a methodof orderandtruthessential
to the peculiar natureof the modernworld.

52 Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (Harmondsworth:

Penguin Books, 1960), 265.
53 Cf.
Jacques Derrida, "The Double Session," Dissemination(Chicago:Universityof Chi-

cago Press, 1981), 191-92, and the references in n.22.