Edward Said and Timothy Mitchell

Edward Said and Timothy Mitchell on Orientalism

The final lines of the article by Timothy Mitchell entitled

Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order, succinctly summarizes the intention of the author work and situates it is an important expansion of the ideas and views that were initiated in Said's Orientalism. Mitchell concludes his article by stating that:

Orientalism, it follows, is not just a nineteenth-century instance of some general historical problem of how one culture portrays another, nor just an aspect of colonial domination, but part of a method of order and truth essential to the peculiar nature of the modern world."

(Mitchell 313/314)

In other words, the issue and question of Orientalism is much more for Mitchell than just a question of cultural bias and dominance; but rather that Orientalism is a phenomenon that is a related to the particular mode of representation in West and to the very nature of representation itself.

Therefore, in his article he explores the way that Western representation tends to separate and objectify reality and the way in which it reduces not only the Orient but the entire word to a form of the "other." Put in another way, Mitchell is suggesting that the Western mode of binary representation divorces us from reality and forces us into a continual recurrence of illusion. From this perspective the Western form of representation tends to isolate mankind and to reduce all to an exhibition or an objectification that is characteristic of dualism and logocentric thought.

Central to the ideas that Said expressed is his view of Orientalism and its function in the Western construction of the "other," which was seen as different and in opposition to the West. Mitchell goes further and suggests that it is the very mode of thought as objectified representation that is so characteristic of the West and which is the central issue at stake in an understanding of colonial bias and hegemony.

Mitchell refers to various aspects of Orientalist reality. These refer not only to cultural and racial differences but also to a variety of opposites; these include aspects such as passive than active, static rather than dynamic and chaotic as opposed to ordered. However, he goes further in his analysis of the world as exhibit. He suggests that the way in which the West represents realty as an objectified "picture' in essence distorts and separates us from reality. This is in essence is the stance taken by Martin Heidegger in his critique of Western Metaphysics and dualistic thought.

In his analysis of world-as-exhibit Mitchell states that. "The consolidation of the global hegemony of the West, economically and politically, can be connected not just to the imagery of Orientalism but to all the new machinery for rendering up and laying out the meaning of the world." ( Mitchell 289) The representation of reality is treated as an exhibit so that the difference between reality and illusion becomes opaque. What Mitchell implies is this analysis is that the exhibit-as-reality is a central facet of the Western objectification of reality. He adds that;