and the excitement of its possible reproduction or imitation for an objective modern spectator. This subject is the person for whom this serializable order is designed—the subject, as Mitchell puts it, “for whom the social world seems to exist as a view to be observed, an experience to be had, a set of meanings to be interpreted or a code to be followed or deciphered.”9 Implicitly it would seem that this is the same “national subject” that Benedict Anderson referred to as participating in the collective imaginary of the nation by conceiving of a homo- geneous horizontal time and place. It is this modernity—linked to an original West in an orderly, well-designed city of commodities, with an enlightened national subject—that becomes the “modernity” replicatable in country after country. He continues to emphasize that the knowledge of such modernity was not enough; it existed most powerfully in its replicated form, as something that was “staged” again and again. And yet, what is immediately apparent in this staging, as Mitchell convincingly shows us, is that the very act of performing or imitating the modern is a declaration of the nonoriginality of the thing. Thus the gap or the delay between the “original” and the replicated version of moder- nity allows for a contamination or a disruption in the act of staging. This is how Mitchell understands the condition of colonial modernity—namely, that the non-West in staging the same becomes a site that hybridizes (here he borrows from Bhabha) or “mutates” the modern. Ironically this very act is what allows the West (as a fixed, albeit fictional, referent) to come into being as the site of a singular, homogeneous modernity. Mitchell writes that “modernity, like capital- ism, is defined by its claim to universality, to uniqueness, unity and universal- ity that represent the end (in every sense) of history. Yet this always remains an impossible unity, an incomplete universal. Each staging of the modern must be arranged to produce the unified, global history of modernity, yet each requires those forms of difference that introduce the possibility of discrepancy, that return to undermine its unity and identity. Modernity then becomes the unsuitable yet unavoidable name for all these discrepant histories.”10 Mitchell refutes the universality of a western modernity and powerfully suggests that the very act of delineation between the modern and the nonmodern or the West and the non-West is the space in which modernity is born. Thus there is a double- staging at work. Not only is there the space between the modern and its other, nonmodern counterpart where we might locate modernity, but there is also the distance between what is “real” and the “representation” of the real. It is here where Mitchell argues for the critical role of space in understanding the social:
What will appear especially real is the modern production of the social as a spatial object. Just as medical practice produces the modern difference between the body as physical object and its meanings, other social practices of modernity establish what appears as the difference between physical space and its representation. The