Authorial intent and state authority share the same historically-produced metaphysics

Evidence

Textual intention was analogous in nature and method to the intention or authority of political power, and in fact had always formed an important part of such power. The new effect of meaning—as an abstract frame constituted in opposition to the real—offered at the same time a new effect of political authority. Like meaning in the world-as-exhibition, authority was now to appear as a generalised abstraction, with names like law or the state. Like meaning, it would now appear as a framework standing outside the real world. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 43

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The equation of textual intention with political authority — both as ‘effects’ generated by the same representational machinery — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting claim that could sit with a reader for a long time.
• XREF: Echoes the law-merchant reading of institutions emerging to create the effect of abstract order standing outside face-to-face relations. — connects to: Reading symbolism to the second power reveals the mythical surrender of autonomy — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 149
• SEED: Article angle: how the modern idea of ‘the state’ as an abstract framework is partly a byproduct of print technology and schooling, parallel to textual authorship.