Colonial authority is imagined as an unseen metaphysical power operating through a material apparatus

Evidence

Cromer has discussed the power and functioning of each part of the political apparatus over several chapters without once, as far as I know, employing the image of the body. At the moment when he turns to discuss power itself – the vague, invisible, preponderant power of the ‘British representative’, who ‘represents’ colonial authority itself – the machine metaphor is suddenly associated with the body. In terms of the ‘body politic’ one can speak of the ‘unseen’. To the physical apparatus of the body can be added a separate entity, the non-physical, non-visible realm of authority itself. Colonial authority appears as this unseen, yet ‘none the less real’, metaphysical power. Although the metaphor switches from the machine to the physical body, there is no contradiction. The body is now thought of like a machine, and a machine, like a physical body, always implies a non-mechanical power separate from itself. There is always apart from the machine an operator or a ‘motive force’, as Cromer says, the working of an unseen will. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 498

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Cartesian mind-body split theme already surfacing in this book and to similar analyses of how metaphorical language does ideological work.
• DEFINE: Clarifies how the machine/body metaphor structurally requires a separate ‘operator’ — a key conceptual move in Mitchell’s argument.