Modern political authority mirrors the unproblematic, mechanical presence of an author in written texts.

Evidence

The new mode of writing and communication made the re-presenting of an author’s meaning appear an essentially unproblematic mechanical process. The unproblematic presence of an author in writing would now correspond, in all the other realms of ordering that characterise the world-as-exhibition, to the production of an essentially unproblematic and mechanical presence of authority in political life. … This political authority, produced in the modern state the way a modern text produces the unambiguous effect of an author, would appear continuously and mechanically present. At the same time, like an author’s meaning, this authority would somehow stand mysteriously apart. Just as meaning does not exist in the ‘material’ of the words themselves, but seems to belong to a separate mental or conceptual realm that words only ever re-present, political authority would now exist apart as something metaphysical, which in the material world is only ever re-presented. Authority would become something both mechanical and mysterious: as certain and straightforward as the process of meaning, and equally metaphysical. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 482

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Mitchell’s broader world-as-exhibition thesis from earlier chapters — the ordering of representation that stands apart from things themselves. — connects to: Universal authorship arrives long before universal literacy did — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 34
• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanical-yet-mysterious duality of authority — simultaneously automatic and metaphysical — is a genuinely dense, paradigm-shifting observation about how representation and power work in parallel.