Modern political truth and authority are produced and understood through the language of machinery

Evidence

What I want to describe here is the distinctiveness of this kind of power and truth. It is a truth of the age of telegraphs and machine guns, of representations and exhibitions, and is an authority imagined and produced in the image of such mechanisms. Our thinking about this authority, however, is itself something that lives within the language of machinery and communication – the language of representation. Contained in this manner, we are generally constrained from considering the very peculiar way in which the truth of such political authority is produced. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 416

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the world-as-exhibition concept threaded throughout this book, and to media theory claims about communication technologies shaping thought (Innis, McLuhan).