Modernity finds itself in a dissociated state, that is, unable to attach its social energies and political desires to a political vision that resonates and coheres.

In a moment of systems collapse, institutional critiques can only offer diagnostics of what has failed, how and why, and with what repercussions. What would it mean to move from an institutional critique of the recurrence of hierarchy and domination to an infrastructural critique of an anticolonial politics of the present? Often institutions are construed as simply contributing to existing orders and their interpellations (Althusser 1970, Foucault 1961, 1976). Colonial hospitals, have long been understood as complicitous in shoring up more clearly political patterns of exclusion and marginalization (Keller 2007). More recently, institutions and infrastructure have been understood as crucial to contributing the resources for sustaining long-term anti-colonial challenges (Robcis 2021, Adalet 2022). Beyond utopic figurations or liberatory fantasies, I argue that “infrastructure” should be understood as the spatial articulation of historically specific social relations than endure. Thinking in terms of infrastructure offers both (1) a mode of thinking that favors the material over the abstract; and (2) a means to redirect the relations, rhythms, and hierarchies that make institutional forms thrum with desire. Thinking illustratively through the example of the Psychiatric Hospital at Blida (HPB), this paper outlines the infrastructures of this space – the provision of food and medicine, institutional architecture, and the training of nursing staff – that made propositional spaces out of the ruins of what came before. This paper thus offers a re-visioning of how institutions might re-circulate people, materials, and the rhythms of social time so as to “unseat mastery” and its structuring recurrence within political and social order.

Speaker Bio:

Nancy Luxon is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her work in contemporary political and social theory concentrates on questions of power, subjectivity, and truth-telling. Her first book, Crisis of Authority (2013), considers political authority as a political and psychological process in which individuals come to author themselves, and so to act within and against relations of hierarchy. More recently, she has edited a translation of Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault’s Disorderly Families (2017), along with a companion scholarly volume, Archives of Infamy (2019). Her second monograph, Staging the Political: Colonial Encounters in North Africa and France, analyzes a range of speech contexts, from the psychiatric clinics at Blida and Charles-Nicolle, to Tropiques and Présence Africaine, and the sites of anti-colonial postwar politics.