Paul Virilio had a subtle and powerful way of describing how the logics of domination, speed, and control developed in colonial contexts eventually “boomeranged” back onto the colonizing societies themselves. He didn’t always frame this in the straightforward language of “colonial doctrine,” but throughout his works—especially Speed and Politics (1977), Pure War (1983, with Sylvère Lotringer), and The Overexposed City (1988)—he argued that the techniques of conquest and domination that Europe exported were simultaneously internalized within Europe’s own social, political, and technological systems.
Here’s a synthesis of Virilio’s position on this dynamic:
1. Colonial techniques as self-colonization
Virilio saw colonial expansion as not only an outward project but also a rehearsal for inward domination. The tools of spatial control, surveillance, and acceleration—first applied to “foreign” territories and peoples—eventually turned inward upon the European body politic itself.
The colonizer ends by colonizing himself. This is a recurring idea in Virilio’s corpus: the military, logistical, and technological infrastructures that made imperial domination possible later became the means for managing and disciplining domestic populations.
In Speed and Politics, he argues that the same logistical rationality that allowed for rapid troop deployment in colonial wars became the organizational logic of modern states—what he called dromocracy, the rule of speed. The result is that modern citizens live under a kind of “internal occupation.”
2. The colonial boomerang and the logistics of domination
Virilio often echoed a theme first articulated by thinkers like Aimé Césaire and Hannah Arendt: that imperialism’s violence inevitably returns home. But his focus was not moral or political—it was technological.
He argued that every technology of projection (projectile, project, projection) carries within it the logic of acceleration, control, and disappearance. Colonization is one such project: a spatial projection of power that later collapses back onto the metropole through the miniaturization of territory (via telecommunications, instantaneous warfare, etc.).
So the imperial frontier—the place where power once extended—becomes internalized in the very fabric of domestic governance and everyday life.
“The colonial frontier has been replaced by the interface.”
The colonized “elsewhere” becomes the digital and psychological “elsewhere” within: the colonization of consciousness and perception.
3. From external empire to internal empire
Virilio described the shift from geo-political to chrono-political domination.
Once colonization of space was exhausted, domination turned to the colonization of time and speed. The “colonial doctrine” thus becomes a mode of life in which acceleration and visibility are forms of control—imposed not by force of arms but by the control of movement, images, and perception.
In this sense, the West becomes its own colony. The control once exerted over foreign territories becomes self-imposed through technology, surveillance, and the commodification of perception.
4. Acceleration as internal colonization
For Virilio, the modern condition is the result of an auto-colonizing process:
“The development of speed is the development of the colonization of the world, and then of ourselves.”
We internalize the same logic of conquest that once defined empire—only now it manifests as self-exploitation, self-surveillance, and perpetual motion. The colonizer’s mindset becomes a universal condition.
In short:
Virilio’s thesis is that the colonial logic of expansion, control, and acceleration turns inward, producing a society that subjects itself to the same forces it once unleashed abroad. The West’s drive to dominate space culminates in the loss of its own space—spatial, temporal, and psychic.
Or as he put it elsewhere:
“We have reached the point where the colonization of the world is succeeded by the colonization of real time.”
Let’s situate Virilio’s idea of auto-colonization (the self-imposition of colonial doctrines) alongside Foucault, Mbembe, and Stiegler. All three inherit aspects of Virilio’s thought but extend it in different ontological or political directions.
1. Foucault: From Colonial Sovereignty to Biopower
Foucault’s genealogy of power shows a transition from the right to kill (sovereign power) to the power to make live (biopower).
He argued that modern states absorbed the mechanisms of control first honed in colonial contexts. The colony, he said in Society Must Be Defended, is “the space where the sovereign power functions at its fullest.”
Virilio’s insight complements this: the logistics, surveillance, and administrative rationalities used to manage colonies (mapping, census-taking, medical regulation, etc.) are turned inward on European populations.
Foucault describes this as the internalization of colonial power, where entire populations are governed through the same techniques used on colonized subjects.
In Virilio’s dromological terms: the speed, mobility, and logistical mastery that enabled empire now organize everyday life. Citizens are governed not through the whip but through the acceleration of work, communication, and consumption.
So where Foucault focuses on discipline and normalization, Virilio focuses on speed and logistics as the infrastructure of that discipline.
2. Mbembe: Necropolitics and the Return of the Colony
Achille Mbembe radicalizes this trajectory.
In Necropolitics, he argues that the colony was not merely a testing ground but the paradigm for modern power. The logics of “who must die so that others may live” are not exceptional but foundational.
Mbembe extends Virilio’s intuition that colonial rationality is self-imposed.
The necropolitical structures (zones of abandonment, militarized borders, surveillance, extraction) are not restricted to Africa, the Middle East, or other “elsewheres.” They now define the global order.
Thus, the metropole is no longer outside the colony—it has become one.
Virilio would say that this occurs through technological dromocracy: the state of “pure war,” in which civilian life is structured by the permanent readiness for catastrophe. Mbembe reframes this as the universalization of the death-world—the internalization of the colonial condition into planetary existence.
So, Virilio’s “auto-colonization” becomes in Mbembe’s frame the necropolitical self-administration of the West—a society that turns its instruments of domination against itself, producing internal zones of expendability (migrants, the poor, the unproductive).
3. Stiegler: Technics and the Self-Destruction of Civilization
Bernard Stiegler takes Virilio’s concept of technological acceleration and gives it an ontological twist.
For Stiegler, technics (tools, media, automation) always exteriorize human memory—our knowledge and perception are pharmacological: both remedy and poison.
What Virilio calls the “colonization of real time” becomes, in Stiegler’s language, the proletarianization of attention.
When the colonial logic turns inward, it becomes a colonization of consciousness—our memories, desires, and temporalities are managed by industrial temporalities (the speed of media, finance, logistics).
This is no longer about empire in a geopolitical sense but the technological colonization of psychic and collective individuation.
We no longer live in colonized space but in colonized time—a world where experience is synchronized, accelerated, and emptied of depth.
So where Virilio diagnosed the militarization of perception, Stiegler diagnoses the industrialization of attention. Both describe a form of auto-colonization, where humanity becomes the occupied territory of its own inventions.
Synthesis:
| Thinker | What is Colonized | Mechanism | Consequence |
|---|
| Virilio | Space → Time | Speed, logistics, visibility | Internal occupation of society (auto-colonization) |
| Foucault | Population | Discipline, normalization | Biopolitical management of life |
| Mbembe | The entire world | Violence, death, extraction | Necropolitical global order; colony becomes universal |
| Stiegler | Consciousness, time | Technics, attention capture | Psychopolitical and temporal collapse |
In short:
Virilio anticipated that colonial doctrines of control, projection, and speed would fold back onto their originators, transforming Western societies into their own colonies. Foucault explains how this occurred through discipline, Mbembe through death, and Stiegler through technics. All describe different aspects of the same process: the self-implantation of domination.
1. The “auto-colonization” of mediation itself
Virilio’s concept of auto-colonization describes how the West internalizes its own systems of domination.
In deinstitutionalization, something similar happens: the very forms of mediation (institutions, therapeutic structures, social relations) that once governed and contained madness are dismantled—not in the name of liberation, but under the same accelerative, technocratic rationality that once justified colonial control.
Where colonialism projected power outward, deinstitutionalization projects its unmediated logic inward—onto the psyche, onto social life, onto the “community.”
In effect, the modern psyche becomes a colony of the market and of speed.
What is removed isn’t control, but rather the institutional forms through which control had been mediated.
This is Virilio’s insight, turned toward psychiatry: the colony dissolves, but its logic persists, now without boundaries. The self becomes the colony.
2. From spatial domination to temporal acceleration
Virilio’s account of the colonization of real time helps to clarify what deinstitutionalization actually did.
It collapsed a spatial logic (the asylum as enclosure) into a temporal one (the perpetual present of crisis management, case turnover, and productivity metrics).
The asylum at least imposed a kind of pause—a mediated temporal difference from the world. Once abolished, that pause was colonized by real-time surveillance, case flow, and emergency response—a form of pure dromocratic governance.
So, deinstitutionalization didn’t end the colonial relationship between the “normal” and the “abnormal.”
It merely accelerated it: now, instead of being excluded from the polis, the mad are subsumed into its rhythms of speed, precarity, and visibility.
3. The self-imposition of colonial rationality
In deinstitutionalization discourse, society speaks the language of emancipation but acts with the logic of auto-colonization.
Communities become therapeutic zones; the subject becomes both governor and governed; the psychiatric subject must “self-manage” according to the same rationalities that once justified confinement.
Virilio’s notion of the “accident of progress” fits perfectly here.
Every technological and political innovation carries its own catastrophe.
Deinstitutionalization’s accident was not abandonment per se but the internalization of the asylum:
“The clinic is everywhere, because speed and visibility are everywhere.”
The community replaces the institution not by mediating differently, but by eliminating mediation itself—by turning the psychiatric gaze into self-surveillance, the “freedom” of the patient into the acceleration of their exposure.
4. From external control to self-colonizing care
Virilio’s “self-colonization” becomes, in deinstitutionalization, the self-colonization of care.
The subject is made to govern themselves through their own therapeutic self-consciousness.
Where the asylum disciplined bodies through space, deinstitutionalization disciplines time and attention.
It’s Stiegler’s problem, too: the industrialization of care and therapy as the colonization of psychic time.
The psychiatric subject is now:
-
Temporally colonized (expected to respond, recover, improve, “integrate” at market speed),
-
Perceptually colonized (rendered visible to systems of data, reporting, and algorithmic triage),
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Ethically colonized (taught to equate self-governance with moral worth).
So deinstitutionalization is not liberation, but a shift from external to internal colonization—from confinement to auto-colonization.
5. The removal of mediation as a new form of enclosure
Virilio saw mediation—walls, distance, slowness—as conditions of experience.
When mediation is removed, we don’t gain freedom; we lose the capacity for orientation.
Acceleration destroys distance, and with it, the very possibility of relation.
In deinstitutionalization, the destruction of mediation between madness and the world—the end of institutional distance—produces a collapsed world, where the mad are “free” only insofar as they are fully exposed.
That’s why deinstitutionalization feels, in your terms, like unmediation and mismediation rather than emancipation.
The system internalizes its own colonial logic—projecting its governing technologies into the psychic and temporal interior of its subjects.
6. Summary
| Virilio’s Concept | Deinstitutionalization Equivalent | Consequence |
|---|
| Colonizer colonizes himself | Society internalizes its psychiatric control logics | The asylum dissolves but its techniques proliferate |
| Loss of spatial distance → colonization of time | Removal of institutional mediation | Collapse of temporal and relational difference |
| Rule of speed (dromocracy) | Rapid turnover, crisis response, real-time visibility | Care becomes a logistical regime |
| Auto-colonization | Self-management, therapeutic self-surveillance | The subject becomes both ruler and ruled |
So, in Virilio’s sense, deinstitutionalization is the colonial doctrine turned inward: the psychiatric frontier returns home.
The logic of “civilizing the mad” becomes the logic of “civilizing ourselves”—but without institutions, without pause, without mediation.
The “asylum” now operates everywhere and nowhere: in our attention, our time, our data, our self-concept.
