Virilio Self-Colonization and Deinstitutionalization 

Paul Virilio wrote that the colonizer eventually colonizes himself. The technologies of conquest—speed, visibility, projection—once directed outward toward the world, return inward and begin to organize domestic life. The imperial frontier, he said, becomes an interface. What was once a technique of domination at a distance becomes the internal logic of governance.

Deinstitutionalization follows the same arc. The psychiatric institution was the site where madness was spatially and morally set apart, governed as an exterior domain. Its abolition was framed as emancipation, yet the colonial logic of management was not dismantled—it was internalized. The asylum was dissolved into the social body; its walls were reconstituted as protocols, case management systems, and expectations of self-regulation. The subject who was once confined is now expected to self-administer their care, to internalize the rationalities of the clinic, to live in what Virilio would call “real time.”

In Virilio’s terms, the spatial colonization of madness has become temporal. The rhythms of treatment and recovery are synchronized with the accelerative tempo of the market and the network. The institution’s external discipline has become an auto-colonizing care regime—one in which exposure, speed, and visibility replace mediation, distance, and slowness.

This is not liberation but a shift in the topography of control. The asylum’s disappearance marks not the end of psychiatric power but its dispersion into the temporal and perceptual fabric of everyday life. Mediation itself—the slow, buffered space through which relation might occur—has been rendered obsolete. The population, now the site of care, is organized by the same logistical rationalities that once organized confinement.

Deinstitutionalization thus represents the self-imposition of colonial doctrine: the colonization of mediation, of time, of perception. Society internalizes the very logic it claimed to abolish. Madness, stripped of institutional distance, is exposed to the unmediated violence of speed and transparency. The world becomes its own asylum—without walls, without delay, and without reprieve.

From Virilio’s Real Time to Agamben’s State of Exception

What Virilio names as the loss of mediation through the acceleration of real time, Agamben articulates as the collapse of the threshold—the indistinction between inside and outside, law and life, inclusion and abandonment. Both diagnose the same condition under different aspects: a world in which there is no longer a mediating interval between what governs and what is governed.

In Agamben’s analysis, the state of exception is not the suspension of order but its generalization. When mediation collapses, the distinction between the normal and the exceptional becomes impossible to sustain. Likewise, when institutions disappear, the distinction between care and control, between inclusion and abandonment, collapses into a single continuous field of exposure. The unmediated population reproduces the asylum’s logic under another name.

Virilio’s “real time” is Agamben’s “permanent exception.” In both, the absence of distance—the compression of time, the erasure of thresholds—renders every relation immediate, and therefore violent. The mad are no longer excluded, but neither are they protected by the formalities of mediation. They inhabit a world that has turned itself inside out, a world that has colonized its own interior.

If Agamben’s sovereign is the one who decides on the exception, Virilio’s sovereign is the interface that erases the need for decision altogether. Power no longer needs to act; it merely accelerates. The humanitarian language of deinstitutionalization—care in the community, integration, inclusion—functions as the moral alibi for this acceleration. Underneath, the same colonial grammar persists: the logic of management, transparency, and total exposure.

What appears as progress is simply the modern form of auto-colonization—the reimposition of control through the destruction of mediation itself.