A minoritarian approach to mental infrastructures

Abstract

This article attempts to provide a definition of “mental infrastructure” that would be compatible with some of the lessons drawn from disability studies as they have flourished over the past decades. It does so by taking as a test case the “attentional crisis” much discussed in recent years. We start by surveying canonical definitions of infrastructural power, showing how most of them already take into account a complex entanglement between material, institutional and imaginary realities. A second section considers more specifically the mental aspect of infrastructural assemblages, while a third one revisits them under the minoritarian light shed by disability studies. “Repairing” our mental infrastructures, as observed in the field of attention studies, does not merely aim at “recovering” a mental ability for idealized concentration: it rather calls for communicational infrastructures capable of putting multiple (minoritarian and majoritarian) perspectives “on par with” each other. A final section identifies six moves which can help construct the multi-perspectivist mental infrastructures we desperately need in order to remantle our cognitively dissonant worldviews and to negotiate a just cohabitation on planet Earth in the Anthropocene.