"Indeed, much more than a new set of financial instruments at the IDA’s disposal, the discovery of the social extends vastly the Bank’s scope of action and influence. Once the direct link between the project and verifiable economic production has been exploded, the Bank is free to conceive of infrastructure and superstructure in a dialectical relationship: that is, where both can be thought of as potentially productive, and where infrastructure is no longer presumed to organically generate superstructure; rather, both need cultivation. Within the logic of this cultural turn, then, the potential scope and duration of [World] Bank sponsored development telescopes toward a horizon that promises to be infinite and eternal."
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Bret Benjamin, Invested Interests, pg. 70.
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A valuable reminder that thinking “infrastructure and superstructure in a dialectical relationship” can be both “potentially productive” and sponsor financial colonization. Or, more broadly, undercutting binaries is not always a good thing. In this instance, “the social” as Benjamin names it for the moment, or superstructural development underwrites the Bank’s forced infrastructural development that leaves their target countries in “infinite and eternal” debt.
