Obiits

“Institutions”

Terminology

Clarification is necessary. What are we talking about, and why employ the word “institution”? This word can mean more than one thing. But we need it to fill a gap that other words leave unworked.

“Society” is on another scale. If we leave aside “high society” and society in the sense of the public sphere, we mean something quite maximal in scale. On the dimension of what French sociology named a “total” fact. Kinship structures are an example, and relations of production too. This total fact has to be taken or left as a whole. You can’t, for example, take part of the social contract and leave the rest. Society in this usage is total—all or nothing—and there’s only one of it. (On the shelf, Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Marx, Althusser, Rousseau.) An institution is something smaller, and there are many of them.

“Community” is of another color. The word is loaded. One could also say “charged.” It seems to name something local, a unity and union in presence and proximity; “community” is, additionally, understood to be something concrete and thus opposed to the distance, abstraction, artifice legal rights (equality in principle and not in fact), and, finally, the atomization wrought by market forces, enclosure and expropriation, modernizing reforms, and colonial pillage.

The union we’ve lost to this many-armed disaster is itself preconceived by its role as an ideal. Proximity, presence, locality seem like a “natural” side of human gregariousness, which the social dismembers through abstraction and artifice. This ideal (“community”) has important things to teach, but two of its lessons absolutely must be unlearned. Rejecting artifice, it relegates human agency to the “artificial” field of law, leaving only a very poor conceptual apparatus to think their agency in their communal relations. Emphasizing unity, it overlooks the multiplicity of smaller institutions of collectivity which overlap, interplay, conflict, develop within a community. In fact, there is no total community, but a stable interplay of multiple communities which is refined to a unity by means an image (for example, a flag). (On the shelf, Ferdinand Tönnies’ Community and Society, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.)

We must make this dimension of social facts into something we can talk about, facts that are not untouchable hoverings in the structure or all-or-nothings of joining or leaving society or idealized communities modelled on love.

We need a name for this other dimension. Something within in our reach, something maniable. The need for this concept is the main point. Terminologically, “institutions” will do. The word is often used this way: by Saint-Just in particular in his posthumous “Fragments of Republican Institutions”. But to avoid confusion, it’s essential to completely sideline the dominant connotation of the word in English today, that of being “The Institution”, in the singular, something big, major, central, capital. The institutions we are chronicling are many, heterogeneous, often peripheral. Neither one nor all, but some. Medium-sized. Though these days we often see them defunded or closed by a state, their making requires much more than the prince’s signature. People make them together.

For example, the Libreria delle donne di Milano

For example, the women’s ward at Evin Prison

For example, cinema on 42nd Street

Attributes and Gradients

Institutions are many. One “passes through” many of them with every step one takes. Thus one can hardly be fatalist regarding institutions.

“Membership” is only one sort of belonging. They permit ephemeralities: visitors, guests. Some of them exist above all for those with no other public for expression, dialogue, research, publication. (Favret-Saada in Vacarme 28: “J’ai trouvé dans l’expérience, les écrits, et le milieu analytiques un appui que mes collègues ethnologues me refusaient. / In the psychoanalytic experience, writings, and milieu, I found the support which my colleagues in ethnography refused me.”)

They can span distances, render distances viable, render differences sharable.

They are of many sizes, and their size matters.

The Rabbis said that institutions (of one, of two, of five, of nine) share amidst themselves a word and an experience of learning, or do not; with this learning comes a kind of spiritual presence, and absent it, something ugly. (Pirkei Avoth 3:2, 3:3, 3:6.)

The concept of institution contains something disjunctive. They can form little dictators, little servants. Or they can produce something one would describe as collective. But, once again, “collective” has not one but many, many forms. It is not the most helpful concept to presuppose, unless one is ready to enter into the rhythms and humors of a specific collectivity.

Institutions are lost and made but above all kept, reproduced, and mutated.

For example, a rose

Founding vs. Reproducing

At a moment in which one has lost many institutions, one comes to reflect on the conditions of their making and founding. Certain children (this author included) dreamed in manifestos and grew up to wish for a future in our ways of being together. The perspective of “founding” must be viewed with caution as we conceptualize institutions. Why? Because it is the characteristic of unhappy times to start from nothing.

What are you doing, when you found? Catching a bunch of atoms in a bag? If so, this is the pre-history of an institution. Its concept lies rather in what comes later, in a life that is not that of atoms.

The perspective of “founding” might make us think founders are needed. Such great names, to paraphrase Saint-Just, had the misfortune of living in times without institutions.

The perspective of “founding” might make us think that institutions are made by laws, rules. But they are only proposals. Additionally, they are proposals written in an alphabet we must already share, at least partly. But without thinking first about what we already share, we fail to see that they are not the founder’s making, but a collective one. Even for us today, when someone founds something—maybe better to say “initiates” or “occasions” something—what they do is create a situation, not write a story.

The perspective of “founding” might make us lose, finally, the creativity of their duration. I repeat: the creativity of institutions is not in their beginning, but in their duration, of their reproduction. Dividing the two according to a gendered schema of reproduction and production or the classic division between intellectual and manual labor yields a founding that is either fruitless or unaware of the ruse of the collective pressing within it; and a collective which misunderstands its power and above all its importance in the institution’s life and future.

Institutions have been closed, atoms set loose, but it would be a mistake to believe that we are left with just atoms. The concept of institutions must formulate a spectrum from inchoate to recognizable, and another (distinct) spectrum from unfigured to explicit.

When one recognizes these gradients: smaller and larger, inchoate and recognizable, unfigured and explicit, dictatorial and collective, one develops an eye. One sees them. One sees that they are everywhere. And at the same time that they are rare.

The perspective of “founding” lets us think that we know something about institutions when we read a bylaw or a manifesto. We do not. The knowledge of institutions is in their reproduction, not in their founding. This reproduction, or rather, this collective making, is what makes an institution different from a piece of paper. Pieces of paper and certainly correspondences, messages, calls and emails are part of the life and creative reproduction of an institution when they are exchanged. But the knowledge of institutions, if it is not in the document given in advance, is in its middle, in midstride.

This knowledge is one of experience. Every institution, at the same time as it is a constant creation and mutation, is also a constant learning.

Another spectrum consists in the way this learning is made available. Of course, this act, of making available, is not exclusively of the institution’s own life, but also of their reader.