A Question for Institutions

The word ‘institution’ indicates a change in the level of analysis. An institution is just a summarization of ecosystemic coordinations. To ‘study institutions’ means to study that conceptual, or even political, operation whereby a new layer of coordinated activity is established. To think or act institutionally is to shift the discourse neither ‘left’ nor ‘right,’ but rather up, to a higher layer or perspective. By raising the question of institutions, the speaker immediately forces a dimensional shift in the geometry of the local conceptual-political field. Such an institutionally ‘corrupted’ discourse inevitably devolves into a sort of summary-machine: the consequence is a shift not only in our collection of ideas, but necessarily even their inter-relations, that is, even the essence of the ideas themselves.

The problem of institutions, like that of violence, is very obscure. It is currently situated at what amounts to an ‘inertial point’ with respect to dominant traditions. Raising the problem of institutions accelerates the convergence of critical discourses. Disciplines compel each another to merge together, in order to explain. Yet a single voice may be able to express what an entire chorus may not.

For when the question of establishment itself is reached, specialists suddenly surrender their confidence in method, precisely that which would enable them to distinguish clearly what about this question would otherwise be essentially obscure. For at the point where the proper question of institutionalization is finally able to be posed as such, then disciplines suddenly seem to have an incredible difficulty in maintaining their idiosyncratic approach, their distinct identities. They merge into a single goal and question. A discipline re-organized. Indeed, when an overly specialized approach breaches the critical zone, it swiftly becomes de-organized by dint of the hyper-organization of the object.

Institutions combine the ‘eternal memory’ of science, mathematics and religion, with the ‘momentary experience’ of phenomenology, sociopsychology, and critical theory. The problem of institutions is the problem of slavery and aristocracy, the problem of freedom and envy. Approached through the lens of objective science, the subject simply imitates the multiplicity of the institution. Even science becomes an institution only when its sets about to study them as a subject (‘subject to law’) -- and, in a real sense, to control them by this study. The universal simulation produced by the institution is the central problematic of hyper-mechanization; it is the dream of establishment -- a paradise. All institutions secretly want to become utopias; this desire distorted, become obscene, is capital. Social thought has become almost completely functionalized, embodied as exchange within an open community. The closure of society to the universe is almost irreversible; the functionalization of the universe for society is almost complete. But we are not yet machines, and still have time to postpone the moment of inhumanity.

Let us begin by saying institutionalization is a becoming-machine, the establishment of a universalizable operation cycle. The institution is a machine which as such has no authority to impose rules and laws, is impotent as such -- and so rather subjects the entire universe to its cycle of operations, utilizing whatever forces are available to it to ensure its survival.

Institutions provoke a cosmic functionalization which is necessarily ambiguous: to open new spaces for coordinated vitality, some others must be closed forever. Society is a machine which unfolds itself more than it folds back in: it is a super-institution, which miraculously donates a positive function to all that which benefits its self-organization.

Thus machinic subjects understand intimately the role of science, even if they can no longer conceive of the scientific as such. Does the institution destroy the possibility of pure science? It is perhaps too much to assert that science can only becomes ‘innovative’ when at a distance from machinic organizations of subjectivity; doubtless they require one another. Yet this very need seems somewhat contrived, something of a fiction. Yet what would such a ‘pure’ science be, in isolation from any predictable processes? And what would such an institution produce, devoid of order, synchrony or goal?

Culture is an institution in the past tense: what was or has been established. But the dynamics of coordination do not necessarily proceed along indicated cultural paths. To all goals, identities, desires, layers, pathways, endpoints, institutions are indifferent.

In short, institutes are organizations which transform energy; speed is the only important difference. Establishment invests energy directly into a circular process of self-renewal. Consider a cube replaced by infinitely many differently-sized spheres: the fact of difference (in size) precludes any question of alternative distributions, and the position of the largest determine the necessary arrangement of the smaller...

The geometry of social order is invested by divisions of life-space, while the intensity of social desire seeks to overcome divisions by reunification, streamlining the separation which produces cultural objects... Eventually the process ends where it had begun: we find our culture has become automatic, our thoughts and actions reflexive, our intensity subdivided until it has become harmless.

Institutions neutralize desire. There is no escaping the fact that the massive coordination of activity has as its necessary consequence the 'automatization' of almost every aspect of life, to the extent we are shocked when the world doesn't correspond to our institutionalized cognition. So my question is this: is it possible to truly think post-institutionally, given that our cultural mode of thought has been irrevocably shaped by institutions?

'A Chain of Necessary Rings of Culture': Nietzsche and the Ability of Science

In sections 4 and 5 of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche develops a non-linear train of thought that attempts to analyze and reconstruct the experiences and concepts of religion, art and science. There are developmental factors and connections among these three, for “art raises its head when religion relaxes its hold,” and the “scientific man is the further evolution of the artistic” (150; 223). Poets, for example, construct bridges to distant ages and dying religions, creating metaphysical alleviations that only serve to quell the truly revolutionary energy flowing beneath the surface of the social body (148). Also, artists are the notorious “glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of mankind,” and even though this has granted us the signification of a beautiful world, we have to ask ourselves the question: if Nietzsche tells of the death throes of art and religion, what does science inherit from these projects and how can their insights and creations be carried on in an affirmative project for the creation of necessary rings of a universal culture of free spirits (220)?

Art’s expansion transforms religious sensations and expressions, lending them profundity and an increased capacity for articulating these sensations—and science (the Enlightenment) is responsible for the dispersion of religious feelings into other areas, even politics (150). But if art is dying, then we must posit that the transformations of these metaphysical and religious sensations through art must also become invested into a new sphere, namely science. This is true because, when one organ of culture has weakened, another organ “has to discharge not only its own function but another as well” (231). Science inherits from art its ability to “look upon life in any of its forms with interest and pleasure, and to educate our sensibilities so far that we at last cry: ‘life, however it may be, is good!’” and has even made this affirmation “an almighty requirement of knowledge” (222). Thus, we can give up art without losing the capacity and sensibility that art and religion has prepared for us.

Science has to cultivate these capacities and seize upon its true calling as the project of achieving an objective by the appropriate means (256). Nietzsche’s science, gifted with the premonition of the Eternal Return, will assert that “every action performed by a human being becomes in some way the cause of other actions, decisions, thoughts, that everything that happens is inextricably knotted to everything that will happen,” that motion is enveloped in an immortality that is the total union of all being (208). Science also must recognize that everyone is “determined by such systems and representatives of different cultures” in a necessary but alterable fashion (274). This power to alter our cultural “determinations” means that we are responsible for our experiences and life experiments, that these are to be fused into a “goal without remainder” that has as its aim the will to distinguish ourselves as forming “a necessary chain of rings of culture and from this necessity to recognize the necessity inherent in the course of culture in general” (292). We are cultural artifacts composing necessary links to a universal culture that, even if it exists only potentially, must be achieved by the labor of free spirits, the kind that seem “to be the opposite of that which is profitable to their country or class” (227). Of course, the dominant culture and the established authority will resist the required degeneration of its stability, but the development of a de-centered, non-hierarchical, universal culture can only begin through the process of weakening the fetters of state culture. This will allow for the generation of lines of flight for new social organizations and/or assemblages.

To conclude, there are three possible factors for the birth of a global culture: absolute music, the scientific analysis of symbolic gestures, and a new language for all. The first two are closely linked, and they require an understanding of how poetry produces a superimposition of immediate feelings in music to the point where the music itself is rendered immediately symbolic for our internal life (215). The development of absolute music for the social ear means that music’s symbolism is understood without further assistance—likewise, the science of cultural tones in vocal patterns that are indicative of mood, feelings and expressions will be necessary to uncovering the vastness of operations at work in unconscious modifications of body and voice. Furthermore, linguistics and philology, as the two dominant sciences of language, can then dedicate their study of the laws of individual languages to the forms of non-verbal thought in a synthesis that has as its goal the creation of a “new language for all—first as a commercial language, then as the language of intellectual intercourse in general” (267). Given that this is merely a preliminary overview of an undercurrent in Human All Too Human, the next step in continuing this line of thought has to navigate the role of the state, the relations of states among themselves, and the relations among the responsibilities that we all bare to our composition of immortal vibrations in the links of a universal cultural chain.