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?

Identity and Division

What is the relation between experience and identity? Clearly, a purely logical account of identity cannot lay claim to our ‘experience’ of identity, only its most formal aspects. Even an ontological account of identity, identity as collection of experiences or even identity as a pure cognitive event, would again demonstrate only the tautological function of identity (for example, agent A is that entity which experiences ‘being-agent-A’.) Like the tangled hierarchies implicit in the cogito, the ontological perspective aims to resolve at a higher position than it began: it seeks to make decisions based on a total comprehension, which is to be accomplished by a rigorous division. We say that logic studies this same schism, but algebraically rather than differentially. Yet a profound question remains silent: why is the subject missing from our experiential space? Where has identity gone?

It is to Alain Badiou’s credit that we now think the relation of a subject to an event as essentially multiple. But this same principle undermines the mathematical principle of continuity upon which we must base any ontological analysis of a ‘system’ of events. Even if we approach identity naively, as meaning a “belonging in a certain way to a certain state of affairs,” we cannot thereby functionally account for its continuity (a subject still maintaining its identity despite, even perhaps because of her transpositions, or non-continuously varying degrees-of-belonging.) We already see that we have need for a more complicated algebraic structure, one which at least allows for division into partial membership classes. The very nature of equivalence depends fundamentally on this division into ‘similar’ sets.

Furthermore, the fact that inclusion itself is already an ontological division demands further explanation. For example, an identity cannot be ‘induced’ from the situation by the simple observation (or negotiation) which decides that such-and-such belongs to the state of affairs, or does not. In reality, we cannot rigorously establish the existence of the void or the multiple from a pure induction. Rather, even induction depends on a rigorous subdivision of the One until this operation approaches its ‘vulgar’ limit (of non-accuracy, of meaning ‘nothing’.) So when we say this ‘limit’ (zero) belongs to every set, even to itself, we mean that induction (the operation-as-limit) has meaning only when the situation its observes is already understood as meaning ‘nothing.’ Hence the infallibility of the inductive process; it is already a “transductive” tautology! So ‘identity’ (as singularity) refers only to the void’s self-belonging (by subdivision into n classes of varying degrees of 'belonging'...)

We can of course use induction to demonstrate that the endless process of the self-division of the void will "eventually" produce a pure distinction, a tautological “A is A (and not B)” which, by being so utterly commonplace, completely escapes attention. Distinction masquerades as some sort of absolute truth-event, a pure objective identity. We claim to the contrary that the void is never self-identical, that it never belongs to itself or anyone else. In fact, the power of the void is not ‘activated’ by its emptiness but rather the mathematical intuition of the operator, the one who utilizes the void in order to reconstruct a shrinking remainder of the 'original' existential-schematic, again only of this 'layer' of being. Thus, we claim that this operation of division cannot in fact account for the reciprocal yet asymmterical relation between experience and identity.