Against Institution

The word "institutions," especially in studies of the context in which Derrida, Foucault and others emerged, generally has negative connotations. To begin with, the term refers to corporate bodies with rules, protocols and a material existence. More broadly it implies a discourse or field informed by a habitus, as in Derrida's essays in Right to Philosophy, which question the linguistic and demographic exclusions of classical philosophy. To criticize philosophy these days is popular, and insofar as I touch on the above senses of institution, I want to add that this negative use of the word to imply a conservatism of the practico-inert which Theory countered in the sixties cannot be distributed in terms of a left/right or past/present discourse. It is also possible to envision a more positive use of the term, which I take up through Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, wherein institution is what inaugurates a new field of investigation. But I begin with the institution of a discourse on institution in the period when institutions—universities, learned societies, journals—were being founded in greater numbers than ever before. The Romantic period also saw a first birth of Theory, which Derrida evokes in citing the philosopher Friedrich Schelling in two essays in Right to Philosophy, to ask if philosophy can be contained in a faculty or institution (2004, 63, 72). Derrida's word is philosophy, since he sees Theory as a North American coinage (2002a, 208); but one could as well say Theory, given the interdisciplinary and decidedly non-classical nature of Schelling's philosophy, to which I return.

I start with William Godwin, whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793/1798) can be seen as a founding anarchist text, but only in the sense of going before arche-, foundation or institution. Godwin broaches a radical deconstruction of institution, a word he uses in the singular to connote something more oblique than specific institutions. "Positive institution" is the process by which obedience is compelled, sometimes through "positive law" but often more insidiously (Godwin 1946, 1.175-8). For Godwin, "government" goes beyond the "public institutions" to which we commonly attach its effects and power, and "insinuate[s] itself" into the arts and even into "our personal dispositions" and "most secret retirements" (1.4-6). As such, it is not unlike what Foucault calls discourse or governmentality, but as "habit of a second sort" (1.65), it precedes even discourse at an instinctive, inscriptive level.

For Deleuze, by contrast, in the Introduction to a collection that Georges Canguilhem asked him to edit in 1953, though the institution is "an organized system of means," it is "a positive model for actions," while it is law which is "a limitation of actions." "Instincts" find expression in institutions—thus sexuality is expressed in marriage—, which allows Deleuze to naturalize institutions (2004, 19-20); in his later terms, institutions are expressive rather than limited by representation. They are not dispositifs which structure a social order from above, but assemblages—a word Deleuze comes to prefer—which may exhibit "verticality," but "receive a[n]…immanent determination" that makes them open to restructuring (Hardt 1973, 121). Complaining that even theories of law which valorize natural rights put "the positive outside the social," Deleuze sees "the theory of the institution" as placing the "negative outside the social," which is seen as "positive and inventive" (2004, 19). Deleuze gives these comments a more thorough utilitarian and empirical lineage in Empiricism and Subjectivity, his early book on Hume, which again claims that society is essentially positive because its core is the institution, not law (1989, 45-6). By contrast for Godwin, whose negative construction of the social should on no account be identified with natural rights theorists like Paine and Wollstonecraft and thus with the naivete of thinking that institutionalizing the progressive will deal with institution as interpellation, the only right is the right not to. Godwin worries about juries and a system of national education, two progressive institutions that were on his horizon (1946, 2.209-11, 297-302). For him any positive right inevitably becomes an institution, and any institution—like democracy—is based on representation...