Thomas Rickert
Purdue University
Institutional Life
Strange Fabrics: We Are the Institution
I inhabit an institution, a university, and it is a commonplace, perhaps the commonplace,
that the university is not only space for ideas but is itself the incarnation of the Idea (which is
also a philosophical position). The best known treatments of the university make this plain. For
instance, Kant's The Conflict of the Faculties, which greatly influenced von Humboldt's design
and charter of the University of Berlin (1810), espouses the power of reason as pursued and
deployed through the Idea and its rational critique.1 The notion of the power of thought to pursue
thinking freely still has great power. It not only corresponds with the so called "life of the mind,"
but it grounds at least four pursuits for critical work: the refinement of knowledge, research,
professionalization, and the enculturation of an autonomous, rational citizenry.2 Contemporary
discussions are still tethered to such a philosophical idea(l),3 and this includes more postmodern
treatments, such as Bill Readings' The University in Ruins and Christopher Fynsk's The Claim of
Language. Readings counterposes the empty idea of excellence to that of thought itself. Fynsk,
working in a post-Heideggerian idiom, proposes a similarly groundless claim (or call) of
language. Certainly, they are advances in reworking what a philosophical grounding can be, but
they ultimately remain wedded to grounding the university in the idea, even if an
antifoundational one. I will complicate to this statement in my conclusion, but for now, I want to
emphasize that in theorizing the university as resultant effect of a plan or idea, there is an
underlying assumption that the university, like any institution, remains crucially distinct from
human being. As idea, the institution can be reworked, controlled, rethought through idea.
I argue that this idea is misleading, if not pernicious. Institutional life isn't a description
of a (human, academic) life that at some point meets The Institution as the alienating product of
human intent.4 Rather, Institutional life is an ontological claim: our way of being in the world is
already also a way of being with institutions. As Heidegger argues, our way of being in the
world, our way of dwelling, is an activity inclusive of what we build, and thus dwelling here
connotes that what we do and make is inseparable from how we are (see Poetry).5 What I'd like
to do now is explore three different theoretical models, the apparatus, the network, and the
assemblage as alternatives to the idea as ground for institutional life.
The Apparatus
In a brief essay, Giorgio Agamben distills the concept of the apparatus (dispositif) from
Michel Foucault. Agamben considers it a key technical term that indicates a heterogeneous set of
discourses, laws, buildings, propositions, practices, and so on, including institutions. The
institution is an apparatus, then, even as it is also connected to other apparatuses (for instance,
the state) (2-3). So, appearing at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge,
the apparatus describes not so much an entity or entities, but the relational network that obtains
among the various elements. The apparatus includes but cannot be reduced to the Idea.
Agamben goes on to demonstrate similarities between the apparatus and, for instance,
Heidegger's notion of Gestell, or technological enframing. What connects such otherwise
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disparate theoretical constructions is the fact that they "manage . . . the behaviors, gestures, and
thoughts of human beings" (12). While I cannot adequately explain this here, I do not in fact find
this to be an apt comparison to Gestell. Heidegger does not uphold, I think, the clear distinction
Agamben makes between what he calls the two great classes: "living beings (or substances) and
apparatuses" (14). But note that it is precisely this division that gives the negative cast to
subjectivization, in spite of all of Foucault's efforts to emphasize the positivity of productive
power. (And Byron will have more to add to all this.) Accordingly, Agamben also pursues the
possibility that under contemporary capitalism, the apparatus can desubjectify, but really the
distinction is merely a negative mirror play of subjectivation. To be made or unmade as subject
to the apparatus is a model that still works on the most fundamental of binaries, physis/nomos.
Put as succinctly at possible: Agamben's take on Foucault's apparatus cannot push the notion of
the human to include elements of the nonhuman. Given this, all conversations that stem from this
ground move in the discursive orbits of power, subjection, control, management, administration,
and so on. This in turn results in a strong focus on critique, resistance, counterpower, all of
which bring forth the apparatus as some combination of obstruction and enablement that
nevertheless remains crucially distinct from the human.6
The Network
There are numerous relational theories available, with many of them prioritizing the
network as a key term, but here I will limit myself to Bruno Latour, whose actor-network theory
prioritizes actants in relation. For example, a scientist, such as Pasteur, is one actant in a complex
weave of actants including politicians, funding, laboratory equipment, scientific narratives and
methodologies, and even the bacteria being studied. Such networks, constantly made and
unmade, are "strange fabrics" (Pasteurization 199). Importantly, actants can be human,
nonhuman, material, and immaterial. What becomes decisive is not only the expansion of
possible actants beyond the human/non-human split retained by Agamben, but the conceptual
turn that results: we move from Agamben's terminology of critique and counterpower to alliance
and mobilization. The strange fabrics of Latour's networks are the work of sophistic clothiers.
The institution is assembled from myriad actants networked together, so that the institution's
current "shape," inclusive of our perceptions and interpretations, is itself a product of networked
actants—a series of observations, selections, interpretations, joinings, and practices.
While there's much more to be said here, I want to pick out one point in particular.
Latour's networks consistently emphasize alliance in a rhetorical sense. As Graham Harman
explains, "actants become more real by making larger portions of the cosmos vibrate in harmony
with their goals" (19). We might call this a materialist sophistic. On first blush this may seem
nonsensical: how does one persuade or generate alliance with non-humans such as gravity or
disease . . . or the non-human aspects of the university? But, as Harman says of Latour, what is
nonsensical is to view the world's forces as uniquely different from human force. It is not that
there is nothing but power or that all forms of activity are the same, but that actants achieve their
effects through colluding with other actants, and collusive practices are always ongoing, being
made and unmade. If flu is an actant, it acts through a host; that is, it makes its way through a
series of alliances that allow it to spread and propagate. It's never just the thing itself, it's the
thing as a curriculum vita, as an ongoing assembling and disassembling of networks of actants
that catalyzes effects (see Harman 65). It's the story of alliances and resultant effects. There is no
idea or essence to which we have recourse. And, not to put to fine a point on it, who- or whatever
2
has achieved the greater alliances—the marshalling and pulling together of human and
nonhuman actants—is unlikely to be swayed by appeals to an Idea(l) marshaled through critique.
The Assemblage
The notion of assemblage, developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, is given an
exemplary exploration by Jane Bennett in a series of recent essays.7 In one of them, Bennett
describes the assemblage as an historical and contingent grouping, vibrantly inserted into and
coexisting with assemblages that exceed and conflict with it, and as having an uneven power
distribution among differing actants, including both human and nonhuman, material and
immaterial (445). Bennett makes numerous connections to Latour as well, suggesting that the
relational network of Latour and the assemblage have much in common.8
Bennett highlights two aspects of the assemblage pertinent here. First, similarly to
Latour, it disrupts the commonplace that people, as the sole agents, achieve results in the world
by translating ideas into effects (453). By granting agency to nonhuman things and forces, we are
confronted with agency as a composite achievement—the result of alliances and compositions,
stemming from the interplay of discrete and collective agencies (447).9 Second, such activity as
results from assemblages is seldom linear, which is to say, it is nonlinear, i.e. emergent. We must
leave behind the notion of billiard ball causation. For this reason, Bennett not only highlights the
process itself as an actant (459), but offers the term "cascade" as substitute for "act" so as to
transform our notion of intention (457).10 It is an understatement that rhetorical theory remains
wedded to notions of linear intent, whereby a rhetor achieves the results intended via artful
discourse. To take the notion of the assemblage seriously would result in an abandonment of
such a model and seeing that regardless of intent, institutional transformation is better understood
as the result of a cascade of activity whose initiation was catalytic (i.e., not pregiven in advance
nor predictable based on past activity).
Eh, Wot?, Or, How Exactly Is This Supposed to Play Out?
The above models shed light on the vertiginous effort that goes into conceiving and
critiquing institutions, in particular, the contemporary, corporate university. If we don't like the
university institution as it is, we need to move beyond blaming the institution as fallen from or
corrupted in its Idea to blaming our alliances. I say this because most critique highlights how
institutions are corrupting, privileging of the powerful, dehumanizing, inefficient, exploitive,
etc., all of which can be righted through recourse to the proper Idea. My claim is that, even if the
specifics of a particular critique are correct, lurking behind such charges, and which help
organize the way they become meaningful for us, is the sense that we pre-exist the institution. On
this view, our inhabitancy is limited to the extent that it precludes the institution as an essential
aspect of who and how we are.11 In short, critique shores up the priority of the human by
maintaining a fundamental separation from the nonhuman elements that confound our intents.
Let me conclude with some quick hit illustration. Marc Bousquet's recent book, How the
University Works, reputedly a splash at MLA, excoriates the contemporary university for its
Toyotaist, just-in-time labor practices, union-busting, exploitation of students, and more. Such
critique is as exhilarating as the Soviet constructivist era poster art emblazoned on the cover.
3
It is obvious but not trivial to point out that Bousquet's critique, published by a university press,
furthers Bousquet's university career, creates networks of like-minded university critics and
activists, and in general functions no differently in the institutional economy than other
scholarlship. This is an important point because it helps maintain the institutional economy he
critiques. That is, Bousquet thinks that changes in labor practices are utterly distinct from
scholarly practices, in keeping with the idea of the university he upholds. However, there is an
interesting contradiction at work here, for Bousquet also demonstrates, though his examination
of corporate partnering, court cases, legal battles, student life, administrative theory, business
practices, even capital itself, that the university is precisely not an idea but an assemblage. But he
makes this demonstration in the negative, as it were, falling back on the idea that we must
reclaim the collegiality and tenure-track positions of yore. This is woefully inadequate.
Certainly, in calling on the power of unions, Bousquet seeks the power of alliance. But
the alliances Bousquet make do not extend further. And this becomes damning when we consider
Bousquet's off-the-cuff but symptomatic charge that university presidents are the way they are
because "it feels good to be president" (7). It's not just that I need to know more than that
corporately-aligned university administration drinks my milkshake, it's that Bousquet, like so
many others, declines to see them as actants in a network of alliances that all make their own
demands. It equates the institution with people in power, and, indeed, it reflects that well-known
moral soundbite about speaking truth to power—as if power, too, does not or cannot dwell, that
it remains in some essential way unconditioned.12 What Bousquet's analysis does not do is find a
way to more thoughtfully reflect on the university as the result of nonlinear intent—forms of
cascade and catalyst—conditioned by forces both human and nonhuman, and, from that
perspective, pursue its diagnoses and proposals. In this regard, then, despite my criticisms of
Fynsk and Readings, they still constitute an advance. Although thought and language issue forth
from humans, they are not human, and their agency appears as their call and claim upon us.
Perhaps it is just that we cannot rest on thought and language, but must assemble more broadly
and find new resources beyond those of the human and human-centric. When we hear the
institution speak, perhaps then this will have been institutional life.
Concluding questions:
 What happens when we move to a rhetorical politics built on nonlinear theories of intent,
action, and causality? I add that this gives insight into Latour's statement that "It takes
something like courage to admit that we will never do better than a politician" (qtd. in
Harman 21).
 How do we move beyond the ressentiment and fetishization of higher administration, to
see them as part of a shifting assemblage, and therefore beholden to networked forces
conditioning and confounding them?
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
Can we question the university in the same way Heidegger queried language (see "On"
398): to bring the university as the university to the university. That is, if we, as faculty,
are not separate from the university, but take shape within it as an institutional
assemblage, then we are also marshalling allegiances and resistances within that
institutional assemblage to bring to that same assemblage. And from this position, what
other alliances can be created—ones we have yet to imagine, that are, in Derrida's
promissory idiom, still to come?
Endnotes
1
For Kant, such an idea underpins the power of the lower, or philosophy, faculty, as Kant speaks of the
Enlightenment-era humanities, to critique and adjudicate the truth of the higher faculty, or professions such as law
and medicine.
2
Despite real differences, we see something similar in John Henry Newman’s fortuitously titled The Idea of a
University. Newman emphasizes the cultivation of the minds of students above all (see 5-7), even going so far as to
distinguish teaching and research as requiring different talents and therefore sundering them, rather than trying to
create the organic co-relation between them Kant and other German idealists sought. But, like Kant, reason and truth
and knowledge are very much the material in which the university traffics, even if, unlike Kant, they are ultimately
in service to faith (4).
3
Such a tendency is also at work in Jaroslav Pelikan's updating of Newman, The Idea of the University, which
presents a constellation of issues—"the interrelation of the knowledge to utility, the problem of intellectual virtues,
the nature of the university as community" (21)—and then, quoting Newman, espouses "pushing things up to their
first principles" (22 Cf. Newman 116). For Pelikan, too, the university is philosophical in its fulfillment of its
essence.
4
A pertinent example of this point appears in Graham Harman's book on Bruno Latour, The Prince of Networks,
Harman's acknowledgements include gratitude for the event that inspired the book: "It was an unusual and unlikely
event . . . What are the chances of hosting a metaphysical debate between a Heideggerian philosopher and a
sociologist known for his dislike of Heidegger on the grounds of a management school, organized by PhD students
of an information systems department?" (3). This statement is interesting for the light it casts on the idea of a
university:
 The fundamental disparity between the various actants involved, not only people but departments, and not
only departments but colleges
 The severally divided materiality of the institution: it's not just that different fields, housed in different
spaces, departments, and colleges, read and engage each others' work; it's that such work of itself requires
space, funds, rationale, training, skill, interest, and people (i.e., a wide array of actants)
 The creative work involved in this hybrid: philosophy, sociology, science, management, and information
systems, yes, but what brings these particular fields together, and what means of affiliation,
communication, and commerce facilitate it?
5
This in particular is the argument in "Building Dwelling Thinking," but it also shows up, albeit thematized
differently, in "The Thing," both essays being included in the collection Poetry, Language, Thought.
6
While Agamben's model advances us past a lingering commitment to the Idea, it nevertheless reclaims a sheltering
notion of the human. I ask: what happens if we re-begin this conversation without following Agamben's
traditionally-derived distinctiveness of the human as regards other things? The first thing we notice is that
inflections of key organizational and interventional concepts begin to shift, as can be seen in the following models.
While they are not so far removed from what Agamben pulls from Foucault, being sophisticated in theorizing how
conjoinment of techniques, discourses, and bodies occur, still, important points of divergence appear.
7
An even more sophisticated theory of the assemblage is developed in Manuel DeLanda's recent book , but I do not
have the space to treat it here. Nor do I have the space the tease out the differences between the Deleuzian (Bennett
and DeLanda) and Heideggerian (Harman) sources that are prominent in theorizing what has come to be known
Speculative Realism, whereby nonhuman things are given agentive force, among other propositions. Latour,
interestingly, takes cues from both.
5
8
It is easy to see the University as an assemblage: it is a grouping of a wide array of actants, generating disparate
loci of power, and extending along a continuum from various human actors, such as students, faculty, and
administration, to forces and things, such as methodologies, texts, discourses, funding, technologies, and buildings,
and embedded within a constantly shifting terrains of other assemblages, corporate, political, public, national, and
global.
9
Customarily, we redescribe such composite agency as background, context, setting, and so forth, and thereby show
up the human dynamic agent against these purportedly static or at least secondary backgrounds. Thus, the university
would not on this view be the stage upon which human agents strut and fret but would instead be a vital, shifting
assemblage of elements, all of which have their peculiar powers, affordances, conflicts, and alliances.
10
See also DeLanda, 19-22. Delanda offers a different term, "catalysis."
11
Critique of the institution is thus emblematic of the Institution(alization) of the Idea and its Critique, which, as
Vitanza points out, is already brought forth in cynicism.
11
I refer here, with the notion of "unconditioned," to Heidegger's statement that "We are the be-thinged, the
conditioned ones" (Poetry 181).
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009.
Bennett, Jane. "The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout." Public Culture
17.3: 445-65.
Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low Wage Nation. New
York: New York UP, 2998.
DeLanda, Manuel. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity.
New York: Continuum, 2006.
Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Tr. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and
Row, 1975.
Fynsk, Christopher. The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities. Minneapolis, MN: U of
Minnesota P, 2004.
Harman, Graham. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: Re.press,
2009.
Kant, Immanuel. The Conflict of the Faculties. Tr. Mary J. Gregor. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska
P, 1992.
Latour, Bruno. The Pasteurization of France. Tr. Alan Sheridan and John Law. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1993.
Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996.
Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Idea of the University: A Reexamination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992.
Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.
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