A Mill, a River

A river runs past the west wall of a paper mill. A few kilometers downstream, a household farms fish at the water’s edge. In the mill there is a monitoring technician who takes samples every day; on the shop floor a shift supervisor runs a crew; a veteran technician is training a newly arrived apprentice.

All eight essays in this series speak through this mill, this river, these few people. The example is invented; it points to no particular country and no real mill. The mill is a construct: a permit, a set of rules, some positions, a few buildings. It cannot read a document, yet every day it says “ought” to people — when to start work, how to report the data, whom to go to when something goes wrong.

This series asks about those oughts: what an institution is for, and what it ought to achieve. The paper upstream of it, How Is Institution Possible, answered on what grounds an institution stands. It stopped at the conditions on purpose — “This proposition establishes conditions only; it establishes no office and no ought” — and handed the normative question on. There are really two questions there: how one person is to treat another, and how a construct ought to be arranged. This series takes the one about the construct. The one about the person goes to the Critiques.

Before asking it, a few things have to be cleared away. Left standing, they would bend the reading of every ought that follows.

A Means, Not a Subject

An institution is not an end. Subjects exist before institutions; institutions are things people make. How Is Institution Possible puts it flatly: “Any institution, including the most elegant constitution, is a means, not an end.” The sentence does work twice in this series. Once at the start: because an institution is a means, one can say to it “this is what you ought to achieve,” as one can say of a tool what it should be made to do. And once at the end: a means’ continued existence can be a condition for getting things done; it cannot be a reason to close off questioning.

Nor is an institution a subject. The mill “decides,” “discharges,” “takes responsibility” — the phrases come easily, but the mill has no first person. The mill does not open the valve; the dispatcher opens it, and the director signs. The mill’s acts can always be traced back to particular people invoking it. The mill is an address of attribution, not the subject of the act. The address and the hands that did it both remain, and neither stands in for the other.

This fixes the grammar of the whole series. A person has his own law; a construct has none. To a person, an institution can put only demands on his position; it may not use them to avow his own law for him — that would be legislating for him from outside. To a construct, saying “ought” replaces no one’s law, since it has none to replace. So the oughts of this series are addressed to the construct, and to the construct only.

It Issues No Certificates

A person is an end, and that standing is not issued by institutions. Upstream, “end in itself” was split into two senses. One is standing — “the non-meritocratic normative standing of every person within the domain of objects” — no reward for having acquired some capacity or received some recognition. The other is realization: how far the conditions of persons, relations and institutions actually support him.

An institution works only in the realization column. The mill can make a person’s conditions better or worse; it can see to it that he is respected more or less. It cannot make him more of a person, or less of one. The household downstream holds no registered position at the mill, and their standing is not one bit smaller; a worker who makes a mistake and is disciplined loses not one bit of his. Every ought in this series makes demands on the construct about realization. None of them issues certificates of standing.

Not Neutral, and Not Convicted in Advance

An institution is not neutral. “Institutions are not neutral containers,” the upstream paper says; through the people around a person and through the ways he is evaluated, an institution keeps shaping those inside it. The mill’s appraisal forms, its shift rosters, its monitoring list: each pushes people in some direction, or stops them somewhere. To call them “neutral” is to skip the question that ought to be asked.

But only half of “not neutral” is taken. The other half — that every act of an institution is either cultivation or colonization — this series leaves aside. Rules on when samples are taken, how a shift is handed over, where hard hats must be worn: such constraints fall within the line. They are ordinary; institutions cannot do without them, and there is no call to give them grand names. When this series says “colonization,” it means something narrow: a boundary-crossing disguised as cultivation. Not neutral means: open to being questioned. It does not mean: convicted in advance.

It Cannot Produce a “We”

The mill can hang a banner reading “We are one family,” organize team-building, have every crew write up “Our Story.” At most these leave people one more chance to run into one another. Upstream, the two things the word “co-construction” can point to were pulled apart: actual mutual recognition and shared activity between persons, and a rule-level commitment made by the framework. “An arrangement may be a co-constructive institution while no ‘we’ has yet formed among its members — there is no contradiction in that; the contradiction arises only from using one abbreviation for both.”

What an institution can do is keep open the places where a “we” can still happen: people can meet, can speak, can refuse, can leave. What it cannot do is produce a “we” on their behalf.

Not a Design Manual

This series writes only what an institution ought to achieve — not how to achieve it, and not whether it can be achieved. The labor is divided in three tiers. How Is Institution Possible answers on what grounds an institution stands. This series answers what an institution is for. The particular institution theories — of government, of companies — answer how, and judge whether a given thing can be done and what to do when it cannot.

So the reader will not find here a single rule to copy into an employee handbook. Which substances the monitoring list should name, how mentoring should be arranged, which office complaints should go to: none of that is here. Only this. However things are designed, there are a few lines that may not be crossed, a few things that must be guarded, given and left unsealed, and one thing that may never be closed. When a mill cannot manage one of these for a time, the series grants that such times come; the ought is not withdrawn on that account, nor discounted.

A Ruler

The first essay sets the grammar; essays two to six each write one ought. The grammar: the construct takes the ought, the position takes accountability, the person takes his own law. The five oughts: the mill’s acts cross no line against anyone inside it; it guards the lines between those inside it, and its way of guarding crosses no line either; it provides conditions for the cultivation of those inside it, by relational thickness, concerned with conditions and not with outcomes; it lets cultivation between them happen, leaving room and sealing no channel; and it itself remains open to questioning and correction. Together they make one main line: toward its internal subjects, an institution holds to anti-colonization and strives for cultivation; it itself remains open to questioning.

The premise is mixed reality. An institution does not presuppose that the people inside it all act by their own law; the same person treats people as ends in one matter and as means in another, and what is mixed is realization, not standing. The interior is drawn by entanglement, not by identity, so the household downstream is inside too. An institution’s recognition of a person stops at the event: it judges the operation, not the person.

There are three things this series will not do for the reader. It will not say how to achieve anything: if the reader works in a mill, a school, an agency, there is no remediation checklist here. It will not write oughts for persons: the reader is a person, and how a person ought to be is his own law; the series does not say the reader ought to go and question, nor whose lines he ought to guard. And it will not judge the reader’s own institution for him. The five oughts are a ruler; where to measure, how, and what the measurement shows are up to the reader.

Whether to take it up and ask, and whom to ask, is the reader’s own business.