Extitution
= "Extitutional space is defined by its exclusion from the stability, manufactured neutrality and access to dominant channels of reproduction afforded to institutions". [1]
Description
1. Richard Bartlett:
"To name this tension between street movements and institutional power, in Madrid they coined the term extitution: “If institutions are organizational systems based on an inside-outside framework, extitutions are designed as areas where a multitude of agents can spontaneously assemble.” (The same author has named Cooperation Jackson as a U.S. example of the same phenomenon.)
All of this extremely promising organisational innovation is enmeshed with technological innovation. I’m immensely encouraged by the deep collaboration between political scientists and computer scientists that I’ve seen in Spain, which holds a rigorous critique of proprietary “sharing economy” and “smart cities” software, while also prototyping tools for direct democracy."
(https://c4ss.org/content/50824)
2.
Extitutional Processes are processes to assemble diverse forms of capital and resources, based on the collective self-empowerment created by citizens, rather than on expert submissions to institutions
"The other, the extitutional procedure, is based on the collective self-empowerment created by citizens. While the institutional process is based on its hard materiality, the extitutional process is a soft surface that operates thanks to the logic of the network; from the inside-outside duality that governs the institution and its hierarchies, extitutional surfaces can be understood as able to eventually assemble a multitude of different agents. As a concept in construction , we understand the extitutional process as a logic or a mode, instead of a positive reality. Extitutional is not the contrary of institutional. So at this point, what is the urban extitutional vector that determines the eviction´s processes in Madrid?
We propose and question the idea and give it a whirl for a citizens’ appropriation of it. We think about the environment of collective housing initiatives as extitutional and civic procedures. We suggest and query the idea of extitutional processes, which is opposed to the institutions providing access to housing and its development, economy, valuations and buildings. Citizens organize themselves thanks to the right and access to housing in multiple rhizomatic assemblies, into a dynamic and temporary extitutional process."
Typology
Exeunt:
Horizontal scaling
"Necessarily spreading on a decentralized basis, patterns of behavior in extitutional space ride contingency rather than asserting universality, so that each scaled reproduction of an extitutional protocol of behavior is a monstrous mutation of its previous form, adequate to the issue at hand.
Field Ontology
Whereas administrative institutions bring categorical hierarchies to their systems - hierarchies which they tend to inherent from the state and which the two, through mutual reinforcement, conceal and naturalize - extitutional space is made up of field ontologies, shifting assumptions about what dimensions of the real deserve attention or operative preeminence adequate (again) to the contingency of the encounter. (The fact that practical knowledge often points in the direction of interrelation, intersubjectivity, codeterminacy, etc. is a convenient nod to the technical sense of the term field.)
Open Protocolization
Institutional protocols share (to varying degrees) the two features of being antimimetic (containing some dimension which discourages its reproduction, think military classification, NDAs, industrial secrets) and anti-empirical (resistant to inconvenient truths, interpretations or revisions that may have empirical veracity but be contrary to the interests of the organization or its authorities - see David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs for a wide-spanning index of this tendency.) Open protocols, conversely, are maximally memetic and empirically defined - when they reach a status as a stable entity, they have done so by being battle-tested and extremely versatile, structured with minimal uniformity needed to maximally expand the possibility space of its users. (Ex. under the pressure of legal prohibition, the development of the phrase for LSD: Turn on, Tune in, Drop out."
Discussion
1. Extitutions.org:
"Extitutions are not the opposite of institutions, nor can they be understood as a new type of institution. Extitutional scholars suggest that institutional theory and extitutional theory are two distinct perspectives or “lenses” to the same set of social phenomena or “assemblage”. They contend that institutions and extitutions are both normative constructions focusing on specific ordering logics and social dynamics. These normative constructions characterise—but also limit—the set of social phenomena that can be seen and therefore analysed through their respective lenses.
Extitutional theory claims that no one lens can fully capture and study the entire complexity of social phenomena. The same social phenomena could be characterised as an institution, an extitution, or both, depending on the perspective.
While the institutional lens focuses on the roles and rules that shape and influence social interactions, the extitutional lens focuses on individuals and the relationships amongst them. Specifically, the extitutional lens focuses on the ways in which participation and mutual recognition pull people into alignment through local interactions. These local interactions constitute the basis for a distinct set of ordering dynamics which are the focus of extitutional theory.
Without claiming that one lens is more accurate than the other, extitutional theorists contend that some social phenomena can only be fully understood through a combination of institutional and extitutional analysis. This is because certain ordering logics which are specific to extitutions are insufficiently addressed (or even ignored) by most institutional frameworks, despite the important role they play in animating the institution.
Extitutional theory establishes a new theoretical framework for the study of social dynamics that extends beyond the existing institutional framework."
(https://extitutions.org/about)
2. By Jessy Kate Schingler and Primavera de Filippi:
"Extitutional theory is an emerging field of scholarship that provides a set of conceptual tools to describe and analyse the underlying social dynamics of a variety of social arrangements, such as communities, companies, organisations, or any other types of institutions.
Extitutional theory posits that the institutional framework is just one specific lens through which we can make sense of social behaviour. Social dynamics that are not part of an institution are not unstructured, just differently structured. Specifically, institutions focus on the static and inert elements of social structures — the aspects that persist over time — whereas extitutions focus on the dynamic and mutating elements of social structures — the aspects that continuously evolve over time. Both serve as filters to observe different aspects of the underlying social arrangements. This means that if we look at structured social dynamics only and exclusively through an institutional lens, we are only seeing one part of the larger picture. Extitutional theory provides an alternative lens — and the choice to use it is a normative decision to look at another part of the picture."
(https://medium.com/berkman-klein-center/an-introduction-to-extitutional-theory-e74b5a49ea53)