[text forthcoming in special issue of Television & New Media on ‘MyMedia Studies’.]
Sociality is always immanent to institutional arrangements. This was the analysis of Althusser and later Foucault. The state, family, school, prison, hospital, madhouse. During the time of Western modernity, as it is commonly understood, we can add the firm, the union, the university. Foucault’s tendency was to see these institutional fields as technologies of discipline. My interest is to consider technologies of invention. What institutional form might such technologies assemble? What are the conditions of their emergence? What are the technics of governance that distinguish new institutions from their modern counterparts? How do they connect to other institutions and what is their economy? What is the relation between the construction of the common—understood as processes of translation constituted through struggles of labor—and its differential potential or multiplying affects?[1] And how might this relation constitute a new institutional form? More…
