Instituted Time, Instituting Time

In recent years, I have had the opportunity to work with many artist groups (being that they are one of the principal activities at the Santa Mònica Arts Center), some already existing and others created by institutional action. With some of these groups I have been able to talk about an increasingly evident and, in my opinion, worrying symptom: the growing tension between institutional time (or, if you prefer, its rhythms) and that of the groups that work with it.

If I am concerned about this issue now in Santa Mònica and before that in La Escocesa, it is perhaps because my seven years of work dedicated exclusively to these institutions have not erased the deep mark left on me by more than a decade as a self-employed and precarious “cultural” worker (in quotation marks because, even when I worked at other jobs I insisted on thinking of myself as such). Precarious because a collection of disparate and unrelated jobs, poorly paid or unpaid, supported only by enthusiasm, a rhetoric of sacrifice and the need to fill up a curriculum, constantly having to change my tax status and, without any support or even a well-off family, without being able to pay rent for months because I wanted to continue working in what I should be doing. Precarious also because of the absence of a network, and continuous doubts about who I was and why I did what I did.

Those years were marked by the economic crisis of 2008 and the widespread feeling that being able to bum around, live, and drink a beer with the money from a desired job and with which to be able to express oneself was a rare privilege. The obvious economic difficulties, however, concealed another deep malaise: the tension between the apparently objective time of the institution and the viscerally subjective time that each person carries within them, with which we have to get by. We abandoned everything when an institution called proposing a single, unpostponable meeting. Our own times and desires were appeased every time an art center makes a gesture of recognition, sending us an “I want you.” The possibility of working took precedence over everything else, even something as intimate as our own rhythm.

Today this continues to happen, and even more so in other places. Every minute in every city, an increasing acceleration bends the rhythm of the people who have the most unstable jobs. Delivery people on Glovo, drivers on Cabify, and cleaners on MyPoppins literally leave everything aside every time their mobile vibrates, at the risk of algorithmic penalties and the terrifying spectre of unemployment. Aren’t all self-employed people today subjecting their life rhythm to the capricious demands of capital in the form of the thousands of notifications that must be attended to instantly with everything else left on hold?

In the so-called institutional cultural sector, however, in a different context than in 2008, there seems to be greater awareness of what was previously disguised. Today people are beginning to pay more attention and care to their own time, they are reclaiming their rhythm, and this is why the tension with institutional times is finally manifesting itself as a symptom.

What has changed since 2008? My impression is that today the institution can take into account family conciliation, multiple jobs and personal availability. Some of them (though not all) try to negotiate with diagnosed and certified diversities and, therefore, with alternative production times. The institution, however, remains alien to the recognition of subjectivities and the wide range of non-determinable temporalities that they entail, and that is precisely where we must be looking.

The institution has the responsibility to recognize and assimilate the fact that it cannot equate its rhythms with those of any individual with whom it works. When it puts them on the same level, it is carrying out a violent exercise of power.

An institution is not only made up of various people who can react to a crisis, but it also has mechanisms that can support them. No one has been given, however, on an individual level, these advantages. Each person is alone, and they must adapt to external norms their subjectivity, their vulnerabilities, which they may not even be conscious, and which can leave them in a very vulnerable situation. This is the radical inequality that the institution must assume when it carries out the complex operation of negotiating its time with others.

This, however, does not invalidate another important issue: the institution is also composed of people. These people, despite being supported and protected (in certain cases) by institutional mechanisms, are also crossed by subjective vulnerabilities that can deeply compromise the time of the institution.

So far I have referred to the relationship established between institutional rhythms and those of the people who work in or with it. What happens, however, in the relationship of the institution with the time of a collective? This was my initial question. To get into it, I will begin by sharing my point of view (influenced by the analysis of the Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis and institutional psychotherapy) on what is an institution.

*

At the counter in a bar, three people are heatedly discussing an article published the previous week in A*DESK. Their conflicting opinions keep them engaged in conversation until closing time. As they leave, they agree on the anomalous nature of the scene. “This was not normal,” they say. “We must do it again next Thursday.”

After weeks of other meetings go by, they decide one day to set two simple rules: the meeting will be at regular intervals, at an agreed time, and will involve the commitment to have read the latest article published in this magazine. To establish regularity, they ask the manager of the bar to reserve a table for them each week.

The group has carried out an institutional action: it has recognized its members, defined the relationships that exist between them, and established a regulatory framework that responds to and protects these people and relationships. If, afterwards, a fourth person wanted to join, they would do so in an instituted group, in an institution, but the basis of the meetings (the texts from A*DESK are the object of that institution) or the meeting time (which now depends on another institution, the bar) could not be modified.

This institution consists of the people it recognizes, the relationships they establish, and the set of rules that arise from them. All institutions are interdependent, and that is why rules imply a dialogue with other institutions. When agreeing on the weekly meeting time, the group must not only take into account the availability of its members but it must also be subject to what another institution has established as its own rule, the closing time of the bar.

If we are all in agreement up to this point, there is no essential distinction between institution and collective. Unlike the relationship between institutions and individuals, between which there is a radical separation, the difference between institutions and collectives is one of degrees, consisting of which people, which relationships, which normative frameworks are at stake in each case, and the institutions with which each one must negotiate.

It follows from this that institutional and collective time are not radically different, either. The institution can have its own rhythms, just as the collective can have its own. To assume that there is no radical difference between institutional time and that of any collective can help to understand where the growing tension between the two comes from and, as a conclusion, to understand what is feeding a false binary between what we call “an institution” and what we call “a collective.”

*

Let’s go back a bit. What happens if that group of four people, now unable to meet at another time, suggests to the bar manager that they reserve their table for midnight, outside of the usual hours? Most likely, to avoid going into details, the manager would refer to closing time as something unalterable, that is, established. He would say something like: “It is a rule that I have to follow.”

This is precisely the exercise of opacity, the exercise of power that any institutionalized entity has the power to do, and that those things we commonly call “institutions” have been doing with impunity since the beginning. By doing so, by referring to the institution itself as an exclusively established, unalterable collectivity, governed by a regulatory framework against which nothing can be done, is always a tendentious simplification.

The manager is assuming that opening hours are based on rules from other institutions on which he depends: the government, unions, the city with its time restrictions or the family that sets work and leisure time. It is true that this governs their schedule, but precisely in the act of obscuring this entire institutional network, by presenting the bar as an instituted, closed framework, by hiding the complex web of people, relationships, laws and institutions that lie behind a simple rule (such as the opening hours of the establishment), it shuts the door to an obvious fact: that in no institution is its institutional impulse exhausted.

It is necessary and urgent that we, the people, begin to make a radical exercise of transparency about the rhythms of cultural institutions. We must be able to show where the normative frameworks that define the working hours of people and groups with whom it is going to interact come from. Being able to map or diagram them can be an excellent way of showing which times are instituted and which are institutional, and that can open the door to a true negotiation between the different structures that are going to have to get involved in the difficult negotiation between internal rhythms.

The times of “an institution” and that of “a collective” are, then, not essentially different. Their greatest difference lies in how these times are used (or not) to hide the laws, relationships and subjects that lie beneath the skin. Abandoning this tendentious use and, on the contrary, sharing the sense of one’s own time, its genealogy, the laws that it is subject to, and the consensus on which it has been formed, is a necessary exercise for artist collectives to exert their institutional strength and for institutions to enjoy their collective condition. In order that time does not create a confrontation between us, we must begin to talk about it.

[Featured Image: György Ligeti. Poème Symphonique für 100 Metronome. (Image of the performance at Sceanet Rued Langgaard Festival 2016)]