Institutional Recomposition
On institutional capacity, inherited identity, and the unrealized forms of action that become possible when resources are recomposed into new relations, objectives, and effects.
Capacity Misconceived as Possession
The notion of institutional capacity is often conceptualized as a possessible potentiality: something that an institution has and whose possession enables the institution to produce a desired outcome. The issue with this conception lies in the component of possession. Once capacity is perceived as something which an institution possesses, it tends to be conflated with the measurable objects that the institution can account for and inventory. The number of employees an institution retains, the technologies it is able to employ, its physical infrastructure, and even its available financial capital – all are then treated as a measure of how much capacity the institution possesses. These inventories, however, are not capability itself. They are forms of institutional energy that can be placed into a composition and transduced into an effect. Their institutional significance therefore does not simply reside in their quantity, but in what they can be made to do through their relations with other institutional resources.
Consider an institution that is said to possess the capacity to provide high-quality education because it “possesses” investment capital with which it can pay high-quality educators. When this logic is presented to institutional leaders, they must be reminded that the educational capacity being referred to is not the capital itself. The capacity lies in the composition through which the capital can be transduced into an educational effect:
If the same institution lacked the investment capital required to employ outside educators, it may nevertheless remain capable of providing the same high-quality education. Its existing employees may themselves possess the knowledge and capability required to become high-quality educators in place of outsourced educators. The institution would then produce a comparable effect through ‘another composition’ of the resources already present within it. The capacity cannot therefore be located exclusively in the capital, the outside educators, or even the existing employees considered independently. It arises from the composition through which one or more of these resources are transduced into the desired effect.
Capacity as Composition and Transduction
The fact that an institution may remain capable of producing the same educational effect through different inputs means that capacity itself is not a resource. Capacity is the conditional effect-potential constituted through the arrangement of an institution’s resources. It is ‘conditional’ because what the composition can produce remains related to the external circumstances within which the institution operates. It is an effect-potential because it concerns what the composition may bring about rather than what the institution simply contains.
Capacity is therefore not an “inventory-possession” but a “compositional disposition.” It is a disposition in the sense that the relationships among an institution’s resources constitute what the institution may become capable of producing. In this sense: composition describes the arrangement of the resources and the relationships established among them; on the other hand, transduction describes the process through which resources, by entering into the composition, are carried into an effect that they do not produce simply by existing separately.
From this perspective, a resource is not confined to one institutional use residing inside the resource itself. What it can do changes according to what it is composed with – what relation it has to other resources; what position it occupies within the composition; and what objective organizes that composition. The same capital can become a composed input-resource for employment, physical infrastructure, or any element within a composition that has not yet been conceived.
The same physical space can become an exhibition space, a classroom, a meeting environment, or any operative element within a form that does not correspond to any of these inherited classifications. The same employee can function as an administrator, educator, relationship-holder, or connective element between the institution and resources that are formally external to it. The possible institutional function of a resource is generated through composition rather than fully contained within the resource itself.
If we return to the educational institution, it ‘possesses’ readily distinguishable input-resources such as educators from varying disciplines and financial capital supplied by donors. However, it also contains resources that are not as readily distinguishable through conventional institutional accounting. These may include high-leverage network relationships with members of a city’s governing council, extensive statistical information concerning the region’s residents, or even intelligence possessed by educators regarding the interests of parents and the professional institutions those parents represent.
These relationships, forms of information and bodies of intelligence are not simply additional objects that can be appended to the institution’s inventory. Each may alter what the other resources are capable of doing. A relationship with a city council may enable institutional information to become governmental access. The institution’s statistical information may enable its educators to become interpreters of regional conditions rather than only providers of classroom instruction. The knowledge held by educators regarding parents and their professional institutions may connect the educational institution to additional expertise, industries and other forms of authority.
A resource can therefore alter another resource, not simply by adding more quantity to the institution, but by changing the relation through which the other resource can be transduced into an effect. The institution’s resources do not stand beside one another as a collection of separately usable objects. In fact, they exist within a field of possible relations in which their institutional meanings and powers can be continuously recomposed.
This field is unlimited in the sense that no final number of uses or relations is contained within the resources as presently defined. Every additional relation may change materially what the existing resources can do, while the effect produced through one composition may itself become a resource within another composition. Capacity is not a closed set of dormant abilities stored inside an institution. It is an unlimited compositional field through which resources may be transduced into effects, and effects themselves may become conditions for further composition.
Institutional Identity and the Constriction of Composition
Institutions commonly interpret everything they possess through an inherited account of what they ‘are’: an art gallery interprets its physical space as “exhibition space”; a university typically interprets its faculty as “professors and researchers”; a private or community foundation almost exclusively interprets its capital as “grant money.”
The issue is not that these institutions perceive their resources in such narrow terms. The issue is that the perception becomes mistaken for the full capacity of the resource. The gallery does not simply recognize that art is ‘presently’ exhibited within its building; it begins to perceive the building itself as essentially exhibition space. The university does not simply use faculty for teaching and research; it begins to perceive teaching and research as the functions through which faculty become institutionally intelligible. The foundation does not simply use some of its capital for grants; it perceives the capital itself through the identity-defined category of grant money.
This illustration shows that institutional identity assigns a prior meaning to the resource before the resource enters into any newly considered composition. The institution does not begin with the resource and ask what unlimited relations and effects may arise through its composition with other resources. On the contrary, it begins with an inherited account of what the resource is for and then recognizes primarily those compositions that remain legible through that account.
The same resources could be transduced toward other institutional products or effects. Yet even when the use of a resource is shifted, the shift typically remains adjacent to the institution’s identity. An art gallery may conclude that its physical space can be used for more than the exhibition of art. However, the expanded uses it conceives may remain limited to community art classes, donor gatherings or simply private dinners. While these are additional uses of the space, they remain adjacent to the gallery’s existing account of what the space, the institution and its relationships are for. The resource is being used differently “without being released from the identity that continues to organize its intelligible uses.”
A community foundation may similarly require capital for internal management and institutional development. Its inherited rules and assumptions will tend to direct that capital toward prospective-donor outreach, expansion of its grant-making operations, or further development of the foundation as the kind of institution it already is. The capital is ‘redirected,’ but it is redirected toward the continuation, enlargement or increased efficiency of the inherited institutional form.
Institutional identity therefore acts as a “possibility filter.” It tells the people carrying out institutional operations: “this resource is for this particular purpose; employees perform this kind of work; this capital belongs to this class of activity; this relationship is relevant; this building is used in this way.” It renders identity-compatible actions as immediately legible while rendering other compositions as strange or irrelevant – and in most cases it renders them outright invisible.
When institutional identity acts in this manner, many institutions may be incapable of seeing a new capacity for a resource because seeing it would require them to temporarily suspend their existing definition of themselves. To see another capacity in the gallery’s building, the institution may have to stop treating “gallery” as the final explanation of what the building is for. To see another capacity in university faculty, the institution may have to stop treating “professor and researcher” as the final explanation of what that intelligence can be composed to produce. And, as bound by the same logic, to see another capacity in foundation capital, the institution may have to stop treating “grant-making” as the final institutional form through which capital becomes socially operative.
Institutional Identity and the Constriction of Objectives
Institutional identity does not constrain only how resources are composed toward an objective. It also constrains which objectives can be conceived as belonging to the institution – the direction in which input-resources are transduced is constrained by the objectives that remain legible to the institution.
The gallery’s identity does not simply direct the building toward the objective of exhibiting art. It establishes the class of objectives that the institution recognizes as properly its own – such as art education and artistic patronage; and even objectives such as audience development. The university’s identity does not simply determine that faculty will be used for teaching and research. It establishes teaching, research and publication as the effects through which the institution understands what faculty intelligence is for. The foundation’s identity does not simply choose grant-making as one possible use of capital. It organizes the institution’s understanding of social effect around the administration of “philanthropic” capital.
Identity constrains the entire logic structure associating resources to effect. It constrains what counts as a resource, what functions a resource may possess, what relationship may exist between resources, how they may be transduced, and ultimately which of those effects may be perceived as objectives. An objective may never be rejected because the institution may never reach the point of conceiving it. The objective remains outside the institution’s field of possibility because it cannot be formulated through the inherited identity of the institution.
Institutional identity therefore creates a recursive logic of confinement:
The institution consequently continues to compose its resources within the same field of action while interpreting that field as the extent of what the institution can possibly do.
Uncomposed Capacity
Institutional identity consequently leads an organization to bear a “higher operational capacity” than it permits itself to exercise. This excess may be described as “uncomposed capacity.”
Uncomposed capacity is not a separate resource which is hidden somewhere inside the institution. It is the capacity contained within relations and arrangements which remain unformed because institutional identity prevents their resources, objectives, and the transduction of such resources towards such objectives, from becoming legible. The institution possesses the resources – or possesses relationships through which additional resources may be reached – but does not compose them into the effects they could produce. It therefore exercises only the capacities contained within its inherited composition while leaving the capacities of other compositions institutionally unrealized.
In this sense, a higher operational capacity does not mean greater efficiency. Capacity is often conflated with operational efficiency because institutions commonly perceive becoming more efficient as becoming more capable. However, an increase in efficiency and an expansion of capacity are not the same event. Efficiency concerns how economically an established operation can be performed. On the other hand, capacity concerns what operation or effect can be performed at all.
This distinction can be understood through hand tools. The “capacity” of a screwdriver refers to what the object can do. Within an immediate mechanical operation, the screwdriver participates in joining two objects by driving a screw through them. Two pieces of wood, for example, may be fastened together through the operation performed by the screwdriver and screw. However, at a more abstract level, fastening is not confined simply to the screwdriver or even to mechanical tools conventionally associated with construction. A button on a shirt “fastens” two sides of fabric together when their separation is no longer desired. The mechanism differs, but the more abstract effect – fastening one thing to another – is shared.
The same can be said of mechanical striking, which is conventionally associated with a hammer but is not exhausted by the hammer as an object. The larger point is that an operation is not identical to the inherited identity of the object most commonly used to perform it.
Conversely, the “efficiency” of these tools concerns another question. A tool is commonly judged more efficient when it performs the operation in less time and requires less physical effort from the person using it. At one point in human history, manual screwdrivers and hammers represented highly efficient methods for producing fastening and striking effects. They became ‘incomparably more efficient’ when motors were added and the mechanical energy required for their operation was externalized from the body of the user. The motor increased the speed of the operation while decreasing the amount of physical effort required to perform it. Yet the motor did not necessarily create an entirely different capacity. It intensified and accelerated an already established operation.
An institution can likewise become faster, more productive or less costly while remaining within the same composition of resources and the same class of objectives. It becomes a more efficient version of what it already is without becoming capable of producing a substantially different institutional effect.
Institutional Recomposition
Most institutions contain more possible forms of action than their present organization permits them to practice. These possible forms of action are not produced by resources considered as isolated objects. They arise from the unlimited ways in which those resources may be composed – from the unlimited relationships they may possess with other resources, and from the effects toward which those relationships may be transduced.
If we return to the art gallery, its physical space provides for the showing of art. Yet a deeper institutional resource can be found within the connections and social networks which these art exhibits embody. Art is a universal cultural phenomenon in the sense that it is capable of crossing social, economic and national divisions. Interests in art may be shared among tech-giants, highly resourced royal families, and highly connected residents of a local community.
The gallery does not simply possess artworks to display or walls upon which to display them. The gallery may, for example, obtain information from or distribute information to a local community regarding matters that are not conventionally considered art-adjacent. Its relationships, cultural legitimacy and access to different social groups may be composed into a means of gathering information, attracting attention to it and moving it between communities and institutions.
The significance of this example is not that such practices are secret or have never been attempted within the art community. Comparable practices may already be common. Its significance lies in the structure it exposes. Institutional resources can be recomposed to provide capacities beyond those commonly associated with the externally perceived and internally inherited identity of the institution. They can also be recomposed toward objectives that the institution’s inherited identity would not ordinarily allow it to recognize as its own.
Structural growth is therefore not reducible to efficiency or to increasing the rate and productive output of capacities that have already been established. Efficiency develops the performance of an established form. On the other hand, “recomposition” changes entirely the relations, objectives and respective transductions through which the institutional form is constituted.
For an institution to undertake this growth, it must decompose itself into its input-resources and temporarily separate those resources from the identity-defined functions through which they are normally perceived: “it must identify the resources that are immediately visible and those that remain hidden because institutional accounting does not ordinarily classify them as resources; it must identify the relationships already existing among those resources and the further relationships that could be produced among them; it must examine how each alternative composition could transduce those resources into a different effect; and ultimately it must examine whether its inherited identity has predetermined the objective before the possibilities of the composition have even been encountered.”
The contemporary institutional world places enormous emphasis upon efficiency. Efficiency has become so widely pursued that it alone no longer constitutes structural exceptionality. The institution that performs an inherited function more efficiently may still be confined to the same field of effects as every other institution organized through that function. What makes an institution structurally consequential is therefore not only the efficiency with which it does something, but “what it is able to do.” Institutions must retain efficiency as important “while holding what they can do as primary.” That is not a matter of “being able to do many things well.” An institution can add programs and activities while remaining enclosed within the same identity and objective structure. Nor is it “simply a matter of being adaptable.” An adaptable institution may change its methods continuously while preserving the inherited definition of what it is, what its resources are for, and what it is trying to achieve.
Institutional recomposition concerns the recognition that an unlimited space exists regarding what an institution can do. That space consists in the unlimited ways its resources may be used, the unlimited relationships they may possess with other resources, and the unlimited transductions through which those compositions may produce effects. This space is not limited to alternative ways of achieving objectives that are already fixed. The objectives themselves belong to the composition and may be constrained by the identity through which the institution understands itself.
So long as an institution defines legible actions in accordance with what it presently is, it constrains the resources it can recognize, the relationships it can form, the transductions it can perform, the effects it can produce, and the objectives it can conceive. It constrains not only what it can do, but what it can achieve, because institutional identity has already constrained what the institution is capable of trying to achieve.
Therefore, institutional recomposition begins when the inherited identity is no longer treated as the final boundary of institutional possibility. It begins when the institution encounters its current form as one composition of its resources rather than as the final explanation of what those resources, their relationships, their objectives – and ultimately the institution itself – can become.