Institutions and Certainties

I have been thinking for some time now, if the idea of the "institution" is a heteronormative concept. I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the idea of institution and institutionalization. In simple words, institutionalization would mean to consolidate any task into a systemic process. In other words it is "the action of establishing something as a convention or norm in an organization or culture." Institutions are formed through improvising upon trials and errors within a group of people to aid fool proof decision making. These are formed over long time, studied as patterns and codified into rules in order for the smooth and efficient functioning within any organization. Identifying patterns and codifying them also means the freezing of cultural actions. Institutions are often critiqued for the solidification processes. They become stronger because they are able to deal with situations through their pre-ascertained decision making. In other words, institutions are about charting certainties. They operate within firm speculations, and expect people to behave within their identified parameters. Any one who falls outside of their pattern, may become un-institutional. 

These people who lie on the margins of the institutions are often called deviants, and always at the risk of societal othering, for all of society is neatly divided into multiple overlapping institutional mechanisms. Ideas like family, school, nation, and so on - all expect a subject to behave in a particular way. These are concepts that are formulated and consolidated primarily through a heteronormalized morality - that which privileges and is rested on a the idea of a future that will validate its own productive forms and logics. The family is predicated upon the idea of security of progeny and property, and is held together in economic and social rules that will disallow any deviations to the idea. The entire financial industry is structured to support this dominant notion of a relationship unit - that consists of a man, a woman and their children. Other forms of relationships are not necessarily supported as readily by financial institutions. Non-productive relationships like homosexual partners, or sorority kinships and many such other relationships do not promise the future of the institution of the family, and hence do not avail several security benefits within the present scheme of things.

Schools as institutions are expected to prepare candidates for serving different jobs within the productive world. Thus, they largely have to frame a certain picture of future for their clients, i.e. students. That you "will" become an engineer, or an architect, or a doctor - all are promises that are made at the beginning of the course. A certificate of degree is handed over to you as a document of proof. There is no real value to these certificate or degrees, for there is a fair chance for everyone to make mistakes even in their professional delivery of learned knowledge during application in real instances. Yes, institutions create this guarantee-mechanism through their own validation mechanisms that gain societal approvals. The success of these mechanisms is approved through a process of majoritarian survey. At a certain point, industry and institution tie up to co-produce these figures. Thus the cycle of institutionalization becomes impenetrable and solidified. In other words, the formula for certainty is manufactured, in a way that any genuine question regarding ethical or moral anomalies could easily be dismissed on the ground that they do not fall within the system. The language of institutions can not be penetrated easily by deviants, because deviants do not find (or may not enjoy) place within the accepted rules of the institutions themselves.  

I began to write out this thought, in fact, to find a place for uncertainty within the world we exist in. What is the place of uncertainty and doubt in the environment that we come to inhabit today? If the entire world is predominantly categorized into dominant institutional frameworks for every aspect of life (that eventually becomes an industry) - how and where do we locate and plant the seeds of uncertainty? The question of ambiguity is important for several groups who have not figured out their world, or are not able to fit into the given world. These include communities of different kinds of people who feel marginalized all the time - queer, racialized, handicapped, and other such bodies for whom an institutionalized idea of the world seems alien. There is a expectation that institutions impose on subjects - to behave in set ways, to perform in identified modes, to reciprocate in assumed manners. These are tropes of certainties that lay in the idea of institutions. Institutions expect you to project a world far ahead based on the patterns and assumptions they have codified in their books. Their dispositional engagement with future is predicated on learnt certainties, which leaves very little room for unexpected events to occur. The burden of the future is thus exacerbated by institutional thinking. I hope there are more interesting ways to exist without these institutional bindings.