= "Extitutional theory builds upon assemblage theory to conceptualise the ordering logic and dynamics of social phenomena." [1]

Contextual Quote

"Extitutional theory establishes a new theoretical framework for the study of social dynamics that extends beyond the existing institutional framework. Comparing and analysing the interplay between these two frameworks creates an opportunity to achieve a more complete understanding of the underlying ordering logics that characterise many of our social phenomena."

- Extitutions.org [2]

Description

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)

Status

Exeunt, 2026:

"Primavera De Filippi and Jessy Kate Schingler broke ground in 2021 by formalizing the theory of extitutionality; Amber Case’s wonderful Cyborg Encyclopedia defines it as “a framework for analyzing the latent interpersonal relationships and social dynamics that shape and animate formal institutions.”

The term has incubated in the p2p and dweb online and conference circuit, as often as not by the superficial impressions of those who like the name but have no interest in reading the literature. Our group’s attempts to reconsolidate the canon have had to reckon with this as it were “extitutional life” of extitutional theory. The insight of that reckoning may be this: while the proposed framework of extitutional theory was largely descriptive, there is an appetite out there for an elaboration of extitutionality along the vectors of antagonism, experimental organizing, and refusal of the toxic elements of what I would call administrative, or perhaps Scottian, “institutionality.”

(https://exeuntisunderground.substack.com/p/toward-an-extitutional-people?)

Characteristics

Three Elements of an Extitutional People

Exeunt:

"The first feature of an extitutional people is that they are integrated by a craft with empirical stakes. They have to experiment, because the materiality of the world (whether that be stone, paint, word, code, maths) pushes back at them. The reciprocity between their imagination and the world as it is builds an agreement between the two that is like a channel of discourse with the outside. While others are fighting, romancing, opining, engaging the world of individuals, these dissidents are heads down, hearing the broadcast of the world, working it and finding the code and stone ‘laden with singularities.’

The second feature of an extitutional people is that their labor is free. This means their work is enlivening and aligned with their inner nature, what Spinoza might call their conatus. This people may get paid, but they would do the work for free. Having arrived through ordeal at a craft done out of love and up against empirical stakes, an extitutional people tends toward not only their freedom, but freedom as such. They love not only their creativity, but creativity as such. Because of this, they tend to adopt principles that benefit not just their own freedom and creativity, but the freedom and creativity of those they encounter.

This gives way to the third feature of an extitutional people, characteristic of all the great eruptions of free and creative practice of the 20th century (hip hop, psychedelia, bdsm, free party movement): an extitutional people discovers or creates a stigmergic medium. This is what allows for creative exchange and reciprocity under free conditions and it is, on close examination, the essence of life without institutions. (In other work we have emphasized the liberating role of open protocolization; the stigmergic process is a generalization of that code to multiple channels of cognition.) The dance floor, the internet, the urban space, language itself. An extitutional people appears under a hoodie at night, faceless in the umbra; they come and go in silence, but when they leave, the writing is on the wall.

Wittgenstein’s famous dictum “there is no private language” can be abstracted to extitutional production itself: the free labor of an extitutional people is networked because the insight of an ordeal of freedom is in accord with reciprocity and love of the world - even when that love means hatred for the human, the individual, the enclosure it represents3 The hermit can’t help but inter-participate: flight from the world of direct communication is cradled in the arms of the medium.

Concluding for now: A people is extitutional to the extent that they have undergone an ordeal of labor, such that their labor is empirical (1), free (2), is, by virtue of or determination by (1) & (2), engaging a stigmergic medium (3). Be it a Lee Scratch Perry, a Kathy Acker or a Richard Stallman, the triad maintains, the prolix generosity of the work like a key to the autonomy of the labor."

(https://exeuntisunderground.substack.com/p/toward-an-extitutional-people?)

Discussion

(May be a different interpretation of the concept of extitution than above ? - MB)

Andre Spicer:

"In this essay, I have argued that institutions are driven by a tension between attempts to create conformity to modern rational myths and attempts to escape or resist these myths in various ways. Recent research in neo-institutional theory has partially addressed this tension by looking at how resistance can give rise to new institutions. Here I have sought to reverse this by considering how existing institutions feed off aspects that escape the institution. In order to understand this process, I have developed the concept of the extitution. I have argued that this is a kind of formless life which exceeds institutional parameters, but which institutions seek to capture. In many ways we can look at an institution as a huge machine designed to regulate and contain these extitutional elements, whereby the work of institutions is precisely this work of containment. However, I have also pointed out that extitutions are rarely completely captured. Rather, they are excessive and often overflow the boundaries of existing institutions. This overflow gives rise to further rounds of institution building.

I have tried to show in this piece that there are at least two possible ways institutions have sought to deal with extitutional elements: through discipline and through control. The technologies of discipline developed in modern institutions certainly did not please everyone. There were many protestors who questioned institutionalized life. These include the anti-psychiatry movement, the prisoner’s movement, and the de-schooling movement. At the heart of each of these movements was a desire to destroy the modern total institution and rebuild something altogether different. Their central hope was to break down the walls of the institution. Obviously these movements were often not completely successful. They did not demolish institutions as was expected. Prisons populations grew. Schooling took up more of our life. Work took over our time. Record numbers of the population are now on some kind of medication.

In some ways, we have never been more institutionalized than we are today. But if we look a little closer, we begin to realise that the churn and chug of these institutions has changed. An institutional life is no longer just characterised by regularity and discipline. Rather, the mantra seems to be innovation, diversity and experimentation. This has meant that instead of seeking to carefully contain the extitutional elements, institutional workers try to facilitate and engage them. The cumulative result was a thorough going redesign of institutions and their functioning. Instead of being designed around principles of closure and capture, the new institutional archetype seemed to be one of facilitation, boundary crossing and dialogue. The total institution is out. The open institution is in.

To be sure, empirical reality is often not quite as stark as this. There are many people on this planet whose lives are not incorporated into either disciplinary or control based institutions. Instead they rely on ‘pre-modern’ institutions such as kinship-based networks or exist in situations where most existing institutions have broken down (eg. Mair and Martí, 2009). There are others whose lives are totally determined and shaped by disciplinary technologies. There are others still who must deal not just with disciplinary mechanisms, but also strategies of control at the same time. Indeed, we might speculate that purely control-based institutions are relatively rare. Nonetheless, they seem to have become an increasingly important aspect of life today, which we are only beginning to understand.

The rise of control means that institutional life, for some, is lived beyond the confines of the iron cage. The boundaries of what is normal, permissible and legitimate have become increasingly porous. It is as if we increasingly occupy an institutional grey-zone. It is therefore not so surprising that the armies of neo-institutional theorists have recalibrated their increasingly complex instruments to track institutional change and irregularity rather than seeking an answer to that increasingly passé question of institutional isomorphism. It is also not so surprising that what passes for an institution in the social sciences has become increasingly gaseous. We once had a shared sense of exactly what an institution was. Today, it seems that almost anything can pass for an institution (a handshake, a meal in a fancy French restaurant, dolphin watching tours). At the same time as social scientists seem to have lost control of the concept, in our daily lives we have lost a sense of where the institutions which we inhabit begin and end. To paraphrase Gilles Deleuze (1992), we are never finished with institutions like schools, the hospital, and the office. They are constantly present in our lives. This is because they have no beginning or end – temporally or spatially. We are always in training, always monitoring our health, and always at work (or at least on call). The result is what Deleuze so perceptively noted was a crisis in modern institutions. And this crisis is not just a question of how these institutions might be designed, created and staffed. It is also a question of how we might occupy and live within them (or perhaps outside them)."

(https://ephemerajournal.org/contribution/extitutions-other-side-institutions)

More information

* Article: An Introduction to Extitutional Theory. By Jessy Kate Schingler and Primavera de Filippi. Berkman Klein Center Collection, 2021.

URL = https://medium.com/berkman-klein-center/an-introduction-to-extitutional-theory-e74b5a49ea53

* Article: Extitutions: The other side of institutions. By André Spicer

URL = https://ephemerajournal.org/contribution/extitutions-other-side-institutions

"Institutions are structured around an extitutional core that always escapes them. Extitutions are figures which have an ambiguous, destabilised and sometimes threatening quality. The central problem that institutional workers face is dealing with and ultimately capturing these extitutions. I look at two ways that institutions have sought to deal with extitutions – through attempts to discipline them or through more recent attempts to control them. I suggest that the generalised crisis of institutions may involve this passage from disciplining extitutions to controlling them."

Extitutional Theory

Contents