Changing Institutions

The lie of Institutional Fatalism

My new book, No is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining is ready to go into production! Next step, baby steps.

I am so grateful to my companions who have travelled with me in each step of this journey, especially everyone who shared their complaints with me, which meant of course, sharing so much of themselves. Now, more than ever, we need our companions. We need to give each other time. Also space. To be in solidarity: that space is not safe or simple. What brings us to that space is what we are fighting against. We fight for it, and for each other.

This is the content page:

Changing Institutions was the title of a lecture I have given a number of times last year. In that lecture I approached complaint and common sense as ‘legacy projects.’

I will be returning to common sense now: that ever expanding archive.

Changing Institutions is also the title of the middle part of No is Not a Lonely Utterance.

Each part has an introduction. I am sharing the introduction to the middle part to mark the moment.

Killjoy solidarity with all those complaining for a more just world!

Sara xx

Part 11

Changing Institutions

Even to indicate you might complain within an institution is to receive many messages from it that tell you about it. Remember Darcy’s experience: she decided not to complain because she was told by the institution, or at least those responsible for administering complaints, that the professor who was harassing her would be protected (and she would not). She met a set of beliefs I call ‘institutional fatalism,’ assertions that what institutions are is what they will be (institutions will be institutions!). She was told there was no point in complaining given the person she was complaining about was ‘well loved.’ To be told ‘institutions will be institutions’ is to be told who they will and will not love, who they will and will not protect. Institutional fatalism sometimes combines with gender fatalism, ‘boys will be boys.’ Darcy also said she didn’t complain formally because it would most likely become ‘a note in his file.’ Were he to be freed from any consequences to complaint, she thought she would be the one to suffer them.

I suspect it is not so much that senior managers or administrators believe institutions cannot change but that they want other people to believe it or at least to act as if they do. And the people they want to believe it are the very people who act as if they don’t.

That is why it is the people who are more likely to complain who are also more likely to know about institutional fatalism. Emma, a woman of colour, shared her knowledge of institutions with me. Explaining why she didn’t complain about the sexism and racism she experienced in her department, she said ‘There’s an agreement between people not to rock the boat. People would talk about the institution as a kind of legacy project and would imply that you just didn’t understand how the institution was formed. The implication was that you have to be respectful of how this place was organised and what its traditions were essentially.’ This expression ‘rocking the boat’ came up earlier in warnings not to complain. That phrase is here used here to imply an informal agreement amongst members of an institution to treat it as a legacy project.

The institutional culture is that you did not complain about the institutional culture.

To become part of the institution is to take up the task of protecting it from complaint (and sometimes, as you will hear later, by complaint). There are, of course, many different kinds of institutions. At one level, the term is used simply to denote scale: an institution can refer to a large and important organisation (so, if you work for a bank, you are part of a financial institution).Institutions are how we preserve the past not only in a story we tell of ‘how the institution was formed,’ but by our conduct, being ‘respectful of how this was place was organised.’ When we use the term institutions, we are not just pointing to traditions, but the act of incorporating them, how we learn to fit in or to do things in the right way. Many of the rules that govern behaviour are not written down in instruction manuals but shared by word of mouth or through imitation or suggestion. Becoming part of an institution can reference the time it takes to say yes to its demands, until it becomes almost automatic to do so. That’s why, when complaints teach about the nature of institutions, they are teaching us how social forms persist over time: those who say yes, are more likely to progress.

That yes, even when it is automatic, has a history. Historian Timothy Snyder opens his important book On Tyranny with an instruction, ‘do not obey in advance.’ He suggests that citizens who obey in advance of an order, a phenomenon he calls ‘anticipatory obedience,’ are ‘teaching power what it can do.’ Disobedience is indeed what we need in the face of the rapid rise of authoritarianism, the hard-to-check abuses of power by oligarchs and patriarchs, the increasing hostility towards, and scapegoating of, minorities.

Snyder’s second instruction is to ‘defend institutions.’ Snyder is pointing to how institutions should function to prevent power from being concentrated in one person or party; when a tyrant gets into power through democratic institutions, they seek to destroy those institutions as quickly as possible. In this part of the book, I show how many institutions function to teach people to obey, to say yes in advance of an order, not least because of how they reward compliance. Using Snyder’s logic, institutions would be sowing the seeds of their own destruction, creating citizens ill equipped to fight for them by fighting back against those who seize power by illegitimate means.

The word ‘obedience’ derives from ear, to obey is to give your ear to law or to the tyrant who suspends the law, replacing it with his own will. A feminist ear might be how we hear the instructions by refusing to follow them; hearing with defiance not compliance.

The data of complaint is generated because people can and do defy the instructions, saying no to institutions, despite being told that there is no point in doing so. This data is also a series of snapshots of institutional resistance to change.

If the title of this part of the book gives the impression that I am going to share some rather more positive stories about complaints, how they succeed in changing institutions, that is not what I am doing. There is nevertheless something positive in these stories. Even when complaints do not succeed in a simple or straightforward way, they teach us that institutions can and do change. And so, most importantly, they help reveal that institutional fatalism is a lie.

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