The Contexts of Critique: Para-Institutions & the Multiple Lives of Institutionality in the Neoliberal University

Response to Jodi Melamed, “Proceduralism, Predisposing, Poesis: Forms of Institutionality, In the Making,” published in Lateral 5.1. Tabares invites us to question the role of what he calls ‘para-institutions,’ such as corporations, in shaping and in uencing the logics and investments within the university. As a counterpoint to these processes, he ponders the possibilities of seizing upon the elements of proceduralism in mobilizing forms of collectivity that can span across institutional contexts outside the academy. In describing rst the neoliberal university’s administrative proceduralism and then her conception of a “social being otherwise”—a radical mode of sociality that exists within the contemporary academy while disrupting its proceduralist processes—Jodi Melamed imagines structures of institutionality that resist the academy’s institutional power while operating within it. Her turn toward pedagogy emphasizes the importance of cultivating relationships between ourselves (as scholars) and our students. Thus Melamed reminds us that critical investments in the academy always depend on the livelihoods of those producing criticism in addition to those consuming it. By highlighting these collectivizing experiences within the institution that houses them, her essay compels us to ask: What form might critique take within the neoliberal academy such that the context(s) of “social being otherwise” can be made legible and therefore able to exist as a collectivizing force? This question unlocks more questions: Considering that the university is always implicated within a network of institutions, how can critique be sustained by individuals outside of the immediate processes of academic proceduralism? What political potential does critique maintain for academics and non-academics in para-institutions, or institutions that are peripheral to the academy yet which directly overlap with certain proceduralist aspects of the academy? These questions are foundational to our ability as scholars to make an impact on the contemporary academy. There is a certain idealism in taking “social being otherwise” to be uniquely poised to disrupt neoliberal proceduralism since such a form of sociality is constituted by the academic system of power itself. Melamed, following Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, sees “social being otherwise” as “a kind of comportment,” a manner of being and acting in the academy, a style of behavior. In this way, she takes otherwise-ness to be a positionality interpellated in a system of power within which acts of otherwise-ness are necessarily legible to others, since otherwise-ness must be able to be conveyed and received in order to be made manifest. What Melamed articulates is a eld where “social being otherwise” is perceptible as a recognizable form of cultural capital that designates a certain relationship to power as well as a relationship de ned by power. Therefore, in 1