Living Under Exposure: 3 Institutions as Perspectival Fields

After recognising exposure in life and teaching, the next unavoidable pressure arises in the sphere of institutions. Institutions can no longer be imagined as shelters or guarantors of authority. Instead, they exist as perspectival fields: arrangements that stabilise possibilities without collapsing them into dogma.

From Shelter to Field

Traditional institutions promise protection: codified rules, hierarchies of authority, and established procedures. Under exposure, these structures cannot serve as guarantees. They can no longer be relied upon to absorb consequence or to shield actors from responsibility.

Instead, institutions are better conceived as fields — relational and perspectival spaces in which actors, practices, and knowledge intersect. They stabilise some distinctions, sustain attention, and allow coordinated action without claiming ultimate authority or certainty.

Perspectival Coordination

Institutions as perspectival fields do not dictate what must be thought or done. They offer orientation: shared attention, repeated practices, and mutual accountability. Within these fields, actors negotiate distinctions and participate in sustaining consequences responsibly.

The perspective is never neutral. It shapes what is visible, what is valued, and what is considered possible. But the field does not replace exposure; it organises it.

Against the Fantasy of Neutral Structures

The temptation is to treat institutions as neutral containers: frameworks that can enforce order, transmit authority, or guarantee outcomes. These fantasies ignore the persistent pressures already outlined: groundlessness, irreversibility, cuts, and responsibility.

An institution that claims neutrality or authority under exposure only relocates the pressure. It cannot eliminate it.

The Third Unavoidable Pressure

The pressure of institutions under exposure can be stated as follows:

Institutions must organise without sheltering, stabilise without closing, and coordinate without imposing authority.

This demands careful design, ongoing attention, and recognition that every institutional act participates in the consequences it helps sustain. Institutions are not safe harbours; they are ongoing experiments in perspectival coordination.

The next post will examine how practices persist and evolve within these fields, shaping life, thought, and teaching under exposure.

Next: Practices That Persist.