Milieu 09 of 12
Institutions as manufacturers of persons
An organization does not merely process people, it strips a self on admission and issues a new one, and you can test this against any institution you have been inside.
- Years
- 1939 to 1977
- Location
- North America and Britain
- Funder
- UNKNOWN. The research document records no funder for Goffman's fieldwork. Illich funded his own centre with language-course fees, which is why he could write what he wrote.
- Institution
- St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington for Goffman, CIDOC in Cuernavaca for Illich
Goffman
Erving Goffman, Asylums (1961), based on fieldwork inside a psychiatric hospital, describes the Glossary / GoffmanAn organization that strips a self on admission and rebuilds it to its own specification: asylums, prisons, barracks, some schools.Full glossary and what he calls the moral career of the inmate.
Admission procedures are the mechanism: the removal of clothes and possessions, the standard issue, the number, the form, the requirement to account for yourself to strangers. What looks like administrative necessity is a sequence that dismantles a person's existing self and installs one the institution can work with.
The other half of the finding is the underlife: the small evasions, workarounds and private irony through which inmates keep something back. Goffman's point is that the underlife is part of the system rather than a failure of it. Every institution runs on its own informal violations.
Goffman is the microphysics that pairs with Foucault's macrophysics, and he is far easier to test against your own experience of a school, a hospital, a barracks or an office.
Also The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) and Stigma (1963).
Illich
Full treatment on his own page. His milieu belongs here. CIDOC in Cuernavaca was funded by language-course fees rather than by foundations, which is an unusual funding structure and directly explains what he was able to publish. He was running an institution while arguing that its entire sector should not exist, and the Vatican investigated him for it in 1968.
Elias
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (1939), written in exile and ignored until the 1970s. External restraint becomes self-restraint as state monopolies on violence and taxation lengthen the chains of interdependence between people. Manners, disgust and embarrassment are the visible residue of a long process of moving control from outside a person to inside them.
It is the panopticon claim made across five centuries and with evidence, and it was written before Foucault was born.
What it adds
This cluster is where the argument stops being abstract. You have been in at least one of these institutions. The question is what it issued you with, and what you kept back.