Institutional Exteriority

Institutional Exteriority: A Theory of Sound, Art, and the Institutional Capture of Events develops a theory of how events become available for handling, reference, comparison, preservation, and capture. The book asks how an event enters handling: how it is localized, how it becomes established as a referable unit, how it opens transferability, and how it becomes connected to procedures of institutional capture. Its concern is not the identity of music, art, work, or practice, but the operations by which such terms begin to carry an event into existing forms of handling. Across sound, art, work, practice, record, comparison, and trace / evidence, the book constructs an apparatus for distinguishing establishment conditions from subsequent institutional handling. Institutional exteriority is read at the moment of establishment: whether institutional connection had already been built in as a necessary condition for the event to stand as what it became. Through its standard path, A/B dual specification, account of trace / evidence, comparison apparatus, standard models, practice connection, and pressure-bearing surface, the book follows the difference between an event's establishment and the procedures that later make it handleable, comparable, preservable, and capturable. This is a theoretical work for readers in sound studies, art theory, aesthetics, media theory, performance studies, cultural theory, institutional critique, and contemporary philosophy who are concerned with how events become units, how units become transferable, and how transferability becomes available to institutional capture.