Transitory erasures: subjects of institutional critique

Almost a decade separates us from the moment that marks a threshold within the history of institutional critique. On one side of this split one finds the ruins and relics of its second phase; on the other side the hypothesis of a new phase, based less on empirical evidence than on a ‘political and theoretical necessity to be found in the logic of institutional critique’ (Raunig, 2009, p. 3). On one side, Andrea Fraser’s calculation that ‘the institution is inside of us, and we can’t get outside of ourselves’ (Fraser, 2009, p. 414); on the other side, the promise of a ‘permanent instituting’ which ‘does not oppose the institution, but does flee from institutionalization and structuration’ (Raunig/Ray, 2009, p. xvii). But who could not escape oneself, before this boundary, to discover, beyond this boundary, that he/she can flee from institutionalization and structuration? This boundary can be thought only by binding institutional critique to a certain subject. The decade that already separates us from this threshold makes it possible and obliges us to ask: what has happened to the subject of institutional critique within these rituals of passage? Who or what exactly is this subject today, and how does he/she operate within the frames of the third phase of institutional critique?