There are two standard views about individuals and groups. The most common view is that individuals are primary. This is usually characterized by people thinking that to build the best teams, you need the best people (as if these best people exist in isolation) and the great man theory of leadership, where an individual can shape a team and individually achieve great things. What comes along with this view of the individual as primary is the notion that individual rights and freedoms are more important than collective liberation. 1 It sees a conflict between freedom and equality and opts for freedom as the way to move things forward.
The other, less common view says that the group and structures are primary. Results depend on the structures and systems within an organization, as those create opportunities or limit the capabilities of the team members. This view usually allows for a degree of individual agency, although it is not always clear exactly how it works within the systemic limits.
Of course, the issue is that both of these views are simplifications, which prevent us from seeing how individuality, groups, and systems mutually impact one another. 2
There is a complex interrelationship between the group and the individual. Paradoxically, it is only with others that we become individuals:
One does not need a desert island to become an individual, but, on the contrary, an entire city. 3
This view that individuals only exist as a product of the collective it makes up is an ontological perspective known as Transindividuality. This idea is tackled in Jason Read’s book The Politics of Transindividuality where Read takes the term from Gilbert Simondon as developed by Étienne Balibar. He defines Transindivudation as “the process by which the individual and collective are constituted.” 4
These are not two processes: one that creates the individual and another that creates the collective. Both are made via the same process (and this would need to change through a process that changes both).
This new perspective allows us to focus less on the collective or group and more on the individual and separate subjects and to think of them both simultaneously.
Transindividuality does not eliminate thinking about individuals or collectives; rather, it helps us see how our concept of both is dependent on this alternative perspective.
As Read writes,
it is not enough to simply denounce the limitations of an individualistic understanding of social relations, and propose an alternate ontology of transindividuality, to resort to a sterile opposition of true to false, it is necessary to explain how the latter paradoxically constitutes the former. How is it that through social relations, through transindividuality, people come to see themselves as a kingdom within a kingdom, and posit society as nothing other than the sum total of self-interested competitive relations.5
That is, it is not just a matter of seeing how transindividuality mutually creates the individual and the group but also how that very process causes people to see themselves as individuals and distinct from that group.
Spinoza
One of the thinkers that preceded this notion is Spinoza, and this is Read’s jumping-off point. One of Spinoza’s key points is that “people are ignorant of the causes of things but conscious of their appetite.” 6
We understand our desires but not the causes, which means we often think we are free when something is really driving that desire. This confusion (Spinoza calls it prejudice) leads to us misunderstanding what is a cause and what is an effect.
This leads us to see that which helps us achieve our desires as good and that which hinders us as bad.
Spinoza writes: ‘This doctrine concerning the end turns Nature completely upside down. For what is really a cause, it considers as an effect, and conversely’ . What he is referring to here is the way in which final causes, desires and intentions are, in every theology and metaphysics, made to be explanatory causes of the world, when they are nothing but effects. Final causes are not the origin of the world, but are an effect of a particular way of viewing the world, a particular temperament. This effect in turn acts as a cause, reproducing itself as a particular temperament and way of thinking. 7
Thus, we confuse cause and effect. We think the reason we do things is because of our desires and intentions, but in reality, those desires and intentions are the result of our particular way of thinking. That way of thinking comes from our life experiences. 8
Collectives, groups, and systems have similar ways of thinking. This isn’t a result of individuals causing a way of being for the group or the group causing a way of being for those within it, but rather “that the individuation of individuals and collectives are made up of the same material, affects, desires, and ideas, and virtually the same process, the constitution of a memory, of habit.” 9
This turning of effects into causes is part of how we are individuated both as individuals and groups. We see these causes (our affects, desires, ideas) as the cause of things; these are the effects of a view of the world that then become a cause of how we are individuated individually and collectively.
This is all driven by desire. And because we are always relational, our desire is always relative to something. It is a specific desire, but at the same time it has no predefined object or goal. 10
These desires are contingent; they are based on our histories. And what we determine to be good is based on what we desire.
As Spinoza writes, ‘it is clear that we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it’. 11
Thus, it is the desires that are created historically that shape how we see things; we see what we strive for as good.
When we think of affects or emotions, we are likely to think that they are very individual, but a closer examination shows that affects are what individuate us and also collectives.
While affects might at first appear to be highly individuated, even personal and idiosyncratic, a more sustained examination clarifies that they are a terrain of individuation. Affects are not only profoundly individual, but individuating, as each individual can be defined by their particular love, hates, and desires. Affects are both causes and effects of individuation, constitutive of and constituted by the process of individuation. As such every affect is simultaneously collective and individual, not just because the general affective comportments – love, hatred, hope, and fear– constitute a shared set of orientations, but that the objects of these affects do not exist as isolated objects but only in and through their constitutive relations. Affects or emotions are also collective not just in that they refer to shared terminology and experience, but also insofar as their objects are collective as well. Objects of love and hate define communities as much as individuals. 12
It may be tempting to accept emotions as shared but view reason as still individual. But returning to Spinoza, Read makes the case that our Social relations, the presence of others, are not external to thought but integral to its definition, genesis, and development.” 13 Thought is not separate from our striving. We strive to “imagine those things that affirm our existence” 14
Every act of thinking is, by nature, relational and social. We are only capable of thinking through our relations and interactions with others.
It is transindividual in that the ideas, the affects, and the striving, are neither strictly individual nor strictly collective: there is never a private desire, nor is there any affect, or idea, that would have any existence, any reality outside of being actively felt, thought, and desired by specific individuals. Ideas, affects, and desires exist at the intersection of the individual and the collective. It is for this reason that society, the state or nation, can be understood as being founded on communication, as being a particular mode of communication, a communication that constitutes and encompasses affects and reason. 15
Balibar
Spinoza gives a strong foundation to Read’s thinking but Spinoza never used the term Transindividual, he is only seen as a transindividual thinker retroactively.
Étienne Balibar does use the term and builds on it. He defines the concept of political anthropology as the way of finding a middle path between seeing the way we organize as being based on some fundamental feature of what it means to be a human and seeing who we are as defined by the fundamental way we organize. In the former, people are seen as inherently social or cutthroat, and thus, we form the societies we do, nor are we the way we are based solely on our structures. Instead, we are some semblance of both and neither 16
Every definition of a group or belonging, or even what it is to be human, will always be defined by what is excluded. That exclusion requires our institutions to maintain that separation. 17
Every way we think we belong, each identity, racial, national, role, title, team, whatever, is inherently a transindividual individuation. They create both individual and collective identities.
The fundamental institutions of political belonging (class, nation, and race) are all transindividual individuations, providing a basis for collective and individual identity. Such a declaration affirms the theses we have already seen at work in the general problem of transindividuality. First, there is the fundamental assertion that ‘nature makes no nations’, a point that could be extended to races and classes as well. Their existence constitutes an institution, an organisation of politics. Their origins are not to be found in some natural sentiment of belonging or identification, but are an organisation of affects, ideas, and bodies. Second, these different institutions are different organisations of the most fundamental aspect of human existence. Nation, class, and race are not some supplement to individual identity, something that could be adopted or dropped leaving behind a generic humanity, but encompass language and the body, the very basis of recognition and relation. These two theses cut two ways: first, against any attempt to naturalise race, nation, or economy, as something simply given, or reducible to psychological tendencies, as in many commonsense definitions of racism or nationalism; second, against any understanding of the economy or the nation that posits it simply as an institution or structure that leaves individuals unaffected. 18
These divisions and roles are not natural. They don’t come from anything other than human institutions. Secondly, they connect us to the core of who we are. We can’t make claims that these things are a given or make universal claims based on these attributes, but we also can’t say that they don’t impact who we are.
There are two key individuations in how we are members of groups, which are via shared customs, habits, and memories and by our rights and obligations. 19
Balibar’s perspective of transindividuality builds on his anthropological definition. He sees both “collective belonging and individual identity” as deeply related. He also recognizes that there will always be a “tension between these different conditions of individuation.” 20 We all feel these tensions when we navigate between different groups and question who our authentic selves are when we act differently in very different contexts.
Simondon
The final voice we will consider is Gilbert Simondon. Simondon coined the phrase “transindividuality,” so it is fitting that we conclude this survey with him.
Simondon’s starting point is to argue that technology is culture, which, when we initially hear that phrase in our technological age, may seem obvious. However, when we look at our own language, we can see that we often say things about technology like “it is just a tool” that minimizes the cultural role of things like the internet or even AI.
For Simondon, technology is an example of transindividuality.
The technological world is transindividual in that it forms the basis of both individuality and collectivity, of psychic phenomena and social structures. It is in this obscure zone that everything happens, that new technologies are constituted and new collectivities emerge.21
Simondon’s key point is that individuation is a process you can’t understand by looking at individuals and the boundaries that define them; instead, you must look at the process by which they are formed. 22
Simondon sees this process as a “reconciliation of the tensions and potentials” of a metastable state that he calls the pre-individual. There is always a remainder to that process; there is always more potential beyond any individuation. 23
Key to this pre-individual state are the affects. Simondon differentiates between emotions and affects. Emotions are individual and named as such, but affects are more of a feeling that comes before as pre-individual.
For Simondon, the foundation of any collective needs to be affective.
Simondon’s argument for the affective, or rather affective-emotional, basis of collectivity refers not to the fundamental divide between reason and emotion, but to the degree of individuation. A collective cannot be constituted by action, since actions are too discontinuous to provide the basis for collective identity. Nor is a collective constituted by representations, which demand too much uniformity of thought. Rather it is constituted by affect and emotions, by the intersection of the pre-individual and transindividual.24
Individually, “Perceptions and emotions are often in tension and contradiction; what we perceive does not always correspond with what we feel. Collectivity, shared meaning and structure of feeling, reconciles and reinforces the relation between feeling and perceptions.” 25
A collective, a group, creates a sense of shared meaning. Thus, transindividuality is not the creation of a collective with something that is between individuals but rather something that is between how individuals come to be as they are.
It is important not to confuse this with intersubjectivity or relationships between people. Transindividuality is about the relationship between how people became the individuals they are. 26
We also shouldn’t think there is some linear process from a pre-individual state to that of the transindividual. We shouldn’t mistake the pre-individual as a pre-existing state from which the individual is formed; instead, it is “an immanent cause.” 27 It is something that exists with and because of that which it causes. The pre-individual exists because of the result and intersection of different “psychic and collective” individuations.28
Thus, the process of becoming an individual is “a particular way of resolving a tension between different affects, perceptions, and concepts, but what works for one problem does not work for others; it is a solution that is constantly being put into question.” 29
And we should not make the mistake of assuming that a collective behaves like an individual. We shouldn’t see the group as one mind and action as that misses the fundamental transindividual nature of it.
This allows us to have a clearer picture of transindividuality based on a clearer view of what it is not.
Transindividuality can thus be defined as:
Against totality, or the critique of the individual in terms of some larger individual within which it would be subsumed, nature or society, there is an insistence on the necessary ‘trans’ dimension of individuality. Against the reduction of the relation between individuals to intersubjectivity, there is the insistence on the ‘trans’ as necessarily passing beneath and above subjectivity, as the intersection of the pre-individual and transindividual. Against the insistence of the linear determinism of individuation, there is the insistence of the necessarily metastable relations of intersecting individuations. 30
Individuating
What causes us to be the individuals we are is contextual and changing, and it is directly related to the collectivities we are part of. However, another great value of transindividuality is how it allows us to think about “the relation between determination and liberation.” 31
We tend to think of the individual as free and with agency, while groups are seen as determined through conformity. Transindividuality breaks both of these down. 32
We tend to think that being an individual means being separated from some larger collective, what makes you stand out from it, and that to act freely, we must have some essence that is our own. From this, we see crowds as conforming and standing apart from a crowd as being free.
As Read beautifully puts it,
The centripetal force of a dominant imaginary confronts the irreducible centrifugal force of singular encounters. 33
There is a force pulling you into what everyone else is doing, the dominant narrative and ideas, and there is a force pushing you away, which is the uniqueness of every encounter; because each individual has unique encounters, they bring them to the collective, which contains both.
Different people will react differently in different situations based on their own experiences. “[E]very experience, every interpretation, rests on the ground of experiences, previous interpretations.”34 The famous example that Read relays from Spinoza is that of the farmer and the soldier who both see hoof prints in the field and, based on their experiences, draw very different conclusions. 35
We often fail to see the connections and thus remain ignorant that there are causes to things we take to be freely achieved. The farmer and soldier are unaware that they are conditioned to see the hooves as they do. They are ignorant of the relations that cause them to see things as they do.36
Spinoza asks “Why people fight for their servitude as if were salvation: 37
This points to the challenge of determinism vs. freedom. We mistake our subjection for freedom. We see the things that we are drawn to do based on our own individuation in a particular context or collective as free choices when they are really driven by causes we don’t understand. We always try to understand our experiences, and we do so in a way that makes us seem free and powerful. However, the result of that choice to see things as if we are free binds us to our conditions. We can’t break free because we don’t comprehend how our desires are determined and our ideas of what we think we are capable of. 38
How we perceive people, objects, and ideas is initially conditioned by how we first perceive them. 39 We make associations between images and signs and those associations from expectations both individually and collectively. 40
Language is a helpful example of how this works. We collectively form connections that are part of how we interpret things. We associate the word cat with the smallish animal with whiskers, fur, and a tail that meows. When we have associations in common, it allows us to have a language in common. 41
So, where does this leave us when comparing determinism to freedom? Perhaps what articulates this most clearly is Read’s statement, “The more complex the determinations, the easier it is to imagine oneself as autonomous, as not determined.” 42
We are all unique individuals with unique histories, so we will not all behave similarly even in the same circumstances. Our histories, experiences, and the unique position we play in a contextual situation are singular.
Due to our multiple individuations, there are possibilities for how we may behave in certain situations. We are not determined, but we must choose based on determined options. As a result, there is freedom, but that freedom is determined by our own transindividuality.
Conclusion
Transindividuality teaches us that individuation is historical; it is a product of its time. As such, even exploring the concept of transindividuality must be seen as historical. 43 And like the observer effect in physics: “There is no knowledge of individuation that is not itself an individuation, a transformation of the problem.” 44
And this leads us to the real value of seeing things through the lens of transindividuality. Each individuation is a way to resolve tensions; as such, it is contingent; there are other ways to resolve tensions, and other individuations can emerge.
You, your group, the system you are in, and society are not destined to be the way they are. There is hope for other ways to resolve the tensions that have caused the current individuations.
Read leaves us with these two final insights that drive this point home.
There are then two fundamental insights that transindividuality offers to any thought of political practice. The first is simply transindividuality itself, the assertion that the very conditions of our individuation, the affects, desires, habits, and gestures that seem most unique to us, are shared in ways that we do not recognise. This is not in itself a common interest, a collective belonging, or even a common sense, but provides the basis for the articulation of collective relations. Second, there is the fact that every conjuncture, every articulation of politics and economics, must be seen as metastable; the apparent coherence of affects, desires, habits, and the imagination in some supposed monolith that could be called ‘neoliberalism’, ‘society of the spectacle’, and so on, must be seen as being constituted by tensions and divisions as much as its unity. The metastability of the existing conjuncture means that the different elements that constitute it, affects, knowledge, and habits, are always capable of being organised differently, of becoming the basis for a different individuation. 45
What does this mean for Middle Managers?
In a recent LinkedIn post, John Cutler argued for finding a happy medium between the ideas of individuals vs systems:
Tech has a very hard time talking about competence and experience. It tends to be all or nothing: either:
- A highly oversimplified view grounded in beliefs around meritocracy, context-free experience, halo effect around “the best”, “sense”, “mindset”, etc.
- A highly oversimplified view that describes everyone’s performance in terms of “the environment” or “the system”.
This is a question as old as philosophy: Are we free or not? Are we determined by our circumstances, or are we free to act? In the work context, this is often the question about the individual vs the system they are in.
Transindividuality gives us a new way of thinking about this question by asking, “How is the process of individuation causing me to be who I am in this context, and how is that individuating this system?”
This isn’t an answer that is one or the other; it isn’t an answer that tries to find a compromise between the positions. It is a perspective that provides an alternative to both.
The first point to recognize is that what we see as individuals is contextually constructed based on the system they are in and by all of the past and concurrent systems they are in. There is no high (or low) performer on a desert island. They are only high or low performers based on their context, and who they are in that context cannot be separated from that context.
With this view, the question of whether the individual is primary or whether the system controls everything is moot, as it is only in the system that we can even talk about the individual.
Put another way, the individual is responsible for their performance, but that individual is only who they are based on the system they are in and the systems they have historically been part of. What creates the potential and drives in an individual is created as part of other systems. So, while they are responsible, they are also determined by the systems they are in.
It isn’t one or the other or some middle-ground; it is both contradictory and the necessary state as transindividuals.
It is also important to note that because of some people’s history, which includes things like gender, race, disability status, body type, past experiences, etc, they may have a more challenging time than others adapting to specific contexts and systems. What becomes more evident in these cases is often that the reasons that they are challenged by particular systems have less to do with their own capabilities and more with the contingency of their own individuations.
- Jason Read, The Politics of Transindividuality. p1 ↩︎
- Ibid p2 ↩︎
- Ibid p4 ↩︎
- Ibid p6 ↩︎
- Ibid p18 ↩︎
- Ibid 21 ↩︎
- Ibid 23 ↩︎
- Ibid 24 ↩︎
- Ibid 25 ↩︎
- Ibid 28 ↩︎
- Ibid 28-29 ↩︎
- Ibid 143 ↩︎
- Ibid 32 ↩︎
- Ibid ↩︎
- Ibid 34 ↩︎
- Ibid 83 ↩︎
- Ibid 83-84 ↩︎
- Ibid 86 ↩︎
- Ibid 92 ↩︎
- Ibid 101 ↩︎
- Ibid 107 ↩︎
- Ibid 108 ↩︎
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- Ibid 127 ↩︎
- Ibid 113 ↩︎
- Ibid ↩︎
- Ibid 116 ↩︎
- Ibid ↩︎
- Ibid 130 ↩︎
- Ibid 139 ↩︎
- Ibid 249 ↩︎
- Ibid ↩︎
- Ibid 250 ↩︎
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- Ibid 252 ↩︎
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- Ibid 252 ↩︎
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- Ibid 260 ↩︎
- Ibid 287 ↩︎
- Ibid ↩︎
- Ibid 290 ↩︎