This summer, I will give a talk at Agile 2025 on how we shape and are shaped by the systems we inhabit. For research on that talk, I have continued to investigate the concept of the transindividual. In this newsletter, I will look more specifically at the work of Étienne Balibar, one of the modern thinkers who have explored this idea.
The concept of becoming or individuation is foundational to understanding who we are. This contrasts with the idea of an individual or a state of being. What is the difference here?
Being refers to a final state of being, whereas becoming denotes something that is constantly in flux.
The second core attribute, perhaps the most unique aspect of this view, is that it situates the individuation process in a social context. We usually think about groups or systems made up of people. This approach suggests that while people create groups, groups also develop people simultaneously. While we see ourselves as the same person and autonomous and singular individuals in each context, that view is a misunderstanding of the context’s role in creating who we are.
From this perspective, we see ourselves as different individuals in various aspects of our lives, as distinct people in the process of becoming, depending on our circumstances. We are different at work than at home because work and home cause us to be different.
Desire as Essence
From Spinoza’s perspective, who we are as individuals is based on our desires. It is our desires that differentiate us from others.  Spinoza sees desires as “appetite together with consciousness of the appetite” 1. That is, we are aware of what we crave, which is our desire and what we seek after. This definition thus gives way to how we understand the causes of those desires.
Spinoza famously said that we are aware of our appetites but ignorant of their causes(38). This perspective then leads to what Spinoza calls adequate and inadequate ideas. Adequate ideas understand the real cause, and inadequate ideas don’t.
As an example, we often assume that why we like something is an inherent property of the thing itself. But the cause is outside of that object. For example, I liked pro wrestling when I was a young teen (something that feels embarrassing to admit today). An inadequate idea of pro wrestling would have been that I liked it because it was good. However, an adequate idea would be to recognize that I liked it because I enjoyed the way my friends would tell stories about it, and the nature of the pay-per-view event meant that it led to a fun evening hanging out at my friend’s house. The cause wasn’t what I desired, but rather the context that created that desire.
As we can see in that example, the desire was not something that came within me, but rather came as a result of my relationship with others. As Balibar explains,
if man’s essence always pertains to his individual singularity, this, in reality, cannot be isolated from a network of relations with other individuals that determines it, and in which this essence is always simultaneously active and passive, affected by others and affecting others. (156)
Here, Balibar uses Spinoza’s terms active and passive to denote those feelings (affects) that are caused adequately (“being primarily active or producing effects explained ‘by our own nature’”) and inadequately (“being primarily passive, determined by external causes”) “This is generally understood by contrasting situations where we depend on other individuals with those where we are independent and act ‘by ourselves’.”(58)
Lest we get the idea that Spinoza is saying that the goal is to be purely individual and limit the impact of others, Balibar goes on to show that Spinoza
associates perfection (or, it would be better to say, perfecting) with the idea of a growing autonomy of the individual (in the double sense of a growth in freedom and in singularity) which goes together with growth in ‘friendship’, which is to say with ever closer association with other individuals. (59)
Thus, there is a need for both autonomy and community simultaneously.
Balibar goes on to stress that to preserve ourselves, we must continuously regenerate who we are, and this happens through an exchange with other people (52). What is exchanged are the parts that make up the individuals.
He explains this in more detail using the example of a city:
human individuals can survive, preserve themselves, cultivate themselves, and develop their ‘power to act’ only insofar as they pool common resources incorporated in the city (which is really a utility), the greater stability from which they benefit and which makes it possible to speak of a relatively autonomous individuality itself has the stability of the city as a condition (161)
This happens through both how we act (activity) and how we are acted upon (passivity).
Imaginary and Rational
This activity and passivity are how we change the groups that we are part of, while we are also changed by them. But it goes even further. This exchange between the person and the collective happens at two levels (or modalities), which can be deemed the imaginary and the rational.
the modality of passionate exchanges for which the motor is the ambivalent (and unstable) desire (flutuatio animi) of each person to identify themselves with others and that of others to identify themselves with that person (ambitio); and the modality of rational calculation that leads each person to understand that their own utility resides in the existence of a society where the forces of all, instead of neutralising or destroying each other, compose a superior power to act (and to preserve everyone). (156)
When Spinoza talks of the imagination, he is talking about how we take as our
object the very structure of the constitution and differentiation of the individual ‘self’, including self-awareness as well as self-identification or self-recognition and self-assertion. (61)
All these views, where we look at ourselves and try to view ourselves from the outside, are transindividual relations.
any relationship that ‘I’ can establish with ‘myself’ would be mediated by the Other (or, more precisely, by an image of the Other), but shows the life of the imagination to be a circular process of successive identifications, in which I never cease to imagine the Other via my image, and to imagine myself via the image of the Other. (61-62)
How we see ourselves is always “mediated by the Other.” We have to find some external point from which to see ourselves to gain any sense of self, which requires some idea, some image of another. We identify with others in a two-step process: we see how we resemble each other in various ways (looks, attributes, or attitudes), and from that, we “project our own affections onto them” and assume that they feel what we do and that we feel as they do. (63)
As Balibar says,
We try to imitate others and act according to the image we have made of them, and we try to get them to imitate us and act according to the image we project from ourselves onto them… Imagination is therefore a transindividual reality consisting of mimetic processes of partial transfer of ideas and of affects. (63-64)
That is to say, what we imagine ourselves to be is a set of ideas that come from how we see others and imagine that as part of ourselves. Our self-image is partly shaped by how we see others and how we imagine they see us.
This idea of imagination is contrasted with the perspective of reason, which also acts in a transindividual, although different, way.
The core of our reason is a “structure or system of mutual relations” that causes individuals to try to preserve themselves by understanding what is good for us and how we can work with others. (65) We seek out what is necessary for our own survival and thriving, and for that, we are dependent on others.
As Balibar explains,
what makes other humans supremely useful for each of us is not what they have, or what they make or produce, but what they are (that is, their power to act or ‘to cause’, as individuals, from which what they have, make or produce also derives). (66)
These perspectives of imagination and rationality form the basis of two forms of communication.
Imaginative communication is based on the fact that the minds of individuals are dominated by ideas of similarity that are both inadequate and confused, so they can only oscillate between opposite illusions (believing in the absolute identity or incompatibility of individuals, seeing in humans brothers or natural enemies). As for rational communication, it requires humans to know each other as different individuals who have much in common. (68)
This communication, this back and forth, give and take, allows each of us to learn and become who we are through others, through our active and passive relations with them in these two ways.
Intersubjectivity
There is a key difference worth pointing out between the idea of the transindividual and the more common notion of intersubjectivity.
With intersubjectivity, it is assumed that there are existing individuals who all have differing perspectives on an existing reality, which is nothing other than “the sum total of every individual’s perceptions of all other individuals” (73). This perspective emphasizes each individual’s inner perspective, and while they can influence others, it is by making their inner life visible that they can have the most impact on others.
The transindividual perspective takes a different position that calls into question the notion of an interior and an exterior. (91) It assumes that rather than each individual having their own perspective on a different reality, it assumes that each individual’s perspectives shape those perspectives of others.
This comes down to the relationship between the ideas of individuation (the process of becoming autonomous) and individualization (the process of being singular or unique in yourself). The common notion of intersubjectivity is that we are already autonomous and thus become singular individuals. The perspective of transindividuality is that it is the opposite. We only gain autonomy because we become unique in a collective context. (78)
What does this mean for Middle Managers?
We can gain a new perspective on how we deal with change when we recognize that the group helps create people as they are through the exchange with the group, in both imaginary and rational ways.
First, it allows us to focus on the group and group dynamics as core to how people are within that group.
Second, it looks at individual contributions to the group not solely as an individual, but in an intersectional way, considering what other groups and collectives the individuals identify with bring to the group.
Finally, it creates a dual approach in that we both work on how individuals see themselves within that group and the rational understanding of why they need each other and the group.
- Balibar, E. & Kelly, M. (2020). Spinoza, the Transindividual. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (p 37) All future references to this text will be in-line with the page number in parentheses. ↩