Transindividual
Discussion
Hanzi Freinacht:
"The French philosopher Deleuze proposes that we should see society as made up by dividuals, i.e. that we all are in fact part of one another and affect one another. We consist of many different influences, roles and perspectives, within a multitude of contexts.
I am offering a related bid for anti-individualism: the transpersonal perspective. The transpersonal perspective holds two seemingly opposed, but in reality complementary, positions.
The first position is to see society as determined by the deep, inner lives – the most personal relations and tender emotions – of human beings. This takes the unique lived experience of each human being very seriously. Such lived experience is taken to be the very foundation of society: if there is anger or love in our hearts, if there is peace in our minds, and if all manner of psychological issues have been properly dealt with. Such things determine if we turn out engaged world citizens, mindless consumers or bitter reactionaries.
The second position is that this deeply human and personal experience is in turn created by societal processes that are largely invisible to each single person, and accessible only through a profound and systematic sociological and psychological analysis of society.
So this lands us in an apparent paradox: to really see the singular human being, to really respect her rights and uniqueness, we must go beyond the idea of the individual; we must see through it and strive to see how society is present within each single person as well as in the relationships through which she is born as a “self”. We go from the idea of the individual (vs. “the collective”), to simply seeing society as an evolving, interlinked set of transindividuals. This is the transpersonal perspective. It’s not just that we are each a billiard ball that “interacts” with other people. We co-emerge. Or, as the physicist-philosopher Karen Barad has put it: we intra-act.
Initially, it may seem counter-intuitive to think of humans as something other than individuals: after all, don’t we all have one body each, one voice and one inner monologue? But even neuroscience challenges this assumption. Ever heard of what is popularly called “split-brain”? It occurs in rare cases when the bridge between the left and right hemispheres of the brain is surgically removed to treat severe epilepsy. People with “split-brain” show a number of deeply puzzling features; they appear to have two different selves, each controlling one side of the body. Sometimes these two sides work past one another, the conscious mind (or rather: the linguistically endowed “talking” mind of the dominant hemisphere) even making excuses and rationalizations for the behaviors of the ghostly left hand which seems to gain a will of its own.
Or, you can show a picture to one eye and not the other – and the split-brain person will act as if he has seen the picture. But if you ask him, he is still unaware of having seen the picture and gives rationalizations for why he acted as if he had seen the picture. What you can see here is that the brain becomes split in half, and each part seems to have a mind of its own – although sometimes the two communicate indirectly. This truly is bizarre, at least from a perspective where humans are thought to have an individual self and will of their own.
Or you may have heard of the cranially conjoined child twins (meaning that their heads are partly physically merged into one) from Vancouver, Krista and Tatiana Hogan, who seem to be able to pass visual impressions to one another directly through their brains: you can ask one girl what the other sees and she will know. Such cases make the reality of the dividual clearly apparent: the single human mind is not indivisible, not a “single atom”. It’s just not; not even biologically speaking. But these uncommon cases serve only to underscore something more fundamental that involves all of us: nowhere can you find a single, individual “self”; it’s always connected to everything around us.
To the metamodern activist, the rights and interests of the transindividual are seen as much deeper, more real and more important than the rights of the individual. Just like modern society scrapped the rights of the clan or the family in favor of the individual, we are now scrapping the individual in favor of the much more morally entitled and more analytically valid transindividual.
The idea of the listening society serves the transindividual: the human being is seen as more than a unique, separate life story. The idea of the transindividual sees the human being as inseparable from her language, her deep unconscious, her relations, roles, societal positions, values, emotions, developmental psychology, biological organism and so forth. Each human being is viewed as an open and social process, a whirlwind of participation and co-creation of society. Society as a whole is viewed as a self-organizing system which creates such transindividuals who are in turn able to recreate society.
To sum up, the idea of the individual and her rights and freedom has served us well, but now we need to move on – lest society come crashing down on us like London Bridge.
Metamodern politics, working from sincere irony, applies a transpersonal perspective to society, serving the transindividual, her rights and interests. You can use the words transpersonalism and transindividualism more or less interchangeably. Just remember this: It is by looking at deep psychological issues, the inner development of each of us, and how such properties are generated within society, that we address the core of society’s problems. (In the appendix of my book you will find some more condensed definitions of what the transpersonal perspective means.)" (https://metamoderna.org/death-to-the-individual/)