Collective Individuals

Collective Individuals = a collective institution whose interest diverges from the individuals that compose it,and acts as an individual itself.

Context

The concept is from the French anthropologist Louis Dumont, who studied egalitarianism and hierarchy in societies. Collective individuals are institutions or groups, such as the nation or the corporation, that act 'as if they were individuals', i.e. they act strategically to increase their power and privilege, and in which a selected group of guardians, i.e. the elite, the hierarchy of the group, act to increase their own power within it, often at the expense of the mass of individuals that compose it. In other words: power is transcended to the institution, and is no longer immanent to the individual members. The bureaucratizaton and hierarchisation of such institutions create recuring cycles of inequalities.

How to avoid this?

In peer to peer theory, Michel Bauwens put forward the thesis that the best peer governance practices adhere to the paradigm of non-representationality, and try to avoid 'transcendence of power to collective individuals', through the use of social or algorhythmic mechanisms, aimed to replace the role of 'mediating agents' which could divorce themselves from the community.

See the section on the De-Monopolization of Power in the P2P Manifesto [1].

However, an important caveat: it is becoming increasingly clear that the solutions themselves have a drawback: 1) social mechanisms, such as the Wikipedia process, often lead to a hierarchy of engagement, in which experienced and active individualis have a primacy over loosely participating individuals (in their power to influence the content of the pages); 2) algorhythmic mechanisms, such as Google Page Ranking, reward older and successfull pages, creating a positive feedback loop that is hard for newcomers to break.

Citations

"But the user community is not without power to affect these processes: collective reaction through opinion storms are activated by abusive monopolistic behavior, and can quickly damage the reputation of the perpetrator, thereby forcing a change in behavior in the monopolistic ambitions. Competing resources are almost always available, or can be built by the open source community. But more fundamentally, the blogosphere practice shows that it is possible to route around such problems, by creating mediating processes using the community as a whole. Thus techniques such as folksonomies, i.e. communal tagging, or reputation ranking, such as the ‘Karma’ points used by the Slashdot community, avoid the emergence of autonomous mediating agents. The blogosphere itself, in the form of the Technorati ranking system for example, has found ways to calculate the interlinking done by countless individuals, thereby enabling itself to filter out the most used contributions. Again, monopolization is excluded."

What is the mechanism behind this? For this we have to turn again to the concept of non-representationality, (see our entry on the Non-representational Paradigm of Power) or what Negri calls immanence. In modernity, the concept is that autonomous individuals cannot create a peaceful order, and therefore they defer their power to a sovereign, whether it be the king of the nation. In becoming a people, they become a ‘collective individual’. They loose out as individuals, while the unified people or nation behaves ‘as if’ it was an individual, i.e. with ambition for power. It is ‘transcendent’ vis a vis its parts. In non-representationality however, nothing of the sort is given away. This means that the collective hereby created, is not a ‘collective individual’, it cannot act with ambition apart from its members. The genius of the protocols devised in peer to peer initiatives, is that they avoid the creation of a collective individual with agency. Instead, it is the communion of the collective which filters value. The ethical implication is important as well. Not having given anything up of their full power, the participants in fact voluntarily take up the concern not only for the whole in terms of the project, but for the social field in which its operates." (http://www.p2pfoundation.net/index.php/4.2.A._De-Monopolization_of_Power)