Individuation is usually treated as the most obvious thing in the world.
We begin with individuals, and then ask how they relate, coordinate, conflict, or cooperate. Agency is assumed to belong to them; responsibility is assigned to them; meaning is traced back to their intentions, beliefs, or desires. The individual appears as the smallest intelligible unit of explanation.
This post takes the opposite approach.
Here, individuation is not the starting point. It is the problem.
The Explanatory Shortcut
Across philosophy, social theory, psychology, and even much linguistics, “the individual” functions as an explanatory shortcut. It allows us to stop asking questions too early.
Once individuals are assumed, differentiation is no longer puzzling. Differences in action, commitment, belief, or responsibility can be attributed to:
different intentions
different preferences
different identities
different internal states
But this attribution comes at a cost.
It prevents us from asking how those differences come to be stabilised in the first place.
The moment individuation is treated as given, the processes that produce it disappear from view.
What Gets Obscured
Treating individuation as primitive obscures at least three things.
First, it obscures the relational conditions under which differentiation emerges. If individuals are already distinct, there is no need to explain how perspectives diverge within a shared field of meaning.
Second, it obscures the temporal dimension of differentiation. Individuals appear as static bearers of properties rather than as positions that are gradually sedimented through commitment, uptake, and obligation.
Third, it obscures the semiotic work involved in stabilising difference. Meaning appears to flow from individuals outward, rather than individuating perspectives through interaction.
In short, starting with individuals makes individuation invisible.
Three Common Misplacements
To clear the ground, we need to displace three familiar equations.
Individuation ≠ Biological Organism
A biological organism is a physical entity with metabolic boundaries. Individuation, as it concerns us here, does not track those boundaries.
Multiple semiotic perspectives can be enacted by the same organism. Conversely, a single perspective can be distributed across multiple organisms, artefacts, or roles.
Biology matters, but it does not explain how futures, commitments, or responsibilities differentiate.
Individuation ≠ Psychological Self
Psychological accounts locate individuation in inner states: beliefs, intentions, desires, identities.
But inner states are already differentiated. They presuppose the very individuation they claim to explain.
Appealing to the self explains who experiences differentiation, not how differentiation is produced and stabilised.
From a semiotic perspective, the psychological self is an outcome of patterned meaning-making, not its origin.
Individuation ≠ Social Role
Sociological accounts often equate individuation with role occupancy. Roles differentiate expectations and responsibilities, and this differentiation is real.
But roles are not individuals. They are institutionalised perspectives, designed precisely to be repeatable and transferable.
Explaining individuation by appeal to roles merely shifts the problem upward: how do particular trajectories become attached to particular positions within and across roles?
Reframing the Question
If individuation is not given by biology, psychology, or social structure, then it cannot be assumed as a starting point.
It must be explained.
The question is no longer:
How do individuals make meaning?
but:
How does meaning-making produce differentiated, relatively stable perspectives within a shared field of possibility?
This reframing shifts attention away from entities and toward processes — specifically, semiotic processes.
Individuation as Semiotic Phenomenon
To treat individuation as a semiotic phenomenon is to claim that it emerges through:
differential readiness
asymmetric commitment
patterned uptake
stabilised obligation
Perspectives become individuated not because they belong to different people, but because they are bound to different futures, embedded in different histories of meaning, and constrained by different semiotic environments.
Individuation, on this view, is not an ontological primitive. It is a relational achievement.
What This Makes Possible
By treating individuation as something that needs explaining, rather than something that does the explaining, we open up a different analytic space.
We can begin to trace:
how shared meaning potential differentiates
how commitments carve trajectories
how responsibility emerges without ownership
how perspectives stabilise without becoming substances
This is the work the rest of the series will undertake.
In the next post, we replace the individual altogether as the unit of analysis, and introduce perspective as the basic term — a position within meaning potential, not a bounded subject.
That move will allow individuation to be described without smuggling subjects back in under another name.
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