In the previous post, the individual was displaced by perspective as the unit of analysis. Individuation was reframed as perspectival differentiation within a shared field of meaning potential.
That move, however, leaves an open question:
Where does such differentiation actually stabilise?
If perspectives are positional, overlapping, and potentially transient, what allows them to endure long enough to matter?
The answer is commitment.
Returning to Commitment
Earlier in this project, commitment was analysed as the transition from meaning readiness to binding futures. Commitment stabilises what was previously negotiable. It makes withdrawal costly, deviation salient, and alignment expected.
Here, that same phenomenon takes on a further role.
Commitment is not only a way that meaning becomes binding. It is also the primary site at which individuation occurs.
Binding Futures, Diverging Trajectories
When a future becomes binding, it does more than constrain action. It differentiates trajectories.
Two perspectives may inhabit the same semiotic climate and participate in the same interaction, yet be bound to different futures:
one obligated to deliver
another obligated to respond
another obligated to justify
From that moment on, their paths diverge.
Individuation begins not with difference in identity, but with difference in what must now be carried forward.
Uneven Constraint on Readiness
Commitment does not constrain all perspectives equally.
A binding future may:
foreclose options for one perspective
intensify readiness for another
barely register for a third
This uneven constraint is crucial.
As commitments accumulate, readiness becomes increasingly differentiated. Some futures arrive as heavy with obligation; others remain light, optional, or unavailable.
What looks like difference in disposition is, from this view, difference in binding history.
Stabilisation Over Time
Perspectives stabilise not because they are internally coherent, but because commitments persist.
Once bound, a future:
structures subsequent uptake
conditions expectation
shapes what counts as deviation
Over time, these constraints sediment. A perspective acquires duration, not through essence, but through temporal continuity of obligation.
Individuation, here, is a temporal achievement.
Sediment, Not Source
This allows us to reverse a familiar assumption.
It is tempting to think that individuals commit because of who they are. On that view, commitment expresses identity.
From the present perspective, the direction runs the other way.
Commitments sediment into trajectories, and trajectories stabilise perspectives. What later appears as identity is an effect of accumulated binding.
Individuation is not the cause of commitment. It is its residue.
You Are What You Are Bound To
This leads to a simple but unsettling formulation:
You are individuated by what you are bound to — not by what you “are”.
This does not deny embodiment, psychology, or biography. It relocates their explanatory force.
What differentiates perspectives is not their intrinsic properties, but the futures they cannot easily step away from.
Relational and Temporal Individuation
Seen this way, individuation is neither intrinsic nor instantaneous.
It is:
relational, because it arises from shared semiotic fields
temporal, because it depends on the persistence of binding
revisable, because commitments can sometimes be renegotiated
But it is also durable. Some bindings are hard to undo, and their effects extend far beyond the interactions in which they were formed.
Looking Ahead
If individuation stabilises through commitment, a further question follows.
Commitments bind, but they also allocate responsibility. And responsibility, as we have already seen, does not always sit neatly with persons.
In the next post, we will examine responsibility without ownership, showing how obligation distributes ethical weight across perspectives, roles, and institutions — and how this further complicates any subject-centred account of individuation.
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