Across this series, individuation has been progressively displaced: first from biology, then from psychology, then from subjects and ownership. What remains to be made explicit is the positive alternative.
This post articulates that alternative directly.
Individuation is not a split between the individual and the collective. It is a cline — a graded differentiation within a single field of meaning potential.
The Mistaken Opposition
Most social theory inherits a basic opposition:
either the individual is primary and society is derived
or the collective is primary and individuals are its effects
Both positions presuppose that “individual” and “collective” are opposed kinds of thing.
From the perspective developed here, this opposition is a category error.
There is only meaning potential — and different cuts through it.
Meaning Potential as Collective
Meaning potential is inherently collective.
Not because it belongs to a group, but because it exceeds any local instantiation. It is the structured space of semiotic possibility available within a culture, institution, or interactional ecology.
This potential is not yet individuated. It is shared, ambient, and plural.
At this level, nothing like an “individual” exists — only availability.
Differentiated Readiness
Individuation begins with differentiated readiness.
Within the same collective potential, different perspectives exhibit:
different sensitivities to futures
different thresholds of obligation
different propensities for uptake
Readiness is never evenly distributed. It is already patterned by history, position, and prior modulation.
This differentiation is the first gradient along the individuation cline.
Perspectival Commitment
Readiness alone does not individuate.
Individuation sharpens where readiness becomes commitment — where futures bind unevenly across perspectives.
Commitments:
stabilise certain trajectories
foreclose alternative possibilities
sediment histories that constrain future readiness
At this point, perspectives begin to diverge decisively. They are no longer merely differently poised; they are differently bound.
Singular Trajectories
At the far end of the cline lie singular trajectories.
These are not “individuals” in the metaphysical sense. They are paths through meaning potential that have become sufficiently stabilised to be treated as unitary.
What appears as an individual is:
a perspectival trajectory
carrying a distinctive history of commitments
embedded within ongoing collective potential
Singularity is an effect of stabilisation, not a primitive.
The Full Cline
We can now state the individuation cline explicitly:
Each phase is a transformation of the same potential, not the emergence of a new substance.
There is no point at which “the collective” ends and “the individual” begins.
Reciprocal Actualisation
Individuals and collectives are reciprocal actualisations of meaning potential.
Collectives are visible where potential remains open and shared.
Individuals are visible where potential has been differentially bound and stabilised.
Neither precedes the other. Each makes the other intelligible.
Cuts, Not Entities
The decisive correction, then, is this:
There is no opposition between individual and collective — only different cuts through the same potential.
These cuts are perspectival, not ontological. They depend on readiness, commitment, and stabilisation — not on substance, essence, or interior selfhood.
Individuation Repositioned
With the cline in view, individuation is finally placed where it belongs.
It is not a property of organisms.
It is not an achievement of selves.
It is a perspectival cut within relational meaning potential, produced through modulation, commitment, and time.
Closing the Series
This completes the displacement begun in Post 1.
Individuation has been reframed as:
relational rather than intrinsic
temporal rather than static
semiotic rather than psychological
What remains is not a theory of persons, but a theory of how persons become thinkable at all — as one outcome among many within the becoming of possibility.
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