Across this series, individuation has been displaced from its most familiar home: the sovereign subject. That displacement is conceptually clean — and yet, the subject keeps trying to come back.
This final post does not reopen the debate. It inoculates the framework against a predictable regression.
The Seduction of the Subject
Subject-centred explanations are seductive for good reasons.
They appear to offer:
a clear locus of agency
a stable bearer of responsibility
an intuitive unit for explanation
When something happens, it feels natural to ask: who did it? When something goes wrong: who is responsible?
The subject seems to answer these questions effortlessly.
What the Subject Appears to Explain
Invoking subjects seems to explain:
why actions are coherent over time
why obligations stick
why trajectories diverge
why accountability feels personal
In short, the subject looks like a convenient compression device — a way of bundling continuity, commitment, and responsibility into a single figure.
But convenience is not explanation.
What the Subject Actually Obscures
By starting with subjects, we obscure the very phenomena we want to understand.
Subject-centred accounts typically:
presuppose individuation instead of explaining it
repackage commitment as intention
treat obligation as psychological ownership
collapse semiotic processes into interior states
The subject explains by naming, not by analysing.
It hides the relational machinery behind a familiar label.
The Re-entry Problem
Even after careful theoretical displacement, subjects tend to reappear through the back door.
They re-enter as:
agents behind commitments
owners of responsibility
sources of obligation
containers of meaning
This re-entry is not accidental. It reflects the fact that subject-talk is deeply sedimented in everyday language, institutional practice, and moral discourse.
Recognising this sedimentation helps us resist it.
Doing the Explanatory Work Without Subjects
The central claim of this series is not that subjects are illusory or forbidden.
It is that they are explanatory shortcuts, not foundational units.
The real explanatory work is done elsewhere:
readiness explains orientation to futures
commitment explains stabilisation over time
modulation explains obligation and responsibility
perspectival differentiation explains individuation
Once these processes are visible, the subject becomes redundant.
Why the Semiotic Account Is Stronger
The semiotic account outperforms subject-centred explanations because it:
explains how obligation arises without ownership
explains continuity without identity
explains differentiation without separation
explains agency without interior will
Nothing essential is lost.
What is lost is mystification.
Subjects as Effects, Not Causes
Within this framework, subjects can still be talked about — but only as effects.
A “subject” names:
a sufficiently stabilised perspectival trajectory
with a recognisable history of commitments
embedded in collective meaning potential
Subjects are outcomes of individuation, not its engines.
Why We Don’t Need Them
We do not need subjects to:
ground responsibility
explain agency
account for ethical weight
analyse social coordination
All of this work is already accomplished by semiotic processes operating across time and relation.
Invoking subjects adds familiarity, not insight.
Confidence, Not Defiance
This series does not reject subjects out of contrarian impulse.
It simply shows that once meaning is treated as relational, perspectival, and temporally binding, subjects no longer do any necessary theoretical work.
They may still appear in discourse.
They no longer need to appear in explanation.
Closing Remark
Individuation, we have seen, is not the story of how subjects emerge from nowhere.
It is the story of how meaning becomes differentiated, bound, and stabilised over time.
Subjects are one way that story is told.
They are not the story itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment