The preceding posts have performed a series of withdrawals.
What remains is a problem that can no longer be avoided:
what, if anything, becomes of “the human”?
If the human cannot be treated as a unified bearer of biology, sociality, and meaning, how is it to be described?
The answer will not restore the lost unity.
It will replace it with something less familiar:
the human as intersection.
1. Against the Unified Subject
The most persistent residue of the earlier framework is the figure of the subject.
Even when the “symbolic animal” is questioned, the subject often remains: a locus in which different domains come together, a centre that integrates biological processes, social relations, and meanings into a single perspective.
This figure appears difficult to dislodge because it seems to correspond to experience. There is, after all, a sense in which “I” act, perceive, and mean.
But this sense of unity cannot be taken as a theoretical starting point.
It is itself an effect—one that must be accounted for, not assumed.
To treat the subject as a ground is to reintroduce, in condensed form, the very unification that has already been rejected.
2. No Single Site
If there is no unified subject, there is no single site at which biological, social, and semiotic systems converge.
This requires a shift in how “the human” is located.
It is not:
an organism that also participates in society and meaning
a social being that also has a body and uses language
a meaning-maker grounded in life and interaction
Each of these formulations presupposes a single entity to which different properties are attributed.
The framework developed here does not support such an entity.
3. Intersection as Relation, Not Place
To speak of intersection is not to name a point where systems meet, as if they were lines crossing on a surface.
It is to describe a relation of alignment across distinct systems.
An intersection occurs when:
a biological instantiation
a social instantiation
a semiotic instantiation
are aligned in such a way that they can be treated, in practice, as belonging together.
This alignment is what is ordinarily recognised as “a person acting,” “a speaker meaning,” “an individual participating.”
But the unity is not prior to the alignment.
It is produced by it.
4. The Distribution of the “Human”
Once described in this way, “the human” ceases to be a bounded entity.
It becomes distributed across systems.
In biological terms, it is a pattern of viable states.
In social terms, it is a position within relations of coordination.
In semiotic terms, it is a locus of construal within a system of meaning.
These do not coincide by necessity. They are brought into alignment through coupling.
What is called “a human being” is a relatively stable configuration of such alignments.
5. Stability and Its Effects
The stability of these configurations is what gives rise to the impression of a unified individual.
When alignments persist:
biological processes remain within viable ranges
social relations maintain recognisable patterns
semiotic activity exhibits continuity of construal
this stability can be reified as a single entity: a person with an identity, a perspective, a set of properties.
But this reification is an effect of coupling.
It does not license the inference that there is an underlying unity that produces it.
6. Disruptions
The account becomes clearer when alignment fails.
Consider situations in which:
biological processes disrupt social participation
social disalignment interrupts semiotic activity
semiotic breakdown alters coordination
In such cases, the apparent unity of the “human” fractures.
What was taken to be a single entity reveals itself as a set of misaligned processes.
These disruptions are often treated as deviations from a norm. Here, they are analytically instructive.
They show that unity is contingent, not given.
7. No Core, No Essence
If the human is an intersection, it has no core that exists independently of its instantiations.
There is no essence that persists beneath biological change, social variation, or shifts in meaning.
This does not imply that anything goes, or that identities are arbitrary.
It implies that whatever stability exists is the result of recurrent alignment across systems, not the expression of an underlying substance.
8. Rethinking Agency
One of the most immediate consequences concerns agency.
If there is no unified subject, who or what acts?
The question is misposed.
Action is not the output of a central agent. It is the outcome of aligned instantiations across systems.
biological processes enable movement
social configurations position that movement within interaction
semiotic construals give it meaning
To attribute the action to a single “agent” is to compress this alignment into a point.
The compression is useful in practice. It is misleading in analysis.
9. The Persistence of the Person
Despite this analysis, the concept of the person will not disappear.
Nor should it.
It functions effectively within social and semiotic systems. It organises responsibility, identity, continuity. It provides a stable reference for interaction and meaning.
The point is not to eliminate it, but to relocate it.
The person is not the ground of the systems.
It is a product of their coupling.
10. After the Intersection
To think of the human as intersection is to accept a certain loss.
The reassuring image of a unified being—grounded in life, expressed in society, articulated in meaning—is no longer available.
In its place is a more fragmented, more contingent account:
no single site
no underlying unity
no essence
What remains is a pattern:
recurrent alignments across distinct systems,stabilised enough to appear as a being.
This is not a redefinition of the human.
It is a refusal of the demand that such a definition be possible.
What we call “the human” does not name a thing that can be described in itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment