We commonly imagine society as something built from individuals.
The image feels straightforward.
First there are separate people.
Then those people interact.
Large numbers of interactions eventually produce families, communities, institutions, cultures, and societies.
Society appears to be an aggregate.
Individuals come first.
Society comes afterwards.
The image feels natural because it resembles familiar objects.
A pile of stones is made from stones.
A forest is made from trees.
A crowd is made from people.
The same logic is then projected onto social life.
Society appears to be a collection of individuals.
Yet familiar metaphors often conceal familiar assumptions.
The inherited construal
The inherited picture often assumes something like this:
- individuals exist independently
- individuals possess their own thoughts, values, and identities
- social relations arise between individuals
- society emerges as the sum of these relations
The image appears intuitive because it begins from what seems immediately visible.
One sees individual people.
One sees interactions among them.
The conclusion appears obvious.
Individuals seem primary.
Society seems secondary.
Social life becomes something added to an already completed individual world.
Yet something curious appears once we look more closely.
The hidden assumptions
How exactly does an isolated individual become a social individual?
Language is acquired through others.
Meanings emerge through interaction.
Practices, expectations, roles, and norms are learned through participation.
Even the categories through which individuals understand themselves are inherited socially.
One learns what counts as a parent, a friend, a profession, a nation, a promise, a success, or a failure.
Without such shared systems, much of what appears to belong to the individual becomes difficult even to formulate.
The supposedly independent individual begins to look strangely dependent upon relations that were assumed to be secondary.
The image starts to wobble.
The fracture
A further problem appears.
If society were simply a collection of individuals, then removing relations should leave individuals largely intact.
Yet social disruption often transforms individuals profoundly.
Changes in institutions alter behaviour.
Changes in relationships alter identity.
Changes in language alter possibilities for meaning.
The social environment does not merely surround individuals.
It participates in shaping the conditions through which individuality itself emerges.
The supposedly independent units begin to lose their apparent independence.
Perhaps the problem lies in imagining individuals as complete objects existing prior to social relations.
The inversion
Suppose society is not built from pre-existing individuals.
Suppose instead that individuals and societies emerge together through ongoing relations.
On such a view, society would not be a structure imposed upon already completed persons.
Nor would individuals merely disappear into an undifferentiated collective.
Rather, individuality itself would emerge through participation in social processes.
Society would not be a collection.
It would be an ongoing organisation of relations through which distinguishable individuals become possible.
The inversion appears subtle.
Yet its implications are substantial.
Consequences
If society is relational rather than aggregative, then social life changes character.
The question is no longer:
How do separate individuals come together to form society?
The question becomes:
How do social relations and individuality continually co-emerge?
Relationships cease to appear as external connections between independent units.
They become constitutive conditions.
Individuality itself changes character.
Individuals remain distinguishable.
Lives remain personal.
Differences remain real.
But individuality becomes something continually actualised within relations rather than something possessed in isolation.
The world begins to look slightly different.
People remain.
Communities remain.
Societies remain.
But perhaps society was never a pile of individuals assembled together.
Perhaps individuals and societies were always emerging together within the ongoing organisation of relations.
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