Outlining the Problem
Even before matters of personal perspectivation come into play, we humans have to begin with the insight that we are born blind, if only because our organs of perception absorb only a very narrow range of physical light and sound waves. Today, mediatic methods of observation and expanded cognitive interests, macro- and microscopic technologies, gazes rendered keener by eco(techno)logical concerns (as well as appropriations and valorisations by the mechanisms of control) lead us to the insight that we are far more blind than we suspected. Only a vanishingly small fraction of what occurs around us and passes through us enters into our conventionally individualised self-understanding. After all, we do not continually pan like film cameras, instead tending to focus on what is most proximate to us and segment events from our own eye level, thus failing to notice most of the things that co-exist subliminally within our visual and auditory field: most of what happens to us and passes through us is below our threshold of perception. We barely begin to sense how many orders of events not attuned to human perception we are involved in.
As today’s critical epistemological perspective teaches us, contemporary becoming-world needs to be understood as an expanded “principle of relativity,”1 one that constrains us to adopt perspectives informed by various lenses and to direct them at the multi-scalar levels of the real, at biological, sociological, anthropological and artistic levels, with no level’s structure able to be represented on another level or grasped by means of the same cognitive framework. Advancing into the realm of the infinitely small, microscopic observation and recording instruments demonstrate the impotence of our capacity for visualisation and tell us of micro-organic processes that human existence is linked to without being aware of it. By focusing on the little-noticed substratum of human existence, they report that living organisms far below our threshold of perception inhabit us and contribute to our psycho-physical constitution. We are informed that we are intergrown with “a thousand billion friends” (Ackerman 2012) and have been allocated to unknown spatio-temporal order systems and their dynamics. Our senses do not conceive of or perceive them. Moreover, the new bio-technologies hold that they can calculate and demonstrate that we share a large portion of our genetic dispositions with non-human others. The articulation of genes is also said to be performed by micro-organisms, viruses and parasites that respond to temporalisation values and use copy-and-paste procedures to translate genetic information into a complex networked structure—thereby contributing to the articulation of our destiny. As if that weren’t enough, we are called upon to think of ourselves as integrated into and partly determined by bio-chemical circuits and the internal dynamics of comprehensive ecosystems, before imagining ourselves placed within a multi-dimensional universe, whose relations of force also co-determine us.
On the macroscopic-anthropomorphic level, the promise of increased vitality prompts us to joyfully insert ourselves into worldwide communications and mediatised forms of becoming-world-society. Thanks to highly potent interconnection and storage devices, we enter into time-consuming and emotionally intense relations of interdependence with human and technological others; we create virtual alliances for the purposes of stimulating interest, accessing information or coordinating action. We experience ourselves as affectively and cognitively linked to strangers, participating in their intimate utterances or acts of protest, and we vitalise ourselves by means of imaginary participation in their activity. Comprehensive self-care and self-government: that is the implicit promise of the palm-sized global interconnection device!
Recently, of course, we have become more aware of how the very technological apparatuses that bring about a spatio-temporal potentiation of our relationship to ourselves, carrying us off on virtual walks across foreign beaches or through exquisite galleries and fuelling our fantasies of self-empowerment through unrestricted connectedness and, most importantly, our self-chosen multiplication of possibilities for democratic participation, also unwittingly affect, condition and help subjectivate us, on a level far below our threshold of awareness. After all, the sensory apparatus of digital devices not only affects our psycho-physical constitution as imperceptible micro-organisms and other environmental factors do, it also latches onto our capacities for sentiment, perception and thought, coalesces with our neuronal micro-structure and determines the way we manage our time and our affects. It models our self-perception by means of text message responses, modifies our allocation of attention, even anticipates our autonomous choice through our motion and interest profiles. As externalised “intelligibilisation” of passive-active sensors and actants it co-determines communication and is becoming increasingly independent of human actors.
Trumping even Foucault’s and Deleuze’s assumptions on the “societies of control, ” our global interconnection devices turn out to be fine-tuned conditioning instruments that remember our digital operations and even anticipate them with an eye to their possible valorisation; every mouse click on the web and even unsent messages become material for a statistically exploitable data archive. In the interests of capitalisable bio- and social politics, the individual address is spatio-temporally fixed, via an electronic trace, and registered as a metadatum; if required, it can then be selected as a piece of information associated with a certain subset and targeted with materials from advertising firms. Given adequate focus, the recorded information can yield insight on social problems and even future developments the communicator himself knows nothing about. Thus human subjectivation becomes recognisable as one element within a pattern of utterance, as an “individual type” that is betrayed by its questions and whose future behaviour can be anticipated. In this sense, Mark Hansen describes what remains of “human agency as […] contained […] within a multi-scalar cosmological context. […] Far from being an independent source of power that is […] somehow cut off from the rest of the world, human agency operates as a configuration […] within larger configurations” (Hansen 2011). Given the efficacy and spatio-temporal dynamism of such larger configurations, it appears increasingly puzzling that single persons persist in imagining themselves as “independent sources of power,” as undivided and unmistakable individuals.
We are far from being familiar with the processes of bio- and socio(techno)logical appropriation into multi-scalar quantities that we find ourselves subject to by virtue of our passive-active participation, and we are not necessarily confident with or fond of them. The question that can no longer be elided is: How, in the face of all this, can we still think of ourselves as actors and co-creators of our participations?
Certainly, the question of degree of social involvement and self-choice of participation poses itself ever more urgently for those segments of the population that are excluded from social co-determination by virtue of being excluded from the labour process, through illness or a lack of financial possibilities for participation.
The question poses itself on a grander scale with regard to the politico-economic and technological inequalities that characterise the distribution of participatory opportunities on the global level. Here we must see how the organisation of becoming-world-society occurs via different forms of passivisation of the desire for participation, and through a denial of offers of participation, a reality that leads to increasingly harsh economic divisions and growing inequalities between populations.
In summary, the anthropos appears today as an entity that is possessed, administered and co-constituted by a variety of others, with a need for the passenger consciousness perspective to recognise itself as inserted into the apparatuses proper to various orders of magnitude. Agamben sketches the contemporary development of apparatuses under the heading of capitalism as one in which “there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modelled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus” (Agamben 2009, p. 15). Already fundamentally alienated from itself because its survival and prosperity depends on human others, and co-constituted, in its psychic reality, by the speech acts and unconscious habits of said others, the anthropos appears today to be self-alienated to a still higher degree, due to its insight into multi-scalar intertwinings. On various epistemological levels, it is compelled to take note of a co-determination by non-human and technological others. This insight has recently prompted it to construct ever more comprehensive epistemological framings, so as to come to terms with humanity’s special status and reassess the importance of non-human actants, but also to bio-technologically instrumentalise human material. Development of an extended “sense of self-alienation”2—one capable of confronting the facts of multiple participation and dividedness by others on a more fundamental level than that of established sensations and self-perceptions, one that can extract the epistemological and pragmatic consequences—presents itself as an unavoidable necessity. This sense of self-alienation would have the difficult task of establishing a balance between desired and non-desired multi-directional participations , thus compensating for the circumstance that the anthropos cannot deliberately confront the imperceptible co-determinants of its vital destiny or transfer their unsolicited contributions into any sort of symbolisation of conflict.
In light of these contrary aspects, participation reveals itself to be a highly ambivalent value: it may signify a desired connection, an aimed-for transfer of knowledge or an affirmed alliance and presence in other places, or harsh separation, involuntary bio- and socio(techno)logical appropriations and the undesired presence of others in “our” place. It offers an opportunity to multi-directionally expand the power of individual humans, dynamising the development of one’s capacities, experimenting with the long-distance effects of the tiniest finger flicks and organising one’s own unique becoming-world starting from a minimal point in space. Accordingly, Giorgio Agamben speaks of the “extreme proliferation in processes of subjectivation,” of their “dissemination” (Agamben 2009, p. 15). This multiplication of subjectivation processes does not, however, entail increased individuation . On the contrary, it is precisely the continuously increasing practice of participation that undermines claims to indivisibility and uniqueness. It produces major areas of bio- and socio(techno)logical intersection with variously sized others. It reveals itself as being produced and divided by the existence both of non-humans and of technological devices and their algorithmic annexations. Practices shared with enormous masses of people, parallel and similarly paced interconnections, pieces of information, moods and affects simultaneously consumed by innumerable and unknown others—involuntary bio- and socio-technological participations all make us appear powerful artists of subdivision who have long since forfeited all claims to uniqueness. Today, we assure ourselves of our own identities not so much in self-enclosed collectivities as through participation in varied, perhaps culturally different structures that are themselves shifting and only temporarily consistent; a new personal pronoun, one situated between the collective “We” and the individualised “I,” would be needed to identify the person within whom these interrelations converge. It is precisely observable desires for increased participation and particularly tailored optimisations of participation that argue for relinquishing outdated self-descriptions and conceptually embracing the new subjectivations—via the term “dividuation.”
The term suggests cuts und divisions, but is intended to describe qualitatively diverse, variously paced, but analogous processes of participation—processes that extend the single person into new orders of space and time by interlinking and synchronising the single person with others and complicating the single person’s sense of coherence. They give individual existence a hitherto unconceived-of plasticity and mutability, but also a precarious psycho-physical stability. Overall, they suggest a self-conception that can be summarised thus: qualified undividable multiple dividedness.
Insight into the degree to which our existence is involved in variously sized dimensions of reality provides us with our starting point. Implicated in major and minor processes that are only partly transparent, we are participants in a becoming-world that is restrictedly examined here, on Planet Earth, in spite of the speculative assumption of pluriverses and imaginary excursions into outer space; this becoming-world already appears complex enough. The self-contained, independent and unambiguously localisable nature of not only individual human but also of natural, social and artistic circumstances is today being put into question. They are all situated in expanded configurations that contribute to bringing them about, traverse them, and prompt them to enter into transversal and possibly genus-foreign combinations, configurations whose independence is threatened—the entire field of epistemological distinctions and scientific divisions has become fluid. It is not only human identities, but also ecological and social structures and sequences associated with production technologies and artistic processes that are being multiply subdivided, multi-directionally oriented, traversed, cohabited or co-constituted by others, making questionable their individuality and the possibility of clearly delimiting them. Thus (in Chaps. 4, 5 and 6), contemporary discourses of biology, sociology and aesthetic theory will be examined in terms of their epistemological redefinitions and the problematising of the relationship between undividedness and divisibility. Bruno Latour speaks of “tangled” objects, whose mutually “implicated” nature needs to be reconceptualised.3 After all, the fact that what has hitherto been taxonomically distinct is now recognisable as being in reality inseparable entails insights into differentiated indistinguishability. Depending on a given mode of observation, the detachment of so-called individuals is possible only with a traditional and narrow epistemological framing and at the cost of violently isolating single persons. Dividuations and dividual relationships are differentiated according to the epistemic level chosen; they cannot be deduced from an overarching cognitive framework. Rather, and by virtue of their diversity, they call for specific forms of observation that accentuate the micro- and macro-structural heterogeneity of their interrelationship. However, their discovery and the possibility of differentiating them, in fact their very emergence, owes itself largely to today’s degree of technological sophistication, which is why I will speak here of socio(techno)logical but also of artistic dividuations.
In light of this, my brief reconstruction of the conceptual history of the “individual” (Chap. 2) is intended as a reminder that the notion of unvarying and indivisible ultimate units, a notion that has been elaborated within philosophy for more than ...