Again a long post (sorry ’bout that).
Huh?
Anthropologists like Marylin Strathern (1988) or philosophers like Gilles Deleuze (1992:5) and Felix Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 341–343) make a distinction between the “individual” and the “dividual”. For Deleuze, building on Foucault, the individual was the result of a disciplinary society aimed at regulating the bodies of its members. Now, however, this disciplinary society (having the factory as its model) has evolved into a society of control (modeled after the corporation). Such a society of control comes about as an incessant modulation of floating numerical codes that monitor its members and force them to continuously ‘divide’ themselves in order to gain or retain access to information and services. Even though Deleuze did not use these terms (he wrote long before the spectacular rise of the internet and before the advent of Big Data), his understanding of the dividual refers to the pressure people experience to continuously come up with new on- and offline identities and avatars. In this understanding, dividuality then refers to an ongoing fragmentation of the subject in response to the pressures of late capitalism. A similar analysis was made by Fredric Jameson (1997), especially then in his critique of the lack of depth of postmodern artistic production (also see Strauss 1997).
Whereas Deleuze focuses on the fragmented individual –the dividual– as a figure to ground his moral philosophy and critique of late capitalism, anthropologists such as Marylin Strathern (1988: 13, 287), in contrast, understand the dividual as a form of relational personhood.
Do note that this formulation differs considerably from the adagio by the sociologist George Herbert Mead that the self consists of an “I” and a “Me” (the internalized other), a distinction that roughly corresponds to Freud’s distinction between the Ego and the Superego. According to Mead, “We cannot be ourselves unless we are also members.” (Mead 1972, 163).
At the same time, Strathern argues against the common, western, opposition of individual versus society:
Far from being regarded as unique entities, Melanesian persons are as dividually as they are individually conceived. They contain a generalized sociality within. Indeed, persons are frequently constructed as the plural and composite site of the relationships that produced them” (Strathern 1988: 13).
As she sees persons as an embodiment of a generalized sociality, Strathern conceives of dividualism and individualism as a continuum, a tension present in each society. In the same vein, Marshal Sahlins (2011a:13) rightly warns us that we should not perceive the dividual as a pre-modern (or post-modern) form of personhood; for him, the dividual capacity of the self is the basis of all human relations. Dividuality implies co-being: an intersubjective relationality (Sahlins 2011b: 227), between people who are intrinsic to one another’s existence (Sahlins 2011a: 2), “a co-presence (…) in the transpersonal unities of bodies” (Sahlins 2011a: 11). We are relationships.
Strathern, who popularized the concept in anthropology, cites McKim Mariott as her source of inspiration: “[single actors] are not thought in South Asia to be ‘individual’, that is, indivisible, bounded units, as they are in much of Western social and psychological theory as well as in common sense. Instead, it appears that persons are generally thought by South Asians to be ‘dividual’ or divisible. To exist, dividual persons absorb heterogeneous material influences. They must also give out from themselves panicles of their own coded substances –essences, residues, or other active influences-that may men reproduce in others something of the nature of the persons in whom they have originated” (Marriott 1976, 111, cited in Strathern 1988: 348). Sahlins traces the genealogy of the concept back to Roger Bastide as the author who, having worked initially in Melanesia, was the first to discuss notions of (African) personhood in terms of its divisibility: “[H]e does not exist except in the measure he is ‘outside’ and ‘different’ than himself” (Bastide 1973, 38, cited in Sahlins 2011a: 10).
Modernist discourse places ideological and hegemonic emphasis on the individual as the outcome, or even goal, of a process of modernization or development, as the inevitable product of history. Battaglia (1995: 3, 7), for one, points out that the image of an unchanging and universal self is part of a dominant ideology that associates individuality with modernization and a sociocentric personality with either traditionalism or nostalgia. In neoliberalist ideology, this individual is the smallest building block and unit of analysis, the cornerstone and yardstick by which to measure the progress of society. This is the individual as an ideological concept, indivisible and hence irreducible to something else, a self-referential and self-evident datum and essence.
Postmodern thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari or Jameson, in contrast, point towards the growing distance between this political and cultural ideal and the fragmentation people experience under late capitalism, and hence the increasing need to keep all these fragments of self together, to integrate them into a more or less meaningful whole. The dividual here then appears as the shattered dream of individual emancipation, the shattering itself a product of recent developments in (Western) societies.
However, anthropological scholars such as Strathern or Sahlins posit a different perspective on the dividual/ individual divide. They focus on how people understand and experience personhood and describe the dividual not as a form of fragmentation, but as a set of relationships, a node in a meshwork, in which (at least part of) the person is not a self-referential essence but always refers to others, to what is outside, not a singleton but a multiplicity in a continuous state of flux that escapes final definition (which, perhaps, partly explains why the concept of identity, despite its popularity nowadays, has proven to be notoriously hard to pin down). One important difference between these authors and the critics of late capitalism cited above, then, is that dividual and individual tendencies exist everywhere and are not limited to or characteristic of postmodern or late capitalist societies. Societies do differ, however, in the extent that their dominant ideology emphasizes either one of the poles of the dividual-individual continuum.
The dividual, in other words, may mean (at least) three different things. For Deleuze it is part of his social critique and philosophy, as he observes that under late capitalism (or neoliberalism) a growing emphasis on individuation leads to fragmentation and loss. For Strathern and Sahlins, dividuality refers to local, cultural, understandings of personhood that situate its source on the ‘outside’, in the relationships one has (with others, living or deceased, but also with, for instance, animals, or objects). This dividuality, however, is but one pole in a continuum of how people experience their self. A third meaning then is a similar tension that plays at the level of ideology –the extent to which societies endorse one pole over the other. It is especially because of this second meaning that my interlocutors insisted on being photographed “whole”, and that the garments and jewellery that linked them to their others would be part of the picture. It also was one of the reasons why I decided to mask the personae in Six Circles –to underline the dividuality of the actors in this graphic novel.
This post is based Van Wolputte, Steven. 2020. Masking and the Dividual: An Exploration. In Revisionen des Porträts: Jenseits von Mimesis und Repräsentation, edited by T. Greub. Paderborn: Brill, Wilhelm Fink, pp. 55–72.
References
Roger Bastide, Roger (1973): Le principe d’individuation (contribution à une philosophie africaine). In: La notion de personne en Afrique Noire, Colloque International du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique544. Paris 1973: pp. 33–43.
Battaglia, Debbora (1995): Problematizing the self: a thematic introduction. In Rhetorics of self-making, edited by Debbora Battaglia. Berkeley: University of California Press: pp. 1–15.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gilles Deleuze (1992). Postscript on the Societies of Control. October 59: 3–7.
Marriott, McKim (1976). Hindu transactions: diversity without dualism. In Transaction and Meaning (ASA Essays in Anthropology 1), edited by Bruce Kapferer. Philadelphia: univ. Pennsylvania Press: pp. 109–142.
Mead, George H. (1972 [1934]). Mind, self and society. Chicago University Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 2011a. What kinship is (part one). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17 (1):2–19.
Sahlins, Marshall. 2011b. What kinship is (part two). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17 (2):227–242.
Strathern, Marilyn (1988). The gender of the gift. Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. Berkeley: Univ. California Press.
Strauss, Claudia (1997). Partly fragmented, partly integrated: an anthropological examination of “postmodern” fragmented subjects. Cultural Anthropology 12 (3): 362–404.
anthrographics 