Art as Biography (original) (raw)

Constellations and Coordinates In our globalized world, the idea of the individual and the contours of the self have become increasingly permeable while at the same time hardened. The tensions between the qualities of the fluid and the fixed, the flows of information and the landlocked mines of precious metals, the orthodox and the psychedelic, perception management and predictive analytics of big data, what can be and what is, such contractions are found in these same said individuals, para-states, social groups, nations and corporations. All of this raises the question that perhaps the very idea of the individual has been an illusion. And as powerful and empowering the idea of the individual has been, perhaps it’s time to put it to rest or at the very least refigure it again. How can we conceptualize an idea of a single individual in a specific moment and time when the individual is continually composed and decomposed by other individuals by processes of constant movements of association and repulsion? If individual things (res singulares) exist only as a consequence of the existence of other individual things (EIP28), with which they participate in an infinite network of connections (Balibar 1997:27). Notice here that this also implies that causality must not be understood in the sense of a linear succession of events, but rather as a multiplicity of connections of causal links between individuals, which are made up of more simple and more complex individuals all causally related.... Otherwise said, every individual is constantly composed and decomposed by other individuals with which it enters into contact through a process of individuation, which involves both the infra-individual and the supra-individual levels (Balibar 1997:27). And it is in order to render this complexity and plurality that Balibar argued individuality must be understood as a transindividuality (For those who like to trace the origins of this ontology of the transindividual, Balibar draws inspiration from Gilbert Simondon’s L’individuation psychique et collective). Individuals thus understood are therefore never atoms, events, let alone subjects, given once for all. They are processes, the result of constant movements of association and repulsion that connect more simple individuals with other simple individuals, but also with more complex ones that constantly do and undo a body. (Chiara Bottici, “Bodies in plural: Towards an anarcha-feminist manifesto,” talking about Etienne Balibar’s Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality)