Social Discomposition and the Nature of Individuality

Introduction

Georg Simmel writes that the “deepest problems of modern life” arise from the individual’s effort to maintain the “independence and individuality of his existence.”¹ Simmel’s formulation conceives the individual as one who must preserve itself against the social world it inherits. While representative of the anecdotal condition of the human, this formulation risks being interpreted as treating “independence” and “individuality” as ontological predispositions. However, under analytical investigation, these properties do not appear to exist as ontological primitives, nor as self-evident features of the human condition. Rather, they are devices of abstraction by which thought distinguishes between the individual and its external field of relation – a field through which the individual itself is constituted.

As the human abstractly defines its interior field, that field becomes inherently susceptible to discomposition – not decomposition, but “discomposition.” It is not that this interior field is susceptible to destruction. Rather, it possesses an inherent tendency to return to its baseline form, realigning itself with the prior mode of existence from which it was displaced by the exterior social field. Under analysis of the universal world within which Simmel’s conception must exist, the individual is never simply “isolated” from its external field of relation. In fact, it devotes itself to preserving a conceptual distinction of its individuality and continuously pulls this conception away from its original alignment with the reality that it attempts to represent. This tendency of the conception of individuality to return toward its baseline form may be referred to as “social discomposition.”

Misattribution of Dyadic Reduction

This common misconception – that individuality is an inherent property of the human, and that it can be understood apart from its aligned baseline form – results from a reduction of the conception of the nature of social reactivity within the human. Discussion of human reactivity often reduces social encounter to a solely dyadic phenomenon: one individual affects, while another is affected. Under such a model, one individual is defined as the active agent in the shifting of the receptive agent’s stabilized structure of actualization: A affects B, and B reacts to A. Such a model may be analytically useful as a heuristic fiction, but it becomes misleading when the conception is reified – when what begins as an analytical simplification is mistaken for a concrete structure of social reality.

In this context, Max Scheler’s conception of such a relationship provides a basis for challenging this reduction, insofar as he insists that one person’s feeling and another person’s participation in that feeling remain distinct phenomenological facts.² Scheler writes: “Fellow-feeling proper, actual ‘participation,’ presents itself in the very phenomenon as a re-action to the state and value of the other’s feelings – as these are ‘visualized’ in the vicarious feeling. Thus in this case the two functions of vicariously visualized feeling, and participation in feeling are separately given and must be sharply distinguished. Very many descriptions of fellow-feeling suffer from failure to make this distinction.”³

Scheler’s distinction allows the dyadic model to be questioned more precisely. A and B may stand in relation to one another, but their relation is not reducible to any form of “direct transfer.” Both are pressured by a shared field of “co-affection”: whereas dyadic reduction treats the individual as the primary unit of reaction, co-affection suggests that both individuals are co-oriented by a mediating field. This mediating field is where the abstract conception of individuality seemingly lies, logically entailing that, if the abstract conception lies there, then the mediating field itself is also a field of abstraction. While phenomenologically distinguishable, within this mediating field, the individual is not distinguished from the external field of relation. Social discomposition begins when the abstract conception of individuality deviates from its baseline form – a baseline form located within reality itself, and therefore not distinguishable from the external field of relation. Once such a deviation emerges, the human must devote particular effort not only to its further deviation but also to its maintenance. However, as the force of this effort weakens, the abstract conception of individuality naturally tends back toward its baseline form.

The Fluidity of Social Proximity

Accordingly, the force of this effort seemingly weakens under the presence of other individuals. However, social presence within the context of social discomposition cannot be reduced simply to physical nearness or conscious awareness – a point that does not exist without precedent. Edward T. Hall’s Proxemics shows that spatial experience is not a neutral datum, but a culturally patterned mode of perception. For Hall, the senses do not simply receive the same world in the same way; rather, they are emphasized and suppressed through culturally patterned behavior, and not only through language. Therefore, proximity has a “felt” meaning, not simply a measurable or analytic value: if spatial experience is shaped by different sensory patterning and selective attention, then, as Hall writes, “what crowds one people does not necessarily crowd another.”⁴ If the mediating field’s status as an abstraction is logically sufficient, then the co-orientation of such a field may exist distinctly for each individual; it is the inheritance and influence of cultural patterns that produce a tendency for these distinct conceptual fields to align in parallel with one another.

Furthermore, Hall’s distinction between sociopetal and sociofugal space further demonstrates that space is not neutral. Hall states that “what is sociofugal to one culture or subculture may be sociopetal to another,”⁵ and later insists that there is “no fixed distance-sensing mechanism” universal to all cultures.⁶ This distinction bears substantial significance: space does not simply contain relation; it plays an essential role in its organization. The various potential forms of this organization may either intensify co-presence or protect separation – and, by logical implication, may either contract the deviation between the abstract conception of individuality and its baseline form, or further expand it, depending on the cultural and situational code through which it is experienced.

For this particular discussion, the significance of Hall’s conception does not lie in the specific divergence between the distance-pattern of one culture and that of another, but in the broader implication that proximity is culturally variable and situationally modulated. The cultural variability of proximity clarifies the analysis of the abstract conception of individuality because it shows that some spatial conditions preserve deviation within the mediating conceptual field, while others strip the human of much of its capacity to conceptualize a sense of individuality within the contradictory forces inhabited and experienced in the phenomenal condition presented by co-presence.

Therefore, presence is not a fixed physical distance, but a threshold at which another person becomes operative within the individual’s mediative conceptual field. From Hall, presence can be understood as the culturally patterned activation of mediative space: the moment another is experienced as constitutive-of-my-space, rather than not-constitutive-of-my-space. Analytically, this reveals the sought-after distinction between an abstract conception of individuality and the contradictory reality over which such a conception bears no force. Social discomposition begins once this contradiction is made conscious and forces the conception to align with the greater force of the presentation of reality itself.

Language and Shared Orientation

Having outlined the conception of such deviation within its universal form, this section will attempt to define it more particularly within the phenomenon of language, using the conception of co-presence as an analytic orientor. Merleau-Ponty extends the problem of co-presence into language. In Phenomenology of Perception, he writes that, within dialogue, “a common ground is constituted between me and another,” such that “my thought and his form a single fabric.”⁷ This aligns with the present discussion’s conception that each individual bears its own mediative field, and that, under the forces of co-presence and cultural patterning, these mediative fields tend to align in parallel with one another. Language, then, is not simply the external expression of a thought already completed in private. It is a shared medium in which thought becomes exposed to correction and possible misunderstanding. Care must be taken, however, not to conflate the social mediative field with the medium presented by language. Such a medium is utilized as a device that inherently affects the mediative field within each individual. Dialogue does not simply transmit meaning from one private interior to another; it draws speakers into a processing medium that neither may fully control individually.

The medium presented by language is a shared operation in which thought and meaning tend toward a stable, mutual form. Dialogue, under this conception, is not simply a sequence in which A privately forms a thought, encodes it into words, and sends it to B to decode. In dialogue, thought itself may be redirected or partly brought into being through the exchange. A and B inhabit a common ground in which each individual’s speech is shaped by what the other understands, anticipates, or fails to grasp. This is separate from “inward articulation,” within which language may be utilized in any form and according to any composition, and in which only the regimenting force of the internal dictates composition. Addressivity, by contrast, is inherently a relational phenomenon, not one that occurs from the individual to itself – logically implying dialogue as a solely relational phenomenon. As such, dialogue interrupts the internal effort of the human to maintain and expand the deviation of the abstract conception of individuality from its baseline form, dispelling the illusion that thought remains wholly private. The individual’s thought, and so too its “individuality,” becomes answerable to another; in becoming answerable, it is partially reshaped. The abstract conception of individuality is not destroyed by being processed through the medium presented by language; rather, it is presented with a contradictory experience that breaks the illusion of private inwardness.

By extension, this form of shared orientation within the medium of language – or within its logical universal, “communication” – is distinctively human because it involves not only coordination, but exposure to meaning and interpretation. A wolf may coordinate with its pack, but this coordination does not yet describe the specifically human experience of being visible and interpretable to others. Since the processing of language, and consequently this experience of visibility and interpretability, inherently affects the mediative social field within which the abstract conception of individuality lies, its disturbance can arise not only from another human body, but also from other human-derived products of the language medium: signs, expectations, or similar social devices that cause the individual to experience a sense of social exposure. For example, at a zoo exhibit, the animal may affect the viewer through fear or fascination, but it does not necessarily discompose him in the specifically social sense. The social disturbance enters through the human field surrounding the exhibit: other viewers, the publicness of looking, the placard that names and classifies the animal, or the awareness of one’s own attention occurring before others. As such, social discomposition is not caused solely by the physical nearness of another body. It occurs when another person, or a human-derived social device, becomes operative within the individual’s mediative field, forcing the abstract conception of individuality to tend back toward the baseline-reality form from which the conception itself is derived.

Conclusion

If co-presence extends beyond the common conception of face-to-face, verbal, or written social participation, then the human seemingly remains continuously present within the contemporary organization of society. Even within the confines of the individual’s dwelling, he is continuously in contact with things defined by the standards of the external field from which such a dwelling and its constitution emerge: the contemporary standard of what constitutes a “house,” including its organization into rooms, a kitchen, and a living area; furnishings arranged in accordance with external social standards; and devices such as radios, televisions, and the mobile device that remains within immediate reach throughout most, if not all, of the day. These conditions open what is defined as a “private region” to the external world from which that region is defined as distinct.

Thus, as the human attempts throughout its day to maintain its conception of individuality apart from the external field within which it is submerged, it is frequently presented with a reality that contradicts the illusion against which its life narrative defines itself. While the human is separate from its external field conceptually, and even phenomenologically, its reality suggests that individuality is only a narrative consistently told in order to preserve a more favorable conception than the nature of a reality the human can never change.