Is individuality impossible? (Kenneth Gergen)

Featuring Kenneth Gergen (guest) with Stanton Wortham (host) and Samantha Ha DiMuzio (commentator)

Usually, we envision ourselves as individuals who build relationships, comprise communities, and make our own decisions. In this episode, Ken Gergen troubles this notion of individualism and instead offers an alternative perspective based on relationality and coordination. What if relationships come before the individual? 

Transcript

Pulled Up Short with Stanton Wortham

Is individuality impossible?
Featuring Kenneth Gergen with Stanton Wortham (host) and Samantha Ha DiMuzio (commentator)
Original Air Date: February 7, 2022


Stanton Wortham  0:05  

Welcome back to another episode of Pulled Up Short. Thank you very much for joining us. Today, we're very pleased to have Ken Gergen from Swarthmore College with us, as well as Sam Ha DiMuzio from Boston College as our discussant. So Ken, I understand you're going to talk to us today about individuals and why individuals are the wrong way to think about human activity?

Kenneth Gergen  0:27  

Yes, Stanton. Thank you very much for allowing me to be here to share with you. Let me start simply by asking what is a relationship? I mean, we all agree that relationships are really important somehow, but what do we mean by relationships? Now, generally, we talk about relationships as created when two individuals come together. The larger entity, then, is a creation of the fundamental units, which are the individuals. Now, essentially, this means that relationships are artificial. You can have one or not have one, build one or let it fail. Put another way, you can say relationships are important, but it's very hard to say individuals are important, because we more or less take that for granted. In this way, we assume that families, for example, are composed of individuals; the same as organizations, made up of all its participants; and societies, indeed, are made up of all the individual persons in the society. So our fundamental understanding is that individuals make up the social world. What I'd like to do here is to turn that idea on its head and propose that individuals are secondary, that relationships are prior to the persons, that without that process of relating, there are no individual persons as such. Now, I don't mean this just as some clever philosophic trick, because indeed, my sense at this point is that the very future of our civilization - or our life on this planet - depends on that recognition. 

Our centering on the individual is so common that we prize the individual - we celebrate the individual hero, the thinker, the creator, the leader, and so on. Education, by and large, is focused on the individual mind, the individual performance. The outcome of education is individuals who possess knowledge. Democracy too; it is based on the sanctity of the individual: each person, one vote, think for yourself, decide for yourself. Then we simply add up the individual votes to make decisions about who will then represent us. Much the same with our ethical codes. They are largely based on individual responsibility: what you should do as an individual, what you can be held responsible for. Our legal process is based largely on that same kind of implicit ethic. Individuals are responsible in courts of law. Indeed, I must say that many of our academic disciplines, and Including  the one that I came out of, psychology - is based on the notion that the individual is of central importance, and the individual’s mental process gives rise to action. The same would be the case for microeconomics and the centrality of individual calculations. Much of our history is written in terms of individual leaders, politicians, or rulers, or so on. So, to place the process of relating as prior to the individual has enormous consequences and implications.

Stanton Wortham  4:18  

If you really mean this, this is quite disorienting, because I certainly (and I imagine others) take ourselves to be individual people. So the beginning of imagining how we're going to participate in the world, who we are, and what's important starts with this notion of a discrete individual who was, as you're saying, the locus of rights in a society, thoughts, emotions, and so forth and so on. So you're claiming that it's the other way around - relationships are prior, and my sense of individuality is somehow derived from other processes.

Kenneth Gergen  4:53  

That's exactly it, but let me expand on that just so that it doesn't sound so absurd. Let's begin with language. Alright, so I can utter a sound, but when does that sound become language? I mean, if I say "uuglee," chances are that if you're an English speaker, and that's sort of a nonsense term. But the word igloo - that's meaningful. We know what that means. We can use that to refer to ice houses, Eskimos, and so on, but "uuglee" doesn't count. However, if I point to my dog and say “that’s little Uuglee," you might then say, "Oh, Uuglee, let me give you a pat" or something like that. Now have a  meaningful term in language. But until you agree with my  use of the term - until you coordinate with my actions, with my pointing to that animal - it's not a word. It's nonsense. What I'm trying to point out here is that the sound does not become language until there is something like coordination between us. That is, it's the coordination that gives rise to the meaning of the term. So let's say in a Wittsgensteinian sense, there are no private languages. A private set of sounds wouldn't be a language because it would be nonsense for the rest of us. Language, quintessentially, is the byproduct of coordination - not you, not me, but that process of coordination. 

Let me expand here for a little bit more, because there's a lot to say to make this intelligible. But when you begin to think about it that way, then anything we can say about reality - what there is in the world, our fundamental ontologies - in language is not a result of any one's observation; it is the result of coordination. Anything we can say which counts as a rational or intelligible comment gains its rationality, not by virtue of the individual mind, but by the process of coordination. Likewise, anything we could say that counts as good or evil emerges from that process of coordination. So in effect, everything that we can make intelligible in language emerges from that process. 

Let me go on with this even further to consider my gestures. For example, the way I move my hands if I'm giving a talk or where my gaze falls if I'm talking with you, only makes sense because, like utterances, there has been a process of coordination. We together make it intelligible to look in each other's eyes. Now continue to expand the point. I would say the clothing I wear gains its intelligibility, its acceptability, not by any one of our choices, but by the coordination among us - what I often call "co-action." Consider I get up in the morning and almost everything I do during the day - outside of physically breathing and digesting -pretty much gains its intelligibility, not because I myself thought it up, but by virtue of something that WE did within the process of relating. So in effect, it's the process of relating that serves as the originary source of all intelligibility.

This includes the very concept of the individual person. What was there before we could say "individual person"? We're mute. We have nothing to say. Thus, in our daily language, we can use that phrase,"individual person," because we made it up, and we can agree on it. If you were in physics, the notion of the individual person would disappear. They don't need that phrase to account for all of the cosmos. Individuals do not count. They don't even figure in the equation. 

I want to add one more issue here because to me, I find it quite intriguing. Alright, so we've got this language that we've generated, but if you look across numerous languages, there's always a term for entities or bounded units. In English we might call them nouns or pronouns. That is, the language itself creates an understanding of the world in terms of units, for example, individual persons, an individual book, or cup, or a microphone. We don't have very much of a language for the process. In some sense, we're victims of a language that creates these notions of individual persons, of time as a sequence of units. Our very understanding of the world - our fundamental ontology of separated units - doesn't include the process on which that very understanding depends. We accept the world of units, and we don't actually have very much in the way of either an understanding or a language to account for the very process that gave rise to all of that. In some sense, we're victimized by the limits of a binary-based language.

Stanton Wortham  11:21  

Interesting. So I'm starting to understand the radical nature of this suggestion you're making. So to take language first, you're saying that the typical expectation of language (as we imagine it, at least in the West) is that language is a property of an individual. I can speak because somewhere in my brain, there's a bunch of stuff going on, and I have this little computer up there that has the capacity to produce language. The reason you and I can talk is because you've got the same language in your head as I have in my head, and we're able to communicate. But you're saying that, actually, language is the property of the collective; it's not the property of the individual. So language is something that I borrow from a collective, but it's not a possession of mine. The proof of that is that it can change. I think you're saying the same thing with respect to conversation. So we, having this conversation, in the typical individualistic view, are two people with a bunch of ideas, understandings, and points that we'd like to make. We engage by putting something out on the table and then responding. But from your perspective, actually, the conversation is a collective process, which involves the kind of coordination that you've described. The notions of individuals in that conversation are derived from, secondary to, that more primordial process. So I get it with respect to language and conversation - is the same point true about other parts of human functioning: emotions, the mind, and so forth and so on?

Kenneth Gergen  13:05  

Yes, but let me add one little point to something you said, because I find it entertaining to think about. Alright, these words are coming out of my mouth. They seem to be coming out of my brain, as you say, but actually come out of other conversations. I mean, I'm just sort of a conduit for thousands of conversations and writings - and they,  upon other conversations,  writings, and so on, back in history. So all that's behind me, and what I'm doing is ventriloquating the past in some odd fashion, and simply passing it on to you in this conversation, and you from your history of coordination within parts of that tradition are taking it up, and we'll move it in some other direction. So we're just participants a continuous dance of process. It has no end, so long as our people are communicating. 

Anyway, back to your question. Well, the question I have, and it's even bigger than you're putting it, is that we have a huge vocabulary for talking about mental process. I mean, ever since the Enlightenment, we've multiplied the terms for what goes on the mind, and professional psychologists have added thousands of additional terms. That's kind of interesting in itself, because actually, we don't know if there are minds. I mean, where did we get that concept? I can't point to it, like I could my animal and say "Uuglee". As we largely recognize in the social sciences, whatever we're talking about that goes on inside people's heads - other than physical functioning, brain process, and so on - is in kind of a black box. What we placed in that black box continues to change over time. In the social sciences, we don't generally talk about souls within bodies. We don't generally talk about being moved by the demons within. In fact, in psychology we can't even talk about free will, because that just don't exist within our scientific assumptions. 

So let's not take the terms of the mind as standing for some world inside the head. Let's look at them in terms of language in use, like I can say things that  you will find rational or not. But what is critical here is the way I'm using the language. I'll grade a student's paper, and I'll say, "Good argument" or "Irrational," but I have no idea what's going on in the minds of the student. I mean, they may be moved by a god-like visitation, I have no idea. But what I am exposed to is the way in which they use the words. What they're doing is not 'reasoning' or 'thinking within' and then producing those thoughts into words, because that's all make-believe. What they are doing is engaging in a social process. That is, they are speaking like people that we'd like to have speak this way. Even though we take Descartes very seriously - "I think therefore I am" - you can raise questions about how Descartes would know he was thinking. The very idea of 'thinking' didn't really emerge in the English language until 1400/1500, and then it had other meanings, like 'thank you', 'blame,' or 'memory.' The very idea of thought, the way Descartes used, it is another recent origin. But let me go to emotions for a moment, because it's more complicated and in some ways more interesting.

Again, what is an emotion? Even psychologists have never been able to come up with a widely acceptable definition. What counts as emotion changes over history. Concepts drop out; others are added. The idea of depression, for example, and anxiety - they are of relatively recent origin. Attention deficit disorder (ADD) is 50 years old, basically. So what do they refer to? Again, it's hard to find reference within the mind, whatever that is, although we might have some neurological components. But it's not that the neuro-components produced the emotion. The components are being used by people to do things together. 

So take a concept like anger. Now, I can use the term, and I know how to do anger. I know what my face will look like. I know what the sound of my words should sound like - they will become more harsh, for example, or the volume will go up. It's a cultural way of being, and I can do it well or I can do it poorly. I can't do it everywhere. I can only do it when it's sanctioned or declared to be okay to be angry under those conditions, because we've agreed on that. In effect, we've agreed on the conditions in which I can be angry. We've agreed on how it will be expressed, and we have some agreement about what you will do, as I tell you, "I am angry with you." Because that too, is culturally sanctioned. It's part of the coordinated dance of which we’re part. So, anger is not something I have that grows in me and that I own. Again, it’s part of a cultural process, which we have given a meaning to and can change. 

I want to add one more thing here, which to me is of tremendous importance in terms of what I said earlier about how I feel as if this perspective is vital in terms of the future. Let me start this by just talking about ethics for a moment, because we do have a lot of ethical theory pointing to our responsibility to the other: love the other as yourself, care for the other, attend to the voice of the other, and so on. At least in our Western heritage, this ethical orientation presumes the existence of separate selves: me here, taking care of the one over there. Self and other are distinct and separate. What we don't have is any kind of ethic based on care for the relational process - not the individuals, but the process out of which we become. 

Again, a little bit more on this, because these kinds of processes that we have can be what I call "generative." Essentially we create our language in a very generative process of coordination.  Through coordination we give meaning to life, to give meaning to our actions. In that sense, we co-create worlds of the good, acceptable worlds, communities of people that we like, who do the right thing, are rational by our standards, and so on. But when you multiply those communities of 'we who think this' and 'you think that,' then we've got another problem on our hands, because those become competing communities. When there are multiple goods, then we set the stage for another kind of process, which is what I'll call "degenerative." This is where we begin to compete, to destroy, to question, to undermine, to exclude, to imprison, or annihilate. Once you freeze that multiplication of goods ("we who believe this,"  and "for whom this is good") into something that looks to be, "this is the right, this is the good,"  then we set the stage for ultimately, our potential mutual annihilation.

Stanton Wortham  20:07  

So I'm starting to see the broad implications of this shift you're asking us to entertain - away from individuals as the primary unit of human activity and toward relationships and processes of coordination as instead the appropriate unit for thinking about what we do. You've mentioned a couple of examples of important institutions or activities that are going to have to be rethought if we follow you in this shift toward a more relational way of imagining human nature. You mentioned the legal system and the notion of holding people responsible for actions. You mentioned the educational system and trying to help people learn new things. Can you give a little more detail about how dramatically we would have to change some of these institutions or activities, if we adopt the change that you're urging on us?

Kenneth Gergen  23:30  

Let me start small, as the implications become much larger as you move further into the society and to what's happening globally. I've been interested in the recent years in education as a primary candidate, because it does seem to me that promising moves there are possible. If you look at the traditional public school system in terms of what it facilitates - a contribution to let's say, generative or degenerative relationships - in some ways, it is disastrous. Because what we've set up is a condition of alienation and separation. You've got a system in which each individual - whether it be a principal, a teacher, a student, or parent - are all looked at as individual players, and within the system, each are evaluated for what they're doing. Is that a good school leader? Is the teacher up to standards? And particularly students (I’ll say more about that). I've got one major concern. The question I often ask myself is, how are we preparing the young to relate to each other in ways that are or are generative, that facilitate coordination? Because school systems largely prepare you to be your own person. They put you under pressure to measure up according to some standard.

For example, when I graduated from college, I was well prepared to defend myself, to defend my ideas. I'd learned well enough in essays and so on to defend my position, to generate facts and ideas and so on, that would make me unassailable, perfect. If you had an opposing position, I was well prepared to critique it. So in effect, critical thinking - as we put it - is thinking that is going to be damaging to something. So I'm well prepared to damage. I'm not very well prepared to collaborate. I'd have no training in it - how to build on others’ ideas, how to soar with them, how to bring them into new levels of potential, and so on. What if education had, as its primary goal, to enable us to participate in more collaborative, co-creative relationships? 

I do believe that the groundwork is prepared for moving in this direction. Consider here the testing of students. We know from so many years of experience, that testing - whether it be testing in classes or high stakes testing - is killing our education system. Teachers teach to the test. Students prepare for what they will be tested on.  Education in itself doesn't matter. What counts are grades. And we know that's wrong. At the same time, we’ve got other kinds of pedagogies at stake here. We've got the potential, for example, for dialogic classrooms, for working on projects together, for collaborative learning. We have an enormous array of wonderful pedagogies that are there at our disposal. Many are practiced, but as long as testing and grading are required, they cannot flourish. Because at the end of the day, if you can't grade it - if you can't place all your students into some kind of single dimension, differentiating them all - then learning hasn't happened. If you can't measure it, it’s irrelevant. So my primary aim in a book called The Tyranny Of Testing: A Relational Evaluation In Education was to mine the possibilities of much more dialogic process of evaluation, where you enhance the capacities of coordination among students; between teachers and students and parents; and among all of those in the community where learning takes place. Such forms of evaluation would not reduce all performance to a single continuum, which is itself divisive. Anyway, here is one of the cases where I think we're poised to make a difference. Indeed, in some parts of the world, this is already happening, where they now dispense with high stakes testing. Other schools are dispensing with grading. I think there's a possibility where a world-changing shift is possible. There are other kinds of implications, if you'd like me to go on.

Stanton Wortham  29:01  

I think we're coming to the end of our time. I had one more question I wanted to ask you to reflect on. It has to do with the obstacles, the barriers that we might confront. So you're envisioning a transition to a relational way of thinking about the world and approaching our actions together. The education example is helpful. You're describing how a set of key practices could be reoriented such that we focus on coordination and augmenting the collective process, as opposed to individual goals. Do you think they are things getting in the way or blocking us from trying to make this transition you're advocating?

Kenneth Gergen  29:40  

There's an enormous background of separation - organizations and people out for themselves. I mean, competition haunts virtually every aspect of our society. I do think there are major changes that are happening. There's a move in social research from 'we, as researchers, studying them' and to making that research much more collaborative, so that 'we research together.' It's also happening in healthcare, with a move towards collaborative healthcare. There's a move in organizations to try to flatten the organization, to bring about some kind of collective process within organizations. 

Where it really bothers me most, and this is where I think the largest stakes and the greatest difficulties are of the kind you mentioned, is in commerce and government. Because we have so often looked at commerce as competitive, it's almost looked at as a zero sum game for the greatest profits. In that way, we've not only annihilated each other in many respects, but the environment as well. Then, there is competition among nations. That is, we look at nations as independent entities, which in some ways is insane at this point in time, because we know the flow of meaning-making goes across all the borders. But as long as the competition exists between nations - of protecting ourselves, and making sure we flourish is our primary aim - I don't see any possibility of bringing commerce into the equation or for us ever solving catastrophic problems of environment, of pandemics, and so on. Somehow, it's this point that we really have to work on: how to soften that sense of separation, so that we understand that we need another kind of relationship, a generative process as opposed to a degenerative process of relating, in terms of our future on this planet.

Stanton Wortham  32:08  

Great. This has been very provocative - this notion that we need to reorient our thinking away from individuals engaging with and competing with each other, to collective processes that we can improve as things that exist above the level of just an individual. So at this point, I'd like to bring in Sam Ha DiMuzio and ask her if she has a couple of questions.

Samantha Ha DiMuzio  32:31  

Definitely. Thank you, Professor Gergen, for this provocative idea. I certainly have a few questions. One of the things you said that I felt was really compelling was pointing out how this concept of the individual and individualism is really closely tied to Western society and our institutions. It's really baked into the fabric of those institutions in a lot of ways. You mentioned the idea of how it's tied to meritocracy, individual freedom and rights, accountability, punishment, that kind of thing. I'm thinking about how people might respond to this idea of pulling away from individualism to an idea of coordination, of relationality. I think people might be resistant to the idea because of the idea of choice and control. I can control, for example, how I act, or behave, or speak supposedly, and I can't necessarily control others. So the idea of shifting to a coordinated process feels like I'm losing my agency to some extent, you know? So I was wondering if you could respond to that kind of resistance. How might you speak to the agency that is still inherent in this more coordinated process?

Kenneth Gergen  34:05  

There's an interesting point at stake here, and that is: it's time to put the process before the persons. We must begin to ask how we could establish the conditions under which a certain process would take place that would lead the participants in certain directions? That's a little abstract, but for example, if we put politicians into a debate, they will find fault in everything the other says. You put them at the bar, and they may have a lot of good things to say about each other. In effect, the process that we put people into generates the kinds of persons that they will become. 

Now, if you put me in a rowing team, and my job is to row in a concerted way with my fellow teammates, I won't ask the question of agency. That just won't come up, I think. I won't be saying, "This is not my free will. I didn't choose this." It is as if the concepts that we use, the words that we use, emerge from the process of relating in which we are engaged. So could you change the practices of relating so that our job or challenge was, "how could we, together, make something happen?". You wouldn't ask the question of agency. I spend a lot of time with a practice called Appreciative Inquiry, for example, which is a practice of co-creation. Rather than bringing people in to fight with each other over an issue, they ask at the beginning about good things that happened together. By asking such questions as: "Tell us a story about times when you really enjoyed each other, or really worked together well, or about things that you really care about", suddenly the issues of "I'm right, and you're wrong," and so on, begin to drift to the side. They disappear from the vocabulary of relating at that time. So rather than fighting over the concept of will or agency, which people do, I would put the focus on developing practices where that isn't the major issue that we have to talk about.

Samantha Ha DiMuzio  36:40  

Yeah, I think that makes sense. Actually, I'm making some connections back to what you said earlier, where even thinking about the concept of agency is already rooted in this process. It rises out of this coordination in the first place. So I appreciate your response to that. I think, related to this, what you just mentioned, is also given the ways that individuality is so entrenched in our society and in our institutions, I was wondering about how we can really move toward a coordinated state where that becomes more of the norm. I was thinking about the theory of change, of how to get there. So you'll have to bear with me for a second, because I thought of this analogy that has to do with self-driving cars. Like I said, you'll have to bear with me. So I'm reading about self-driving cars, and how it's probably a technology of the near future. The research that they're doing on self-driving cars says that it's actually quite safe... when you're driving with other self-driving cars. The problem is when you mix self-driving cars with humans driving cars. And so, in order for the shift to self-driving cars to be the norm, it has to be a seismic shift, one where we have to transition almost fully to self-driving cars all at once to prevent the risk and the damage that might come through. So I was thinking about this, related to this idea, because if so many of our institutions, ideas, and concepts are rooted in individuality now, and we're trying to move toward coordination, do you think that we need a seismic shift? A more revolutionary shift toward coordination all at once? Or do you feel like the incremental reform-based approach is also a decent way that we can work toward a more relational world?

Kenneth Gergen  39:00  

I'm a very strong incrementalist. Grassroots work really helps and really is significant. So what goes on in classrooms around the world, for example, in terms of alternative pedagogies and ways of evaluation, is now circulating. I think, to introduce this change all at once would be beyond anyone's potential. Of course, you could point to societies, for example, that are much more communal in their orientation. I don't think that's necessarily the answer either. Because there can also be a kind of a tyranny of the community. The community becomes now another entity, and if you don't agree with the community, you're out. It's like another form of individualism, just at a larger scale. However, as I I mentioned there are all  kinds of practices now in motion. We are partly driven now by the very sense that we're in a dire situation, especially with the environment. Somehow we are realizing that  we must work together. So you see a lot more grassroots innovation happening now than you did, say 20 years ago. The consciousness of the 'we' - the world as a 'we,' not just our people. There's hope there. 

I wish I were more hopeful about the national situation. I don't see how we can easily get around the idea of nations independent of each other, with strong boundaries, each out for their own good. That's the major impediment, I think. If we could somehow begin to think about how to change that. By the way, related to that, particularly in the United States, is that we have a democracy that doesn't work either. I mean, democracy is a really a poor concept in terms of generative coordination, because it is based on the assumption that everybody's out for themselves - what I need,  what I want, and on representatives who are going to secure what I want. It's not a system based on the common good. It's based on the idea that summation of private goods equals the common good, which is not the case. So there's a sense in which we are collectively stupid. That is, you wouldn't run any organization - other than a democracy - based on that kind of way of making decisions. So somehow, democracy in itself has got to change. I can see potential, but it seems like a big step. I'd like to see some even promising incrementals, but I'm not seeing them yet. But there's the big challenge. I don't think there’s  going to be sweeping change. I think it's going to be much more creeping from the ground up.

Samantha Ha DiMuzio  42:13  

Thank you, and I know we're running at a time, but I had just one more question. It's related to what you just mentioned about our crisis with the environment. I know that throughout your talk, you were mentioning a lot about this coordination between human-to-human. I was also thinking about other philosophies from indigenous literature as well as from Buddhist literature that really thinks about the interconnectivity of all things. I was just wondering, if you think that coordination, especially in regard to something like climate change and climate justice, I wonder if that coordination process you're talking about also applies to the more-than-human? The relationality between us as humans, but also between the land and waters, between other beings? I just wanted to ask about your feedback on that, if you feel like it also applies to those instances.

Kenneth Gergen  43:21  

I think it's absolutely essential. It hasn't been a focus yet in my own work, but it's a question that a lot of people are asking. In fact, even today, I got an email from someone in Australia: "How would this apply to a relationship with animals and animal consumption?" These are really important questions. How do we look at our relationship with nature in terms of an ethic of caring for the relationship, as opposed to "we who need the food," and so on? It needs theorizing. It needs practices, and it's a wonderful avenue to the future. Yeah. Thank you for that. 

Samantha Ha DiMuzio  44:01  

Thank you.

Stanton Wortham  44:03  

Thanks for listening to this episode of Pulled Up Short with Ken Gergen and Sam Ha. Next week, we will have our final episode of season two with Karin Nisenbaum, arguing about destiny. Check out the American Anthropological Association website at AmericanAnthro.org. Please subscribe to Pulled Up Short wherever you get your podcasts, and follow us on Twitter @PulledUpShort.