Kinship Highlights Week 4: The Individual
This week we explore the role of the individual in relation to kinship. This week is unique in that there is a sense of "going against the grain". Many narratives around community and kinship have suggested that the notion of the individual is to blame for the collapse of healthy relationships. It is true that the narcissistic individualism peddled by capitalism has wreaked havoc. However it is the "ism" that has caused harm, not the individual. In fact, attempts to erase the sacredness of the individual create immense harm. When people feel that they are not seen and that their needs don't matter, harm tends to follow. We explore how cultivating a healthy sense of our individuality allows us to become responsible in relationship. Can we have kinship with ourselves? Nuance is key here - because we are both individuals and we are not. It's a "both/and" situation.
Session 10: Minna Salami: The Illusion of the Individual
In social discourse, individualism typically has a negative connotation, and for the right reasons - individualist dogma is both a catalyst and a perpetuator of numerous social ills. But the individual can also be a symbol of radical progressive change, and the collective a symbol for conformity. Basically, the notion of the individual is a more paradoxical and complex notion than it is generally assumed to be. Drawing from examples around the globe as well as from feminist thought, this session will venture beyond the binary to thinking about the individual and the collective in ways that deepen our understanding of kinship and social transformation.
Session 11: Andreas Weber: The Paradox of the Individual - A Biopoetic Perspective
In this session we will look at the biological and biopoetic foundations of individuality. Every being desires aliveness, to go on breathing, expand, unfold, and enter into connection with others. What subjects do in order to exist, from a single cell to every one of us, multi-billion cellular ecosystems, is in service of their individuality. At the same time, no being is autonomous. On the contrary: what individuals do in order to exist is a continuous exchange with others that touches the very building blocks of our bodies and the very imaginations of our identity. Every body is built from pieces that stem not from themselves, but from others. Every in-breath makes me incorporate the body of plant subjects who breathe out their physical existence. With every out-breath I give away my own body into the commons of the atmosphere, ready to be used by the bodies of others. In order to be individuals, we are “dividuals”: processes of mutual transformation shared between a multitude of participants. Through this, every individual, in a certain sense, is the whole. Organisms are “meshworks of selfless selves” (Francisco Varela). Individuality can only be productive if it allows other individuals to thrive.
Session 12: Charles Eisenstein: Living with Ourselves, Together
In this session we will explore how the individual shows up in communities, in particular intentional communities, which are on the rise, and how tensions arise when the individual is misunderstood, neglected, or demonised. We will explore how the individual must take care of themselves in order to serve others - “you can’t pour from an empty cup”. We will look at the individual as both an agentic “node”, and part of an interconnected, co-dependent network, never wholly separate. The work of our times is learning how to live well with others, but in order to do so, we must also learn to live well with ourselves.
