The Collective Person

A recent study indicates that the immune system of an individual being, in this case rhesus monkeys, is sensitive to social rank. Immune system responses and severity of tissue inflammation varied according to where the individual fell with respect to rank within its community.

The study raises two questions for me. One, to what extent can we identify individual persons given the extent to which an individual body appears to be connected to exogenous structures? Two, to what extent can we conceive and speak of collective persons, given that there seems to be an identifiable network of agency that lies outside of the body of a single entity?

Michel Serres has written of our inability or reluctance to acknowledge 'the swarm'. He made his observations quite some time ago, before public health and epidemiological studies began making the individual-collective connection, but on a general cultural level, his observation is still valid. Studies show that one's eating habits depend strongly upon the habits of one's social group, so measures aimed at controlling obesity, diabetes and other diet related conditions that focus only or primarily on individual agency are largely unsuccessful. We may understand this group dynamic scientifically, but culturally it seems we have still not formulated a working model of it.

Here is where the idea that plants serve as models for human behavior becomes instructive. Many people balk at the idea that plants are more like humans than we are wont to believe, but the idea that humans are more like plants seems to be received more readily. Among plants, the relation between individual and collective seems more normal and less problematic. The rhizome in its many forms: the lawn, the thatch, the grove, all seem to be understandable instantiations of nature. Grass, bamboo and oaks seem, in their sessile durability, easily clustered together. I have a family of cactus, presumably mamas and babies, firmly rooted in one corner of my front yard, that have so far resisted any interventions on my part to uproot them, having marshaled their collective adorability against my hostility. Parents often gain esteem from their children, but this is sometimes not acknowledged in a society that privileges individual over group, and especially familial, achievement.

I will have to revisit Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to see what insights he has into this notion.