On Wed, 4 Dec 2002 topp8564 at mail.usyd.edu.au wrote:
> Call this an anthropologists' dream, but isn't this a pretty serious
> failure? What's society without persons, subjectivities, psychologies,
> loves, little neuroses and very direct experiences? Don't you (meaning
> that "we" you defined above) end up substituting your own images of
> persons into social relations? That's been my tendency anyway, whenever
> I try to understand something like game theory or Marx: to imagine the
> sort of person - full blown, actualised human being - who lives in these
> equations and schema. Without the flesh and bones of social life the
> sociological imagination ends up in a state of sensory deprivation.
> Sooner or later, the hallucinations set in...
>
> Thiago
I like Freddy N. on this: truth is a set of necessary fictions. Any scientific truth is a pathetic simplification of the complexity of many different individual entities and historical contexts. Do you berate physicists because they can't accurately predict the trajectory of a particular leaf falling from a particular tree? --or question astronomers because they can't accurately predict the exact location of the next meteorite visible at a specific location on a specific night? The hallucination is that we can in fact understand "individualities". I think Marx (and C.) have it right here: it's much more useful to study the social relations that produce types of individuals than to tediously catalogue all the individual "subjectivities".
Miles