Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
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> It's fascinating to look at the obsolete meanings of the word "individual":
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You get a similar story from looking up "identity"in the OED. We had a long discussion of that on this list a couple years ago.
I checked "subjectivity" today in the OED and found a peculiar situation. My guess is that the second edition just repeats the first on it, because the latest examples are in the 1880s. The earliest were from Southey and Coleridge. Not much of a pedigree.
If I recall correctly Yoshie and I have used "historical person" in contrast to "individual." Using that distinction, I would say that to try to incorporate "subjectivity" into the study of social relations is to reduce the richness of the historical person to the abstractness of the individual (see Theses on Feuerbach and comments on "dot-like isolation" in the Grundrisse). This was I think this was Miles's crucial point: "Any scientific truth is a pathetic simplification of the complexity of many different individual entities and historical contexts." Social theory is necessarily going to be abstract, as is all theory -- all knowledge. Hence to focus on "subjectivity" necessarily forces one to consider only those aspects of subjectivity that are shared by everyone, completely abstracting from the concrete (historical) person. Hamlet had it right. Humans (historical persons) are much too complex, too endlessly changing, to be played on like a flute.
But I think Thiago and Catherine should have another go at explaining what they mean by subjectivity and how it can possibly be the focus of study.
Carrol