Originally Posted by roachboy

let's take this sentence as an example of the problems with claiming to "argue from reality"---the data is experiential (i worked in a kitchen) which comes with particular advantages (grain of experience, say) and certain disadvantages---among the disadvantages are problems of generalization.

if you move from an experience that had you, say, standing across a table handing out food to making statements about who you were handing food to and, more problematically, why these folk were there, you run into trouble, yes?

well, that depends on what you think the social world is and, by extension, what you think "reality" is. if i were to try to unpack what ace seems to think reality is from the sentence, it'd go like this:

you, ace, see these people as objects: you read off information from clothing, posture, etc.--the conclusion is that "ironically" for some reason, they were mostly "able-bodied men"---and that's it.

so the political conclusion i would draw from this is that ace looks at these folk and just looks at them--when he goes to explain why they might be there, he simply transposes the looking across a table onto the social level--nothing changes about how he sees these folk--and his interpretation appears to follow from that--if folk are hungry in the united states, it is their fault--their lack of gumption or whatever meaningless adjective you like is to blame.

now the conceptual problem:
so what is this "reality" that ace speaks from?
it is an accumulation of objects.
human beings are a particular type of object.
both are defined by features that inhere in them.
so if you are going to move from the individual experience level to that of the social, you need make no adjustments--to think otherwise would be like.....say you are trying to understand what a vase is.
so you start off by looking at one of them in isolation.
you want to know what features define a vase.
if you do this with one and then later find yourself looking at, say, 30 of them, nothing in particular changes about the question "what is a vase" or how you'd go about answering it---well, maybe you could do a comparison amongst the 30 vases and isolate a feature or two that defines vases in general that you hadn't thought of--but adding more objects to one object does not create any particular problem.

since human beings are a type of object, it would follow then that moving from a particular instance to making general statements about not only what these human-things are but why they are as they are also poses no particular trouble.

but does it make sense to see human beings as things, a objects?

i guess it does if you imagine that, say, television news footage presents you with the world as it is and not with an image of the world, an image that has certain features which get superimposed on the world these images are assumed to represent.
but if you think about human beings as the results of social processes (growing up, acquiring language, ordering themselves as being-in-a-world as they begin to order the world, as operating within social contexts FROM WHICH THEY ARE NOT SEPARABLE---human beings as complex systems of dynamic systems, say) then there is a REAL problem with treating them conceptually as if they were objects. and if you want to think about what the social world is, you wont get anywhere by acting as though it is simply given, as if what you see and how you see is functionally like a camera, reflecting a world that is as it is with no particular problems attending either the arrangement of the world or of your sensory apparatus.

if you want to think about poverty, you are thinking about a complex of social relations---say class---and specific questions of social position in relation to, say, labor markets and their structure. poverty is a social fact: it is relational (it does not mean the same thing context to context)...ace is consistent in his refusal to consider social factors on this order: in keeping with the assumption that human beings are things, he looks for some internal attribute (real or imagined) that he can look to to explain poverty.

i dont think treating human beings as things is a particularly useful basis for claiming that you "operate from reality" ace.