"even the best sociological arguments for "objective" social facts or
structures (Bourdieu
is pretty eloquent in the Durkheimian tradition today), mistake a
combination of higher scale and materiality for observer independence."
Yes, I would add that arguments that take this form philosophically often
also have braided into them (sometimes smuggled in) forms of
personification or global actors, in which these objective entities in fact
"speak for" the universal subject. Having proved something about (choose
one): class, race, gender, science, deviance -- the entity begins to take
on the voice of the author, disguised as an objective fact. Agency becomes
conflated with scale/materiality, behind the screen of data. Sociological
and social psychological writing in the 1950s and 1960s was especially rife
with this sleight of hand.
L*
______________________________________________
Susan Leigh Star, Professor
University of Illinois
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
501 East Daniel St. Champaign, IL 61820 USA
(217) 244-3280
"A classified and hierarchically ordered set of pluralities, of variants,
has none of the sting of the miscellaneous and uncoordinated plurals of our
actual world." --John Dewey