Categorical abstraction suspends the ethical rules of personal interaction

Evidence

To know another personally is not to eliminate knowing him categorically. Personal knowing supplements categoric knowing; it adds temporal events, nuances of meaning, relational depth to the stark outline of the other’s roles and statuses. It adds adjectives and adverbs and qualifying phrases, as it were, to the simple sentence that is categoric knowing. In some instances, to carry the analogy further, the noun and the verb themselves lack meaning without their modifiers and qualifiers. That is-and the importance of this point will become clear soon-complex categoric knowing is frequently dependent upon personal knowing, categorical placement being dependent upon biographical information. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 106 (#complicates, via linked claim)

The counterpart of displacement is reembedding. The disembedding mechanisms lift social relations and the exchange of information out of specific time-space contexts, but at the same time provide new opportunities for their reinsertion. This is another reason why it is a mistake to see the modern world as one in which large, impersonal systems increasingly swallow up most of personal life. The self-same processes that lead to the destruction of older city neighbourhoods and their replacement by towering office-blocks and skyscrapers often permit the gentrification of other areas and a recreation of locality. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 342 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Rather, it uses third-person perspective to impersonalize vivid yens and acute pain, it uses narrative ellipsis to abstract away from crescendos of interpersonal conflict or personal suffering, and it evokes a scientist’s study of particulate matter and sensuous data, an objective microscopy of smells and birds, weather, and wasps. The novel also constructs a staggeringly lyrical, metaphorical, figurative linguistic texture, an intricacy that beautifully confounds expressivism and refuses prosaic immersion. Sentence by sentence, the reader is not asked to identify one to one with the emanating individual on the page, but to conceptualize the interlocking social forces that contour the story and systematize individuals. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 351 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Manufactured objects encode impersonal directives that strip users of individuality — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 504; Algorithmic categorization erases the interactivity that defined older social categories. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 403; capacities for living with difference arise through situated relations, not abstract categories — Farhan Samanani, Conviviality and its others: for a…, 72 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Categorical knowledge of strangers frequently depends on personal information about them #complicates (0.75) — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 106
• Impersonal modern systems paradoxically enable reembedding of local personal life #complicates (0.74) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 342
• Third-person abstraction can convey intimacy better than first-person immersion #complicates (0.72) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 351