Individuality emerges from the layering and clash of overlapping social types

Evidence

If you aim for a universal character you may end up with a vague or dull or windy one. If you set out to write a typical character you’re likely to produce a caricature, because people are typical only in the generalized qualities that lump them together. Typical is the most provincial adjective in a writer’s vocabulary, signaling that you’re writing only for those who share your assumptions. A “typical” schoolgirl in Dar es Salaam is a very different type from one in San Francisco. Furthermore, every person is typical of many things successively or simultaneously. She may be in turn a typical schoolgirl, bride, divorcée, and feminist. He may be at one and the same time a typical New Yorker, math professor, doting father, and adulterer. It is in the confrontation and convolution of types that much of our individuality is produced. — Janet Burroway; Elizabeth Stuckey-French; Ned Stuckey-French, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition, 284

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘consistent inconsistencies’ (Aristotle) idea and to the Craft section on ‘telling details’ — individuality as convolution of types. — connects to: Neurotic structure combines environmental pressures with the individual’s own mode of reacting to them — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 299; Language is socially constructed and speaks through individuals; Social formation elements articulate with each other in complex ways (+46 more)

Related

• Everyone is composed of multiple social identities that position them differently (similarity 0.91)
• Uncritical worldviews make a single personality a composite of many historical layers (similarity 0.88)
• Language is socially constructed and speaks through individuals (similarity 0.86)
• Social relations reduce to structures of knowledge in Schutz’s extreme sociology (similarity 0.84)
• Clique-dominated society demands self-representation as a type rather than as an individual. (similarity 0.84)
• Individual identity is stabilized only within collective cultural networks (similarity 0.84)
• Social types can embody an all-dominating orientation to the world (similarity 0.81)
• Social formations form complex unities structured in dominance rather than expressive identities. (similarity 0.81)
• Socially constructed action categories generate increased social complexity (similarity 0.80)
• Complex categorical placement depends on personal biographical knowledge (similarity 0.79)
• Each person is a fragment even of their own singular type (similarity 0.79)
• Societies require a mix of discord and harmony to take determinate shape (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Social formation elements articulate with each other in complex ways #expands (0.70)
• Social formations form complex unities structured in dominance rather than expressive identities. #expands (0.65)
• Full autonomy of social levels cannot capture a social formation’s complex unity #corroborates (0.60)