May 21, 2013:
Exercise: in a crowded public space you're habituated to observing, take your glasses off. Now, describe the people.
Where individual features are indistinct, you have two possibilities for depiction:
— Retreat into subjectivity, where personalities and motives belong to your own unconscious.
— Advance into abstraction, where individuals disappear into generality, and you no longer describe persons, but society.
There's a certain sense in which both of these things will inevitably happen simultaneously. Because the unconscious is socially determined, that is, political and historical, you'll be unable to escape the pre-selected possibilities your society has chosen for you, even when you believe yourself to be "free" associating.
Try it, see how far you can go in either direction.