What Counts as Abstract
There is a photograph I keep thinking about. An elderly woman sits on a pavement late at night, selling bananas that are beginning to turn. A motorcycle blurs past behind her. The street is otherwise empty.
If you put this photograph in an academic paper and say: look, this is injustice — the response will be predictable. This is anecdotal evidence. This is a single case. This is emotion, not argument.
But if you ask: what kind of person ends up selling overripe bananas on a street at midnight — and why — you have already begun to abstract. You are no longer describing one woman. You are asking about a structure.
Two Kinds of Abstraction
Academic philosophy has a specific meaning for the word “abstract.” It means: disconnected from any particular case, operating at the level of principles, engaging with the existing literature on the relevant theoretical problem.
In this sense, a paper that begins from Rawls’s original position and derives principles of justice is not abstract at all — it is exactly where the conversation is supposed to happen. A paper that begins from a photograph of an old woman selling bananas and derives structural conditions of illegitimacy is abstract in the pejorative sense — it hasn’t engaged with the right people, it doesn’t have a clear target, it mistakes a particular case for a general claim.
This is a revealing asymmetry. Theory that begins from theory is methodologically legitimate. Theory that begins from reality is often treated as methodologically suspect unless it can first be translated into an existing theoretical conversation.
I want to suggest that this gets things exactly backwards.
What the Photograph Already Contains
You do not need to know her name, her income, or whether she has children. The photograph already contains three questions.
The first: does she have a realistic capacity to exit? Not formally — of course she is free to go home, free to stop selling, free to choose a different life. But realistically: what would it cost her to leave? What alternatives are available? Who controls the conditions under which she might exit?
The second: who bears the risk? The bananas may not sell. The weather may turn. The city may decide to clear the pavement. She absorbs all of it. Who made decisions that contributed to this situation — the supply chains, the market structures, the welfare systems that did or did not function — and how much of that risk do they bear?
The third: who defines the terms of her situation? The rules that determine where she may sell, what licenses she needs, what counts as legitimate commerce, what social protection she is entitled to — she did not write those rules. The people who wrote them do not sit on pavements at midnight.
These three questions are more abstract than “how sad.” They are also more explanatory. They do not describe one woman. They describe a position — a structural location characterized by constrained exit, asymmetric risk-bearing, and subjection to definitional frameworks one did not author.
From Reality Upward
There is a direction of travel in theoretical thinking that is rarely made explicit. Most political philosophy moves from abstraction toward abstraction: from justice to equality to opportunity to resources, always within the conceptual register, occasionally gesturing toward the world to illustrate a point already made.
Boundaryism moves the other way. It begins from what is actually happening — not as illustration but as evidence — and asks what structural conditions would have to obtain for this to be the predictable result. The old woman selling bananas is not an anecdote. She is a data point in an argument about structural position, exit capacity, and cost distribution.
The abstraction that results — definitional power, cost transfer, exit monopoly — is derived from reality rather than imposed upon it. This is not a weakness of the method. It is the method.
The Charge of Abstraction
Several papers in the Conceptual Failure Project have been rejected with some version of the same criticism: too abstract, insufficient engagement with existing literature, no clear target for the argument.
I find this criticism revealing, because the concepts in these papers — actuarial silencing, temporal silencing, organizational shielding — are not invented at the level of pure theory. They are named patterns extracted from the way institutions actually operate: the way dispersed costs disappear below accountability thresholds, the way future risk defers present accountability, the way organizational structure insulates those with control from those who bear consequences.
What the criticism actually means, I think, is this: these papers are not arguing against anyone in particular. They do not have a named interlocutor. They are not advancing a position in a debate already in progress.
This is a legitimate criterion for certain kinds of academic work. But it is worth noticing what it privileges and what it excludes. A paper that refines Rawls’s difference principle has a clear target — it is arguing against Rawls, or for a better version of Rawls. A paper that identifies a structural condition that existing frameworks have not named does not have a target in the same sense. It is not correcting anyone. It is pointing at something that has not been pointed at before.
The banana seller does not fit neatly into existing debates about distributive justice or freedom or accountability. She is not a test case for competing theories of what people are owed. She is evidence that the existing theoretical landscape is missing something — a way of asking about structural position that does not reduce to distribution, freedom, or responsibility as these are currently theorized.
On Having Feelings About It
There is a temptation, when doing theoretical work, to treat emotional distance as a form of objectivity. The further from the particular case, the more rigorous the analysis. The less the phenomenon disturbs you, the more clearly you can see it.
I want to resist this.
Seeing the photograph and feeling something is not a methodological error. Feeling nothing would be the error — or at least, it would be a sign that something has gone wrong in the relationship between the analyst and the subject of analysis. A woman selling bananas that are beginning to rot, at midnight, on a street, is not a test case for competing theories of market efficiency. She is a person in a situation that should not be normal, and the feeling that it should not be normal is not an obstacle to analysis. It is the beginning of one.
Much of the theory that has shaped how we think about justice, freedom, and social arrangements began with something like moral disturbance. The wrongness of certain conditions was felt before it was theorized. The theory came from taking the feeling seriously enough to ask why, and then why again, and then what structural conditions would have to obtain for this to keep happening.
The problem is not having feelings about what you see. The problem is stopping there — staying in the register of “how sad” without asking what produces the situation. But the opposite problem is equally real: abstracting so thoroughly that the thing you started from has disappeared, and the analysis runs on its own fuel, self-contained and no longer answerable to the reality that generated it.
What Boundaryism tries to do is hold both. To not normalize what should not be normal. And to not stop at the feeling, but to follow it: why is she there? Why is there always someone there? What would have to be true about the structure for this to be a predictable result rather than an aberration?
Academic philosophy sometimes mistakes distance for objectivity. But the discomfort of seeing a person in this situation is not a bias to be corrected. It is information. It is the signal that something needs explaining — and that the explanation, when found, should remain answerable to what produced the feeling in the first place.
Why There Is Always Someone Sitting There
The most important question is not about this particular woman. It is the question that her situation forces: why is there always someone sitting there?
Not why is she there — that question leads to biography, to individual circumstance, to the particular decisions and misfortunes that produced this specific life. But why, in any moderately developed economy with functioning markets and formal welfare systems, is there always a position like hers — exposed to full downside risk, unable to exit, subject to conditions defined by others?
This is a structural question. It does not require knowing anything about her. It requires asking what arrangements produce and reproduce this kind of position — who benefits from those arrangements, who bears their costs, and why the costs fall where they do rather than where the control is.
Boundaryism is the attempt to answer this question systematically. Not to describe suffering, but to identify the structural conditions under which certain positions are produced and maintained — conditions under which definitional power is unchecked, cost transfer is unlimited, and exit is foreclosed.
The Right Kind of Abstract
There is nothing wrong with abstraction. Theory requires it. The question is what the abstraction is for and where it comes from.
Abstraction that begins from existing theory and elaborates within it serves an important function: it refines our concepts, identifies inconsistencies, extends frameworks to new cases. This is the dominant mode of academic philosophy, and it produces genuine insight.
But abstraction that begins from reality — that names something happening in the world and asks what structural conditions explain it — serves a different function. It does not refine existing concepts. It identifies conditions that existing concepts do not adequately capture.
The woman on the pavement is not too particular to be theoretically useful. She is evidence that the existing theoretical landscape has a gap: a way of seeing structural position, exit capacity, and cost distribution that does not reduce to what we already know how to say.
Boundaryism does not begin from the ideal and work backward to reality. It begins from reality and works upward toward the structural conditions that produce it. The abstraction is real. It just runs in the opposite direction from where academic philosophy usually looks.
The question is not whether to abstract. The question is whether to abstract from the right things.