although the humanities may endeavor to reliably direct attention to the singularity / reality / full social being of the individual object/text (see notes on "social being" and "Kantian responsibility toward the real"), and resist generalizations or conceptualizing (see note on treating something as an "example of a process"), Hayot is quick to observe that we typically do not "reject wholesale as 'not the study of literature' [...] any work in the sociology of literature that points to the insitutional forces that help produce literary activity and meaning [nor do we reject] any work in the history of media studies that points to the coproduction of the literary and the mediatic [nor] any scholarship that [believes] in such overbearing and unsingular categories as the poem, the novel, the period, the school, or the genre. At the limit of the ethical relation to the singular, each object would produce a completely singular method, even a singular language, a singular work of scholarship uniquely attuned to its singularity [...] That's never happened. And it never will."
In short, "[n]o cultural or social criticism proceeds without a significant amount of generalizing, grouping, and so on, each instance of which technically violates the singularity of the object [...] actually grasping the [idiographic] singularity of an object requires, in fact, putting it into categories, groupings, and other social and contextual contexts that help us understand it" (80-1)