The Problem of Categories

I was working on something else, and it dawned on me how conflicted the desire for categories is. Burningbird has dreamed of a special mark-up for poems that would allow you to locate things by thematic categories, yet she rejects the idea of categorizing blogs. Sometimes blogs can be poems too.

I remember my short investment of time reading the TEI standards; I thought to myself that it would require an incredible amount of skill and judgment to use their categories (things like metrical structure, etc., for marking up poetry). The same thing is true of thematic categories. They are always matters of dispute—culturally biased, imperfect, and filled with gray boundaries. But people crave structure. It helps us make sense of things.

Most academic writing in the humanities has been saddled with a really tired group of categories—materialist analysis, class structures, gender, and all that stuff. It isn’t that the categories are meaningless, they aren’t. They just don’t really tell us much in the end. It’s still a mystery why these categories inscribe the range of possibilities which renders a discourse acceptable within a specific group.

Other categories, such as “blogger” or “journalist” have the same problem. They come from outside a practices of a new media (usually taken from an older media that is being displaced). Rough edges are smoothed away, in order to make a better fit. Or, the old label can be redefined (though never so much that it is unrecognizable) to make the fit acceptable. Most of these categories are categories of genre.

I was revisiting Foucault’s “What is an Author?” tonight, and it occurred to me how true his observations about “founders of transdiscursive practice” are. Any time a new type of writing unfolds, we always look for an origin. To define blogging, the earliest recourse was to look at the blogs of the people who wrote the software that enabled it. The software engineers, in effect, created the range of possibilities for blogging. It has certain features, due to the limits set by technology. As these possibilities were extended, the definitions were revised but not fundamentally changed. However this search for origins does not reveal much about why or how people use these tools. Are new genres being created? Ultimately, does it really matter if we look at those genres through the same tired old lenses of gender, identity, and power?

I like the way that Victor Burgin put it in In/ Different Spaces:

It is no longer plausible to separate cultures into such distinct realms as “mass culture,” “popular art,” and “high art.” At the levels of production and distribution, all cultural workers today actually or potentially rely on much the same technologies and institutions, and all cultural products are equally subject to commodification (albeit the specific forms of their relation to the market vary).

At the level of reception, the meanings of all products of contemporary culture tend to be cut from much the same cloth: woven from intertextually interrelated but institutionally heterogeneous strands of sense, originating in disparate times and spaces. As there are no longer any definitively separate realms of cultural production, it follows that there can be no islands of counterhegemonic purity.

Notwithstanding the claims of cultural populists or cultural conservatives, “mass” visual culture is to be neither celebrated nor condemned. It serves neither to simply express nor to repress popular aspirations and desires; it is complexly involved in their production and articulation. (20)

I think that the most important categories to be researched are the categories of “aspirations and desires.” What is it about this new media that has encouraged so many people to write in a public forum? I think it has far less to do with the traditional problematics of gender, class and power. Of course it no doubt suffers from these same categories that assert themselves across all discourse. I think that the questions of genre are a little more interesting, but genre questions always return to some sort of originary hypothesis. What matters most is why do people write, not how or when did it start.

Blogging is a zero-sum game when it comes to rewards or power. The relationship of aggravation vs. reward is constantly shifting for anyone who writes this way. I’ve noticed that I tend to link to women more than men, and that I have a lot of queer blogs on my blogroll. Does this make me revolutionary, given the presupposed hegemony? I don’t think so. I think it just means that I like what these people write. Blogging persists, and it is this persistence that bears a great amount of attention— not the ratio of identity or class categories.

What seems needed are functional rather than genre categories.

Addendum:I begin to worry about myself when someone tells me that my blog has a googlewhack for “lithographic castrati” (now gone, alas) or that I find out that I am the number one search result for tactical polyvalence of discourses.