Categorisation Quotes

“New Adult is a label that is condescending to readers and authors alike. It implies that the books act as training wheels between Young Adult and Adult. For the New Adult books that are particularly childish, the label implies that they are a step above Young Adult--which is insulting to the Young Adult books that are far superior. For the New Adult books that are particularly sophisticated, the label implies that they are not worthy of being considered "adult." It's a lose-lose situation for everyone.

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Therefore, the new genre of New Adult is a large step backwards. It increases the system of categories and labels even further, and prevents readers from expanding their horizons and minds. The term is reductive and it is insulting to its own audience.”
― Lauren Sarner

“Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it, on the screen, in conversation, onstage, on the page.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“The desire to categorize humans along racial lines, and the impulse to superpose attributes such as intelligence (or criminality, creativity, or violence) on those lines, illustrates a general theme concerning genetics and categorization. Like the English novel, or the face, say, the human genome can be lumped and split in a million different ways. But whether to split or lump, to categorize or synthesize, is a choice. ... The narrower the definition of the heritable feature or the trait, the more likely we will find a genetic locus for that trait, and the more likely we will find that the trait will segregate within some human sub-population.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“The process of categorisation is as old as men, yet as old as man alone, for no other animal species categorises itself so neatly. Yet the ultimate, most vulnerable and weakest victim of categorisation is empathy. Categorisation is a process that destroys the very empathy that enlivens communities: the empathy that traditionally binds diverse communities together.”
― Joshua Krook, Us vs Them: A Case for Social Empathy

“Without reduction and categorization we simply could not survive. And so, when considered in the strictest sense, the point is not to live without categories, rather to first liquify established and malignant categories on order to then to helpful sense categories and interpretations that will open up the cognitive space of putting for interpretation and action.”
― Jürgen Kriz, Self-Actualization