The Company of Categories | Associations: Writing, Discipline, and ...

This blog began as a chronicle of my near mid-life career. For me, and maybe others at a crossroad, I hoped it could sound a weekly alarm in prose: ?write or wrestle with regret.?

?Alarm? signals immediate need, even emergency.? And writing this blog sometimes felt like that.? It?s clear that the book-report/writing process posts could belong in such a category, a category called ?alarm.? ?Tag: product.

But sometimes writing the blog was like hitting a snooze button.? My musings on the end of summer and the start of fall (thinly masked mediations on melancholy) belong in this category. I call it ?snooze.? ?Tag: process.

I started thinking about the company of the categories I keep last Monday, when I had the priviledge of speaking at a CCRC event at the CUNY Graduate Center.? The topic chosen for the evening was the relationship between informal and scholarly writing.

At this half-life in my year of blogging, I thought it would be a good time to find out if the alarm and the snooze posts could coexist.

So for this CCRC forum, I offered a tour of this blog, stopping to speak about posts that perform the blurred lines of public-personal-scholarly writing.

At the end of the talk, one participant asked a key question that helped me find some shared space for the intersecting identities of blogging. ?She asked, ?how do you find readers??

The answer?obvious to this savvy group of students?was clear: create good categories and tags, those devices that enable blog entries to be ?found? (linked to others).

I agree in theory.? But in practice I?ve been dismissive of categories and tagging.? I find them too driven, purposeful, and promotional. ?I always hope for potential in a piece of writing.

Blame it on the French. Their theory taught me to read into texts, not climb all over them with categories.?One of those theorists, Roland Barthes, made this influential claim: as soon as language becomes writing, ?our subject slips away? and ?the author enters into his own death.?

But thanks to CCRC?s ?extraordinary group of student-scholars, this author is newly energized. ?I found a truce between reader-writer and reading-writing, between the alarm and the snooze.

Reconciliation happened when I came face to face (in real life, real time) with actual people asking ?questions that pushed my thinking beyond my false potential/purpose ?binary opposition.?

A good keyword can help coexistence among our many identities. But so can a good, live conversation?not composed but contractual.

I now welcome a new category for this blog: camaraderie.? Tag: reality check.

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I am an Associate Professor of English at Lehman College and at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Composition and Rhetoric is my primary field and research into the history and emerging role of writing in our contemporary culture continues to broaden my definition of this discipline. Work for my book project takes me into the history of literary criticism in America, complexity theories, the culture wars and the intellectual crises of the 1990's, and the enduring complexity of first-year writing and writers.

Source: http://jyood.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2012/11/19/293/

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