Themes versus categories

From my flickr

Trying to make sense of experiences and events can lead to categorization.

I try to resist that, given that I think and have written here that categorizations are usually trade-offs between understanding and convenience.

A grouping is as good as the criteria used for grouping, and there's the rub.

Rational categorizations, the ones used by encyclopedias, are part of our cultural thinking. What I think is missing from the cultural tool arsenal is emotional grouping. (I really should say it is missing from the serious argumentative arsenal, but is very present in rhetoric, which can have a bad name.)

I think the reason for that is individuality. Emotions are based on experience, and this differentiates the perceived and experiential validity of the grouping depending on the audiences' family, clan, nation, etc... This may be why AI is so hard.

But...

now we have the means to not generalize.

We can simulate individuals, mirror them really, and build networks of relationships, like Facebook and other network applications do, and map the emotional gradients and correlate to the other more usual and accepted categorizations and deal with the rhetoric.

But I did not begin this post to write about that.

I want to write about the notion of theme, which is a categorization of emotion and fact, intertwined, used in the arts.

Let me give an example: the outsider theme

I was reading Edward Said's autobiography over (Canadian) Thanksgiving, where he talks about his feelings of being between cultures, and I related it to other immigrant and emigrant writings. Rushdie provides liner notes to Said's book, and I believe that Hitchens was a supporter and friend. I mention this because both are contrarians and sometimes wilful outsiders.

How to describe, or even define the theme of "the outsider"? How does it differ from a category?

Outsiders may feel kinship based on the feeling of belonging, which is rooted in emotion, even in biology.
Attempting to completely categorize the theme of the outsider with words will fail, because one has to feel as an outsider to completely know and understand. Sometimes the feeling is due to internal stuff: memories, wounds, predispositions, inheritance, rather than external immediate factors. It is not reliably induce-able and I would also say that it is not measurable - yet.

For example, a novel's or a painting's theme is a shot in the dark, a collection of experiences and perceptions manipulated to model a simulacrum or resonance of the theme in the audience's mind.

The success of the work depends on the accuracy of the resonance between "player" and "listener", and sometimes on the group think that comes with it, the meme concept, aided by marketing, and that is how culture moves along and changes. Evolution in action.

Happy (survivalist) themes succeed more easily, thus escapist magic, futuristic fantasy, sex stuff. Stuff that is more emotionally ambivalent like Graham Greene's and J.M. Coetzee's  works provide themes that can take root, sometimes grow into the main thread, the canon, produce seed, and thus can join other classics in the taxonomy or network of thematic relationships we call culture.

Themes versus categories. We can now manage thematic encyclopedias. The Web is the perfect tool for this.