Categorization systems fail and threaten authority when semantic boundaries overlap.

Evidence

Halfbreeds differ significantly from apparently similar cases of the ‘boundary-blurring’. If social outcasts, the declassé individuals, are, so to speak, decategorized, while immigrants tend to be a-categorized (they exist, as it were, outside the dominant classification and hence on the whole do not sap its authority), half-breeds are overcategorized; they force the overlap of semantic fields which need to be carefully fenced and kept separate if the dominant classification is to retain its authority — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 776

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the tripartite distinction between decategorized, a-categorized, and overcategorized subjects — a precise mechanism for how racial classification derives its authority.
• XREF: Connects directly to Orientalism’s construction of the Other and to Richard Alba’s boundary concepts; a core piece of the race-thinking toolkit the reader is assembling. — connects to: Comintern practice collapsed left and right opposition into one category; Classification systems constitute infrastructures with political consequences in AI training. — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 1526; Narrative structure models how categories travel across ontologies into AI systems — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 2384 (+1 more)
• SEED: The ‘overcategorized’ figure — the metis, the mulatto, the convert — is a rich angle for an essay on how ambivalent identities threaten classification systems more than outsiders do.

Related

• Comintern practice collapsed left and right opposition into one category (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Classification systems constitute infrastructures with political consequences in AI training. #expands (0.82) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 1526
• Knowledge-versus-ignorance categories protect present-day readers from self-implication #exemplifies (0.72)
• Narrative structure models how categories travel across ontologies into AI systems #expands (0.70) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 2384