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are restored. If the patient survives, they are the same but different: an isomorphic transformation has occurred (Timmermans 1996, in press a). |
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The Twisted Landscape: Adding Texture to Multiplicity and Standardization |
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Next, we have add a third trajectory dimension to play off against the interacting trajectories of bodies and multiple identities: the trajectory of classification systems themselves (as part of infrastructure). In looking at an extreme case temporally, where the "time" of the body and of the multiple identities cannot be aligned with the "time" of the classification system, we have suggested that the latter gets twisted by the former. A variety of monstrous classification schemes bubble through the rift in space-time. In the case of tuberculosis, there is a chronic illness that necessitates withdrawal for a prolonged period from normal life, sequestering with others with the disease, in an uncertain time frame that partly depends on the ways classification schemes are perceived, negotiated, and used by health personnel. It also draws on a matrix of possibilities for the basis for these negotiations, including how medical knowledge is represented by public health agencies, classifications modified in the hospital, and images from literature, film, and popular science about "what people with tuberculosis are like." The rich topography of body and biography intercalates with a bureaucratic infrastructural typology (classification scheme; see figure 5.4). |
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When standard classifications are added to the scheme, patients try to fit their experiences along both body and biographical trajectories to a standard picture of metric. Changing definitions, local arrangements, and complex relations of all three trajectories contribute to "torquing" the typology-topography via the dotted lines, which represent negotiations. |
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Twists and Textures: Classification and Lived Experience |
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Time morality is not cut and dried. |
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(Condon and Schweingruber 1994, 63) |
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The information infrastructure that deals with tuberculosis, as with other diseases, operationalizes a classification system that is purely spatial. The disease is localized in this body or not; in this region of the body and no other; it is present among this population but not |
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