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that one; the cure can be found in this place but not that, and so forth. The closest that one gets to the flow of time is the description active or passive, latent or virulent; and at these key points the classification system itself breaks down in numerous ways. The information infrastructure dealing with medical knowledge abstracts away from process to produce ways of knowing defined as being true "for all time" about its subject and so able to abstract contingent historical and biographical flow to uncover the underlying reality. |
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But there is not just one kind of classification in the world, as we have amply demonstrated in the case of the ICD. Classification work is always multiple. As we move further from medical knowledge and closer to the suffering patient, time seeps into the classification systems that get used: how long does group I stay here? (Roth); how can I get reclassified so that I can pass more time on the magic mountain? (Mann). Camille's morality tale unfolds in time in binary oppositions of good-bad, fit-ill, black-white; promotion or demotion from class to class occurs in a continually downward career trajectory. Tuberculosis is the archetypal disease of time: chronic, recurrent, progressive. |
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So what happens when the disease of time meets the classification of space? As we have shown, the formal, spatial classification twists. "Other" categories run rampant, each seeking a way of expressing the elusive, forbidden flow of time (words like "quiescent" and "nonactive" abound). A macabre landscape is born. And the historiography of the classification system twists too: in stunning contrast to most medical scientific texts, tuberculosis classifiers speak of a cyclical flow to their own historical time (not linear progress). From the other point of view, that of the patient, orthogonal classifications are developed that do not interact with medical categories. "I have put in my time here, and I am a good person, so I deserve to be better and to leave.'' The disease is given a temporal texture at the price of becoming purely local; abstracted away from the standardized language it becomes once again temporally textured and immediate. |
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This way of framing the problem introduces the idea of texture as an important one in conceptualizing the relationships between representations, work, body, and biography. Michael Lynch's (1995) work on topical contextures implies a similar direction: the look and feel of being in a place and using a genre of representations. Kari Thoresen (personal communication), a former geologist, is developing a model and vocabulary for different aspects of texture in organizations and technological networks, examining layers and strata, crystallization |
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