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Donald Crowhurst went quietly mad on a round-the-world yachting race and lay becalmed on the ocean developing a theory of the cosmic mind while at the same time completing and radioing in an immaculate official log that had him winning the race at a record pace. Crowhurst's double log surfaces within his madness as contemplation on the nature of time: "The Kingdom of God has an area measured in square hours. It is a kingdom with all the time in the worldwe have used all the time available to us and must now seek an imaginary sort of time." (Tomalin and Hall 1970, 259). |
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might lead us to believe. The act of clearance is to take away useless theory; then ethnographic work will uncover the true science (always already there) that NIC can express. The act of clearance, therefore, is not one of simple denial of the past, though complex historical narratives need to be constructed to distinguish the two. |
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We do not accept the position that such clearance leads to the creation of some sort of truer sciencethe issue of the validity of nursing knowledge is entirely orthogonal to our purpose. We are producing an anatomy of what it has meant in the case of nursing work to create such a science. This is not an accidental feature of their work but can be seen as a core strategy over the centuries in the creation of sciences through the establishment of stable classification schemes. The strategy itself provides a way of managing a past that threatens to grow out of control. One can declare by fiat that the past is irrelevant to nursing science, while, in Tripp-Reimer's case, validating the past as embodied in current best practice. The development of a classification scheme will provide for a good ordering of memory in the future so that nothing henceforth deemed vital will be lost. |
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This claim that nothing vital will be lost is strategically important but largely unverifiable for two reasons. First, the classification scheme itself forms a relatively closed system with respect to the knowledge that it enfolds. Thus, in Latour's terms, it resists trials of strength. It becomes difficult to stand outside of it and demonstrate that something is being selectively deleted or overlooked from the archive it supports. Second, even if the classification scheme is in principle robust, it is by definition hard to remember what has been removed from the archive when the archive itself is basically the only memory repository at hand. |
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