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this chapter on Macintosh and IBM computers, for example, and cutting and pasting are no longer phenomenologically novel operations, although we can remember when they once were. We have naturalized the mouse, the operation of selecting text, and the anachronistic "cut and paste" metaphor. |
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This chapter, so far, has discussed analytically two sets of relationships: between people and membership on the one hand; and objects and naturalization on the other hand. In any given instance, both membership and naturalization are relations along a trajectory. In saying this, we do not want to recreate a great divide between people and objects, reifying an objectless human or wild child. Ironically, social science has spent incredible resources on precisely this sort of search. There is something compelling about the idea of a person without "a society," naked even of touch or language. The sad case of "Genie," a child kept captive by her parents for many years (Rymer 1993, Star 1995d), or the "wild child of Aveyron" who amazed eighteenth-century philosophers, are emblematic of this propensity. They have been seen as holding the key to language or in a way to what it is to be human. |
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Exactly the opposite, however, is true. People-and-things, which are the same as people-and-society, cannot be separated in any meaningful practical sense. At the same time, it is possible for analytical purposes to think of two trajectories traveling in tandem, membership, and naturalization. Just as it is not practically possible to separate a disease from a sick patient, yet it is possible to speak of the trajectories of disease and biography operating and pulling at one another, as seen in chapter 5 in the case of tuberculosis. |
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Residual Categories, Marginal People, and Monsters |
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People often see multiplicity and heterogeneity as accidents or exceptions. The marginal person, who is for example of mixed race, is portrayed as the troubled outsider; just as the thing that does not fit into one bin or another gets put into a "residual" category. This habit of purity has old and complicated origins in western scientific and political culture (e.g. as explicated by Dewey 1916). The habit perpetuates a cruel pluralistic ignorance. No one is pure. No one is even average. And all things inhabit someone's residual category in some |
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