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category system. The myriad of classifications and standards that surround and support the modern world, however, often blind people to the importance of the "other" category as constitutive of the whole social architecture (Derrida 1980). |
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Communities vary in their tastes for openness, and in their tolerance for this ambiguity. Cults, for example, are one sort of collective that is low on the openness dimension and correspondingly high on the naturalization-positivism dimensionus versus them. |
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In recent years social theorists have been working toward enriching an understanding of multiplicity and misfit, decentering the idea of an unproblematic mainstream. The schools of thought grappling with this include feminist research (e.g., Haraway 1997), multicultural or race-critical theory (e.g., Ferguson et al. 1990), symbolic interactionism, and activity theory (e.g., Cole 1996, Wertsch 1991, 1998). During the same period, such issues have become increasingly of concern to some information scientists. As the information systems of the world expand and flow into each other, and more kinds of people use them for more different things, it becomes harder to hold to pure or universal ideas about representation or information. |
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Some of these problems are taken up in the intellectual common territory sometimes called "cyborg." Cyborg, as used for example by Donna Haraway (1991) and Adele Clarke (1998), means the intermingling of people, things (including information technologies), representations, and politics in a way that challenges both the romance of essentialism and the hype about what is technologically possible. It acknowledges the interdependence of people and things, and it shows just how blurry the boundaries between them have become. The notion of cyborg has clearly touched a nerve across a broad spectrum of intellectual endeavors. The American Anthropological Association has hosted sessions on cyborg anthropology for the past several years; the weighty Cyborg Handbook was published a few years ago (Gray 1995). |
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Through looking at ubiquitous classification systems and standards, it is possible to move toward an understanding of the stuff that makes up the networks that shape much of modern daily life in cyborg fashion. We draw attention here to the places where the work gets done of assuring that these networks will stick together: to the places where human and nonhuman are constructed to be operationally and analytically equivalent. By so doing, we explore the political and ethical dimensions of classification theory. |
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