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with objectsonce a film has been thrown into the x-rated bin, then there is a strong incentive for the director to make it really x-rated; once a house has been posted as condemned, then people will feel free to trash it. |
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Where the difference lies between transparency and convergence is that where transparency ideally just produces a reflection of the way things really are (and so, in Jullien's (1995) beautiful phrase captures the "propensity of things" in any situation); convergence can radically break downover time or across geographical borders. When categories do break down in this fashion they leave no continuous trace back to the previous regime. So, for instance, when the category of "hysteric" became medically unfashionable, then people with (what used to be called) hysteria were distributed into multiple widely scattered categories. At that juncture, there was no point in their seeing the same doctors, or learning from each other what hysteria was. |
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Scaling Up: Generalization and Standards |
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Similarity is an institution.
Mary Douglas (1986, 55) |
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In this whole complicated coconstruction process, what are the things that make objects and statuses seem given, durable, and real? For, as Desrosières (1990) reminds us, partly through classification work, large-scale bureaucracies are very good at making objects, people, and institutions hold together. Some objects are naturalized in more than one world. They are not then boundary objects, but rather they become standards within and across the multiple worlds in which they are naturalized. Much of mathematics and, in the West, much of medicine and physiology fits this bill. In the Middle Ages a lot of Christian doctrine fit this, too. The hegemony of patriarchy rose from the naturalization of objects across a variety of communities of practice, with the exclusion of women from membership and the denial of their alternative interpretations of objects (Kramarae 1988, Merchant 1980, Croissant and Restivo 1995). |
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When an object becomes naturalized in more than one community of practice, its naturalization gains enormous power to the extent that a basis is formed for dissent to be viewed as madness or heresy. It is also where ideas like "laws of nature" get their power because we are always looking to other communities of practice as sources of validity, and if as far as we look we find naturalization, then the invisibility |
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