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Thus we have used the metaphor of the texture of a classification system to explore the fact that any given classification provides surfaces of resistances (where the real resists its definition), blocks against certain agendas, and smooth roads for others. Within this metaphorical landscape, the individual's trajectoryoften, for all that, perceived as continuous and self-consistentis at each moment twisted and torqued by classifications and vice versa. |
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Therefore we have, through our analysis of various classification systems, attempted to provide a first approximation to an analytic language that recognizes that the architecture of classification schemes is simultaneously a moral and an informatic one. This book has brought to light as crucial to the design process the reading of classification schemes as political and cultural productions. We have stressed that any classification scheme can be read in this fashion. We initially deliberately eschewed cases like DSM-IV, where categories have often already become explicit objects of political contention, such as "homosexual" or "premenstrual tension." In the psychiatric case, there can in this sense often be a more direct read-off from political exigencies to disease categories. Although such readings are of course highly valuable in their own right (see Kirk and Kutchins 1992, Kutchins and Kirk 1997, and Figert 1996), we first took the more muted cases posed by the ICD where the politics were quieter. This we hoped would show the generalizability of the thesis that all category systems are moral and political entities. This was balanced later in the book with an analysis of the much more obviously politically laden categories generated by the proapartheid government and its scientific apologists. |
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This book has implications for both designers and users (and we are all increasingly both) of complex information spaces. It provides intellectual and methodological tools for recognizing and working with the ethical and political dimensions of classification systems. In particular we have underlined several design exigencies that speak both to the architecture of information systems encoding classification systems and to their development and change: |
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Recognizing the balancing act of classifying. Classification schemes always represent multiple constituencies. They can do so most effectively through the incorporation of ambiguityleaving certain terms open for multiple definitions across different social worlds: they are in this sense boundary objects. Designers must recognize these zones of am- |
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