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biguity, protecting them where necessary to leave free play for the schemes to do their organizational work. |
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Rendering voice retrievable. As classification systems get ever more deeply embedded into working infrastructures, they risk getting black boxed and thence made both potent and invisible. By keeping the voices of classifiers and their constituents present, the system can retain maximum political flexibility. This includes the key ability to be able to change with changing natural, organizational, and political imperatives. A caveat here, drawn from chapter 7's lesson about the invisibility of nursing work: we are not simply celebrating visibility or naively proposing a populist agenda for the empire of classification. Visibility is not an unmitigated good. Rather, by retrievability, we are suggesting that under many circumstances, the "rule by no one" or the "iron cage of bureaucracy" is strengthened by its absence. When classification systems and standards acquire inertia because they are part of invisible infrastructure, the public is de facto excluded from policy participation. |
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Being sensitive to exclusions. We have in particular drawn attention here to the distribution of residual categories (who gets to determine what is "other"). Classification systems always have other categories, to which actants (entities or people) who remain effectively invisible to the scheme are assigned. A detailed analysis of these others throws into relief the organizational structure of any scheme (Derrida 1998). Residual categories have their own texture that operates like the silences in a symphony to pattern the visible categories and their boundaries. |
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Stewart Brand's (1994) wonderful book, How Buildings Learn, gives many examples of how buildings get designed as they are used as much as on the architect's drawing board. Thus a house with a balcony and numerous curlicues around the roof will become a battened-down square fortress block under the influence of a generation of storms from the northeast. Big single-family mansions become apartment buildings as a neighborhood's finances change. These criteria generalize to classification systems. Through these three design criteria we are drawing attention to the fact that architecture becomes archaeology over time. This in turn may become a cycle. |
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Overall, we have argued that classifications are a key part of the standardization processes that are themselves the cornerstones of working infrastructures. People have always navigated sets of classification spaces. Mary Douglas (1984), among others, has drawn |
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