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and the very doorways of museums and galleries. These constraints are mutable only at great cost, and artists must always consider them before violating them. |
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Scientific inversions of infrastructure were the theme of a path-breaking edited volume, The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth-Century Life Sciences (Clarke and Fujimura 1992). The purpose of this volume was to tell the history of biology in a new wayfrom the point of view of the materials that constrain and enable biological researchers. Rats, petri dishes, taxidermy, planaria, drosophila, and test tubes take center stage in this narrative. The standardization of genetic research on a few specially bred organisms (notably drosophila) has constrained the pacing of research and the ways the questions may be framed, and it has given biological supply houses an important, invisible role in research horizons. While elephants or whales might answer different kinds of biological questions, they are obviously unwieldy lab animals. While pregnant cow's urine played a critical role in the discovery and isolation of reproductive hormones, no historian of biology had thought it important to describe the task of obtaining gallons of it on a regular basis. Adele Clarke (1998) puckishly relates her discovery, found in the memoirs of a biologist, of the technique required to do so: tickle the cow's labia to make her urinate. A starkly different view of the tasks of laboratory biology emerges from this image. It must be added to the processes of stabling, feeding, impregnating, and caring for the cows involved. The supply chain, techniques, and animal handling methods had to be invented along with biology's conceptual frame; they are not accidental, but constitutive. |
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Our infrastructural inversion with respect to information technologies and their attendant classification systems follows this line of analysis. Like the cow's urine or the eight-hour concert, we have found many examples of counterintuitive, often humorous struggles with constraints and conventions in the crafting of classifications. For instance, as we shall see in chapter 5, in analyzing the experience of tuberculosis patients in Mann's The Magic Mountain, we found the story of one woman who had been incarcerated so long in the sanatorium that leaving it became unthinkable. She recovered from the disease, but tried to subvert the diagnosis of wellness. When the doctors took her temperature, she would surreptitiously dip the thermometer in hot water to make it seem that she still had a fever. On discovering this, the doctors created a thermometer without markings, so that she could not tell what the mercury column indicated. They called this |
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