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standing movements, textures, and shifts that will grasp patterns within the ubiquitous larger phenomenon. The distribution of residual categories ("not elsewhere classified" or "other") is one such concept. ''Others" are everywhere, structuring social order. Another such concept might be what Strauss et al. (1985) call a "cumulative mess trajectory." In medicine, this occurs when one has an illness, is given a medicine to cure the illness, but incurs a serious side effect, which then needs to be treated with another medicine, and so forth. If the trajectory becomes so tangled that you cannot turn back and the interactions multiply, "cumulative mess" results. We see this phenomenon in the interaction of categories and standards all the timeecological examples are particularly rich places to look. |
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The second methodological departure point is that classifications and standards are material, as well as symbolic. How do we perceive this densely saturated classified and textured world? Under the sway of cognitive idealism, it is easy to see classifications as properties of mind and standards as ideal numbers or floating cultural inheritances. But they have material force in the world. They are built into and embedded in every feature of the built environment (and in many of the nature-culture borderlands, such as with engineered genetic organisms). |
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All classification and standardization schemes are a mixture of physical entities, such as paper forms, plugs, or software instructions encoded in silicon, and conventional arrangements such as speed and rhythm, dimension, and how specifications are implemented. Perhaps because of this mixture, the web of intertwined schemes can be difficult to see. In general, the trick is to question every apparently natural easiness in the world around us and look for the work involved in making it easy. Within a project or on a desktop, the seeing consists in seamlessly moving between the physical and the conventional. So when computer programmers write some lines of Java code, they move within conventional constraints and make innovations based on them; at the same time, they strike plastic keys, shift notes around on a desktop, and consult manuals for various standards and other information. If we were to try to list all the classifications and standards involved in writing a program, the list could run to pages. Classifications include types of objects, types of hardware, matches between requirements categories and code categories, and metacategories such |
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