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Despite the contentiousness of some categories, however, none of the above-named disciplines or social movements has systematically addressed the pragmatics of the invisible forces of categories and standards in the modern built world, especially the modern information technology world. Foucault's (1970; 1982) work comes the closest to a thoroughgoing examination in his arguments that an archaeological dig is necessary to find the origins and consequences of a range of social categories and practices. He focused on the concept of order and its implementation in categorical discourse. The ubiquity described by Foucault appears as an iron cage of bureaucratic discipline against a broad historical landscape. But there is much more to be done, both empirically and theoretically. No one, including Foucault, has systematically tackled the question of how these properties inform social and moral order via the new technological and electronic infrastructures. Few have looked at the creation and maintenance of complex classifications as a kind of work practice, with its attendant financial, skill, and moral dimensions. These are the tasks of this book. |
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Foucault's practical archaeology is a point of departure for examining several cases of classification, some of which have become formal or standardized, and some of which have not. We have several concerns in this exploration, growing both from the consideration of classification work and its attendant moral dimensions. First, we seek to understand the role of invisibility in the work that classification does in ordering human interaction. We want to understand how these categories are made and kept invisible, and in some cases, we want to challenge the silences surrounding them. In this sense, our job here is to find tools for seeing the invisible, much as Émile Durkheim passionately sought to convince his audience of the material force of the social factto see that society was not just an ideamore than 100 years ago (Durkheim 1982). |
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The book also explores systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as a city planner or urban historian would leaf back through highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, we delve the dusty archives of classification design to understand better how wide-scale classification decisions have been made. |
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We have a moral and ethical agenda in our querying of these systems. Each standard and each category valorizes some point of view and silences another. This is not inherently a bad thingindeed it is inescapable. But it is an ethical choice, and as such it is dangerousnot |
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