In this chapter, Bowker and Star lay out the key critical points underying their concept of the “infrastructural inversion,” an analysis of classification systems which explicitly pays attention to the materiality and labor which leads them to be co-constructed with the social context within which they develop.

This short introduction to the book felt particularly relevant in the context of music because of the moribund approach to organology that has plagued that sub-field of musicology since (basically) the emergence of electronic instruments. The development of those instruments brought an already imperfect system (it would be fun to expand a criticism of the Hornbostel-Sachs system such as Gnoli’s argument in “Phylogenetic Classification” (144), to use the criteria for effective classification discussed in Bowker and Star’s introduction (10)) to relative irrelevance.  Regardless of pretenses of “generative” potential (although I can’t find a citation at the moment, I seem to remember the initial goal of some of these instrumental taxonomies was to encourage the development of new instruments by mapping out what was already done and what was left unexplored), the H.S. system is releagued today to a tool that museums use because, in Margaret Kartomi’s words, “any classification system is better than chaos.” (3) Electronic and electroacoustic instruments effectively decoupled the vibrating body from the interactional medium, challenging half the premise of the H.S. system, which attempts to combine historical perspective with mechanical linking (see Gnoli’s discussion). Worse, some purely electronic instruments made previously uncategorized vibrational schemes accessible to music, but no one has had the temerity to extend the H.S. system to include the various forms of electronic oscillators, filters and processors used by instrument makers in practice. Although I’d personally love to see that, I suspect the level of familiarity with circuits and DSP necessary to effectively do this would a) challenge the boundary work done by ethnomusicologists to establish organology as a discipline useful to them (another topic worth exploring) to the point where both disciplines would have to drastically change and b) not be particularly useful (electronic music instrument museums are rare and small enough a classification system seems irrelevant).

Bowker and Star’s introduction is particularly relevant in the context of Thor Magnusson’s “Rhyzomatic” Organology, a proposal for non-hierarchic, partially machine-generated network of connections that link existing and past instruments in an almost-game-like explorable web (Magnusson, 2017 a and b). Acknowledging the difficulty of productively taxonomizing musical instruments, Magnusson effectively proposes to leverage both continental philosophy and machine learning to a) challenge the need for a hierarchical taxonomy, and b) letting the machine partially figure out the complexity for us. Here, Bowker and Star’s statement that “Standards and classifications, however dry and formal on the surfaces, are suffused with traces of political and social work. ” (50) seems particularly relevant. Although I do want to continue believing in the generative potential of drawing connections between musical instruments, especially electronic ones, to better understand how both past makers have leveraged their modularity and what has been left untried, I do think that erasing all hierarchy makes Magnusson’s system inherently prone to erasing traces of political and social work. This is not a particularly original critique – it’s been used against flat ontologies over and over again – but perhaps there is a version of Magnusson’s vision that allows for local hierarchies, reflecting historical power and social relations in a relatively accurate and accessible way, rather than burying it in machine-generated comments (admittedly, that’s not what he suggests, but that seems like how that kind of information would end up getting written in the rhizomatic model. To riff a la Deleuze, deterritorialization is neither instanteneous nor permanent.

Bowker and Star show us, amongst many things, how to operationalize that. Their avowed focus is classification, but I think the reaches are wider (because classification is ubiquitous). Calls to bring power and relationality to the table, and to make actors accountable for the imbalances and how they’ve used them / how they plan on using them in the future, are commonplace today – but this chapter still seems like a really useful departure point 20 years later.

I may revisit this / expand after our chat.

Works Cited:

Reverse Outline, Chapter 1

Infrastructural inversion

“Infrastructural inversion means recognizing the depths of interdependence of technical networks and standards, on the one hand, and the real work of politics and knowledge production on the other.” 34

Ubiquity: “Classification schemes and standards literally saturate our environment.” 37 “Classification schemes and standards literally saturate our environment.” 38

“It is a struggle to step back from this complexity and think about the issue of ubiquity rather than try to trace the myriad connections in any one case. ” 38

Materiality and texture: “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.” 39

Past as indeterminate: ” We are constantly revising our knowledge of the past in light of new developments in the present. This is not a new idea to historiography or to biography.” 40

The practical politics of classifying and standardizing: “It follows from the indeterminacy discussed above that the spread or enforcement of categories and standards involves negotiation or force. Whatever appears as universal or indeed standard, is the result of negotiations, organizational processes, and conflict. How do these negotiations take place? 44

“Once a system is in place, the practical politics of these decisions are often forgotten, literally buried in archives (when records are kept at all) or built into software or the sizes and compositions of things.” 45

Convergence:

“These ubiquitous, textured classifications and standards help frame our representation of the past and the sequencing of events in the present. They can best be understood as doing the ever local, ever partial work of making it appear that science describes nature (and nature alone) and that politics is about social power (and social power alone). ” 46

” A “reverse engineering” of the DSM or the lCD reveals the multitude of local political and social struggles and compromises that go into the constitution of a “universal” classification. ” 47

“This blindness occurs by changing the world such that the system’s description of reality becomes true. Thus, for example, consider the case where all diseases are classified purely physiologically. Systems of medical observation and treatment are set up such that physical manifestations are the only manifestations recorded. Physical treatments are the only treatments available. Under these conditions, then, logically schizophrenia may only result purely and simply from a chemical imbalance in the brain. It will be impossible to think or act otherwise. We have called this the principle of convergence (Star, Bowker and Neumann in press). ” 49

Resistance:

“The methods in this chapter offer an approach to resistance as a reading of where and how political work is done in the world of classifications and standards, and how such artifacts can be problematized and challenged.” 49

“Standards and classifications, however dry and formal on the surfaces, are suffused with traces of political and social work. Whether we wish to uninvent any particular aspect of complex information infrastructure is properly a political and a public issue. Because it has rarely been cast in that light, tyrannies of various sorts flourish. Some are the tyrannies of inertia-red tape-rather than explicit public policies. Others are the quiet victories of infrastructure builders inscribing their politics into the systems. Still other are almost accidental-systems that become so complex that no one person and no organization can predict or administer good policy.” 50