Indeterminacy. Группа авторов
Sweet wrapper
3.1 Columbusstrasse, Bremerhaven City Center
3.2 Hansastrasse, Bremerhaven
3.3 Donated items at the Headquarters of the Equal Rights Club, Hansastrasse, Bremerhaven
3.4 Schrotthaus, Goetheviertel, Bremerhaven
3.5 Schrotthaus, detail, Goetheviertel, Bremerhaven
5.1 Coal-washing plant female workers cleaning the factory yard, Karaganda
5.2 Retired Russian miner in Shakhtinsk, Kazakhstan, displaying his Soviet-era medals
5.3 Lunchtime conversation at the Estonian mine’s underground garage
5.4 Miners’ rock band, Karaganda
6.1 Kazakh migrants from Narynkol to Almaty in 2000
6.2 Shanyrak, one of Almaty’s informal settlements in 2000
6.3 Repatriate Kazakhs from Karakalpakstan in Shanyrak in 2000
7.1 The Korean shipyard of Subic Bay
7.2 The main gate to the former US naval base
Introduction
The Values of Indeterminacy
Catherine Alexander and Andrew Sanchez
Indeterminacy and Classification
This book explores the relationship between indeterminacy and classification, particularly the kind of classificatory order that is central to the modern bureaucratic state. At the heart of classification is the question of value and waste. What we propose here is a third term to challenge this binary: indeterminacy. Used here it describes that which defies classification. As Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star point out in their pathbreaking book Sorting Things Out, “each category valorizes some point of view and silences another” (1999: 5). While the production of value and waste through classification has been well rehearsed (Star and Lampland 2008), here we are analyzing how value-making categories also produce waste that resists classification. It is these indeterminacies—the silenced points of view—that interest us here. Thinking of waste in relation to classification systems inevitably brings us to Mary Douglas’s classic formulation in Purity and Danger that dirt is matter out of place (1966: 36).1 However, as Ben Campkin notes (2013: 3), there is some inconsistency between this neat binary definition of dirt and her analysis of waste as anomalous and disruptive of the structured way through which worlds are understood. “Reflection on dirt,” Douglas wrote, “involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness” (1966: 6).
Bowker and Star have two further points that are relevant for us here. They remind us that classification is a profoundly moral process, making some places, materials, actions, and people visible, while others are “left wild, or in darkness, or even unmapped” (1999: 32); and that visibility may bring disadvantage as much as advantage (ibid.: 44). To this we add Star and Martha Lampland’s comment that categories are necessarily part of a larger scheme of meaning and value that frame how knowledge is represented through classification (2008: 21): classification thus implies a totality or whole of which it is part. Whether these totalities are value systems, states, or society, they are also partly effects of the imagination (Graeber 2013).
By training our gaze on that very relation between form and formlessness that Douglas suggests, we offer a series of interventions that problematize a binary reading of waste and value and in so doing complicate such approaches to classificatory systems. We suggest that waste and value are both aspects of Douglas’s “form” whereas formlessness or indeterminacy is a third modality occupying a space between waste and value.2 Indeterminacy can also encompass these conditions, or act as an imaginary state that provides the precondition for certain value-creating interventions, or indeed operate within categories where fuzzy gradients of compliance are obscured by binary determination. Thus we highlight that classification, as a way of apprehending reality, is itself essentially indeterminate.
We show, for example, how accounting techniques can invoke, or imagine waste and value as co-constitutive, but not as opposites; how people, places, infrastructure, and materials may be in limbo, suspended spaces and times that escape ideas of either waste or value; how instances of the “anomalous” can elide different instances of category confusion with markedly different consequences; how waste as excess of meaning can threaten to explode meaning-making categories from within; and how a superabundance of legislative categories and guidance can create gaps where (for example) one legal regime does not quite mesh with the next. Indeterminacy may thus act as a third term, or challenge binary category-making from within. It is also one way in which some wastes are characterized or certain conditions of exclusion experienced.
We take forward Bowker and Star’s observation that visibility (and we would add invisibility) may bring either benefit or loss to challenge analytical normativities that tend to see indeterminacy as either positive or negative. Indeed both may be different facets of the same experience. For example, in resisting gender codification people may also find themselves economically harmed, invisible as citizens, and therefore unable to claim welfare rights.
Just as bureaucratic classifications and standards appear to be abstract but are relational in their effect, so too are infrastructure’s effects unevenly distributed (Star and Lampland 2008: 13; Star and Ruhleder 1996: 113). Again, introducing indeterminacy as a third term can highlight the co-constitution of advantage and disadvantage: if houses are perceived to be derelict by city officials, their inhabitants are less likely to be immediate victims of gentrification. Such housing is simultaneously rubbish and prized—to different constituencies. Recognition, whether or not explicitly referred to as such, therefore emerges as a theme throughout this volume, although the perspective twists and turns: who classifies someone or something as excessive or unknowable is a question of power. In many instances, indeterminacy is lack of recognition on someone’s part, not always on everyone’s part. And that is the crux of the ethnographic puzzle.
We further offer an analysis of how people who feel themselves cast out, or mourn the loss of previous status, may long for reincorporation to alternative or earlier totalities and, in contrast, consider how the fragment challenges any notion of a past or potential whole, or indeed any sense of classification or motion toward another state at all. Attention paid to the fragment signals one more engagement with indeterminacy, classification, and totalizing systems. This additional engagement puts emphasis on contingency, which includes going nowhere at all, as opposed to prior or predetermined futures.
As some of these examples might suggest, this book is largely staged through wastes as matter and metaphor embracing people, places, and materials that have been broadly classified as waste, displaced, been removed, or removed themselves from dominant systems of value. We also include two familiar waste sites (a landfill and a sorting station) to highlight both that these places can be transformative for people and materials moving from discard to value, and that indistinct remnants and wayward pollution defy containment and relation to other entities or putative wholes.
In so doing, we flag the complexity and multiplicity of relationships that waste can have with value. Depending on context and perspective, waste is (at least): the antithesis of value, that which enables value, irredeemably toxic or sterile, a resource by another name, an unrecoverable residue, not yet productive, disgusting,