Memory Practices in the Sciences (review)

Bowker has written an ambitious and intriguing book—in his words, "a reading of the ways in which information technology in all its forms has become imbricated in the nature and production of knowledge over the past two hundred years" (2). However, it is more a work of cultural geography than narrative history, concerned with the way in which time and space are constructed and represented through scientific practice. Bowker calls science "one of very few modern institutions that claim a perfect memory of the past," adding, "This book is about the work that goes into creating this avowedly perfect memory" (4).

Creating this perfect memory necessarily involves developing a social and technical set of operations and infrastructures, which Bowker terms "memory practices" (7). With respect to science, memory practices result in the production and reproduction of what Bowker calls the generalized "archive"—not just a system for storing, naming, standardizing, and classifying data, but an interlocking (and often hidden) set of claims about how the world works, about how to construct and remember facts that support these claims, and about how to use these claims and remembered facts to generate new knowledge. Bowker suggests that every archive is a "jussive" construction about what can be said about the world and not just a catalog of neutral facts about the world. It is a system designed with a particular worldview in mind, which in turn affects the reproduction (or replacement) of that very worldview.

Bowker develops this thesis by tracing the practices of knowledge production through three eras: "uniformitarian" geology in the 1830s, computer-inspired cybernetics in the 1960s, and database-driven biodiversity research in the present day. But for all of Bowker's attention to temporality, he is not himself writing a history of the disciplines that he investigates; he makes no attempt to arrange or explain chronologically the various claims, projects, funding sources, institution-building efforts, reproductive structures, critical challenges, or successes and failures within geology, cybernetics, or biodiversity. Rather, Bowker deconstructs claims and texts, looking for the key spatial and temporal metaphors that connect to the new information technologies and practices in each period—statistics and accounting for geology, automation and computerization for cybernetics, and networking and visualization for biodiversity.

This technique works poorly for the first two eras, about which Bowker is often unnecessarily cryptic, literary, and playful—so much so that he may bewilder or alienate readers. Moreover, he often exceeds the limits of what his sources can tell him. For instance, he claims that nineteenth-century geology was mainly "a cosmology inspired by factory production developed in the early nineteenth century in Britain and France" where "disordered human events were being made orderly" (43), and that in the twentieth century, "the problems cyberneticians were tackling (managing large systems necessary to keeping complex systems stable) were problems that were central to the new capitalist order" (76). Besides a longer treatment of historical context and development, along the lines of Stephen Kern's The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (New York, 1986), such arguments demand a richer theory of the spatial-temporal connections between culture, capital, and technology, such as in Neil Smith's Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (New York, 1991).

Bowker's discussion of the development of database technology and its application to biodiversity research, however, is required reading for scholars of both science studies and information studies, and for historians interested in the recent development of "technoscientific" efforts on a global scale. In this context, Bowker's political-economic and disciplinary concerns finally emerge directly; he convincingly argues that "the work of producing these databases is inherently political and philosophical and about our relationship with our past despite their acclaimed practicality in the present." He reminds us that in the virtual world of biodiversity data, "exclusion from databases has drastic consequences" in the material world of funding and attention, since "you can only protect through policy interventions that which can be named, that which...