“Texts are active. And they do so much.” (Mol, subtext 160).
Lucid, deliberative, thoughtful, and restrained, Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple is a welcome contrast to Helmreich’s Alien Ocean. I found Mol’s self-described “ethnographic” and “praxiographic” approach toward the different ways that atherosclerosis is enacted in Hospital Z to resonate powerfully with phenomenological and pragmatist philosophical traditions, which dispense with epistemological skepticism in favor of descriptive engagements with experienced existence. It is no wonder Mol refers to Merleau-Ponty in her preface (x); his phenomenological work on embodiment and especially on “the phantom limb” was never far from my mind while reading Mol’s descriptions of atherosclerosis as “pain,” as “interview,” and as “evidence,” not least when the “phantom limb” appeared here as a real leg, amputated, refrigerated, and dissected (37-38).
I appreciate very much Mol’s restraint and self-awareness. In her written practice, atherosclerosis is “enacted” as a subject of meditation and an object through which she can “enact” theoretical questions, and by keeping a tight focus on Hospital Z and atherosclerosis of the legs, Mol is able to address her concerns with depth and care (subtext 181). Her subtext offers a curious counterpoint to her “ethnography” that neither undermines nor properly contextualizes the main text, but rather adds another frame of questions about practice and enactment, this time about writing itself.
It is on this self-reflective note that I will finish. Coming from outside the discipline of anthropology, I find myself struggling with the notion of “ethnography,” particularly in Mol’s text. On the one hand fighting naïve notions of Margaret Mead among the Samoans, on the other I’m perplexed as to how Mol can write an “ethnography” that is explicitly without an “ethnos”—unless, that is, atherosclerosis is a “people.” Perhaps she means the people affected by or dealing with atherosclerosis, but this doesn’t seem to quite be her topic; her own “praxiography,” or even the wider term “phenomenology,” seems more apt. This is a question I have about the text that I cannot answer. I would like to pose more questions, especially about some of Mol’s “gestures” (which while well-performed are still troublesome) insofar as they are typical of what I think of as “theory,” gestures such as the refusal to provide answers in favor of opening “the space in which [questions] may be posed,” the overt but necessarily limited interdisciplinarity, and the suggestion that critical strategies of reframing and problematization might be in themselves emancipatory, not because I think they can be dispensed with but because these practices are practices, themselves open to examination (see, for example, Ian Hunter’s “The History of Theory” in Critical Inquiry. This post is too long already, tho, and all I can do is suggest the space in which these questions might be posed…
“My ethnographic strategy hinges on the art of never forgetting about microscopes” And so begins Mol’s intervention (or interference) into anthropology, philosophy, medicine, and, ultimately, to situate her text as an enacted object according to her own “ontology-as-practice”, into a reality, both multiple and shared.
My own practice of reading enacts The Body Multiple in a different way to the rest of the class; enacted, as such, however, it exists in the same space (this blog, in part) to those other readings and, in class on Thursday, the book will become something else again when we coordinate it through discussion. It is not, therefore, that the text only exists because I have read it, nor is it always already formed and only waiting to be read. Rather, it is my practice of reading (performative and material at the same time) that holds significance, that enacts and that interferes with other practices in the ultimate form of coexistence that goes by the title “The Body Multiple”. Certainly, if I were not to have read as an anthropologist – a literature student, perhaps – the multiple life of this object might have become more explicit.
When an object is granted a life of its own, rather than only the life we give it, we are able to think with objects across divides – knower/known, subject/object, doctor/patient, reader/text. Mol actively provokes: “what are you, reader, going to do with my words?”
If ontology is a question of being, then the notion of being alongside becomes most useful for grasping the way in which Mol invites us to think differently. “Ontology-in-practice comes with objects that do not so much cohere as assemble”. Thus, just as Mol’s subtext exists alongside her ethnographic narrative, situating and interfering with it and enacting The Body Multiple as a “single multiple object”, so in her ethnography of disease “artery and person are situated next to each other, rather than being a part contained inside a whole”. This notion of coexistence opens the space for a different kind of logic and a different kind of spatiality – one in which we, ultimately, can exist as multiple selves.
In response to Roy, above, as to “how Mol can write an “ethnography” that is explicitly without an “ethnos””, I think it is precisely the absence of a fixed notion of society/culture/the human that opens the political space that she moves us into. Her “politics of what” foregrounds (ethnographic/medical/scientific) practice in a way that does not over- or under-determine; that demands intellectual and scientific questioning, both materiality and abstraction, and an analysis that is, like Mol’s, rigorously philosophical as well as intimately ethnographic. Perhaps in challenge to the very notion of the “ethnos”, she suggests that “there are a lot of ways to live…and there is no we to stand outside them or above them…we are implied”.
Mol proposes a methodology based on panning as opposed to zooming, the idea being that the concepts of nested scales do not adequately account for the multiplicity of beings. Precisely because focusing in on any site makes clear that it is multiple, her approach is to work across, to see how objects are multiple without fragmenting, how it is that they hang together. Her point is not that things don't exist in reality, or that they are all social constructs, but that being is contingent and an achievment, that there is a great deal of work going into enacting objects: a labor-theory-of-being perhaps.
What I especially like about Mol's approach is the way she has provided a analysis that refuses to move toward the universal, insisting in its locality but that is, exactly because of this, hugely mobile. I wondered throughout though, how a book that has been around for 7 years now and so lucidly written has not had more impact. Perhaps I relate to wrong literatures, but it seems that Mol offers such a succinct analytic and method to get around so many tired problematics (solidarity/confilct, structure/agency etc) that bog down debates. She is also much more explicit in thinking through the ethical space that her work opens. Although, as Roy writes, she 'simply' opens the space, it was satisfying after Helmreich's evasions of these discussions to see her take them on. I disagree, however, with her own assessment that her work is not critical. Not denunciatory, sure. But her politics of engagement, of what, and her ethical insistence that a diffuse we can rethink the order(ing) of things is, in my mind, precisely the terrain of critique.
I found Mol's ethnography fascinating in part because the subject is not traditional in the sense of an "ethnos" or people; yet it is traditional because Mol's subject cannot exist without human actions. As readers and as patients who have participated in the biomedical process we are introduced to atherosclerosis as pains and discomfort that become symptoms and then diagnoses. As Mol emphasizes, there is no such thing as atherosclerosis before the doctor translates a patient's problems into symptom of the diagnosis. This does not mean that the disease is nonexistent; this means that we have a category within which certain methods and analyses identify a familiar pattern by which understand the disease as such. This might be a simplification of a more complex social process, but we can imagine the scientism of medicine mirroring a study of magic or myth. The meanings and associations with the physical and mental body and other objects come to have multiple identities, purposes, and expectations, and the experience of reality, even at a level of everyday experience, is molded and tempered by these influences.
This relates to the idea of multiplicities that Mol explains throughout the book. Something as empirically defined as atherosclerosis is nonetheless arcane and constantly transformed by new interpretations and medical discoveries. Moreover, the category of "atherosclerosis" contains a diverse list of symptoms and types that almost appear as many different diseases--yet are all one disease. Cross sections of veins , the ability to walk only short distances, pains in the thigh, CT-scan images--all these factors contribute to the identification of atherosclerosis. A CT=scan might uncover claudification in the artery of a leg--that claudification leads to a diagnosis of atherosclerosis. The question is: are claudification and atherosclerosis equivalent? What does it mean if they are not? The diagnosis is comprised of other diagnoses based on symptoms identified through complaint by the patient. The disease is the manifestation of the totality of these diagnoses, which leads to prescribed treatments. We as readers (and patients) view this process as traditional, following proven methods. Yet, despite our comfort with or expectations of the medical process, there is no tangible meaning to any of it outside of our own legitimization of the process through participation. Certainly, certain methods will heal the body of physical wounds, and there is no denying that lives have been changed by medicine, both positively and negatively. What is important, and what Mol identifies, is that there is a social system attached at all times; we feel that we can heal--sure, but we feel that we know what is healed because we have named it and described it. A diagnosis represents the participation all professionals and patients who come to understand their bodies--the body--as a subject to definition, itself comprised of smaller subjects, and in that way integrated into the social system as an entity separate from its physicality, and yet, at the same time, at one with that form.
My reading of Mol's book felt haphazard because of the double text, yet that very structure of the book mirrored its subject. A reader is exposed to description, interviews, technical jargon and explanation. Then, the second text orients the reader toward relevant literature, ideas, and a historicization of anthropological/sociological thought concerning diagnoses and disease as socio-cultural, thoroughly political tropes. We learn that diagnoses and disease are enacted through a physicians methodology and findings. Though the disease may exist without diagnosis, it exists for the doctor through a name and a classification of that name. Both name and classification are entered into the vocabulary and library of knowledge and understanding by which disease is understood in Western medicine, and becomes a part of patient/future patient understanding. To enact is to give meaning, which is in itself to be an actor in the process of creation and dissemination or circulation of meaning. This of course involves a great big web of standards, positions of power (who can make definitions, or who do we trust to do so), cultural differences, resistance of patients or even older generations of physicians, etc.
As with Helmreich's book from last week, Mol has introduced an idea of the integration of the human into the constructions of humans. The body multiple is a singular form endowed with a multiplicity of identities, meanings, and representations.
What is atherosclerosis? Mol gives many answers to the question and as I read this piece, I was absorbed by each answer or each entity of atherosclerosis. It is pain for the patient. It is Atherosclerosis for the doctor in the Out-Patient Clinic. It is a thickening of the arterial walls for the surgeon. It is process which can be prevented for the department of internal medicine. It is “deviance” involving the blood-clotting mechanism for the hematologist. It would appear that atherosclerosis could be anything and everything, but Mol warns against this, “It is more than one, and less than many” (82, subtext). So, it would appear that there are boundaries to this thing called atherosclerosis. Keeping these boundaries in mind, we can then wonder how these multiplicities come into being.
In all of these different “versions” of atherosclerosis, a certain Atherosclerosis hangs together. That is to say, the multiplicity that exists as atherosclerosis is somehow coordinated into a singularity (82, subtext). But how? This is one of the open questions Mol poses to her readers. While we cannot be certain about the nature of how this singularity is made, Mol does make it clear that it is done and is done remarkably well. It is coordinated through practice. It is enacted.
Mol makes a point to note the lack of general communication between such departments in Hospital Z as the department of pathology and the vascular surgeons, yet when it is necessary for the two departments to communicate, they have little trouble. This brings into question the weight of the act of enacting. Since enacting is an act, right? To what extent is that what has been enacted carried over to another act of enacting? In what shared form does atherosclerosis take so that it can be communicated between two people?
By trying to locate knowledge in the activity or practice, rather than in the subject and their object of knowledge, Mol suggests a brilliant answer to most of the questions I raised above: coexistence. As Jacob noted above, Mol takes us away from the tiresome self/other divide. For her, selves are “flowing into their others” (143). For Mol, “modes of coordination, distribution, and inclusion…allow different versions of a “single” object to coexist” (Mol,180).
"Knowledge is not understood as a matter of reference, but as one of manipulation"
As Alice pointed out, there are many ways to engage with Mol's The Body Multiple, as there is with all texts. Yet, because her argument aligns with the many, the multiple, and the varied, in this case this plurality becomes a more conscious act. To call it an act also complies with Mol's argument about how things should be understood: not as empty recipients that are later provided with meaning but as the things they become when manipulated in practice. Objects, says Mol, gain their identities at the various moments when and where they are handled, staged, performed. And so do people. "The dividing line between human subjects and natural objects has been breached."(44) This is part of Mol's act, as she is attentive to the multiplicity of reality. A big step, at least in theory.
However, this is something I still can't fully understand. I see Eric's point about Mol's understanding of identity through processes of coordination, inclusion and distribution. But, when she mentions something like "(...) to spread the activity of knowing widely. To spread it out over tables, knives, records, microscopes, buildings, and other things or habits in which it is embedded" (50, subtext) I got disoriented. She says, it is about enacting reality in practice. Does spreading the activity of knowing to things means something like knowledge is embedded in things, or just something like things also think? Or is it something else?
What I like the most about Mol's argument is that her call for multiplicity does not translate into cultural relativism. This is not about using ethnography to make the famous anthropological point of emphasizing that there are different ways to see and relate to the world. In fact, she departs from that need of understanding forms of representation, and rejoins the philosophical questioning for ontology. Yet, as she explains it in chapter 3, to ask about what things are, hold a different meaning today. It is not a quest for the real nature of the material. It is rather to try to position things along others. "To be is to be related" (54). And this is where ethnography comes in, of a different type, for sure.
Last comment: why did she leave out Bourdieu from the subtext?
In The Body Multiple we see a disease through situated, coordinated enactments through Mol’s practice, or set of practices of and with single multiplicities. Here, ontological politics of who and what, are brought into being: “far from falling into fragments, multiple objects tend to hang together somehow. Attending to the multiplicity of reality opens up the possibility of studying this remarkable achievement.” Mol’s ethnography interferes with, sits alongside, (athwart for Helmreich) other practices, both in what it does and what is left undone.
The book’s style—so very intentional, is very situated in a specific time and place—matches her theoretical practice, as it allows for multiple possibilities for interpretation, affecting the identity of each part and the text as a whole, through relation. Knowledge is incorporated in practice—residing in architecture, objects, subjects, technologies, language— these practices make “partial connections,” references, relations, which draw things, ideas, people, instruments together and establish differences. It does open a space “to do something different” to analyze, map, question, intervene, complex assembled relations. This practice of and with multiple thing-ness which exists as singular, multiple, and as part, in relation to others, is a way to insert herself into the mix, to become a referent. Mol traverses, or enacts a discipline-fluid space, acting as a connector, translator, reference herself….
There is always a sense of nervousness when I read an ethnography. This nervousness comes from a space where as I begin to read, I also begin to imagine the ethnographer ‘in the field’ where s/he and the informants coexist and (I imagine) have real relationships. Questions that go through my mind are: would the ethnographer want the informants to read his/her work?”; what will the informants think when they read the ethnography?: and how would the ethnographer present the text/project back to them when the work is done and published?" The Body Multiples was an ethnography in which this nervousness vanished rather quickly.
Mol writes that her work is an ethnography about atherosclerosis. And it really was an ethnography about atherosclerosis where it was both the subject of study and the object in which all that surrounded it were mediated to tell a narrative. Mol shows us that ethnography of a disease can be done, and more importantly, calls attention to the fact that ethnography is also about producing a text. It is both content and form that matter.
"The different forms of knowledge aren’t divided into paradigms that are closed off from another. It is one of the great miracles of hospital life: there are different atherosclerosis in the hospital but despite the differences between them they are connected. Atherosclerosis enacted is more than one- but less than many. The body multiple is not fragmented. Even if it is multiple, it also hangs together.” (55)
A few comments on method, intertwined with theoretical considerations. The first two methodological observations will proceed by comparison (relating back to last week’s readings), the second two by briefly considering the methodology put forth in the Body Multiple as it stands alone.
1. To begin, I was struck by the clear distinction between A. Mol’s and S. Helmrich’s respective ethnographic techniques. For the sake of brevity, the divergence seems to me to be this: ethnographer as ‘outsider/ insider’ (embedded but not consumed) vs. ethnographer as an immersed agent, situated within the association to which they are investigating. It’s a small distinction, perhaps even tautological (I mean, S. Heimlrich is still an anthropologist even when he‘s in the belly of the beast- the submarine cyborg- and maybe that way we see a limitation within the immersion schema)- but at the very least, it echoes the scope of each project (which I will return to momentarily). But regardless of this operational nuance, both works still seem aligned on matters of standard STS inquiry: translation, practice as mediation, and the productive manner in which networks ’hang together’ to generate understanding. 2. The second contrast seems to be in regards to the treatment of the 'event'. In the Body Multiple, it is the emphasis on the connections (‘associations’) of the multiplicity pertaining to a singular event over time- that of focusing on the diagnosing of atherosclerosis within the enclosed spaces of the hospital. What we have then are ‘snapshots’ of medical interventions that engage one particular object (the ’disease’ atherosclerosis) on a variety of interrelated fronts- pathology, the clinical interview, vascular surgery, et al.. As a result, localized practices affect a localized domain (the ‘disease’ that is/ becomes atherosclerosis in a given clinical environment). On the other hand, Alien Oceans deploys an assemblage of associated singular events, broadly scoping and even potentially divergent in their ‘relationships’, to move across an entire perceptual spectrum of one representation- the ocean (and given the size of the book, this breadth seems to speak for itself). In other words, it seems to be an issue contingent upon what I’ll tentatively call depth vs. movement. Depth of the singular event- the multiple times/ ways a singular event is enacted, seems to be personified by A. Mol’s proclivity to foreground concepts/ representations through practices (enactment), for the recoding of an analytic technique which renders visible the multiplicities of spaces which constitute the object (like atherosclerosis as it is within the event or representation). Consider this as it relates to Movement. Movement is explicitly allied with S.Helmrich’s method (see Athwart theory- lateral connections broadly over space that mediate/ negotiate our understanding of an assemblage). The purpose is then to extrapolate a variety practices and representations to expose the polyvalence of multiple discourses at work, in time. Again, this seems like a general comment on the productivity of their work: If for Mol “The question this study poses is how the body and its diseases might be done well” (7)- a comment aimed quite purposefully at specific techniques within a specific domain of knowing, then for Helmrich, Alien Oceans doesn’t seek a critical stance on how the ocean is represented, but instead looks for a technique to open new space for anthropological visibility itself, set dialectically over the evolving/ emergent/ generative conception of the seas at work in multiple fields. 3. A quick note on style- I much enjoyed the book’s ‘structural’ division between the local narrative (ethnography on top) and the general epistemological processes informing ’objects’ (Theoretical/ Literary); furthermore, it seemed like a more nuanced exposition of the division between anthropological epistemology (or their praxis as it relates to the emergence of an anthro. episteme) and medical/ scientific systems of knowledge- the social (cultural) understanding of ‘the body and its diseases’ and biological. 4. To be blunt: Was this method (specified event/ multiple practices + stylistic reinforcement) effective? To a degree. I think it works- the reduction of the event to a particular specificity (‘one’ practice/ ‘one’ site/ ‘one‘ disease) and a focus on localization- and they seem to hang together. And besides, I like experiments. Although, containing the network under investigation seems to render the idea of connectivity/ or associations in a general way somewhat inert, but that might just be the realities of finding an opening in a system or a page requirement on essays. But overall, I did feel as though the ‘localized narratives’ within the ethnographic component did resonate as an effective way of extrapolating the multiple strata of enacting (practice) and representing (knowledge) when it came to a singular object of question (body/ disease).
In Mol’s The Body Multiple she enacts an incredibly sophisticated technique to challenge the notions of what a book is and how a reader “does” it. Clearly, she tries challenge by using a duel narrative. More importantly, she tries to subvert the traditional notion of text/author as authority by asking the reader to look into her citations. She disclaims that she is only tentatively, “relating to the literature” (30) which she would prefer not to do at all because, “…there is the danger that it implicitly strengthens a number of assumptions against which the text is making explicit arguments.” (30) By alluding to certain texts: “See, for example, Duyvendak 1994…” (107), “For an overview…see Barreau et al. 1986” (129), “See for this the various volumes of the late Radical Science Journal” (97) Mol is doing two things. By pointing to her sources she is making herself a reader, a contemporary of those engaging in her work and she is asking us to be professional readers. This becomes clear when we add the author/reader relationship to the following quote: “Then it may be better to stop shifting the boundary between the domains of professionals and patients and instead look for new ways of governing the territory together. But, this suggests that ethnographers, philosophers, and sociologists of medicine as, or just like, patients need to explore and engage with professionalism.” (171) Mol has become a reader activist, asking us to engage in a tense parallel with her – difference without conflict. But, by taking no authority, Mol has less to offer her readers.
Ultimately, one could argue that Mol attempts too much in her 184 pages. She argues her plot is that, “It is possible to refrain from understanding objects as the central points of focus of different people’s perspectives. It is possible to understand them instead as things manipulated in practice.” (4) She attempts to do this by describing her time at Hospital Z and her study of atherosclerosis. But, imbedded in the text are multiple agendas –the aforementioned readers’ rights, patients’ rights to be taken as their own ethnographers and female patients’ rights. She loses her plot of the manipulated practices of atherosclerosis in these. But, perhaps, she defines the limits of what a book cannot do in attempting it.
A methodological point about ethnographic attention to events. “It is possible to listen to people’s stories as if they tell about events,” writes Annemarie Mol (20). Events, which “are made to happen by several people and lots of things” (25). Such events do have meanings and people do have feelings and opinions about them, but in Mol’s brilliant ethnography events are not merely occasions for the production of meaning. People live through events and events demand a description illuminating a practice, not just interpretation revealing a meaning. Thinking through events provides for a quite different ethnographic sensibility, one interested in what things and people do, rather than what they mean or think. An event calls upon things and bodies in their materiality--a leg stumbling on a step--and practices attended to in a realist mode--a trip to the supermarket. “What are the events people report on?” (15) seems like an easy enough question to ask; what is more difficult is to deal the answers on their own terms. Ethnography as writing on events in terms they themselves demand?
Events are to state of affairs as the virtual to the actual (Fraser, 2006: 130; a discussion of Deleuze). The notion of event seems to enable Mol retaining an ethnographic engagement with substantive things and states of affairs while attending to the multiplicity and potentiality at the same time.
Annemarie Mol's The Body Multiple is a brilliant exploration of difference though an exploration of the diverse ontologies she encountered during her research in Hospital Z studying the disease atherosclerosis. Conducting what she calls praxiography, the methodology she uses to execute her empirical philosophical investigations of the ontologies of atherosclerosis, Mol illustrates quite effectively the multiple realities of atherosclerosis: different practices, different ontologies. By elucidating the diverse enactments of atherosclerosis, she proceeds beyond the rather accepted theoretical move of expounding difference by complicating the multiple with what she calls a “single multiple object.” It is not enough to end an investigation of an object by exploding its being, Mol's stated contribution is to theorize the ways multiple ontologies are managed, how a singular disease remains despite the insistence on such a multiverse. These multiple ontologies are managed by the following four strategies: addition, translation, distribution, and inclusion. This direction of study leads her to a reframing what she calls a politics-of-who into a politics-of-what: “A politics-of-what explores the differences, not between doctors and patients, but between various enactments of a particular disease. This book has tried to argue that different enactments of a disease entail different ontologies. They each do the body differently. But they also come with different ways of doing the good” (176). The politics-of-what is a politics which is less concerned with the question of representation (epistemology) than the question of what happens when what might be taken as different representations are instead apprehended as distinct ontologies of a singular multiple object. It is a similar political project to that elaborated by Bruno Latour in The Politics of Nature: an open politics of possibilities.
While reading Mol's work, I found a clearer depiction of what “the agency of things” looks like in light of our rather circuitous conversation about Helmreich last week. I do think Helmreich shows a similar “agency of things” in his exploration of ocean microbes. However, he did this in conjunction with an engagement with meaning and sentiments: the wonder of discovery, the fear of invasion, the estrangement of the alien. Can there be a place for meaning in Mol's single multiple objects?
Mol points us to "the modes of coordination, distribution, and inclusion that allow different versions of a 'single' object to coexist" in order to, among other things, disrupt our "intellectual reflexes" (180, 184). She wants to raise doubt. I can't help but compare this to something Nicholas Dirks says in "Is Vice Versa? Historical Anthropologies and Anthropological Histories" (1999), which is that the "historicizing impulse" should lead us scholars to "the celebration of doubt" (17). Now, I just read this Dirks article a few days ago, and a few days ago his comment struck me as familiar and even arrogant - why should he assume the hypocritical authority of telling me when, how, and what to doubt? But Mol's doubt feels fresh to me and, in fact, genuinely humble. But it's not just that. And here I will try to ask a question that she might ask: How is this version of doubt enacted differently, and how does it coexist with the other version that Dirks puts forth, and still others yet? Put another way, why does she make me want to doubt when Dirks doesn't?
Certainly some of it is what we might call literary devices: style (hers is simple and concise without being simplistic or reductionist) and tone (she's controlled and cautious, yet at the same time intimate with her direct addresses). Insofar as the text enacts the author, I like this enactment of this person Mol, who seems to take her commitment to reflexivity more seriously than most. She is fully present and engaged in the narrative(s), yet at the same time leaving space for you, for other materials, for other enactments, for other questions and, yes, for doubts.
So the structure of her argument - the non-structure? - is also what makes her enactment of doubt work for me. (The style, tone, and argument can't be separated out as distinct things, either.) Doubt is implicit in her approach through and through. When she does finally come out with it directly in the final chapter, it's almost unnecessary at that point because she has already set the stage for this mode of thinking, which is also a mode of practicing doubt. So reading the word "doubt" at the end of her text evokes a quite different feeling than when I read it in Dirks. She is not asking us to "celebrate," as he suggests, but to be open to living with it. It's quite a different sentiment. In so doing, she does not deny to us that doubt can be something painful and difficult (even as it is also useful and perhaps unavoidable). In short, she leaves doubt open; it's not forced, but we are asked to enact it.
Where is knowledge located? At multiple times throughout this text Mol tells us explicitly what she is doing. However, every time she does so it is phrased slightly different; which only serves her open-ended suggestion that – well – which one of us knows? As, she tells us in one of the subtexts:
The ethnographic study of practice does not search for knowledge in subjects who have it in their minds and may talk about it. Instead, it locates knowledge primarily in activities, events, buildings, instruments, procedures, and so on. Objects, in their turn, are not taken here as entities waiting out there to be represented but neither are they the constructions shaped by the subject-knowers. Objects are – well, what are they? That is the question. That is the question this book tries to address. (32)
There it is. Like in other places. It is interesting how this question can be framed, and articulated in so many ways. And I do not mean just in this text. It seems to me representational problems emerge wherever language dwells. Moreover, it seems to me the only thing to do is to ask why is it relevant to ask the question? Is the potential there to solve any “real world” (I am not sure what that means) problems by asking it? (alleviate hunger, make pain go away, mend broken hearts, end war, help us make “tough decisions”, erase Emily’s doubts) I am not holding my breath. And yet it is so seductive to ask. Why? I think it is more reasonable to start there. Before, it gets to the point where we understand the question better than any possible answers.
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In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
“Texts are active. And they do so much.” (Mol, subtext 160).
ReplyDeleteLucid, deliberative, thoughtful, and restrained, Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple is a welcome contrast to Helmreich’s Alien Ocean. I found Mol’s self-described “ethnographic” and “praxiographic” approach toward the different ways that atherosclerosis is enacted in Hospital Z to resonate powerfully with phenomenological and pragmatist philosophical traditions, which dispense with epistemological skepticism in favor of descriptive engagements with experienced existence. It is no wonder Mol refers to Merleau-Ponty in her preface (x); his phenomenological work on embodiment and especially on “the phantom limb” was never far from my mind while reading Mol’s descriptions of atherosclerosis as “pain,” as “interview,” and as “evidence,” not least when the “phantom limb” appeared here as a real leg, amputated, refrigerated, and dissected (37-38).
I appreciate very much Mol’s restraint and self-awareness. In her written practice, atherosclerosis is “enacted” as a subject of meditation and an object through which she can “enact” theoretical questions, and by keeping a tight focus on Hospital Z and atherosclerosis of the legs, Mol is able to address her concerns with depth and care (subtext 181). Her subtext offers a curious counterpoint to her “ethnography” that neither undermines nor properly contextualizes the main text, but rather adds another frame of questions about practice and enactment, this time about writing itself.
It is on this self-reflective note that I will finish. Coming from outside the discipline of anthropology, I find myself struggling with the notion of “ethnography,” particularly in Mol’s text. On the one hand fighting naïve notions of Margaret Mead among the Samoans, on the other I’m perplexed as to how Mol can write an “ethnography” that is explicitly without an “ethnos”—unless, that is, atherosclerosis is a “people.” Perhaps she means the people affected by or dealing with atherosclerosis, but this doesn’t seem to quite be her topic; her own “praxiography,” or even the wider term “phenomenology,” seems more apt. This is a question I have about the text that I cannot answer. I would like to pose more questions, especially about some of Mol’s “gestures” (which while well-performed are still troublesome) insofar as they are typical of what I think of as “theory,” gestures such as the refusal to provide answers in favor of opening “the space in which [questions] may be posed,” the overt but necessarily limited interdisciplinarity, and the suggestion that critical strategies of reframing and problematization might be in themselves emancipatory, not because I think they can be dispensed with but because these practices are practices, themselves open to examination (see, for example, Ian Hunter’s “The History of Theory” in Critical Inquiry. This post is too long already, tho, and all I can do is suggest the space in which these questions might be posed…
“My ethnographic strategy hinges on the art of never forgetting about microscopes” And so begins Mol’s intervention (or interference) into anthropology, philosophy, medicine, and, ultimately, to situate her text as an enacted object according to her own “ontology-as-practice”, into a reality, both multiple and shared.
ReplyDeleteMy own practice of reading enacts The Body Multiple in a different way to the rest of the class; enacted, as such, however, it exists in the same space (this blog, in part) to those other readings and, in class on Thursday, the book will become something else again when we coordinate it through discussion. It is not, therefore, that the text only exists because I have read it, nor is it always already formed and only waiting to be read. Rather, it is my practice of reading (performative and material at the same time) that holds significance, that enacts and that interferes with other practices in the ultimate form of coexistence that goes by the title “The Body Multiple”. Certainly, if I were not to have read as an anthropologist – a literature student, perhaps – the multiple life of this object might have become more explicit.
When an object is granted a life of its own, rather than only the life we give it, we are able to think with objects across divides – knower/known, subject/object, doctor/patient, reader/text. Mol actively provokes: “what are you, reader, going to do with my words?”
If ontology is a question of being, then the notion of being alongside becomes most useful for grasping the way in which Mol invites us to think differently. “Ontology-in-practice comes with objects that do not so much cohere as assemble”. Thus, just as Mol’s subtext exists alongside her ethnographic narrative, situating and interfering with it and enacting The Body Multiple as a “single multiple object”, so in her ethnography of disease “artery and person are situated next to each other, rather than being a part contained inside a whole”. This notion of coexistence opens the space for a different kind of logic and a different kind of spatiality – one in which we, ultimately, can exist as multiple selves.
In response to Roy, above, as to “how Mol can write an “ethnography” that is explicitly without an “ethnos””, I think it is precisely the absence of a fixed notion of society/culture/the human that opens the political space that she moves us into. Her “politics of what” foregrounds (ethnographic/medical/scientific) practice in a way that does not over- or under-determine; that demands intellectual and scientific questioning, both materiality and abstraction, and an analysis that is, like Mol’s, rigorously philosophical as well as intimately ethnographic. Perhaps in challenge to the very notion of the “ethnos”, she suggests that “there are a lot of ways to live…and there is no we to stand outside them or above them…we are implied”.
Mol proposes a methodology based on panning as opposed to zooming, the idea being that the concepts of nested scales do not adequately account for the multiplicity of beings. Precisely because focusing in on any site makes clear that it is multiple, her approach is to work across, to see how objects are multiple without fragmenting, how it is that they hang together. Her point is not that things don't exist in reality, or that they are all social constructs, but that being is contingent and an achievment, that there is a great deal of work going into enacting objects: a labor-theory-of-being perhaps.
ReplyDeleteWhat I especially like about Mol's approach is the way she has provided a analysis that refuses to move toward the universal, insisting in its locality but that is, exactly because of this, hugely mobile. I wondered throughout though, how a book that has been around for 7 years now and so lucidly written has not had more impact. Perhaps I relate to wrong literatures, but it seems that Mol offers such a succinct analytic and method to get around so many tired problematics (solidarity/confilct, structure/agency etc) that bog down debates. She is also much more explicit in thinking through the ethical space that her work opens. Although, as Roy writes, she 'simply' opens the space, it was satisfying after Helmreich's evasions of these discussions to see her take them on. I disagree, however, with her own assessment that her work is not critical. Not denunciatory, sure. But her politics of engagement, of what, and her ethical insistence that a diffuse we can rethink the order(ing) of things is, in my mind, precisely the terrain of critique.
I found Mol's ethnography fascinating in part because the subject is not traditional in the sense of an "ethnos" or people; yet it is traditional because Mol's subject cannot exist without human actions. As readers and as patients who have participated in the biomedical process we are introduced to atherosclerosis as pains and discomfort that become symptoms and then diagnoses. As Mol emphasizes, there is no such thing as atherosclerosis before the doctor translates a patient's problems into symptom of the diagnosis. This does not mean that the disease is nonexistent; this means that we have a category within which certain methods and analyses identify a familiar pattern by which understand the disease as such. This might be a simplification of a more complex social process, but we can imagine the scientism of medicine mirroring a study of magic or myth. The meanings and associations with the physical and mental body and other objects come to have multiple identities, purposes, and expectations, and the experience of reality, even at a level of everyday experience, is molded and tempered by these influences.
ReplyDeleteThis relates to the idea of multiplicities that Mol explains throughout the book. Something as empirically defined as atherosclerosis is nonetheless arcane and constantly transformed by new interpretations and medical discoveries. Moreover, the category of "atherosclerosis" contains a diverse list of symptoms and types that almost appear as many different diseases--yet are all one disease. Cross sections of veins , the ability to walk only short distances, pains in the thigh, CT-scan images--all these factors contribute to the identification of atherosclerosis. A CT=scan might uncover claudification in the artery of a leg--that claudification leads to a diagnosis of atherosclerosis. The question is: are claudification and atherosclerosis equivalent? What does it mean if they are not? The diagnosis is comprised of other diagnoses based on symptoms identified through complaint by the patient. The disease is the manifestation of the totality of these diagnoses, which leads to prescribed treatments. We as readers (and patients) view this process as traditional, following proven methods. Yet, despite our comfort with or expectations of the medical process, there is no tangible meaning to any of it outside of our own legitimization of the process through participation. Certainly, certain methods will heal the body of physical wounds, and there is no denying that lives have been changed by medicine, both positively and negatively. What is important, and what Mol identifies, is that there is a social system attached at all times; we feel that we can heal--sure, but we feel that we know what is healed because we have named it and described it. A diagnosis represents the participation all professionals and patients who come to understand their bodies--the body--as a subject to definition, itself comprised of smaller subjects, and in that way integrated into the social system as an entity separate from its physicality, and yet, at the same time, at one with that form.
My reading of Mol's book felt haphazard because of the double text, yet that very structure of the book mirrored its subject. A reader is exposed to description, interviews, technical jargon and explanation. Then, the second text orients the reader toward relevant literature, ideas, and a historicization of anthropological/sociological thought concerning diagnoses and disease as socio-cultural, thoroughly political tropes. We learn that diagnoses and disease are enacted through a physicians methodology and findings. Though the disease may exist without diagnosis, it exists for the doctor through a name and a classification of that name. Both name and classification are entered into the vocabulary and library of knowledge and understanding by which disease is understood in Western medicine, and becomes a part of patient/future patient understanding. To enact is to give meaning, which is in itself to be an actor in the process of creation and dissemination or circulation of meaning. This of course involves a great big web of standards, positions of power (who can make definitions, or who do we trust to do so), cultural differences, resistance of patients or even older generations of physicians, etc.
As with Helmreich's book from last week, Mol has introduced an idea of the integration of the human into the constructions of humans. The body multiple is a singular form endowed with a multiplicity of identities, meanings, and representations.
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ReplyDeleteWhat is atherosclerosis? Mol gives many answers to the question and as I read this piece, I was absorbed by each answer or each entity of atherosclerosis. It is pain for the patient. It is Atherosclerosis for the doctor in the Out-Patient Clinic. It is a thickening of the arterial walls for the surgeon. It is process which can be prevented for the department of internal medicine. It is “deviance” involving the blood-clotting mechanism for the hematologist. It would appear that atherosclerosis could be anything and everything, but Mol warns against this, “It is more than one, and less than many” (82, subtext). So, it would appear that there are boundaries to this thing called atherosclerosis. Keeping these boundaries in mind, we can then wonder how these multiplicities come into being.
ReplyDeleteIn all of these different “versions” of atherosclerosis, a certain Atherosclerosis hangs together. That is to say, the multiplicity that exists as atherosclerosis is somehow coordinated into a singularity (82, subtext). But how? This is one of the open questions Mol poses to her readers. While we cannot be certain about the nature of how this singularity is made, Mol does make it clear that it is done and is done remarkably well. It is coordinated through practice. It is enacted.
Mol makes a point to note the lack of general communication between such departments in Hospital Z as the department of pathology and the vascular surgeons, yet when it is necessary for the two departments to communicate, they have little trouble. This brings into question the weight of the act of enacting. Since enacting is an act, right? To what extent is that what has been enacted carried over to another act of enacting? In what shared form does atherosclerosis take so that it can be communicated between two people?
By trying to locate knowledge in the activity or practice, rather than in the subject and their object of knowledge, Mol suggests a brilliant answer to most of the questions I raised above: coexistence. As Jacob noted above, Mol takes us away from the tiresome self/other divide. For her, selves are “flowing into their others” (143). For Mol, “modes of coordination, distribution, and inclusion…allow different versions of a “single” object to coexist” (Mol,180).
"Knowledge is not understood as a matter of reference, but as one of manipulation"
ReplyDeleteAs Alice pointed out, there are many ways to engage with Mol's The Body Multiple, as there is with all texts. Yet, because her argument aligns with the many, the multiple, and the varied, in this case this plurality becomes a more conscious act. To call it an act also complies with Mol's argument about how things should be understood: not as empty recipients that are later provided with meaning but as the things they become when manipulated in practice. Objects, says Mol, gain their identities at the various moments when and where they are handled, staged, performed. And so do people. "The dividing line between human subjects and natural objects has been breached."(44) This is part of Mol's act, as she is attentive to the multiplicity of reality. A big step, at least in theory.
However, this is something I still can't fully understand. I see Eric's point about Mol's understanding of identity through processes of coordination, inclusion and distribution. But, when she mentions something like "(...) to spread the activity of knowing widely. To spread it out over tables, knives, records, microscopes, buildings, and other things or habits in which it is embedded" (50, subtext) I got disoriented. She says, it is about enacting reality in practice. Does spreading the activity of knowing to things means something like knowledge is embedded in things, or just something like things also think? Or is it something else?
What I like the most about Mol's argument is that her call for multiplicity does not translate into cultural relativism. This is not about using ethnography to make the famous anthropological point of emphasizing that there are different ways to see and relate to the world. In fact, she departs from that need of understanding forms of representation, and rejoins the philosophical questioning for ontology. Yet, as she explains it in chapter 3, to ask about what things are, hold a different meaning today. It is not a quest for the real nature of the material. It is rather to try to position things along others. "To be is to be related" (54). And this is where ethnography comes in, of a different type, for sure.
Last comment: why did she leave out Bourdieu from the subtext?
In The Body Multiple we see a disease through situated, coordinated enactments through Mol’s practice, or set of practices of and with single multiplicities. Here, ontological politics of who and what, are brought into being: “far from falling into fragments, multiple objects tend to hang together somehow. Attending to the multiplicity of reality opens up the possibility of studying this remarkable achievement.” Mol’s ethnography interferes with, sits alongside, (athwart for Helmreich) other practices, both in what it does and what is left undone.
ReplyDeleteThe book’s style—so very intentional, is very situated in a specific time and place—matches her theoretical practice, as it allows for multiple possibilities for interpretation, affecting the identity of each part and the text as a whole, through relation. Knowledge is incorporated in practice—residing in architecture, objects, subjects, technologies, language— these practices make “partial connections,” references, relations, which draw things, ideas, people, instruments together and establish differences. It does open a space “to do something different” to analyze, map, question, intervene, complex assembled relations. This practice of and with multiple thing-ness which exists as singular, multiple, and as part, in relation to others, is a way to insert herself into the mix, to become a referent. Mol traverses, or enacts a discipline-fluid space, acting as a connector, translator, reference herself….
There is always a sense of nervousness when I read an ethnography. This nervousness comes from a space where as I begin to read, I also begin to imagine the ethnographer ‘in the field’ where s/he and the informants coexist and (I imagine) have real relationships. Questions that go through my mind are: would the ethnographer want the informants to read his/her work?”; what will the informants think when they read the ethnography?: and how would the ethnographer present the text/project back to them when the work is done and published?" The Body Multiples was an ethnography in which this nervousness vanished rather quickly.
ReplyDeleteMol writes that her work is an ethnography about atherosclerosis. And it really was an ethnography about atherosclerosis where it was both the subject of study and the object in which all that surrounded it were mediated to tell a narrative. Mol shows us that ethnography of a disease can be done, and more importantly, calls attention to the fact that ethnography is also about producing a text. It is both content and form that matter.
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ReplyDeleteoh, rings is nina... somehow i can't leave a comment through my email account right now. i will figure it out for future comments!
ReplyDelete"The different forms of knowledge aren’t divided into paradigms that are closed off from another. It is one of the great miracles of hospital life: there are different atherosclerosis in the hospital but despite the differences between them they are connected. Atherosclerosis enacted is more than one- but less than many. The body multiple is not fragmented. Even if it is multiple, it also hangs together.” (55)
ReplyDeleteA few comments on method, intertwined with theoretical considerations. The first two methodological observations will proceed by comparison (relating back to last week’s readings), the second two by briefly considering the methodology put forth in the Body Multiple as it stands alone.
1. To begin, I was struck by the clear distinction between A. Mol’s and S. Helmrich’s respective ethnographic techniques. For the sake of brevity, the divergence seems to me to be this: ethnographer as ‘outsider/ insider’ (embedded but not consumed) vs. ethnographer as an immersed agent, situated within the association to which they are investigating. It’s a small distinction, perhaps even tautological (I mean, S. Heimlrich is still an anthropologist even when he‘s in the belly of the beast- the submarine cyborg- and maybe that way we see a limitation within the immersion schema)- but at the very least, it echoes the scope of each project (which I will return to momentarily). But regardless of this operational nuance, both works still seem aligned on matters of standard STS inquiry: translation, practice as mediation, and the productive manner in which networks ’hang together’ to generate understanding.
2. The second contrast seems to be in regards to the treatment of the 'event'. In the Body Multiple, it is the emphasis on the connections (‘associations’) of the multiplicity pertaining to a singular event over time- that of focusing on the diagnosing of atherosclerosis within the enclosed spaces of the hospital. What we have then are ‘snapshots’ of medical interventions that engage one particular object (the ’disease’ atherosclerosis) on a variety of interrelated fronts- pathology, the clinical interview, vascular surgery, et al.. As a result, localized practices affect a localized domain (the ‘disease’ that is/ becomes atherosclerosis in a given clinical environment). On the other hand, Alien Oceans deploys an assemblage of associated singular events, broadly scoping and even potentially divergent in their ‘relationships’, to move across an entire perceptual spectrum of one representation- the ocean (and given the size of the book, this breadth seems to speak for itself). In other words, it seems to be an issue contingent upon what I’ll tentatively call depth vs. movement. Depth of the singular event- the multiple times/ ways a singular event is enacted, seems to be personified by A. Mol’s proclivity to foreground concepts/ representations through practices (enactment), for the recoding of an analytic technique which renders visible the multiplicities of spaces which constitute the object (like atherosclerosis as it is within the event or representation). Consider this as it relates to Movement. Movement is explicitly allied with S.Helmrich’s method (see Athwart theory- lateral connections broadly over space that mediate/ negotiate our understanding of an assemblage). The purpose is then to extrapolate a variety practices and representations to expose the polyvalence of multiple discourses at work, in time. Again, this seems like a general comment on the productivity of their work: If for Mol “The question this study poses is how the body and its diseases might be done well” (7)- a comment aimed quite purposefully at specific techniques within a specific domain of knowing, then for Helmrich, Alien Oceans doesn’t seek a critical stance on how the ocean is represented, but instead looks for a technique to open new space for anthropological visibility itself, set dialectically over the evolving/ emergent/ generative conception of the seas at work in multiple fields.
3. A quick note on style- I much enjoyed the book’s ‘structural’ division between the local narrative (ethnography on top) and the general epistemological processes informing ’objects’ (Theoretical/ Literary); furthermore, it seemed like a more nuanced exposition of the division between anthropological epistemology (or their praxis as it relates to the emergence of an anthro. episteme) and medical/ scientific systems of knowledge- the social (cultural) understanding of ‘the body and its diseases’ and biological.
4. To be blunt: Was this method (specified event/ multiple practices + stylistic reinforcement) effective? To a degree. I think it works- the reduction of the event to a particular specificity (‘one’ practice/ ‘one’ site/ ‘one‘ disease) and a focus on localization- and they seem to hang together. And besides, I like experiments. Although, containing the network under investigation seems to render the idea of connectivity/ or associations in a general way somewhat inert, but that might just be the realities of finding an opening in a system or a page requirement on essays. But overall, I did feel as though the ‘localized narratives’ within the ethnographic component did resonate as an effective way of extrapolating the multiple strata of enacting (practice) and representing (knowledge) when it came to a singular object of question (body/ disease).
In Mol’s The Body Multiple she enacts an incredibly sophisticated technique to challenge the notions of what a book is and how a reader “does” it. Clearly, she tries challenge by using a duel narrative. More importantly, she tries to subvert the traditional notion of text/author as authority by asking the reader to look into her citations. She disclaims that she is only tentatively, “relating to the literature” (30) which she would prefer not to do at all because, “…there is the danger that it implicitly strengthens a number of assumptions against which the text is making explicit arguments.” (30) By alluding to certain texts: “See, for example, Duyvendak 1994…” (107), “For an overview…see Barreau et al. 1986” (129), “See for this the various volumes of the late Radical Science Journal” (97) Mol is doing two things. By pointing to her sources she is making herself a reader, a contemporary of those engaging in her work and she is asking us to be professional readers. This becomes clear when we add the author/reader relationship to the following quote: “Then it may be better to stop shifting the boundary between the domains of professionals and patients and instead look for new ways of governing the territory together. But, this suggests that ethnographers, philosophers, and sociologists of medicine as, or just like, patients need to explore and engage with professionalism.” (171) Mol has become a reader activist, asking us to engage in a tense parallel with her – difference without conflict. But, by taking no authority, Mol has less to offer her readers.
ReplyDeleteUltimately, one could argue that Mol attempts too much in her 184 pages. She argues her plot is that, “It is possible to refrain from understanding objects as the central points of focus of different people’s perspectives. It is possible to understand them instead as things manipulated in practice.” (4) She attempts to do this by describing her time at Hospital Z and her study of atherosclerosis. But, imbedded in the text are multiple agendas –the aforementioned readers’ rights, patients’ rights to be taken as their own ethnographers and female patients’ rights. She loses her plot of the manipulated practices of atherosclerosis in these. But, perhaps, she defines the limits of what a book cannot do in attempting it.
A methodological point about ethnographic attention to events. “It is possible to listen to people’s stories as if they tell about events,” writes Annemarie Mol (20). Events, which “are made to happen by several people and lots of things” (25). Such events do have meanings and people do have feelings and opinions about them, but in Mol’s brilliant ethnography events are not merely occasions for the production of meaning. People live through events and events demand a description illuminating a practice, not just interpretation revealing a meaning. Thinking through events provides for a quite different ethnographic sensibility, one interested in what things and people do, rather than what they mean or think. An event calls upon things and bodies in their materiality--a leg stumbling on a step--and practices attended to in a realist mode--a trip to the supermarket. “What are the events people report on?” (15) seems like an easy enough question to ask; what is more difficult is to deal the answers on their own terms. Ethnography as writing on events in terms they themselves demand?
ReplyDeleteEvents are to state of affairs as the virtual to the actual (Fraser, 2006: 130; a discussion of Deleuze). The notion of event seems to enable Mol retaining an ethnographic engagement with substantive things and states of affairs while attending to the multiplicity and potentiality at the same time.
How do events relate to practice?
Annemarie Mol's The Body Multiple is a brilliant exploration of difference though an exploration of the diverse ontologies she encountered during her research in Hospital Z studying the disease atherosclerosis. Conducting what she calls praxiography, the methodology she uses to execute her empirical philosophical investigations of the ontologies of atherosclerosis, Mol illustrates quite effectively the multiple realities of atherosclerosis: different practices, different ontologies. By elucidating the diverse enactments of atherosclerosis, she proceeds beyond the rather accepted theoretical move of expounding difference by complicating the multiple with what she calls a “single multiple object.” It is not enough to end an investigation of an object by exploding its being, Mol's stated contribution is to theorize the ways multiple ontologies are managed, how a singular disease remains despite the insistence on such a multiverse. These multiple ontologies are managed by the following four strategies: addition, translation, distribution, and inclusion. This direction of study leads her to a reframing what she calls a politics-of-who into a politics-of-what: “A politics-of-what explores the differences, not between doctors and patients, but between various enactments of a particular disease. This book has tried to argue that different enactments of a disease entail different ontologies. They each do the body differently. But they also come with different ways of doing the good” (176). The politics-of-what is a politics which is less concerned with the question of representation (epistemology) than the question of what happens when what might be taken as different representations are instead apprehended as distinct ontologies of a singular multiple object. It is a similar political project to that elaborated by Bruno Latour in The Politics of Nature: an open politics of possibilities.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading Mol's work, I found a clearer depiction of what “the agency of things” looks like in light of our rather circuitous conversation about Helmreich last week. I do think Helmreich shows a similar “agency of things” in his exploration of ocean microbes. However, he did this in conjunction with an engagement with meaning and sentiments: the wonder of discovery, the fear of invasion, the estrangement of the alien. Can there be a place for meaning in Mol's single multiple objects?
Mol points us to "the modes of coordination, distribution, and inclusion that allow different versions of a 'single' object to coexist" in order to, among other things, disrupt our "intellectual reflexes" (180, 184). She wants to raise doubt. I can't help but compare this to something Nicholas Dirks says in "Is Vice Versa? Historical Anthropologies and Anthropological Histories" (1999), which is that the "historicizing impulse" should lead us scholars to "the celebration of doubt" (17). Now, I just read this Dirks article a few days ago, and a few days ago his comment struck me as familiar and even arrogant - why should he assume the hypocritical authority of telling me when, how, and what to doubt? But Mol's doubt feels fresh to me and, in fact, genuinely humble. But it's not just that. And here I will try to ask a question that she might ask: How is this version of doubt enacted differently, and how does it coexist with the other version that Dirks puts forth, and still others yet? Put another way, why does she make me want to doubt when Dirks doesn't?
ReplyDeleteCertainly some of it is what we might call literary devices: style (hers is simple and concise without being simplistic or reductionist) and tone (she's controlled and cautious, yet at the same time intimate with her direct addresses). Insofar as the text enacts the author, I like this enactment of this person Mol, who seems to take her commitment to reflexivity more seriously than most. She is fully present and engaged in the narrative(s), yet at the same time leaving space for you, for other materials, for other enactments, for other questions and, yes, for doubts.
So the structure of her argument - the non-structure? - is also what makes her enactment of doubt work for me. (The style, tone, and argument can't be separated out as distinct things, either.) Doubt is implicit in her approach through and through. When she does finally come out with it directly in the final chapter, it's almost unnecessary at that point because she has already set the stage for this mode of thinking, which is also a mode of practicing doubt. So reading the word "doubt" at the end of her text evokes a quite different feeling than when I read it in Dirks. She is not asking us to "celebrate," as he suggests, but to be open to living with it. It's quite a different sentiment. In so doing, she does not deny to us that doubt can be something painful and difficult (even as it is also useful and perhaps unavoidable). In short, she leaves doubt open; it's not forced, but we are asked to enact it.
Where is knowledge located? At multiple times throughout this text Mol tells us explicitly what she is doing. However, every time she does so it is phrased slightly different; which only serves her open-ended suggestion that – well – which one of us knows? As, she tells us in one of the subtexts:
ReplyDeleteThe ethnographic study of practice does not search for knowledge in subjects who have it in their minds and may talk about it. Instead, it locates knowledge primarily in activities, events, buildings, instruments, procedures, and so on. Objects, in their turn, are not taken here as entities waiting out there to be represented but neither are they the constructions shaped by the subject-knowers. Objects are – well, what are they? That is the question. That is the question this book tries to address. (32)
There it is. Like in other places. It is interesting how this question can be framed, and articulated in so many ways. And I do not mean just in this text. It seems to me representational problems emerge wherever language dwells. Moreover, it seems to me the only thing to do is to ask why is it relevant to ask the question? Is the potential there to solve any “real world” (I am not sure what that means) problems by asking it? (alleviate hunger, make pain go away, mend broken hearts, end war, help us make “tough decisions”, erase Emily’s doubts) I am not holding my breath. And yet it is so seductive to ask. Why? I think it is more reasonable to start there. Before, it gets to the point where we understand the question better than any possible answers.
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In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.