Inventive Methods

The Happening of the Social

Celia Lury, Nina Wakeford, Celia Lury, Nina Wakeford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136993961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Social and cultural research has changed dramatically in the last few years in response to changing conceptions of the empirical, an intensification of interest in interdisciplinary work, and the growing need to communicate with diverse users and audiences. Methods texts, however, have not kept pace with these changes.

This volume provides a set of new approaches for the investigation of the contemporary world. Building on the increasing importance of methodologies that cut across disciplines, more than twenty expert authors explain the utility of 'devices' for social and cultural research – their essays cover such diverse devices as the list, the pattern, the event, the photograph, the tape recorder and the anecdote.

This fascinating collection stresses the open-endedness of the social world, and explores the ways in which each device requires the user to reflect critically on the value and status of contemporary ways of making knowledge. With a range of genres and styles of writing, each chapter presents the device as a hinge between theory and practice, ontology and epistemology, and explores whether and how methods can be inventive. The book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of sociology and cultural studies.

1 Introduction

A perpetual inventory

Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford

How to use this book

Before we begin this introduction, we think it might be helpful to say a little about the organization of the book, and its inclusion of some, but not other inventive methods.¹ In a broad sense, the collection is a response to the current renewal of interest in the politics of method in some social sciences (Burrows and Savage, 2007; Thrift, 2007; Adkins and Lury, 2009; Rabinow and Marcus, 2009), as evidenced by the recent discussion of research methods and dissemination activities that critically engage theory and practice, including participatory and action research methods; performative and non-representational investigations; the acknowledgement of non-human agencies; as well as interdisciplinary and collaborative and beyond-the-academy working practices. It responds and hopes to make a contribution to the ‘new empiricism of sensation’ (Clough and Halley, 2007), to help expand the repertoire of ‘materially innovative methods’ (Law, 2004) and address the limits of the phenomenal. More specifically, the book refers back to a workshop that the editors organized in 2009, and includes chapters based on presentations made there. In thinking about this collection, however, we have also drawn upon accounts of methods of conducting research that are not included here, but are relevant in relation to the patterns (see Chapters 9 and 10) we see emerging in this collection. These include Haraway (1985) on cyborg, Serres (2007) on parasite, Agamben (2009) on apparatus, Berlant (2007) on the case, Fraser (2010) on event, Kwinter (1998) on diagram, Rabinow and Marcus (2009) and Parker (2012, forthcoming) on contraption, Riles (2001) on network, and Stark (2009) on search, all of which are models, ideals or exemplars that we believe deserve imitation.

The collection makes use of an alphabetical listing, an ordering that is explicitly presented in the form of an ‘index’. Although, like numbers, letters may be used not only to list, but also to rank (as in a school report), their use here is purely alphabetical, and is intended to encourage – perhaps even incite – you, the reader, not to read from A through to Z, but rather to make a selective entry into the collection, to use your own principles of inclusion and exclusion, of ordering and valuing. Our hope is thus that the alphabetical list – familiar from other uses – will nonetheless act as an experimental and alternative ordering to an academic book (see also Pile and Thrift, 2000). We invite you to make your own associations – draw a line – across and between the chapters in ways that we may anticipate but do not want to predetermine. You might want to: establish relations of equivalence between methods; make groups or sets; draw distinctions; compare and contrast; or see how one method is included or configured in relation to others. What always becomes clear, however – if you read more than one entry, no matter what order you read them in – is that inventiveness is not intrinsic to methods; it is rather something that emerges in relation to the purposes to which they are put. The listing of methods is thus also intended to act as a provocation to you, the reader, to consider (more) methods in relation to your own purposes, to begin devising yourself.

You will, in any case, soon find out how each chapter refuses to be ordered by this introduction: they have been left – more or less – to their own devices. Each is written with a different voice, to different effect. The entries deliberately and systematically employ a range of styles of writing. From an editorial point of view, the retention of this diversity of modes of address is a way of acknowledging the significance of the semiotic materiality of the methods they describe and the radical heterogeneity of the worlds that they enact. Disciplinary differences are not erased or minimized, but acknowledged. Nor is there any attempt to present the collection as complete; we do not aspire to either unity or completeness; a fact to which attention is drawn – paradoxically – by the way in which some methods are represented by one entry, while others are represented by more than one. This variability testifies that there is no way to complete a list of inventive methods, not even by doubling or multiplying an entry, no way to fill all the gaps. Yet, although the collection is incomplete, we also believe that, if, as readers, you bring together the chapters together variously, there are many possible books here. The collection is designed as a perpetual inventory (Krauss, 2010): testimony to the irreducibly unstable relations between elements and parts, inclusion and belonging, sensing, knowing and doing.

Beginning, or refrain

The guiding aim in putting together this collection is to provide a resource, an inventory of methods or devices that may be used to conduct research that is explicitly oriented towards an investigation of the open-endedness of the social world. Our hope is that the methods collected here will variously enable the happening of the social world – its ongoingness, relationality, contingency and sensuousness – to be investigated. Our belief is that, to address these dimensions of social life, the full actuality of the world, its indeterminateness, what AbdouMaliq Simone describes as ‘the unregulated thickening of relationships among things of all kinds’, it is not possible to apply a method as if it were indifferent or external to the problem it seeks to address, but that method must rather be made specific and relevant to the problem.² In short, inventive methods are ways to introduce answerability into a problem.³ Further, if methods are to be inventive, they should not leave that problem untouched.

The methods or devices included here are various. They are: anecdote (Mike Michael), category (Evelyn Ruppert), configuration (Lucy Suchman), experiment (Steve Brown; Noortje Marres), list (Andrea Phillips), number (Helen Verran), pattern (Janis Jefferies; Paul Stenner), photo-image (Vikki Bell), phrase (Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova), population (Cori Hayden), probe (Kirsten Boehner, William Gaver and Andy Boucher), screen (AbdouMaliq Simone), set (Adrian Mackenzie), speculation (Luciana Parisi) and tape recorder (Les Back). As such, they appear a somewhat heterogeneous collection of research ‘methods’, with some, such as tape recorder, appearing closer to a device or instrument than a method or knowledge practice, while others, such as anecdote, not seeming at first glance to belong to an academic repertoire of methods at all. Many are more easily seen as a method once they are introduced as a verb: to probe, to categorize, to list, to pattern, to record, but still they are heterogeneous. Some are in between a thing and a practice; some are more or less the monopoly of social researchers; others are an everyday activity of ‘lay’ people; some have acquired legitimacy in their use by governments or by business; while others are more frequently deployed by those without authority. Each, however, is discussed here in relation to their use to conduct (popular and professional, lay and academic) research, whether this is in cities in the urban south (screen), computer programming and software packages (phrase, set), the carrying out of a census in Canada (category), socio-technical projects in the UK (anecdote), USA and southern India (configuration), a pharmaceutical chain in Mexico (population), the making of the art world (list, pattern), swarms of swallows and textiles (pattern), soundscapes (tape recorder), the home (probe), the valuation of natural resources (number), reality television, social and developmental psychology and blogs about green living (experiment), thought experiments and AI (speculation).

One of the principal claims the book makes is that there is a need to (re)consider the relevance of method (Fraser, 2008, 2009) to the empirical investigation of the here and now, the contemporary (Rabinow and Marcus, 2009). The methods the book includes make this possible because of the ways in which, as they are discussed here, they require their user to reflect critically upon the value, status and significance of knowledge today. So, for example, the methods of anecdote, category, configuration, phrase and population do not presume that the subjects and objects of the research imagination are discrete, or stand in external relation to each other, although they allow such distinctions to be drawn. There is no presumption that time and space operate in a standardized relation to each other; rather the methods of list, pattern and screen open up the issues of scale, calibration and measurement. They do not rely upon external measures but are rather revealed to be ‘things that scale’ (Tsing, 2004; Holbraad and Pedersen, 2009). Nor do the methods necessarily privilege either the quantitative or the qualitative: number is set alongside photo-image and anecdote, while others – such as set, population, pattern – draw on mathematical thinking in ways that do not adhere to a quantitative-qualitative divide. In addition, methods such as the photo-image and the probe do not presume the senses by which the social world is known, the medium in which data should be collected or argument is best communicated. They do not take the human as the only measure of the significance of the world, or as the only source of agency, as the discussion of cats and dogs in the case of the anecdote, swallows and ants in pattern, the chemical in relation to population, and batteries in the discussion of the tape recorder reveal. Instead, speculation and the other methods included here enable research to follow forked directions, to trace processes that are in disequilibrium or uncertain, to acknowledge and refract complex combinations of human and non-human agencies, supporting an investigation of what matters and how in ways that are open, without assuming a single fixed relation between epistemology and ontology.

While the methods collected here are focused on the social world, the book is not narrowly disciplinary. Rather, there is an exploration of interdisciplinarity through the juxtaposition of different disciplinary uses of methods and, in some cases – such as the list, the probe and the pattern – through explicit reflection on the possibilities and limits of interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary approaches. Many of the methods discussed have, in any case, been developed in movements across and between disciplines in the social sciences, the humanities and the natural sciences. So, for example, the device of phrase has a linguistic and literary critical history but is taken up here in relation to computing and software studies, while the methods of experiment and pattern have multiple histories and may be situated in relation to both art and science. The refusal of the methods collected here to assume the operation of disciplinary distinctions is not meant to imply that disciplines do not matter, however. Rather it is intended to invite recognition of how methods participate – variously – in the making of disciplinary distinctions as well as interdisciplinary space.

There is, we would suggest, much to be gained from putting histories of social scientific method in relation to those of other traditions, including, for example, art movements. Jenny Shaw, for example, observes, ‘If Surrealism and sociology appear to be light years apart from one another . . . they are not, and Mass Observation is the link’. For Mass Observation, she says, art and sociology were indivisible. Its adherents foregrounded the importance of irrational and subconscious processes; disruption and shock, rupture and breaks in routine, were used as methods of perception. In contrast, Ben Highmore has suggested that Mass Observation practiced a kind of ‘radical positivism’ that built on surrealism and yet differed from it: Mass Observation, in his view, insisted on attending to the everyday as a mass project of collecting ‘facts’, not so much commenting on the everyday as becoming coterminous with it (Highmore, 2000: 16). Such contested histories are necessary to understand the potential inventiveness of methods; that of Mass Observation, for example, provides a valuable context for the dream recorders that are one example of probes discussed by Boehner, Gaver and Boucher.

Methods that have the capacity to be inventive are also, as Noortje Marres puts it, ‘multifarious instruments’ in the sense that they have a variety and variability of purpose. The book speaks to the way in which methods such as the list, the tape recorder and the set may be encoded in everyday and specialized technologies and assemblages, and addresses the challenge currently posed to researchers thinking about the distinctiveness of academic and disciplinary knowledge when it is set alongside commercial and everyday knowledge-making practices. Indeed, this challenge is the explicit topic of some of the chapters. So, for example, Marres herself describes experiments in living as an example of ‘collective practices of researching social and cultural change, as engaged in by actors who do not necessarily identify themselves as “social researchers”’, and Simone focuses on the everyday uses of screening as a method in urban space, pointing out that, since people in cities ‘step in and out of various “shells” of operation’, they are necessarily involved in carrying out ‘popular research’, while Andrea Phillips’ discussion of web-based art listings highlights the relationship of lists and ranking to commercial values and the market. She writes, pointedly:

The conditions of production of such devices in art do so at the behest of an economy of alienation that is rarely acknowledged, even when artists turn to dispositifs that enable a relation, broadly, to the realm of the social (for this is what the list does).

The methods described here are thus not the monopoly of academics alone. Indeed, we would emphasize – as a way of resisting the fears raised by the notion of a crisis in empirical research in academic social science (Burrows and Savage, 2007) induced by the recognition that academic sociology is becoming less of an obligatory point of passage for the powerful agents of knowing capitalism – that methods of social research never have been so restricted in their use. They have always been distributed. Nevertheless, we recognize with Phillips that relationality and participation are dominant tropes of knowing capitalism,⁴ and with Marres that the ‘resources and techniques of social research are being redistributed among a variety of agencies inside and outside the university’. Indeed, Marres observes that the proliferation of social methods involves not just a displacement or ‘democratization’ of social methods – as in the slogan ‘we are all social researchers now’ – but is rather a question of the (re-)organization of processes of knowledge-making’.

Inventive methods – like any other methods – are, for good and ill, caught up in what Helga Nowotny (2002) describes as the expansion of the present, in which there is an ongoing maximization of the agencies involved in social life. As Adrian Mackenzie puts it in his discussion of the method of set-making, there are more and more techniques to determine the excess of the actual, ‘to present it, to manage it, to undo it or to politicize it’. But if, as Marres says, ‘the active participation of social actors in the conduct of research is today increasingly recognized across social life’, and we cannot – and should not – foreclose the ‘multiplicity of purposes’ of social research, and there is no necessary relation between problems, solutions, invention and critique, should we not be a little more precise about how the inventiveness of the methods collected here are to be understood?

Inventiveness does not, for us, equate to new. Many methods, such as experiment, pattern or population, have a long history, although others, such as the anecdote, screen or speculation, are marginal to the established histories of natural and social sciences. Some – such as probe or phrase – are self-evidently methods in the making.⁵ What unites them, however, is that they are methods or means by which the social world is not only investigated, but may also be engaged. Indeed, the book as a whole seeks to open up the question of how methods contribute to the framing of change; it aims to enable change to be understood not only as complex, contradictory and uncertain, but also as everyday, routine and ongoing: as something in which methods of social research are necessarily engaged. To describe them as inventive is to seek to realize the potenti...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Inventive Methods
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: A perpetual inventory
• 2 Anecdote
• 3 Category
• 4 Configuration
• 5 Experiment: Abstract experimentalism
• 6 Experiment: The experiment in living
• 7 List
• 8 Number
• 9 Pattern, patterning
• 10 Pattern
• 11 Photo-image
• 12 Phrase
• 13 Population
• 14 Probes
• 15 Screen
• 16 Set
• 17 Speculation: A method for the unattainable
• 18 Tape recorder
• Index