Making a Mess with Method

* Making a Mess with Method John Law (until March 31st 2010) Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YN, UK ([email protected]) (from April 1st 2010) Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA (After Method 4, 19th January 2006.) This paper is in draft form. You are welcome to cite it, but please reference it appropriately – for instance in the following form: John Law, ‘Making a Mess with Method, version of 19th January 2006, available at http://www. heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2006Makinga MesswithMethod.pdf, (downloaded on ….). * This paper arises out of conversations with Andrew Barry, Michel Callon, Kevin Hetherington, Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser, Vicky Singleton, Lucy Suchman, John Urry and Helen Verran. I am grateful to them all, and in particular to Vicky Singleton for allowing me to use material from our joint work. I am also grateful to John Holm and Laura Watts for sharing some of the same obsessions in their PhD work! SHROPSHIRE’S ‘When does one have the thought: the possible movements of a machine are OLD PRISON already there in some mysterious way? — Well, when one is doing philosophy. And FACES THE AXE what leads us into thinking that? The kind BRITAIN’S PRISON watchdog of way in which we talk about machines. Judge Stephen Tumin today we slammed overcrowded Birmingham Amsterdam Shrewsbury Jail for having cells like “moderate-sized 0715 0920 lavatories”. 0910 1140 1000 1205 1100 1310 1405 1610 1510 1735 1635 1840 1950 2155 Art Nouveauau Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Type Your Caption Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. If this is an awful mess... then would something less messy make a mess of describing it? 1 Introduction The presenting symptom is easily shown. Look at the picture and then reflect on the caption: ‘If this is an awful mess … then would something less messy make a mess of describing it?’ This is a leading question. I’m looking for your agreement. Simplicity, I’m asking you to say, won’t help us to understand mess. So my topic is mess, messy worlds. I’m interested in the politics of mess. I’m interested in the process of knowing mess. I’m interested, in particular, in methodologies for knowing mess. My intuition, to say it quickly, is that the world is largely messy. It is also that contemporary social science methods are hopelessly bad at knowing that mess. Indeed it is that dominant approaches to method work with some success to repress the very possibility of mess. They cannot know mess, except in their aporias, as they try to make the world clean and neat. So it is my concern to broaden method. To imagine it more imaginatively. To imagine what method – and its politics – might be if it were not caught in an obsession with clarity, with specificity, and with the definite. The argument is open-ended. I don’t know where it will lead. I don’t know what kind of social science it implies, or what social science inquiry might look like, methodologically or indeed institutionally. Here then, too, I find that I am at odds with method as this is usually understood. This, it seems to me, is mostly about guarantees. Sometimes I think of it as a form of hygiene. Do your methods properly. Eat your epistemological greens. Wash your hands after mixing with the real world. Then you will lead the good research life. Your data will be clean. Your findings warrantable. The product you will produce will be pure. It will come with the guaranteed of a long shelf-life. So there are lots of books about intellectual hygiene, about methodological cleanliness. There are books that offer access to the methodological uplands of social science research. No doubt there is much that is good in these texts. No doubt it is useful, indeed, to know about statistical significance, or how to avoid interviewer bias. Tips for research are always handy. But to the extent they assume hygienic form they don’t really work, at least for me. In practice research needs to be messy and heterogeneous. It needs to be messy and heterogeneous, because that is the way it, research, actually is. And also, and more importantly, it needs to be messy because that is the way the largest part of the world is – messy, unknowable in a regular and routinised way. Unknowable, therefore, in ways that are definite or coherent. That is the point of the figure. Clarity doesn’t help. Disciplined lack of clarity, this may be what we need. This is a big argument, and I can’t make it properly in a short chapter1. Actually, since I live in a world without warranties, I can’t make it all full-stop. What I can do, however, is pick at a few strands of the argument to try to give a sense of its flavour. So this is what I’ll do: 1 The argument is developed more extensively in Law (2004). 2 • I’ll start with a real research example of mess. I want to persuade you that this is a real problem, at least for me and some of my colleagues. • Then I’ll go philosophical on you, and talk a little about the common- sense realism of research and what I think this implies. What I’ll try to do is to show that realism, at least in its conventional versions, has a highly prescriptive version of the nature of the real which rules that reality cannot be a mess. I beg to differ. • Then I’ll then make a post-structuralist detour. I’ll say that method may be understood as the simultaneous enactment of presence and absence. In post-structuralism (but also in common sense) presence by itself is impossible: presence necessitates absence. In research practice this suggests that some things (for instance research findings and texts) are present but at the same time other things are being rendered absent. But what? The answer is: two kinds of things. One: whatever we are studying and describing, our object of research. And two, other absences that are hidden, indeed repressed. Othered. • What does this imply for the common-sense realism of social science method? The answer, I’ll suggest, is that method Others the possibility of mess. In which case the nice clear research findings which fill the journals rise from an Othered bed of confusion, paradox and imprecision. Perhaps this is fine: perhaps we want to Other mess. But perhaps it isn’t, and this is my view. My interest, then is in rehabilitating parts of the mess, of finding ways of living with and knowing confusion, and of imagining methods that live, as Helen Verran puts it in a very different context, with disconcertment2. • I’ll conclude by hinting at what this might mean for research by returning to my original empirical example. Empirical Mess A few years ago Vicky Singleton and I were asked to investigate the way in which a local hospital trust handled patients suffering from alcoholic liver disease3. They thought that they weren’t doing this very well, and as a part of this they were also worried about the drain on resources. In a phenomenon that they called ‘the revolving door’, the professionals described the way in which patients would be admitted, dried out, treated, and released back into the community, only to turn up again in Accident and Emergency (A&E), very seriously ill a few weeks or months later. We said we’d look into the organization of treatment within and beyond the hospital. Blithely, we told the consultant commissioning the research that we would map out the ‘typical trajectories’ of the patients as they moved through the health care system. How did they move in and out of the hospital? How did they move across the organizational divides between (for instance) the acute hospital trust, the community trust, general practice, and social 2 See Verran (2001). 3 Our findings are more fully explored in Law and Singleton (2003; 2005). 3 services? When we said this we should have known that something was wrong: the ghost of a smile passed fleetingly across the consultant’s face and he gently intimated that he wasn’t sure that there was such a thing as a ‘typical trajectory’. But we agreed to go ahead with the study on this basis anyway, and set off to interview some of the professionals: consultants; ward sisters; general practitioners; nurses; and social workers. The interviews were mostly fine, but in due course two problems began to take shape. First, it indeed proved difficult, indeed arguably more or less impossible, to map the trajectories of ‘typical patients’. Often our interviewees were willing to play the game. They’d say that there was probably no such thing as a ‘typical trajectory’, but if there were it would, perhaps, look like this or that. But the real difficulty came when we came to try to map the different trajectories onto one another. It turned out that often they didn’t, or they wouldn’t. Trajectories offered by one interviewee didn’t plug into trajectories suggested by another. Here’s an example. There was an alcohol advice centre in the middle of the city.

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