* 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.