Читать книгу Problem Spaces - Celia Lury - Страница 11

Before embarking on this journey, it may be helpful to make a couple of observations about some of the assumptions that inform the book. The first is that the book’s understanding of compositional methodology deploys an understanding of methods as practices. In some ways, such an understanding seems too obvious to need stating: in everyday as well as methodological uses, a method is a procedure or process for attaining an object, a way of doing things. But in some accounts, methods are only discussed before or after they are put to work – described in textbooks as a set of techniques to be learnt and then applied or in articles and monographs as completed actions that led to findings.⁸ Rather than adopt this approach, the book emphasizes the doing or practice of methods to make visible the work that goes into the accomplishment of epistemological values. As Andrea Mubi Brighenti puts it, while being regulatory ideals, these accomplishments are also ‘peculiar creations, … bounded and contingent practices aimed to stabilize certain courses of action and interaction patterns’ (2018: 24). Recognizing that epistemological values emerge from the doing of methods as material-semiotic practices enables a recognition of the composite nature of methodological exploration; for example:

Calculation thus appears as not merely mathematical or metrical in nature, but rather as a composite work made of different stages including objectification, separation, individualization, comparison, association, transformation, disembedding and distribution. (Brighenti 2018: 24)

As the book proceeds, what becomes apparent (hopefully) is that this doing, the compulsion of composition, comprises not only the intended actions of researchers, but also the actions and operations that are proposed, engaged, activated and (sometimes) automated in the epistemic infrastructure. And such actions and operations are themselves embedded in distributed activities that are not necessarily, indeed are not often, guided by epistemological concerns.

In this regard, the book speaks to and engages with discussions of the performativity of methods, the double social life of methods (Law, Ruppert and Savage 2011; Law and Urry 2003; Giddens 1987) and social epistemology (Collier 2005) as well as learning from studies of how science is done alongside more conventional accounts of methodology. It has been profoundly shaped by the longstanding feminist debates on epistemology and methodology, which are shown to have anticipated many concerns only recently identified in other debates. It also draws on the understanding of methods as interruptions I developed with the co-editors and contributors to the Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods (Lury et al. 2018). There we describe methods as gerunds; that is, as the active present tense form of verbs that function as nouns. Put rather grandly, the Handbook’s concern is to emphasize the role of methods in the activation of the present: the determination of a situation as a problem; that is, ‘a state of things in which something that will perhaps matter is unfolding amidst the usual activity of life’ (Berlant 2008: 4). A further source of inspiration is recent work on digital media, including on platforms, interfaces, data and circulation.

In drawing on and developing these ideas, the book describes the use of as many kinds of methods as possible. I do not find much value in, for example, opposing quantitative or qualitative methods or restricting my examples to one or the other; nor do I wish to fetishize either ‘the’ scientific method or ‘the’ hermeneutic method, de-construction or constructionism. The aim is to explore the possibilities for the accomplishment of epistemological values as they emerge in the use of a diversity of methods. In this regard, I follow John Dewey who says:

We are trying to know knowledge. The procedure which I have tried to follow, no matter with what obscurity and confusion, is to begin with cases of knowledge and to analyze them to discover why and how they are knowledges. (1922: 60)

To this end, the book also deploys examples and ideas relating to the use of methods in professional, lay and academic practices. This is not always the case in academic discussions of methodology but it seems especially important at a time of platformization, since platforms are often the site of tensions in collaborative forms of knowledge production (Rabinow et al. 2008), between, for example, the academy and its outside(s), across public and private organizations, with objects that may be more or less objective (Knorr Cetina 1997) and with subjects who may or may not be citizens, able to act as individuals or only be recognized as informants or data points.

The interest in the use of methods inside and outside academia does not, however, assume equivalence between the various practices described. Instead the aim is to recognize that at a time when scientific registers are losing some of their traditional hold over the deployment and interpretation of experimental interventions, epistemological considerations must contend with alternative repertoires of evaluation (Lezaun, Marres and Tironi 2017), and to acknowledge some of the many ways in which relations between academic and non-academic uses of methods are currently being negotiated.

Noortje Marres (2012a) describes some of the complications associated with these changes and the associated redistribution of expertise when she identifies three positions in contemporary methodological debates in the discipline of sociology. The first is the equation of sociological and social methods, an approach in which the latter are characterized by the (sometimes unacknowledged) naturalization or appropriation of social science methodology. I do not adopt this position: as will become clear I think it is important to acknowledge the two-way exchange that happens between academic and non-academic methods while acknowledging their different concerns. The second position is the marked opposition of sociological and social methods: an opposition between disciplinary and public problems which is developed in various forms of academic critique. In relation to this second position, while I do not want to diminish the importance of critique, neither do I want to start by assuming the terms of exchange as those of opposition or that academic practice is invariably ‘better’. Marres’ third position is to refuse any fixed identity for either sociological or social research and to avoid presuming the nature of the differences between them. In relation to this position, which is the one she adopts, methods are unstable, undetermined and interested; that is, methods are a way of equipping a situation to be a problem. I adopt this third position, and, like Marres, view methods as sites of engagement. Indeed, it is because I agree with Marres when she says that method development is a way to engage critically and creatively with wider analytical apparatuses that problem spaces are approached through a dual focus on methodology and the epistemic infrastructure. While it is becoming harder and harder to loosen the knots in which the strands of epistemic and social control have become entangled, this does not mean that their entanglement in the new empire of truth can be ignored (Herberg and Vilsmaier 2020).