Enacting the Social
Law, J., & Urry, J. (2004). Enacting the social. Economy & Society, 33(3), 390-410.
In a way, this is the perfect starting point for Actant.
One of the things that I have come to expect from the Actor-Network Theorists are these kinds of treatises, as much concerned with pushing the social sciences forward while at the same time doing everything they can to enroll as many academics as possible into abandoning the 20th Century project, a project which they have more or less established as an unmitigated failure.
Law & Urry have written a beautifully constructed article here, a textbook example of exactly how these types of articles should be written. Establish the villain (social science methods), explain exactly why we need to stop everything we are doing to defeat said villain (they are participating in enacting realities that are both simplistic and Euclidian), and then point towards the toolkits that may provide the best weapons (taking the lessons of complexity theory seriously).
For Law and Urry, the social sciences are relational or interactive, in that they “participate in, reflect upon, and enact the social in a wide range of locations including the state” (p. 392). Key is understanding methods as performative, “they have effects; they make differences; they enact realities; and they can help to bring into being what they also discover” (p. 393). If we believe that methods are participating in the production of realities, what are we to do with this?
Here they point to Osborne and Rose’s 1999 article “Do the social sciences create phenomena? The example of public opinion research,” which argues that there are no realities in such forms as public opinion, and therefore the “truth” can never be properly discovered. For Osborne and Rose, methods are not simply technically flawed, but are “constitutively inappropriate” as well. Yet Law & Urry are not satisfied with this response, calling it both too romantic (implies that we can never know reality well at all) and too scientistic (implies an ultimate truth that appears beyond reach in the methods of social science).
This brings Law & Urry to question how this polarization (of being too romantic on one side, and too scientistic on the other) can be avoided. This may come from an understanding that the “real” is indeed “real”, but also understanding that it is also made, and that it is made within relations; “certain kinds of social realities are performed into being in social science, and this does not make them any less real” (p. 395). Here they quote Heisenberg “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” The conclusion is that social science and its methods are simultaneously real and produced.
If social science is both real and produced, “the issue is not simply how what is out there can be uncovered and brought to light, though this remains an important issue. It is also about what might be made in the relations of investigation, what might be brought into being” (p. 396). The question of “what might be brought into being” is crucial here, the “ontological politics” of trying to parse out which entities are being enacted. With the ontological politics question in mind, we are able to consider what realities the current methods of social science help to enact or erode, and which realities are strengthened. The important shift is from epistemology (where what is known depends on perspective) to ontology (what is known is also being made differently).
How do we move on from the single world (“different methods produce different and often inconsistent results”) and Euclidian space (“much social science method is predicated on a set of more or less spatial metaphors to do with height, depth, levels, size, and proximity” p. 398)?
For Law & Urry, the first thing to do is admit that much of life escapes our capacities to make models of it, “not only in the technical sense that it is beyond the grasp of current research methods, but in the more profound sense that it is constitutively resistant to the process of being gathered together into a single account, description, or model” (p. 399). We can also admit that our methods have problems understanding non-linear relationships and flows.
In the final act, Law & Urry point towards approaches that are rooted in complexity theory. These approaches takes us away from conventional linear analysis (structure/agency), and rejects common-sense notion that large changes in causes produce large changes in effects. Using complexity, small changes can sometimes produce large effects, and vice versa, individual and statistical levels of analysis are not equivalent, system effects do not result from the simple addition of individual components. Finally, complexity theory models the emergent properties of non-linear systems, but it does not predict them.
This brings us back to the first question, and leads us to question our “methodological inheritance.” As Law & Urry argue, we can no longer assume that there is a world “out there,” and that it is our job to “find it.” We are reminded that, when methods enact whatever they describe into reality, methods are not innocent; “they help make realities, But the question is: which realities? Which do we want to help make more real, and which less real? How do we want to interfere?” (p. 404).
If there was any doubt, they end the paper with a list of things that our current social science methodologies are unable to deal with:
Deal poorly with the fleeting – that which is here today and gone tomorrow.
Deal poorly with the distributed – that which is found here and there and not inbetween
Deal poorly with the multiple – that which takes different shapes in different places
Deal poorly with the non-casual, the chaotic, the complex.
Deal poorly with the sensory – vision, taste, sound, smell
Deal poorly with the emotional – time compressed outburtst of anger, pain, rage, pleasure,
Deal poorly with the kinaesthetic – the pleasures and pains that follow the movements and displacement of people, object, information, and ideas.
I just finished my last course requirement for my PhD in sociology, and I have to say that it doesn’t feel good thinking about the time (and money) I have spent becoming skilled methods that I currently understand as being ill equip in dealing with the world I live in. I have heard the argument that you have to know what you are tearing down, but I think that argument is pretty weak (I learned Parsons without having to live Parsons). However, I think I am lucky in that I can work on re-building of Sociology (which I am still believe has potential) early in my career, before I become established and likely cranky at all these kids trying to tear down everything I have worked so hard to build. I already see this in some of the other kids around me, so willing to stay in the comfortable captains quarters of all of these sinking ships.
This is only the start.
