Definite fluidities?

If real objects and their visible contexts are enacted in practices, then there are issues about how those practices relate together. This is the problem of difference, or the problem of multiplicity. And there are various metaphors for

handling this and dealing with bundles of partially overlapping methods assemblages. As we have seen, Mol describes a series of strategies for holding singularity and multiplicity together. Perhaps she can be read as suggesting that this oscillation between the single and the multiple is a chronic condition of being in Euro-America: that the assumption of singular out-thereness is an enactment that sets limits to the Euro-American conditions of possibility, even if it is also, and in some senses, misleading. Misleading because the method assemblage depends on, grows out of, and is enacted by mechanisms of inter- ference between practices which depend on separation while also insisting that they are joined. As we have seen, there are other arguments similar to this. Thus in Latour’s understanding modernity grows out of an analogous distinc- tion between pure forms, pure distinctions on the one hand, and a proliferation of heterogeneities, impurities and hybrids on the other. His argument is that both heterogeneities or impurities and attempts at purity and distinctness are necessary: it is the pretence of the latter that allows the fecund but more or less concealed production of hybrids.73

Perhaps this is so, but there are further questions arising. For instance, multiplicity also poses questions about definiteness, the last of the Euro- American versions of out-thereness detailed in Chapter 2. Is it a sin to be indefinite? Perhaps. But as we have seen, out-thereness and its in-here objects may look indefinite because they are slippery, changing their shape and perhaps even their name. But if this is right then perhaps we also need to change our sense of what it is to be definite. Perhaps we need to say that the shape shifters and the name changers are indeed definite – but that they also change their shapes and names. To do this is to redraw the boundary between two parts of out-thereness – between that which is visible and that which is not. It re-works the conditions of possibility for Euro-American method. It makes it quieter and more generous.

But there is a more radical possibility too. We might, instead or as well, imagine versions of method assemblage that craft, sensitise us to, and apprehend the indefinite or the non-coherent in-here and out-there. This is the challenge that I address in the next chapter.

INTERLUDE:

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