Notes on presence and absence

In the 1920s Ferdinand de Saussure wrote that: ‘The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound image’ (Saussure 1960, 66). In his synchronic linguistics the sign thus links sound image (signified) and concept (signifier). The relationship between signifier and signified – the sign – is arbitrary, and the value of the sign also depends on its difference from other signs: ‘child’, ‘woman’, ‘man’, these terms achieve their value relationally.

This relationality has been the working tool for structuralist and post-structuralist writers. Structuralists hoped and searched for a fixed syntax of relations that reflects mental processes and actions in the world. Post-structuralists abandoned this search for foundations. There are always things that cannot be told, that cannot be made present. Instead they explored limits and incompletenesses. For Michel Foucault the limits to the conditions of possibility were or are set by the (modern) episteme. For Jacques Derrida the traces of incompleteness can always be discerned in the erasures and aporias enacted in whatever is present: in the deferrals of différance. Nothing is self-sealing, complete. Not everything can be known: it depends on what is not there. The argument is against what these philosophers call a ‘metaphysics of presence’: the idea that everything could be brought together and created or joined or known in a single location. What is being made present always depends on what is also being made absent.

The relationality of synchronic linguistics and its post-structuralist successors has also been a working tool in the sociology and philosophy of science and technology. For instance, Donna Haraway’s arguments about partial connec- tions, cyborgs and situated knowledges are composed in a different idiom, but their overall shape is similar. Collapse to unity is never a possibility, even though it claims to be. In addition, relationality underpins the work of Latour and Woolgar, and of Mol. Writers such as Foucault and Derrida insist on the materiality of relations and of the trace.74Foucault’s understanding of ‘discourse’ reveals its thoroughgoing materiality. Feminist theory has explored the enactments of embodiment, and the materialisation of (for instance) heterosexuality and the displaced traces of other possible sexualities.75Prodded by feminist sensibilities, science technology and society (STS) has come more recently to embodiment (for instance in the writing of Charis Cussins, Tiago Moreira and Ingunn Moser, as well as that of Haraway and Mol).76 Nevertheless, it is perhaps in STS that materiality has been most attended to. Thus we have seen the way in which Latour and Woolgar consider the relations of science both in the form of traces and statements and in the shape of other materials such as inscription devices. This is a thoroughgoing relational materiality. Materials – and so realities – are treated as relational products. They do not exist in and of themselves.77And the same logic is used to explore, in particular, the relations between materials and statements. We have seen that these are pictured as more or less precarious chains of relations. The links in these chains then get deleted, pushed into invisibility out-there, in the final product when suddenly all the intermediate steps

84 Interlude

are made to disappear, and we are confronted on the one hand by a visible fact out-there, and on the other hand by a statement in-here that describes that reality and which appears to derive from it. Latour and Woolgar can be understood, then, as calling for the rehabilitation of the mediating relations which produce statements and visible realities. For the rehabilitation of the necessary but invisible work which produces these.

This is a version of method assemblage. It is the making of relations. So what do those relations do? What is distinctive about them? What is method assem- blage? I have offered two provisional responses. In Chapter 2 I defined this for the case of representation, as the enactment of a bundle of ramifying relations that shapes, mediates and separates representations in-here, represented realities out-there, and invisible out-there relations, processes and contexts necessary to in-here. In Chapter 3, I offered a parallel definition appropriate to objects: that method assemblage is also the crafting of relations that shape, mediate and separate an object in-here, its relevant context out-there, and then an endless set of out-there relations, processes and all the rest that are a necessary part of the assemblage but at the same time have disappeared from it. As is obvious, the two are similar in form. But the post-structuralist philosophical tradition suggests a different vocabulary. If we use this then method assemblage becomes the enactment of presence, manifest absence, and absence as Otherness. More specifically, method assemblage becomes the crafting or bundling of relations or hinterland into three parts: (a) whatever is in-here or present; (b) whatever is absent but is also manifest in its absence; and (c) whatever is absent but is Other because, while it is necessary to presence, it is not or cannot be made manifest. Note that it is the emphasis on presence that distinguishes method from any other form of assemblage. Note also that to talk of crafting is not necessarily to imply human agency and skill. The various ethnographies we have explored suggest that people, machines, traces, resources of all kinds – and we might in other contexts extend the list to include spirits or angels or muses – are all involved in the process of crafting.

A comment, now, on presence, manifest absence and Otherness.

Presence is, obviously, what is made present or (as I shall sometimes say) condensed ‘in-here’. Latour and Woolgar talk of statements: these are versions of presence. Mol talks about angiographies, but also atherosclerotic blood vessels: these are further versions of presence. Others that we have touched upon include technical objects such as bush-pumps, and such shape-changing entities as alcoholic liver disease. All of these are presences enacted into being within practices. Some are representations while others are objects or processes. Presence, then, is any kind of in-here enactment.

Manifest absence goes with presence. It is one of its correlates since presence is incomplete and depends on absence. To make present is also to make absent. Examples. The statements in the papers of the Salk Laboratory describe endocrinological realities. Present angiographies describe diseased blood vessels. Excised blood vessels grow out of or have implications for future regimes of treatment, or past disease-inducing events. Alcohol abuse on a sink estate

Interlude 85

makes and depends on a context quite unlike that generated by alcoholic liver disease in a hospital gastro-enterology ward. The context of a bush-pump in a village is not much like its context in, say, its original manufacture. Each of these is a presence and a manifest absence, in one form or another.

Otherness, or absence that is not made manifest, also goes with presence. It too is necessary to presence. But it disappears. Perhaps it disappears because it is not interesting while it goes on routinely (the power-supply to the Salk Laboratory? The pay cheques to hospital staff? The current organisation of health care? A factory in Harare with a non-proprietorial proprietor?). Perhaps it disappears because it is not interesting, full stop (the availability of alcohol, a pub-going culture, a broken marriage). Perhaps (though no doubt this is an overlapping category) it disappears because what is being brought to presence and manifest absence cannot be sustained unless it is Othered (the social-and- cultural context for alcoholic liver disease in the context of the consultant’s office? The active character of authorship in the production of Salk Laboratory statements?). The implication is that Otherness takes a variety of forms. Those above – routine, insignificance and repression – are no doubt only three of the possibilities.78

It follows that method assemblage is also about the crafting and enacting of boundaries between presence, manifest absence and Otherness. These bound- aries are necessary. Each category depends on the others, so it is not that they can be avoided. To put it differently, there will always be Othering. What is brought to presence – or manifest absence – is always limited, always poten- tially contestable. How it might be crafted is endlessly uncertain, endlessly revisable. Normative methods try to define and police boundary relations in ways that are tight and hold steady. An inquiry into slow method suggests that we might imagine more flexible boundaries, and different forms of presence and manifest absence. Other possibilities can be imagined, for instance if we attend to non-coherence. It is in this spirit that in the next chapter I consider allegories and events as versions of method.

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