Non-conventional forms

Introduction

We are not good at thinking movement. Our institutional skills favour the fixed and static, the separate and self-contained. Taxonomies, hierarchies, systems and structure represent the instinctive vocabulary of institution- alised thought in its subordinating of movement and transformation. The philosopher Whitehead (1925) called this the principle of simple location in which clear-cut, definite things occupy clear-cut, definite places in space and time. There is movement – of a kind: the simple movement of definite things from one definite place to another. But it’s a form of movement which denies the restlessness of transformation, deformation and refor- mation. Simple location reconstitutes a world of finished subjects and objects from the flux and flow of unfinished, heteromorphic ‘organisms’.

(Cooper 1998, 108)

The scheme I am proposing is permissive, and in the first instance the approach is ontologically and epistemologically symmetrical. Method assemblage, I am suggesting, may gather in any form. The absent out-therenesses enacted may be, but do not need to be, definite and singular. The condensed in- herenesses crafted into presence may take, but do not need to take, the form of statements or texts. But what are methods assemblages, over and above a series of mediations that produce presence, manifest absence and Otherness? Is there anything more that we can say about them? In this permissive turn to the ontological and its politics, what is being implied about absence? These are the questions that I explore in this chapter.

I work once again through empirical materials – in this case three small case studies. These are, first, the development of a project management system; second, a laboratory ethnography; and third, a Quaker meeting for worship. Each is a form of method assemblage. I explore these cases, and the more general metaphysical and methodological questions, by addressing a particular and very matter-of-fact problem experienced by many natural and social scien- tists in the course of their research. This is the paradoxical experience that, on the one hand, and at least some of the time, reality seems to be overwhelming

and quite dazzling. And then, on the other hand, the contrary experience that there is not much of interest going on: that somehow or other, at some stages in research, the world has gone silent. These contrary but related experiences are, I suggest, a key to the character of the method assemblage and the metaphysics in which it is situated.

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