Hinterland and reality

In this book I have used a range of metaphors for talking about the ‘out-there’. These have included: hinterland; manifest absence; absence as Othered, fluxes, relations, and resonances. I have avoided using one of the most common terms in the social science literature: that of structure. I hope the reason for this is clear. The idea of ‘structure’ usually implies not simply a generic or primitive version of out-thereness, but additional commitments to independence, anteriority, singularity and definiteness. To talk of ‘structure’, then, is probably to imply that the real is out-there, in definite form, waiting to be discovered – even if there are major technical difficulties standing in the way of its discovery in practice.

Assumptions of this kind underpin contemporary versions of realism.122The latter argue that scientific experiments make no sense if there is no reality independent of the actions of scientists: an independent reality is one of the conditions of possibility for experimentation. The job of the investigator is to experiment in order to make and test hypotheses about the mechanisms that underlie or make up reality. Since science is conducted within specific social and cultural circumstances, the models and metaphors used to generate fallible claims are, of course, socially contexted, and always revisable.123 Nevertheless the assumption is that out-thereness is independent and definite. Different ‘paradigms’ relate to (possibly different parts of) the same world.

The metaphysics that I have been exploring are also realist, but only in the primitive or originary sense. They assume general flux of out-thereness but nothing more. The position is close to that of Ian Hacking:

There is only one way in which my thesis is contrary to a bundle of metaphysical doctrines loosely labelled ‘realist’. Realists commonly suppose that the ultimate aim or ideal of science is ‘the one true theory about the universe.’ I have never believed that even makes sense.

(Hacking 1992, 31)

For Hacking:

Our preserved theories and the world fit together so snugly less because we have found out how the world is than because we have tailored each to the other.

(Hacking 1992, 3)

Hacking has a constructivist view of scientific experiment. In the particular world in which we happen to live, scientific inquiry has, as a matter of fact, arrived at a set of particular conclusions, and created an empirical reality to match. To arrive at the version of method assemblage argued in this book we need to move from a focus on construction to attend to enactment. This, as we have seen, allows or requires us to add in multiplicity. The possibility – indeed the likelihood

Interlude 141

– that tensions appear between different enactments (and knowledges) of reality is made manifest. And with this possibility that realities may be crafted and acknowledged as indefinite gatherings, coherent or non-coherent, ambivalent, allegorical, and within or beyond language. If we wanted to play games with words we might think of calling this position enactment realism.

Of course if all the social and sociological method assemblages were co-ordinated in a single place, if they were all brought together, then such an enactment might craft a more or less singular, and who knows, definite hinterland or ‘structure’ across a range of different locations. It would seem coherent. But this ignores everything that we have learned about multiplicity and multiple enactments. Even more importantly, it also ignores the distinction we have made between manifest absences on the one hand, and Othering on the other. For if realities are multiple or fractional, then the resonances and the patterns of the different absences made manifest overlap – but only fractionally. And if there is always absence as Othering, then we can say nothing in general about that Othering. Only in particular, and at particular moments.

In the end this is a matter of metaphysics. If we feel uncomfortable without clear, definite and singular accounts of clear, definite and singular structures, then that is how it is. However, if we are able and willing to tolerate the uncertainties and the specificities of enactment, flux and resonance, then we find that we are confronted with a quite different set of important puzzles about the nature of the real and how to intervene in it. Perhaps, for instance, the ‘great structures’ of inequality are to be understood not as great structures but as relatively non-coherent enactments which nevertheless resonate or interfere with one another to keep each other in place. Latour offers a parable about colonialism written in such terms. The whites who arrived in the colonies, he says, were a rabble. But:

They were stronger than the strongest because they arrived together. No, better than that. They arrived separately, each in his place and each with his purity, like another plague on Egypt.

The priests spoke only of the bible, and to this and this alone they attributed the success of their mission. The administrators, with their rules and regu- lations, attributed their success to their country’s civilizing mission. The geographers spoke only of science and its advance, The merchants attributed all the virtues of their art to gold, to trade, and to the London Stock Exchange. The soldiers simply obeyed orders and interpreted everything they did in terms of the fatherland. The engineers attributed the efficacy of their machines to progress.

(Latour 1988, 202)

Perhaps this particular gathering is helpful. Perhaps it is not. But as a style it deserves some thought. And, to be sure, we have visited the possibility already in Chapter 6 in our discussion of ambivalence and allegory. To put it differently, this is the idea that what engineers call ‘loosely coupled systems’ are more robust

142 Interlude

than those that display a single and definite logic. Perhaps out-thereness resonates to produce dramatic patterns without single and definite structures at all. Perhaps things hold together precisely because they don’t. Citations: the bush-pump; the cervical screening programme; the Quaker meeting for worship.124In which case the great inequalities and distributions might be better understood not as structures but as non-structures. And we will need, for better or for worse, to find ways of exploring the partial overlaps of hinterlands, the manifest absences, if we want to get to grips with those inequalities.

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