Calculation thus appears as not merely mathematical or metrical in nature, but rather as a composite work made of different stages including objectification, separation, individualization, comparison, association, transformation, disembedding and distribution. (Brighenti 2018: 24)
As the book proceeds, what becomes apparent (hopefully) is that this doing, the compulsion of composition, comprises not only the intended actions of researchers, but also the actions and operations that are proposed, engaged, activated and (sometimes) automated in the epistemic infrastructure. And such actions and operations are themselves embedded in distributed activities that are not necessarily, indeed are not often, guided by epistemological concerns.
In this regard, the book speaks to and engages with discussions of the performativity of methods, the double social life of methods (Law, Ruppert and Savage 2011; Law and Urry 2003; Giddens 1987) and social epistemology (Collier 2005) as well as learning from studies of how science is done alongside more conventional accounts of methodology. It has been profoundly shaped by the longstanding feminist debates on epistemology and methodology, which are shown to have anticipated many concerns only recently identified in other debates. It also draws on the understanding of methods as interruptions I developed with the co-editors and contributors to the Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods (Lury et al. 2018). There we describe methods as gerunds; that is, as the active present tense form of verbs that function as nouns. Put rather grandly, the Handbook’s concern is to emphasize the role of methods in the activation of the present: the determination of a situation as a problem; that is, ‘a state of things in which something that will perhaps matter is unfolding amidst the usual activity of life’ (Berlant 2008: 4). A further source of inspiration is recent work on digital media, including on platforms, interfaces, data and circulation.
In drawing on and developing these ideas, the book describes the use of as many kinds of methods as possible. I do not find much value in, for example, opposing quantitative or qualitative methods or restricting my examples to one or the other; nor do I wish to fetishize either ‘the’ scientific method or ‘the’ hermeneutic method, de-construction or constructionism. The aim is to explore the possibilities for the accomplishment of epistemological values as they emerge in the use of a diversity of methods. In this regard, I follow John Dewey who says:
We are trying to know knowledge. The procedure which I have tried to follow, no matter with what obscurity and confusion, is to begin with cases of knowledge and to analyze them to discover why and how they are knowledges. (1922: 60)
To this end, the book also deploys examples and ideas relating to the use of methods in professional, lay and academic practices. This is not always the case in academic discussions of methodology but it seems especially important at a time of platformization, since platforms are often the site of tensions in collaborative forms of knowledge production (Rabinow et al. 2008), between, for example, the academy and its outside(s), across public and private organizations, with objects that may be more or less objective (Knorr Cetina 1997) and with subjects who may or may not be citizens, able to act as individuals or only be recognized as informants or data points.
The interest in the use of methods inside and outside academia does not, however, assume equivalence between the various practices described. Instead the aim is to recognize that at a time when scientific registers are losing some of their traditional hold over the deployment and interpretation of experimental interventions, epistemological considerations must contend with alternative repertoires of evaluation (Lezaun, Marres and Tironi 2017), and to acknowledge some of the many ways in which relations between academic and non-academic uses of methods are currently being negotiated.
Noortje Marres (2012a) describes some of the complications associated with these changes and the associated redistribution of expertise when she identifies three positions in contemporary methodological debates in the discipline of sociology. The first is the equation of sociological and social methods, an approach in which the latter are characterized by the (sometimes unacknowledged) naturalization or appropriation of social science methodology. I do not adopt this position: as will become clear I think it is important to acknowledge the two-way exchange that happens between academic and non-academic methods while acknowledging their different concerns. The second position is the marked opposition of sociological and social methods: an opposition between disciplinary and public problems which is developed in various forms of academic critique. In relation to this second position, while I do not want to diminish the importance of critique, neither do I want to start by assuming the terms of exchange as those of opposition or that academic practice is invariably ‘better’. Marres’ third position is to refuse any fixed identity for either sociological or social research and to avoid presuming the nature of the differences between them. In relation to this position, which is the one she adopts, methods are unstable, undetermined and interested; that is, methods are a way of equipping a situation to be a problem. I adopt this third position, and, like Marres, view methods as sites of engagement. Indeed, it is because I agree with Marres when she says that method development is a way to engage critically and creatively with wider analytical apparatuses that problem spaces are approached through a dual focus on methodology and the epistemic infrastructure. While it is becoming harder and harder to loosen the knots in which the strands of epistemic and social control have become entangled, this does not mean that their entanglement in the new empire of truth can be ignored (Herberg and Vilsmaier 2020).
Notes
1 This approach is thus very different from what has been called solutionism (Morozov 2013), in which problems are identified in relation to solutions that are already available. However, it has similarities with the consideration of problems as wicked (Rittel and Webber 1973; Buchanan 1992). In this approach, problems are wicked because they are indeterminate; that is, they have no definitive conditions or limits. Problem definition is considered a design space just as the solution is, with progress towards a solution affecting the progress of defining the problem. There are no inherent stopping criteria. This understanding of wicked problems has many affinities with the analysis of problem spaces proposed here. However, the emphasis here is on methodology rather than design as such. This is to enable a more open-ended discussion of the issues involved. Perhaps most importantly, however, the focus on problem spaces, rather than problems, even if they are qualified as wicked, draws attention to how problems are made, their becoming, rather than seeing them as having inherent characteristics. 2 Drawing on Whitehead, both Bruno Latour (2010) and Isabelle Stengers (2010) also use the term composition in relation to issues of methodology and politics. While sympathetic to these approaches, my use has a more strongly aesthetic emphasis, indicated by the discussion of form. 3 I hope to avoid the charge of formalism: the understanding of form proposed here is a dynamic social category; that is, it is a modality of social making. 4 I would like to thank Emma Uprichard for this formulation. 5 Roy Wagner says, ‘time is the difference between itself and space; space is the similarity between the two. Hence (pace Einstein) the nature of perception itself forbids a conflation of space and time as a single continuum’ (2019: xiii). 6 Compare with the definition given by Edwards et al.: ‘knowledge infrastructures comprise robust networks of people, artifacts, and institutions that generate, share and maintain specific knowledge about the human and natural worlds’ (2010: 17; see also: http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/Edwards_etal_2013_Knowledge_Infrastructures.pdf). Bowker defines