Doing the epistemic and the ontic together
Emma Uprichard
This section brings together 12 contributions that collectively illustrate the many ways methods are continuously capturing and composing the world. In effect, capturing and composing are a set of what Celia Lury describes in the introduction to this handbook as ‘compound methods’: combinations of practices that are always interrupting (in) the now (and then) of the (historical and forthcoming) present. How capturing and composing interrupt is, in part, through the way they co-occur and co-act simultaneously. As we shall see, the recursion between the captured – the seized, taken, or recorded – and the composed is an important part of how the contributions in this section compound and interrupt knowing and being in the world. More specifically, it will be shown that capturing and composing bring together the epistemic and the ontic.
First, it is suggested that different methods capture and compose the world in particular ways. The fact that all methods compose their object of study epistemically is not a new idea and has been a key assumption across a range of authors for some time now (Collins and Pinch 1993; Latour and Woolgar 1986/1979; Law 2004; Mulkay 1990). But, as will be shown, the advantage of thinking of capturing and composing in this way is that it offers a foothold on the challenges and complexities of interdisciplinary methods. Second, the essays in this section, each in its own way, demonstrate a notion of doing method. The emphasis on doing, and specifically capturing and composing, brings with it a whole host of implications as to how methods are doing the world. A key consequence of doing method is that time and temporality are inscribed into method; that is, methods move things into being and becoming different to what they are. This leads into the concluding issue raised in this essay, namely, the ontic construction of what methods and things are together being and becoming. After all, it is not only that method shapes the world; it is also that the world recursively shapes method. By this I mean that methods are compounding the way the world is, was and can become as methods continually capture and compose.
It is fair to say, at least as a starting point, that in most other methods textbooks, capturing and composing might be thought of as collecting and analysing. And in many ways, collecting and analysing are what is meant by capturing and composing, except that capturing and composing are also interrupting and disrupting that which they capture and compose.
Capturing (from the Latin verb caperer) has many layers of meanings, among which are: to cause (data) to be stored in a computer; and from physics, capturing also refers to sub-atomic particle absorption. As these layers of meaning suggest, that which is captured is not necessarily freely giving itself – it is not data as given, but rather data as taken with or without ‘will’. Capturing can be seen as ‘seizing’, forcing the storage or absorption of a thing. Alongside capturing the world, the entries in this section also implicitly describe the ways that methods are necessarily composing the world. Interestingly, the verb to compose is itself composed of many histories with multiple origins: from Middle English for ‘put together’ or ‘construct’; from Old French for composer (to consist of, or to be drawn), and from Latin componere (forming the noun component) and compositus (to place). Note that composing can also involve decomposing – breaking down components, rotting and putrefying that which is captured.
When multiple practices come together as compound methods (instead of multiple methods or mixed methods), we end up with multiple ensembles or assemblages of method – a mesh of methods – that are capturing and composing the world as it is continuously being and becoming. Capturing and composing take us beyond the singular or multiple; they have the capacity of holding, folding and twisting – that is, compounding – partials and wholes simultaneously. Interdisciplinary research, in particular, often demands compound methods capable of capturing and composing the world across contexts, in many ways and simultaneously.
We see an example of a compound method doing many things simultaneously in Leila Dawney’s contribution Figurationing, where she notes that ‘Figures are both material and semiotic: they convey meaning and have material substance and world-making effects’. Likewise, in her contribution on Abducting, Ana Teixeira de Melo draws on Pierce to propose the notion of abducting as a ‘meta-methodological’ practice. She writes: ‘Abducting is considered as a meta-practice, a meta-method composed of different dimensions.’ Among the things that go into the compound practice of abducting, de Melo argues, is the notion of surprise. Compound methods, like all methods, are both made in and through the world, and as such they are used to reflect – or rather as Leila Dawney argues – to ‘diffract’ the world. Diffracting is a way of representing the multiplicity of the world and acknowledging the ways in which every methodological ‘cut’ illuminates tangled in/visibilities. Similarly, Charles C. Ragin brings to light the way that combinations of quantitative and qualitative methods may be involved in ‘casing the case’. He draws attention to the different and similar ways that qualitative and quantitative methods use and produce cases. For example, he argues, qualitative methods in the social sciences are mainly occupied with the ‘patterns of difference’ between cases whereas quantitative methods produce ‘generalities’ across cases. He suggests that in the humanities, casing is done differently again, since there the focus is typically on bringing out the specificities of one particular case.
Put into practice as doings, methods enact and perform the world as they act and are acted on. This point is made most explicitly in Holger Pötzsch’s contribution on iBorder/ing – the slash here being an important marker of the ‘twin concept’ he develops, which ‘co-constitutes contingent subjectivities and practices’. He explains:
iBorder/ing in its composite form, thus, becomes conceivable as a fundamental cultural technique of in/exclusion that not so much identifies and processes already established practices and subjectivities, but becomes co-constitutive of them in and through technologically predisposed and procedurally framed everyday border work. In turn, an apparently clear-cut distinction between border technologies and institutions on the one hand and border subjects and practices on the other is problematized and replaced by a processual understanding of the border as a constantly emerging assemblage combining all the above phenomena.
Made visible as a doing or happening, iBordering activates the epistemologically crucial practice of inclusion/exclusion to make it available as a methodological resource for a method assemblage.
By explicitly approaching methods as doings, we can put ourselves into the method as (disciplinary and disciplined) subjects. We do methods and methods also do us. As has long been argued, classifying classifies the classified, and vice versa. We know the impact of methods being done only too well when working in interdisciplinary teams, where methods can quickly become the vehicles through which we dialogue, unite, oppress, negotiate, silence and bond with our colleagues. When methods are understood as doings, we can also account for the way that methods are acting as they are conducted, used and done. As Thomas and Hunt sum up:
Just look at the vocabulary of methodologies: requirements, design, quality, communication, tests, deliverables – all good solid nouns, and not a verb in sight. Yet increasingly, [we] are coming to believe that these things, these nouns, aren’t really that useful. Instead, we see that the real value lies in the processes that lead to the artifact’s creation; the verbs are more valuable than the nouns.
Thomas and Hunt 2003: 82
And once we understand methods as doings, we can also see how they act on themselves and each other recursively. For example, Google is an entity, a search engine, which continually reconstitutes itself as a method assemblage – in relation to a user or re-searcher – in the activity of Googling. In this way, as Alberto Corsín Jiménez suggests in his contribution, interdisciplinary methods are always producing knowledge that is ‘forever in beta’. Indeed, methods themselves are also ‘forever beta’, since they too keep evolving, whether it be through the ways they are modified over time to measure or categorize differently or in relation to disciplinary vogues that come and go.
Consider, also, the method of visualizing as both capturing and composing the object being visualized. The object of a visualization is individuated in a recursive process: data that is visualized can show the object to be changing, that is to be growing or increasing and so on. Similarly, Carolin Gerlitz notes the capacity for ‘retrieving’ digital data by default generates other kinds of possibilities. She writes:
The grammatization of a platform suggests that the data units it generates are comparable if not similar entities, while at the same time creating the conditions for third parties and users to fold heterogeneous interpretations of these grammars into the platform.
In Greg McInerny’s essay, he makes the point that ‘anything can be visualized’ and he uses the notion of ‘design space’ to imagine ‘the hyper-volume that contains all visualizations whether they have been made or not, and whether they are of use, or no use at all’ Similarly, in Notating, Moritz Wedell says:
Acts of notating do not only refer to static objects. Notations can efficiently represent movements: movements of mathematical operations, movements of bodies, of sound, of thought, etc. But acts of notating do not merely ‘put’ these movements ‘into’ a notational composition, or a choreography of things in order to make them re-accessible. Acts of notating detach these movements from the restrictions of the real world, and they allow us to proceed and explore movements in a virtual realm, a sphere only restricted by the rules of the notation. It is this freedom to carry out movements in an abstract realm of notational practice that is an important precondition for composition and invention both in the arts and in science.
In relation to these examples, we might think of how capturing and composing are made possible through and in relations with ‘design spaces’, where such spaces are dynamic, hyper-volumes, in which what is captured and composed is being and becoming in the doing of compound methods.
In summary, the focus on doing methods draws attention to the ways in which methods capture and compose epistemic things relative to where, when, how, or for how long the methods are carried out. Doing methods not only morphs the world epistemically (what methods make knowable), but also morphs the world ontically (what methods make to be and become). Methods act, and they act intensively; they act on and inflect the world in myriad ways that might or might not matter.
As a doing, method itself can be and become. Doing method means activating time and temporality as well as space. Interviewing can capture experiences in the past as well as ‘narratives of the future’ (Uprichard 2011). Method-related words are, in fact, already riddled with the temporal. Oral history, forecasting methods, clustering or sequencing methods all indicate the bounded region of time that they will capture (the past, the present, the future), but they also make temporalities, that is, the relation between the past and the present, the present and the future. Different timings are etched into methodological activities such as recording, reporting, transcribing, modelling, simulating, forecasting, narrating, processing, reporting, interpreting, projecting, anticipating, explaining, predicting, often in the closely specified rules of specific disciplines, which assert their primacy to make (methodological) time.
As Luciana Duranti’s chapter suggests, archiving as a form of ‘documenting society’ captures and composes society in a way that is, she notes, ‘highly regulated by a discipline’. But, doing methods invites multiple timings, invites adverbs and negation (Fonteyn, De Smet and Heyvaert 2015). So, for example, we might imagine a doing method capable of capturing and composing one aspect of the world by slowing it down, while it captures and composes in other areas by speeding it up at the same time. Computational techniques, for example, have sped up the activities of capturing, retrieving, sorting, processing and visualizing data, sometimes allowing, sometimes requiring that they are done in parallel or in sequences of various kinds, allowing for different kinds of pausing, sometimes leading to various kinds of stoppage.
Barbara Adam’s contribution on Timing is infused with tense and time. Her contribution is unique insofar as she captures and composes what she calls ‘compressed’ or ‘distilled’ theory in ‘poetic shape’ (see Adam 2004). ‘Timing is,’ she suggests, ‘Doing time’. Emphasizing the doing of method ‘challenges method and methodology’ and ‘troubles ontology-epistemology distinctions / Recognizing our complicity in generating data changes the nature of a fact’:
Time open, unbounded: imposing boundaries is our doing
Holding time still to contemplate the social de-temporalizes
Ossifies becoming; closes down processes; negates potentials
All of past and future encoded in momentary slices of social life
Temporal wholes expressed in moment-parts: present embedded
Reworking temporal complexity fundamentally reconfigures theory
Emphasizing process over product challenges method & methodology
Embracing temporal extension reforms disciplines, categories & norms
As Adam puts it: ‘Temporal wholes expressed in moment-parts’ are always capturing and composing change and continuity. ‘[Q]uestions and answers become intermeshed / Once quests for interdisciplinary inquiry are seriously engaging process timing’. Time tenses method and this is turn moves the thing that is the object of the method.
Tensing calls into being when and where method is being and becoming. In much the same way as muscles are tensed to (not) move a part of the body, it is in the tensing of methods that parts of the world are (not) moved too. Tensing reveals the space of movement where and when methods become – or as Thrift (2004) might call it, tensing reveals the ‘movement-space’ that methods do, a movement-space which is ‘relative rather than absolute’.
When method is tensed, then we can also imagine its object to be moved into a new space of being, making the object become something other than what it was, poised for action. For example, when I conduct an interview, the person I am speaking with is both subject and object, depending on the turn-taking of the conversation. Furthermore, the person being interviewed is always being and becoming (Uprichard 2008) as a person in the moment, at the time, before, during and after the present time of the interview itself. Both interviewer and interviewee are in action, co-constructing the emerging dialogue, which is being captured and composed dynamically through interaction. Similarly, when Google ‘searches’, the object of the search does not simply sit and wait for the algorithm to ‘find’ it. Instead, much of the work of Googling is to continuously capture and compose parts of the Internet data in a way that tenses it up, moving it into spaces where it can be matched, weighted, filtered, indexed, compared and ranked before appearing in a list. The data are kneaded like the baker’s dough that folds whole and partial folds that are repeatedly refolding and unfolding the (un)foldings – iteratively capturing and composing data such that the end user has an object (a list of results) that might or might not be to his or her liking. Tensing the doing of method brings th-ings to ‘life’ by morphing them into something other than what or where or how they once were or might become.
Capturing and composing are epistemic constructs: they organize knowledge in and about the world; they are also ontic constructs and organize aspects of the world. After all, where individuals reflexively re-act to both actions and descriptions, there is a ‘looping effect’ – to use Hacking’s (1995) term – as the world is re-made through the th-ings (concepts, actions, classifications) that have already gone into making it. The world keeps changing (and not changing) and so too do our modes of being, becoming and knowing the world. Interdisciplinary research is no different in this respect; it requires us to consider new possibilities for action under new kinds of description.
Once we interrogate how methods always compound the world in particular ways, then the question becomes less about what is and is not captured and composed (although this is certainly an important component in understanding how the world is compounded). Rather, the question becomes more about how we might (re)construct methods which expose the way methods compound. And vice versa, how does the world compound methods such that patterns of change and continuity are maintained?
Crucially, what we do when we approach methods in this way is what Alberto Corsín Jiménez refers to in his contribution as ‘white-boxing’: we expose sites of methodological praxis and ‘disclose and re-source their capacities for agency and relation’. He explains:
white-boxing allows for novel forms and new locations of social durability to emerge – new expressions of cultural, political and aesthetic materiality and critique. White-boxing finally comes full circle in helping us unpack and interrogate the very sources and resources through which we . . . take presence in the world. It invites us to reconsider the infrastructures, spaces and times that give shape to our research methodologies.
In other words, approaching method as compound methods not only invites the debates around ‘politics of method’ (May 2005) to re-turn to centre-stage, but also interrogates the ways in which methods in general compound disciplinary and interdisciplinary sites capture and de/ re-compose each other.
Once we start thinking of ways in which methods are continually compounding particular epistemological and ontological spaces in the world, then interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary methods take on new kinds of emancipatory possibilities. Indeed, how methods compound, de- and re-compose epistemic and ontic inter/disciplinary presents and futures arguably becomes a necessary (and potentially sufficient) part of any chance of disrupting and displacing the present (and future). As Hacking (2002: 100) puts it: ‘Social change creates new categories of people, but the counting is no mere report of developments. It elaborately, often philanthropically, creates new ways for people to be.’ Similarly, method creates new kinds of knowledge and interdisciplinary contexts often create new ways for knowledge to be and become also. Methods and knowledge make each other. They both conspire to create the world in the ‘forever beta’. It is up to methodologists and interdisciplinary researchers alike to come together to ‘white box’ the ways in which both method and interdisciplinarity re-produce the capturings and composings that ultimately defy our individual and collective agency.
I am grateful to Celia Lury for her comments and suggestions on earlier drafts, which have improved this discussion.
Adam, B. (2004). Time: Key Concepts. Oxford: Polity Press.
Collins, H. and Pinch, T. (1993). The Golem: What Everyone Should Know About Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fonteyn, L., De Smet, H. and Heyvaert, L. (2015). What it means to verbalize: the changing discourse functions of the English gerund. Journal of English Linguistics, 43(1): 36–60.
Hacking, I. (1995). The looping effects of human kinds. In D. Sperber, D. Premack and A. J. Premack (Eds.) Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate (pp. 351–383). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hacking, I. (2002). Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1986/1979). Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (2nd ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge.
May, C. (2005). Methodological pluralism, British sociology and the evidence-based state: a reply to Payne. Sociology, 39 (3): 519–528.
Mulkay, M. (1990). Sociology of Science. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Thomas, D. and Hunt, A. (2003). Verbing the noun. IEEE Software, 20(4): 82–83.
Thrift, N. (2004). Movement-space: the changing domain of thinking resulting from the development of new kinds of spatial awareness. Economy and Society, 33(4): 582–604.
Uprichard, E. (2008). Children as ‘being and becomings’: children, childhood and temporality. Children & Society, 22(4): 303–313.
Uprichard, E. (2011). Narratives of the future. In M. Williams and P. Vogt (Eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Innovation in Social Research Methods (pp. 103–119). London: Sage.