objects-, ontologies-in-practice.

objects-, ontologies-in-practice.

March 3, 2010, 1:26 pm
Filed under: research, rhetoric | Tags: ANT, cancer, ontology

Exigency for blogging the Mol (2002) passage below is twofold. First, a colleague of mine is completing a draft of a manuscript in which he discusses actor-network theory. Second, I’m working on revisions for a journal manuscript wherein I argue,

“The function, role, and usefulness of medical images’ display, therefore, is not found in their expediency or because they illustrate disease. They are the disease inasmuch as they are the only way to know and do.”

To which one of the manuscript reviewers objected (and perhaps took offense?),

“I take it the author has not had breast cancer, for if she had I doubt she would confuse the disease with an illustration of it.”

Cue Mol (2002). I can’t find the earlier passage where she describes the ways that the pathologist she interviews says something about “that…there…that’s atherosclerosis…that, under the microscope.” Here, Mol is arguing that a body can be multiple without “shifting into pluralism” (p. 151). Moreover,

“When objects are taken to be at the center of a variety of perspectives, the object world tends to be handled as if it were an assemblage of entities that hang together. They are part of one another. That cohere. But if we engage in praxiographic studies of the way reality is enacted, this transitive image of the relations between objects loses its appeal. Objects-in-practice have complex relations. An artery operated on is not necessarily smaller than the patient operated, nor is the first situated inside the latter. The artery may be bigger in that it receives more attention during the operation than the patient. And the patient does not contain the artery; he or she is not the body on the operating table plus something extra (a mind, or a social life). Instead, the patient is someone whom, at some other moment, the surgeon may exchange jokes with. It is someone who, elsewhere, may have a wife waiting for a telephone call. The two realities, that of the artery and that of the patient, do not encompass each other: they are, rather, situated side by side.”

:: Mol | the body multiple, p. 149 ::

I need to better describe how my doctors know about cancer–not because their gaze makes real what they know, but because of the ways cancer is enacted as real: “Ontology-in-practice is multiple. Objects that are enacted cannot be aligned from small to big, from simple to complex. Their relations are the intricate ones that we find between practices” (Mol, 2002, p. 157).

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