Methodological intimacies and the figure of the twins

Twins and the anxiety of influence

We begin with the first strand of our argument, which draws on biographical writings and empirical studies of twins. Twins have long been utilised as models, examples and illustrations of the enduring tension between individuality and mutuality. And they have long reflected back at researchers an overactive desire to delineate, or what cognitive sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel (1991) calls our imperative ‘to categorise’, to ‘split things apart’ and ‘lump things together’, in an effort to order and ‘know’ the world. Yet, as will become clear, the Dioscuri both summons and defies desires to lump or split, and refuses to serve as a measure that adjudicates between nature and culture, or self and other. Writings on twins struggle to either wholly unite or divide ‘the double’ and, in this productive tension, demonstrate the figurative power of twins to hold presumed opposites together in a way that allows us to reformulate their separability and/as entanglement.

One of the most illustrative tales of twins is told by Marjorie Wallace in her biography of June and Jennifer Gibbons. In The Silent Twins (1986), Wallace documents not only the rich, deep ambivalence and conflict of twinhood, but also the consequences of living in a society with an implicit standard of individuality. We are told that from an early age, June and Jennifer Gibbons were inseparable. They grew up identical in appearance and mannerism, and developed a bond so intense that by the time they were at school age, both were virtually cut off from the people around them, including their own family members. Here is how Wallace describes the degree of emotional porosity between the sisters when she first interviewed them and read their personal diaries:

June and Jennifer emerge … as two human beings who love and hate each other with such intensity that they can neither live together nor apart. Like twin stars, they are caught in the gravitational field between them, doomed to spin round each other for ever. If they come too close or drift apart, both are destroyed. (1986, p. 7)

For most of their lives, at home and elsewhere, June and Jennifer Gibbons adopted an ‘elective mutism’, refusing to speak in almost all social situations. Unable or unwilling to interact with outsiders, they were ‘locked in a tight orbit’ (Couser, 2003, p. 247), developing strange if also striking habits of communication. Notwithstanding their taciturnity, the Gibbons twins learned to connect with and influence each other’s behaviour by moving in perfect synchrony, a feat that spooked and alarmed many of their classmates and teachers. The intensity of the bond between Jennifer and June was considered so detrimental to their individual integrity that they were forcibly separated by school authorities and, later on, by prison officers. One educator justified their need for separation in terms of sacrifice and compromise: ‘They are dying in each other’s arms and we must save one of them, even if it is at the price of the other’ (Wallace, 1986, p. 33). Represented as an example of too much intimate entanglement, such twinship is detrimental, even dangerous to the societal preoccupation with individuality.

In Twins of the World (2008), Alessandra Pointelli captures the anxiety around twins and what is believed to be their limited capacity to individuate. She cites a list of ‘commandments’ for bringing up twins published by eminent psychologists on the World of Twins Association website. The recommendations evoke a ‘dangerous intimacy’ in twinship that must be avoided by actively promoting singular identities. The list includes advice such as: ‘Provide separate sleeping arrangements and if possible separate rooms’, ‘Never dress them alike’, ‘Never call them twins or allow anyone else to do so’ and ‘Choose separate classes starting from the crèche’ (p. 18). The psychologists recommend these practices in the interest of being ‘healthy’ (p. 18), with the blurred nature of twinned identities operating as a pathological ground. The list highlights just how troubled we are by the likeness, or closeness, of twin siblings. Yet, as the popularity of the ‘silent twins’ demonstrates (the Gibbons sisters are the subject of telemovies, documentaries, podcasts, a biography, and countless news stories, interviews and ‘spooky’ blogs), the porousness that unfolds between twins also catches at something deep within us. We are at once unsettled and fascinated by the unclear line between one and other, what is proximate and distant, perceptible and hidden from view.

Thomas Couser argues that just as the figure of the twins ‘challenges Western culture’s valorization of the unique individual’ it also poses a dilemma for ‘the major Western life-writing genres, autobiography and biography’ (2003, p. 243). Analysing Marjorie Wallace’s The Silent Twins, Couser explains that the ‘challenges for Wallace were at once logistical, methodological, and ethical … most of all, how to represent twins so tightly bound together without collapsing the distance between them – how to represent their inseparability without denying their separateness’ (p. 247). What Couser describes as Wallace’s challenge is a quandary that plays out at empirical and methodological scales beyond the opportunity that twin studies offer to grapple with the meaning of individuality. Drawing from Marilyn Strathern’s work on the dividual, Joanna Latimer has explored a similar question in the context of thinking about how portraiture can summon a challenge to notions of identity as singularity. Latimer does this via Frida Kahlo’s painting, Two Fridas. In this painting, Kahlo depicts herself in duplicate and uses twinness (the two Fridas share a heart, almost as ‘Siamese twins’) to portray the dimensionality of her self/ves. Latimer argues that the painting ‘makes elements of Frida’s conception explicit, her multiplicity and heterogeneity, but these parts do not settle into a whole, so that Kahlo does not offer us a simple image of Western plurality … but [of personhood] as something almost incommensurate, and irreducible’ (2009, pp. 49, 54). Kahlo invokes the twins to recast the traditions of self-portraiture; and because of this, Two Fridas, Latimer argues, opens up fixed notions about identity at the same time as it unsettles methodologies that presume a certain idea of subjectivity as bounded and discrete.

As these biographical representations suggest, the figure of twins unsteadies our ability to make a definitive cut or decide which body is more vital – an insight which challenges our understanding of identity as singularity and troubles neat either/or conclusions. Crucially, twins also present methodological challenges for social scientists. The figure of the twin invokes the question of how can we write ‘about’ identity and difference in ways that both recognise and question the powerful demand for division between self and other. This is particularly important in the context of the demand that any process of investigation needs to demonstrate uniqueness and originality in the carving out of a research terrain and in order for work to be distinguished as our own.

In the following section, we look at Victorian scientist Francis Galton’s foundational study of twin rearing, focusing especially on how Galton’s preferred conclusion about the weight of nature over nurture (themselves timeless twins) surprisingly sits at odds with the evidence he presents.

The confounding measure of twins

As the title of Galton’s 1875 paper, ‘The History of Twins, As a Criterion of the Relative Powers of Nature and Nurture’, suggests, twin rearing has long been utilised as a standard by which to determine the cause and effect of identity formation. Among the many ‘claims to attention’ that twins enjoy, Galton highlights the one that preoccupies him: ‘the means of distinguishing between the effects of tendencies received at birth, and of those that were imposed by the circumstances of their after lives’ (p. 566). Already, at the outset of the essay, we have a prime example of either/or thinking based in an argument that sets out only to prove itself. It betrays Galton’s obsession with locating twins as evidence of a hardwired destiny. In Galton’s world, the lives of twins run along in mirrored parallel, on occasion disrupted by disparate life events, but by his account, always realigned to an extent, with each dying by a similar sequence of biological events, even if not in the same timeframe. Galton wants twins to prove the dominant power of nature. He wants the comparison to reveal a clear answer – ‘this not that’. But at the very same time, Galton’s study offers unintended insights. It derails an attempt to separate twins. As they become not only dangerously intimate, but actually interchangeable, the very notion of a singular identity is undermined.

As a related aside, Galton’s scientific method is worthy of discussion in its irreverence (not always intended) for the lines that divide another great Dioscuri – the ‘two cultures’, science and arts. This is a troubling structure that still drives the vexed, convoluted tensions between social and biological, or in its more recent iterations, epigenetic and genetic, perspectives. Although a detailed analysis of these tensions is beyond the scope of this article, we want to highlight just how compelling it is that Galton’s understanding of determinism draws from the language of science and myth in his casting of ‘life’s order’ as set by both biology and fate. The twins in his study ‘know’ the course of the flesh that is at once theirs and the Other’s, despite life’s minor ravages injuring one half and not the other. Relying entirely on subjective anecdotes and self-reports as his evidentiary basis, Galton considers the histories of 35 pairs of twins, and their close relations ranging from parents to teachers and romantic partners. He collects stories of the many fraught and curious encounters of both intimate entanglement and the struggle for individuality. From intonation of voice, handwriting, teachers misidentifying which twin they are dealing with, twins vying for the same romantic partner, to twins’ tendency to fall sick and recover at similar times in their lives, Galton maps, as methodically as possible, the intimacy and high jinks of twins, though always with the presumption of heredity as the determinant of similitude.

But evidence – indeed the very goal-posts of scientific measurement – in Galton’s argument slips around and unsettles his desired conclusions. Via ‘the allusions of a few correspondents’, twins are found not only to be indistinguishably alike, but able to, at times, interchange even over attributes that distinguished one from the other. A mother of twins says to Galton, ‘There seemed to be a sort of interchangeable likeness in expression that often gave to each the effect of being more like his brother than himself’ (1875, p. 569). Another correspondent explains that when he and his brother forked in different directions after high school, one into business and the other to college, their ‘respective characters were inverted … at that time we each ran into the character of the other’ (p. 569). Galton takes this to mean that each twin shares the same natural destiny, with both differences and interchangeability allowed by the fact that each is exactly the same, with identical capacities, only more or less dormant or dominant at certain times. Strikingly, this notion of interchangeability destabilises the comparative logic that drives Galton’s argument, as the twins – here a mode of adjudicating nature over nurture – are made out to be radically indistinguishable to the point of not being anchored in a single identity. For Galton, the twins are not merely confusing in their likeness, but incomparable.

Collected together, Wallace’s biography of the Gibbons sisters, Pointelli’s study of parenting guides, Latimer’s analysis of the Two Fridas and Galton’s nature/nurture polemic give us an insight into what twins do – how they provoke enduring questions and yet also defy quick answers. Twinning, then, is a refusal to – at least in any easy way – abstract figure from ground, other from self, or to pinpoint where one thing ends and another begins. What twins reveal is intimate entanglement not only at the level of being twins, but also in how we might seek to explain or represent twins, and by extension, other entangled phenomena. In a sense, part of what is so compelling about Wallace’s efforts to write the biography of the Gibbons sisters is that it identifies an entanglement that, more or less, troubles all writing. Scholars’ attempts to grapple with the material complexities of being entangled with the often invisible, backgrounded aspects of the research process are also underpinned by questions about the genesis of identity/authorship and what makes it legible. Whether writing about twins, or trying to author a singular, unique object of research, we feel the pressure to draw boundaries or make a cut where, as Latimer says, identity (of a figure, an authorial voice or of a field) may indeed resist such actions, and be ‘something almost incommensurate, and irreducible’ (2009, p. 54).

In sum, accounts of twins push us to reconsider the idea of the twin as an outlier or a riddle to be solved. In his theory of mimesis, Rene Girard (1982) suggests that twins present an obstacle to both comparison and decision-making within origin stories. He argues that in myths of cultural formation, twins often assume the role of the scapegoat because, in their sameness, they threaten the notion of an originary difference needed to establish the propriety of the social group. We think of the ‘monstrous’, he writes, ‘as beginning with the lack of differentiation’ (p. 33). As Girard argues here, twins disturb some of our most deeply held assumptions about personhood, and by extension community. It is therefore more convenient for them to be cast as a curiosity, an anomaly that in its supreme difference, reaffirms the norm. Similarly, in his cultural genealogy of twins, William Viney (2014) suggests that the routine treatment of twins as an extraordinary phenomenon, distinguished from ‘mere’ singletons, is a cultural construction aided by both popular and biomedical characterisations of human twinning as somehow rare and contrary to nature. But highlighting the ‘mysterious’ consistency of rates of twin births in the modern world, Viney (2014, p. 50) argues that there is a need to attend more closely to the ‘elastic rather than immobile relation between “us” and “them”, the one and the multiple’, in order to better appreciate how ‘the meaning of twins is not only born but also made’ (p. 48). By this logic, it seems possible to argue that the meaning of the individual (the author, the critic, the originator of thoughts and ideas) is likewise not self-evident but also made. Read as ordinary, rather than the extraordinary, twins encourage us to look at how singularity is authored and often defended, and to see what exclusions, particularly the intimate entanglements, its reproduction entails.

In the remaining sections of this article, we unpack the second strand of our overall argument. We bring the notion of twinning set out so far to think through important ethical and practical questions about how we do intellectual work, especially in the realm of theory and critique. Our discussion of methodology seeks to illuminate the intimate entanglement at play when we try to define a field, an argument, or a contribution to knowledge as unique and singular.

Methodological intimacies in sociological research

Having outlined the potential provocation of twinning, we return here to Fraser and Puwar’s discussion of ‘intimacy in research rather than [just] research on intimacy’ (2008, p. 2). Their work helps us to locate the value of bringing the notion of intimate entanglement to an analysis of how we practise theory, argumentation and critique. Fraser and Puwar point out that academic research and the power relations typically at play in the production of knowledge often exclude the sensory, emotional and embodied aspects of the research process. That is, the ‘affective properties of research labour’ (p. 4) – ‘the flesh, fabric, glamour, sounds, grease and grit of the everyday nature of research’ (p. 5) – tend to be concealed in the ‘writing up’ phase with neat methodological justifications and clearly articulated findings.

We argue that Fraser and Puwar’s observation has far-reaching implications not only for acknowledging the messy, behind-the-scenes processes that enable us to ‘produce’ knowledge, but also how researchers come to frame the ‘originality’ of their research contributions. What are the methodological intimacies that surface in the alleged singularity of an argument or approach? We suggest that attending to intimacy in research demands recognising the complexity of an entangled model of authorship, one that reworks entrenched dualisms such as rational/emotional, scientific/mythical, subjective/objective, and by extension, the presumed separation between individual and collective knowledge and what appears to be original and its derivative. If there is something to be said for being open to the less conspicuous aspects of the research process – be they indistinct or inconclusive findings, or researchers’ peripheral sense of their own blind-spots and oversights – these typically hidden elements of research are also, we contend, the moments when singularity is already porous, when the perceived discreteness of an identity, the identity of an argument, for instance, is in fact informed by an ecology of influence. As Strathern and Latimer put it in their ‘In Conversation’ piece in this monograph, ‘despite the endless ways in which we are positioned as individuals our creation(s) is/are in fact the effect of relations and the parts of others that make us up, including the debt we owe for what forms us’.

Whether we endorse it or not, competition and comparison have become key features of academic work in the 21st century. As two early career researchers, this atmosphere has fundamentally shaped our intellectual apprenticeship. Public commentary often focuses on the impact of austerity policies on the precarity of jobs and the scarcity of funding, but these conditions also have profound impacts on the shaping of knowledge and everyday practices of thinking and writing. Critical work becomes more risky. Self-branding hoards time away from reading and reflection. Similarly, competitive institutional settings exacerbate what is arguably already an entrenched imperative to segregate research deemed novel from that deemed shopworn, suggesting that part of what is expected to prove conceptual innovation or make ‘progress’ is for each new project or school of thought to carefully differentiate itself from competing areas of study. According to this model of research, the ideas in scholarship that are worth pursuing rest on the ability to prove novelty and independence. This is nowhere more apparent than in doctoral training programmes, where students face the formidable pressure to demonstrate their contribution to knowledge through the all too familiar requirement to ‘find the gap’. ¹ In his study of originality in poetry, Harold Bloom describes this endless quest to differentiate as ‘the anxiety of influence’ (1973). Each poet hopes to debut a writing style never seen before, yet is haunted by an acute awareness that their poetic ancestors and peers are present in the very metre of their poems. The paradox Bloom identifies is that singularity is only ever recognisable within the frame of collective knowledge that gives ‘it’ its apparent originality (see also Strathern and Latimer’s ‘Conversation’ for a similar argument).

Bloom takes us back to the conundrum highlighted by Latimer on Kahlo, namely, that the figure cannot be so easily differentiated from the ground, from the very ecology that gives it form. Similarly, by bringing Fraser and Puwar’s concerns about ‘intimacy in research’ into a discussion of how we routinely make claims to originality in the context of the hyper-competitive academy, we offer the challenge of thinking with the notion of twinning, that is, by insisting on how our intellectual practices are intimately entangled in the structural and affective realities of their environments. This consideration is crucial because it helps us to attune to and think very carefully about how – as part of the essential messiness of research – we might sometimes unwittingly frame intellectual innovation and originality in ways that cut away vital ancestors, actors and co-creators of what, as the ‘finished’ product, appears to be singularly authored.

As an example, we could think through the value of twinning via a brief analysis of the turn to affect (an important context for this collection), and more specifically debates about what should be included in and excluded from affect studies in order to produce the unique identity of the field. The sense of entanglement in the methodological intimacies we discuss here could be said of all ‘turns’, or attempts to break with and move beyond the perceived shortcomings of previous theoretical traditions. The focus on affect interests us because affect theory seeks to address questions of porosity and transmission, questions that include reckoning with its own sense of how affect as an object of study is (or is not) entangled with more conventional understandings of body, individual and subject. Consider the analogy of an M. C. Escher etching here: it is a field about entanglement that is also trying to grapple with its own entanglement in other fields. Drawing from varying theorists, including Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Silvan Tomkins and Gabriel Tarde, affect scholars aim to track how particular atmospheres or intense currents of feeling move between and exert influence on bodies, changing their rhythms and disposition. Since taking off in the 1990s, the field has been animated by debates about the specific value and meaning of the term ‘affect’ (Papoulias & Callard, 2010; Hemmings, 2005; Leys, 2011; Massumi, 2002).

It is because of these very tensions that the turn to affect provides a useful case with which to think about methodological intimacies, or how we manage entanglement and innovation in research. Margaret Wetherell argues that the history of work on affect ‘reflect[s] an understandable desire for something different in social research – a desire to recognize the way the world moves us’ (Wetherell & Beer, 2014). In response to this helpful description we can contemplate, in the spirit of Fraser and Puwar’s writings on intimacy in research, what is at stake in ‘the desire for something different’. What ambiguities might be ironed out in delineating the very concept of affect as specifically posthuman? Our intention is not to suggest the shift to thinking about affect as an error, or as bad faith; far from it. Rather, we wish to highlight just how complex a process it is to map out a new field while at the same time acknowledging its entanglement with the fields it – perhaps inevitably in the current model of research and scholarship – defines itself against. This is a challenge we continually face in our own theoretical writings on affect and posthumanism.

To give a specific example, it is sometimes suggested, either explicitly or implicitly, that to engage with the notions of fluidity, materiality and ontology we must not veer too closely to structuralism, constructivism, or epistemology (Bennett, 2009; Massumi, 2002; Mol, 2002). In Vibrant Matter, philosopher Jane Bennett argues that she, after Bruno Latour, ‘strategically elides what is commonly taken as distinctive or even unique about humans’ (2009, p. ix). Bennett adds that ‘to present human and nonhuman actants on a less vertical plane than is common is to bracket the question of the human and the rich and diverse literature on subjectivity and its genesis’ (p. ix). Bennett also resists methods of ‘demystification’ on the basis that ‘demystification tends to screen from view the vitality of matter and to reduce political agency to human agency’ (p. xv). In this example, competing methods of thought are set aside, despite acknowledgement of their ongoing richness, in order to develop new approaches. Here, we can arguably see an anxiety of influence, the tangle of methodological intimacy, where the risk of not being sufficiently differentiated may result in the ‘bracketing’ of certain entanglements. In the very differentiations with which Bennett outlines her argument we see the ontological trouble of the twins – who at once display and confound separation.

There has also been a self-critical push within the development of affect theory to keep conceptual boundaries open, and not to reproduce a break between body and society, or perception and cognition. This, through the lens of twinning, is the wrestling of figure and ground. For Wetherell, ‘versions of “affect theory” that posit affect as a pre-personal extra-discursive force hitting and shaping bodies prior to sense making are simply unsustainable” ’ as there cannot be a ‘generic category of autonomous affect’ that imposes itself on predefined individuals, bodies and relations (Wetherell & Beer, 2014). On this, Lisa Blackman also points out that the most popular conception of affect, one that gives primacy to the physiological, pre-cognitive workings of affect, has deferred important questions of psyche and the immaterial in its intended departure from the human. ‘The turn to affect’, Blackman argues, ‘is considered a turn away from the problematic of subjectivity’ (2010 p. 186). Blackman’s work, a strong foundation for our own here, calls for scholars to take a less circumscribed approach to affect and processes of transmission (see also Brennan, 2004). Instead, she contends, analyses of affect could focus on subjectivity as a site to interrogate ‘the problem of affective transfer’ and ‘the borders and boundaries between the human and the non-human, the material and the ephemeral, the self and the not-self, and the living and the dead’ (2010, p. 167). It is worth noting that both Wetherell and Blackman work within the field of affect but are also attentive to debates about what should be included in the figure of the field, or cast to its ground.

As stated, we could apply our reading to any number of theoretical interventions. But this brief analysis of debates within the turn to affect helps us to demonstrate how the ‘intimacies in research’ that Fraser and Puwar locate within empirical contexts – where traditions compel us to ‘tidy-up’ our findings and make out arguments neat – also operate within theory and critique. Importantly, viewed through the prism of twinning, we want to suggest that we can approach such debates with a slightly different orientation and potentially reframe the methodological pursuit of innovation to be something more entangled and unsure. Holding figure and ground in tension, we can reflect on the very structures of competition that drive turns and consider how they make certain methodological contradictions – such as nominating exclusions in pursuit of inclusion – difficult to avoid. This mode of thinking is vital in a field where one of its primary aims is to promote a more expansive sense of ecological inclusiveness and awareness of the ephemeral and contingent aspects of material life.

Twinning as a mode of authorship

By way of concluding, the sense of the always-already entangled we are getting at inheres not only in the mythical narratives and empirical studies of twins themselves but also in methodological approaches, such as those we have discussed in the current turn to affect. We have demonstrated that while empirical research and mythologies call upon twins as a means to measure difference, pinpoint origin, and chart both progress and decline, twins very often resist such determinations and refuse to be either severed or subsumed into singular forms. Here, we want to open up the broader ethical implications of our argument for issues around authorship and, in doing so, offer a space for readers to contemplate how the notion of ‘twinning’ might reframe available models of argumentation. We offer these as probes rather than straightforward answers for thinking and, indeed, experimenting with the theme of intimate entanglement.

What is significant about the logic of doubleness (as opposed to duplication) in twins is that it challenges our most foundational assumptions about how the work of positioning might be set within an entangled conception of authorship. As a community of scholars we may seek to forge arguments that attest to the inextricability of the sociological, ontological and ecological nature of life and matter, and yet we still often assume – like Modern thinkers – that intellectual progress is premised on leaving behind what has gone before in favour of a presumably better alternative. As Deborah Tannen (2002, p. 1651) puts it, academic discourse has a long history of encouraging a sort of ‘ritualized adversativeness’ in which intellectual exchange is conceived as a battlefield and where the annihilation of one perspective over another authorises what counts as important or worthwhile. Here, we might also recall Bruno Latour’s (2004) concern with critique as something that has ‘run out of steam’ because it can be too easily wielded as a tool to dismiss, upstage or gain mastery over another scholar or way of thinking.

To consider the figure of twinning as an ethical provocation, then, is to begin to rethink the competitive structure of academic contribution, such as where we locate our points of departure, or how we map the linearity, circulation and value of ideas. If what appears to be singular is always already ‘twinned’, if mimesis and contagion are intrinsic rather than derivative features of thought, how do we acknowledge and articulate this profound sense of entanglement without denying that being entangled is in fact also the basis for things like ‘originality’ and ‘innovation’? Strathern’s notion of figure and ground is helpful in its recognition that every act of interpretation ‘implies taking something – an event or location or artefact or whatever – and specifying its singular qualities’ (2002, p. 89). This perceived singularity may initially appear as a cogent point of reference for comparison or divergence from other views, but, as Strathern explains, ‘the entity in question is … inevitably summoning a context of a kind, a whole field of possible (further) particulars and understandings’ (p. 89). From this perspective, our remarks on the difficult logic of competition and entanglement are not intended as solutions to what are often academic and institutional complexities in the production of knowledge and the discursive contexts (and constraints) within which scholars frame the distinctiveness of their positions. However, we believe it is in mulling over the complexity of how any one position/perspective is enabled by, and implicated in, a field of possible interpretations – including apparently opposing ones – that we may begin to shift the temperament of our collective efforts to think ecologically: which is to say, to resist any easy attempts at presenting corrective, progress-driven arguments. This is for us the most challenging yet also profound interpretation of what an intimate, entangled, and inclusive sociology entails.

These considerations are especially crucial in forging accounts of the ontological and the material, if the promise is to urge a more encompassing way of thinking about and being intimately entangled with the world and the complex relations that shape it. Indeed, to unsettle the logic of competition and singularity that underlies theoretical innovation, we may need to re-examine altogether the aptness of the metaphor of the ‘turn’ by recognising the entanglement of forms, ideas and traditions. It goes without saying that the point we are making is not to reject new enquiries or cutting-edge theories that may shift foundational ways of looking at an issue, but to recognise how the notion of the turn is being used to frame a problem and consequently decide what gets counted or excluded as no longer relevant. If ‘turning’ is more like ‘twinning’ in the sense that we are proposing, what we have is not so much a mechanism for looking away and moving on, but a reminder of the ‘already-there’ of entanglement and thus a call to attend differently and carefully to forms of intellectual engagement that extend the reach of existing questions. This mode of engagement has a different flavour to the anxiety of producing knowledge or concepts ‘never seen before’. To acknowledge the gravity and momentum of methodological intimacies is to inhabit the generative role of twinning as the foundation of authorship – an authorship that is always dispersed, collective, and defined by relations of productive tension.