Stuck with/in a ‘turn’: Can we metaphorize better in Science and Technology Studies?

Invitation

This essay is about the tensions of ‘turns’, both in Science and Technology Studies (STS) in general and in the debates on the ‘ontological turn’ in the June 2013 special issue of this journal in particular. It seeks accountability from and for a metaphor all too casually raised whenever some fresh, powerful themes and thinking stir STS up. Turn-talking/making, I wish to show, is a precarious business. The immanent tensions ‘turn’ generates are intimated in Lynch’s (2013) observation that STS history is often recounted as made up of a series of ‘turns’, some of which ‘met with skepticism as well as enthusiasm […] and given their frequency, one may wonder if “spin” might not be a better way to describe these revolutions’ (p. 445). Distilling the tensions between proclaiming the newest, ‘ontological’ turn and querying this very turn, the question ‘Has STS been turned?’ was asked in June 2008 when Woolgar, Cheniti, Lezaun, Neyland, Sugden and Toennesen convened a workshop ‘A Turn to Ontology in STS?’ at Oxford, hatched the entity in/under question, and playfully wondered: ‘Can you imagine how awful it would be, say two years after this meeting, still to be stuck in the turn to ontology?’ (p. 2). A special issue five years on, and we were stuck with it – stuck with/in a ‘turn’. The present contribution to the debate attempts a move to dodge the tensions. To provoke and mindfully turn ontological enquiry back on itself, I ask: what reality of STS is brought about by common and ontology-related turn-talking/making and with what implications and consequences for the value of what we do? Can we do better?

There are two more sections or acts, and a conclusion, a coda. The first act puts the metaphor of ‘turn’ under scrutiny for its politics – affordances and inadequacies – to be appreciated. The second act ventures into the debates on the ‘ontological turn’, interrogating the claims/counterclaims concerning its reality and value. The conclusion dares a condition of a possible emancipation from stuck-ness.

Act I: ‘The turn multiple’ and its worlds

This act calls on a simple device, the Oxford English Dictionary, to enact its particular making out of what is in ‘turn’. It hopes to be an antidote to the taken-for-grantedness of the trope. Spelling out four (considered most relevant) practical usages of the term as a noun suffices to establish – drawing on and paraphrasing Mol (2002) – ‘the turn multiple’ and, by extension, demonstrate how it makes worlds, for ‘nothing comes without its world’ (Haraway, 1997: 137) indeed.

In a first version, ‘turn’ is rotation, the act of moving something in a circular direction, around an axis, point or centre, as in ‘a turn of the wheel’ or ‘the turn of the Earth on its axis’. Taking rotation to STS, we must believe in a certain creature: a homogeneous entity with a single centre/focal point/axis around which all activity swirls. This is one way that STS becomes an ‘it’, ‘a unified, internally coherent entity and actor – as though STS is and STS acts as a coherent subject’ (Lynch, 2013: 445, emphasis in original). We may wonder how new thinking could appear in such a uniform, spinning world: it would disconcert its integrity and the world – or its fiction – would have to go. Until pure fiction holds, a new ‘turn’ demands an external mover and change that is necessarily total, asynchronous (many possible centres but only one at a time) and discontinuous (marking genuine breaks). The rotational variant of ‘turn’ thus denies, excludes and forbids STS as, say, a heterogeneous and uncoordinated network – a world without a single centre around which to organize/gyrate.

In a second version, ‘turn’ is change of direction or course when moving, the act or junction of turning another way, veering from one’s hitherto course. An unmistakably different movement, this ‘turn’ can co-exist with the rotational kind as separate and distinct. Yet it also implies a unique, coherent entity – a vehicle – undertaking a prime, singular shift while travelling a path or trajectory. For STS to make this change of direction, ‘it’ must embark on a mono-chronological trip and voyage. ‘It’ is visiting new realms, but is this a progression forward? Or perhaps a wandering journey of curiosity, temporary enchantments, experimentation and exploration, or revisiting? However sharp the turns or serpentine the trajectory, and whoever is driving, change results in a history or a continuity: never a complete break with one’s past trail, but an inheritance, regardless of the abandoning or leaving behind that moving on seems to entail. This precludes a conceivable STS as a dispersed entity, a web of actors (including bastard children) and activities, of numerous intersecting trajectories, of multiple incremental movements, of flows, of STS as a fluid. In brief, this field-born variant of ‘turn’ reduces STS to an ‘it’ to chronicle, to draw a trajectory of, to map out neatly (as a field indeed), to even steer, which is an endeavour – fancy that! – to ‘solidify a fire’ (Mol, 2010: 256).

In a third version, ‘turn’ is change in general, the act(ion) of turning or changing. ‘Turn’ now announces an alteration/modification/new development in a situation, a change of affairs/conditions/circumstances that need not be too far a cry from a major shift, a revolution: it is indeed more common for events to ‘take a dramatic turn’ or ‘a turn for the better or worse’. We ignore the normative implications and consequences of this most explicitly political meaning of doing things differently in STS at our peril. Change here is the categorical disruption of what is happening to rectify a crisis or stalemate in need of a radical, revisionist solution. A ‘turn’ is a project of deliberate introduction of a new regime, new rules, a new vocabulary, a new order, which are – it is argued – better than the past. We may easily find ourselves in a battlefield STS, a world of perversity of turn-talking/making: ‘turning’ requires a revolutionary front, an avant-garde and the work of making ‘others’, the old, the retrograde, the passé, without forgetting an entrepreneurial usher to herald the reinvention. There is a clear desire to do away with the status quo in order to innovate, to renew, to live on, which might be very well and for the better could such an ethics of progress square with its shadow, the (inexhaustible) dark side of ‘partial affiliations, fractious tendencies, and professional rivalries’ (Lynch, 2013: 445), of fashion and competition to stay on top of events. To be succinct, the transformationist variant of ‘turn’ engenders another STS to be appropriated, a singularized ‘it’ barring plurality and multiplicity in favour of imposing one’s own truth, to be made into a hegemonic dogma or potentially worse, an imperialistic pretension to what Pickering (1995) has called a ‘theory of everything’. It should disqualify a view of STS such as that espoused by Woolgar (2014) and Lezaun (2014): a fairly tight bundle of analytical sensibilities, rather than a prior and unqualified theory of the world, that can get improved by being intensified, extended and honed over time through empirical work, rather than turned.

In a fourth version, ‘turn’ is an occasion, the time at which something happens. It is the opportunity or obligation to do something in a succession, at a particular time/order, when ‘it is one’s turn’ as in ‘one’s turn to speak’. We cannot know how reformist the proposed change is, but only conjecture that as each actor takes the stage something new, re-energizing, kicks in to inspire us. There need not be an agonistic dynamic, but an institution to guarantee the turn-taking. Translated to STS, this variant affords a heterogeneous, pluralistic commons – an ‘us’ – that gets more ‘turned’ in those rows and by those voices that command the greatest number of associates, a ‘turning’ which is always partial, that is, pertaining to a party. So, it makes us embrace a tempting candidate – a democratic parliamentary world of free association and partial connections, romantic and popular as it shines – but one may like a bag of salt.

In expounding the implications and ramifications of four substantially distinct versions of the ‘turn’ metaphor, I hope to contribute a more fine-grained understanding of the trope and its pricey politics in terms of worlds enacted for us to inhabit. I have argued that turn-talking/making in the first three variants produces or reifies a unified, directed, dichotomized or otherwise oversimplified ‘it’ – STS. Crucially, the first three turn-species all accommodate a ‘turn to’ form, where ‘to’ conveys a definite directedness of movement or change. The fourth version, however, is less convertible to the inexorable directedness constituted through ‘turn to’ and thus affords freer motion, a broader space for the surprising, the awkward, the humble to move us. The ‘empirical’ instantiation of these inadequacies as well as affordances of ‘turn’ in the debates on the ‘ontological turn’ that enact – play on and out – the trope in all four versions is the matter of the second act.

Act II: The ‘ontological turn’ unmade

The 2008 Oxford workshop had been motivated by the observation of ‘a discernible increase in recent years of the use of the term “ontology” in STS literatures’ and the question ‘Can this be construed as a turn to ontology and what does this mean?’ (Woolgar et al., 2008: 1). ‘Ontology’ had increased in circulation, or better, rotation: it might have become a central term, a focal point, a new axis for research, invoking the first, potentially sweeping version of ‘turn’. In a realist ‘go out and hunt the turn down’ exercise, Van Heur et al. (2013) carry out a combination of a quantitative bibliometric analysis and a qualitative reading of the literatures published between 1989 and 2008 to conclude that ‘STS itself has not been turned’ (p. 355). The ‘almost eightfold increase in the use of the term “ontology” (p. 356), they posit, ‘cannot be considered as a single turn but rather as many incremental movements’ (p. 342) which ‘do not point to a shared STS-wide understanding of ontology’ (p. 341), and so ‘the field is fragmented’ (p. 347). We can apprehend the tension in the first version of ‘turn’ – the prescribed but ultimately unreal universal rotation around ‘ontology’ – a tension that betrays the turn.

The ‘ontological turn’ is cited by its commonly recognized drivers, Annemarie Mol and John Law, and recited by critics as ‘an effort to circumvent epistemology and its attendant language of representation in favour of an approach that addresses itself more directly to the composition of the world’ (Woolgar and Lezaun, 2013: 322). That this mobilizes, and rather selectively so, the second – change of course/direction when moving – version of ‘turn’ is articulated in Woolgar and Lezaun’s (2013)’s critique ‘this presumed transition, from “mere” matters of epistemology (back) to a consideration of ontological world-making’ is difficult to sustain in the history of STS where ‘the distinction between epistemology and ontology is rarely clear-cut’ (p. 336). This very aptly pinpoints and exploits another detaining tension in the second version of ‘turn’ where change necessarily involves continuity, a seeming contradiction that renders the trope vulnerable and grants no release.

Where the ‘ontological turn’ most evinces the third version of ‘turn’ – transformation of the status quo – is arguably in its vocabulary. Mol (1999) pronounces early on a fundamental, qualitative distinction differentiating ontic terms from constructionist ones:

Talking about reality as multiple depends on another set of metaphors. Not those of perspective and construction, but rather those of intervention and performance. These suggest a reality that is done and enacted rather than observed. (p. 77, emphasis in original)

Law (2009) rubs it in further:

Something seismic is happening here. A vital metaphorical and explanatory shift is taking place. We are no longer dealing with construction, social or otherwise […] Rather we are dealing with enactment or performance. […] The shift is easily misunderstood, but it is crucial. The metaphor of construction – and social construction – will no longer serve. (p. 151, emphasis in original)

But Woolgar and Lezaun (2013) challenge back, arguing that ‘“enacting” connotes the most provocative’ end of ‘a continuum from weak to strong scepticism’ about ‘the notion that entities pre-exist our apprehension of them’ (p. 324). There is no discontinuous change, no radical shift, no revolutionary turn, as ‘enactment’ does not break from, but rather enters, extends, elevates and culminates the list ‘social shaping, aggregating, affording, providing for, constructing, apprehending, performing, accomplishing, bringing into being, constituting and enacting’ (p. 324). ‘Enactment’, in other words, does not mark a qualitative difference, but is assimilated, made homogeneous with, and different only in degree, – ‘for only quantity can take into account both homogeneity and variation’ (Canguilhem, 1989: 57) – from the ‘cluster of related terms’ (Woolgar and Lezaun, 2013: 324). These terms are ‘related’ because they are commensurable when graded on a continuum of measurable provocation. To further make their case for continuity, Woolgar and Lezaun attest that the ‘ontological turn’ ‘resonates with powerful intellectual traditions in STS’ and early ethnomethodology:

the turn to ontology offers opportunities for a more insistent, thorough-going and provocative critical analysis of world-making and that it demands a full reckoning with the many other turns and inflections that have characterized the evolution of STS in the past decades. (p. 327)

But Woolgar and Lezaun effectively tame the ‘ontological turn’ in the third sense – its enactment concept made into a measure, lined up, domesticated in some list – by reverting it back to the second, a displacement encoded in the following verdict: ‘the turn to ontology in STS can be better understood as another attempt to apply its longstanding core slogan – “it could be otherwise” – this time to the realm of the ontological’ (p. 322). How could the ‘ontological turn’, thus tamed through a disconcerting self-seeking move, offer ‘opportunities for a more insistent, thorough-going and provocative critical analysis’? Or could it do so precisely because it can be deflated and its ‘realm’ recruited, if not annexed, to advance analytical orthodoxy? Are Woolgar and Lezaun inflating the compelling ‘it could be otherwise’ into a devouring project of hegemony? ‘It could be otherwise’, for all its might, does not guarantee the simultaneous ongoing multiplicity of objects and worlds as ‘ontologies’ (Zuiderent-Jerak, 2015) do. It is otherwise, and ontological multiplicity is revealed in/through a praxeography: by ethnographically attending to and unravelling sociomaterial practices of enactment at a variety of sites, with each site ‘manipulating’ and bringing about its own version of an object (Mol, 2002). For their part, Woolgar and Lezaun (2013) perform a cerebral trip to the dominion of tabloids and trash, attending to and unravelling the discursive organization of a text, said to illustrate ‘our under-the-skin approach to ontological analysis’ (p. 327). Of the mundane things and situations possible, they enact – exercising the non-innocent ‘capacity for ontological enactment’ of the ‘textual’ (p. 333), here as an analytical description – the being-one-thing of ‘the wrong bin bag’ in a unique location: a singular cultural representation. Has the bin bag – in one neat move deploying the ordinary species of material for faithfully constructivist analysis – been purified of multiplicity? It could be otherwise, but is not otherwise in ‘wrong rubbish’ ontology. In selecting and championing – in literally singling out – the ‘reality’ accomplished in one newspaper article, for such are its powers of ‘mundane governance’ through representation, are Woolgar and Lezaun consigning us to living with/in the conditions of possibility as defined by tabloids? Where ‘comes the killer move’ (p. 332)? Ironies. While ‘enactment’ is chained up in a list, multiplicity is betrayed by locking it in a single trash sack. And we in STS? Our ‘turn’ is stuck with/in a barren perspective (with/in a wasteland?).

In her expressly empirical contribution, Mol (2013) distances herself from argumentative contentions that cast ontology-minded enquiry in its seismic overtones and from defences against those challenging it altogether. Perhaps this attitude is construable as a motion to hear ‘turn’ in its fourth version, to a surprising end. Mol employs ‘ontologies’ only to reclaim the term from ‘new materialists’, asking, ‘Is it still possible to use the term “ontology” in this wilfully counterintuitive, playfully anti-philosophical way? I am so not sure’ (p. 380). Introducing a new term, ‘ontonorms’, Mol refuses to define it. She warns she is ‘not trying to frame a “theory of ontonorms” here’ but to use the term as ‘a productive methodological tool’ (p. 390). From the stage of the article, she speaks,

If it comes in handy, by all means experiment with the term ontonorms in your own work. If you do, the methodological possibilities of this terminological tool will be gradually fleshed out. What does the term ontonorms lead you to see in the cases that you study? Where do you hit upon its limits? How might we adapt and play with it? If we sooner or later end up discarding the term ontonorms again because it stops being a strange, terse, productive oxymoron, that is fine by me. But this is my request. Please do not define this term. Abstain from all attempts to make it definite. Let’s not make a turn to ontonorms, but rather keep them fluid, ambivalent, dancing and gerrymandering. (Mol, 2013)

So here we are, ‘the ontological turn’ unmade in a most unexpected move. We get to an adequately awkward, self-deprecating treason that is here the only way not to betray. Better unmade than tamed. Unmade is not undone, but tamed is always betrayed. Such is the moral of tracing three betrayals and a redemption, each indebted to the respective ambitions of a ‘turns’ quartet: a navel of the STS universe, a move away from the past, a transformation of the status quo, an opportunity for creativity. I have shown, however cursorily, how debates on the ‘ontological turn’ operate on or with each of the four versions of the metaphor, thereby doing the ‘ontological turn’. Claims positing the reality and value of the professed ‘turn’ fall prey to counterclaims that contest its reality and value by calling into service the inadequacies of the trope in its first three enactments. The fourth enactment, though, opens room to escape the contest.

But how is it possible to ascertain the significance of ontological studies against all the dismantling, against the very metaphor of ‘turn’ that so distracts from and cripples the insights ontologies-minded analyses bring to STS? Of course, STS has not been turned in any full-blown version of any of the four versions of ‘turn’. Exercises to establish the actuality of the ‘ontological turn’ have either debunked or qualified its existence, hardly ever seeming to occasion a recognition of their own performativity. While debunking trades in the kind of ‘corrosive scepticism’ that ‘cannot be midwife to new stories’ (Haraway, 1991: 78), qualifying the extent of the ‘turn’ could be all very fine if it were careful and caring enough not to make qualification into taming. From stuck to tamed is not a long step at all! Stuck/tamed. Stucktamed, in the narrow spaces of impossible turning, of stifled motion. This is a precarious situation to be caught in and nothing less than the out-turn of turn-talking/making.

Coda

Codas allow for the bending of the rules of conclusions, so I shall bring out a fifth version of ‘turn’ in a short finale that does not summarize, establish truths without options or seek closure of the conversation, but rather does quite the contrary, and hence calling it a coda, a tail. The conversation must not be curtailed. In every likelihood, the turn-talking/making will continue as if it were the mode to evolve in STS, the mould in which to cast innovation. The fifth version – and I am afraid it makes things only worse – is that of an illness. It is an old-fashioned, informal signification of a slight illness, a strange feeling or a nervous shock: one can ‘have funny turns’ or be ‘given quite a turn’. That is about as far as I would like to go into this usage and not make unfunny jokes about getting dizzy and sick from so much ‘turning’. ‘Turns’ make us stuck, and then worse, stucktamed, in danger of betrayal. It should be plain by now that it is precarious to metaphorize ‘turns’ in STS. We depend on our metaphors (Mol, 1999). They enable and in the same move disable us, part of their art as devices and multiples and for which we use them in our world of studies. Why are we so precariously squandering this art with the uninhabitable worlds of ‘turns’? Would we rather live in Science and Technology Turns, to take the rigid moulding of turn-talking/making to an extreme? Or can we stay with Studies but metaphorize better? Not that better means – as if it were possible – to eradicate betrayal: metaphors are impure. To recognize and respect this, however, is a condition for a possible emancipation from stuck-ness.