Knowing would become possible through techniques of deliberate imprecision

Extracts from the book called After Method: Mess in Social Science Research

• This book is about what happens social science tries to describe things that are complex, diffuse and messy. .. it tends to make a mess of it.. This is because simple clear descriptions don't work if what if what they are describing is not itself very coherent. the very attempt to be clear simply increases the mess. The aim is to remake social science in ways better equipped to deal with mess, confusion and relative disorder.
• Parts of the world are caught in our ethnographies, our histories and our statistics. But other parts are not, or if they are then this is because they have been distorted into clarity.
• If much of the world is vague, diffuse or unspecific, slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elusive or indistinct, changes like a kaleidoscope, or doesn’t really have much of a pattern at all… How might we catch some of the realities we are currently missing? Can we know them? Should we know them? Is "knowing" the metaphor that we need? And if it isn't, then how might we relate to them? 
• No single response to these questions. The book is intended as an opening rather than a closing. In any case, if much of reality is ephemeral and elusive, then we cannot expect single answers. If the world is complex and messy, then at least some of the time we're going to have to give up on simplicities.
• If we want to think about the messes of the reality at all then we are going to have to teach ourselves to think, to practise, to relate and to know in new ways. We will need to teach our selves to know some of the realities of the world using methods unusual to or unknown in social science.
• Perhaps we will need to know them through hungers, tastes, discomforts, or pains of our bodies. These would be forms of knowing as embodiment.
• Perhaps we will need to know them through 'private emotions' that open us to worlds of sensibilities, passions, fears and betrayals. These would be forms of knowing as emotionality or apprehension.
• Perhaps we will need to rethink our ideas of clarity and rigour, and find ways of knowing the indistinct and slippery without trying to grasp and hold them tight. Here knowing would become possible through techniques of deliberate imprecision.
• Perhaps we will need to rethink how far whatever it is that we know travels and whether it still makes sense in other locations, and if so how.This would be knowing as situated inquiry.
• We will need to think hard about our relations with whatever it is we know, and ask how far the process of knowing it brings it into being. 
• and we should certainly be asking ourselves whether 'knowing' is the metaphor we need.
• a way of thinking about method that is broader, looser, more generous and in certain respects quite different to that of many of the conventional understandings.
• While standard methods are often extremely good at what they do, they are badly adapted to the study of the ephemeral. the indefinite and irregular. The problem is not so much the standard research methods themselves, but the normativities that are attached to them in discourses about method. We are being told how we must see and what we must do and when we investigate.
• It is that methods, their rules, and even more methods' practices, not only describe but also help to produce the reality that they understand.
• Particular sets of rules and procedures may be questioned and debated, but the overall need for proper rules and procedures is not. It is taken for granted that these are necessary. The kinds of facts we need to gather and the appropriate techniques for gathering and theorising data. 
• The task is to imagine methods when they no longer seek the definite, the repeatable, the more or less stable.
• Events and processes are not simply complex in the sense that they are technically difficult to grasp (though it is certainly often the case). Rather they are also complex because they necessarily exceed our capacity to know them.

• The need, then, is for heterogeneity and variation. "~playing with the capacity to think six impossible things before breakfast." 
• It is about creating metaphors and images for what is impossible or barely possible, unthinkable or almost unthinkable. 
• Slippery, indistinct, elusive, complex, diffuse, messy, textured, vague, unspecific, confused, disordered, emotional, painful, pleasurable, hopeful, horrific, lost, redeemed, visionary, angelic, demonic, mundane, intuitive, sliding and unpredictable. Each of these metaphors is a way of trying to open space for the indefinite. Each is a way of apprehending or appreciating displacement. Each is a possible image of the world, of our experience of the world and indeed of ourselves. But so too is their combination
• The world as a generative flux that produces realities.

• To remake methods that imagine and participate in politics and other forms of the "good" in novel and creative ways; and that start to do this by escaping the postulate of singularity and responding creatively to a world that is taken to be composed of an excess of generative forces and relations.
• to do this, we will need to unmake many of our methodological habits! including
• the desire for certainty;
• the expectation that we can usually arrive at more or less stable conclusions about the way things really are;
• the belief that as researchers we have special insights that allow us to see further that others into certain parts of social reality; 
• the expectations of generality that are wrapped up in what is often called 'universalism'
• but first of all we need to unmake our desire and expectation for security.

• Method hopes to act as a set of short-circuits that link us in the best possible way with reality, and allow us to return more or less quickly from that reality to our place of study with findings that are reasonably secure. But this, most of all, is what we need to unlearn. Method, I am proposing, will often be slow and uncertain. A risky and troubling process, it will take time and effort to make realities and hold them steady for a moment against a background of flux and indeterminacy. 
• it takes longer to do things
• it takes longer to understand, to make sense of things.
• it, stop, erodes the idea that by taking in the distance at a glance we can get an overview of a single reality. So the stop has costs. We will learn less about certain kinds of things. But we will learn a lot more about a far wider range of realities. And we will participate in the making of those realities.

• Method is not a more or less successful set of procedures for reporting on a given reality. Rather it is performative. It helps to produce realities. Enactments and the realities that they produce do not automatically stay in place. Instead they are made and remade. Thus they can, at least in principle, be remade in other ways.
• One way or another, it makes things more or less different. The issue becomes how to make things different, and what to make!
• What would it be to practise methods that were slow, uncertain, that stuttered to the stop.. attention to process? What would it be to practise quiet method? Method with fewer guarantees? Method less caught up in a logic of means and ends? Method that was more generous?
• So what are the kinds of issues we might debate?
• Process
• Symmetry
• Multiplicity
• Reflexivity
• Goods
• Imaginaries
• Materialities
• Indefiniteness
• Re-enchantment

• What realities are being made manifest or Othered in this or that mode of inquiry? Why do we make realities in this way or that?
• After the subdivision of the universal we need quite other metaphors for imagining our worlds and our responsibilities to those worlds. Localities. Specificities. Enactments. Multiplicities. Fractionalities. Goods. Resonances. Gatherings. Forms of craftings. Processes of weaving. Spirals. Vortices. Indefiniteness. Condensates. Dances. Imaginaries. Passions. Interferences. That is metaphors for quiet and more generous versions of method.