A Dutch ethnographer and philosopher, Annemarie Mol has been at the forefront of the social studies of science, technology, and medicine over the past two decades. Most well known for her work on the enactment of materially different realities through scientific and corporeal practices in the realm of embodiment, Mol’s intellectual project is driven by an inter- est in how to investigate, and how best to convey, the multiplicity and situatedness of bodies. Her contributions—richly textured accounts of events that range from clinical encounters between doctors and patients, to the everyday experience of eating an apple—are at once theoretical, methodological, and empirical.
In The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, Mol (2002) draws upon ethnographic work conducted in an atherosclerosis clinic to inves- tigate how medicine “attunes to, interacts with, and shapes its objects”
through its “various and varied practices” (p. vii). While a definition of
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atherosclerosis would usually be well-placed here, Mol’s project is to open up the question of what exactly this disease “is,” and the role of different medical practices in enacting it. That it is a disease known to inhibit blood circulation, one that predominantly affects elderly people, is only the beginning of what needs to be investigated. Over four years of field- work at a clinic observing patients and doctors and immersing herself in this institutional and intellectual domain, Mol finds that different ver- sions of atherosclerosis are materialized by different kinds of medical practice. Rather than a given, stable object to be analysed, atherosclerosis is shown to be “brought into being, sustained, or allowed to wither away in common, day-to-day, sociomaterial practices” (p. 6).
By focusing on how objects are “enacted,” Mol (2002) seeks to shift the terrain of critical studies of bodies and disease away from a perspec- tival approach, in which objects are articulated as singular, passive things about which people hold different views, and towards an approach that centres objects as they come into being—or fall apart—through prac- tices. Implicit in this manoeuvre is a critique of the limits of social con- structivism, insofar as this usually equates to an “addition to existing medical knowledge” (p. 7) by social scientists who cannot comment on, less still complicate, the objectivity of the body itself. Hence, the multi- plicity of atherosclerosis is not “just” an epistemological acknowledge- ment but an empirical observation, supporting the bolder claim that
“[n]o object, no body, no disease, is singular” (p. 6).
Importantly, Mol is interested in how “versions” of the body are coor- dinated in particular scenes or locations. By “versions” she means mani- festations of disparate kinds of bodies, at once physical and social, that emerge as “events in time” in “different circumstances” (2012, p. 513).
Her project is to understand how such versions are held together, without allowing them to “recede” behind interpretation (2002, p. 12) in ways that reinscribe perspectival approaches. She writes: “[A]s long as the prac- ticalities of enacting a disease are kept unbracketed, out in the open, the varieties of ‘atherosclerosis’ multiply” (p. 51). In her fieldwork, different versions of atherosclerosis (the anatomical version, the physiological ver- sion, the daily life version) are shown to accompany different versions of the body (a spatial body served by arteries narrowed through the accumu- lation of plaque; a processual body that is transformed by the buildup of
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plaque over time; a lived with body that experiences pain upon walking).
Such distinctions not only are interesting but hold “practical conse- quences”: regular walking can help solve a patient’s pain but it doesn’t increase the width of their veins (Mol 2018, p. 3). These different ver- sions of the body are neither entirely distinct nor reducible to one another, for even as the body is multiple, “it still hangs together” (2002, p. 55). If we take this approach, we begin to see, with Mol, that bodies are “more than one and less than many” (2002, p. 55).
This interest in coordination stems from one of Mol’s foremost influ- ences, actor-network theory (ANT). Developed through laboratory eth- nographies that sought to observe science in action (i.e., science as it is practised; see Latour and Woolgar 1979), ANT outlines a series of meth- odological premises discernable in Mol’s work, notably the importance of tracing how one’s object of inquiry is made—quite literally—through its connectivity with other “actors” (Latour 2005). Actors are understood not (necessarily) as human subjects but as things, substances, and forces that perform certain functions in holding an object (such as atherosclero- sis) together. Thus, atherosclerosis emerges through its association with actors (or “actants” when they are in the process of modifying other actors) such as stethoscopes, patients and patient disclosures, doctors and doctors prescriptions, blood vessels, clots, and tests, hospitals, treatments, and medical knowledges. And, in the pathbreaking contribution of Mol’s work, it manifests in different forms depending on its tethering to par- ticular actors. Mol’s contention is that the atherosclerosis clinic is not so much a site for contestation between competing accounts or “versions” of the disease, but instead incubates the multiplicity of these versions as they multiply in a situated clinical context. Continuity and coordination are the key interactions in her analysis, but if situated in a different clinic, scene, or context, things could be otherwise.
Mol extends the work of The Body Multiple in a provocatively titled essay, “Layers or Versions: Human Bodies and the Love of Bitterness”
(2012), by posing a question that preoccupies many a theorist of embodi- ment and technology: How can social science researchers best capture the fleshiness and physicality of the human body in their work? Traditionally, Mol notes, researchers have conceptualized the body in layers, with the singular, natural, physical entity assumed to lie underneath the learned
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and constructed social skin. Building on the critique of the “addition of the social” put forth in The Body Multiple, she writes: “In a layered reality the body is just a single thing. It may have many abilities that can each be observed from a variety of perspectives, but when it comes to it ‘the body’
is a unity, a whole” (2012, p. 11). This conceptualization, Mol argues, works in tandem with a disciplinary divide that tasks biologists with studying the body’s physicality and social scientists with studying how the body is shaped by culture, politics, the economy, and so on.
The same issue also animates Mol’s recent collaborative research on omega-3 supplementation (Abrahamsson et al. 2015), in which the enact- ment of reality through practices is again the central claim. Here, though, the objective is as much to complicate the claims of the en vogue “new”
materialisms as it is to open up the multiplicity of commodified fish oil.
The accusation levelled here at “new” materialists—and Jane Bennett’s (2010) vitalist brand of materialism in particular—is that, in taking up the lesson that matter and things be recognized as active, even vital, in social science and humanities research, they have veered too close to a detached realism in which things act autonomously. Abrahamsson et al.’s counterclaim, borne of an STS-inspired study of scientific methods addressed to omega-3’s health benefits, is that “omega-3 is not matter itself all by itself, but rather matter in context. It is engaged in many relations”
(Abrahamsson et al. 2015, p. 5, original emphasis). Thus, the authors advocate for a relational materialism, in which ontology (reality) can never be untethered from epistemology (knowledge-making and repre- sentation). The ancient philosophical debate about reality and its media- tion cannot be rehearsed here, though it is of continuing relevance to those scholars interested in the making of the athletic body and its rela- tion to technoscience. That said, the following passage on the alteration of bodies through the practice of ingestion is akin to what we have observed in the movements of whey protein, and thus warrants quotation in full:
[O]mega-3, absorbed and transformed into a part of a human body, is a very peculiar example of nonhuman agency. For, as a mode of doing, eating crucially includes transforming: food into eater and eater into a well-fed rather than an undernourished creature. But, as it is through eating and feeding that diverse beings or substances fuse, in the end you never quite
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Note that adjudicating who has done what to whom (or what) gives way to observing and carefully documenting the “transformations” that occur in situated encounters between bodies of all kinds.
By way of summary, Mol’s contention is that objects of inquiry are not only affected by perception (epistemology) but enacted through practice (ontology). That is to say, the substance of the world and its bringing- into- being through contextually contingent knowledge-making practices and technological devices are entwined. It would not be controversial to state that there exist different perspectives on bodies, diseases, and so on.
Indeed, kinesiology departments are comprised of precisely this multidis- ciplinary model, where biomechanists, sociologists, psychologists, physi- ologists, historians, and others bring their disparate disciplinary expertise to bear on a common object of study: the moving body. As Mol points out, though, such “perspectivalism” implies a stable object to which dif- ferent lenses can be applied (and, accordingly, a stable concept of objec- tivity at its centre). Mol’s contention is more radical and more consequential. To say that objects are situated is to say that they emerge differently depending on the knowledge-making apparatus to which they are tethered.