After Methods, After Subjects, After Drugs

Book review essay: After methods, after subjects,after drugs

BY CAMERON DUFF

After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, by JohnLaw (London: Routledge, 2007), 188pp, $185.04.

Doing Sensory Ethnography, by Sarah Pink (London: Sage,2009), 168pp, $121.00.

Just another Night in the Shooting Gallery? The Syringe,Space and Affect, (2010) by Nicole Vitellone, Environmentand Planning D: Society and Space, 28, 867-880.

The Science of the Syringe, (2011) by Nicole Vitellone,Feminist Theory, 12(2), 201-207.

The differentiation of subjects and objects, of the human andthe nonhuman, is perhaps the most significant and enduring ofall ontological and epistemological commitments in the socialsciences. To imagine social inquiry without reifying the sub-ject in all its diverse guises—without distinguishing subjectsfrom the variety of “things” that comprise the world of inter-action and experience—offends both the primary methodolog-ical conventions governing social science and, ostensibly, itsbroader moral and ethical purpose. Yet the writings reviewedbelow conjure a social science after, beyond, or in the absenceof the subject and its objects. Each in their own way reflectsBruno Latour’s (2003) seminal contention that “a strong dis-tinction between humans and non-humans is no longerrequired for research purposes” (p. 78) in the social sciences.

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CDP Summer 2012 article by: Duff

© 2012 by Federal Legal Publications, Inc.

This contention stands among the primary epistemologicaland ontological principles guiding the application of actor-network theory (ANT) in the contemporary social sciences(Law, 2004, pp. 12-15). In a measure of the intellectual andempirical force of ANT’s provocations, the commitment to a“symmetrical” method that refuses to privilege the “knowingsubject” at the expense of the objects of this knowing isobservable in much recent innovation in the social sciences.This includes feminist studies of science, technology and soci-ety (Bacchi, 2009; Sismondo, 2010); the turn to nonrepresen-tational accounts of everyday life (Thrift, 2007); analysis ofinformation and communication technologies (Adams, 2009);and the study of health and illness (Mol, 2002; Gomart, 2002).Building on these innovations, the present review addressessome of the major implications of ANT’s eschewal of thehuman/nonhuman dyad for the study of alcohol and otherdrugs (AOD). I wonder in particular what substantive differ-ence this eschewal augurs for the analysis of drug use, and thedistinctive contours of such a study.

I begin by assessing the implications of ANT’s refusal to reifythe subject and its objects for the selection of methods in AODresearch, drawing on John Law’s treatment of these themes inhis 2004 book After Method. Taking up Law’s offer of a rela-tional and processual alternative to the “static” (pp. 7-10)methods of traditional social science inquiry, I will next exam-ine Sarah Pink’s (2009) account of a “sensory ethnography.”The various innovations associated with sensory ethnographyexemplify the intellectual and empirical promise of ANT,while positing a series of methods and procedures ideally suit-ed to the study of AOD use in diverse settings. NicoleVitellone’s work (2010, 2011a, 2011b) illustrates the contoursof a research program that harnesses the force of ANT andsensory ethnography in the articulation of a “novel social science of AOD use” (Rhodes, 2009, pp. 198-199). Note,however, that the readings enacted in this review will notalways prioritize the exegesis of the selected texts, but willrather seek to identify the coordinates of a novel praxis of

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AOD research after method, after subjects, and after drugs(see also Gomart, 2002; Demant, 2009; Fraser and Moore,2011; Weinberg, 2011). With this goal in mind, the review willassess the intellectual and empirical dividend to be derivedfrom such a praxis, as well as the general orientation of a moreaffective, relational, and processual understanding of AOD use(Vitellone, 2010).

After methods

Law’s argument in After Method proceeds from the convictionthat the contemporary social sciences require the suppositionof a fixed and stable social ontology in order for their methodsto “work” (2004, pp. 24-25). In a memorable formulation,Law describes this ontology—and the picture of reality that itpresents—as “independent, anterior, definite and singular”(pp. 31). It builds on the “common sense” proposition of areality “out there,” external to the observations of a remote,perceiving subject and thus available to conscious reflectionand scientific inquiry (pp. 24-25). Reality is, in this sense, saidto be “independent” of the perceiving subject in that it exists,it unfolds, regardless of the interest a subject may or may notinvest in it. It follows that reality exists “anterior to...ourreports of it” (pp. 24-25). As the common medium of experi-ence, the knowable world must be regarded as bearing an inde-pendent existence with its own history, its own temporal logicseparate from any attempt to investigate or know that history.As such, reality subsists in a “definite set of forms and rela-tions” (p. 31), which endures in its distinctiveness withoutinterference from the invigilation of a custodial subject.Reality is also “singular,” therefore, the “same everywhere”(p. 24) and thus common for all who experience it. Havingestablished that the objects of empirical inquiry are fixed, sta-ble and singular, social science proceeds to the elaboration ofa suite of research methods equal to the solidity of this reality.Law provides the example of alcoholic liver disease to illus-trate this point, noting that medical researchers generally

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downplay the cultural contexts of alcohol use in concentratingon the ways this use interferes with the normal functioning ofa healthy liver, and the ways this interference might be arrest-ed. Again, the key facts of this disorder are regarded as stable,knowable, and resistant to cultural variation; one substance involume (alcohol) merely encounters another (the liver), pro-ducing stable, predictable effects (pp. 70-76).

Law draws two general conclusions from his analysis of tradi-tional social science methods and the ontologies that sustainthem. The first, familiar to scholars of science and technology, isthat far from faithfully reporting the dynamics of a stable, inde-pendent reality, social scientific methods are intimately involvedin the production or delineation of this reality. While Law most-ly eschews the “hard” constructivist claim that reality is nothingmore than an appearance produced in discourse, his analysisrelies on the key ANT contention that methods participate in thearticulation of the reality they purportedly only describe. Farfrom producing a stable facsimile of reality, the application ofmethod helps to bring a specific world into view, emphasizingcertain features while obscuring others, soliciting our attention.Methods are always selective in this sense, and they inevitablycontribute to the ways in which realities are posed as objects foranalysis, discussion and conjecture (pp. 13-14).

Law’s second, and arguably more significant observation, isthat in positing a fixed, stable, and definite reality, social sci-entific methods are likewise best suited to the analysis offixed, stable, and definite entities (pp. 2-7). Traditional meth-ods remain unsatisfactory in an approach to “the ephemeral,the indefinite and the irregular” (p. 4): those transient, unsta-ble, dynamic, or otherwise “messy” features of the world andits realities. This is no doubt the most controversial claim inAfter Method, with Law insisting that traditional methods areincreasingly unable to accommodate the contingent and dynamicflux typical of modern cultures in a global world. Law addsthat the kinds of problems the social sciences are now calledupon to arbitrate demand new, more sensitive and reflexive



methods better suited to the challenges of late capitalism,globalization, postmodernity, the digital and technologicaldivide, and so on (pp. 13-14). The rest of Law’s book is devotedto the elaboration of his own alternative, what he calls “methodassemblage” (pp. 84-85).

While Law insists that all social science methods ought to beunderstood as assemblages—inasmuch as traditional methodsinvariably draw together (or assemble) distinctive objects,problems, representational schemas, techniques, and modes ofinquiry (pp. 84)—the notion of method assemblage as Lawdeploys it relies on an altogether different ontological “hinter-land” (pp. 32-35, 160). Method assemblage in this strictersense is premised on a picture of social reality understood as“interactive, remade, indefinite and multiple” (p. 122). Eachof these terms serves as a messy alternative to the “independ-ent, anterior, definite and singular” properties of the morefamiliar ontologies characteristic of traditional social scienceinquiry. In addressing mess, method assemblage is conceivedof as a methodological innovation designed to overcome thehuman/nonhuman dyad so characteristic of traditional socialscience (pp. 132-133). Despite the array of sometimes confus-ing jargon that Law relies on to describe method assem-blage—confusion that is only partially abated in recourse tothe book’s glossary—the principal features of this approachare simple enough to convey once the two general conclusionsnoted above have been absorbed.

To recap, method assemblage is built on the claim that theapplication of research methods always contributes to the delineations of reality, just as it reflects the contention thatthe contemporary social sciences should concern themselveswith the messiness of that reality. Research methods equal tothis mess will necessarily “detect, resonate with, and amplifyparticular patterns of relations in the excessive and over-whelming fluxes of the real” (p. 14). If all methods contributeto the expression of a particular reality, then method assem-blages must adopt a stance that is “a combination of reality

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detector and reality amplifier” (p. 14). This is the interactivedimension of method assemblage, combining various tech-niques from various sources that subsequently interact or res-onate with the world they are designed to explain or makesense of. All research methods are relational in this sense, inthat they always adapt to (or are modified by) contacts in thefield. Method assemblage simply makes a virtue of this con-tingency, elevating it to a kind of methodological truism. Itfollows that methods are: remade in the course of their deploy-ment; adapted to the demands of the field; modified in thehands of their users; transformed by research participants;interpreted by research sponsors; neglected by rival traditions;and exposed for their shortcomings in light of the complexi-ties they are expected to elucidate. Experienced AODresearchers will no doubt find much that is familiar in Law’sdiscussion of the uses of research methods in practice, partic-ularly the improvisatory, spontaneous feel of method assem-blage, which remains a feature of so much applied AODresearch, notwithstanding the confident assurances of researchgrant applications and ethical review protocols.

The effect of all this interference between the application ofresearch methods, their reception in the field, and subsequentmanifestation in research findings is to render the objects ofsuch methods “indefinite and multiple” (p. 122)—indefinitebecause the realities that methods are called upon to examineare themselves indefinite, complex, dynamic and ephemeral,and multiple because of the ramifying effects of social scien-tific inquiry itself. After a century and a half of establishedsocial science research (and millennia of careful observationbefore that), the vast majority of the objects of social inquiryhave by now been rendered in innumerable divergent and com-peting iterations. Drug use is a perfect example of this profu-sion. Given the extent of scientific analysis of AOD use, it isno longer possible (if it ever were) to identify a discrete con-sensus regarding the characteristic features of either drugs orthe individuals and groups who consume them. One must nowspeak of multiple, overlapping, disjunctive scientific accounts



of AOD use, each with its own distinctive features and atten-dant methods of disclosure and discussion (Fraser & Moore,2011, pp. 1-8). While this is not so different from Foucault’streatment of the order of discourse in scientific production,Law updates this account, furnishing a host of finely drawnvignettes describing the workings of social scientific inquiryin various domains, and the mess of findings and practices thisinquiry supports (p. 35).

Such indeed is the mess that method has bequeathed to thesocial sciences, and such is the mess that AOD researchersfind themselves in. And yet Law’s way out of this mess pro-vides a highly original basis for investigating the consumptionof alcohol and other drugs. Applied to this end, Law’s accountof a social science “after method” draws attention to the roleof objects, spaces, bodies and things in the mediation of AODuse (see Vitellone, 2011a, pp. 204-206). It discloses the workof myriad objects, bodies, and spaces in the active task of pro-ducing and transforming the agencies necessary to initiatepractices like AOD use. Indeed, Law distributes or spatializesagency, attributing it both to (human) actors understood in aconventional sense, and to “actants” regarded as any nonhu-man entity, object, substance, or process that makes a differ-ence in a network of force relations or actions/behaviors (seeLatour, 2005, pp. 70-72). This distinction forces one toacknowledge—in the context of injection drug use, for exam-ple—the presence of the drug itself as an agent; the humanbody amid other bodies; the needle and the syringe; culturalconventions governing the course of drug consumption; thespatial circumstances of the event including the visibilitiesand “manifest absences” (p. 84) enacted therein, among aneverramifying throng of “actants” and agencies. Importantly,Law does not imagine a remote subject who serves as theauthor of this agentic production, and instead accommodates apanoply of spaces, bodies and objects in the modulations ofpractice (pp. 68-69). These actors and “actants” transform thecharacteristic features of practices like AOD use, requiring anequivalent method assemblage to document the trajectories of

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the diverse human and nonhuman agents that comprise thisassembly. In a telling invention, Law describes the constituentsof method assemblage as “inscription devices,” each designedto record the activity of varied agents in the course of theirparticipation in a particular actor network (pp. 18-20).

Inscription devices are subsequently diverse—from formal sci-entific methods, to the activity of research objects and materi-als, the vagaries of academic gossip, and the cultural norms ofindividual research settings—and yet each reveals the “relativemessiness of practice” (p. 18). Each is designed to capture andconvey the everyday work of producing scientific knowledge.Each concerns itself with the distinctive materials, objects, andthings that enable scientists and practitioners to generateresearch data, and to translate these data into research findings.These materials typically range from state-of-the-art researchtechnologies, to familiar, timeworn research instruments likethe humble notepad and pencil by which the researcher docu-ments spontaneous hunches. All record the messiness ofresearch practice and each, therefore, contributes to the messi-ness of knowledge production in the social sciences. Law’spoint is that method assemblages must include an array ofinscription devices to record the traces of this messiness invivo. While Law goes on to canvass various case studies(drawn from his own research collaborations) to illustrate thecharacteristic features of method assemblages, researcherslooking for more simple guidance regarding the selection ofmethods and the identification of appropriate research proto-cols are likely to be disappointed. Law touches here and thereon the practice of research methods, but is far more concernedwith the articulation of a novel methodology for the social sci-ences. The title of Law’s book is deeply misleading in thissense. The book is peppered with anecdotes drawn from Law’sextensive research archive, and yet it fails to provide a suffi-ciently robust sense of where one might start in constructing amethod assemblage of one’s own. It is for this reason worthturning to Sarah Pink’s (2009) far more pragmatic account of asensory ethnography for guidance in such matters.



After subjects

Pink’s sensory ethnography is primarily concerned with thepresentation of a suite of research methods open to the myriadaffective and material textures of everyday life. In so doing, Pinkprovides a means of applying the insights derived from Law’saccount of method assemblage to the analysis of social and polit-ical “problems” like AOD consumption. Pink, of course, pres-ents her own method assemblage, alert to the activity of theobjects, spaces, and bodies assembled in the event of sociality,and suggestive of a novel methodology for the analysis of thisactivity in the ongoing investigation of AOD use. Each of Pink’smethods relies on the sensitivities of the various bodies (bothhuman and nonhuman) assembled in the course of social scienceresearch, harnessing these sensitivities in the generation of novelkinds of research data. Sensory ethnography treats the body as adiscrete research instrument, responsive to the contexts andworlds it inhabits, and retaining the traces of this habitation inunique ways (pp. 23-25). Pink provides numerous examplesfrom her own research regarding the merits of this innovation,including work on the “sensory experience” of home and theways everyday domestic activities like washing dishes, cleaning,cooking, and dressing oneself orient the body and its senses in adomestic space. These activities require “embodied sensoryknowing,” which in turn supports the various identity practicesby which a particular self is contrived (pp. 52-53). Both homeand identity are produced in a set of sensory practices thatenmesh or embed the body in place, establishing relationsbetween bodies and sites, even though these practices and rela-tions are not always the subject of conscious reflection. Thebody acts in its senses, generating a kind of corporeal knowledgethat differs from cognition or intentionality. Pink’s understand-ing of the body is, in this respect, reminiscent of Law’s accountof inscription devices, even though sensory ethnography isoffered more in parallel to ANT than in debt to it.

Pink is arguably more interested than Law in establishing forthe social sciences a unique means of recording the traces of

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the body’s inscriptions; its inescapable imbrication in theplaces and worlds of its sensory investments such as the home,community, neighborhood, and belonging (pp. 65-69). Locatingthis effort within recent debates in anthropology, sociology,and geography regarding the role of the senses in (human)practice, sociality and experience, Pink insists that the bodyitself remains the most powerful register of these inscriptions(pp. 7-22). While sensory ethnography no doubt privileges thesensitivity (or receptiveness) of human bodies, Pink’s discus-sion of the relationality of bodies and contexts clears the wayfor an ethnography of “things” (Bennett, 2010) alert to theinscriptive force of objects, spaces, and “actants” in the organ-ization of social life. Foremost among these inscriptions arethe traces bodies effect on their environment, and the marksenvironments in turn leave on bodies. Construed in the fashionof method assemblage, Pink’s account of place, context andenvironment provides a means of incorporating the objects,spaces, and processes that comprise these milieux within theremit of a sensory ethnography, even if she ultimately fallsshort of this innovation herself (pp. 23-25).

Pink’s account of the relationality of bodies and places does,however, provide the first general principle of sensory ethnog-raphy: “seek to know places in other people’s worlds that aresimilar to the places and ways of knowing of those others.” Toknow the places of other people’s worlds requires that oneattend to the ways places leave their mark on bodies and theways these marks transform the experience of dwelling inplace. These marks are stored in the “perception, memory andimagination” (p. 23) expressed in bodies and rendered know-able by the techniques of sensory ethnography. This “anthro-pology of the senses” (p. 1) might at first appear to reify thesensual properties of a “natural” body—something the authorcomes close to in her reading of phenomenology—and yetPink’s ethnography is ultimately concerned with the human“sensorium”: with the ways in which the senses are constantlymodified and translated in practice, in culture, and in lan-guage. The senses are, for Pink, always “emplaced” in a cul-



tural, historical and political milieu, such that one can speakof the contingency of the senses and their dynamic history (pp. 11-15). Senses are never merely natural in this regard. They are always in and of the world, mingling and diverging,“swapping properties” (Latour, 1994, pp. 801-805) with theobjects of this sense perception in a continuum of “sense-world-sensing.” This, no doubt, makes sensory ethnography messy inthe sense Law reserves for the term, yet it also highlights thevalue of ANT’s rejection of the subject/object dyad for socialscience research.

As soon as the senses are denaturalized, as soon as they aretaken from the subject and returned to the world, sensoryethnography claims for itself a novel methodology and a novelresearch mandate. This mandate addresses the worlding of thesenses amid the sensing of the world. It is interested in the“entanglements” of bodies and places, senses, and life-worlds,and how these entanglements transform the ways bodies sense(and make sense of) their world (pp. 29-32). Sensory ethnog-raphy provides the tools for documenting this sensing of theworld in process, in its relations. In assessing these tools, Pinkemphasizes the use of visual and communication technolo-gies, which she argues provide a basis for recording a broaderarray of sensory data. Drawing on memory, perception, whim-sy, imagination, reason, and observation, the use of film andphotography, auto-ethnography, creative writing, interviews,and walking tours, among other more conventional qualitativetechniques, provides a basis for documenting more of theinteractive and indefinite dimensions of social life notedabove. This kind of ethnography takes seriously Law’s insightsinto the production and reproduction of reality in diverseassemblages of human and nonhuman actors, furnishing vari-ous methods for mapping these assemblages in place.

Pink’s discussion of these methods and procedures is dividedinto three sections: the first addresses methodological and theoretical issues to do with the various ontological and epis-temological investments typical of sensory ethnography. This

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discussion mostly concerns the kinds of places-bodies-senses-worlds problems noted above. Pink then turns to consider thepractice of sensory ethnography, devoting individual chapters toparticipant observation, the conduct of in-depth interviews, andthe use of visual methods like film and photography. Through-out, Pink is concerned to take what remain mostly familiarethnographic techniques and rework them in the service of anovel anthropology of the senses. The extent to which Pinkachieves this goal is probably moot, with much of her discussioncovering ideas, problems, and advice common to many existingintroductions to qualitative methods in the social sciences. Still,these chapters contain useful insights into the cultivation of sen-sory data in ethnographic research. All speak to the need toaddress oneself in research settings to the “feeling” of what hap-pens; to the events that punctuate everyday experience and thetraces these events leave in participants’ sensing of events andtheir passage. Pink insists that the collection of research datamust, for these reasons, remain as generous and all-encompass-ing as possible. This calls for new ways of “sharing” the“emplaced experiences and sensory subjectivities of . . . researchparticipants” (p. 49). Pink recommends the careful probing ofmemories, perceptions, longings, imagination, desires, plans,and dreams to achieve this understanding. This can be done for-mally through interviews that focus more on the feeling of phe-nomena than their meaning or wider social, political and culturalsignificance—or, it can be achieved in observational contextswhereby researchers attend to the sensed traces of the world,both in their own bodies and in the bodies of human and nonhu-man participants active in this world. Pink further emphasizesthe value of “eating together” and “walking with others” as simple techniques for generating rich accounts of “being there”amid the lived sense of place. Pushing sensory ethnography a little, one could add that an ethnography of place might just as profitably concern itself with the materiality of place as theaffective, with the activity of the objects and “actants” embeddedin place, and their role in the production and reproduction ofcontext.



Pink goes on to consider the role of audio-visual methods inthe practice of sensory ethnography, before closing with chap-ters on analyzing and reporting sensory data in the preparationof ethnographic findings. I will leave the consideration ofanalysis and reporting for my discussion of Nicole Vitellone’swork below; however, it is worth briefly noting the promiseoffered in Pink’s assessment of visual methods for the study ofAOD use. Pink argues that the rapid proliferation of ever-cheaper and more accessible audio-visual technologies offersa great opportunity for research innovation in the social sci-ences. In what has become something of a well-worn theme inrecent visual ethnography, Pink discovers in the explosion ofdigital technologies like cameras and mobile phones themeans of quickly and efficiently gathering all kinds of uniquesensory data. Examples of these data include: digital voicerecordings collected in the course of walking interviews; thegathering of still photography and digital film in the docu-menting of movement and mobility; as well as image elicita-tion and sensory commentary (pp. 103-112). Importantly forPink, the great advantage of these emerging audio-visual tech-nologies is the scope they offer for documenting and analyz-ing the interconnectedness, or “multi-modality,” of the senses(pp. 98-102). Film, in particular, provides a means of captur-ing the myriad ways senses resonate and interfere with oneanother in practice. The use of these kinds of technologies alsopresents opportunities to shift responsibility for data collec-tion from researchers to participants directly. This includes therole participants might play in the analysis and reporting offindings, particularly in relation to the editing and presenta-tion of visual material. While Pink draws numerous examplesfrom her own research to highlight the array of benefits thatfollow from the practice of sensory ethnography in the socialsciences, Nicole Vitellone’s recent scholarship provides arange of more pertinent illustrations for researchers interestedin the consumption of alcohol and other drugs. Vitellone con-firms in particular the promise of a sensory ethnography ofAOD use, highlighting the array of actors, “actants,” bodies,

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senses, and spaces involved in the event of injection drug use,and the subsequent distribution of agencies necessary for anyfair accounting of the social, cultural, and/or political media-tion of this consumption.

After drugs

Vitellone’s work is intimately concerned with the material,affective, and corporeal experience of AOD use, and the statusof objects like needles and syringes in this consumption. Ofcourse, the question of AOD consumption inevitably intro-duces the problem of the consuming body and the diverse sub-jectivities practices of consumption mediate (2010, p. 876). YetVitellone is interested in examining how the problem of con-sumption might be interrogated in the absence of a traditionalsubject. As Vitellone (2011b) notes, almost all scientificaccounts of the consumption of alcohol and other drugs makea clear distinction between the subject of this consumptionand its objects, whether alcohol, illicit drugs, or some combi-nation thereof. The consuming subject is located within thiswork as a rational, calculative agent, even if AOD use some-times disrupts this calculative propensity. Moreover, theagency necessary to initiate AOD use is posited as the specialprivilege of the consuming subject, such that the object of thisconsumption is cast as an inert substance, a passive thing.Vitellone notes the significance of these distinctions in recentharm-reduction and prevention campaigns in the UK, whichseek to dramatize the significance of social context in framingAOD use, even as they rely on more familiar messages regard-ing the importance of (human) knowledge, attitudes andbehaviors in reducing problems associated with AOD use(2011b, pp. 587-593).

Vitellone develops these arguments in the context of what she,rather provocatively, calls a “science of the syringe” (2011b).Her explicit references to Law and Latour in describing thisscience are instructive, in that they bear witness to the produc-



tive force of the objects of this science; the syringes, needles,bodies, spaces, and affects associated with the event of injec-tion drug use. Vitellone takes issue with existing accounts ofinjection drug use for exaggerating the “political economy ofsuffering” at the expense of a proper understanding of theaffects and sensations generated in this use (2010, p. 867).Singling out Phillipe Bourgois’ work, Vitellone argues that apolitical economy of injection-drug use inevitably reifies thevery structural forces that it claims to unmask. Vitellone addsthat while Bourgois denounces AOD researchers for failing toadequately attend to the structural drivers of poverty, socialexclusion and addiction, he inevitably reduces all drug use tothe same structural forces, leaving little room for the local,contingent actors involved in injection-drug use (2010,pp. 876-878). This effectively erases all traces of the local,while reinforcing the agentic force of structure and econom-ics. Indeed for Vitellone, the places of injection drug usebecome interchangeable in Bourgois’ hands, with each merelyexemplifying the broader and more important force of powerand structure. And yet, ironically, Bourgois’ political economydoes a fine job of unveiling the nonhuman “actants” involvedin injection drug use, even if he is reluctant to accord theseentities the full measure of their agency. Vitellone might, inthis respect, be a little harsh in her reading of Bourgois, for Isuspect his position is a good deal closer to Vitellone’s thanshe acknowledges. For me, both Bourgois and Vitellone drawattention to the cast of actors and actants involved in the eventof injection drug use, even if Bourgois prefers the more distalamong this cast and Vitellone the more local. In focusing onthe local, Vitellone highlights the intimacy of spaces, objectsand bodies acting together in the event of injection drug use(2010, 2011b).

Chief among these “actants” is the syringe itself. Far fromserving as a passive prop in the ongoing drama of injectiondrug use, Vitellone argues that the syringe should be under-stood as an active protagonist in the production and reproduc-tion of space in the event of injection drug use in the city

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(2010, pp. 873-875). Drawing on methods that bare a strong ifunacknowledged resemblance to Pink’s sensory ethnography,Vitellone traces the trajectories of syringes throughoutManchester’s Northern Quarter, noting their role in the demar-cation of “hypodermic space.” These spaces are not the soleeffects of marginalization, squalor, and poverty, despite theefforts Vitellone observes locally to reduce them to this, butrather support diverse affects, subjectivities, and sensations,many of which are “aesthetically pleasing” in the words of oneof Vitellone’s respondents (2010, pp. 873-875).

The point for Vitellone is that hypodermic space, like allspaces of drug use, is made and remade in the activity ofhuman and nonhuman actors and “actants.” This activity pro-duces discrete “zones of intensity,” which resonate with thesensation of myriad affects, including pleasure, hope, anddesire, as well as fear, pain, loss, and longing (pp. 876-878).Ignoring the various actors assembled in the immediate eventof injection drug use, in favor of the more familiar forces ofstructure, power, and economics, obscures these felt and livedsensations (especially the more “positive” ones), just as itignores the local spatialization of consumption. As Vitelloneconcludes, this further reifies the idea of context at the expenseof detailed understandings of the sense of the spaces andobjects involved in AOD use (pp. 878-879). Vitellone does notdeny the role of non-local actors and “actants” in shapingpractices like injection drug use, but rather insists that suchentities are always in the process of being assembled andreassembled, without ever settling into the familiar reifica-tions of structure or context. While the idea of contextcalls attention to the role of nonhuman actors in shaping prac-tices like injection drug use, the force of this insight is greatlyreduced whenever it obscures the contingent effects of par-ticular, local spaces, times, senses, affects, and objects inmodifying and further translating such practices. Overcomingthe shortcomings of traditional understandings of context isprecisely what a social science of drug use after methods, aftersubjects, and after drugs might accomplish.



After methods, after subjects, after drugs

The idea of a social science after methods, after subjects, andafter drugs is meant as a provocation. Certainly, this is the wayit is presented in Vitellone’s work. The idea is premised in thefirst instance on the “symmetrical” treatment of humans andnonhumans recommended by Law and common to ANT-inspiredresearch in the social sciences. A social science of AOD useafter methods, after subjects, and after drugs demands thateach of the forces present in the event of AOD use be given itsdue. Importantly, it refuses to fix the ontology of methods,subject, or drugs. None can be regarded as stable, homogenousentities, and so researchers must adapt themselves to thedynamic contingency of methods, subjects and drugs—to their“co-constitution” in the very act of inquiry (valentine, 2011,pp. 438-440). The practice of such a science—according to themethods of sensory ethnography, and exemplified in Vitellone’srecent research—provides a means of documenting this co-constitution in practice and in place. It invites one to recordthe residue of concrete and grit on the hands of the occupantsof the shooting gallery; the feeling of plastic-metal-rubber-concrete-blood of the event of injection (pp. 873-875). It alertsone to the ramifications of politics, media, semiotics, bodies,movement, and drugs in all cultures of AOD use (pp. 587-591).This is a social science that cares for the assembled society ofbodies active in the moment of AOD use, attending to each,assessing the agentic contributions of all. Such a science pres-ents three distinctive advantages—and three correspondingopportunities—for scholars interested in tracing the diversetrajectories of AOD use in practice.

The first concerns the prospect of accounting for AOD usewithout reifying the authority of a singular, sovereign subjectof consumption. A good deal of contemporary AOD researchquestions the explanatory utility of such a subject (see Fraserand Moore, 2011), and yet rarely has a viable alternative beenpresented. Of course, the problem in relying on the subject inAOD research is that it invites one to explain drug use in terms

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of the free choice of a deliberative (human) agent. It followsthat the subject is necessarily responsible for its own behavior,and so drug use must be explained either as a rational choice(which presents its own moral hazards), or as some inexplica-ble deficit in or malfunction of this faculty. Moreover, anyattempt to assert the force of structural or contextual factors inthe course of AOD consumption must overcome this logic. Itgoes without saying that these attempts often founder, suchthat the social sciences are routinely divided between disci-plines which favor agentic explanations of AOD use, and thosewhich prefer more structural ones (Duff, 2007, pp. 504-507).Yet, this is where a social science of AOD use “after the sub-ject” offers hope for synthesis. It suggests that drug use is nota function of either the free subject, or an indomitable socialcontext: it is always both, acting at once, in ways that demandcareful empirical discrimination. This, then, is the secondgreat advantage of a social science after methods, after sub-jects, and after drugs, that opens up a path for AOD researchbetween structure and agency.

This novelty depends on the account of subjectivity presentedin Law’s actor-network theory, and implied in Pink’s sensoryethnography. Far from abandoning it, Law and Pink fractureand spatialize subjectivity. They distribute it among andbetween the diverse objects, structures, agencies and bodiesthat characterize everyday life (Law, 2004, p. 36). Subjectivitycannot (in this respect) be reduced to the familiar terms of thetraditional, rational subject—to mind, in a traditional practiceof psychology, physiology, or biology. “Subjectivity is theachievement of bodies and objects acting together” (Pink,2009, pp. 51-55). Remove one or another of these bodies andthe subject so constituted changes also, sometimes profound-ly, other times imperceptibly. Hence, there is not a subject andits objects (or an agent amid its structures), but rather eventsof subjectivization effectuated in the meeting of elements inspace and time. It follows that subjects—and the events,processes, and agencies that comprise them—should be under-stood as fluid, relational, and affective congeries and not as



stable, static, presuppositions for social science inquiry. Forscholars interested in AOD use, this suggests that subjectivityis as much the effect of drug use as its foundational cause. Itfurther suggests that the subject of AOD consumption neveracts alone. AOD use always involves multiple agencies, whichconverge in the initiation of this consumption. All, in otherwords, are responsible for AOD use. To the extent that it evenmakes sense to ask which of these bodies or agencies is moreor less responsible for this consumption, the question must,regardless, remain an empirical problem requiring carefulempirical observation.

The implications of this contention for drug policy, lawenforcement, prevention, and harm reduction have scarcelybeen countenanced, even though the inclination to apportionresponsibility for the activity of AOD use is discernible ineach. Vitellone’s work surely indicates the folly of this exer-cise, insofar as the agencies implicated in the event of AODuse are forever distributed among diverse human and nonhu-man actors. Mercifully, Vitellone also suggests a way out ofthis folly in the work of determining how more of the nonhu-man actors at work in AOD use might be accounted for in thestudy of AOD consumption. Due regard for the nonhuman isone of the most attractive features of Vitellone’s work, althoughher interest is shared by many others in the field (see Demant,2009; Holt & Treloar, 2008; Race, 2009; valentine, 2011).Moreover, interest in identifying and assessing the varioushuman and nonhuman actors present in the activity of AODuse suggests new grounds for conceiving of the role of socialcontexts in this use. If it is accepted that the subject of AODconsumption never acts alone, then the search for this prac-tice’s nonhuman collaborators establishes a means of describ-ing the role of context in practice. This is the third greatopportunity furnished with the articulation of a social scienceof AOD use after methods, after subjects, and after drugs.

Yet, as Law (2004) so ably demonstrates, social and structuralactors are never as remote or as stable as social scientists imag-

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ine. Each must be accounted for in its involvement in the pro-duction of the social, along with the work it does to sustain thisstructuring presence. It is precisely because this work of “pres-ence” is so demanding (see Law, pp. 83-85) that structures andcontexts shift and evolve over time. Structures and contexts arenot, for this reason, remote, monolithic entities, somehowremoved from everyday social life. They act in this socialsphere to be sure, but they are also acted upon in ways that leavethem open to alteration or outright removal. It follows that thesocial and structural forces at work in AOD consumption mustthemselves be established, supported, made and remade in timeand space. Conceiving of structures in this way presents a novelbasis for exploring the role of structures and contexts in AODuse, and the ways these contexts change over time. It suggeststhat social contexts are assembled and reassembled in the activ-ity of diverse bodies, spaces, processes, and objects. The taskfor scholars interested in AOD use is to document the myriadassociations by which these contexts are organized and main-tained in specific activities and spaces. Sensory ethnographyprovides the tools for conducting such analysis, whileVitellone’s recent research provides the testimony regarding theenduring benefits to be derived from this work.

Each however, requires AOD researchers to abandon the onto-logical distinction between subjects and objects in theirattempts to explain AOD use. The fact that drug policy has forso long relied on this distinction goes a long way towardsexplaining its enduring failures. Singling out the human sub-ject among the panoply of actors at work in the event of AODuse, and then making the subject solely responsible for theeffects of this panoply, ignores the diversity of these extra-subjective forces, with predictable results. For it leaves thearray of nonhuman agencies involved in AOD consumptionrelatively unencumbered. With the notable exception of(human) bodies and drugs themselves, the majority of objectsand actors involved in AOD consumption remain unknown toresearchers and ignored by policy makers. The work of Law,Pink, and Vitellone highlights the benefits that might follow



from the rejection of this indifference, yet it also opens up ahost of new problems for the field.

Most importantly, if AOD use can be shown to the effect ofbodies acting together, then it follows that drug-related harmsare likewise generated in assemblages of human and nonhu-man actors. Admittedly, this fact is reasonably well estab-lished in harm-reduction debates (even if the terms may beunfamiliar), given that it furnishes the principal rationale forpopular harm-reduction programs like the distribution of ster-ile injection equipment. But what of the array of messy, unsta-ble and ephemeral objects, “actants” and bodies involved indrug-use assemblages? How might these actors be theorizedand studied in ways that enable their “enrollment” in localharm-reduction efforts? Understanding the role of the syringeis one thing; the greater challenge is to characterize the signif-icance of the various affects, spaces, and sensations identifiedby scholars like Vitellone, and to determine how they might bemodified in the interests of safer AOD use. How, in otherwords, might the agencies enacted in this consumption bemodified in the interests of further reducing the harms associ-ated with AOD use, while at the same time amplifying theunquestionably positive affects and relations that attend thisuse? Various scholars have recently begun exploring howthese challenges might be resolved in the conduct of a“posthuman” AOD-research agenda (see Demant, 2009;Fraser and Moore, 2011; Keane, 2011; Race, 2011; Weinberg,2011). Each points beyond fixed or objective understandingsof drugs to the more messy business of clarifying the charac-ter of drug use assemblages and the means of their transforma-tion. This is the primary challenge set out in the research andtheory reviewed in this article, yet it also amounts to a tanta-lizing invitation for researchers interested in AOD use. Theextent to which this invitation is taken up ought to be the fullmeasure of the viability of a social science of AOD use aftermethods, after subjects, and after drugs.

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