Adjacent temporalities: Making Medico-Scientific Futures and the Present

Abstract

The Concept as Response This essay offers the concept of “adjacent temporalities” to draw attention (1) to how different sociotechnical spaces and processes have different temporalities; (2) how this influences the relation between episteme and ontos; and (3) to the choreography that is needed to link these temporalities together in order to stabilize emerging technoscientific practices. By choreography I refer to the “process of forging a functional zone of compatibility that maintains referential power between things of different kinds” (Cousins 1996, 600), that is, which brings together the clinical, technical, scientific, legal, and political aspects of technoscientific projects. I offer the concept as a response to my reading of STS studies in ontology, which is coupled to my empirical engagement with the field of face transplantation (Taylor-Alexander 2014a; Taylor-Alexander 2015), especially the changing regulatory status of the face for transplantation. What struck me about the extant body of STS literature on ontology and on “making matter matter” was the profound omission of time and temporality from the conceptual equation. The result is often a reading that sees ontological discordance, where a “thing” is different “here and there” (Mol 2002; Mol 2010) as a result of variations in knowing, as if knowing / being are static activities.2 By adjacent temporalities I refer to the multiple ways in which a thing is done in mutually contingent presents—its beginnings and endings, how it starts and stops in meaning, in matter, and in time vis-a-vis the locales of its enactments. The aim is thus to draw attention to the importance of attending to time when producing an account of ontology and matter. In this piece I demonstrate the utility of adjacent temporalities as an analytic concept by using it to think through the changed regulatory status of the face for transplantation. It helps to reveal how both the materiality and meaning of what is the face have been modified by the advent of face transplantation and corollary medical and policy developments. Here, we can see at least four social spaces, each with their own temporalities—the clinic and transplant policy in the present, and the same two spaces in a nascent future—that are in flux