MORE THAN ONE — LESS THAN TWO: THE CONCEPT AND METHODOLOGY OF ENACTMENT OF MULTIPLICITY IN ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY

Abstract

Attempts to find alternatives to totalizing (which appears in the social sciences as explanations via society, class, gender, culture, etc.) and essentializing the understanding of the social lie at the heart of the contemporary efforts in the social sciences to appeal to a concept of multiplicity that enables rendering reality not only as various and fragmented, but also as inconsistent, complex and variously distributed within itself. Psychology, economics, political theory and many other disciplines have offered their own ways of conceiving multiplicity. In sociology the most wellknown attempts to use this concept are by the neo-Marxist authors Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Paolo Virno, and other such attempts are found in Schütze’s phenomenological sociology as well as in the Goffmanian tradition. The article provides theoretical and methodological explications of the multiplicity concept in actor-network theory. In the theoretical terms, it is argued that Annemarie Mol and John Law make the distinction between multiplicity and plurality without resorting to relativism and social constructivism. They employ multiplicity to analyze the decentralized, distributed objects which combine actual existence with the potential to change. The methodological approach of the article is to delineate and analyze the foundations of three methods of explicating multiplicity in actor-network theory: the ethnographic one (Annemarie Mol, John Law, Charis Thompson), the “technological” one (Noortje Marres, Albena Yaneva), and methods of making conceptual figures (Donna Haraway, Michel Serres, Isabelle Stengers). The author maintains that the juncture between theoretical and the methodological consideration of the concept of multiplicity enables actor-network theory to provide definite ways to carry out enactments of social reality rather than merely describing it.