MULTIPLE BODIES, MULTIPLE TEXTS

Abstract

The paper concerns the bodily and textual practices in the social epistemology of Annemarie Mol as presented in her book The Body Multiple. From her ethnography of medical practices in hospital Z, Mol derives a new ontology of objects that changes the emphasis from the opposition of representation and construction to the practices of production and performance. “Ontology in practice” as presented by Mol concentrates on what is done to the object and what exactly makes it an object, rather than determining what the object is. Her study therefore does not deal with the multiplicity of ways to view the body and illness; it deals instead with the multiplicity of practices which generate the multifaceted object of research. Constructed and put together by a variety of practices, this object is always more than one thing: it prominently features the multiplicity of its enactments and the ways of coordinating them. At the same time, Mol’s study deals with social epistemology itself and also makes a contribution to construction of another multifaceted object of research. The field of social epistemology is not just a field of multifaceted objects, but also of multifaceted texts. The seemingly selfevident objectivity of an object is undermined by the diachronic analysis in Mol’s synchronic text. It concerns more than the politics of the normal/pathological distinction or the object/method distinction (although it does handle these). It mostly deals with the practice of academic texts per se: the politics of writing, publishing, reading, citation, etc. The unusual material construction of this text plays an essential role in its textual practice, which also carries over to the text of the paper.