In response to the criticism that obligatory passage points promote single moments of translation, Law (1994) and Mol (2010) suggest that the term ‘modes of ordering’ may be a more helpful term than ‘translation’ to denote a relational ontology. The plural of the word ‘mode’ signals that, in any given time or place, there are multiple ‘modes’ being performed. I draw attention to the verb ‘performed’ here to show that the active notion of performativity is a crucial feature of a relational ontology where “different elements assemble together and act in certain ways to produce specific consequences” (Law & Singleton, 2000, p. 774). Law and Singleton (2000) state that these hybrid performances need to be enacted. This suggests a doing: an accomplishment or an achievement. I use both the verbs ‘perform’ and ‘enact’ throughout this thesis to denote this sense of ‘doing’ a reality.
A key feature of performativity that is pertinent for this study is that the work to assemble these performances is on-going. That is, vast amounts of energy are expended by different actors in trying to maintain the connections that act in certain ways. Nothing is ever in a finished, final state, but is constantly performed in the moment: “There is no social order. Rather, there are endless attempts at ordering” (Law, 1994, p. 101). Organising practices, knowledges and objects are effects of these endless attempts at ordering. They are being performed into existence.
I have found Latour’s (1986) ‘ostensive’ and ‘performative’ views of reality useful to keep in mind when working with the concept of performativity. An ostensive view assumes that the social is characterised by stability, predictability and orderliness, which is treated “in principle” (p. 272). Yet, “in practice”, the social is better understood as being performed, and is in fact unstable and fragile, a “negotiable, a practical and revisable matter” (Latour, 1986, p.264). Thus, the performance of the social is subject to translation, depending on the hands
through which it travelled and the networks within which it was located. Therefore, a performative understanding helps to reconceptualise knowing as an on-going process that is enacted, in the moment, by the actors themselves rather than being understood as a reified ‘thing’, contained in, and imposed upon, the engineers. This is an important concept to highlight as it opens-up a different way of understanding how ‘acceptable practices’ and ‘innovation’ might be seen, in Law’s (1994) terms, as ‘endless attempts at ordering’, which are enacted as performative, rather than ostensive, knowings-in-practice.
The notion of performativity helps address a critique of ANT that it is politically conservative and fails to offer explanations in favour of description (Whittle & Spicer, 2008). Law and Singleton (2000, p. 767) point out that ANT is more than just description; the very act of writing an account is a political performance, which produces its own reality “that does equally particular kinds of work”. Thus, I am conscious that, in the writing of this thesis, I am performing a certain political reality that could be otherwise. I reflect on this performativity in further detail in the following chapter, and in Chapter 8.
Furthermore, Law (2009, p. 151) reveals that this shift to a performative ontology has “strange consequences”. By this, he means that alongside multiple modes of ordering emerge multiple realities. This is quite a move from claiming that there are different perspectives of a single reality. It signals a shift from “epistemology and representation to practical ontology and performativity” (Jensen, 2010, p. 7). Mol (2002) is often attributed with this revelation. In her study of lower limb atherosclerosis practices, Mol (2002) contends that atherosclerosis, as a condition, emerges in different forms and in different places. For example, in the doctor’s surgery it is performed as painful walking, while in hospital it is performed through X-rays and radiography as blocked blood vessels. The different material and local practices evoke their own material reality: “in theory the body may be single, but in practice it is multiple because there are many body practices and therefore many bodies” (Law, 2009, p. 152, original emphasis). Law (2007) argues that in acknowledging that there are multiple actor-networks circulating, the demand for a centre (for example, a single OPP) has disappeared. Therefore,
an ‘object’ or a ‘knowledge’ that appears to be one thing may be understood as multiple; as “a set of related performances” (Law & Singleton, 2000, p. 775). This understanding of multiplicity has truly been a revelation for how I have come to understand practice because, as a researcher, I no longer feel obligated to look for neat, ordered and coherent patterns to ‘explain’ certain phenomena. It allows me to approach the engineers’ practices as messy, ambiguous, and indeed, multiple performances that are “irreducible to one another” (Law, 2007, p. 14). I return later in the chapter to the notion of multiplicity, highlighting how it has helped me to conceptualise the mediating role of objects in engineers’ practices.
As I imagined I would see lots of different modes of ordering that were being performed, perhaps as multiple realities, as the engineers worked together to sell, and build-out, wind turbines, amongst high levels of change and multiple actors, I needed to consider how I would conceptualise these ‘orderings’. While ‘assemblage’ and ‘network’ are useful metaphors to help describe the tentative gathering of different bits and pieces, I needed a concept that helped me to understand how these different orderings may come together – and hold together, however briefly – to form connections that produced particular effects, such as policies, processes and technologies. To do so, I look to Law’s (1987) concept of ‘heterogeneous engineering’, which I explore in the following section.