We may first ask the question: What is this book about?
This book is about a disease, or a illness, or disease/illness, or whatever. Anyway, a thing.... a "thing" should be the appropriate description.. a thing called "atherosclerosis".
What is antherosclerosis? A medical term among experts, a signfier without a signfied (Because most people don't even have the concept of antherosclerosis, unless you are suffering from it), a pain, a series of inconvenience, a topic of discussions, inability to walk, an experience, fear, a sign of death, an event.
Yes, it is an event.
What is an event? An event is "what has happened". But it is not just WHAT has happened, but also what has HAPPENED. An event is an action, a process, or duree, perhaps. An event is not just a THING, but the action, process, duree of the thing. "Thing" is an ontological question. It is there, there. But event is not. Deleuze said Duree is "the whole of relations". Event can be understood in this sense, the whole of relations. But it is not the WHOLE, in a complete sense. It is the whole in a fluid sense, or the flux.
But I have said "antherosclerosis" is a thing. A thing carries its ontological meaning. It exists though without a physical existence. But isn't it contradictary? No, it is not. Because a thing is also an event. Ontology is also of the ontology of flux, relations, different forces. Then ontology has to be multiple. But ontology is not plural, please. Mol uses "ontologies". It doesn't make sense. Just like people saying there are two realities.
It is ontology intrinsically heterogenous, or multiple, to use her term. No... not ontologies.
Thank you for bear my incomprensible writing. After all, this book is ON philosophy.
Like many others in this class, I found this text difficult to engage with. This may be due to personal reasons (my father is having his fourth surgery for antherosclerosis in a about a week), or perhaps it is due to the fact that I found the subtext far more interesting than the book’s main attraction. However, there were a few concepts that I found useful, and I also have a question about this text in relation to Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment.
In the subtext, Mol posits that ontological categories of race, gender, sex, illness, nature, culture, and disease have a striking commonality. These classifications were created by social scientists in an attempt to differentiate between the social and biological sciences (21). She takes this analysis a step further by elucidating their performative characteristics. I find this useful for this analysis seems to integrate ideas found in various different areas of feminism and anthropology. For example, the nature/culture divide is frequently discussed in science studies while Butler’s idea of gender performance is often reserved for feminism and feminist anthropology. More often than not, I have difficulty understanding how the various ethnographies we read (inside and outside of this class) tie together. Mol performs the intellectual labor of showing how the various dichotomies and analytics anthropologists work with are related on a larger conceptual level.
On another note, it is interesting to consider how an ethnography of a disease can be written/researched. Vita is also, at some level, an ethnography of disease. However, the work he did was far more removed from the institution. Although the title of the book directly refers to the geriatric home where she lived, it was far more about the social ties that lie outside of the institution that penetrate individual care (or mistreatment in her case). The Body Multiple seemed to be far more about the sociality of treatment and the conceptualization of illness. While both authors elucidate the relationship between power and the medical field, her work seems to describe an embeddedness of power, rather than power as an outside, penetrating influence.
When thinking about how to write about this book, the first thing that comes to mind for me is the form. At first, when she mentions those who are used to flipping through channels may have an easier time with it, I was a bit put off. I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy going back and forth. And I didn’t quite understand why she wanted it set up like that. And through the first few chapters, I didn’t actually like having the stories, and the literary references split. I was so engrossed with the stories, with learning about her experiences at Hospital Z, with her interactions with patients, doctors, that when I had to go back and read about the literature, I was kind of annoyed, and didn’t care quite as much with comparison to the stories. It made me question the reason for the references to the literature in the first place. I felt the stories could hold on their own. But then she offers the quote from Latour, “A paper that does not have references is like a child without an escort waking in the night in a big city it does now know: isolated, lost, anything may happen to it” (30). But I still wasn’t quite convinced… Maybe I just had to get used to it, but by the chapter on coordination, when I went back to read the ‘theory’ it clicked. I finally could see how the literary references informed the stories. She makes the reader do more of the work of linking the theory and her stories, and I grew to like that. And I finally could understand better her reason for separating (but not ‘fragmenting’) the text – I feel she was enacting a partial connection of her own through the form of the text. With her discussion of partial connections in chapter 3, it clarified Strathern for me in a new way. And also the way she was looking at atherosclerosis. As a multiple – more than one and less than many (82). While I finally ‘got’ what she was trying to do, I’d be interested in discussing how this helps us think about ethnography. I was eventually engaged, but I’m not convinced of how I think it works as ethnography. Does ethnography necessarily have to take people as its object – what does it do when it takes objects, a disease, as its object?
3 Comments:
At 2:06 AM,
Jason Lau said…
We may first ask the question: What is this book about?
This book is about a disease, or a illness, or disease/illness, or whatever. Anyway, a thing.... a "thing" should be the appropriate description.. a thing called "atherosclerosis".
What is antherosclerosis? A medical term among experts, a signfier without a signfied (Because most people don't even have the concept of antherosclerosis, unless you are suffering from it), a pain, a series of inconvenience, a topic of discussions, inability to walk, an experience, fear, a sign of death, an event.
Yes, it is an event.
What is an event?
An event is "what has happened". But it is not just WHAT has happened, but also what has HAPPENED. An event is an action, a process, or duree, perhaps. An event is not just a THING, but the action, process, duree of the thing. "Thing" is an ontological question. It is there, there. But event is not. Deleuze said Duree is "the whole of relations". Event can be understood in this sense, the whole of relations. But it is not the WHOLE, in a complete sense. It is the whole in a fluid sense, or the flux.
But I have said "antherosclerosis" is a thing. A thing carries its ontological meaning. It exists though without a physical existence.
But isn't it contradictary? No, it is not. Because a thing is also an event. Ontology is also of the ontology of flux, relations, different forces. Then ontology has to be multiple. But ontology is not plural, please. Mol uses "ontologies". It doesn't make sense. Just like people saying there are two realities.
It is ontology intrinsically heterogenous, or multiple, to use her term. No... not ontologies.
Thank you for bear my incomprensible writing. After all, this book is ON philosophy.
At 10:51 PM,
Jenny K. said…
Like many others in this class, I found this text difficult to engage with. This may be due to personal reasons (my father is having his fourth surgery for antherosclerosis in a about a week), or perhaps it is due to the fact that I found the subtext far more interesting than the book’s main attraction. However, there were a few concepts that I found useful, and I also have a question about this text in relation to Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment.
In the subtext, Mol posits that ontological categories of race, gender, sex, illness, nature, culture, and disease have a striking commonality. These classifications were created by social scientists in an attempt to differentiate between the social and biological sciences (21). She takes this analysis a step further by elucidating their performative characteristics. I find this useful for this analysis seems to integrate ideas found in various different areas of feminism and anthropology. For example, the nature/culture divide is frequently discussed in science studies while Butler’s idea of gender performance is often reserved for feminism and feminist anthropology. More often than not, I have difficulty understanding how the various ethnographies we read (inside and outside of this class) tie together. Mol performs the intellectual labor of showing how the various dichotomies and analytics anthropologists work with are related on a larger conceptual level.
On another note, it is interesting to consider how an ethnography of a disease can be written/researched. Vita is also, at some level, an ethnography of disease. However, the work he did was far more removed from the institution. Although the title of the book directly refers to the geriatric home where she lived, it was far more about the social ties that lie outside of the institution that penetrate individual care (or mistreatment in her case). The Body Multiple seemed to be far more about the sociality of treatment and the conceptualization of illness. While both authors elucidate the relationship between power and the medical field, her work seems to describe an embeddedness of power, rather than power as an outside, penetrating influence.
At 7:52 AM,
rheabonita said…
When thinking about how to write about this book, the first thing that comes to mind for me is the form. At first, when she mentions those who are used to flipping through channels may have an easier time with it, I was a bit put off. I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy going back and forth. And I didn’t quite understand why she wanted it set up like that. And through the first few chapters, I didn’t actually like having the stories, and the literary references split. I was so engrossed with the stories, with learning about her experiences at Hospital Z, with her interactions with patients, doctors, that when I had to go back and read about the literature, I was kind of annoyed, and didn’t care quite as much with comparison to the stories. It made me question the reason for the references to the literature in the first place. I felt the stories could hold on their own. But then she offers the quote from Latour, “A paper that does not have references is like a child without an escort waking in the night in a big city it does now know: isolated, lost, anything may happen to it” (30). But I still wasn’t quite convinced… Maybe I just had to get used to it, but by the chapter on coordination, when I went back to read the ‘theory’ it clicked. I finally could see how the literary references informed the stories. She makes the reader do more of the work of linking the theory and her stories, and I grew to like that. And I finally could understand better her reason for separating (but not ‘fragmenting’) the text – I feel she was enacting a partial connection of her own through the form of the text. With her discussion of partial connections in chapter 3, it clarified Strathern for me in a new way. And also the way she was looking at atherosclerosis. As a multiple – more than one and less than many (82).
While I finally ‘got’ what she was trying to do, I’d be interested in discussing how this helps us think about ethnography. I was eventually engaged, but I’m not convinced of how I think it works as ethnography. Does ethnography necessarily have to take people as its object – what does it do when it takes objects, a disease, as its object?
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