on page 62 she writes, "All self-evidence has vanished. When the patient's feelings and the results of the pressure measurements contradict each other, they are no longer signs of a single object. The story that relates pain and pressures falters. What to do?" and on 63 she writes, "A hierarchy between subjective "complaints" and objectifying "laboratory findings" is institutionalized in the very routine that says that all patients with clinical disease go to the lab before further therapeutic measures are considered. And yet it isn't solid. There are other modes of establishing coherence as well. Sometimes the clinic is on the top of the hierarchy. Pressure measurements are not necessarily "believed" in." I found this section, chapter 3, to be particularly interesting. The disconnect that occurs sometimes between the "subjective" account of the patient and the "objective account" of the medical practitioner is interesting. The fact that the doctor cannot "feel" what the patients pain yet can measure that pain is intriguing. two different people (doctor and patient, tests and interview) complete the picture of one body.
The Body Multiple is a work by Annemarie Mol that argues, through theoretical and ethnographic work, how to subjectify, rather than objectify disease, in particular, atherosclerosis of the leg, a painful condition in which the walls of arteries become clogged. She considers the many positions and circumstances in which to understand how atherosclerosis is understood and acted upon, whether from the perspectives of patients, doctors, or pathologists in the hospital. The disease’s relationship to the patient, looks, feels, and is different to the disease’s relationship to the surgeon, atherosclerosis cut open is different from atherosclerosis hidden by skin. By using ontology, or the study of being, to direct understanding of disease and medicine, Mol produces and describes social connections and networks between things as a multiplicity, but contends multiplicity does not imply fragmentation but “permanent possibility of alternative configuration” (164). Atherosclerosis is not one disease, nor one object, but it is many, according to Mol. Her specificity to this notion of many is described when she states, “many entities are involved: knives, questions, telephones, forms, files, pictures, trousers, technicians, and so on. But none of these are solid characters : after a little more investigation, all of them, like the surgeon, appear to be multiple” (143). Mystery Object at Noon, also has attributes of multiplicity, and through telling of many stories in many ways, or descriptions of anecdotes, Mol and Weerasethakul create dynamics of perception in which many ideas, and objects can convey uniformly, yet hold on to what makes things different from each other. I do not think Weerasethakul meant to create an easily understood narrative, but one of tension and uncertainty. The film direction is also mysterious, and I found myself paying close attention, really desiring to make sense. And once I thought I knew, something occurred that negated my understanding of the situations.
Annemarie Mol’s thesis is “no object, no body, no disease is singular. If it is not removed from the practices that sustain it, reality is multiple.” Objects do not exist in vacuums; a patient experiences a disease differently than a doctor, even a specialist who too lives with it every day. The facts of the disease (and therefore, the disease itself) are inherently divergent. When looking at objects through this lens, the line between objects and subjective understanding becomes more complicated. (It reminded me of the problems we were discussing in class regarding writing ethnography.) In this approach, no object is reducible to any single truth; the value, therein, is that it allows one to accept that objects inhabit different spaces (as we have previously seen) without having to reconcile those differences.
Mol’s The Body Multiple explores atherosclerosis as a disease and an illness, and how the information of the two are equally constructed and dependent on each other. When patients and doctors interact, a patient often understands and describes their disease through the emotional and physical interference it creates in their lives. The doctors use this information to draw conclusions, but they are not necessarily interested in the feelings of the patient. This is what Foucault refers to in Birth of a Clinic as as the medical gaze. Emotions have no place in a diagnosis. However, the feelings are equally if not more relevant to the patient than the diagnosis of their disease. By pointing this out Mol is getting at the fact that diseases have multiple realities, as objects and as subjective conditions of individuals. She writes, “Day-to-day reality, the life we live, is also a fleshy affair. A matter of chairs and tables, food and air, machines and blood. Of bodies. That is a good reason not to leave these issues in the hands of medical professionals alone but to seek ways, lay ways so to speak, to freely talk about them” (27). Her ethnography is her pursuit to show how patient perspective and professional perspective work together to make the disease reality. She looks closely at the relationship between patients and professionals, between patients and the disease, and professionals and disease and through her observations she analyses how pain is measured, talked about, understood, and constructed.
The Body Multiple is an intriguing, synecdochic take on hospitals’ (and their/its inhabitants’) interactions with atherosclerosis, from a perspective entwined with, but separate from, medical practice. Though she begins by describing her aims - as they extend from the history of the field - in a way that links her authorial perspective with sociology, Annemarie Mol’s narrative shows divergences from that tradition that give her book consequent force due to its comprehension of what it is like living with this disease. Herein lies, what I find to be, the most interesting aspect of her study: an ethnographic exploration of multiplicity in said context, centered around this connecting feature in objects. A passage from chapter 1, “Doing Disease,” highlights my fascination with the text. Mol writes “The driving question no longer is ‘how to find the truth?’ but ‘how are objects handled in practice?’.... A new series of questions [thus] emerges. The objects handled in practice are not the same from one site to another: so how does the coordination between such objects proceed? And how do different objects that go under a single name avoid clashes and confrontations? And might it be that even if there are tensions between them, various versions of an object sometimes depend on one another?.... This book tells that no object, no body, no disease, is singular. If it is not removed from the practices that sustain it, reality is multiple.... But attending to the multiplicity of reality is also an act.” It is an act that I believe Mol pulls off extraordinarily well, primarily because her form fits her function. In discussing “the body multiple” she provides us with a multiplicitous text. By mixing two separate, though connected and continuous narratives on the page - thus juxtaposing one type of argument (description and analysis of her field work, which in itself is an amalgamation) with another (analysis of relevant works); as well as, on the most basic level, thereby creating an apposition of font types (placing italics adjacent to what Microsoft Word deems “regular”) and sizes - she fashions her text as an object similar to the instruments, bodies, physiological parts, people, and disease, to which The Body Multiple is dedicated. This book provides us (our class on Things) interaction with a new type of object - one whose multiplicity, connectivity and networks both create and comment on these aspects in objects. The Body Multiple is a thing that comments on the very nature of its own being through others: it is created by evaluating characteristics in other forms that are common to itself: it is then made, essentially, by evaluating itself, and is able to evaluate itself only by being made.
Mol’s main text is an ethnography of atherosclerosis (or the hardening of the arteries) comprised of interviews and observations with doctors and patients and the subtext discusses medical anthropology, philosophy and sociology in order to re-contextualize atherosclerosis as more than an object or disease. By using these two parallel texts Mol illustrates the complex realities that occur in Hospital Z, patients bodies and elsewhere. Rather than looking at atherosclerosis through multiple and separate perspectives (medical, cultural, sociological) Mol chooses to utilize all these fields to create a unified object which reminded me of actor-network theory (combining relationships between objects and concepts).
I was also intrigued by Mol’s section on pain in chapter 3 entitled ‘coordination’.
“Crucial to enacting a clinical diagnosis is the patients capacity to feel pain” (65).
Pain is completely subjective yet we have decided on an objective scale of the sensation of pain (usually in hospitals it is 1-10). Pain tolerance is influenced by various different factors such as genes, gender (estrogen can act as a natural pain killer), and individual psychology (“mind over matter”). It is not as simple as rating pain on a 1 to 10 scale, which Mol demonstrates not only in this section but also throughout the entire book. This reminded me of the different cultural pain tolerances that doctors supposedly are trained to identify and also points to a larger theme I think Mol is trying to highlight: that we need to question and reformulate our ontologies. More specifically , Mol’s study aims to provoke questions about how the body multiple and its disease might be done 'well' (7).
(Here’s one article about cultural differences in pain tolerance-http://journals.lww.com/ajnonline/Fulltext/2010/04000/Culture_s_Effects_on_Pain_Assessment_and.29.aspx )
One of the things you learn in a biology class is just how many different parts there are in your body and it is baffling. In the section, "Founding and Following," Mol discusses the fact that even though you never thing of all the cells and all of the arteries that are connected to your pinkie they are always there and always working. Mol uses a disease inside of a leg to describe this idea. A doctor will ask you questions and examine you and then test a piece afterwards just to be sure. But if a disease is just in your leg, why do they need to test a tiny sample? They test it because seeing the disease itself allows you to see the whole picture. Why do they have so much in common? Mol describes this by saying, "They have as their referent a single disease, residing inside the body" (p. 36). There are so many little pieces that the only way to get the whole picture is to see the tiniest piece. Even after they amputate your leg, pathologists are there to open it up so they can make sure that everything was done to make sure that you would be ok.
In "The Body Multiple", I was thrown off by the format of Mol's writing. There were two passages going on at the same time throughout each chapter and I found it hard to follow. I do feel that she is trying to create an overall theme regarding atherosclerosis and the general medical field. Everything in this field works together, from the tools to the patients and doctors. The doctors would not be able to be doctors if they didn't have patients to perform on. Patients would not be able to be helped unless they voiced their symptoms, which cannot show up without pain. She constantly emphasizes the fact that in a way everything works together, but also that it cannot be seen in just one perspective. The clogged arteries can represent pain and the inability to walk for a patient, while it represents research for the pathologist. It seems as if she is trying to say they are all connected through a similar theme yet they are all so different in each situation.
I think its interesting how she points out that an object's multiplicity appears when attached to practices and it seems to be related to how the different disease is (as objects) when its coordinated or it lacks that coordination (in the form of conflict). a pathologist isn't aware or concerned with how her/his practice manipulates an object until it comes into conflict or direct overlap with a different practice. Despite the multiplicity always existing, she seems to talk a lot about the coordination of these practices as necessary to having these multiple objects singularly "hang together" as a linguistic or bodily object. Does that mean a less coordinated structure of practice creates more or less multiple objects? I only thought about this because it's very difficult to think about disease and body as anything but singular (which is implicit in the intro when she discusses epistemology and other kinds of analysis of disease that came before).
I found The Body Multiple to be an intriguing read for a number of reasons. Firstly, Mol's writing style is candid in light of the subject matter, which would I imagine, read otherwise as a very intellectually authoritative depiction. Instead, she eliminates that assumption by allowing other voices to be heard in the narration. Secondly, as I read, I was reminded of early semester discussions we'd had about the idea of arrangement. In the Body Multiply, I appreciated the idea of arrangement as an evolved concept shown through the notion of enactment. Similar to the layering nature of atherosclerosis, Mol brings on perspective by making us aware of processes layered that enact [or bring about] the realization of other things in order to uncover multiple meanings.
Early on, Mol made a great point when stating that "objects come in being--and disappear--with the practices in which they are manipulated. And since the object of manipulation tends to differ from one practice to another, [reality multiplies]." (5)
To demonstrate such multiple realities, we are directed for instance to attest to interpretation, i.e. the symptomatic discourse between disease and illness.
I'm interested in the theory which she outlines and expounds in the bottom half section of each page. She also states at many points her intent to write a philosophic account of the ethnography... this, I'm not so sure if she is doing, though that may be up for grabs. Either way, within much of the theory and philosophy that I am currently reading and have read throughout my years at Lang, the author most often than not claims there to be a certain defining element, if you will, of humankind and of human society. Just as some examples: Marx believes that we are all subject to the ways in which we produce our subsistence, i.e. our labor-power which produces it... while Durkheim believes the most fundamental and essentially human element to be sociality itself, for anywhere one will encounter humans, they will accordingly encounter the social... Foucault cannot be found along either of these routes, but he is concerned with the power/knowledge nexus and how that can be understood functioning within and through human society... So, what all of these people, among countless others, have in common is their pursuit to discover the lowest abstractable function of humanity... For Annmarie Mol, this is quite difficult to discern. However, I think what she is getting at is space and its changing composition due to the factors that caused its creation and enable it to continue its existence. For Mol, these factors are human actors. Mol believes it to be important to remember that, especially in a medical setting, not everybody (including doctors!) is always honest, genuinely sick, etc... This is not to say that their information is not to be trusted, but to point out that the presentation of information in various settings is an important aspect of the story taking place. Therefore, these actors for Mol are more like enactors, in that they perform enactments depending on the role they are occupying in a given space. She cites the "sick role" one takes on when they enter a medical space... So, there are socially defined meanings inherent in the various enactments, which are codified modes of interacting based on the situation through the taking-on of a role. She also goes on to discuss how an object can come within the periphery of a sociologist's gaze, and how that is another example of how space in which enacting can take place is created. For, an object for a sociologist is something that is a part of their "technical competence," in that they somehow have the abilities necessary to discuss it, utilizing their particular vocabulary. Hence, I am not sure Mol is trying to say that these spaces for roles and enacting are purely physical spaces, such as in the hospital... I think she wants to say that they can be created in any medium, i.e. intellectual space, etc... however, she wants to say that we willingly enter into spaces, take on the role particular to that space, where an enactment follows, in which (maybe) something of ourselves is left behind in the last enactment, and the one before that, all of our multiple bodies combined in essence to compose our Selves. This last sentence is my take, but I'm fairly confident it is what she is trying to get across.
11 comments:
on page 62 she writes, "All self-evidence has vanished. When the patient's feelings and the results of
the pressure measurements contradict each other, they are no longer signs of a
single object. The story that relates pain and pressures falters. What to do?"
and on 63 she writes, "A hierarchy between subjective "complaints" and objectifying "laboratory
findings" is institutionalized in the very routine that says that all patients with
clinical disease go to the lab before further therapeutic measures are considered.
And yet it isn't solid. There are other modes of establishing coherence as well.
Sometimes the clinic is on the top of the hierarchy. Pressure measurements are
not necessarily "believed" in."
I found this section, chapter 3, to be particularly interesting. The disconnect that occurs sometimes between the "subjective" account of the patient and the "objective account" of the medical practitioner is interesting. The fact that the doctor cannot "feel" what the patients pain yet can measure that pain is intriguing. two different people (doctor and patient, tests and interview) complete the picture of one body.
The Body Multiple is a work by Annemarie Mol that argues, through theoretical and ethnographic work, how to subjectify, rather than objectify disease, in particular, atherosclerosis of the leg, a painful condition in which the walls of arteries become clogged. She considers the many positions and circumstances in which to understand how atherosclerosis is understood and acted upon, whether from the perspectives of patients, doctors, or pathologists in the hospital. The disease’s relationship to the patient, looks, feels, and is different to the disease’s relationship to the surgeon, atherosclerosis cut open is different from atherosclerosis hidden by skin. By using ontology, or the study of being, to direct understanding of disease and medicine, Mol produces and describes social connections and networks between things as a multiplicity, but contends multiplicity does not imply fragmentation but “permanent possibility of alternative configuration” (164). Atherosclerosis is not one disease, nor one object, but it is many, according to Mol. Her specificity to this notion of many is described when she states, “many entities are involved: knives, questions, telephones, forms, files, pictures, trousers, technicians, and so on. But none of these are solid characters : after a little more investigation, all of them, like the surgeon, appear to be multiple” (143).
Mystery Object at Noon, also has attributes of multiplicity, and through telling of many stories in many ways, or descriptions of anecdotes, Mol and Weerasethakul create dynamics of perception in which many ideas, and objects can convey uniformly, yet hold on to what makes things different from each other. I do not think Weerasethakul meant to create an easily understood narrative, but one of tension and uncertainty. The film direction is also mysterious, and I found myself paying close attention, really desiring to make sense. And once I thought I knew, something occurred that negated my understanding of the situations.
Annemarie Mol’s thesis is “no object, no body, no disease is singular. If it is not removed from the practices that sustain it, reality is multiple.” Objects do not exist in vacuums; a patient experiences a disease differently than a doctor, even a specialist who too lives with it every day. The facts of the disease (and therefore, the disease itself) are inherently divergent. When looking at objects through this lens, the line between objects and subjective understanding becomes more complicated. (It reminded me of the problems we were discussing in class regarding writing ethnography.) In this approach, no object is reducible to any single truth; the value, therein, is that it allows one to accept that objects inhabit different spaces (as we have previously seen) without having to reconcile those differences.
Mol’s The Body Multiple explores atherosclerosis as a disease and an illness, and how the information of the two are equally constructed and dependent on each other. When patients and doctors interact, a patient often understands and describes their disease through the emotional and physical interference it creates in their lives. The doctors use this information to draw conclusions, but they are not necessarily interested in the feelings of the patient. This is what Foucault refers to in Birth of a Clinic as as the medical gaze. Emotions have no place in a diagnosis. However, the feelings are equally if not more relevant to the patient than the diagnosis of their disease. By pointing this out Mol is getting at the fact that diseases have multiple realities, as objects and as subjective conditions of individuals. She writes, “Day-to-day reality, the life we live, is also a fleshy affair. A matter of chairs and tables, food and air, machines and blood. Of bodies. That is a good reason not to leave these issues in the hands of medical professionals alone but to seek ways, lay ways so to speak, to freely talk about them” (27). Her ethnography is her pursuit to show how patient perspective and professional perspective work together to make the disease reality. She looks closely at the relationship between patients and professionals, between patients and the disease, and professionals and disease and through her observations she analyses how pain is measured, talked about, understood, and constructed.
The Body Multiple is an intriguing, synecdochic take on hospitals’ (and their/its inhabitants’) interactions with atherosclerosis, from a perspective entwined with, but separate from, medical practice. Though she begins by describing her aims - as they extend from the history of the field - in a way that links her authorial perspective with sociology, Annemarie Mol’s narrative shows divergences from that tradition that give her book consequent force due to its comprehension of what it is like living with this disease. Herein lies, what I find to be, the most interesting aspect of her study: an ethnographic exploration of multiplicity in said context, centered around this connecting feature in objects. A passage from chapter 1, “Doing Disease,” highlights my fascination with the text. Mol writes “The driving question no longer is ‘how to find the truth?’ but ‘how are objects handled in practice?’.... A new series of questions [thus] emerges. The objects handled in practice are not the same from one site to another: so how does the coordination between such objects proceed? And how do different objects that go under a single name avoid clashes and confrontations? And might it be that even if there are tensions between them, various versions of an object sometimes depend on one another?.... This book tells that no object, no body, no disease, is singular. If it is not removed from the practices that sustain it, reality is multiple.... But attending to the multiplicity of reality is also an act.”
It is an act that I believe Mol pulls off extraordinarily well, primarily because her form fits her function. In discussing “the body multiple” she provides us with a multiplicitous text. By mixing two separate, though connected and continuous narratives on the page - thus juxtaposing one type of argument (description and analysis of her field work, which in itself is an amalgamation) with another (analysis of relevant works); as well as, on the most basic level, thereby creating an apposition of font types (placing italics adjacent to what Microsoft Word deems “regular”) and sizes - she fashions her text as an object similar to the instruments, bodies, physiological parts, people, and disease, to which The Body Multiple is dedicated. This book provides us (our class on Things) interaction with a new type of object - one whose multiplicity, connectivity and networks both create and comment on these aspects in objects. The Body Multiple is a thing that comments on the very nature of its own being through others: it is created by evaluating characteristics in other forms that are common to itself: it is then made, essentially, by evaluating itself, and is able to evaluate itself only by being made.
Mol’s main text is an ethnography of atherosclerosis (or the hardening of the arteries) comprised of interviews and observations with doctors and patients and the subtext discusses medical anthropology, philosophy and sociology in order to re-contextualize atherosclerosis as more than an object or disease. By using these two parallel texts Mol illustrates the complex realities that occur in Hospital Z, patients bodies and elsewhere. Rather than looking at atherosclerosis through multiple and separate perspectives (medical, cultural, sociological) Mol chooses to utilize all these fields to create a unified object which reminded me of actor-network theory (combining relationships between objects and concepts).
I was also intrigued by Mol’s section on pain in chapter 3 entitled ‘coordination’.
“Crucial to enacting a clinical diagnosis is the patients capacity to feel pain” (65).
Pain is completely subjective yet we have decided on an objective scale of the sensation of pain (usually in hospitals it is 1-10). Pain tolerance is influenced by various different factors such as genes, gender (estrogen can act as a natural pain killer), and individual psychology (“mind over matter”). It is not as simple as rating pain on a 1 to 10 scale, which Mol demonstrates not only in this section but also throughout the entire book. This reminded me of the different cultural pain tolerances that doctors supposedly are trained to identify and also points to a larger theme I think Mol is trying to highlight: that we need to question and reformulate our ontologies. More specifically , Mol’s study aims to provoke questions about how the body multiple and its disease might be done 'well' (7).
(Here’s one article about cultural differences in pain tolerance-http://journals.lww.com/ajnonline/Fulltext/2010/04000/Culture_s_Effects_on_Pain_Assessment_and.29.aspx )
One of the things you learn in a biology class is just how many different parts there are in your body and it is baffling. In the section, "Founding and Following," Mol discusses the fact that even though you never thing of all the cells and all of the arteries that are connected to your pinkie they are always there and always working. Mol uses a disease inside of a leg to describe this idea. A doctor will ask you questions and examine you and then test a piece afterwards just to be sure. But if a disease is just in your leg, why do they need to test a tiny sample? They test it because seeing the disease itself allows you to see the whole picture. Why do they have so much in common? Mol describes this by saying, "They have as their referent a single disease, residing inside the body" (p. 36). There are so many little pieces that the only way to get the whole picture is to see the tiniest piece. Even after they amputate your leg, pathologists are there to open it up so they can make sure that everything was done to make sure that you would be ok.
In "The Body Multiple", I was thrown off by the format of Mol's writing. There were two passages going on at the same time throughout each chapter and I found it hard to follow. I do feel that she is trying to create an overall theme regarding atherosclerosis and the general medical field. Everything in this field works together, from the tools to the patients and doctors. The doctors would not be able to be doctors if they didn't have patients to perform on. Patients would not be able to be helped unless they voiced their symptoms, which cannot show up without pain. She constantly emphasizes the fact that in a way everything works together, but also that it cannot be seen in just one perspective. The clogged arteries can represent pain and the inability to walk for a patient, while it represents research for the pathologist. It seems as if she is trying to say they are all connected through a similar theme yet they are all so different in each situation.
I think its interesting how she points out that an object's multiplicity appears when attached to practices and it seems to be related to how the different disease is (as objects) when its coordinated or it lacks that coordination (in the form of conflict). a pathologist isn't aware or concerned with how her/his practice manipulates an object until it comes into conflict or direct overlap with a different practice. Despite the multiplicity always existing, she seems to talk a lot about the coordination of these practices as necessary to having these multiple objects singularly "hang together" as a linguistic or bodily object. Does that mean a less coordinated structure of practice creates more or less multiple objects? I only thought about this because it's very difficult to think about disease and body as anything but singular (which is implicit in the intro when she discusses epistemology and other kinds of analysis of disease that came before).
I found The Body Multiple to be an intriguing read for a number of reasons. Firstly, Mol's writing style is candid in light of the subject matter, which would I imagine, read otherwise as a very intellectually authoritative depiction. Instead, she eliminates that assumption by allowing other voices to be heard in the narration. Secondly, as I read, I was reminded of early semester discussions we'd had about the idea of arrangement. In the Body Multiply, I appreciated the idea of arrangement as an evolved concept shown through the notion of enactment. Similar to the layering nature of atherosclerosis, Mol brings on perspective by making us aware of processes layered that enact [or bring about] the realization of other things in order to uncover multiple meanings.
Early on, Mol made a great point when stating that "objects come in being--and disappear--with the practices in which they are manipulated. And since the object of manipulation tends to differ from one practice to another, [reality multiplies]." (5)
To demonstrate such multiple realities, we are directed for instance to attest to interpretation, i.e. the symptomatic discourse between disease and illness.
I'm interested in the theory which she outlines and expounds in the bottom half section of each page. She also states at many points her intent to write a philosophic account of the ethnography... this, I'm not so sure if she is doing, though that may be up for grabs. Either way, within much of the theory and philosophy that I am currently reading and have read throughout my years at Lang, the author most often than not claims there to be a certain defining element, if you will, of humankind and of human society. Just as some examples: Marx believes that we are all subject to the ways in which we produce our subsistence, i.e. our labor-power which produces it... while Durkheim believes the most fundamental and essentially human element to be sociality itself, for anywhere one will encounter humans, they will accordingly encounter the social... Foucault cannot be found along either of these routes, but he is concerned with the power/knowledge nexus and how that can be understood functioning within and through human society...
So, what all of these people, among countless others, have in common is their pursuit to discover the lowest abstractable function of humanity... For Annmarie Mol, this is quite difficult to discern. However, I think what she is getting at is space and its changing composition due to the factors that caused its creation and enable it to continue its existence. For Mol, these factors are human actors. Mol believes it to be important to remember that, especially in a medical setting, not everybody (including doctors!) is always honest, genuinely sick, etc... This is not to say that their information is not to be trusted, but to point out that the presentation of information in various settings is an important aspect of the story taking place. Therefore, these actors for Mol are more like enactors, in that they perform enactments depending on the role they are occupying in a given space. She cites the "sick role" one takes on when they enter a medical space... So, there are socially defined meanings inherent in the various enactments, which are codified modes of interacting based on the situation through the taking-on of a role.
She also goes on to discuss how an object can come within the periphery of a sociologist's gaze, and how that is another example of how space in which enacting can take place is created. For, an object for a sociologist is something that is a part of their "technical competence," in that they somehow have the abilities necessary to discuss it, utilizing their particular vocabulary. Hence, I am not sure Mol is trying to say that these spaces for roles and enacting are purely physical spaces, such as in the hospital... I think she wants to say that they can be created in any medium, i.e. intellectual space, etc... however, she wants to say that we willingly enter into spaces, take on the role particular to that space, where an enactment follows, in which (maybe) something of ourselves is left behind in the last enactment, and the one before that, all of our multiple bodies combined in essence to compose our Selves. This last sentence is my take, but I'm fairly confident it is what she is trying to get across.
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