Notes on materiality and sociality

John Law and Annemarie Mol

Abstract

In this paper it is argued that materiality and sociality are produced

together. In order to explore the implications of this suggestion, three
metaphors are developed through a series of note-like stories. The first
is that of semiotics. This suggests that materials are relational effects.
The second is that of strategy. Here it is suggested that strategy is
recursively and reflexively implicated in the performance of material-
ity. And the third is that of the patchwork. This is a way of exploring
the possibility that though material and social relations might be mat-
ters of local performance, they may not 'add up' to form an overall
pattern or structure.

Introduction

What is materiality? What is sociality?

Perhaps these are two different questions. Perhaps materiality
is a matter of solid matter. And sociality has to do with interac-
tive practices. Perhaps, then, sociology departs from matter.
Perhaps it 'departs' from it in two different senses: perhaps it
both rests upon it; and it goes beyond it. To say this would be to
hold on to materialism. And to idealism. Together. It would be
to hold on to a traffic between the two. An interchange.
Perhaps. But perhaps not. Perhaps materiality and sociality
produce themselves together. Perhaps association is not just a
matter for social beings, but also one to do with materials.
Perhaps, then, when we look at the social, we are also looking at
the production of materiality. And when we look at materials, we
are witnessing the production of the social. That, at any rate, is a
possibility. The possibility that we here explore.
© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 1995. Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford 0X4 lJF, UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
 Notes on materiality and sociality

We're after brevity, so we write in note form. And in these

notes we tell stories that are simultaneously about soeiality and
materiality. These are stories that have to do with the stability of
soeial-material production. Or, as it turns out, its laek of stabil-
ity. And we use our stories to explore three theory-metaphors for
sociality-materiality.
The first is semiotic. Our semiotics suggests that sociology and
materiology go together; and that materials are relational efieets.
It also suggests that social stability is linked to material distinc-
tion.
The second is that of strategy. Strategy, or so we suggest, is
also a matter of material distinction: recursive and reflexive mate-
rial distinction. Strategy then, both performs distinction and
derives from it. But instead of helping us to understand social
stability, strategy is about social change. About material inflation
and the social shifts with which it is linked.
The third theory-metaphor is that of the patchwork. It depends
on a sensitivity to difference, here and now. Or rather, it depends
on a sensitivity to the possibility that social and material rela-
tions don't add up. Or hang together as a whole. Semiotically, or
strategically. Which means that they are like a patchwork. That
all entities are local. And that what we thought were stabilities
are - unstable. What we thought had direction - shakes and
quivers.

Metaphor number one: materiality and semiotics

Material heterogeneity
Story 1: Primatologists tell stories about baboon society. Some
emphasise the power of elever old females.' But
Michel Callon and Bruno Latour^ are interested in
the character of baboon patriarchy. Its 'somatic
character. In their story there is hierarchy in baboon
society. At the top there is a large male baboon in his
physical and sexual prime. But it's pretty tough-going
at the top, because nothing stays in place for very
long. Sure, the head baboon can intimidate the
smaller male baboons in face-to-face interaction.
And he may convince the females that they should
mate with him. But the moment his baek is turned
his dominance is under threat. For he has few

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John Law and Annemarie Mol

extrasomatic resources with which to secure his

position. There are no prison walls, bayonets, files, or
secret policemen. Grass and sticks and rocks perhaps.
But in general he has, as the jargon puts it, few
resources for time-space distanciation. All that he has
is his intimidating physical presence. And what
happens to be around, there and then.

Are baboons capable of paranoia? We have no idea. All we

can be sure of is that in this account the head baboon sustains
the pyramid by means of personal interaction. But (this is the
point of the story) people aren't like baboons. They deal in both
social and technical relations; they produce (and simultaneously
shape) scientific knowledge, economies, industrial structures, and
technologies. They are, as the jargon puts it, heterogeneous engi-
neers,'' or engineer-sociologists."*

Story 2: Michel Callon^ tells how the French power utility,

filectricite de France, decided to create and sell an
electric vehicle. It's a story about heterogeneous
engineering on a grand scale, to do with ordering, and
indeed creating, all sorts of different bits and pieces.
For they couldn't create an electric vehicle without a
society fit for this to live in. And this was compli-
cated, filectricite de France needed to: shepherd
electrons into novel kinds of accumulators and fuel
cells; organise the efforts of scientists into laborato-
ries; break up rival companies and reorganise them to
produce vehicle bodies instead of petrol engines;
coerce local authorities into a post-industrial world
favourable to electrically powered public transport;
and retrain consumers to think of vehicles as a
practical way of moving from A to B rather than a
mode of conspicuous consumption.

Relational Materiality
The first two stories together suggest that the social isn't purely
social; and that if it were then it wouldn't hang together for very
long.^ It suggests that stability resides in material heterogeneity.
But notice something else. In these stories the bits and pieces
achieve significance in relation to others: the electric vehicle is a

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 Notes on materiality and sociality

set of relations between electrons, accumulators, fuel cells, labo-

ratories, industrial companies, municipalities, and consumers; it is
nothing more. Sometimes it's useful to talk about 'the electric
vehicle' without deconstructing all the other nodes-that-are-
really-networks. But in principle this could be done, for the latter
are also sets of more or less precarious relational effects: city
councils, industrial companies, consumers, electrons, electrodes,
laboratories - none can be said to exist in and of themselves. All
are interactive products.
So the metaphor behind Callon's story is semiotic: the bits and
pieces don't exist in and of themselves. They are constituted in
the networks of which they form a part. Objects, entities, actors,
processes - all are semiotic effects: network nodes are sets of
relations; or they are sets of relations between relations. Press the
logic one step further: materials are interactively constituted; out-
side their interactions they have no existence, no reality.
Machines, people, social institutions, the natural world, the
divine - all are effects or products. Which is why we speak of
relational materialism!'
Story 3: Bruno Latour^ describes how Louis Pasteur created a
network of bits and pieces in the process of develop-
ing, testing, and securing acceptance of the immunisa-
tion of cattle against anthrax. Bacteria, cultures,
microscopes, laboratories, laboratory assistants, farms
and farmers, cows, diseases, vaccines - all of these
and many more were assembled together.^ So the
story is one of scientific enterprise. But it also tells
about Pasteur 'himself. So who, or what, was he?
Well, this is complicated. There are many answers. He
was a physical body, an organism, a French citizen, a
science-politician, a laboratory-scientist, a family
member, a failed politician. It depends upon where
and how one looks. This, then, is the point: Pasteur
'the successful scientist' is an ordered network,'" a
relational effect. And also, under other circumstances,
a point in a network.
The conclusion: human actors are no different. This semiotic
relational materialism is non-humanist: like inanimate objects,
human actors are not primitive components or atoms. Humans
may, but need not be, actors; and actors may, but need not be,
humans."

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John Law and Annemarie Mol

Monism
If there are no fundamental distinctions in principle between dif-
ferent classes of entities then everything is, or might be, the same
in kind. Everything is, or might be, assembled in a network. And
everything is, or might be, dissolved. So we've learned - or
reminded ourselves - that semiotics is monist. But we've also
reminded ourselves that it's all about the formation of material
distinction. Distinction which may achieve qualitative significance.
But this is a contingent matter. For there is no order of things
made for once and all. Which means that semiotics adds fuel to
the bonfire of the dualisms. Divisions between the natural and
the social, mind and body, truth and knowledge, science and pol-
itics, structure and agency, or male and female - all can be
deconstructed.'^
Here's an example. Some say that humans are distinct from
machines because they can talk. But in semiotic terms this makes
no general sense, because it is to take a single possible distinction
between people and machines, and insist upon it as the measure
of last resort. Why should we do this?

Story 4: Sherry Turkle tells about children talking about

computers. And about whether these are alive:
'Elvira, four, says that [the computer] Speak and Spell
is alive 'because it has a talking voice in it'. Ingrid at
five: 'It's alive - it talks'. Randall, an eight-year-old,
says with an air of confidence and authority, 'Things
that talk are alive'. Kelley, six, gives an answer with a
different twist. She looks closely at the seven-by-ten-
inch Speak and Spell and pronounces, 'It's alive -
there's a man inside who can talk'. But eight-year-old
Adam . . . [says] 'Okay, so it talks, but it's not really
thinking of what it's saying. It's not alive.''^
The 'experts' have similar arguments about artificial
intelligence.

Sherry Turkle's stories suggest that the dividing line between

people and machines is negotiable. And that sometimes it is
difficult to draw a line at all. So that what we see is heteroge-
neous. Think of that heterogeneity. People have dental fillings,
spectacles, drugs, heart pacemakers, condoms, alarm clocks,

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 Notes on materiality and sociality

dresses, telephones, shopping bags, money, books, identity cards,

bus passes and ball-point pens. And machines have drivers,
pilots, users, service-people, designers, victims, onlookers, look-
outs, cleaners, bricoleurs, adapters, admirers and abusers.

Gradients of durability
So baboons live without most of the objects that stabilise human
relations. While humans cannot be clearly distinguished from the
materialities they live with. In the last instance there are no stable
ontological differences between entities. This is what the semiotic
metaphor suggests. But in the first instance, and indeed in the
second and the third, there are differences. Question: what should
we make of these?

Story 5: A few miles outside Utrecht the fields are filled with
large blocks of concrete and heavily armoured
bunkers. These are part of a line of defence built by
slaves for the Nazis during World War Two. The
object was to preserve the Thousand Year Reich.
Happily, though the concrete blocks remain, they
didn't work. Like the elaborate nineteenth century
system of flooding the polders which failed to saved
Netherlands from the Nazis in 1940, the blocks didn't
stop the Allied advance in 1945.

So some differences in durability maintain themselves for

longer than others. The concrete bunkers still stand there, in the
Dutch fields. Nearly fifty years of cold wet European winters
have not undone all the work of those who built them. This is
why concrete is so beloved of generals, architects, and road-
builders. It often keeps on going. Is often durable.
Does this fit with a semiotics of materiality? If we thought of
concrete as a 'thing in itself we'd have to say no. But suppose
we imagine that concrete is not a thing in itself. Suppose we say,
instead, that it is a set of relations: relations (for instance) with
the weather; the molecular forces that make it up; and the rein-
forcing rods that run through it. Then we can guess that it
will take 1,000 years for the Dutch weather to dissolve the
Nazi bunkers, to break the chemical bonds, to rust the reinforce-
ments. (Though, of course, under different circumstances, the
forces released in an atomic explosion might do the job in a

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John Law and Annemarie Mol

microsecond). So a material semiotics asks how things measure

up to one another to generate relative durabilities. It doesn't
deny durabilities themselves.

Story 5 (cont):
The object-networks which were supposed to obstruct
allied tanks did not stand in their way. The soldiers
are gone, and when the rain drives across the flat
Dutch landscape the concrete blocks shelter cows. So
the concrete is still there. But it isn't an element in a
Nazi network any more. That network was less
durable than some of its concrete elements.

Metaphor number two: materiality and strategy

Strategy and durability

Perhaps it's best to think of semiotics as a way of clearing the
ground. Perhaps it's a way of helping us to imagine that sociality
and materiality go together. That they form themselves together.
That socials and materials come together, as a package. And that
stability or durability have something to do with material hetero-
geneity. But where do we go next?

Story 6: Let's talk about the bridges over the Long Island
Parkway. F''or these are very low. But why? Langdon
Winner tells it so:
'Robert Moses . . . built his overpasses according to
specifications that would discourage the presence of
buses on his parkways. . . . the reasons reflect Moses'
social class bias and racial prejudice. Automobile-
owning whites. . . would be free to use the parkways
for recreation and commuting. Poor people and blacks,
who normally used public transit, were kept off the
roads because the twelve-foot tall buses could not
handle the overpasses'.'" And they were, accordingly,
kept away from the public park at Jones' Beach.

Like the Nazi bunkers, Robert Moses' bridges over the Long
Island Parkway are still there. They suggest, as Winner puts it,
that 'artifacts have polities'. They witness how artifacts may be

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 Notes on materiality and sociality

strategically designed to have politics. Bridges may be built to

maintain the distribution between rich and poor or white and
black. They embody 'social relations' in materials more durable
than those of face-to-face interaction. This, then, is a hurtful
move away from baboon-land.

Story 6 (cont):
But it isn't so simple. Nowadays many blacks in the
United States have cars, and those who do can cruise
the Long Island Parkway. So we are reminded again
that durability is a relational effect. Though the
bridges haven't gone (despite their continuing combat
with the New York winters) most of the buses have:
the bridges have lost some of their strategic
significance.

But there's another point here. How did the bridges come into
being in the first place? Answer: they were designed. Robert
Moses drew them, on paper. So this is the point: strategy resides
in differences in material durability, manipulability, and scale.
Indeed, strategy is inconceivable without re-presentation; without
relations in which one material signifies another.
Let's look at this more closely:

Story 7: In the design office of Bristol Engines in the middle

1950s they sat down and started to design a new jet
engine. A few designers scratched their heads, and
played with equations about pressure, temperature,
and combustion efficiency. They used pencils and
sheets of paper. The object was to invent a schematic
plan of an engine with an efficient combustion cycle.
Let's say that this was a conceptual engine. Certainly
it was simple: a few symbols and line drawings.
The designer's cross-section was passed the drawing
office. Here the question was: could it be converted
into a set of engineering drawings? Could the concep-
tual engine be translated into a drawn engine? Could
it be persuaded to hang together physically and
mechanically? Were the right materials available? To
answer these questions, a large number of draftspeo-
ple, engineers and materials scientists produced a
'real' design, a drawn engine, a huge number of

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John Law and Annemarie Mol

drawings and instructions to machinists about how to

cut metal. This was complex: that is, it was complex
by comparison with the conceptual engine. Though
not when compared with the 'real engine' to be
installed in an aircraft.
Then the drawn engine went to the workshop to be
converted into a wooden engine, and then a metal
engine. Why a wooden engine? Answer: sometimes
paper engines don't work in three dimensions; things
don't fit. But at the same time specialist machinists
tried (though not always with success for sometimes
the demands were impossible) to translate their
instructions into metal: to create a metal engine.

This story is all about strategy and materiality: again it sug-

gests that strategy resides in material distinction. For without
these it is inconceivable. Literally. Let's emphasise this. It is not
possible to conceive of what might be unless it can be re-
presented. Imagined. Or (this is the point of strategy, what makes
it possible) to represent and imagine it in materials that are rela-
tively simple, relatively malleable, and relatively tractable. So
strategy is also the (attempted) performance of material distinc-
tion. Of certain kinds of material relations. Of relations in which
one set of materials comes to stand for others. In sum: strategy
both organises and produces material distinction.

Story 7 (cont):
Which is why the engineers drew engines. And worked
with mathematical symbols. The latter were more
tractable: more easily changed. And yet they stood -
or were supposed to stand - for the 'real thing'.'^ For
if this were not the case, then perhaps we could all
build aeroengines in our back yards at weekends.

So strategy is the performance of teleology embedded in varia-

tions of scale, manipulability, and durability. It depends on and
enacts material diversity. It is a way of defining re-presentation:
the links between related materials with differing degrees of
tractability. And it is a form of linking, a set of relations, that is
full of hazards. For the malleable representative may turn out to
be a poor representative. Is the representative legitimate? That is
the question.

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 Notes on materiality and sociality

Story 7 (cont):
The metal engine was tested, and it failed. It was
tested again, and it failed again. And again. And
again. Only after many failures did it begin to
behave like the conceptual engine, and the drawn
16
engine.

New material forms

So strategy implies materiality. It's a metaphor for thinking
about the organisation of materiality. For imagining relatively
stable distinctions between materials. Though - a caution here -
it doesn't depend on the idea that there's a human strategist lurk-
ing behind every material object. For strategies, strategic loci,
and indeed 'intentions' are like the layers in a silicon chip.
They're recursive effects produced in a place where materials dif-
fering in durability and manipulability join together. They're an
effect generated by workable translation or exchange between the
more and the less durable.'^ They aren't people.
We don't want to invent cybernetic myths about the origins of
strategy. But perhaps we can say something about it once it's
under way. For the possibility of simulating the more durable in
materials that are less durable, or at any rate more manipulable,
entails the possibility of representative advantage. If (but only if)
the logic is one of strategic competition, there may be pressure to
create new kinds of materials, materials that are more manipula-
ble, materials which represent more and more in less and less. So
strategic performance may lead to new material forms; indeed,
perhaps to material escalation and inflation. And so to a certain
kind of material instability.
This is the reasoning: what is manipulable one day (like the
scroll and the quill pen) is less so the next with the invention of
the book and the fountain pen. That is, it becomes relatively less
manipulable: it may be easier to write with a fountain pen than its
quill equivalent. But the process goes on. For the pen is followed
by the typewriter and carbon paper. And these are followed by the
word processor, its floppy discs, and the database with its elec-
tronic networks. If the logic is one of competition and control
there is pressure towards material inflation, material instability.
Which is, roughly speaking, one way of talking of the history of
the West since the early-modern period - and also explains the
(overblown) promises made about every 'information revolution'.

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John Law and Annemarie Mol

Story 8: This was the logic of organisation of the aeroengine

ofifice: the generation of representative ephemera.
Algebra is relatively quick and easy: mistakes or
algebraic non-starters don't really matter if they are
quickly discovered. But the discovery that drawings
do not adequately 'represent reality' is much more
costly. For by this stage there is an army of people,
all drawing. And a whole lot of specialist equipment.
And time. And money. Even so it's better to uncover
problems in the drawing office than on the test rigs.
And much, much, better to discover them on test rigs
than once the engine is inside an aircraft.

Nowadays things are different: designs are simulated, both con-

ceptually and spatially, with computer-aided design. In theory, at
any rate, the translation between the computer screen and the
finished product is more secure. So this is material inflation - the
creation of new, strategically relevant, material forms.

Multiple strategies, multiple materialities

Story 9: The electrodes in the batteries they made for the

electric vehicle misbehaved. When they got polluted
they didn't make electricity. Renault was supposed to
make bodies for electric vehicles, but it didn't fancy
this. Instead it mounted a campaign for conventional
cars and against the electric vehicle. French con-
sumers didn't fancy their new role either, as 'mature'
and 'ecologically responsible' members of a post
industrial society. Instead they went on seeking social
distinction by buying conventional cars. And the local
authorities refused to favour public transport and
restrict private petrol-driven cars. The result: the
electric vehicle came unstuck. It never came into
being.

Here the problem of legitimate representation wasn't resolved.

The imagined world, the simulated world, of Electricite de
France wasn't successfully translated into other material forms:
the junction of translation broke down. But this is a chronic
problem, not one specific to felectricite de France. For the trans-
lation between materials that represent and those that are repre-

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 Notes on materiality and sociality

sented is always uncertain. It may turn out that what is manipu-

lable is actually telling stories only of itself. So material distinc-
tions performed in strategy are always insecure. Stability may be
achieved, but it may not. For there are no dualisms or ultimate
divisions. The stable and the transient are never separated for
ever after. And any particular strategy is also insecure.
But this has an important consequence. It means that the 'best'
strategy is usually impure. It's a mix of different strategies. Not
one alone.'*
Story 10: We're in a large laboratory and we're listening to its
managers. They're talking about the Librarian's
request for money to sort the archives out:
Andrew: 'What archives? I didn't know that we had
any. Where are they?
Tim\ 'In the basement . . . It is full of them, box
after box, that people have put down there
when they ran out of space in their offices'.
Andrew: 'What's the problem with just chucking
them out?'
Tim: 'The law says that we can't destroy them.
We have to keep our organizational
records'.
Andrew: 'I didn't know anything about this! When I
finished my last job I just threw out six
filing cabinets of papers. You've no idea
what a relief it was - like a great weight off
my shoulders!'
John: 'If you want my opinion, we should just
put a match to them!'
Terry: 'But it's worrying if we're supposed to be
keeping them'.
Andrew: 'Listen, this is quite a lot of money they
are asking for. . . . What's to stop us
drawing a line in history at 1990 and
deciding on what we should be doing from
now on, and doing that? Meanwhile we'll
say 'no' to their [request for money] for
sorting out the archives that are already
there. '^

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John Law and Annemarie Mol

There's a humanist: reading of this story. It says that these

people, the managers, are 'deciding' what to do next. But that's
not the way we want to read it. For instead of talking about men
with strategies we want to say that this talk is a product of
strategic material distinction. Indeed, of multiply-ordered mater-
ial distinction. For we want to suggest that there are at least
three distinct strategic logics here. The first makes us think of
Weber. Let's call this administration. At any rate, it has to do
with legality, rationality and due process. It's voiced by Tim who
talks of the legal requirement to keep records. The second is
iconoclastic. There isn't much to go on here - only John's single
comment. But other data makes us think that this iconoclasm is
an expression of scientific charisma and grace, a semiotics of
vision. So it's Weber again, this time in romantic mode. And the
third logic? Running through Andrew's talk there's a line of
pragmatism and opportunism, so perhaps it's a strategic semi-
otics of enterprise. In which case Andrew's closing judgement is
one which artfully juxtaposes administration and enterprise. He
tells that while the rules of administration will be obeyed in the
future, it's too expensive to sort out past archives - and never
mind the law.^°
The argument is that there is narrative and strategic hetero-
geneity. Which means that there is also material heterogeneity,
for each strategic logic performs material relations in its own dis-
tinctive way. For instance, papers move from irrelevance (in
vision) via a necessary nuisance (in enterprise) to legal records (in
administration).
So the co-existence of multiple strategic semiotics implies the
co-existence of multiple forms of materiality. Which means that
the world is a kind of kaleidoscope in which materiality is contin-
ually being organised and reorganised. Perhaps at times these
materialities compete. But this isn't necessarily the case, for a mix
of strategies may be stronger than one alone.^' Agents, papers,
machines - all are being redrawn. Kaleidescopically. Multi-strate-
gically:

Story 11: A scientist working in the same laboratory says: '. . .

you've got to understand what you are doing.
Otherwise [the instrument] is just a black box where
you put in this sample and get data out. All the
commands in [this computer program] are quite
simple, and will allow you to process the data. But

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 Notes on materiality and sociality

you have to have some knowledge about x-ray

diffraction. So the philosophy is that you should
have some idea about x-ray diffraction and what you
can do with it'.

This talk describes a further strategy. And another kind of

material distinction. Perhaps it's a matter of vocation. At any rate
humans are told and performed as responsible and thoughtful
puzzle-solvers, and machines are turned into tools or aids that
have to be guided. Which can be contrasted with, for instance,
administration, in which responsibility is taken away from
humans and given to machines:

Story 12: '[In order to ensure radiation safety] we need a new

hardware arrangement which removes the need for
written protocols. Protocols can [work] but your
advice is that [we shouldn't use them] for a long
time. Sooner or later people slip up on procedures.
So in a reasonable time the hardware should be
modified'.

Here the skilful people who 'master' machines have disap-

peared. Suddenly people are untrustworthy. Hardware is needed
to replace them. Which means that the boundary between
humans and machines isn't settled but shifts, being drawn in one
way here and another there. Which means that materialities (and
actions and organisations too)^^ are multi-strategic and kaleido-
scopic. It means that they're decentred.

Metaphor number three: patchwork

Materiality is decentred: so suggest our stories about strategies.

Better, materialities are decentered. There are multiple materiali-
ties performing themselves in manifold ways. So another question
follows. Do these different materialities fit together? How do they
relate?
It seems that sometimes materialities do fit together. For
instance, they may fit together within strategies. For strategy is a
narrative method for pulling material differences together into a
single kind of story. But what happens if materialities are local
arrangements? Local and decentred? What can we tell of these

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John Law and Annemarie Mol

if it turns out to be difficult to gather them together? What

happens if there isn't a single field to unravel? What happens if
there are no interrelated strategies? The answer, or so we want to
suggest, leads us to the logic - the multiple logic - of the patch-
work, in which we move from one place to another, looking for
local connections, without the expectation of pattern 'as a whole'.

Story 13: He's a surgeon. He's in his consulting room. A

patient comes in. They talk for a few minutes. Then
the patient takes his trousers off and lies down on
the examination table. The surgeon puts some gel on
the patient's ankle. And then picks up the probe of
an instrument and rests it on the patient's skin, just
above a blood vessel. 'Pshew, pshew', the apparatus
says. The surgeon listens to the pitch of this sound.
Why the pitch? What does it signify? Here's the
answer: it tells something about the velocity of the
bloodstream. The higher the pitch the faster the
blood flow. And the faster the blood flow the greater
the obstruction in the arteries of the leg. The greater
the extent of arteriosclerosis.

Story 14: She's a midwife. She's in her consulting room. A

pregnant woman comes in. They talk for a few
minutes. Then she takes of her sweater and lies on
the examination table. The midwife puts some gel on
the pregnant belly. And then she puts a probe on the
tight skin, just above the place where the foetus is
likely to be. 'Pshew, pshew', the apparatus says. The
midwife listens. She listens to the frequency of the
sound. So why does she do this? Why the frequency?
The answer is that it says something about the
heartbeat of the unborn child. If the sound is fast
and regular then the baby is doing okay. If not,
there may be a problem.

Story 15: He's a technician. He's working on an apparatus. He

replaces a component. And then places the probe
belonging to the apparatus on his wrist and listens.
He frowns. There's nothing to be heard. He fiddles
with the apparatus some more. Puts the probe back
on his wrist and listens again. Suddenly

288 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 1995

 Notes on materiality and sociality

there is a sound. 'Pshew, pshew' it goes. He smiles. Why

does he smile? The answer is that the sound says some-
thing about the apparatus. It tells him that the probe is
emitting ultrasound again, and picking up its reflections.
It tells him that the apparatus is working.

Three stories. But how are they related? How are their materi-
alities related? What kind of stories could we tell about those
relations? About the link between them?
Option one. We could say: each of these stories is about the
same machine; each is about an apparatus called 'Doppler'; and
about what happens to 'Doppler' in different contexts. The appa-
ratus is a piece of ultrasound technology. And the contexts are to
be found in various parts of health care. There's nothing to stop
us telling a story in this way. It's the kind of story they often tell
in the sociology of technology. But there's a problem: it is that it
assumes a lot about materiality; and in particular, it assumes that
there is material continuity. Which means that it stops us asking
questions about materiality. The social departs from pre-existing
matter. Or it shapes it. That is: the objects may be manipulated,
but their identities are relatively stable. In this case: the object
manipulated is 'the' Doppler apparatus.
Option two would be to say that the links between our stories
are of no importance, and instead to stress their differences. It
would be to say: each of these stories is about a different strat-
egy. That is, it's about another way in which materiality is dis-
tributed, in a specific place, according to a specific logic. This
would lead us to say that different 'Dopplers' are being per-
formed. Thus in the first story 'Doppler' is instrumental in diag-
nosing clogged vessels, in the second it helps to assess the health
of an unborn child, while in the third it itself has been turned
into the object of diagnosis and assessment. But it's not just that
different Dopplers do different things. The elements that make
them up differ too - as for instance in the case of the Doppler
sound. First it is 'the stenosis'; second, it represents 'the heart-
beat'; and third, it stands for 'the soundness of the apparatus'.
This is a nice kind of story, for it dissolves the idea that there is
a stable object, Doppler, that stays the same from one place to
another. An object in which durability resides. An object with
which the social can interact.
But there's a third option. This is to go neither for overall
links, nor to move to closed off, isolated and fragmented worlds.

© The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 1995 289

John Law and Annemarie Mol

Instead, it is to ask about the possibility that there are partial

connections. Partial and varied connections between sites, situa-
tions, and stories." This, then, is the patchwork option. It's to
imagine that materials and social - and stories too - are like bits
of cloth that have been sewn together. It's to imagine that there
are many ways of sewing. It's to imagine that there are many
kinds of thread. It's to attend to the specifics of the sewing and
the thread. It's to attend to the local links. And it's to remember
that a heap of pieces of cloth can be turned into a whole variety
of patchworks. By dint of local sewing. It's just a matter of mak-
ing them.

Story 16: Like the midwife, the surgeon puts gel on the skin.
On the place where he will put the Doppler probe.
The technician doesn't bother, for he's not interested
in detail.
Like the surgeon, the technician works in the hospi-
tal. Here the midwife is different. Her office is in an
old house in town which she shares with several oth-
ers.
Sometimes when a vascular patient hears the
Doppler he asks the surgeon: 'Is that my heartbeat,
doctor?' 'Yeah', replies the doctor. And if it's fast he
may add: 'Are you nervous?'
But the midwife tells the pregnant women that the
heartbeat of her unborn baby is twice as fast as that
of an adult. 'Don't worry, this sounds fine, this is as
it should be'. (So both are talking about heartbeats
and nerves. But different kinds of heartbeats and dif-
ferent sorts of nerves).
The technician only sees the apparatus because
someone sent him a form to complain about it. And
the surgical patients come to the surgeon's office
with complaints, too. 'Doctor, it hurts, my leg does,
when I walk. I hardly get to walking any more these
days'. But it's different for the midwife. She uses her
Doppler apparatus regularly in routine check-ups
for pregnant women. There's no need for the
woman or her baby to complain. It happens any-
way.

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 Notes on materiality and sociality

No, this isn't a story: it's bits and pieces from a whole list of
possible stories. We could go on and on. There are endless stories
to tell. Endless stories about practices. About interactions. About
designs. About coincidences. About sequences. About logics.
About inclusions and exclusions. Endless stories about the kalei-
doscope of materialities. Some of those stories sometimes make it
possible to say that these Dopplers are single entities being used
in 'different ways'. And other stories make it possible to say that
we're dealing here with 'different entities'; they suggest that there
is material multiplicity. And then there are stories of a third kind.
Stories which explore the possibility that these Dopplers are dif-
ferent. And the same. And different. And the same. Depending
on where and when and how you tell your story.^"* Gel is a link
between the probes - though not in all cases. The hospital is a
link between Dopplers - though not every time. Heartbeats form
a partial connection between the sounds of Doppler - though
they are different heartbeats. Doppler is a part of the problem-
solving process - but this isn't always so, for sometimes it goes
and looks for problems. Go and look. Trace connections. Partial
connections. Here. There. Somewhere else again. Relational
materialism doesn't just reside in objects. It's also a way of telling
stories.

Story 17: When a dominant male baboon looks away, his

society collapses. But what of human society?
Isn't the answer this? The moment a human turns
his - or even her - head and looks away, the world
may start to change. Sometimes, perhaps, there are
networks. Sometimes, again, there are strategies.
Sometimes those strategies brace themselves, one
against another, and hold together. But sometimes
what we find is partiality. Partial connections.
Patchwork. Which means that materialities may
shift. Socialities may move. And this may happen
even if we concentrate and try to observe their multi-
ple realities. For matter isn't as solid and durable as
it sometimes appears. And if it does hold together?
Well, this is an astonishing achievement.

University of Keele Received 15 March 1993

University of Limburg Finally accepted 1 March 1994

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John Law and Annemarie Mol

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Michel Callon, Nicholas Dodier and the

anonymous referees who commented on an earlier draft of this
paper. Annemarie Mol is grateful to the Dutch Organisation for
Scientific Research (NWO) for its postdoctoral fellowship sup-
port.

Notes
1 See Haraway, (1990).
2 See Callon and Latour, (1981).
3 See Law, (1987: 113).
4 See Callon, (1987).
5 See Callon, (1980).
6 See also Latour, (1987a, 1987b) and Law, (1991b).
7 Note that semiotics, in its classical form, insists that the sign is arbitrary with
respect to nature. This is not assumed here.
8 See Latour, (1983; 1984).
9 'Science', says Latour, in a memorable parody of Clausewitz' famous phrase,
'is politics pursued by other means', (Latour; 1983: 168).
10 In practice any kind of Pasteur may be treated as a script, a relational effect,
or the ordering of a network: his body; his 'personal' life; his character as a
political actor; and so on. For the notion of script developed in this semiotic
manner, see Akrich, (1992).
11 Indeed, in some statements of the theory, the term 'actant' is used in prefer-
ence to 'actor'. See, for instance, Irreductions in Latour (1984).
12 On the latter, in related mode, see Mol, (1991).
13 Turkle, (1984: 45). See also Woolgar, (1991).
14 See Winner, (1986a); the quotation is drawn from page 23.
15 For a development of the argument about the character of representation see
Latour, (1990).
16 The story of the OL 320 engine is described in Law (1992).
17 Cooper, (1992) calls this distinction a 'semio-technical hierarchy'. On the rela-
tion between subjectivity and strategy see Foucault, (1981: 95).
18 Boltanksi and Thdvenot, (1987) argue the opposite. They say mixtures
between different justifications are less stable than those which are pure.
19 We are grateful to the Editors of The Sociological Review, and the managers
concerned for permission to print this exchange.
20 This argument is spelled out more fully in Law, (1994).
21 For this point developed in a somewhat different way, see Latour, (1991).
22 For the notion of the production of organisation, see Cooper and Burrell,
(1988).
23 The notion of partial connections is explored in an intriguing and inspiring
manner by Marilyn Strathem, (1991).
24 For further detail on the Doppler case, see Annemarie Mol, (1992).

292 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 1995

 Notes on materiality and sociality

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