Contemporary Drug Problems 39/Summer 2012 265

Book review essay:

After methods, after subjects,
after drugs

BY CAMERON DUFF

After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, by John

Law (London: Routledge, 2007), 188pp, $185.04.
Doing Sensory Ethnography, by Sarah Pink (London: Sage,
2009), 168pp, $121.00.
Just another Night in the Shooting Gallery? The Syringe,
Space and Affect, (2010) by Nicole Vitellone, Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space, 28, 867-880.
The Science of the Syringe, (2011) by Nicole Vitellone,
Feminist Theory, 12(2), 201-207.

The differentiation of subjects and objects, of the human and

the nonhuman, is perhaps the most significant and enduring of
all ontological and epistemological commitments in the social
sciences. To imagine social inquiry without reifying the sub-
ject in all its diverse guises—without distinguishing subjects
from the variety of “things” that comprise the world of inter-
action and experience—offends both the primary methodolog-
ical conventions governing social science and, ostensibly, its
broader moral and ethical purpose. Yet the writings reviewed
below conjure a social science after, beyond, or in the absence
of the subject and its objects. Each in their own way reflects
Bruno Latour’s (2003) seminal contention that “a strong dis-
tinction between humans and non-humans is no longer
required for research purposes” (p. 78) in the social sciences.
© 2012 by Federal Legal Publications, Inc.
266 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

This contention stands among the primary epistemological

and ontological principles guiding the application of actor-
network theory (ANT) in the contemporary social sciences
(Law, 2004, pp. 12-15). In a measure of the intellectual and
empirical force of ANT’s provocations, the commitment to a
“symmetrical” method that refuses to privilege the “knowing
subject” at the expense of the objects of this knowing is
observable in much recent innovation in the social sciences.
This includes feminist studies of science, technology and soci-
ety (Bacchi, 2009; Sismondo, 2010); the turn to nonrepresen-
tational accounts of everyday life (Thrift, 2007); analysis of
information and communication technologies (Adams, 2009);
and the study of health and illness (Mol, 2002; Gomart, 2002).
Building on these innovations, the present review addresses
some of the major implications of ANT’s eschewal of the
human/nonhuman dyad for the study of alcohol and other
drugs (AOD). I wonder in particular what substantive differ-
ence this eschewal augurs for the analysis of drug use, and the
distinctive contours of such a study.

I begin by assessing the implications of ANT’s refusal to reify

the subject and its objects for the selection of methods in AOD
research, drawing on John Law’s treatment of these themes in
his 2004 book After Method. Taking up Law’s offer of a rela-
tional and processual alternative to the “static” (pp. 7-10)
methods of traditional social science inquiry, I will next exam-
ine Sarah Pink’s (2009) account of a “sensory ethnography.”
The various innovations associated with sensory ethnography
exemplify the intellectual and empirical promise of ANT,
while positing a series of methods and procedures ideally suit-
ed to the study of AOD use in diverse settings. Nicole
Vitellone’s work (2010, 2011a, 2011b) illustrates the contours
of a research program that harnesses the force of ANT and
sensory ethnography in the articulation of a “novel social
science of AOD use” (Rhodes, 2009, pp. 198-199). Note,
however, that the readings enacted in this review will not
always prioritize the exegesis of the selected texts, but will
rather seek to identify the coordinates of a novel praxis of
 267

AOD research after method, after subjects, and after drugs

(see also Gomart, 2002; Demant, 2009; Fraser and Moore,
2011; Weinberg, 2011). With this goal in mind, the review will
assess the intellectual and empirical dividend to be derived
from such a praxis, as well as the general orientation of a more
affective, relational, and processual understanding of AOD use
(Vitellone, 2010).

After methods

Law’s argument in After Method proceeds from the conviction

that the contemporary social sciences require the supposition
of a fixed and stable social ontology in order for their methods
to “work” (2004, pp. 24-25). In a memorable formulation,
Law describes this ontology—and the picture of reality that it
presents—as “independent, anterior, definite and singular”
(pp. 31). It builds on the “common sense” proposition of a
reality “out there,” external to the observations of a remote,
perceiving subject and thus available to conscious reflection
and scientific inquiry (pp. 24-25). Reality is, in this sense, said
to be “independent” of the perceiving subject in that it exists,
it unfolds, regardless of the interest a subject may or may not
invest in it. It follows that reality exists “anterior to...our
reports of it” (pp. 24-25). As the common medium of experi-
ence, the knowable world must be regarded as bearing an inde-
pendent existence with its own history, its own temporal logic
separate from any attempt to investigate or know that history.
As such, reality subsists in a “definite set of forms and rela-
tions” (p. 31), which endures in its distinctiveness without
interference from the invigilation of a custodial subject.
Reality is also “singular,” therefore, the “same everywhere”
(p. 24) and thus common for all who experience it. Having
established that the objects of empirical inquiry are fixed, sta-
ble and singular, social science proceeds to the elaboration of
a suite of research methods equal to the solidity of this reality.
Law provides the example of alcoholic liver disease to illus-
trate this point, noting that medical researchers generally
268 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

downplay the cultural contexts of alcohol use in concentrating

on the ways this use interferes with the normal functioning of
a healthy liver, and the ways this interference might be arrest-
ed. Again, the key facts of this disorder are regarded as stable,
knowable, and resistant to cultural variation; one substance in
volume (alcohol) merely encounters another (the liver), pro-
ducing stable, predictable effects (pp. 70-76).

Law draws two general conclusions from his analysis of tradi-

tional social science methods and the ontologies that sustain
them. The first, familiar to scholars of science and technology, is
that far from faithfully reporting the dynamics of a stable, inde-
pendent reality, social scientific methods are intimately involved
in the production or delineation of this reality. While Law most-
ly eschews the “hard” constructivist claim that reality is nothing
more than an appearance produced in discourse, his analysis
relies on the key ANT contention that methods participate in the
articulation of the reality they purportedly only describe. Far
from producing a stable facsimile of reality, the application of
method helps to bring a specific world into view, emphasizing
certain features while obscuring others, soliciting our attention.
Methods are always selective in this sense, and they inevitably
contribute to the ways in which realities are posed as objects for
analysis, discussion and conjecture (pp. 13-14).

Law’s second, and arguably more significant observation, is

that in positing a fixed, stable, and definite reality, social sci-
entific methods are likewise best suited to the analysis of
fixed, stable, and definite entities (pp. 2-7). Traditional meth-
ods remain unsatisfactory in an approach to “the ephemeral,
the indefinite and the irregular” (p. 4): those transient, unsta-
ble, dynamic, or otherwise “messy” features of the world and
its realities. This is no doubt the most controversial claim in
After Method, with Law insisting that traditional methods are
increasingly unable to accommodate the contingent and dynamic
flux typical of modern cultures in a global world. Law adds
that the kinds of problems the social sciences are now called
upon to arbitrate demand new, more sensitive and reflexive
 269

methods better suited to the challenges of late capitalism,

globalization, postmodernity, the digital and technological
divide, and so on (pp. 13-14). The rest of Law’s book is devoted
to the elaboration of his own alternative, what he calls “method
assemblage” (pp. 84-85).

While Law insists that all social science methods ought to be

understood as assemblages—inasmuch as traditional methods
invariably draw together (or assemble) distinctive objects,
problems, representational schemas, techniques, and modes of
inquiry (pp. 84)—the notion of method assemblage as Law
deploys it relies on an altogether different ontological “hinter-
land” (pp. 32-35, 160). Method assemblage in this stricter
sense is premised on a picture of social reality understood as
“interactive, remade, indefinite and multiple” (p. 122). Each
of these terms serves as a messy alternative to the “independ-
ent, anterior, definite and singular” properties of the more
familiar ontologies characteristic of traditional social science
inquiry. In addressing mess, method assemblage is conceived
of as a methodological innovation designed to overcome the
human/nonhuman dyad so characteristic of traditional social
science (pp. 132-133). Despite the array of sometimes confus-
ing jargon that Law relies on to describe method assem-
blage—confusion that is only partially abated in recourse to
the book’s glossary—the principal features of this approach
are simple enough to convey once the two general conclusions
noted above have been absorbed.

To recap, method assemblage is built on the claim that the

application of research methods always contributes to
the delineations of reality, just as it reflects the contention that
the contemporary social sciences should concern themselves
with the messiness of that reality. Research methods equal to
this mess will necessarily “detect, resonate with, and amplify
particular patterns of relations in the excessive and over-
whelming fluxes of the real” (p. 14). If all methods contribute
to the expression of a particular reality, then method assem-
blages must adopt a stance that is “a combination of reality
270 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

detector and reality amplifier” (p. 14). This is the interactive

dimension of method assemblage, combining various tech-
niques from various sources that subsequently interact or res-
onate with the world they are designed to explain or make
sense of. All research methods are relational in this sense, in
that they always adapt to (or are modified by) contacts in the
field. Method assemblage simply makes a virtue of this con-
tingency, elevating it to a kind of methodological truism. It
follows that methods are: remade in the course of their deploy-
ment; adapted to the demands of the field; modified in the
hands of their users; transformed by research participants;
interpreted by research sponsors; neglected by rival traditions;
and exposed for their shortcomings in light of the complexi-
ties they are expected to elucidate. Experienced AOD
researchers will no doubt find much that is familiar in Law’s
discussion of the uses of research methods in practice, partic-
ularly the improvisatory, spontaneous feel of method assem-
blage, which remains a feature of so much applied AOD
research, notwithstanding the confident assurances of research
grant applications and ethical review protocols.

The effect of all this interference between the application of

research methods, their reception in the field, and subsequent
manifestation in research findings is to render the objects of
such methods “indefinite and multiple” (p. 122)—indefinite
because the realities that methods are called upon to examine
are themselves indefinite, complex, dynamic and ephemeral,
and multiple because of the ramifying effects of social scien-
tific inquiry itself. After a century and a half of established
social science research (and millennia of careful observation
before that), the vast majority of the objects of social inquiry
have by now been rendered in innumerable divergent and com-
peting iterations. Drug use is a perfect example of this profu-
sion. Given the extent of scientific analysis of AOD use, it is
no longer possible (if it ever were) to identify a discrete con-
sensus regarding the characteristic features of either drugs or
the individuals and groups who consume them. One must now
speak of multiple, overlapping, disjunctive scientific accounts
 271

of AOD use, each with its own distinctive features and atten-
dant methods of disclosure and discussion (Fraser & Moore,
2011, pp. 1-8). While this is not so different from Foucault’s
treatment of the order of discourse in scientific production,
Law updates this account, furnishing a host of finely drawn
vignettes describing the workings of social scientific inquiry
in various domains, and the mess of findings and practices this
inquiry supports (p. 35).

Such indeed is the mess that method has bequeathed to the

social sciences, and such is the mess that AOD researchers
find themselves in. And yet Law’s way out of this mess pro-
vides a highly original basis for investigating the consumption
of alcohol and other drugs. Applied to this end, Law’s account
of a social science “after method” draws attention to the role
of objects, spaces, bodies and things in the mediation of AOD
use (see Vitellone, 2011a, pp. 204-206). It discloses the work
of myriad objects, bodies, and spaces in the active task of pro-
ducing and transforming the agencies necessary to initiate
practices like AOD use. Indeed, Law distributes or spatializes
agency, attributing it both to (human) actors understood in a
conventional sense, and to “actants” regarded as any nonhu-
man entity, object, substance, or process that makes a differ-
ence in a network of force relations or actions/behaviors (see
Latour, 2005, pp. 70-72). This distinction forces one to
acknowledge—in the context of injection drug use, for exam-
ple—the presence of the drug itself as an agent; the human
body amid other bodies; the needle and the syringe; cultural
conventions governing the course of drug consumption; the
spatial circumstances of the event including the visibilities
and “manifest absences” (p. 84) enacted therein, among an
everramifying throng of “actants” and agencies. Importantly,
Law does not imagine a remote subject who serves as the
author of this agentic production, and instead accommodates a
panoply of spaces, bodies and objects in the modulations of
practice (pp. 68-69). These actors and “actants” transform the
characteristic features of practices like AOD use, requiring an
equivalent method assemblage to document the trajectories of
272 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

the diverse human and nonhuman agents that comprise this

assembly. In a telling invention, Law describes the constituents
of method assemblage as “inscription devices,” each designed
to record the activity of varied agents in the course of their
participation in a particular actor network (pp. 18-20).

Inscription devices are subsequently diverse—from formal sci-

entific methods, to the activity of research objects and materi-
als, the vagaries of academic gossip, and the cultural norms of
individual research settings—and yet each reveals the “relative
messiness of practice” (p. 18). Each is designed to capture and
convey the everyday work of producing scientific knowledge.
Each concerns itself with the distinctive materials, objects, and
things that enable scientists and practitioners to generate
research data, and to translate these data into research findings.
These materials typically range from state-of-the-art research
technologies, to familiar, timeworn research instruments like
the humble notepad and pencil by which the researcher docu-
ments spontaneous hunches. All record the messiness of
research practice and each, therefore, contributes to the messi-
ness of knowledge production in the social sciences. Law’s
point is that method assemblages must include an array of
inscription devices to record the traces of this messiness in
vivo. While Law goes on to canvass various case studies
(drawn from his own research collaborations) to illustrate the
characteristic features of method assemblages, researchers
looking for more simple guidance regarding the selection of
methods and the identification of appropriate research proto-
cols are likely to be disappointed. Law touches here and there
on the practice of research methods, but is far more concerned
with the articulation of a novel methodology for the social sci-
ences. The title of Law’s book is deeply misleading in this
sense. The book is peppered with anecdotes drawn from Law’s
extensive research archive, and yet it fails to provide a suffi-
ciently robust sense of where one might start in constructing a
method assemblage of one’s own. It is for this reason worth
turning to Sarah Pink’s (2009) far more pragmatic account of a
sensory ethnography for guidance in such matters.
 273

After subjects

Pink’s sensory ethnography is primarily concerned with the

presentation of a suite of research methods open to the myriad
affective and material textures of everyday life. In so doing, Pink
provides a means of applying the insights derived from Law’s
account of method assemblage to the analysis of social and polit-
ical “problems” like AOD consumption. Pink, of course, pres-
ents her own method assemblage, alert to the activity of the
objects, spaces, and bodies assembled in the event of sociality,
and suggestive of a novel methodology for the analysis of this
activity in the ongoing investigation of AOD use. Each of Pink’s
methods relies on the sensitivities of the various bodies (both
human and nonhuman) assembled in the course of social science
research, harnessing these sensitivities in the generation of novel
kinds of research data. Sensory ethnography treats the body as a
discrete research instrument, responsive to the contexts and
worlds it inhabits, and retaining the traces of this habitation in
unique ways (pp. 23-25). Pink provides numerous examples
from her own research regarding the merits of this innovation,
including work on the “sensory experience” of home and the
ways everyday domestic activities like washing dishes, cleaning,
cooking, and dressing oneself orient the body and its senses in a
domestic space. These activities require “embodied sensory
knowing,” which in turn supports the various identity practices
by which a particular self is contrived (pp. 52-53). Both home
and identity are produced in a set of sensory practices that
enmesh or embed the body in place, establishing relations
between bodies and sites, even though these practices and rela-
tions are not always the subject of conscious reflection. The
body acts in its senses, generating a kind of corporeal knowledge
that differs from cognition or intentionality. Pink’s understand-
ing of the body is, in this respect, reminiscent of Law’s account
of inscription devices, even though sensory ethnography is
offered more in parallel to ANT than in debt to it.

Pink is arguably more interested than Law in establishing for

the social sciences a unique means of recording the traces of
274 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

the body’s inscriptions; its inescapable imbrication in the

places and worlds of its sensory investments such as the home,
community, neighborhood, and belonging (pp. 65-69). Locating
this effort within recent debates in anthropology, sociology,
and geography regarding the role of the senses in (human)
practice, sociality and experience, Pink insists that the body
itself remains the most powerful register of these inscriptions
(pp. 7-22). While sensory ethnography no doubt privileges the
sensitivity (or receptiveness) of human bodies, Pink’s discus-
sion of the relationality of bodies and contexts clears the way
for an ethnography of “things” (Bennett, 2010) alert to the
inscriptive force of objects, spaces, and “actants” in the organ-
ization of social life. Foremost among these inscriptions are
the traces bodies effect on their environment, and the marks
environments in turn leave on bodies. Construed in the fashion
of method assemblage, Pink’s account of place, context and
environment provides a means of incorporating the objects,
spaces, and processes that comprise these milieux within the
remit of a sensory ethnography, even if she ultimately falls
short of this innovation herself (pp. 23-25).

Pink’s account of the relationality of bodies and places does,

however, provide the first general principle of sensory ethnog-
raphy: “seek to know places in other people’s worlds that are
similar to the places and ways of knowing of those others.” To
know the places of other people’s worlds requires that one
attend to the ways places leave their mark on bodies and the
ways these marks transform the experience of dwelling in
place. These marks are stored in the “perception, memory and
imagination” (p. 23) expressed in bodies and rendered know-
able by the techniques of sensory ethnography. This “anthro-
pology of the senses” (p. 1) might at first appear to reify the
sensual properties of a “natural” body—something the author
comes close to in her reading of phenomenology—and yet
Pink’s ethnography is ultimately concerned with the human
“sensorium”: with the ways in which the senses are constantly
modified and translated in practice, in culture, and in lan-
guage. The senses are, for Pink, always “emplaced” in a cul-
 275

tural, historical and political milieu, such that one can speak
of the contingency of the senses and their dynamic history
(pp. 11-15). Senses are never merely natural in this regard.
They are always in and of the world, mingling and diverging,
“swapping properties” (Latour, 1994, pp. 801-805) with the
objects of this sense perception in a continuum of “sense-world-
sensing.” This, no doubt, makes sensory ethnography messy in
the sense Law reserves for the term, yet it also highlights the
value of ANT’s rejection of the subject/object dyad for social
science research.

As soon as the senses are denaturalized, as soon as they are

taken from the subject and returned to the world, sensory
ethnography claims for itself a novel methodology and a novel
research mandate. This mandate addresses the worlding of the
senses amid the sensing of the world. It is interested in the
“entanglements” of bodies and places, senses, and life-worlds,
and how these entanglements transform the ways bodies sense
(and make sense of) their world (pp. 29-32). Sensory ethnog-
raphy provides the tools for documenting this sensing of the
world in process, in its relations. In assessing these tools, Pink
emphasizes the use of visual and communication technolo-
gies, which she argues provide a basis for recording a broader
array of sensory data. Drawing on memory, perception, whim-
sy, imagination, reason, and observation, the use of film and
photography, auto-ethnography, creative writing, interviews,
and walking tours, among other more conventional qualitative
techniques, provides a basis for documenting more of the
interactive and indefinite dimensions of social life noted
above. This kind of ethnography takes seriously Law’s insights
into the production and reproduction of reality in diverse
assemblages of human and nonhuman actors, furnishing vari-
ous methods for mapping these assemblages in place.

Pink’s discussion of these methods and procedures is divided

into three sections: the first addresses methodological and
theoretical issues to do with the various ontological and epis-
temological investments typical of sensory ethnography. This
276 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

discussion mostly concerns the kinds of places-bodies-senses-

worlds problems noted above. Pink then turns to consider the
practice of sensory ethnography, devoting individual chapters to
participant observation, the conduct of in-depth interviews, and
the use of visual methods like film and photography. Through-
out, Pink is concerned to take what remain mostly familiar
ethnographic techniques and rework them in the service of a
novel anthropology of the senses. The extent to which Pink
achieves this goal is probably moot, with much of her discussion
covering ideas, problems, and advice common to many existing
introductions to qualitative methods in the social sciences. Still,
these chapters contain useful insights into the cultivation of sen-
sory data in ethnographic research. All speak to the need to
address oneself in research settings to the “feeling” of what hap-
pens; to the events that punctuate everyday experience and the
traces these events leave in participants’ sensing of events and
their passage. Pink insists that the collection of research data
must, for these reasons, remain as generous and all-encompass-
ing as possible. This calls for new ways of “sharing” the
“emplaced experiences and sensory subjectivities of . . . research
participants” (p. 49). Pink recommends the careful probing of
memories, perceptions, longings, imagination, desires, plans,
and dreams to achieve this understanding. This can be done for-
mally through interviews that focus more on the feeling of phe-
nomena than their meaning or wider social, political and cultural
significance—or, it can be achieved in observational contexts
whereby researchers attend to the sensed traces of the world,
both in their own bodies and in the bodies of human and nonhu-
man participants active in this world. Pink further emphasizes
the value of “eating together” and “walking with others” as
simple techniques for generating rich accounts of “being there”
amid the lived sense of place. Pushing sensory ethnography a
little, one could add that an ethnography of place might just
as profitably concern itself with the materiality of place as the
affective, with the activity of the objects and “actants” embedded
in place, and their role in the production and reproduction of
context.
 277

Pink goes on to consider the role of audio-visual methods in

the practice of sensory ethnography, before closing with chap-
ters on analyzing and reporting sensory data in the preparation
of ethnographic findings. I will leave the consideration of
analysis and reporting for my discussion of Nicole Vitellone’s
work below; however, it is worth briefly noting the promise
offered in Pink’s assessment of visual methods for the study of
AOD use. Pink argues that the rapid proliferation of ever-
cheaper and more accessible audio-visual technologies offers
a great opportunity for research innovation in the social sci-
ences. In what has become something of a well-worn theme in
recent visual ethnography, Pink discovers in the explosion of
digital technologies like cameras and mobile phones the
means of quickly and efficiently gathering all kinds of unique
sensory data. Examples of these data include: digital voice
recordings collected in the course of walking interviews; the
gathering of still photography and digital film in the docu-
menting of movement and mobility; as well as image elicita-
tion and sensory commentary (pp. 103-112). Importantly for
Pink, the great advantage of these emerging audio-visual tech-
nologies is the scope they offer for documenting and analyz-
ing the interconnectedness, or “multi-modality,” of the senses
(pp. 98-102). Film, in particular, provides a means of captur-
ing the myriad ways senses resonate and interfere with one
another in practice. The use of these kinds of technologies also
presents opportunities to shift responsibility for data collec-
tion from researchers to participants directly. This includes the
role participants might play in the analysis and reporting of
findings, particularly in relation to the editing and presenta-
tion of visual material. While Pink draws numerous examples
from her own research to highlight the array of benefits that
follow from the practice of sensory ethnography in the social
sciences, Nicole Vitellone’s recent scholarship provides a
range of more pertinent illustrations for researchers interested
in the consumption of alcohol and other drugs. Vitellone con-
firms in particular the promise of a sensory ethnography of
AOD use, highlighting the array of actors, “actants,” bodies,
278 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

senses, and spaces involved in the event of injection drug use,

and the subsequent distribution of agencies necessary for any
fair accounting of the social, cultural, and/or political media-
tion of this consumption.

After drugs

Vitellone’s work is intimately concerned with the material,

affective, and corporeal experience of AOD use, and the status
of objects like needles and syringes in this consumption. Of
course, the question of AOD consumption inevitably intro-
duces the problem of the consuming body and the diverse sub-
jectivities practices of consumption mediate (2010, p. 876). Yet
Vitellone is interested in examining how the problem of con-
sumption might be interrogated in the absence of a traditional
subject. As Vitellone (2011b) notes, almost all scientific
accounts of the consumption of alcohol and other drugs make
a clear distinction between the subject of this consumption
and its objects, whether alcohol, illicit drugs, or some combi-
nation thereof. The consuming subject is located within this
work as a rational, calculative agent, even if AOD use some-
times disrupts this calculative propensity. Moreover, the
agency necessary to initiate AOD use is posited as the special
privilege of the consuming subject, such that the object of this
consumption is cast as an inert substance, a passive thing.
Vitellone notes the significance of these distinctions in recent
harm-reduction and prevention campaigns in the UK, which
seek to dramatize the significance of social context in framing
AOD use, even as they rely on more familiar messages regard-
ing the importance of (human) knowledge, attitudes and
behaviors in reducing problems associated with AOD use
(2011b, pp. 587-593).

Vitellone develops these arguments in the context of what she,

rather provocatively, calls a “science of the syringe” (2011b).
Her explicit references to Law and Latour in describing this
science are instructive, in that they bear witness to the produc-
 279

tive force of the objects of this science; the syringes, needles,

bodies, spaces, and affects associated with the event of injec-
tion drug use. Vitellone takes issue with existing accounts of
injection drug use for exaggerating the “political economy of
suffering” at the expense of a proper understanding of the
affects and sensations generated in this use (2010, p. 867).
Singling out Phillipe Bourgois’ work, Vitellone argues that a
political economy of injection-drug use inevitably reifies the
very structural forces that it claims to unmask. Vitellone adds
that while Bourgois denounces AOD researchers for failing to
adequately attend to the structural drivers of poverty, social
exclusion and addiction, he inevitably reduces all drug use to
the same structural forces, leaving little room for the local,
contingent actors involved in injection-drug use (2010,
pp. 876-878). This effectively erases all traces of the local,
while reinforcing the agentic force of structure and econom-
ics. Indeed for Vitellone, the places of injection drug use
become interchangeable in Bourgois’ hands, with each merely
exemplifying the broader and more important force of power
and structure. And yet, ironically, Bourgois’ political economy
does a fine job of unveiling the nonhuman “actants” involved
in injection drug use, even if he is reluctant to accord these
entities the full measure of their agency. Vitellone might, in
this respect, be a little harsh in her reading of Bourgois, for I
suspect his position is a good deal closer to Vitellone’s than
she acknowledges. For me, both Bourgois and Vitellone draw
attention to the cast of actors and actants involved in the event
of injection drug use, even if Bourgois prefers the more distal
among this cast and Vitellone the more local. In focusing on
the local, Vitellone highlights the intimacy of spaces, objects
and bodies acting together in the event of injection drug use
(2010, 2011b).

Chief among these “actants” is the syringe itself. Far from

serving as a passive prop in the ongoing drama of injection
drug use, Vitellone argues that the syringe should be under-
stood as an active protagonist in the production and reproduc-
tion of space in the event of injection drug use in the city
280 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

(2010, pp. 873-875). Drawing on methods that bare a strong if

unacknowledged resemblance to Pink’s sensory ethnography,
Vitellone traces the trajectories of syringes throughout
Manchester’s Northern Quarter, noting their role in the demar-
cation of “hypodermic space.” These spaces are not the sole
effects of marginalization, squalor, and poverty, despite the
efforts Vitellone observes locally to reduce them to this, but
rather support diverse affects, subjectivities, and sensations,
many of which are “aesthetically pleasing” in the words of one
of Vitellone’s respondents (2010, pp. 873-875).

The point for Vitellone is that hypodermic space, like all

spaces of drug use, is made and remade in the activity of
human and nonhuman actors and “actants.” This activity pro-
duces discrete “zones of intensity,” which resonate with the
sensation of myriad affects, including pleasure, hope, and
desire, as well as fear, pain, loss, and longing (pp. 876-878).
Ignoring the various actors assembled in the immediate event
of injection drug use, in favor of the more familiar forces of
structure, power, and economics, obscures these felt and lived
sensations (especially the more “positive” ones), just as it
ignores the local spatialization of consumption. As Vitellone
concludes, this further reifies the idea of context at the expense
of detailed understandings of the sense of the spaces and
objects involved in AOD use (pp. 878-879). Vitellone does not
deny the role of non-local actors and “actants” in shaping
practices like injection drug use, but rather insists that such
entities are always in the process of being assembled and
reassembled, without ever settling into the familiar reifica-
tions of structure or context. While the idea of context
calls attention to the role of nonhuman actors in shaping prac-
tices like injection drug use, the force of this insight is greatly
reduced whenever it obscures the contingent effects of par-
ticular, local spaces, times, senses, affects, and objects in
modifying and further translating such practices. Overcoming
the shortcomings of traditional understandings of context is
precisely what a social science of drug use after methods, after
subjects, and after drugs might accomplish.
 281

After methods, after subjects, after drugs

The idea of a social science after methods, after subjects, and

after drugs is meant as a provocation. Certainly, this is the way
it is presented in Vitellone’s work. The idea is premised in the
first instance on the “symmetrical” treatment of humans and
nonhumans recommended by Law and common to ANT-inspired
research in the social sciences. A social science of AOD use
after methods, after subjects, and after drugs demands that
each of the forces present in the event of AOD use be given its
due. Importantly, it refuses to fix the ontology of methods,
subject, or drugs. None can be regarded as stable, homogenous
entities, and so researchers must adapt themselves to the
dynamic contingency of methods, subjects and drugs—to their
“co-constitution” in the very act of inquiry (valentine, 2011,
pp. 438-440). The practice of such a science—according to the
methods of sensory ethnography, and exemplified in Vitellone’s
recent research—provides a means of documenting this co-
constitution in practice and in place. It invites one to record
the residue of concrete and grit on the hands of the occupants
of the shooting gallery; the feeling of plastic-metal-rubber-
concrete-blood of the event of injection (pp. 873-875). It alerts
one to the ramifications of politics, media, semiotics, bodies,
movement, and drugs in all cultures of AOD use (pp. 587-591).
This is a social science that cares for the assembled society of
bodies active in the moment of AOD use, attending to each,
assessing the agentic contributions of all. Such a science pres-
ents three distinctive advantages—and three corresponding
opportunities—for scholars interested in tracing the diverse
trajectories of AOD use in practice.

The first concerns the prospect of accounting for AOD use

without reifying the authority of a singular, sovereign subject
of consumption. A good deal of contemporary AOD research
questions the explanatory utility of such a subject (see Fraser
and Moore, 2011), and yet rarely has a viable alternative been
presented. Of course, the problem in relying on the subject in
AOD research is that it invites one to explain drug use in terms
282 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

of the free choice of a deliberative (human) agent. It follows

that the subject is necessarily responsible for its own behavior,
and so drug use must be explained either as a rational choice
(which presents its own moral hazards), or as some inexplica-
ble deficit in or malfunction of this faculty. Moreover, any
attempt to assert the force of structural or contextual factors in
the course of AOD consumption must overcome this logic. It
goes without saying that these attempts often founder, such
that the social sciences are routinely divided between disci-
plines which favor agentic explanations of AOD use, and those
which prefer more structural ones (Duff, 2007, pp. 504-507).
Yet, this is where a social science of AOD use “after the sub-
ject” offers hope for synthesis. It suggests that drug use is not
a function of either the free subject, or an indomitable social
context: it is always both, acting at once, in ways that demand
careful empirical discrimination. This, then, is the second
great advantage of a social science after methods, after sub-
jects, and after drugs, that opens up a path for AOD research
between structure and agency.

This novelty depends on the account of subjectivity presented

in Law’s actor-network theory, and implied in Pink’s sensory
ethnography. Far from abandoning it, Law and Pink fracture
and spatialize subjectivity. They distribute it among and
between the diverse objects, structures, agencies and bodies
that characterize everyday life (Law, 2004, p. 36). Subjectivity
cannot (in this respect) be reduced to the familiar terms of the
traditional, rational subject—to mind, in a traditional practice
of psychology, physiology, or biology. “Subjectivity is the
achievement of bodies and objects acting together” (Pink,
2009, pp. 51-55). Remove one or another of these bodies and
the subject so constituted changes also, sometimes profound-
ly, other times imperceptibly. Hence, there is not a subject and
its objects (or an agent amid its structures), but rather events
of subjectivization effectuated in the meeting of elements in
space and time. It follows that subjects—and the events,
processes, and agencies that comprise them—should be under-
stood as fluid, relational, and affective congeries and not as
 283

stable, static, presuppositions for social science inquiry. For

scholars interested in AOD use, this suggests that subjectivity
is as much the effect of drug use as its foundational cause. It
further suggests that the subject of AOD consumption never
acts alone. AOD use always involves multiple agencies, which
converge in the initiation of this consumption. All, in other
words, are responsible for AOD use. To the extent that it even
makes sense to ask which of these bodies or agencies is more
or less responsible for this consumption, the question must,
regardless, remain an empirical problem requiring careful
empirical observation.

The implications of this contention for drug policy, law

enforcement, prevention, and harm reduction have scarcely
been countenanced, even though the inclination to apportion
responsibility for the activity of AOD use is discernible in
each. Vitellone’s work surely indicates the folly of this exer-
cise, insofar as the agencies implicated in the event of AOD
use are forever distributed among diverse human and nonhu-
man actors. Mercifully, Vitellone also suggests a way out of
this folly in the work of determining how more of the nonhu-
man actors at work in AOD use might be accounted for in the
study of AOD consumption. Due regard for the nonhuman is
one of the most attractive features of Vitellone’s work, although
her interest is shared by many others in the field (see Demant,
2009; Holt & Treloar, 2008; Race, 2009; valentine, 2011).
Moreover, interest in identifying and assessing the various
human and nonhuman actors present in the activity of AOD
use suggests new grounds for conceiving of the role of social
contexts in this use. If it is accepted that the subject of AOD
consumption never acts alone, then the search for this prac-
tice’s nonhuman collaborators establishes a means of describ-
ing the role of context in practice. This is the third great
opportunity furnished with the articulation of a social science
of AOD use after methods, after subjects, and after drugs.

Yet, as Law (2004) so ably demonstrates, social and structural

actors are never as remote or as stable as social scientists imag-
284 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

ine. Each must be accounted for in its involvement in the pro-

duction of the social, along with the work it does to sustain this
structuring presence. It is precisely because this work of “pres-
ence” is so demanding (see Law, pp. 83-85) that structures and
contexts shift and evolve over time. Structures and contexts are
not, for this reason, remote, monolithic entities, somehow
removed from everyday social life. They act in this social
sphere to be sure, but they are also acted upon in ways that leave
them open to alteration or outright removal. It follows that the
social and structural forces at work in AOD consumption must
themselves be established, supported, made and remade in time
and space. Conceiving of structures in this way presents a novel
basis for exploring the role of structures and contexts in AOD
use, and the ways these contexts change over time. It suggests
that social contexts are assembled and reassembled in the activ-
ity of diverse bodies, spaces, processes, and objects. The task
for scholars interested in AOD use is to document the myriad
associations by which these contexts are organized and main-
tained in specific activities and spaces. Sensory ethnography
provides the tools for conducting such analysis, while
Vitellone’s recent research provides the testimony regarding the
enduring benefits to be derived from this work.

Each however, requires AOD researchers to abandon the onto-

logical distinction between subjects and objects in their
attempts to explain AOD use. The fact that drug policy has for
so long relied on this distinction goes a long way towards
explaining its enduring failures. Singling out the human sub-
ject among the panoply of actors at work in the event of AOD
use, and then making the subject solely responsible for the
effects of this panoply, ignores the diversity of these extra-
subjective forces, with predictable results. For it leaves the
array of nonhuman agencies involved in AOD consumption
relatively unencumbered. With the notable exception of
(human) bodies and drugs themselves, the majority of objects
and actors involved in AOD consumption remain unknown to
researchers and ignored by policy makers. The work of Law,
Pink, and Vitellone highlights the benefits that might follow
 285

from the rejection of this indifference, yet it also opens up a

host of new problems for the field.

Most importantly, if AOD use can be shown to the effect of

bodies acting together, then it follows that drug-related harms
are likewise generated in assemblages of human and nonhu-
man actors. Admittedly, this fact is reasonably well estab-
lished in harm-reduction debates (even if the terms may be
unfamiliar), given that it furnishes the principal rationale for
popular harm-reduction programs like the distribution of ster-
ile injection equipment. But what of the array of messy, unsta-
ble and ephemeral objects, “actants” and bodies involved in
drug-use assemblages? How might these actors be theorized
and studied in ways that enable their “enrollment” in local
harm-reduction efforts? Understanding the role of the syringe
is one thing; the greater challenge is to characterize the signif-
icance of the various affects, spaces, and sensations identified
by scholars like Vitellone, and to determine how they might be
modified in the interests of safer AOD use. How, in other
words, might the agencies enacted in this consumption be
modified in the interests of further reducing the harms associ-
ated with AOD use, while at the same time amplifying the
unquestionably positive affects and relations that attend this
use? Various scholars have recently begun exploring how
these challenges might be resolved in the conduct of a
“posthuman” AOD-research agenda (see Demant, 2009;
Fraser and Moore, 2011; Keane, 2011; Race, 2011; Weinberg,
2011). Each points beyond fixed or objective understandings
of drugs to the more messy business of clarifying the charac-
ter of drug use assemblages and the means of their transforma-
tion. This is the primary challenge set out in the research and
theory reviewed in this article, yet it also amounts to a tanta-
lizing invitation for researchers interested in AOD use. The
extent to which this invitation is taken up ought to be the full
measure of the viability of a social science of AOD use after
methods, after subjects, and after drugs.
 286 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

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