ABSTRACT
This book is an account of the state of method. The argument has been that method in social science (and natural science too) is enacted in a set of nineteenth-or even seventeenth-century Euro-American blinkers. This means that it misunderstands and misrepresents itself. Method is not, I have argued, a more or less successful set of procedures for reporting on a given reality. Rather it is performative. It helps to produce realities. It does not do so freely and at whim. There is a hinterland of realities, of manifest absences and Othernesses, resonances and patterns of one kind or another, already being enacted, and it cannot ignore these. At the same time, however, it is also creative. It re-works and re-bundles these and as it does so re-crafts realities and creates new versions of the world. It makes new signals and new resonances, new manifestations and new concealments, and it does so continuously. Enactments and the realities that they produce do not automatically stay in place. Instead they are made, and remade. This means that they can, at least in principle, be remade in other ways.
