Extension and the Disposal of the World: Double-Crossing Systems, Culture, Self and Language

Long indexed by sociological ideas of structure, the notion of extension is yet disparate and poorly disseminated – as evidenced by popular motifs such as ‘the world is at our disposal’ eschewing notions of emplacement and embeddedness and instead championing choice and individualised agency. On the assumption that this lacunae relates in part to paradigm debates over incommensurability, the proposal in this inaugural lecture is to explore double-crossing as a methodological device by which to draw insights on extension from major ‘gatherings’ of Euro-American thought, while respecting the orderings, institutional arrangements, situations and networks each approach imposes. In retracing the ‘disposal’ of the world through four theoretical perspectives germane to sociology – namely systems, culture, self and language – the objective is to illustrate the methodology of double crossing. Drawing on both my work on social and cultural theory and my field studies in market leaders, I first show how moving back and forth between the older and newer ground within each perspective helps to elicit what gets unsighted from either view. Secondly, inasmuch as the usual way of ‘making a clearing’ is argued as caught ‘in reaction’ from extant theory (ending up say talking of parts instead of wholes or consumption in place of production), I advance the methodology of double-crossing by excavating the recessive arrangements and ordering implicit in each perspective and so illuminate the different ways extension is affected by how world is imagined and experienced.


Introduction
In this inaugural lecture I have in mind meanings implied in the old adage 'Man proposes, God disposes', whereby man (sic) is put in the peculiar position of making pronouncements about how the world works, but is unable to do much about its ordering and arrangement. My aim in raising this somewhat abandoned view of disposal is to find a ground in which to explore its denotation of arrangement and ordering, which I see as mislaid rather than lost. Key connotations, for instance, continue to carry in everyday phrases, such as 'I am at your disposal'. Or remain in terms like disposition -how someone's outlook affects the way they frame things -and disposable income -how this goes before choice and constrains the way we spend. To this end I attend to how our various relations of extension are predisposed, in one way or another, towards being this or doing that. Hence, much of what I have to say runs counter to the modernist trend to 'refuse' disposal, rubbishing its possibilities by using the term only to denote waste, and thereby what comes at the end of a production-consumption cycle.
It is helpful to recall how early sociology also put people in the peculiar position of being at the receiving end of a god-like disposal. If its radical moves came from seeing things holistically -capitalism for Marx, culture for Durkheim and modernity for Weber -the dramatic step was surely to suggest how social actors were, more or less, the 'production' of these structures. The idea that class conflict, collective consciousness or the iron cage, produces each of us in terms of agency, conduct or rationality ran counter to Enlightenment teachings of man as sovereign in his (sic) own kingdom. Indeed, to see social actors as emblematic of their class, bearers of culture, or agents of capitalism, not only narrows Kant's 'universe within' to proposals by the self to the self, for the self. In terms of extension -including agency, conduct or rationality -the very persons making proposals were taken to be under the domination of entities only sociologists and anthropologists could understand.
Expectations today are very different. Post-Nietzsche, people are expected to take charge of things and theory in sociology has moved against overly strict and self-sealing notions of production and agency by giving more attention to consumption and the choice of individuals. What matters to contemporary sociological debate is not, however, what people buy (the province of marketing and economics), but is focused instead on what social forms might be being reproduced through consumption. The effect is to draw on studies of consumption to explain production and reproduction, rather than explain consumption from production. This reversal in direction draws on notions of social construction 1 that -while leaving open the actual nature of self -move structure away from being a totalizing concept towards more indeterminate processes that in turn are themselves undergoing change. What matters in the work of Erving Goffman, for instance, is how everyday institutions, such as greetings and civil inattention, are consumed. His idea of strategic conduct, 2 in which social actors draw on these institutions to consummate performance, opens up a reproduction of structure to impression and opportunism as much as it relies on conformance and consent.
Arguably, this working backwards from consumption to production brings latent aspects of disposal back into prominence. The most striking example of 'higher' orderings and arrangements is the deification of 'the market' in the neoliberal use of discourses of rational choice to distract from gross asymmetries in wealth. However, ideas of arrangement and ordering are also incipient in the many ways researchers today look to the work of Pierre Bourdieu in order to reconcile how inequalities, disadvantage and exploitation are animated by the consumption patterns of social actors. Also prominent is the emphasis on studying how networks come into being through the distribution of materials and power, including STS groups who bring into play the artefacts of technology. If the aim in the turn to culture is to avoid the God's eye view, and the reification of systems that so dogged Talcott Parsons' post-war theory, this is often achieved by keeping fieldwork local and specific. In contrast, the refusal in actor network theory to treat individuals as sovereign -stopping them from stepping into the place of the king -appears to lead to a re-emergence of systems theory in all but name.
My proposal is to deploy disposal as a 'third term' in order to explore ground made recessive by a tendency to oscillate between production and consumption views. Critically, in seeking to escape the familiar seesaw between parts and wholes, or agency and structure, I want to ask how world 3 is ordered in ways that keep open the fact that each person finds it arranged differently. This is in preference to asking the more usual question: How are things arranged for this or that set of people? To see the world only in terms of 'things' is to take on the very kind of philosophical stance I want to avoid. It is a reductive move that alters the nature of reality and puts in place prejudicial ways of cutting up the world. Against going along with analytical conventions that endlessly divide one school or tradition from another, or pull observation and knowledge apart into separate domains, I concern myself instead with whatever gathers together for people as 'reality' -even if partially and only temporarily. In this way I allow persons to be caught or 'framed' by the world both as they imagine it and as they experience it.
To put it differently, my point is that there is always a disposal of the world affecting extension and emplacing performance. Even if structures no longer entail a domination once attributed to them, disposal affects: outlook in the form of habitus or a 'system of predispositions'; shapes their ideas through education or thrownness; donates patrons and sponsors by way of 426 C 2016 Sociological Review Publication Limited kith and kin; and allots them material resources such as capital or disposable income. What I am setting out to do, therefore, is to re-trace my work on four 'gatherings' of Euro-American thought germane to sociology: systems, culture, self and language. In so doing I want to bring to the fore how each of these requires to be put 'under erasure' -the crossing-out device favoured by Heidegger to indicate how one's concern is already deeply entangled in the ground on which the topic has previously been worked. There is, however, a subtle methodological difficulty in Heidegger's proposal to create a 'clearing' from the ground on which current knowledge stands. This is because Foucault's counter-claim -that we cannot step out of a truth regime -suggests the idea of accomplishing a clearing may be illusory. 4 In place of attempting to make a clearing, with its invariable dismissal of earlier thought, I use the device of two columns to illustrate a different technique which I call 'double-crossing', namely forms of crossing-out that permit 'return crossings'. 5 Too often academics jettison current theory, as if it were mere landfill to their proposed alternative. Whereas, in truth, much theory is caught within a mode of reaction that typically obscures its dependence upon earlier orderings and arrangements. For example, in seeking to avoid earlier traps such as reification, many theorists get caught instead in webs of individualization and choice. 6 Hence the methodology of double-crossing not only involves holding onto both the older and the newer ground for each gathering of systems, culture, self and language. It requires crossing back and forth between newer and older ground in order to release what is unsighted from either view; and so illuminate the recessive arrangements and ordering implicit in each.
In what follows, I should underline that using two columns to illustrate the method of 'double crossing' to revisit earlier work overstates any ability to be systematic and exact. Specifically, the device of two columns is adopted to slow down, and make explicit, processes of questioning likely to appear haphazard and mercurial at the time. 7 Hence, 'crossings' are likely to be in practice a more temporal affair than spatial, particularly since any crossing typically entails 'crossing out' terms, as Heidegger did in making his mark of erasure, in order to create room for a different view. What is important to note is how, at any one moment, the adoption of a term belonging to a particular perspective, wittingly or unwittingly, 'disposes' us as researchers towards certain ideas and tropes. Whereas, in another moment, we may be caught in webs of a quite different discourse.

Systems thinking
Let me turn first to systems. With notable exceptions, such as in the work of Jurgen Habermas and Nikolas Luhmann, the concept of system became all but banished from the sociological canon. Yet from the 1950s to the 1970s it was a notion much in fashion. Talcott Parsons, the dominant theorist in sociology at the time, saw system as the 'indispensible master concept' 8 and 427 C 2016 Sociological Review Publication Limited built his nomothetic 'action system' as integral to the totalizing effects of the 'social system'. Sophisticated ideas of self-constructing systems, such as autopoiesis in biology, were also mushrooming in science to explain differences in cell and brain behaviour. Large companies like IBM and ICI were imagined as 'closed' systems, while industries like railways and oil were viewed as systems 'open' to technological change and decline. And it was a common convention of the time for everyone to blame anything that went wrong on 'the system'. 9 The universal use of the term drew me into asking whether there was -even in embryo -something akin to a 'systems logic'. In registering to do a doctorate entitled On Form, I had certainly set out to do more than see the world in terms of 'systems' instead of 'things', swapping one set of entities for another. Specifically, I had wanted to escape the kind of bivalent logic I intuitively rejected as an undergraduate and was looking for a way of capturing more worldly forms of order and arrangement. The nub of the issue, as I learnt in my postgraduate studies, is that logic is formalized into sets of deductive moves that are truth-preserving; and, importantly, only truth-preserving. 10 Logic thus ensures moves are valid in themselves, but at the cost of excluding matters of truth -the inductive domain of deriving assumptions and generalizations being left to science.
The systems movement often describes itself as centred on holism. 'Wholes' are excluded from science by methods of reductionism (for instance, Galileo measured the strength of a ship by the resistance of a single plank).
Systems thinking established the holistic convention of separating system from its environment by imagining a 'boundary'. This seems misconceived. Consider how what gets included 'in' the university system depends on whether the focus is on teaching or research.
In contrast I triangulated the division between system and environment with a third term, 'purpose'. This also allowed me to show how the reigning distinction -open and closed systems -fell apart.
Rejecting the idea of everything being a system, I searched, in its place, for what might distinguish a system from other forms of ordering and arrangement. This ambition to revive 'arrangement' from its analytically driven exclusion avoided the trap of assuming wholes are separable entities.
Consider the hand. The holistic argument is that knowledge of what the hand is -and what it can accomplish -has to attend to the whole and cannot be reckoned by reference to the workings of each of its parts, the fingers.
Contrastingly, I took it to be self-evident that certain key workings of the hand can be grasped by attending instead to the arrangement of the fingers.
Crossing back and forth between these positions of holism and arrangement led me to examine the technology of money. Stepping outside extant definitions of money -as a means of payment or as a store of value -I noted that when money performs as a system other forms of exchange are no longer operable. My argument was brief. Whereas money can buy goods and goods can buy money, we find goods can no longer buy other goods. (I did note an asymmetry 428 C 2016 Sociological Review Publication Limited here that might bubble up -this is that money gets used to buy money, since various forms of money always exist). And as David Harvey indicates, in order not to 'oxidise' 11 and lose value, money needs to buy goods (including other forms of money). So while exchange itself gets perpetuated, the main point is that what is expelled by the money system is all other forms of exchange, with the possible exception of gift-giving. Specifically, in ways that challenge ideas about a more gradual evolution towards modernity, customs known as barter are driven out. 12 This theoretical work -informed by theories of semiotics as much as systems theory -led me to limit the definition of systems to those that are selfconstructing -autopoietic in the language of biology. Unless we abandon the notion altogether as bankrupt, it seems vital to distinguish genuine 'systems'phenomena that engross themselves and take on a life of their own -from the merely 'systematic' -arrangements that are crafted together in the form of a design. The latter would include order that is built up from the fusion of sets of procedures and rules, or machine systems artificially created by the addition of feedback loops such as missile, central heating and production systems. On this last definition, rather than fall into either category, systemic or systematic, bureaucracy might perhaps be better considered as more of a social imaginary. Always in need of ad hoc amendments and exceptions, it seems bureaucracy can never be brought into existence in the ideal-typical form that Max Weber had depicted.
With the origins of money lost in the recesses of early civilizations, I was looking for an empirical example of this self-constructing phenomenon and Werner Sombart's claim that the invention of double-entry bookkeeping was as important as Newton's discovery of gravitation -a claim strongly supported by Max Weber-led me into the archives to trace its origins. Unexpectedly, examination of early documents suggested double-entry booking preceded singleentry systems. I was then able to demonstrate that this most likely came about because double entry more or less invents itself into a system. The adoption of a doubling of money signs (making an additional credit entry for every debit entry and vice versa) creates the possibility to 'balance' accounts (the total of credits equalling the debits). Balancing then forges its own order in ways that begin to force out much of the information to be found in early records. All other recorded information, such as thanks to God, memorabilia about the family, details of storms in a voyage, comes to look superfluous and, in time, gets eliminated in favour of a focus on the monetary details of what has been sold or purchased. 13 Double entry is on its way to becoming the only way of ordering market transactions and, importantly, will become accepted as such across all the nations of the world.
What is decisive, I think, is that this self-constructing nature creates a system of record keeping that appears both internally coherent and superior to anything that could be designed. What perspective and the vanishing point did to the visual world of painting and drawing, the form of bookkeeping we call double-entry did to the world of commerce and trading. Bringing about 429 C 2016 Sociological Review Publication Limited a God-given sense of order and objectivity that would become universally accepted, this new ability to measure the periodic accrual of wealth had huge repercussions for the growth of credit and the development of capitalism. Further, its privileging of transaction costs over other forms of information, as I went on to argue in my doctoral thesis, predetermined ways in which income would come to be separated from capital; and so pre-figured the outcome of debates about income measurement that blew up over financial reporting at that time. 14 In summary, questioning holistic notions of system turned out to be just a first step in putting the more general concept of system under erasure. The latter required a means of stepping outside the confines of an ontological debate about essence -deciding what exists -and crossing over to the theory of signs, namely semiotics and semiology, to engage in epistemological issues -asking 'How can we know?' The upshot of this work of double-crossing between analysis and synthesis was to recognize that systems are not entities available to ostension in the normal way. We cannot point to something like John Urry's 'car system' directly, 15 as I can point to a desk or overhead screen. Rather the most we can do is to trace their synthetic effects by working backwards, identifying what is excluded or ruled out and then going on to observe what kind of world is produced and recreated. This said, not all exclusion implies a system, however systematic it may appear. Albeit exclusion lends credence to matters we call systems, other possibilities remain; and prime among these is the phenomenon of culture.

The turn to culture
The turn away from holism and abstract notions of system towards grounded, localized studies was already under way when I engaged in a series of field studies of prestigious institutions from the mid-1980s onwards. It was a time when anthropologists were throwing off much of the structuralism of Levi-Strauss and when many sociologists -disabused with systems views of society -had refocused on what interactionists called 'the everyday', 16 in order to contest Parsons' totalizing ideas of the social system and his focus on action coalescing around common goals and uncontested norms.
Although Durkheim's idea of a collective conscience had long been roundly dismissed (and similar ideas like Weltanschauung fallen into disuse), what still lingered on into the 1980s were definitions of culture that were built around the idea of people internalizing 'shared values'. This was often linked, if spuriously, to earlier understandings of culture as derived from common languages and communal rituals and much of the advice at the time, especially by those who sought to capture the authentic 'organisational culture', revolved around reporting the myths circulated by the owners or gathering everyday stories of resistance. 17 Contrastingly, the very early analysis of social cooperation, particularly David Hume's, had relied on the notion of habit -connotations of which remain in Pierre Bourdieu's definition of habitus as a 'system of 430 C 2016 Sociological Review Publication Limited predispositions' acquired early on in life. 18 So either people were taken to hold similar cognitive beliefs (whether springing from language or place). Or they were depicted as reproducing customs more or less mechanically; not only because things were always done this way, but also because ways of doing are taken to be institutionalized as well as embodied.
The approach I adopted in getting inside each institution departed from these traditions and was two-fold. On the one hand there was an emerging emphasis on consumption, both in the work of Mary Douglas on belonging and in the instruction by actor-network theorists such as Bruno Latour 'to follow the technology'. Each of these movements, in their different ways, might be thought of as linking back to a long-held dictum to read other cultures through the artefacts of their technology. On the other, my interest in ethos 19 -as potentially distinct from culture -was sharpened by access to one key site where I found myself researching the absence of one particularly modern technology, notably budgets; conspicuous in a market leader in the financial services. 20 Insofar as I began my ethnography by trying to pick up on the everyday conduct of people in the form of what they said to each other (and grasp how different relational positions in the institution affected this), what I found to be most helpful was Harold Garfinkel's treatment of such everyday exchanges as 'accounts'.
My mentor at the time, Anthony Cohen, argued that ideas of culture as 'shared values' is a mystification. On the basis that access to what's going on 'inside' people's heads is closed off, he pointed to there being an empirical bar to knowing meanings or values.
Tying exclusion to 'matter out of place' 21 Douglas's The World of Goods explicitly offers instead a consumption thesis of culture that equates choice in goods with displays of belonging. In Douglas working back from everyday purchases to displays of belonging, she seems to be suggesting a more open (and empirically checkable) process by which culture is always being recreated. 22 Her approach thus looks to reverse earlier emphases on production views -which either mistook culture to be a holistic system that predetermined values, or assumed ethos is built up from ritual and habit. What is of concern, however, is how her model smuggles in the hidden premise of signalling systems being shared. 23 Initially I married my attention to technology and its artefacts to a focus on ethos that was more localized as well as being interactive. To avoid conflating ethos with formalized ethical rules of behaviour, I adopted much of Harold Garfinkel's emphasis on researching 'the moral world without '. 24 In supposing ethos to refer to those elusive ways of doing 'membership' that pass muster rather than monster, 25 I stressed the term conduct over that of behaviour. In departing somewhat here from Douglas over how group works, I also gave especial emphasis to the circulation of accounts. Help for criss-crossing back and forth between these contrasting theories of group came from Marilyn Strathern's work on extension and relations. 26 Arguing that membership -as with all relations -is 'partial and provisional', led me to contest the long-standing claim that Garfinkel's work on everyday accounts lacked a theory of power. What I noticed, in the light of this partialness and provisionality, was that persons subtly but continually seek affirmations of membership from each other in all they do and say. It is this inherent doubt about who is really a member -and I might add often considerable uncertainty over exactly what one is a member of -that gives members a form of power to exercise over each other. This is to argue that, while members have little authority over each other, they retain discretion. They have the discretion to stop accounts, challenging what someone else is saying, and even 'call' for more accounts. Hence, whenever they let an account 'pass', they are, implicitly, 'passing' each other as a member. What is of interest in the field, therefore, are the accounts that get 'stopped'. What matters as much as those that circulate are accounts from which people detach themselves; those that they refuse to 'pass' onto others.
To seek a clearing from notions of culture seems a tall order. Given the burgeoning of culturally informed studies, to say nothing of loose talk about cultures of secrecy, cultures of waste, cultures of excellence, and so on, what, if anything, would be left? To the contrary, there seems more merit in continuing to cross back and forth between the anthropological visions of culture as working around artefacts and sociological arguments about ethos in terms of a domination over how people are 'brought up' in institutions, be they family or a form of employment. Indeed, as I discuss in the next section on self, my ethnographic materials suggest people's attachment to cultural artefacts might be better understood as 'cultural performance'. 27 This is to note how alignment with the artefacts of certain technologies not only helps in 'passing' as a member of this or that group, however poorly defined, but works also to make persons 'visible and available' to the agendas of others. 28 Where displays of materials reflect asymmetries of power (and when would they not?), the field is open to strategic conduct and cannot, as Douglas presumed, be a credible source for reading off values and beliefs.

Extension and self
Implicit in much thinking and argument about culture and ethos are different ideas of self. While some would do away with this will of the wisp, with theories of subjugation and domination, most agree a minimal agency is required to animate such matters -to put the whole machinery into motion. This might take the form of admitting 'bearers of culture', persons who keep ways of being in circulation by performing various rites and rituals. Or it might take the form of 'exemplary figures', people who conduct themselves in moral ways that others follow. Inevitably the question of which structure is 432 C 2016 Sociological Review Publication Limited providing what kind of agency has brought the figure of 'the self' under increasing scrutiny.
Self, for many, continues to refer to the Kantian figure of man (sic) as sovereign over his individual consciousness. Yet images of this solitary self have been under constant critique. In addition to attempts by 20th-century philosophers to 'decentre' self through their work on language, as I discuss later, others speak about multiple or hybrid selves.
The idea of multiple selves is illustrated by Alfred Schutz's observation that the ruthless businessman by day can be the loving father by night. This idea allows different spaces, or 'worlds', to elicit different dispositions, but abandons Kant's ideal of self as accountable to self.
More radically Donna Haraway portrays us as cyborgs -part human/part machine, drawing out the prosthetic relations in technology. 29 Just as the prosthetic of a wooden leg helps the onelegged to walk -or the swinging of his hammer helps Heidegger nail his roof -so we can go on to ask how much of what we accomplish would be impossible without extension by virtue of our technologies?
Giving a double meaning to the 'attachment' afforded by prosthetics, Marilyn Strathern suggests how relations are bodied forth. In so doing, she untangles much earlier debris created through a tussle of topdown and bottom-up definitions of culture.
While couched initially in the language of parts and wholes, her handling of extension obviates the need either to reify matters like culture and self; or deny their significance.
Specifically, by taking us to be always and already in manifold forms of relations, she cuts out needless speculation about multiple cultures and multiple selves. Culture and self, for her, are not things in themselves, but result from whatever is being performed in the here and now.
What is of equal interest are the relations underpinning 'cultural performance' (see previous section). Hence it is still possible for Strathern to talk about culture rather than cultures, since the manifold nature of relations allows the partial and provisional composition of culture to be more abundant and profligate in its heterogeneity than one can ever imagine.
What my research began to clarify were the implications here for understanding self. Whereas a consumption view might endorse Hume's argument that self is often in flux -seldom settling down to being one thing rather than another -conventional models of self tend to assume a mastery of technology that picture persons as travelling outwards from Kant's 'inner' self in order to attach to one set of artefacts -a spade or a proverb -and then retreating back inwards to this core self before once more going out again to attach to something else. Similarly, in terms of joining up with other persons, ethos is imagined as being forged through building up from what is called 'relationships'; this is the process of me or you reaching out to attach to one or more persons, then retreating back inwards to ourselves -before going out again into another relationship.
In contradistinction to all this, my work pointed out that selves are already in extension. And argued that they must always and already be so. To elaborate, much as I am illustrating in these examples of double crossing, my image of 433 C 2016 Sociological Review Publication Limited self is one of each of us always and already moving across attachments. This involves linking up, partially and provisionally, with another set of relations without necessarily detaching altogether from earlier relations. In other words, rather than seeing ourselves as coming out from self into enhancement and then returning back in, 30 we might imagine self more as augmented, temporarily, by one form of extension more than another. Indeed, so much so, that we can say that extension is all we are ever 'in'. 31 Extension means self is always situated -and necessarily so -within relations of one kind or another. As such, it is time we rejected images of a mobile entity moving independently and freely in and out of one culture to another, or from one self to another, at will.
Since any attachment or detachment is partial and provisional, relations can vary depending on the conditions of possibility on the one hand and affect on the other. In all this, attachment has a double meaning; as is illustrated by the portrait of Father in Tristram Shandy -unable to sleep in his chair by his compulsion to wait for the unoiled parlour door to creak. 32 However, this doubling of attachment brings up the question of how a movement from one set of relations to another is performed or brought about? Surely, having arrived in one set of relations, we need a form of internal agency to avoid being stuck, like Father, within the maw of that form? 33 The notion linking culture to self I found helpful here was not habitus, since the way Bourdieu uses the term exactly carries the idea of being stuck in a 'system of predispositions', 34 but 'thrownness'. Heidegger argues that we are 'thrown' into the world in very specific circumstances: long before we assert anything called self-consciousness, we are already being brought up speaking a certain language and conducting ourselves in particular ways rather than others. 35 To admit possibilities of attachment being induced by our upbringing or emplacement is certainly to allow aspects of culture to have bonding qualities. But rather than insisting on culture being some holistic system gluing us together, we can allow that its heterogeneity and composite nature affords different passions to be excited by different technologies: compassionate one moment, selfish the next. 36 Heidegger goes further here to consider what he calls Gestell. 37 This enframing or emplacement of us by technology makes us available as a standing resource and here I have drawn attention to the material ways in which certain relations are drawn into the nexus of power by being punctualized. 38 Punctualizing an identity is to call for a cultural performance in which certain relations are adhered to over others. It might be to answer the call to be a responsible professional or loyal employee one moment and in the next to answer the call to arms and go on strike. What is key to understanding the exercise of power over identities is that this 'ordering' is often made invisible by a manipulation of materials and arrangements. In ways reminiscent of Marx, it 434 C 2016 Sociological Review Publication Limited might be said there is much false consciousness in those who believe themselves to be 'choosing' identities.
Whether called upon by others to punctualize our identity or not, we seem constantly to be having to dispose of the world as we see it one way and then dispose of it in another. In this respect my work with Joanna Latimer has identified motility as being key to movement and the more invisible forms of power. 39 In place of the current fashion to extol mobility, motility not only enables us to unstick ourselves from any one set of relationsenabling us to cross back and forth between one 'outlook' and another -it accomplishes this by moving our attachments, in both senses, towards another set.
Joanna and I do not pretend to know how motility actually works, although there may be a kind of return of the repressed in all this. 40 For instance, given that disposal implies a form of rearrangement rather than merely getting rid of something, it is likely that one form of landscaping the world can only push other things out of sight for so long. A kind of Gestalt effect perhaps, whereby involuntarily the duck replaces the rabbit? What we can say though, from our ethnographic observation, is that the seamlessness of this movement can sometimes make it appear as if we have also shifted 'worlds': the affect is to dispose, in both senses of the word, of one outlook for another. But this issue leads on to the final gathering, namely language.

Language and folding
If the portrait of extension which I have just painted accords with Heidegger's inquisition of technology as something humans are unable to 'master', 41 its decentring of the Kantian ideal of self has also gained support from the turn to language in 20th-century philosophy. This should not surprise as language can lay claim to being the oldest technology. Taking this approach though puts into question the popular belief that language is uniquely mine, 42 as well as the countervailing view that it is simply 'shared' as a communal system of communication. Indeed, Heidegger's argument about 'thrownness' implies each of us is brought up in a particular languageand within the peculiarities of place -long before anyone can claim to have the kind of self-consciousness that can begin to question what they are inheriting. 43 What is striking, when viewed as a technology, is that language appears to be as much inside us as it remains outside. Unlike the hand, the arrangement of which arguably developed to pick up tools and put them down, the head never seems free of language. Even if we do not join the early Derrida to valorize writing over speaking, thought and language appear entirely intertwined. As the German linguist Max Muller insisted, there is no thought without language and no language without thought. So much so that much continental philosophy aimed itself at deconstructing the long held belief that language is a secondorder representation of thought; and a rather poor imitation at that. 44 435 C 2016 Sociological Review Publication Limited These debates, including Wittgenstein's thesis against a private language, led me to consider the main difference lies in how we keep language. While it is easy to set out how we store physical prosthetics -what is needed, say, for building, writing and gardening 45 -we fail to notice how we squirrel away artefacts of language -phrases, numbers, formulae and stories.
As the psychologist Jerome Bruner suggests, stories are key: as well as helping to learn language, they afford a means to 'store' experience in narrative form. 46 Once stored as stories (and the common root of the two words is easy to miss), narratives need not be kept to hand, but might jump up like jack-in-the-boxes, surfacing unexpectedly or recalled as occasion demands.
I have in mind those troubling events when affect turns us over, rather than around; occasions when we experience a momentary loss of narrative. 47 If this way of seeing stories draws on Heidegger's contention that we 'dwell' in language, it also re-emphasizes a growing recognition over how culture and language are also inextricably intertwined.
If language were deployed only as mere representations of events, we might find ourselves jettisoning much of our experience. Yet not only do we keep much stuff we inherit, we also tend to hang onto experiences until we make sense of the 'buzzing blooming confusion'. This suggests language is affective in its nature as much as it is instrumental.
Words not only attach to other words, as in the qualifier 'red' in 'red apple', they double the attachment to give depth to meaning, as in pronouncements about a good person, or true friend. Consequently, as has been recognized in discussions of language games, meaning is not just about reference, pointing to the apple, but very much about using qualifiers to 'move' others about. 48 Far from verbal forms of language being 'neutral', with words merely denoting things in the world, phrasing and affect weave together complex forms of sense-making that endow resonance as much as they afford recognition. 49 My preliminary studies here suggest that language, in keeping experience and storing stories, not only informs what we are to see, but also landscapes itself in order to do so. The key is to recall that before the gardening wars of the 18th century -particularly the revolution brought about by the picturesque -landscape is that which we look out from, rather than what we look at. 50 It is what gives a vantage onto the world, helping us put it into focus. If this 'outlook' has become a device by which we then turn the world into picture, 51 it is first and foremost what helps us arrange and order the categories of things, putting into form and shape what gathers together and also what we keep apart. Inasmuch as language is always and already busy 'folding' up the affect of our experiences into stories and other mnemonic devices, the landscape we look out from is intricate, convoluted, motile and recessive.
This idea of language as always and already being busy landscaping, ordering and arranging itself, as seems fit, draws on complex notions of form that go well beyond the bivalent oppositions noted by early structuralists like Saussure. 52 The upshot is that, while arranging and ordering itself into forms and grounds so that we can 'look out' to see and make sense of what is happening, language obviates the very means by which it is helping us see 'world' as this or that. This line of thinking -that language is to be understood as a labyrinth of roots and foldings rather than a veil 53 -might go some way to explain why it is so 436 C 2016 Sociological Review Publication Limited difficult to cut through fashionable language and rid ourselves of extant ways of looking at things? In my understandings of how language works world for each of us, one story can cover up another and one fold of experience can mask an earlier. We do not just have blind spots brought about by forms like a Moebius strip. 54 Rather, to heighten the trope, language landscapes experience through tunnels, potholes, mountains and rivers. Yet, in consequence, a buried story or felt hurt might worm or jack-in-the-box itself back into reflection at any time.
Even larger difficulties lie in the way of working backwards to identify our lines of sight -the disposal of worlds brought about by our 'outlooks' -call them landscape, perspective, paradigm or whatever. This is in part why attempts to make a 'clearing' turn out to be so laborious; putting ideas 'under erasure' is to do far more than merely wish away the ground from which we see. Hence, in this section, I have elaborated a crossing back and forth, from arrangements of language that privilege the place of stories, towards orderings that link language intimately with cultural experience. Certain language systems as I go on to discuss next, like prices or budgets, might appear to take us out of this link, but only at the cost of making the arrangements and orderings of the world even more hidden and recessive.

Concluding comments
In a world overfull of 'things', it is hardly surprising moderns should mislay meanings of disposal as ordering and arrangement and slant its denotation instead to what is our major problem: namely how to remove, discard or dump whatever appears inconvenient or in the way. Yet 'rubbishing' is not the only form of disposal and it is one of Mary Douglas's seminal insights to have noted that, in addition to having stuff we discard as 'below thought', that there is much we also treat as above suspicion. 55 This last ranges from tacit understandings about the everyday to 'uncontroversial' background knowledge shared by scientists working in a particular tradition. 56 In working backwards from this insight, I am arguing that the more general meanings of disposal -arrangement and ordering -offer themselves as a means for sociological thought to escape the modernist tendency to streamline notions of reality by merely getting 'rid' of things -dismissing whatever does not fit into science as 'anomalies', 57 damning unusual conduct as 'deviance', 58 or discarding the disadvantaged as 'normal rubbish'. 59 Instead of treating disposal as solely tied to waste, a mere afterthought to the main focus on production and consumption, I have suggested disposal may also come ahead in the form of 'worlds' that prefigure all we do and presage all we say. This is not only because current understandings about arrangement and order are prefigured by the pathology of modernity, a streamlining that little hesitates to remove anything in the way of what is taken to be progress. It is also because system, culture, self and language are in practice so intermingled 437 C 2016 Sociological Review Publication Limited and conjoined that their reduction into stand-alone fields of study is nothing short of disastrous. While sociology has moved on from the 'wars' which led Randall Collins to sharpen up the boundaries of thought that kept apart what he called our four traditions, 60 the government-induced emphasis on 'quantifying' research findings has tended to elide the equal importance of reflecting on premises, hidden and stated, and hardened the practice of researchers working within a pre-set perspective; perspectives in which one way of looking at the world typically cuts out another.
In this inaugural I have therefore sought to go back over my tracks to see if I could discern a methodology commensurate with this reassessment of disposal as ordering and arrangement, rather than be solely concerned with the removal of 'outdated' ideas as 'waste'. My aim has been to explore whether doublecrossing offers a way out of the over-worn technique of 'rubbishing' competing perspectives in order to privilege one's proposed alternative. Double-crossing thus incorporates Heidegger's emphasis on making a clearing, but without buying into the emphasis on 'getting rid' of a prior theory or dominant view. As I have tried to illustrate using the device of two columns, there are advantages of crossing back and forth between newer and older ground. Not the least of these is the phenomenon of motility, the way 'world' oscillates with focus or argument. Indeed, we should not be surprised if viewing things one moment in terms, say, of production -and then the next in terms of consumption -results in narratives of unintended consequences and stories of the failure of markets.
Critical to a more informed rethinking of disposal than I can accomplish here is to grasp this issue of motility: how perspectives or interpretations appear to be obviated one moment and yet brought back into play the next. What I want to stress for the moment, therefore, is not the validity of one particular line of argument or the truth of any specific finding. Rather, given the speculative nature of the kind of exploration I have undertaken, the point of illustrating the methodology of double-crossing is to set out a way of working that others can follow -even if their follow-up leads to different conclusions. In keeping open findings and conclusions, 61 I should add that I am not valorizing the current fashion for treating ideas merely as matters of opinion or of accepting difference as always something to celebrate. Tolerance to difference in extension is laudable for the most part, particularly in terms of self and language, but may all too easily slip into a laxity over inequalities or disadvantage; and thereby eclipse attention to everyday struggles and conflict. So, too, the practice of insisting researchers select one from a range of multiple perspectives has served well as a device to counter those who insist on knowledge being reduced to universals, but we should be wary of its use degenerating into becoming a form of 'bullet-proofing' 62 against rival perspectives.
My main proposal in all this is not to insist therefore that we must just understand more about the disposal of the world -its arrangements and orderings as effected by the interplay of systems, culture, self and language. It is rather that we may understand disposal better alongside entertaining arguments about 438 C 2016 Sociological Review Publication Limited how systems, cultures, self and languages help to produce and consume each other in the vexatious business of our exchanging attachments and establishing relations. Getting a handle on the disposal of the world -its ordering and arrangements -is no easy matter and especially so when many arrangements that facilitate extension live in the shadows and much ordering of selves is of a recessive nature. As I hope to have shown in illustrating my work of double-crossing, unearthing elisions, obviations and exclusions involves a close engagement both with theories of how we produce and reproduce the 'things' of the world as well as with studies of how we set about consuming events. In this way we neither lose track of how much our own performances can matter, nor seek to jump over our shadows in the form of 'scientific revolutions'.
In exploring the manifold connections and links between culture, language, system and self, I have sought to clarify why we ought to avoid either accepting the conventional wisdom each of these carry, or hastily reject their readymade ideas about arrangement and order. If we can agree, for instance, that language takes on aspects of system as well as culture, 63 some comment might be made here on the ever-growing dependence in modernity on quantification. Specifically, it seems hard to refuse claims for matters like money and double entry to be also included as 'languages'. To the extent that either number or narrative can accomplish aspects of ostension, it should be noted that where numerical systems differ from alphabetic systems is over the need to keep and store. For example, in a clear example of the double nature of disposal, numbers not only bring into play their own forms of ordering and arrangement, they enable particular ways of forgetting. When we count up to ten apples, we happily efface oddities in shape, colour and taste. I hinted at this earlier with respect to how double entry formed itself into a system; that its gift (and its poison) lies in how its proclivity for monetary forms of transaction jettisoned the nature and content of other forms of information we might record. More than this, while some people might have to keep a few numbers in mind, in the form of budgets or cash in the bank, the wonderful thing about using numbers for our 'outlook' is the way they numb us to the content they have excluded. In line with the streamlining nature of modernity, we continually find ourselves beset with new numbers; so much so that their proliferation engenders in us an intense need to erase older numbers from memory. Unlike words, which are attached (in both senses of the word), to forms of arrangement and ordering, numbers only indirectly inscribe our experiences with the world. Hence the common assumption that they are neutral, whereas in fact their ability to alert us instantly to the matter at hand is bought at the overall cost of numbing us to what is actually taking place.
More generally, what can be drawn out from these crossings and doublecrossings? First I might emphasize I have said too little about other key ideas, particularly about notions of formal institutions, which has not only been a mainstay of sociology but is a key site for my own fieldwork. For instance, my research on corporations indicates how ethos, in its proper sense of the 'bringing up' of members in terms of conduct, is undermined in the production 439 C 2016 Sociological Review Publication Limited of 'ethical selves' 64 whenever discretion and trust is removed from staff by a growing reliance on bureaucratic procedures to provide transparency and accountability. So too, I have said little about markets -although my work on budgets in the past has clarified how these end up being used as an interface that severs profit goals from the narration of realities, 65 creates different 'worlds' for employers from that of staff, and seals off strategy from learning from those on the front line. 66 Most wilfully, I have failed to offer a sociological analysis of management 67 -even though I have traced elsewhere the efficacy of disorganization and unmanaging, 68 critiqued the separation of policy from operations, 69 explained how discretion is centred in order to underpin authority, 70 and shown how rhetoric about markets is used to disassociate line management from its oversight in one moment and then re-instated the next. 71 What I can say to sum up, is that my key argument that self is always in extension goes beyond simply repeating how open we are to techniques or technologies. Rather it emphasizes, instead, how unsighted each of us is to the effects of their incorporation as 'attachments'. 72 As Marilyn Strathern has framed the issue, technologies work us as much as we work them. The most obvious correction that follows from this is to go on to admit the many ways in which culture and language intermingle; as much as we think of the former as 'ours' and the latter as 'mine', these are busy ordering and arranging behind our backs. For instance, while Derrida has pointed to a 'violent hierarchy' in language in which one of two terms in an opposition 'governs the other' or 'has the upper hand', 73 such as white and black, or good and evil, Strathern has drawn attention to the dominant relations of ordering that arise from Euro-Americans invariably finding themselves in the mode of comparison. 74 These matters certainly help to point to the more recessive ways domination works today; but, in raising the notion of language as landscape, a landscape which we look out from, I am suggesting they may yet be only threads leading back into the labyrinth.
In turning from self back to systems, the most glaring example of how language and culture are interwoven remains, even today, the long-held Western tying of reason to the deductive powers of formal logic; this fixation on validity not only denies intuition but, more surprisingly, excludes matters of truth. Equally glaring is the well-known way 'law', in its fetish for precedent, appears to drive out justice. However, what I have been pointing to is not so much a putative autopoiesis that could justify reification, but rather how systems like money and double entry (and hence profit budgets as well) 'engross' themselves through the very processes and networks that enrol us. 75 Only with the help of double entry, for instance, could capitalism become global and pull off the cultural feat of turning our debts into credits, 76 rewarding those who forestall repayment with more credit and deem those who never borrow as uncreditworthy.
While my arguments over extension imply the importance of not falling into the trap of thinking of individuals as having agency without structure 440 C 2016 Sociological Review Publication Limited and its artefacts (including accounts in the form of proposals by the self to the self, for the self), it also seems imperative for sociology to avoid treating distributed systems as wholes, reifying say hybrids as new forms of life. What looks to be key instead is to recognize how these off-shoots of modernity install themselves as languages as at the same time they perform as cultures -albeit of an alien, inhuman kind -parasitically living off our complicity with a 'violent hierarchy', or on our ability to incite each other into a 'mode of comparison'. At a minimum, closer attention should be given to how attachment to hybrid forms of artefacts intermingles with the cornucopia of relations upon which selfmaking draws. Going down this direction may also help unpick the chiaroscuro of modernity, illuminating how, and when, one picture of world gets 'disposed' into another and how one self is figured in one moment and discarded for another view of self the next? to others aspects of belonging, but her emphasis on goods acting as symbols imports a reliance on systems of signs being well understood. I thought this smuggled back in the questionable notion of shared values and hence undermined the novelty of her emphasis on display. The idea that people were bonded through a common knowledge of symbols not only reiterates older ideas of commonality from learning a language, it obscured the opportunity for ethnographers to pick up on observable and checkable shifts in the ordering of material arrangements. More critically, in her tendency to overlook the disposal of power in all its distribution and its inter-dependencies, Douglas infers too readily that commonalities in display reveals identity. 24 Harold Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology, Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 35. The phrase is used by Garfinkel in direct opposition to Kant's emphasis on 'the universe within'. The distinction goes to the heart of the difference between ethics and ethos, the former being usually taken to be codification of morals 'inside' persons and the latter belonging to the moral world 'outside'.