‘It is not the sensible being but the being of the sensible. It is not the given but that by which the given is given.’
(Deleuze, 1995, Difference and Repetition, p 139-140).
What does this entail for ethnography?
Shortly after I returned from fieldwork I was often asked ‘Did you get enough material?’ ‘Did you get what you wanted?’ ‘Will you have to go back to get more?’ At the time I had answered, ‘Well, you can never get enough, but I have enough for my thesis.’
The question of ‘enough’ is dealt with by the Goon Show in their episode World War One (S08 E22). It begins as the British chiefs of staff hold a lunch. Peter Sellers tries to turn the chattering bunch to the matter at hand, much to the distress of Harry Secombe.
‘Yes, alright, that’s enough, that’s enough. After all, enough is as good as a feast. Yes!’
‘No, no! I haven’t had enough. I haven’t had enough.’
‘Oh, haven’t you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, swallow this obstacle.’
‘Hup! [Gulps] Oh ho delicious! What was it, eh?’
‘It was enough.’
‘Ha ha, I don’t… I don’t feel as if I’ve had enough.’
‘Well it was enough! It was marked on the tin “A N-U-double-F. Nett weight four ounces.” So you’ve just eaten a four ounce nuff.’
‘Well, if that was a four ounce nuff, I haven’t had enough nuff!’
(You can listen to it if you want and the said conversation takes place after about one and a half minutes).
The question ‘is a nuff being enough’ is not simply word play, but Secombe’s move to shift what Sellers imposes – the adjective ‘enough’ which qualifies the amount as much or as many as required by definition, into a noun – a nuff – of unspecified quantifiable amount. Since a nuff is indefinite in extent but is particular in that it comes in ounces (and cans), the question of ‘what counts as enough nuff?’ might indeed be reasonable question.
So, did I get enough (as much or as many as required) during fieldwork? Or did I get a nuff (a particular thing) during my fieldwork? Translating my answer above – ‘Well, you can never get enough, but I have enough for my thesis’ – into the Goon Show framing, my answer would be – ‘No! I didn’t get enough. But, I have enough nuff to write a thesis.’ So what is this thing – a nuff – that is both enough not enough. If I were a romantic I might say ‘No my dear, I didn’t get enough (of worldly experience). But, I have enough nuff to make me a man.’ If I were a mercenary I might say, ‘Boss, you can never get enough (money)! But, I have enough nuff to make me an entrepreneur.’ If I were a positivist anthropologist I might say ‘One can never know enough, you know every little feature of a particular race. But, I have discerned enough that we, my earnest colleagues, are not like them.’ If I were a relativist anthropologist my answer would be ‘I think I got a nuff, though I’m not sure it is really a nuff. It is enough to be a nuff from my perspective, or is it? What do your nuffs look like? If everyone’s nuff are different we’ll never have enough nuff! Or is there too much nuff? I think I;ve had enough!’ But I am an empirical philosopher, and instead turn to nuff to see if it can be both enough and not enough?
I began with the quote from Deleuze: ‘It is not the given but that by which the given is given.’ To paraphrase, it is not the nuff, but that by which the nuff is given’, that is the question of ‘enough’.
We can simply make the answer to the question foundational to our metaphysics. In doing so we begin with the given, the ‘nuff’, the empirical, as given through our rationality (rationalists), our senses or our perception (Hume and Berkley), by our mind, by our language (relativism), or by universal synthetic a priori (Kant). Doing this reduces empiricism to running around getting ‘enough’: enough data, enough time, enough power, enough words (enough for a thesis), enough graphs, enough money et cetera.
Nuff, the stuff of empirical experience, becomes an extensive entity to be collected. I actually think that this is foundational to most debates, formal and informal, about ethnography. Hence the questions to me ‘Did you get enough?’ Did I collect enough units of experience? Before I left I attended a master class at which we were told that unless we were going to do fieldwork for a year or more, we were not doing ‘real’ ethnography. This counted out almost everyone in the room (I had already been discounted for doing an ethnography of objects)! So again, the empirical becomes defined by a metric entity – time – which can be measured in units that stack up as enough or not.
In one genre of philosophical reasoning we might say say that time is necessary but not sufficient condition for ethnography. And so we go looking for what might count as sufficient: did you go here, did you go there, did you witness this, did you speak to that category of people, did you understand the local language, did you check this account with that account, did you pay attention to the historical in the field? These make your experience better or worse. Again, experience is extensive in that is is inclusive of certain ‘units of experience’ or ‘experience objects’ that are of value. While we could characterise this paragraph as saying it is not just the quantity of experience you get (length of time for example) but the quality of experience you get (participating in number work inside and outside of formal educational and employment settings), this ‘quality’ of experience is still metric, still quantifiable in that is of a good quality or less good quality. It is either good enough or not. So, implied in the enough is always a nuff; a countable, measurable, knowable unit.
But if we want an object oriented account, one that wants to interrogate the the nature of ontology, what is ‘nuff’, we refuse to assume that enough always presupposes a knowable nuff, and the question of enough become very different. What is enough (how the given is given) and what is a nuff (the given) cannot be easily separated. Like Harry Secombe, ethnographers must open wide a gulp down enough nuff all at once.
- World War One, Series 8, Episode 22, First broadcast on February 24, 1958. Script by Spike Milligan. Produced by Charles Chilton. Announced by Wallace Greenslade. The orchestra was conducted by Wally Stott. Transcribed by Christopher Gray, corrections by Paul Webster and Peter Olausson. script at http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s08e22_world_war_one
