Abstract
At residential Home Z, care workers, clients and various technologies enact multiple "mental impairment", reiterating it through repertoires of care. Its various versions - "mental impairment" as a medical condition, an object of care, an opportunity for inclusion, wickedness of the man-child or an object of critical attitude - could be neither coordinated into a coherent whole, nor distributed into clearly delineated areas of application (Mol 2002). "Mental impairment" enacted at the Home Z is less than one and more than many, as none of its versions acquires coherence of a useful whole and every practice of constructing it further multiplies incompatibilities.
Because it does not allow for the felicity conditions (Austin 1962; Latour 2013) of its individual version to be met, it is, contrary to most objects multiple described so far in STS, an infelicitous object, creating ethical and practical difficulties as well as frequent failures of cooperation. Inspired by empirical ethics (Pols 2015) and diplomatic ethnography (Latour 2013; Synek 2018), this paper analyses situations where documenting intra-normativities of various care practices and their effects calls for critical intervention.
Should the harmful versions of "mental impairment" be described as productive institutional arrangements with their own socio-materialities and values? Should ghosts be invoked and time unfolded (M'charek, Oorschot 2020) so that the past utilities' grip upon the present can be made manifest? And what impact such moves have on cooperation between the researcher and his/her partners and on the lives of those whose subjectivities are shaped through connection with infelicitous objects?