From John Law’s After Method: Mess in Social Science Research:

Presence is, obviously, what is made present or (as I shall sometimes say) condensed ‘in-here’. … these are presences enacted into being within practices. Some are representations while others are objects or processes. Presence, then, is any kind of in-here enactment.

Manifest absence goes with presence. It is one of its correlates since presence is incomplete and depends on absence. To make present is also to make absent. …

Otherness, or absence that is not made manifest, also goes with presence. It too is necessary to presence. But it disappears. Perhaps it disappears because it is not interesting while it goes on routinely… Perhaps it disappears because it is not interesting… Perhaps (though no doubt this is an overlapping category) it disappears because what is being brought to presence and manifest absence cannot be sustained unless it is Othered…

It follows that method assemblage is also about the crafting and enacting of boundaries between presence, manifest absence and Otherness. These boundaries are necessary. Each category depends on the others, so it is not that they can be avoided. To put it differently, there will always be Othering. What is brought to presence — or manifest absence — is always limited, always potentially contestable. How it might be crafted is endlessly uncertain, endlessly revisable. Normative methods try to define and police boundary relations in ways that are tight and hold steady. An inquiry into slow method suggests that we might imagine more flexible boundaries, and different forms of presence and manifest absence. Other possibilities can be imagined, for instance if we attend to non-coherence.

I hate to affirm a neoconservative’s thought process, but these correspond to Donald Rumsfeld’s distinctions between known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and honestly Rumsfeld’s articulation is much clearer:

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

But, as Yogi Bera said:

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

Though Rumsfeld was absolutely clear on the fact that unknown unknowns exist, his approach to his work precluded any practical relationship with them. This is because he was so occupied with his knowns (his facts and his explicit questions) that anything that threatened the integrity and clarity of his knowns had to be Othered — until that otherness was able to overwhelm his sense of certainty.

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Camper Van Beethoven – “Sweethearts”

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It’s easy to admit that there are questions we cannot yet answer and to acknowledge that there are questions that we cannot yet ask, because they have not yet dawned on us. But it is completely another matter to live one’s life prepared to allow new questions to dawn on us.

And to be completely frank, this is because we think we already know what a new question dawning on us feels like and feels like, and what the open state of mind looks and feels like — and we are utterly wrong about it.

We think it just comes upon us like some glorious transfiguration of the problem from everyday dullness into some sort of brilliant eureka moment. We think the insight will hit us like a brand new set of opinions about the world we’re already seeing. These are the fantasies of people who have never lived the reality of radical thought, largely because their ignorant preconceptions preclude the reality.

Fact is, a fresh, new question in your mind feels terrible. It feels like shit to begin to have a new thought. It feels as terrible as going into labor.

It takes a long time to come to terms with the agony, to work through it and to process the just-detected-but-as-yet-still-unknown unknown into a feeling of new potential, of intellectual expansiveness and inspiration.

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To learn the answer to a known unknown, simply ask the question that fills in the gap in your knowledge. Ask the sorts of questions that elicit a factual response, the kind of question that begins with “what”, “how”, “who”, or “why”.

One strategy for uncovering an unknown unknown is to learn from other people: invite another person to relate a story. Instead of asking an explicit question, ask for a story or ask the person to tell you about some area you are interested in.

The more you request instruction instead of asking for answers to questions the more able you will be to learn something you didn’t anticipate and were unable to anticipate prior to the encounter.