TCS Special Issue: ‘Problematizing the Problematic’
Problems abound, unbound, they proliferate and overflow, tangle and interlace, they insist and persist. And on this turbulent Earth traversed by ongoing economic crises, global health emergencies, geopolitical instabilities and wars, extreme weather events, ecological devastation, and growing political resentments, the intractable nature of the problems that besiege the present has never loomed larger or more darkly. While the last 50 years have seen an increasing recognition within policy and planning circles of the overwhelming complexity of contemporary problems, such recognition has not quite amounted to an attempt to come to terms with the nature of the problematic itself. What, indeed, is a problem? What is the mode of existence of the problematic as such?
These are the vital questions that resonate at the heart of the ‘Problematizing the Problematic’ special issue of Theory, Culture & Society (Volume 38, Number 2, March 2021) edited by Martin Savransky of Goldsmiths, University of London. Heeding Gilles Deleuze’s (1994: 158) warning that we risk remaining ‘slaves so long as we do not control the problems themselves, so long as we do not possess a right to the problems, to a participation in and management of the problems’, the several articles in this special issue wager, each in their own divergent ways, that coming to terms with the darkening of problems above all requires taking seriously the dark problem of the problematic itself. As Martin Savransky suggests in his introduction to the special issue (Open Access), it demands an ongoing, risky experimentation with the proposition that problems might have a certain amount of being of their own, that they may designate a mode of existence that is irreducible to the subjective, the methodological, or the epistemological. Indeed, what they seek to intensify is the sense that ‘problematic’ may come to express not the absence of order or knowledge, but the dark presence of a generative otherwise that insists on the edge of the present, creating an opening which demands a response yet never determines what that response shall be, thereby giving way to an ongoing dynamics of creation and transformation in whose hold bodies and practices, knowledges and lives, thoughts and worlds, are done and undone, made and remade.
In addition to the comprehensive introduction to the stakes of the issue and the history of alternative arts of problematisation in and across French and pragmatist philosophical traditions, articles by a range of authors cover the following: an exploration of the problematic of transdisciplinarity with Bachelard and Deleuze by Patrice Maniglier; a discussion of vitalism, the problem of life and the life of problems, by Monica Greco; an argument for the etho-poietics of problematisation in the wake of climate disorder by Isabelle Stengers; a methodological problematisation of the nature of environmental problems by Andrew Barry (Open Access); an illumination of the problematic nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s call for a New People and a New Earth, by Craig Lundy; and a reconceptualization of William James’s pragmatic pluralism as an ongoing and unfinished response to the ‘pluralistic problematic’, by Martin Savransky.
In their problematic togetherness, the articles gathered in this special issue seek to create an opening, to sound a call. If ‘those who do not renew the image of thought are’, to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994: 51) words, ‘functionaries who, enjoying a ready-made thought, are not even conscious of the problem and are unaware even of the efforts of those they claim to take as their models’, the articles of this special issue sound a call for modes of social, ecological and political thought that would seek participation in the posing of problems themselves. A call for consenting to the imperative and the adventure of giving to the dark presence of the problematic the power to transform their modes of thinking, to renew the image of thought, so as to precipitate, in turn, a metamorphosis of our modes of knowing, of living, of being, of our manner of inhabiting the Earth.
Special issue cover art: Black and white abstract painting, by Steve Johnson
Abstracts from Theory, Culture & Society’s special issue on ‘Problematizing the Problematic’
Martin Savransky, Problems all the Way Down (Open Access)
Besieged by ongoing economic crises, global health emergencies, geopolitical instabilities, ecological devastation, and growing political resentments, the intractable nature of the problems that configure the present has never loomed larger or more darkly. But what, indeed, is a problem? Problematising the modern image that treats problems as obstacles to be overcome by the progress of technoscientific knowledge and policy, this introductory article lays the groundwork for a generative conceptualisation of problems. Reweaving intercontinental connections between traditions of French philosophy and American pragmatism, it proffers a conception of the problematic as a mode of existence that is irreducible to the subjective, the methodological, or the epistemological. Problems go all the way down and up, requiring nothing less than an art of metamorphosis capable of engendering processes of creation, invention, and transformation in whose hold bodies and practices, knowledges and lives, thoughts and worlds, are done and undone, made and remade.
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Patrice Maniglier, Problem and Structure: Bachelard, Deleuze and Transdisiplinarity
The concept of ‘problem’ has been recently promoted by the official academic institutions and put at the centre of a new field of research, self-styled ‘transdisciplinary studies’, in order to provide a foundation to a resolutely transdisciplinary approach to research and thought in general. The paper notes that the same move (i.e. connecting a problem-centred approach to thought with transdisciplinary method) can be found in Deleuze’s philosophy, which provides us with what the technocratic image of thought advocated by transdisciplinary studies ultimately cannot provide: a positive concept of problems where those are not negative moments but originary and active matrices of thought. It then argues that Deleuze owes this concept to the French epistemological tradition, and more specifically to Bachelard, where it is nothing other than the concept of structure. It ends by explicating what particular version of structuralism Deleuze was thus led to construct in order to account for the role of problems in a radically transdisciplinary account of thought: it is the fact that all structures are multi-structured that grounds the essentially transdisciplinary nature of thought. The fact that we could think differently is precisely what makes us think.
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Monica Greco, Vitalism Now – A Problematic
This paper considers whether and how ‘vitalism’ might be considered relevant as a concept today; whether its relevance should be expressed in terms of disciplinary demarcations between the life sciences and the natural sciences; and whether there is a fundamental incompatibility between a ‘vitalism of process’ and a ‘vitalism as pathos’. I argue that the relevance of vitalism as an epistemological and ontological problem concerning the categorical distinction between living and non-living beings must be contextualized historically, and referred exclusively to the epistemic horizon defined by classical physics. In contrast to this, drawing on the philosophies of Canguilhem, Whitehead, and Atlan, I propose an appreciation of the contemporary relevance of vitalism premised on the pathic and indeterminate character of nature as a whole. From this perspective vitalism expresses a politically significant ethos concerning the relationship between life, knowledge, problems and their solutions.
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Isabelle Stengers, Putting Problematizing to the Test of Our Present
At the end of his life, Michel Foucault wrote of ‘problematization’ as what he had done all along. Yet some commentators see a ‘new’ Foucault emerging together with this term. This essay accepts the last hypothesis and connects it with the French scene, where problematization was already familiar, and its use under tension. Starting with Bachelard, problematization was related with a polemic epistemological stance, but its reprise by Gilles Deleuze turned it into an affirmative theme dramatizing the creation of problems. Situating Foucault’s problematization in this philosophical line permits us to develop the relation he proposed between problematization and the test of contemporary reality on the thinker. This paper will put problematization itself to the test of our present, that is, to the prospect of the social-ecological devastation associated with climate disorder. Both following and betraying Foucault with the help of Whitehead and Haraway, problematization will then be related to the power of sensible events, a power which requires allowing oneself to be touched, and allowing what touches us the power to modify the relation we entertain to our own reasons.
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Andrew Barry, What is an Environmental Problem? (Open Access)
This paper advances two arguments about environmental problems. First, it interrogates the strength and limitations of empiricist accounts of problems and issues offered by actor-network theory. Drawing on the work of C.S. Peirce, it considers how emerging environmental problems often lead to abductive inferences about the existence of hidden causes that may or may not have caused the problem to emerge. The analysis of environmental problems should be empiricist in so far as it is sceptical of the claims of those who know in advance what the problem is, but it should also be alert to processes and things that are not readily traceable or perceived. Secondly, the paper’s contention is that environmental problems almost invariably involve an encounter between unlike or disparate materials or processes. In such circumstances, the challenge is to develop a form of inquiry that is alert to both the specificity of such encounters and to the specificity of the political situations in which they come to matter.
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Craig Lundy, The Call for a New Earth, a New People: An Untimely Problem
In their final book, Deleuze and Guattari state that the practice of philosophy ‘calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist’. This call is deeply problematic: aside from its aristocratic overtones, it is difficult to ascertain what it might sound like, how to give it voice, and what might come of it. But it is also problematic in form. In this paper I will explain how. After investigating its genesis in Deleuze’s engagements with Nietzsche and Bergson, I will outline the geography of the call as it appears in the mature work of Deleuze and Guattari. Aided by this analysis, the paper will conclude by making some tentative remarks on what is to be done with the call for a new earth and people – or, more accurately, what might be done with it, for the benefit of what is to come.
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Martin Savransky, The Pluralistic Problematic: William James and The Pragmatics of The Pluriverse
In his lectures on pragmatism, William James famously proposed that the question of ‘the one and the many’ constitutes the most central of all philosophic problems, and that it is ‘central because so pregnant’. Prompted by James’ proposition, this article explores the intimately political connection in James’ thought between his pluralistic metaphysics and the nature of the problematic as a generative force that impregnates worlds and thoughts with differences: what I here call ‘the pluralistic problematic’. Exploring the generative significance of the problematic in James’ philosophy, I propose that, where James is concerned, the pluriverse has a thoroughly problematic mode of existence. And pluralism, rather than a celebration of the many, rather than a philosophical exposition on multiple worlds and ontologies, or a theory of the organisation of a diverse polis, is first and foremost a pragmatics of the pluriverse – a political, experimental and pragmatic response to the ongoing insistence of the pluralistic problematic.
