April 23, 2007
What is a problematization?
Inspired by comments Colin and Limor have made over on the VSS blog I wanted to propose for explicit discussion (again) the question: what is a problematization? Rather than re-state the basic question that everyone is asking, let me just quote a part of Colin’s question (Limor’s is along very similar lines):
“My question concerns this claim, which I’m not sure does adequate service to the genealogy traced in the rest of the paper: “technological and political developments rendered prior security frameworks inadequate, and forced experts to invent new ways of identifying and intervening in security threats” (p.2).
The claim seems to be that ’something happened’ and this ’something’ simply forced people to develop expertise around new topics. But what is the ’something’ and where did it come from? Did these tech/pol developments force experts to respond to ‘vital security’ matters? Or did the experts seal their status as experts by, at least in part. formulating vital security as a problem? This doesn’t mean that the problem is simply constructed but neither is it simply real. For what I can gather you want to articulate a view somewhere between constructed and real or rather a view that encompasses both of these.
The experts help shape the problems which then in turn further propel the experts. Problems and their solutions are reciprocal, such that you simply cannot have one without the other. Fields or problematization are thus practices which are, we might say, real constructions or constructed realities. Is that fair? Is there a better way to put it given your aims here?”
I certainly agree, the experts and the problems are closely linked. It is in the process of interaction that both define their mutual form. However, let me try to introduce another facet to the discussion of problematization.
The question of constructivism vs. realism is certainly a vexing issue . Hacking has explored it extensively and has given us an excellent way of handling it. My sense, however, is that it ultimately is a philosophical problem, and that Foucault might not have been too concerned about it.
‘Problematization’ is a concept, and as such it is a tool, and therefore the key question for me is: What kind of work do we want this tool to accomplish? I would certainly concede that of course we need to clarify our concepts as best as possible and we need to be as consistent as necessary, but we also need to keep an eye on the following question: What kind of argument do we want to make? Where and how do we want to intervene? And how is the concept of problematization allowing us to do so?
The concept of problematization allowed Foucault to reposition thought in relation to freedom – a move that wasn’t possible in his earlier genealogical power/knowledge framework. The concept of problematization served an existential function helping Foucault to address a pressing problem and resolve an existential crisis. Thereby instantiating precisely what he meant by thinking. It is no coincidence, I guess, that by thought Foucault means both what he analyzes as well as what he himself is doing.
In using the concept of problematization, it seems that we need to keep two things in view at the same time: what experts are doing and what we are trying to accomplish.
I agree with Carlo’s point about asking strict “theoretical” questions of problematization. It clearly was meant as a response to a certain kind of methodological challenge. And, I think it would be worth trying to address this question of the “work” that it is meant to do. But I would push Carlo to say more about the link between probematization and freedom. I think it is quite an intriguing connection, one that, to my knowledge, is most clearly laid out in “What is Critique?” which, through a series of mutations, seems like it became “What is Enlightenment?” It is, indeed, quite curious that a methodological discussion about the term “problematization” emerges in the middle of this lecture. Carlo: Could you say a bit more about what you think is going on there? It might also be helpful to try to relate this to Security, Territory, Population.
I’d be happy to do so, if only my books were here. At any rate, my point was just that it might be helpful to take into account the context in which Foucault came up with the concept of problematization. The question of freedom seems key to me, also because the governmentality guys tend to reduce it to a strategy of liberal government. My sense is that that’s only one aspect of it.
As to the What is Critique essay, I think it is a piece that stands somewhat ambiguously between the governmentality work and the later work on ethics. It is a very dense piece and many conversations seem to go on at the same time. If I remember correctly, Foucault didn’t want to have it published. Parts of it later became What is Enlightenment, which is a bit more focused. In any case, it might be interesting to compare more explicitly problematization as formulated in What is Critique with the three later pieces (the interview with PR; What is Enlightenment, and History of Sexuality II).
In response to the title of Stephen’s post, I would like to a pose a question, or a short series of them, in regard to an issue about Foucault’s use of problematization. These bear on some issues I have been struggling with myself lately.
There seem to be two senses of problematization in Foucault. 1) In one sense, he described it as the work which the historian does to direct the work of thought toward present practices which were once seen as stable but which the historian shows to be problematic in some crucial sense. For instance, Foucault once offered the “problematization of a present” as “the questioning by the philosopher of this present to which he belongs and in relation to which he has to situate himself” (“The Art of Telling the Truth” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p.88). 2) In another sense, though, would aim less to problematize present practices and instead be focused on the way in which certain practices have been subjected to problematization in history. This is the way in which Foucault seemed to describe his work in the methodological “Introduction” to the second volume of The History of Sexuality. Foucault here describes himself as analyzing “the problematizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought—and the practices on the basis of which these problematizations are formed” (p.11). Foucault goes on to clarify that he is not so much problematizing concepts by writing their histories as he is writing the histories of there having been problematized.
My question concerns the relations between these two senses of problematization. Do these two stand in need of any kind of synthesis or can we just let them do their work separately? If they must be related, then how must they be related? If it is merely helpful to relate them or connect them, then what is the most beneficial way of connecting them?
These questions hook up (I think) with some other issues recently discussed.
First, there is a connection to some of the issues on the VSS blog over here concerning the relation between the ‘fieldworker / experimenter’ and their subject matter. Do problematizations demand thematization by the fieldworker in order to truly be problematizations? Surely not in every case. But then again there are some cases where this definitely seems to hold. Think for instance of the way in which Foucault the experimenter was able to define areas of problematization which previously did not exist and which have subsequently proven extremely valuable for some (discipline, governmentality, biopower, etc.).
Second, here is where a connection to issues of realism versus constructivism and their bearing on Foucault and Dewey sneek back in and show their relevance (and this suggests that these debates should not be dismissed at the same time that we should not take them too seriously — the point, I think is not to prove to the philosophers that one is neither naive realist nor naive constructivist, but rather to philosophically do everything one can to avoid both of these naive positions). Let’s say that Foucault’s work was that of specifying a field of problematization. On this view, he did not merely invent a problem but neither did he merely discover it. He interacted with his environment (part of which is our shared history) in order to formulate a very dense but also very precise problem about some of the moral, political, and epistemic assumptions we have made about ourselves for the last century and more.
Third, this, I think, bears on potential connections between Dewey and Foucault vis-a-vis realism. I see Dewey as very weak on precisely this issue of the work of problematization insofar as he takes the situational “indeterminacies” which give rise to “problems” as something that is just immediately given by a situation itself. This view calls back to a naive realism or given-ism (Sellars, Rorty) which is not tenable within Dewey’s own pragmatism. This naive realism is not simply a philosophical error, but has led to decades of Dewey being severely (but so very easily!) misinterpreted as a champion of straight-line instrumental rationality (Horkheimer, Mumford).
[...] is a key term in Foucault (as indicated by the valuable discussion over it at the Biopower and the Contemporary blog). It is defined in the late interview with Francis Ewald (”The concern for truth” [...]
I’ve been thinking about another concept that might help clarify the nuances of “problematization”: “contingency”.
I think it has an important role in the concept of problematization; and I suggest to identify three domains of contingency:
1) The contingency between possible solutions and a general form of problematization (contingency instead of given);
2) “The reason that problematizations are problematic, not surprisingly, is that, something prior “must have happened to introduce uncertainty,…” - the contingency between prior thought/practice and the problem;
3) “The defining trait of problematization does not turn on the coupling of opposites (outside or inside, free or constrained), but rather on the type of relationship forged between observer and problematized situation.”(PR, Anthropos Today, 20) “It is precisely the implication of the thinker and thought as contingent that forms the problem” (PR, AT, 47)- The contingency between thought, thinker and the form of problems.
Putting it differently, I think we can specify three domains of problematization at the level of “object”, “mode”, and “analytic” (this is very similar to the labinars work regarding “the contemporary”)
- Problematization at the level of “object”: solutions are not given but emerge in relation to a form of problematization.
- Problematization as a “mode” is in other words “the history of thought”.
- Problematization as “analytic” is the work of doing the “history of thought”, the work of thought. “it is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals.” In that sense thought is freedom.
Certainly the differentiation is only for the sake of analysis; these three domains are definitely working concurrently. We can’t separate the work of the researcher from the very objects he sets and reflects over as problems, or the problems themselves that call for analysis, and all these together are taken in a mode that determines what he observes and analyzes.
It may be useful to think these questions through with examples so that the stakes can be made a bit clearer, otherwise we get hung up on theoretical answers to problems that are not theoretical.
To take a very familiar example: In the 19th century there were different ways to understand poverty: either in conservative and paternalistic terms (the poor as sinful or victims of misfortunte) or from a new “social” perspective (which saw the poor in terms of regularities of collective life). Intuitively, it seems right to say that the “social” perspective is a new problematization of collective life, one that was being explicitly articulated by the late 18th century in Physiocrat and English Liberal circles. It emerged, in part, because the conservative/paternalistic/sovereigntist understanding could not grasp the rise of pauperism in early industrial Britain or France. The Poor Law interventions of the early 19th century in Britain, for example, only made things worse. So the “social” point of view emerged as much as an intellectual critique of paternalism as it did a response to the problem of pauperism, which it had to reconstitute as a “social” problem of poverty.
So what is there to say here? First, there is a new “problematization” of poverty that is articulated by contemporary observers. It was up to Foucault to name it “governmentality.” But these observers new that they had a new conception of collective life. And Foucault is not the only one who knew they knew. Polanyi recognized the same thing. Second, it seems important that this “new” problematization is articulated in relationship to a particular body of thought — that of early modern liberalism, which distinguished itself initially from sovereigntist theories of collective life and from paternalist perspectives on poverty.
But — and this seems to me absolutely crucial — there are immediate complications. First, by the beginning of the 19th century there are already recombinations in which some liberal thought is attached to conservative political views. So the original split — liberal versus sovereigntist/conservative — does not hold up easily. Second, by at least the middle of the 19th century there are multiple “social” perspectives on collective life: Marxism, liberal political economy, and so on. So what I guess I find curious here is that the new problematization of collective life is formed in relationship to a specific problematic situation. But it almost immediately detaches itself from the specifics of that situation, and is then recombined to produce other forms in other situations. So Foucault situates the emergence of “governmentality” with the liberals, but it opens up on a broader range of formations.
Does this help in thinking through any of the above?
friends,
Here are a few quotes from John Dewey.The “essays” were originally published in 1903.
I think it is important to set Foucault in tension and contrast with someone else and probably not Deleuze (Dreyfus and Searle used to complain about the tendency to explain the obscure by the more obscure).
I will try to say a few things about this when life permits.
Essays in Experimental Logic, John Dewey.
“What Pragmatism Means.”
p.309- “The meaning is the effects these objects produce.”
310- For what an idea as idea means, is precisely that an object is not given. The pragmatic procedure here is to set the idea ‘at work within the stream of experience. It appears less as a solution than as a program for more work, and particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed. Theories, thus, become instruments…’(James)
311. “The term ‘meaning’ and the term ‘practical’ taken in isolation, and without explicit definition from their specific context and problem are triply ambiguous. The meaning may be the conception or definition of an object; it may be the denotative existential referent of an idea; it may be the actual value or importance. So practical in the corresponding cases may mean the attitudes and conduct exacted of us by objects; or the capacity and tendency of an idea to effect changes in prior existences; or the desirable and undesirable quality of certain ends. The general pragmatic attitude, none the less, is applied in all cases.
p.319 James’ reference to veri-fication, the acceptance of the idea that verification means the advent of the object intended.
An added note.
p.330. “the term ‘pragmatic’ means only the rule of referring all thinking, all reflective considerations, to consequences for final meaning and test.”
p.331. “the operations of knowing are (or artfully derived from) natural responses of the organism, which constitute knowing in virtue of the situation of doubt in which they arise and in virtue of the uses of inquiry, reconstruction, and control to which they are put.
p.334. “Thus, the object of knowledge is practical in the sense that it depends upon a specific kind of practice for its existence – for its existence as an object of knowledge. …objects are not known till they are made in the course of the process of experimental thinking. Their usefulness when made is whatever, from infinity to zero, experience may subsequently determine it to be.”
“Logic of Judgments of Practice”
pp.378-79. “…the attempt to bring over from past objects the elements of a standard for valuing future considerations is a hopeless one. The express object of a valuation-judgment is to release factors which being new, cannot be measured on the basis of the past alone.”
“the standard is a rule for conducting inquiry to its completion: it is a counsel to make examination of the operative factors complete, a warning against suppressing recognition of any of them. …For the doing is the actual choice. It is the completed reflection.
p.386. Nietzsche would probably not have made so much of a sensation but he would have been within the limits of wisdom, if he had confined himself to the assertion that all judgment, in the degree in which it is critically intelligent, is a transvaluation of prior values.
p.439. Significant progress, progress which is more than technical, depends upon ability to forsee new and different results and to arrange conditions for their effectuation. Science is the instrument of increasing our technique in attaining results already known and cherished.
p.442. The more their application is confined within its own special calling, the less meaning do the conceptions possess, and the more exposed they are to error. The widest possible range of applications is the means of the deepest verification. …That individuals in every branch of human endeavor should be experimentalists engaged in testing the findings of the theorist is the sole final guaranty for the sanity of the theorist.
What is problematization? It has been suggested that problematization is an attitude (Prado 2000:152), a technical term (Collier, et al. 2004), but not a historical method (Gutting 2005:104) when studying an event or situation. Foucault himself writes:
a problematization does not mean the representation of a pre-existent object nor the creation of an object that did not exist. It is the ensemble of discursive and non-discursive practices that make something into the play of true and false and constitute it as an object of thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc. (cited in Collier, et al. 2004:3).
It is important to underline that problematization, according to Foucault, is a type of analysis that should not be confused with an idealistic approach since it actually pays attention to a concrete real situation (Pearson 2001:171-173). Rather than being read as a substantive idealist, he is to be understood as a realist (Pearce and Woodiwiss 2001; Prado 2000). The real situation, as a concrete and specific aspect of the world, means that something prior “must have happened to introduce uncertainty, a loss of familiarity; that loss, that uncertainty is the result of difficulties in our previous way of understanding, acting, relating” (Collier, et al. 2004:3).
Perhaps problematization simply is a concept with an embedded idea of an situational analysis á la Popper??????
What is a problematization? Well, what is a problematization not? Perhaps we can approximate a definition by way of contrast.
I would contrast problematization to two traditional modes of critique: denunciation and vindication. This contrast is suggested to me by a claim recently made by Rabinow and Rose: “If we are in an emergent moment of vital politics, celebration and denunciation are insufficient as analytical approaches” (Rabinow and Rose 2006, 215). It is also suggested to me by considering Foucault’s genealogy in contrast to Nietzsche’s denunciatory and Bernard Williams’s vindicatory genealogy. If denunciation holds that that X is “bad” and vindication that X is “good”, then problematization refuses these “for and against” polemics and holds that X is “dangerous” (Foucault in the Dreyfus/Rabinow interview) or even better “fraught” (Todd May on Foucault).
I would explicate this contrast as follows: A problematization is a critique does not presuppose its own solution. Problematization precedes, but also invites and provokes, solutions. Now, surely a ‘successful’ problematization is one that is eventually able to articulate itself to a solution such that problem and solution reciprocally inform one another as each gets increasingly refined until at some point this whole problem-solution network congeals and then becomes something more solid and less flexible and therefore close to a traditional critical apparatus, e.g. denunciation or vindication.
In the early stages, before things get (sufficiently) solved, we might say that (a certain practice of) critique takes the form of problematization. This hooks up, I hope, with both Limor’s claim about the contingency of the ‘object’ of problematization and with Paul’s quote from Dewey (1903) above: “…the attempt to bring over from past objects the elements of a standard for valuing future considerations is a hopeless one. The express object of a valuation-judgment is to release factors which being new, cannot be measured on the basis of the past alone.” Problematization differs from denunciation and vindication in that it does not presuppose a solution from some point of view external to its own field of inquiry (i.e., ‘situation’) against which it measures this field. Problematization suggests that solutions must come within the field into which we are inquiring (i.e., it is a ‘local’ critique) such that there is no point in escaping this field to achieve an external perspective which allows one to ‘denounce’ or ‘vindicate’ the field in question (i.e., it is not a ‘revolutionist’ or ‘global’ critique).
An example (because I think Stephen is right that we need to keep our eye on examples here and I know that I myself am very guilty of not heeding this advice). A traditional Marxist critical theory of 19c. poverty would describe poverty as an effect of an imbalance of class power and a consequent extraction of ‘surplus value’ from the ‘proles’ by the ‘capitalists’ such that the solution is already built into the critique–not a problematization but a denunciation. The problematization of the same would redescribe the situation in terms of categories which were not already present within it (e.g., redescribing what had been the moral category of pauperism into the social categories of population, life, welfare, etc., which then themselves have to be developed and experimentally defined.)
A second example (with which I am more comfortable). A reading of 1970s feminism as denunciation would stress feminism as drawing on a pre-existent discourse of ‘rights’ as a moral ideal which Western societies were not living up to and were therefore ‘wrong’ about. A reading of 1970s feminism as problematization would stress feminism as provoking a new kind of political instability or tension which could not just ‘be solved’ but which demanded the work of further practice before solutions could even be proposed, and then when they do get proposed it will be in terms of a new critical apparatus (which is not simply ‘brought over from the past’ [Dewey]), in this case the new or newly-redeployed categories of ‘gender’ and (I would argue perhaps idiosyncratically) ‘public-private’. In the case of feminism as a problematization, clearly the work is not yet done as its new critical categories of problematization are being constantly revised and rearticulated.
I’m wondering if this view on the matter helps at all. What is it missing? What does it have right? And, is it close enough to what Foucault actually said and did?
I find the majority of Colin’s suggestions helpful.
Let me add that the idea of “examples” is fundamentally misleading. What little I know of the secondary literature on Foucault is dis-heartening on so many levels that one could get angry. But whatever the man was doing, it was not using examples to fit his theory (he does not have one) nor to illustrate his world view (sic). Foucault actually practiced inquiry!!!!
Having foolishly volunteered to review some new books on Foucault — here a Russian guy named Prozorov (who wants to make Foucault into Camus) says “reading Foucault today is important not only for gaining …knowledge, but primarily for grasping the singular experience of grasping the movement of his thought.” Mixed metaphors aside, the books pays absolutely no attention to exactly the movement of Foucault’s inquiries. Instead– Homo Academicus (academics are the only ones who make me want to re-read Bourdieu)– we get a philosophy, the true Foucault.
To understand problematizations, you have to know something and want to know more. Strategic bombing arguments rather than yet another discussion of Agamben.
I agree with Colin here that the coming plague of the lectures is something we should rejoice over but vaccinate ourselves against.
from Le philosophe masque,
la philosophe est une maniere de reflechir sur notre relation a la verite….Elle est une maniere de se demander:si telle est le rapport que nous avons a la verite, comment devons-nous conduire?
aujourd’hui il y a un travail considerable et multiple, qui modifie a la fois notre lien a la verite et notre maniere de nous conduire. ..C’est la vie meme de la philosophie.
Of course Foucault is being thumic. It is not the professors of philosophy that he is referring to but to others involved in these considerable and multiple efforts to rethink and remake these relationships.
Paul’s comment is a useful reminder that “problematization” was a term that emerged as the product of inquiry. As Paul wrote in Anthropos Today, it does not refer to just any problematic situation, but to a particular kind of problematic situation, one in which there are forms of sanctioned expertise reflecting upon the situation’s problematic character, and trying to recast it in new terms amenable to knowledge and intervention. So, one might say that all societies (to use a term we want to avoid) have problems, but only certain societies have problematizations.
So the identification of “problematization” as an object of analysis — and, therefore, as a certain mode of history (as Torbjorn suggests) — is already to have made some kind of diagnosis, let us say about the role of sanctioned expertise in the norms and forms of individual and collective life. So, in Dewey’s terms, it is already a way of relating to a situation, its specific needs and problems. I guess this is why it seems to me that the question about whether “problematization” is a term to describe something in the field or a term for the analyst isn’t quite the right question. It already marks a certain way of relating to a certain subset of historical situations.
Stephen, I find that helpful. I’m prompted to consider, as a little experiment, problematization in terms of ‘emergence’ (”Nietzsche, Gnlgy, Hist” 1971).
Can we say that problematization aims to trace the emergence of sites of knowledge-power-ethics in which problems and their corollary conditions for possible solutions come into focus and are eventually stabilized? This would suggest that the object of the inquiry is not always a fully coagulated/crystallized field in which expertise is already stabilized. Rather, the inquiry concerns precisely that fuzzy and murky transition from one situation into another in which the latter situation displays a different configuration of problems and solutions.
This suggests (a point which I would want to defend ‘conceptually’ too) that the line between a situation where expertise already exists and one where it decidedly does not yet exist is never stable and not always clear and distinct. Isn’t the object of inquiry in a problematization precisely this grey ambiguous space where the line is warping, indistinct, and changing?
This leads me to a straightforward factual question: are you all, in your various anthropological inquiries, interested in the process whereby a situation is transformed from one where a certain mode of expertise does not exist into one where this mode of expertise does exist? Is that one form of what a study of the emergence of ‘biopower’ or ‘vital security’ or ’synthetic biology ethics and equipment’ might be? For my own (historical) inquiries into the emergence of the liberal ‘public versus private’ opposition in the late 19c. and early 20c., I think this a fair characterization, although I am a little wary about the term ‘expertise’ in this case and would more favor ‘discursive dominance’. Of course, not all inquiries are identical, even at a general level, and I wouldn’t want to generalize by abstracting the wrong elements.
Colin, sorry I haven’t been checking in on this conversation, which is very good.
The question about expertise versus discursive dominance is interesting, although I will leave it aside for the moment.
As to the other question, I think that there are multiple dynamics of expertise in relationship to new problematizations. There may be an existing form of expertise reshaping itself around new problems, there may be the invention of new forms of expertise, etc. One of the important questions here would seem to be whether only some of these dynamics make something count as a truly “new” form of expertise. So, to go back to our earlier examples, we all agree that the “social” problematization of things corresponded to the emergence of a new kind of expert — the social scientist. But how does one think about neoliberalism? I would argue that the experts involved are still very much social scientists, although they are engaged in very different kinds of problems, using different techniques. This points to an unresolved question in these discussions, concerning the “scale” and scope of a problematization. How big or small does one want it to be? So that is a way of saying, I think, that I agree with your insistence on the ambiguity of the term and the ambiguity of the space of problematization: what does it belong to? How big is it? Etc.
By the way, we have been reading the early lectures of “Security, Territory, Population” in New York, It is quite striking that Foucault is working with a variety of different terms to describe what happens when new problems emerge: redeployments, reproblematizations, unblocking, etc. He points to a kind of topological and dynamic analysis of expertise and techniques around problems that is, as you say, linked to a problematic of emergence. As Carlo Caduff has pointed out, the style and method of those early lectures feels very different from the more genealogical (more “history of the present”) style of the latter.
[...] on the Biopower and the Contemporary blog, which has been the site of extensive exchanges on What is a problematization? and on Dewey and Latour. Our hope is that by creating a space specifically for concept work, and [...]