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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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??????

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.

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?