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. (shrink)

This article focuses on what bodies know yet which cannot be expressed verbally. We started with a problem encountered during conventional interviewing in an ex-mining community in south Wales when some teen girls struggled to speak. This led us to focus on the body, corporeality and movement in improvisational dance workshops. By slowing down and speeding up video footage from the workshops, we notice movement patterns and speculate about how traces of gender body-movement practices developed within mining communities over time (...) become actualised in girls’ habitual movement repertoires. Inspired by the works of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Erin Manning, a series of cameos are presented: room dancing; the hold; the wiggle; the leap and the dance of the not-yet. We speculate about relations between the actual movements we could see, the in-act infused with the history of place, and the virtual potential of movement. (shrink)

In international politics, bridging the gap between the real and knowledge poses a persistent challenge as translating the real into concepts and narratives can nurture the epistemic fallacy. Critical realism addresses this by separating ontology from epistemology at the meta-theoretical level, yet in practical research, critical realism tends to impose assumptions about the ontological complexity of the real at the transcendental level. This paper examines the practical difficulty of overcoming the epistemic fallacy in International Relations inquiries, asserting that critical realism (...) does not effectively guide practical inquiries in separating ontology from epistemology at a methodological level. Despite the meta-theoretical separation, research inquiries can remain theory-laden and epistemically dependent. The solution lies in problematizing ontological presentation, and sustaining critique at the discursive level on International Relations theories, methodologies, and implications. This approach maintains a critical focus on ontological aspects at the practical level to deal with the challenge of the epistemic fallacy. (shrink)

The pandemic implied an acceleration of the impending devastation of various forms of public pedagogical life attached to the campus, changing the ecology of study and affecting the sense-ability and response-ability of the university as an ‘association for/to study’ (‘universitas studii’). This contribution sketches two developments that play a role in this weakening of pedagogical life: the establishment and expansion of a hyper-modern learning factory and the creation of the figure of the independent learner. It is suggested that the rejuvenation (...) and regeneration of pedagogical life can be supported by a critical pedagogy that cultivates the art of distinction in order to describe and indicate the distinctions that matter to various forms of pedagogical life and what they make happen. This is then exemplified through a brief discussion of the lecture and the seminar engendering ‘spoken science’. Finally, it is indicated how a rejuvenation and regeneration implicates students and scholars. (shrink)

This thesis suggests that Deleuze’s early philosophy, culminating in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, unfolds as a polemic between two structural positions – the problematic and the dialectic. This polemic sheds light on “political” aspects in Deleuze’s work as a student of authors such as Jean Hyppolite, Jean Wahl, Martial Guéroult and Ferdinand Alquié, in a period in which he places critical weight on the attempt to escape the constraining influence of their positions. Reading Bergson, Nietzsche, Hume, (...) Kant and Hegel through his teachers, Deleuze seeks to expunge from his thought every trace of their mediation, so as to be able to pose new problems for philosophy. To this end Deleuze puts forward the notion of philosophy as being essentially problematic, irreducible to empiricist, transcendentalist or dialectic dispositions and delineated by unique problems. This notion is established as a calculated move marked by an anti-Hegelian rhetoric, Hegel being the epitome of “old” metaphysical problems that must be overcome. The introduction of Deleuze’s critique of his teachers, who could be considered somewhat marginalised authors from the more recent history of French philosophy, and the establishment of the problematic-dialectic dyad as fundamental to Deleuze’s development as a philosopher, hopes to bring out critical aspects of his work that remain strategically buried in the text. Chapter one introduces Deleuze’s triangulation of Hyppolite-Guéroult-Alquié starting from his confrontation with Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence and continuing to his early efforts to put forward a satisfying “middle ground” with respect to these authors’ disparate positions, from which emerges a unique preoccupation with problems that will persist in Deleuze’s work throughout the 1950s and 60s. Chapter two examines the extent to which Nietzsche and Philosophy is a critical response to Hyppolite’s renowned interpretation of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit, Genesis and Structure, a response which amounts to Deleuze’s interpretation of eternal recurrence as an anti- Hegelian mode of problematization, and which would later be transformed into the Deleuzian project of the overturning of Platonism. Chapter three is a reading of Empiricism and Subjectivity as an anti-Hegelian polemic profoundly inspired by Wahl’s vision of empiricism as a problematic and problematizing theory that responds to Hegel’s critique of “self-certainty” and of empiricism in general. Chapter four considers Deleuze’s Kantianism a strategic endeavour to shift the tectonics of philosophical rigor from a preoccupation with the Absolute as the ultimate ground for knowledge, to a revival of the problematic Idea as that which incites experimentation with the “thickness” of sensibility demolished in the first moment of the Hegelian dialectic, a shift whose successfulness is placed in question. (shrink)

This contribution to the second installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” argues that the field of science studies should be understood as a way of inheriting, rather than fundamentally breaking with, Rorty's antifoundationalism and postepistemology. Taken together, the work of Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway has been less about rebalancing the relative and the objective, and more about redrawing the checkerboard of knowledge into “in-disciplinary” styles of empirical philosophy. These styles rely on doubly (...) held commitments to radical empirical curiosity about, on the one hand, events of science and culture, and, on the other hand, promises of conceptual speculation for collective learning. This work is highly important for the novel perplexities of the Anthropocene, but not quite in the way that Gaskill proposed. (shrink)