‘which, once set off, cannot be arrested’. (In my use of Whitehead’s vocabulary, it is compulsive.) Jullien observes that the concept of shi initially emerged in the realm of Chinese military strategy and politics but evolved to have a much broader philosophical meaning. He explicitly contrasts it with the Western practice of fixing one’s eyes on a model, a practice in which, he suggests, efficacy is conceived in terms of abstract, ideal forms, set up to be projected onto the world as a goal to be attained. In contradistinction, shi is associated with a concept of efficacy that ‘teaches one to learn how to allow an effect to come about: not to aim for it (directly) but to implicate it (as a consequence), in other words, not to seek it, but simply to welcome it – to allow it to result’ (2004: vii).
Jullien’s focus on shi as propensity allows him to reconfigure traditional Western philosophical concerns: ‘the fact is that, beneath the question of efficacy, another gradually surfaces: not the question of being and knowing, which is constantly raised by metaphysics, nor that of action, which is its ethical corollary, but the question of the conditions of effectiveness’ (2004: viii). He continues:
To move on from the question of efficacy, which still bears the imprint of voluntarism, to that of efficiency, which implies an underlying fund of immanence, we need to attempt a shift. A shift in two senses of the term: a shift away from our normal thinking habits, a move from one framework to another – from Europe to China and back again – which will undermine our representations and get our thoughts moving; and also a shift in the sense of shifting the impediment that is preventing us from perceiving what we have always blocked out of our thinking and, for that very reason, have been unable to think about. (2004: viii)
This is a point of difference with Dewey, whose ethics of thought is also concerned with efficacy. As Stengers summarizes, while for Dewey, the ‘question of the truth … is not situated in the true/false alternative, but poses the question of its efficacy’, she also notes that this efficacy is understood in terms of ‘its possible power of breaking through indifference and of engaging and obliging one to choose’ (2009: 10). However, in acknowledging Dewey’s use of the term ‘choice’ she distinguishes his understanding from that of rational choice and adds, ‘It is no longer a worldly choice – what should one choose to be or do in this world? – but a choice for the world to which it is a matter of contributing. This choice doesn’t only imply a world in the making; it affirms a world whose components are themselves indeterminate, whose ‘perfectibility’ depends on the jumper’s trust that he may connect with ‘other parts’ that may become an ingredient in its fabric’ (2009: 11).
In Jullien’s understanding of Chinese thought, context or circumstances are no longer something unpredictable, to be controlled, eliminated or excluded in experimental conditions. Instead, because of their variability, circumstances can be turned to advantage by the propensity emanating from the situation. Jullien writes:
Now circumstances are no longer conceived only (indeed, at all) as “that which surrounds” (circumstare), that is to say, as accessories or details (accompanying that which is essential in the situation or happening – in keeping with a metaphysics of essence). Instead, it is through those very circumstances that potential is released, the potential, precisely, of the situation. (2004: 22)
Within this antagonistic process there is constant interaction: ‘“the potential of the situation is whatever profits from that which is variable”’ (Wang Xi, quoted in Jullien 2004: 22). Jullien concludes:
The whole of Chinese thought about efficacy reverts to a single act: that of “returning” to the fundamental “basis,” that is to say, the starting point of something that, as a condition, subsequently carried forward by the evolution of things, will gradually impose sway of its own accord. In such circumstances, an effect is not merely probable, as it is in a constructed relation of means to an end, but will unfailingly result, spontaneously. (2004: 45)
As he concludes, the ‘way’ (the dao), as conceived traditionally in China, ‘is a far cry indeed from our Western method (methodos, which is a “way” to be “pursued” that leads “toward” something)’ (2004: 33).
The methodological potential of the situation
These two approaches are as different to each other as the first two, but they are paired here to indicate some resources to further develop the understanding of problem space as a space of methodological potential. As indicated in the Introduction, conventional understandings of problem space deploy a concept of space as a container for a problem, setting limits that act to fix an inside and an outside, what the right or wrong context or environment for a problem might be, sometimes even implying that context or situation can be rendered inconsequential (‘context independence’). The two approaches described here offer instead ways to think about the co-emergence of a problem and a problem space in terms of a dynamic practice of situating. Haraway describes situatedness of knowledge not in terms of a fixed position or standpoint but, rather, as position-ing in webs of connection created in a process of splitting. In the practice of splitting, she says, there is a possibility of novelty and continuity in knowing. Figures are a symbolic condensation of that potential. Jullien says that ‘Potential is circumstantial’ (2004: 22) and suggests that, if we were to follow the way of the dao, ‘instead of setting up a goal for our actions, we could allow ourselves to be carried along by the propensity of things’ (2004: 16). Both thus describe the situation – situating or situatedness – as creating conditions for something like methodological potential, although they have different understandings of what that might mean.
The differences are of course revealing. Jullien uses potential and propensity more-or-less interchangeably, although the two terms are typically distinguished (in diverse ways) in Western philosophy. This interchangeability is related, it seems, to the ways in which Chinese cosmology allows for structure and change, statics and dynamics to be thought at the same time. ‘Translators’, Jullien observes ‘translate [shi] indifferently as “positions” or as “movements”. It is, however, precisely both at the same time’ (2004: 105). In calligraphy, he says, shi is the position of the brush, and the stroke, the movement of the brush. That much contemporary Western philosophy and social theory is concerned with the difficulties of how change and continuity may be thought at the same time – with relations between the possible and the real, the virtual and the actual, with whether, how and under what circumstances potential may be actualized, how potential is different from propensity and how both are to be distinguished from capacity – is, I suggest, a sign of both shared concerns in these approaches and continuing differences between Western and Chinese thought.10
Approach 5: Appadurai
The fifth approach introduced here is that of the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, who, in an early influential approach to the globalization of knowledge, described the complex scaling dynamics of the disjunctures and differences of global flows, including flows of ideas, people, technology, media and money (Appadurai 1990). In a later work (2013), he provides a set of terms that allows for the exploration of the specificity of different kinds of flows:11 this specificity arises, he says, from the inter-relationship of the circulation of forms with forms of circulation. The exemplars of forms he provides include novels and comics, but might also include problems, since they too are a ‘family of phenomena, including styles, techniques and genres, which can be inhabited by ‘specific voices, contents, messages and materials’ (2013: 66). He says:
The flow of these forms has affected major world-historical processes such as nationalism. Today, however, the flow of forms also affects the very nature of knowledge, as whole disciplines, techniques and ways of thinking move and transform in the process. (2013: 64)
His term ‘forms of circulation’ refers to kinds of movement or mobility, and thus draws attention to the properties of specific kinds of circulation, including scale, speed,
