value of Appadurai’s focus on the inter-relationship of the circulation of forms and forms of circulation has been revealed in many studies of the social life or biography of things (for a discussion of this as a method see Kopytoff 1986; Lash and Lury 2007; Law, Ruppert and Savage 2011; Coleman 2019). Consider, for example, Susan Erikson’s study of new forms of philanthropic venture capitalism in global health (2015). By following the money, she shows how, in the form of its circulation, philanthropic money reveals different registers of value in global health. She says:
Asking “Who knows what?” and “What benefits whom?” opens up all manner of difference and differential stakes in well-being – financial and corporeal – and provides analytical traction on both new systems of advantage and recent intensifications of old systemic global inequalities. (2015: S307)
For a compositional methodology, a concern with the inter-relationship of forms of circulation and the circulation of forms provides a way to think about the capacity of what emerges in the use of methods to change or transform the problem in a process of generative circulation or generalization. It also provides a way to think about alterations in the epistemic infrastructure. Appadurai himself suggests that the twenty-first century is witnessing new tensions between circulating cultural forms and the emergent, partially culturally formed circuits associated with ‘the explosive growth in highly advanced tools for storing, sharing, and tracking information electronically both by the state and its opponents’ (2013: 62). He says: ‘This dual structure of global cultural forms also generates what we may call the ‘bumps’ or obstacles in regard to many cultural flows’ (2013: 64). Some of these bumps and obstacles will be discussed in later chapters.
Across
This chapter has outlined five approaches to methodology, informing vastly different traditions of thought. Each provides an understanding of space that is not that of a fixed container; instead, each provides a way to think about how a problem is happening – is distributed – not in but across many places at a time and in many times at a place.12 The approaches introduced here are thus all of value to the development of the concept of problem space because they provide vocabularies by which to understand the form of problems as emerging in relations of continuity and transformation across a problem space.
Along with their understanding of the importance of relations across rather than in time and space, what also unites these authors – and makes them useful for an understanding of problem spaces – is that they link their understanding of method (if Jullien would allow the term) to more-or-less explicit understandings of potential. And in doing so, their understandings contribute to an understanding of methodological potential as constituted in the operation of limits with-in and out-with problem spaces. The importance of the necessity of the preservation of continuity and connection in a situation becoming a problem while establishing limits for generalization for Dewey, Simon’s insistence on the constitutive possibilities of contingency, the understanding of shi as potential or propensity in a situation described by Jullien, the non-isomorphic possibilities of splitting for the creation of knowledge identified by Haraway, Appadurai’s concern with the inter-relationship of the circulation of forms with forms of circulation all provide resources for a compositional methodology. However, while drawing on and departing from all five approaches, I end this chapter by emphasizing one aspect of Appadurai’s approach.
In the introduction, it was proposed that problem spaces should be seen in terms of the twisting of problems into processes of problematization. More precisely, it was suggested that the compulsion of composition could be understood as the articulation of a double force: the constitutive effects of methods and their capacity to contribute to a problem’s generative circulation. In the chapters that follow, I develop this claim by drawing on Appadurai’s account of the importance of the inter-relationship of the circulation of forms and forms of circulation. This relationship, I propose, is a way to understand the becoming topological of problem spaces to afford methodological potential. The crucial point that Appadurai’s analysis adds to an understanding of the methodological potential of a problem space is that not only do different kinds of problems have different capacities to make use of properties of circulation but also that different forms of circulation have different capacities to support the circulation of problems.
In the chapters that follow, recent changes in the epistemic infrastructure are described, with special attention paid to how such changes configure the compulsion of composition. The argument to be developed is that the properties of these new kinds of circulation are transforming topologies of knowledge, providing new opportunities for methodological invention and these topologies are, in turn (in the torque as it were) transforming forms of problem, shifting relations between knowledge, ignorance and power.
Notes
1 Bachelard (1970) identifies the importance of what he calls ‘applied doubt’ for the identification of a problematic, in contradistinction to ‘universal doubt’ which, so he proposes, only destroys the world it seeks to investigate. As noted below, Donna Haraway uses the term ‘generative doubt’. 2 Simon holds design to be a ubiquitous practice: ‘Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ (1996: 111). 3 There is considerable debate as to what it means to ‘represent’ a problem. A compositional methodology, as described in the Introduction, does not consider a problem space to be a representation of a problem, in the sense of re-presenting an external referent, but a relational process of composition, the transformation of a situation. 4 Other writers insist on the importance of re-presentation too, including for example Whitehead, who provides a powerful critique of the limitations of perception in the mode of ‘presentational immediacy’. 5 The criticism of instrumentalism might also be levelled at pragmatism, although most commentators would distinguish between pragmatism’s ethical concern with the difference an idea makes to the world from the instrumental design of problem spaces for predetermined purposes or goals. 6 As will be discussed in the next chapter, the equipping of a situation or environment with a variety of forms of cognition is one of the key transformations in the contemporary epistemic infrastructure. 7 Situated knowledges, she says, are neither totalizing nor relativizing. Indeed, in dismissing both, Haraway sees relativism as the ‘perfect mirror twin of totalization …: both deny the stakes in location, embodiment and partial perspective, both make it impossible to see well’ (1991: 191). 8 She says that this promise arises in conversation, one of the few of Haraway’s terms that has not been widely taken up, but which I draw attention to here because of its resonance with the term correspondence that Dewey uses (and which has recently elaborated upon by Tim Ingold 2016). 9 In this respect, there is a link to the understanding of the methodological potential of pattern, both in the sense in which Dewey discusses, and also in the understanding of figure-ground that has been powerfully developed in anthropology, including, for example, in the work of Alfred Gell (1998; see also Küchler and Were 2005). His Anthropology of Art is an anthropology of agency, in that it shows how art objects index complex collective intentionalities as they circulate. In this sense, they are a form of embodied cognition, what he describes as a form of abductive reasoning.10 As Karel van der Leeuw says, ‘Comparison between different traditions can show which particular form is assumed by problems under different presuppositions, or how a particular answer to a question can make another problem invisible or insoluble … Some aspects of a problem remain invisible, either because the tradition simply ignores the problematic side, or because it poses no problem to it, given its specific outlook on reality. Some solutions remain untouched, because they do not fit in with the expectations of the tradition, or because they are at variance with basic assumptions concerning the nature of reality. Thus we gain an insight into why a particular tradition is haunted by problems that seem to play no role at all in another tradition’ (1997: 323).11 In a discussion of the use of the concept ‘reflex arc’ in psychology, Dewey criticizes what he calls its patchwork of stimulus response and proposes instead the term sensori-motor circuits, by which he means the continual reconstitution and adjustment of organisms-in-environments. Begin, he says, not with the specious ‘stimulus’ (for example, ‘seeing’), but with ‘sensori-motor
