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Problem Spaces
How and Why Methodology Matters
Celia Lury
polity
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Copyright © Celia Lury 2021
The right of Celia Lury to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank colleagues, friends and family near and far, including: Nerea Calvillo, Sophie Day, Michael Dieter, Sarah Doughty, Elena Esposito, Carolin Gerlitz, Christina Hughes, Eva Lash, Adam Lury, Giles Lury, Karen Lury, Henry Mainsah, Noortje Marres, Greg McInerny, Mike Michael, João Porto de Albuquerque, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Shirin Rai, Matt Spencer, David Stark, Martín Tironi, Nigel Thrift, Philipp Ulbrich, Matías Valderrama, Sylvia Walby, Naomi Waltham-Smith and Scott Wark. Special thanks go to Michael Castelle, who first introduced me to the idea of problem spaces; to Emma Uprichard, who kept me going; to Nate Tkacz and the three anonymous reviewers who read and commented on a draft of the book; and to Ana Gross, the co-author of Chapter 3. I would also like to thank Karina Jákupsdóttir and Jonathan Skerrett at Polity for their patience and support.
Research for this monograph was supported by an ESRC Professorial Fellowship: Order and Continuity: Methods for Change in a Topological Society, Ref No: 978-1444339598. I am grateful for this support.
Introduction: The Compulsion of Composition
Power is the compulsion of composition … The essence of power is the drive towards aesthetic worth for its own sake. All power is a derivative from this fact of composition attaining worth for itself. There is no other fact. Power and importance are aspects of this fact. It constitutes the drive of the universe. It is efficient cause, maintaining its power of survival. It is final cause, maintaining in the creature its appetition for creation.
Alfred North Whitehead (1968: 119)
Ann Kelly and Lynsey McGoey (2018) suggest that we are witnessing the emergence of ‘a new empire of truth’. Describing the significance of profound transformations in the ‘scaling, pace and symbolic power of fact-making’ for ‘the shifting relationships between knowledge, ignorance and power today’, they ask:
What constitutes authoritative evidence in this political climate? To what uses is evidence put, and what values does it carry? What obligations must be placed on the companies, such as Google or Facebook, that configure our new public spheres while profiting from the tracking and steering of online behaviour? What counts in the making of facts, and who does the counting? Which empirical tools and metrics garner sufficient political capital to guide policy during times of economic uncertainty? And, critically, how do the social sciences respond to the increasing social and political significance of data while accounting for the deepening popular scepticism of the facts that data are used to support? (2018: 2–3)
This book develops the thesis that to understand this new empire of truth and answer the questions Kelly and McGoey pose, a new concept of a problem space is needed.
So, what is a problem space?
In established methodological terms, a problem space is a representation of a problem in terms of relations between three components: givens, goals and operators. ‘Givens’ are the facts or information that describe the problem; ‘goals’ are the desired end state of the problem – what the knower wants to know; and ‘operators’ are the actions to be performed in reaching the desired goals. In many methodological discussions, the relation between these three components is assumed to be stable and relatively straightforward. Once givens and goals are assessed, operators – concepts and methods – can be identified and implemented, problems can be defined, analysed and solved in sequential steps: the problem space contains the problem. But such an approach presumes that we know the problem before we start investigating, and that it remains the same as it is investigated. And this is very often not the case: the problem is a problem, becomes a problem as it is investigated. If we take seriously the becoming of a problem then we cannot stick with a container conception of a problem space. Instead, we should pay attention to
