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 the constantly changing relations between givens, goals and operators in which a problem is transformed.1 This requires an understanding of a problem space as a space of methodological potential.
To develop this understanding and consider how this potential may be realized to ‘test the present’ (Stengers 2019), the book outlines a compositional methodology. The distinctiveness of this methodology comes from an emphasis on the vocabulary of composition,2 a term that Whitehead employs in the quotation above, but whose everyday definition is ‘the action of putting things together’. Here it refers to the processes, the activities with which the givens, goals and operators of a problem space are put together. When the term composition is used in the visual and performing arts the emphasis is on the creativity of this action of putting things together. It is used here – in a way that it is hoped will be of interest to disciplinary and interdisciplinary researchers of all kinds – to describe a methodology in which the focus is on the ways in which a problem is put together, how it is formed and transformed, inventively (Lury and Wakeford 2012). In this process of putting a problem together, of forming and transforming, the compulsion of composition does not come from either inside or outside the problem; the problem is not acted on in a space but emerges across a problem space, from with-in and out-with.
For compositional methodology, an understanding of a problem as a form of process is fundamental, where form consists in both the problem and its limits or constraints.3 To explicate this understanding of form, let me introduce a series of works by the artist Dorothea Rockburne: Drawing Which Makes Itself (1972–3). In these works, a double-sided piece of carbon paper, which I invite you to consider as analogous to a phenomenon or situation becoming a problem, is held against a wall or a floor, folded and rotated, with the edges or limits of the space it makes in these activities scored through the paper onto the wall or floor. The activities (the methods) of folding, rotating and scoring move the paper (the problem) into and through another dimension in a process of transformation. The art critic Rosalind Krauss says of these works:
The act of scoring simultaneously deposits carbon onto the wall surface and underlines the fold of the paper itself. The resultant lines or marks are read with a striking ambivalence, for they are both on the wall and yet they are retained within the carbon paper that had been flipped into a new position. … one confronts works in which the lines [that are ‘out-with’ the paper] arise from information that is ‘[with]in’ the paper. (2010: 221)
Figure 1 Installation piece: Arc
Source: Dorothea Rockburne (1973) © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2020
Acting methodically on the properties of a situation becoming a problem (trans)forms the problem. The limits of the problem are with-in and out-with it: they do not contain it, but, rather, express or encapsulate it.
The material-semiotic properties of the double-sided carbon paper mean that some acts – some methods – have expressive effects; it is a drawing that draws itself. At the same time, not only do the material-semiotic properties of the paper – the problem – have methodological potential (to be folded, to be scored, to be rotated), so too does the context in which the work is (re-)presented matter. Rockburne says the context should ‘represent’ the art. To do so requires that the context be (re)active:
I was very interested in the fact that the whole room should represent the art. I painted the walls with the brightest white paint you could find. As people walked into the room, their footprints became part of the drawing. (https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/minimalism-earthworks/v/rockburne-drawing)
Inspired by this work, the concept of a problem space put forward here is that it is a space of methodological potential that is with-in and out-with the ongoing transformation of a problem. The potential is realized in a methodology that, rather than responding only to the initial presentation of a problem, composes the problem again and again.
Compositional methodology
The activity of composing is not given in advance of a problem, but is rather ever forming and transforming across a problem space. It rarely involves just one action or operation – sensing, categorizing, conceptualizing, scaling, measuring, affecting, experiencing, varying, but involves the doing of many together. In other words, compositional methodology presumes and exploits the fact that a problem is not given but emerges with-in and out-with a myriad sequence of actions or methods that (trans)forms the problem space. Importantly, this sequencing is not the addition of one action or method after another, but a composition in the sense that the actions or methods are not discrete or independent of each other. As ‘it’ happens, a compositional methodology seeks to recognize and exploit the properties of the problem on an ongoing basis. It composes a problem by recognizing and making use of (rather than minimizing) the constantly changing limits that create a problem and a problem space together, identifying and operating the intensive or ‘live’ properties of the problem it investigates (Back and Puwar 2012).
Compositional methodology is, then, concerned with form in and as transformation, a process involving ‘the interweaving of data, form, transition, and issue’ (Whitehead 1968: 210) organized by the compulsion of composition:
It is not that which is discriminated that is most real, nor is it a completed, self-sustaining composition. But instead the compulsion of composition. (Whitehead 1968: 133)
To adapt Rockburne’s title, for compositional methodology a situation or phenomenon becomes a problem, acquires a form, trans-forms, as a ‘problem that problematizes itself’; that is, compulsive composition is the repeated folding or twisting of problems into forms of problematization. In this twisting, the problem is revealed never to be simply a problem, but also a composition of the methodological potential of a problem space to be expressed in transformation. This is to say problems and problem spaces are compulsively composed together.
Let me give another example, taken from a discussion of the development of staging models for