Reading :: Problem Spaces

Problem Spaces: How and Why Methodology Matters

by Celia Lury

My collaborator David Guile suggested this 2021 book to me late last year. In it, Lury considers the question: In a new “empire of truth,” i.e., a world in which digital public spaces (Google, Facebook) host public discussions with different types of evidence, data, and metrics, how do we better understand fact-making?

Lury suggests that to address this question, we need a new understanding of 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” (p.2). Here, “the problem space contains the problem.” But, she says, that container metaphor is inadequate because “the problem … becomes a problem as it is investigated” (p.2) so we must instead “pay attention to the constantly changing relations between givens, goals, and operators in which a problem is transformed” (p.3). To address that issue, “the book outlines a compositional methodology,” which entails “an understanding of a problem as a form of process” (p.3). Thus “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” (p.5). Quoting Rockburne, she characterizes such a problem as “a ‘problem that problematizes itself’” (p.6).

What does such an approach entail? “This book emphasizes the doing or practice of methods to make visible the work that goes into the accomplishment of epistemological values” (p.16). And “we describe methods as gerunds; that is, as the active present tense forms of verbs that function as nouns” (p.17). She thus views “methods as sites of engagement” (p.19).

To develop this argument, in Ch.1, Lury compares “five approaches relevant to the elaboration of concept of a problem space,” grounded in Dewey, Simon, Haraway, Jullien, and Appadurai. All focus on the process of making or composing problems (p.23). These represent “vastly different traditions of thought,” but each “provides an understanding of space,” not as a container, but as “how a problem is happening — is distributed — not in but across many places at a time and in many times in a place” (p.47). These authors all “link their understanding of method … to more-or-less explicit understandings of potential” and thus “their understandings contribute to an understanding of methodological potential as constituted in the operation of limits with-in and out-with problem spaces” (p.47).

Lury suggests we need to think such approaches through because of “recent changes in the epistemological infrastructure,” which she discusses in Part II (Ch.2-4). Skipping a bit, I’ll focus on her Ch.4 argument about the platformatization of the epistemic infrastructure, with the term referring to architectural, political, computational, and figurative aspects of platforms (p.117). For instance, she discusses how statistical packages such as SPSS didn’t just result in new ways of doing quantitative research, they resulted in a different kind of quantitative research (p.125).

In Part III, Lury turns to the question of the implications of platformatization for compositional methodology. She argues that platformatization yields at least three areas of concern:

• “The naively artificial character of the empirical”: the issue that, when measures become targets, they replace the phenomena they represent (pp.153-155). 
• “The ontological multiplicity of the epistemological object”: recursion in methods yields ontological multiplicity, which opens new vistas for research, but also new angles of functionalism and prescriptionism (pp.156-165).
• “Transcontextualism” (p,.166) — (a note here, this heading is in a different sentence form and at a different level from the other two. I’m lumping it in here because, just before #1, she forecasts three areas of concern. But it’s possible that she only covered two areas of concern in that section and Transcontextualism begins a new section.) Today’s problem spaces, Lury argues, have “expanded indexical dynamics,” driving us to ask “whether and how to deal with a problem’s connections to its context(s)” (p.166).

Cards on the table: around the end of this chapter, I was ground down by the dense argumentation. Lury illustrates these arguments with examples, but these examples are largely not that accessible to me, and her arguments themselves are grounded in philosophical terms and arguments that are similarly not that accessible. Ultimately, I found the book harder to follow than much of her source material (e.g., Latour, Law, Haraway).

Is this book worth reading? I think it is, and I think I’ll probably return to it periodically. But it’s also dense and sometimes difficult to get through. Give yourself plenty of time to get through it.