• contemporary European philosophy in historical context
• current ecological philosophy
• developments in feminist philosophy and theory
• politics of internet practices

Expressions of interest, abstracts or texts of up to 8,000 words should be emailed to: mark.neocleous@brunel.ac.uk.

Submissions are refereed within six to ten weeks of receipt.

RP, May 2012

This dossier is the result of discussion following Patrice Maniglier’s contribution to ‘The Concept of Problem’, the second day of the first Workshop in the AHRC-funded research project, ‘Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities: Problems, Methods, Histories, Concepts’, organized by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, at Dorich House, Kingston University London, 25–26 January 2012.

What is a problematic?

Patrice Maniglier

Gaston Bachelard’s 1949 book, Le Rationalisme appliqué (RA; best translated as Reason Applied), is essential to an understanding of his work, and Bachelard is essential to an understanding of twentieth-century French philosophy. That this book has never been translated into English shows how little the anglophone world is yet acquainted with some key aspects of this corpus. Bachelard, like Bergson, is one of those authors that we now need to rediscover. The extract translated below addresses a central concept in his work, one that came to play an important role not only in French thought, but also in general culture: the concept of problematic.

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What does Bachelard mean by rationalisme appliqué?

Mary Tiles

Mary Tiles examines Gaston Bachelard’s “rationalisme appliqué” and argues that “applied rationalism” is an account of empirically (materially) engaged reasoning, hard to grasp because it represents a quite radical departure from philosophical norms, particularly those that analytic philosophy inherited from the logical positivists.

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Corrationalism and the problematic

Gaston Bachelard

This text is a translation by Mary Tiles of sections seven and eight of the third chapter of Gaston Bachelard, Le Rationalisme appliqué, taken from the fifth edition, 1975, pp. 50–60.

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François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder, Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, Violence and Horror in World Politics, Routledge, Abingdon, 2012. 184 pp., £80.00 hb., 978 0 41578 059 9.

Stephen J. Collier, Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2011. 320 pp., £48.95 hb., £18.95 pb., 978 0 69114 830 4 hb., 978 0 69114 831 1 pb.

Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, trans. Zakiya Hanafi, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2011. 200 pp., £55.00 hb., £16.99 pb., 978 0 74564 913 9 hb., 978 0 74564 914 6 pb.

Claudia Aradau

In 2007, Worldwatch Institute published a report on ‘Our Biopolitical Future’, outlining four scenarios of radical change brought about by new genetic technologies. Another site enjoined visitors to become ‘commercial biopower agents’. Academic journals are now dedicated to biosecurity and bioterrorism, and bioethics commissions have proliferated both domestically and internationally. As biopolitics is claimed by experts on biodefence, biosecurity, bioethics and biotechnology, what critical terminology can be invented to grasp the political stakes of the present? If Foucault tentatively proposed the terminology of biopower and biopolitics to capture transformations that had not been named as such, what purchase can the concept of biopolitics have on the proliferation of biopolitical language today? Four recent books offer different answers to these dilemmas.

Two of these books both invoke and depart from the concept of biopolitics by asking what is ‘beyond biopolitics’. Is ‘beyond biopolitics’ a temporal inflection, an ‘after’ biopolitics? Or is ‘beyond biopolitics’ a contemporary reinvention of power, a heterogeneous assemblage where junctures, jointures and transformations rely upon, relay and at times short-circuit each other? In thinking about what is left of biopolitics, questions of remains and remainders are inevitably present. At the same time, biopolitics seems to acquire a renewed vitality that insidiously seeps into, permeates and informs social and political life. Biopolitics as both remainder and reinvention is at the heart of both Clough and Willse’s edited collection and Debrix and Barder’s co-authored book, each of which is entitled Beyond Biopolitics. The arguments in these books are not, however, that biopolitics is dead and that we now live in a post-biopolitical world, but rather that biopolitics is becoming-different while preserving some of its rationality. In Clough and Willse’s formulation, the common theme for the essays collected in the book is ‘the governance of life and death beyond biopolitics’. For Debrix and Barder, the stakes of the analysis emerge out of the ‘biopolitical framing of life and death’ and the need to go beyond the biopolitical frame of intelligibility to understand different manifestations of violence today. Both contributions are thus structured around the relations between biopolitics and necropolitics or thanatopolitics – or what Étienne Balibar has called positive and negative biopolitics. Balibar’s distinction assumes an uneven and differential distribution of positive and negative biopolitics across the world, and the authors in the two books trace the formations of violence, the work of exclusion and the force of death-making globally: from the destruction of bodies through the selling of blood in China to narco-violence in Mexico, from radicalized detention in the USA to targeted assassinations of Palestinians by Israeli military, and from profiling of Muslim populations in the USA to the surveillance of Turkish immigrants in Germany.

The two other books under discussion engage biopolitics either as a grid of intelligibility for past and present regimes of practice (Collier’s Post-Soviet Social) or as a concept that informs the philosophical thinking of the present (Esposito’s Immunitas). In fact, although neither is explicitly located ‘beyond biopolitics’, both Collier’s and Esposito’s interventions also work with more or less explicit inflections of both ‘beyond’ and ‘biopolitics’. In the context of neoliberalism beyond the Washington Consensus, Collier reminds us that ‘beyond’ is not equivalent to ‘after’, given the long histories that traditions of neoliberal thought have. For Collier, neoliberalism is much more elusive and contingent in its manifestations given the different ways in which the post- Soviet social is assembled: there is no ‘coherency and constancy across its articulation in diverse times and spaces’. If Collier’s work is indebted to Ian Hacking’s formulations of historical ontology and develops a method attentive to the historical conditions of intelligibility of both socialist biopolitics and post-socialist neoliberalism, Esposito’s formulations on biopolitics could be seen as ontology tout court, even as both are preoccupied with the interaction between politics, history and thought. Esposito’s conceptualization of biopolitics has already received careful exegesis in the English-speaking world, and, in fact, the third book of his Italian trilogy comprising Communitas, Immunitas and Bios was translated into English a few years ago (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Although only one chapter of Immunitas is explicitly dedicated to biopolitics, Esposito’s engagement sets out a different method and perspective on ‘beyond biopolitics’. For him, the stakes of biopolitics play out in terms of philosophico-political logics rather than struggles over power and knowledge. The extensive medicalization that links states and body politics gains meaning through the legitimation of power as life protecting. The semantics of biopolitics, of life and the body politic to be protected is understood through the ‘quasi-transcendental’ of immunity. Immunity is thus always contaminated by the risks to life it attempts to contain, in a sense always already biopolitical, continually supplemented and reinforced rather than opposed.

The differences in the interpretations of ‘biopolitics’ and its ‘beyond’ that the four books propose emerge out of the different problematizations that each text attends to. For many of the authors in Clough and Willse’s book, and for Debrix and Barder, the problem is that of excessive and ordinary violence, death and destruction. It is the ‘negative’ rather than the ‘positive’ biopolitics that dominates here. Therefore biopolitics is supplemented by either necropolitics or thanatopolitics to expose the co-constitution of life- and death-impulses in biopolitical governance. What characterizes these biopolitical spaces in which life is administered, monitored and surveyed is the drawing of boundaries, the hierarchization of life, the proliferation and intensification of violence. Under the guise of risk management, ethical limits and protection, the contributions to Clough and Willse’s Beyond Biopolitics reveal forms of exclusion, ordinary exceptions, killing, and life destruction as value creation. Violence is also problematized in Debrix and Barder, who are particularly concerned with the transformation of enmity. On the one hand, war as global police action appears to invoke an understanding of enmity based on deviancy, abnormality, criminality and counterconduct. On the other, enmity is simultaneously projected beyond definitions of normality and abnormality that presuppose the framework of political order and meaning. Thus, their argument goes, biopolitical perspectives cannot capture enmity understood as ‘a modality of gruesome maiming of humanity itself’. The distinction between normal and absolute enemy, taken from Susan Buck-Morss and a recent piece by Carlo Galli, does not negate biopolitical practices of normalization and regulation, but effects an implosion of biopolitics. Debrix and Barder draw on Adriana Cavarero’s concept of ‘horrorism’ to analyse violence that is paralysing and repugnant rather than compelling and activating. Agonal violence and horror appear ‘in excess of biopolitics’. The other problematization that traverses these two books, and is entwined with that of violence, is the problematization of racism within biopolitical governance. Sora Y. Han, for instance, suggests that ‘biopower does not fully explain the history of race and the force of sexuality as they are implicated in the Japanese American internment camp’. However, Randy Martin points out, following Foucault, that ‘[r]acism is the governmental protocol for sorting population in response to the series of threats posed by the proliferation of forms of life’. Debrix and Barder also see race as the differentiated principle that introduces death at the heart of biopolitics.

Different problematizations inform Collier’s and Esposito’s books. Collier asks how the health and welfare of populations were constituted as objects of knowledge in Soviet urban planning, and later on through neoliberal reform. In tracing the changing contours of governmental interventions, his aim is to locate what one could call a ‘minor biopolitics’ of mundane regulations. Rather than exceptions, violence or pathology, Collier focuses on the infrastructures, regulations and ideas that are deployed to govern populations, thus tracing ‘possible futures’ within biopolitics rather than beyond it. Although at first sight he seems to offer a reading of ‘positive’ biopolitics – interestingly, violence, exception and death are not even indexed – in fact the distinction positive/negative biopolitics would be an unproductive lens through which to approach the book, in so far as Collier challenges this very distinction through his careful historical analysis. Esposito similarly problematizes the entwinement of life and death in the body politic and the biopolitics/necropolitics distinction, this time through a political-philosophical reading. Specifically, he is concerned with the generalized medicalization of political life and imaginary of disease and infection that traverses political philosophy, and explores the organic metaphor of the body, of flesh and life at the heart of political modernity. His problematization thus entails semantic and etymological readings of biopolitics.

These different readings also emerge from within particular understandings of what counts as knowledge, whether the knowledge of politicians, of experts, of the military, of ethicists and lawyers, of economists and urban planners, or ultimately of the philosopher-king, is constitutive of regimes of practice. For several contributors to Clough and Willse’s Beyond Biopolitics, a concept of pre-emption appears as a needed replacement for that of biopower. Rendered infamous by the Bush doctrine, pre-emption is thought to capture a new modality of governance. As Brian Massumi argues in the book’s first chapter, the temporality of biopolitics emerges in relation to an ‘indiscriminate threat’ understood as generic. For Parisi and Goodman, biopower needs to be understood through ‘the intricate speculative operations of preemptive power’. If, for Massumi, pre-emptive power needs to supplement biopower, for Parisi and Goodman pre-emption appears to define biopower or, rather, to ‘insert a temporal dimension into power’. Pre-emptive power is thus deployed in relation to a changing knowledge of threat as being capable of irrupting at any point in time and everywhere in space, with catastrophic consequences. It mobilizes intelligence, computer science, legal expertise and political strategy to act upon anticipatory futurity. While several contributions engage with modes of knowledge, Eyal Weizman’s chapter stands out in locating the conditions of possibility of targeted assassinations within networks of military specialists, security experts, legal committees and their knowledges. The extension of targeted assassinations as a pre-emptive and ordinary mode of Israeli attack in Gaza needs to be understood through the juncture of modes of technical knowledge and politico-military strategy. For instance, systems analysis changes the understanding of the enemy to an ‘operational network of interacting elements’, where targeted attacks can have wider implications for the network, while presumably reducing the risks of casualties. It is in relation to these forms of knowledge that the question of biopolitics is reformulated. If particular regimes of statistical, biological and economic knowledge had been constitutive of populations as an object of truth and power, the very techniques of risk, of statistical calculation and classification are supplemented and transformed by other modes of knowledge. One could inquire what happens to biopolitics when imaginaries of danger explode towards what François Ewald called the infinitely large and infinitely smallscale risks, when, on the one hand, risks to populations are environmental, thus taking away the very normality and regularity of the milieu upon which biopolitics was deployed, and, on the other, appear at the infinitely small-scale, in biological, genetic or food-related risks. Massumi, for example, tackles this explosion of life towards the infinitely large: life as a ‘complex, systemic threat environment, composed of subsystems that are not only complex in their own right but are complexly interconnected’. When complexity theory and systems analysis are increasingly brought within the remit of statistical, biological and economic knowledge, can immunity capture this recalibration of knowledge? It suffices to think of the ways in which protection has been increasingly supplemented by demands for preparedness and resilience where the infinitely large scale and small scale are concerned. In the understanding that life can no longer be protected, subjects are enjoined to become resilient, to bounce back in the face of unpreventable, unexpected and potentially catastrophic dangers and risks. However, not all knowledge is necessarily reframed through complexity theory or algorithmic processes, as Collier reminds us through a fascinating exploration of the role of economic knowledge in Russia’s post-Communist ‘transition’. Neoliberal knowledge about budgeting and fiscal systems is simultaneously present and absent; some elements of Russia’s fiscal policy derived from neoliberal ideas while others were unrecognizable in a neoliberal thought-collective.

Together, these four books can be seen to canvass an undecidability about what biopolitics is. The interactions between biopolitics and sovereignty, present and future, positive and negative, life and death, normality and excess, terror and horror can support arguments about the transformation of biopolitics, its transgression or continued relevance. For Foucault, the distinction between sovereignty and biopower is not simply that the former works through repression and ‘taking life’, while the latter through productivity and ‘making live’. As Collier reminds us, it is population rather than an undefined life that is ‘a new site of veridiction’. Rather than individualizing, biopolitics is massifying, taking as its object a population through a period of time. Biopolitics captured the transformation of power from sovereign and disciplinary techniques to a technique which acts upon populations as collectives. Yet, Foucault himself had often placed populations in the continuum of human species, life and publics. Thus, Esposito can gloss on the object of biopolitics: ‘he [Foucault] is referring to the only element that groups all individuals into the same species: the fact that each has a body’. Biopolitics is then pushed towards the pole of anatomopolitics, the disciplinary politics of making docile bodies. Readings of biopolitics reconfigure it not only through different problematizations and modes of knowledge, but also through the specification of its object: from populations to species life, from life to bodies, from bodies to affects, from affect to identity, identity to data, and so forth. Rather than disempowering, this undecidability is the springboard for thinking the critical purchase of biopolitics.

The use of biopolitics has been suggestive of critical unease with the administration of life, the pursuance of protection, the transformations of capitalism, the development of biotechnology, the emergence of new modes of regulations of risk, and the making of neoliberal subjects. For Esposito, ‘When politics takes life as an object of direct intervention, it ends up reducing it to a state of absolute immediacy.’ For Debrix and Barder, biopolitics entails the proliferation of violence, not just as terror and war, but also as ‘horror’. A similar unease is formulated by Eugene Thacker: with biopolitics, biological or political life has been replaced by a ‘whatever-life in which biology and sovereignty, or medicine and politics, continually inflect and fold onto each other’. For other contributors to Clough and Willse’s Beyond Biopolitics, biopolitics is invested in the production and circulation of death. So what is left of critique, if we understand it in Foucault’s terms as how not to be governed thus? Can critique embrace indeterminacy, when indeterminacy is now embedded in the modes of knowledge and regimes of practice? Can we reinvent immunity or other forms of life such as ‘common life’ or the ‘good life’ which are excluded through the ‘irresistible tendency of political philosophy (and political practice) to incorporate social plurality’ (Esposito)? Or can critique find its force in the actuality of practice, in asking ‘how these values are elaborated in practical terms, and how they are at stake in particular reforms, institutions and forms of reasoning about the problems of distribution, substantive provisioning, and calculative rationality that have persistently preoccupied governmental reflection in modern states’ (Collier)? Disciplinary affiliations may not be indifferent to the problematizations and critical operations that each text performs. Stephen Collier is an anthropologist, Esposito a philosopher, Debrix and Barder international relations theorists. Clough and Willse, both with disciplinary homes in sociology, introduce Beyond Biopolitics as a ‘transdisciplinary effort to critically engage the multiple tendencies and trajectories that have both informed neoliberal governance and found expression in its reformulation today’. While disciplinary affiliations appear to carry particular orientations towards problematization and critique, all four books also carry a transdisciplinary impulse that takes analysis beyond and at times against disciplinary boundaries. It can be the beginning of a dialogue that takes not only biopolitics as a transdisciplinary concept, but critique itself.

Suddenly, the reality of daily life, with its empty consumerism and attempts to navigate the omnipresent circuits of favours and bribes, was changed. People’s apprehension of each other and fear of indifferent and cruel authorities dissipated, and was replaced by an overwhelming sense that a better society was possible. The leaders of the opposition, while riding the wave of this energy, did not offer any strategic vision beyond the crowds’ expectations of a general change for the better. Leaders and protesters came from a range of political camps, and on the whole political demands did not represent any specific agenda, left or right. Rather than uniting to promote a single challenger to Putin’s power, demonstrators asserted their power as citizens, feeling that they could renegotiate their relationship with the state. In one of the demonstrations, an elderly man standing next to me was carrying a self-made poster with a quotation from Alexander Pushkin’s poem ‘To Chaadaev’: ‘For while of freedom we all dream, while in our hearts there still lives honour, let’s dedicate to our land the highest promptings of our spirits.’ Pushkin belonged to a generation of early-nineteenth-century Russian gentry who hoped that Russia would follow the road of European civilization, with its ideals of enlightenment and liberalism, and see the end of absolutist rule. These hopes were crushed after the failure of the Decembrist uprising of 1825, and future hopes of Russia becoming a free, representative democracy were never realized.

Now a belief that Russia could become a ‘normal European country’, with the rule of law, democratic freedoms and honest elections seemed once again to animate the people at the demonstrations. One of the leaders of the opposition, a popular blogger and anticorruption activist Alexei Navalnyi, had successfully rebranded Putin’s United Russia party ‘The Party of Crooks and Thieves’, a name which has taken root so firmly that it now appears prominently in the results of a Google search for ‘United Russia’. Putin himself was now called ‘Thief number one’. It was not the accusation itself and the ongoing investigations of corruption and theft of public funds by officials that mattered – after all, the extent of the regime’s corruption is well known – but the disenchantment with Putin’s power, the sudden removal of a mystical, magic veil from it.

While, as Lenin put it, a central question of a revolution is the question of power, for the protesters this question concerned not who they wanted to bring to power, but the nature of power itself. Unlike the so-called ‘coloured’ revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia or Kyrgyzstan, where protesters united around specific political figures, the current platforms. The recent protests were led not by partisan interests, but by republican sentiments. Like those involved in the eighteenth-century revolutions, the opponents of Putin’s regime wanted Russia to have a different form of government, focusing on the rule of law and the power of the citizenry rather than obedience to the rule of man over man. The protests were triggered by Medvedev’s refusal to stand for a second term as president, and by Putin’s announcement on 24 September 2011 that his return to power had long been agreed between the two. The concrete prospect of this prearranged succession, and another twelve years of Putin’s rule, offended and horrified many who had allowed themselves to hope that Medvedev’s presidency could lead to an era of change for the better.

Idealism was not only rediscovered by ordinary Muscovites, whose last major mobilization for political freedom dates back to protests against the Communist regime at the end of 1980s; after initial shock at the scale of the protest, Putin himself quite unexpectedly embraced his own version of idealism. In previous years, perhaps in the knowledge that his power was unshakeable and his poll ratings sufficiently high, the relaxed and complacent ruler had been content to play in public the role of a Hollywood superman: one day descending into the depths of the ocean in a submarine, the next flying a bomber and then, like some Russian Indiana Jones, uncovering ancient amphorae from the seabed. Now he suddenly turned to a more authentic and time-honoured Russian script of blood and sacrifice. In a speech at a pre-election gathering of his supporters, many of whom were bussed in to Moscow from provincial towns for the event, he called for the people to stand for Russia. Quoting from Mikhail Lermontov’s poem ‘Borodino’, he made a rallying call to his audience: ‘Hey, lads! Is Moscow not behind us? By Moscow, then, we die, as did our brothers die before us!’

The call was met with derision by Putin’s opponents, who questioned people’s readiness to die so that he and his cronies can enjoy their wealth, kept largely in the banks and mansions of the perfidious West. But Putin, who was visibly moved by his own rhetoric, did not seem to see any irony here: people should love their country and their rulers unconditionally and be ready to sacrifice their lives without demanding anything in return. The feelings he sought to mobilize verged on the cult of death. After the presidential elections, at the rally organized to celebrate his victory, a tearful Putin said: ‘I promised you we would win. We have won. Glory to Russia.’ His victory (against opponents whom he himself hand-picked, while denying independent opposition leaders the opportunity to stand) was presented as a victory against enemy forces sponsored by the West. ‘We showed that no one can direct us in anything! We were able to save ourselves from political provocations, which have one goal – to destroy Russian sovereignty and usurp power.’

Two Russias

The Russia that Putin seems to believe he leads is not a republic of free citizens, but a land of passive obedient subjects, where a person’s only moment of heroic individuality, the apotheosis of his existence, can come at the moment of death for the motherland. The call for sacrifice at times of historical crisis has a long tradition, and has been used by the state many times since the war and the periods of forced collectivization and industrialization under Stalin, lingering on well into the Brezhnev years. As for the enemies plotting to usurp power in Russia, conspiracy theories have always played a prominent role in Russian social and cultural discourse, and Putin happily tapped into this paranoid narrative. The radical duality of a conspiratorial view of the world has historically had a particular relevance in the Russian cultural landscape. The Russian structuralists Lotman and Uspensky identified such duality as a particular feature of Russian cosmology, in which cultural values and cognitive perceptions (good and evil, heaven and hell, Russia and the West, etc.), are divided by sharp boundaries without axiologically neutral zones. Contemporary Russian mass culture, with popular films such as The Night Watch and The Day Watch depicting Russia as a field of a messianic battle between forces of good and evil, is saturated with themes of plots and conspiracies. The theme of the ‘West’ conspiring to destroy Russia, undermine its moral order or confine it to a peripheral state had origins in, among other things, the Orthodox Church’s anti-Western and anti-Catholic stance, and it featured strongly in Stalin’s isolationism and his campaigns against the agents of the Western influence.

At the same time, in the imaginary of the Russian rulers the masses have always been seen as children, who are by their nature innocent but can be easily seduced by evil, and who must be directed by wise ecclesiastical shepherds together with the benighted monarch. Indeed, Putin seems to believe that his position at the helm of the Russian state endows him with a quasi-sacred power, similar to that of the Russian tsars, to lead their charges through dangers and protect them from enemies. This belief finds its expression at both stylistic and rhetorical levels. Putin likes to present himself in this monarchical image at important state events. He appears to the collected dignitaries by walking through the golden gates of the Kremlin palace, or emerges on the Duma stage from behind the speaker’s back. He constantly builds palaces for himself designed to emulate the splendour of the tsars’ residencies. It is not for him to let the world know about his personal life, his children or even the fate of his wife (whose public absence has prompted rumours that, like several Russian tsars before him, he has sent his unloved wife to a monastery). Representative institutions like the Russian parliament are supposed to act as conduits of this power, with an added function of reconciling the interests of various lobby groups. (Boris Gryzlov, who until recently was the speaker of this institution, famously stated that ‘Parliament is not a place for debates.’)

The claim to the sacred power of the tsars dates back to the time of Ivan the Terrible, as does the accusation that anybody who challenges this power is the country’s enemy. Ivan expressed this view in his famous correspondence with the nobleman Andrei Kurbsky, who escaped to Lithuania and questioned Ivan’s absolutist rule. Kurbsky was condemned by the tsar as a traitor and an enemy of Christians. Putin in his own way continues this line. He accuses the opposition of consorting with the West and asks people not to ‘betray their motherland and be with us, work for it and its people and love it like us, with the whole heart’. The ruler is equated with the country, and any attempts to challenge him are seen as Western-inspired treason. This logic is unfalsifiable, despite the lack of any evidence of Western involvement in the recent protests, and the angry reaction of the protesters themselves to the accusation.

In his election campaign, Putin tried to present himself as a kind tsar, a benevolent father of the nation. He made expansive promises to every possible social group. And his efforts were not in vain. During the election campaign, after an initial tumble, his ratings started to rise, support for the protest movement decreased, and on 4 March, according to official election results, he collected 63.6 per cent of the vote. Even though independent observers gathered evidence of mass falsifications, it is undeniable that he would have won the elections even if no vote rigging had taken place, if not in the first then in the second round.

In Moscow the festive mood turned sour. The elections pitted two Russias against one another. In one Russia, people in large urban centres are longing for political freedom, open and honest elections, an end to corruption and police violence. In the other Russia, a country of small towns and villages, and areas where livelihoods are dependent upon the state, people seem supportive of Putin’s quasi-monarchical rule and antagonistic to the West and the Westernized big city dwellers. This second Russia has won, and plunged the other half into despair.

But the key to the ‘other’ Russia’s support for Putin’s power lies not in his successful invocations of the spirit of the tsars, but in the need for a strong centre. The Kremlin undoubtedly retains much symbolic power, and remains the central point in the Russian universe. Where society is so unequal, and people’s lives are lived in increasing isolation from each other, there is a need for a centre of gravity which can overpower the centrifugal forces. The figure of Putin himself is perhaps less significant than this need for common signifiers of nationhood. Following the trauma of the 1990s, with the mass dispossession and spectre of lawlessness associated with the transition to market capitalism, the fear of a new crisis remains ripe. The anti-absolutist, republican discourse that animates many Muscovites is lost on those who have few resources that would allow them social and economic autonomy, and who remain dependent on their local bosses and provincial patrons.

‘Europeans’ and others

The chorus of disappointment in the masses’ inability to hear the call of freedom is as old as republican sentiment in Russia. Pushkin wrote of the people, ‘O passive nation that will not rise to honour’s call. What need have sheep of liberation? A hand will shear and slit them all. They leave to every generation a choking yoke and slaughterstall.’1 These days Internet blogs and public commentary by Moscow intellectuals are full of scathing references to Putin’s voters and supporters, whom they call gopniks (chavs), bydlo (cattle) or anchousy (anchovies). Unlike the members of the self-proclaimed ‘creative class’, these are seen as the slaves of the regime; parasites unable or unwilling to work for themselves, who prefer to rely on state handouts. These days metropolitan snobbery finds a new ideological basis in the neoliberal discourse that equates failure with dependency and a lack of entrepreneurial spirit. As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, people occupying the social or geographical periphery are stigmatized by this discourse as ‘losers’, uneducated masses or cultural aliens, incapable of sharing the values of their more ‘advanced’ middle-class compatriots.2

While longing for a normal, ‘European’, life without corruption and bureaucratic oppression, the ‘creative class’ is not overly concerned with the lives of the distant poor. As for the poor who are nearer, they simply form part of this picture of normality, the ‘prose’ of urban life. In November 2009, a well-known Moscow liberal online magazine, polit.ru, published an article by one of its cultural commentators, the writer Leonid Kostyukov. The title of the article was ‘Normal Life and its Meaning’. Here, the author claimed that the Russian intelligentsia needed to acknowledge the self-evident fact that everyday life in the country has become more normal. A part of the new everyday normality was the presence of homeless people in public spaces. He wrote:

Not being a fan of Yeltsin, Putin and Medvedev, I have to admit: for the last fifteen years … I have been leading a normal life at the place where I live. I will concede straight away: this is a courtyard in the centre of Moscow, but these are not the most prestigious buildings; ordinary families live here. People go to work, walk their dogs or children, they gradually get old. Children play, grow up, finish schools, enter universities and fall in love. Sounds of music come from the music school. A couple of alcoholics had been loitering, one of them has quietly disappeared. Homeless people swarm around the rubbish bins.

He insisted that this idyllic picture of his courtyard could be generalized to the whole of Russia, where, in contrast to the abnormal existence people had in Soviet times, with the perennial shortages of consumer goods and pervasive control of individual’s lives by the state, ‘life is normal’.3 While homeless people are mentioned in passing (Kostyukov uses the word bomzhi – a derogatory term commonly applied to the homeless), the figure of a homeless person has become normalized as part of the urban landscape. For a member of the ‘creative class’ it is quite possible to look at homeless people ‘swarming around rubbish bins’ with the same gaze as one would look, say, at pigeons swarming around the statue of Nelson in Trafalgar Square. Together with alcoholics, the homeless are part of the poor that are ‘always with us’. They are the poor who are not even threatening, but quietly form a background to the ‘normal’, relatively stable and prosperous lives of the urban middle classes.

This ‘othering’ or neutralization of the poor is a sign of how deeply neoliberal ideology has penetrated the mindsets of the Russian metropolitan middle classes. As elsewhere in post-socialist countries, social inequality, social exclusion and a living wage have not been part of the reform agenda, and to express concern about these issues would either be stupidly beholden to old Soviet ways, or be populist or nationalist.4 The neoliberal ‘expert’ community see proposals to introduce progressive taxation and other methods of limiting economic inequalities as threatening macroeconomic stability and unacceptable for the most ‘modernized’ sectors, the urban middle classes, which represent 20–25 per cent of the population. The latter are seen as the vanguard of the nation, as people with ‘European values’. They are more individualistic, less supportive of redistribution, and tend to believe in equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcomes. This is in contrast with the ‘traditional’ statist and egalitarian values of those who do not belong to the affluent minority. And yet there is an obvious blind spot when it comes to other resources of these self-reliant ‘Europeans’, which the masses lack: the connections that allow them to access good hospitals, the opportunity to make successful careers, and to get their offspring into a good school or university, or find them a good job. According to one recent poll, among the middle classes only 40 per cent ‘do not have connections that would allow them to solve all of the above problems’, while among the rest of the population this figure rises to around 65 per cent. Yet the authors of the report, which discusses both the ‘European’ values of the modernizing class and its parochial practices, noticed no contradiction here.

There is a profound disconnection between the lives of liberal ‘individualists’, who in fact are well plugged into the state and non-state distributive networks, and the mass of ‘dependants’, who struggle to keep their jobs, to find money to pay for their children to go to university and to afford even substandard health care. The leaders of the opposition movement have been unable to bridge this gap and offer a unifying and attractive narrative to a mass electorate. By contrast, Putin’s propaganda machine has tried to fill this gap, stoking old phobias about the West and the treacherous intelligentsia, ready to betray their compatriots for the Yankee dollar.

So what is the future for the Russian opposition? Will it be suffocated – by the regime and by the indifference of the ‘other’ Russia? Is it Russia’s destiny to remain a country where, as the Russian historian Klyuchevsky famously said, characterizing Ivan the Terrible’s regime, ‘The state grew bloated as the people wasted away.’ In contrast to the Western Oedipal archetype, where the son must kill the patriarch to find his place in the world, the Russian archetype has been the father killing the son. This is a key trope of Russian history and fiction. Ivan the Terrible killed his son in a fit of rage. Peter the Great killed the son who was plotting with his Catholic enemies to overthow him. In Nikolai Gogol’s novel Taras Bulba, the hero kills his son, who had forsaken his Cossack heritage for a Polish girl. In Mikhail Sholokhov’s story ‘A Birthmark’, the father kills the son during the Civil War without recognizing him – and then, in a reversal of Oedipus’s story, kills himself. In Russia the old seems destined to kill the new. Will the old kill the new again, or will the civic idealists find ways to mobilize the country?

Notes

1. Translated by A.Z.Foreman, http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2010/10/alexander-pushkinfreedoms- sower-from.html.

2. M. Buchowski, ‘The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother’, Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 3, 2006, pp. 463–82; T. Zarycki, ‘Orientalism and Images of Eastern Poland’, in M. Stefański, ed., Endogenous Factors in Development of Eastern Poland, Innovatio Press, Lublin, 2010, pp. 73–88.

3. www.polit.ru/analytics/2009/11/07/normalnayazhizn.html.

4. Z. Ferge, ‘Wellfare and Ill-fare Systems in Central Eastern Europe’, in R. Sykes, B. Palier, P. Prior and J. Campling, eds, Globalization and European Welfare States: Challenges and Change, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2001; T. Zarycki, ‘Socjologia Krytyczna na Peryferiach’, Kultura i Spoleczenstwo, vol. 53, no. 1, 2009.

Every school pupil in France today has to learn how to ‘construct her problematic’ when she works on her ‘dissertation’ in Literature, History, Philosophy, and so on. A ‘problematic’ in this pedagogical sense is not simply a set of questions; it is rather the matrix or the angle from which it will become possible and even necessary to formulate a certain number of precise problems. For instance, if you pick as your essay question ‘What is self-evident?’ (as is perfectly possible in France), your problematic will consist in discovering the philosophical topos that the term alludes to, perhaps opposing formalist and intuitionist approaches in the philosophy of mathematics. Similarly, if you are asked, ‘Does freedom mean doing whatever I like?’, you could oppose individual and social concepts of freedom, or contrast the notion of pleasure with that of law, or even combine the two in a dialectical order. But the point is always to go from a rough theme or question to a precise problem, which has the form of an alternative between already elaborated or structured options.

The word is so popular that everybody has forgotten that it was invented quite recently by Bachelard in Le Rationalisme appliqué. This is all the more surprising in that the concept has undergone very sophisticated elaborations in subsequent philosophical history: it inspired Althusser’s reading of Marx and more generally his attempt at constructing a materialist concept of scientific knowledge; it is implicitly behind Foucault’s concept of episteme and explicitly at work in his later notion of problematization; and it is at the heart of Deleuze’s meditations on the ‘Problem–Idea’ in Difference and Repetition.

In all these cases, it is meant to open up to a different ‘image’ of thought, a structuralist and a materialist one.

[...]

* This dossier is the result of discussion following Patrice Maniglier’s contribution to ‘The Concept of Problem’, the second day of the first Workshop in the AHRC-funded research project, ‘Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities: Problems, Methods, Histories, Concepts’, organized by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, at Dorich House, Kingston University London, 25–26 January 2012.

First, as the beginning of the translated passage indicates, Bachelard is concerned with the processes by which scientific knowledge is acquired. His position is a form of rationalism in the sense that reason has a dominant role here; scientific knowledge is both rationally organized and rationally grounded in experience, and both of these features emerge from the way in which it is acquired. It is not first proposed as theory and then tested empirically (as a Popperian would suggest); the role Bachelard assigns to reason is one of empirical engagement. Applied rationalism is thus an account of empirically (materially) engaged reasoning, not of theoretical reasoning subsequently applied. His position can be hard to grasp because it represents a quite radical departure from philosophical norms, particularly those that analytic philosophy inherited from the logical positivists. He transgresses divisions that others have taken as absolute givens, such as that between abstract and concrete when he talks of the concrete universal.

He is already talking about what Latour would later call the world of hybrids, the material world informed by modern science and technology. This is both the world of industrial mass production and its products and the world of the scientific laboratory where the study of phenomena is heavily mediated by instruments. As Bachelard says, modern science has passed from the phenomenology of nature studies to the phenomeno-technique of the laboratory.1

Second, Bachelard equates reason, reasoning or deduction not with logic but with the development and deployment of mathematics in organizing both thought and experimental practices. It goes without saying that he rejects logicist and formalist views of mathematics. So in a sense he is talking about science as applied mathematics.

[...]

Note

1. For more on this theme, see Mary Tiles, ‘Technology, Science and Inexact Knowledge: Bachelard’s Non-Cartesian Epistemology’, in Gary Gutting, ed.,Continental Philosophy of Science, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005, pp.157–75; Mary Tiles, ‘Is Historical Epistemology Part of the Modernist Settlement?’,Erkenntnis, vol. 75, no. 3,2011, pp. 525–43.

In effect, when it is a question of presenting an object to scientific thought, one cannot confine oneself to the immediacy of a not-self opposed to a self. The scientific object is presented in the light of its definition, after the self is already engaged in a particular kind of thought, consequently in a particular kind of existence. The rationalist cogito which tends to affirm the thinking subject in an activity of apodeictic thought must also function as an emergence over and above that of an existence already affirmed more or less empirically. The world destroyed by universal doubt could only give way, through constructive reflection, to a fortuitous world. If one does not give oneself the right to go via the circuit of the notion of a creator God, one does not in effect see what guarantee one would have, after a totally destructive doubt, of having reconstructed precisely that real world about which one had previously raised fundamental doubts. The Cartesian universe could say to the philosopher: you will not rediscover me if you have really lost me.

Thus between the two poles of the world destroyed and the world constructed, we propose simply to slip the world rectified.

And immediately the rational self is conscious of the rectification. To describe the full span of the grasp of rational consciousness it is sufficient to pass from the disorganized given to a given organized in the light of a rational end. Universal doubt will irremediably pulverize the given into a mass of heteroclite facts. It does not correspond to any real demand of scientific research. Scientific research demands, instead of the parade of universal doubt, the constitution of a problematic. It really starts with a problem, however ill-posed the problem. Once the scientific self is a programme of experiments,1 the scientific non-self is correspondingly already constructed as a problematic. In modern physics, one never works on the whole unknown. A fortiori, contrary to all theses that affirm something fundamentally irrational, one does not work on something unknowable.

In other words, a scientific problem is posed by starting from correlations expressed as laws.

[...]

Translated by Mary Tiles

Notes

1. [Note that the French expérience covers both ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’. Where it is used in a scientific context I have translated expérience as ‘experiment’. Trans.]

* This text is a translation of sections seven and eight of the third chapter of Gaston Bachelard, Le Rationalisme appliqué, taken from the fifth edition, 1975, pp. 50–60. It appears with the kind permission of Presses Universitaires de France.