Description
This paper explores David Scott’s notion of problem-space and probes its contributions to historical and critical enquiry in global politics. We engage with the important orientations and ongoing tensions that characterise ‘Historical International Relations’ and suggest that problem-space as a ‘conception of temporality’ allows us to move beyond the historicism prevalent in IR. Specifically, we outline Scott’s (2005) development and use of the term as ‘a conjunctural, discursive space’ that is generative of questions and answers which structure presents and possible futures, and argue that it offers a more productive approach to the task of historicisation and contextualisation. Bringing David Scott into conversation with recent thinking coming at the question of ‘limits of thinkability’ and more broadly issues of continuity and change, we reflect on the challenges entailed in engaging ‘problem-space’ thinking. We specifically turn, first, to questions of complex, interarticulated spatio-temporalities that affect the transition from one problem space to an other to supplement Scott’s rather linear temporal approach. Finally, we look at a wider, order-level, semiotic perspective we find in the corpus of another Caribbean thinker, Sylvia Wynter, to ascertain the contribution her idea of ‘classarchy -- the ‘morphogenetic fantasy’ (Wynter) or ‘cultural imaginary of the group self’ (Sorentino) which entrenches as reality ‘a middle class model of human identity’. This boundedness within such a semiotic order offers an additional and more capacious understanding of boundaries/limits to thinkability within which ‘problem-space comes to be, how it configures itself’. Wynter’s discussion of the (futile) search for an ‘autonomous frame of reference’ illuminates the stakes for our present discussion of the utility of problem-space analysis.
