Special Issue: Problematizing the Problematic

Theory, Culture & Society

0(0) 1–21
Problem and Structure: ! The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276419878245

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Patrice Maniglier
Paris Nanterre University

Abstract
The concept of ‘problem’ has been recently promoted by the official academic insti-
tutions and put at the centre of a new field of research, self-styled ‘transdisciplinary
studies’, in order to provide a foundation to a resolutely transdisciplinary approach
to research and thought in general. The paper notes that the same move (i.e. con-
necting a problem-centred approach to thought with transdisciplinary method) can
be found in Deleuze’s philosophy, which provides us with what the technocratic
image of thought advocated by transdisciplinary studies ultimately cannot provide:
a positive concept of problems where those are not negative moments but originary
and active matrices of thought. It then argues that Deleuze owes this concept to the
French epistemological tradition, and more specifically to Bachelard, where it is
nothing other than the concept of structure. It ends by explicating what particular
version of structuralism Deleuze was thus led to construct in order to account
for the role of problems in a radically transdisciplinary account of thought: it is
the fact that all structures are multi-structured that grounds the essentially transdis-
ciplinary nature of thought. The fact that we could think differently is precisely
what makes us think.

Keywords
Bachelard, Deleuze, poststructuralism, research methods, structuralism

Introduction
This is the case of an odd encounter. The concept of ‘problem’ has been
promoted by the official academic institutions and put at the centre of a
new field of research, self-styled ‘transdisciplinary studies’: it is deemed to
provide a foundation to a resolutely transdisciplinary approach to research
and thought in general (Nicolescu, 2002; Klein et al., 2001). To think would
not be to try to tell the truth about any particular given object, which
would in turn provide a particular discipline with its identity (matter for

Corresponding author: Patrice Maniglier. Email: patrice.maniglier@gmail.com

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
2 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

physics, life for biology, etc.); it would consist in trying to address singular
problems that do not necessarily match disciplinary boundaries (see
Osborne, 2015). As it happens, this promotion of the category of problem
over that of object is also central to Gilles Deleuze’s work, which also leads
him to support an essentially transdisciplinary account of what it is to
think. This encounter is all the more unexpected in that Deleuze and the
advocates of transdisciplinary studies have in other respects entirely
opposed conceptions of what it is to think: for the former, to think is to
create new problems, whereas for the latter, to think is to solve important
issues that are given to us in the ‘real world’. Whilst transdisciplinary
studies’ advocates hold what I will call a technocratic conception of thought
– in the sense that academic research is conceived as merely a set of means
to fulfil extra-intellectual needs – Deleuze has an aesthetic conception of
thought, since to think is always to create (and not to describe). However,
both agree that to think is to relate to problems and that this implies a
radically transdisciplinary approach to thought.
This sort of encounter should draw the attention of anyone interested in
the legacy of 20th-century French philosophy, because it helps to put
Deleuze’s theses and concepts at work in non-Deleuzian terms. Indeed,
Deleuzian scholarship all too often remains contained in a purely internal
reading of the master, without wondering why one would come to Deleuze
in the first place. It is as if Deleuze was only interesting for Deleuzian
reasons: how one becomes Deleuzian is something Deleuzians seem to be
completely oblivious to. By contrast, in the following pages I would like to
argue that Deleuze provides an internal critique of the contemporary dis-
course on transdisciplinarity, and in particular on the role of problems in
intellectual research. In other words, I would like to show that, if the
advocates of transdisciplinarity want to be consistent with their own pre-
suppositions and aims, they must accept something very similar to what
Deleuze has elaborated in his works.
I will first show that the promotion of the category of problem requires
a concept of problem that the technocratic conception of thought cannot
provide, yet we find it carefully constructed in Deleuze. I will then proceed
to elaborate this concept of problem, and to show what Deleuze here owes
to what is known as the French epistemological tradition, in particular to
the work of Gaston Bachelard. It will appear that this concept of problem
is nothing other than the concept of structure. In the fourth and last sec-
tion of this paper, I will then explicate what particular version of struc-
turalism Deleuze was led to construct in order to account for the role of
problems in a radically transdisciplinary account of thought.

Technocratic Transdisciplinarity and Its Problems

In what sense can we say that a transdisciplinary conception of what it
means to think must appeal to the category of problem? In the literature
Maniglier 3

on ‘transdisciplinary studies’, the idea is very simple. It is firstly that there

are particularly complex issues, involving many dimensions of reality
(life, matter, society, etc.), to which different disciplines correspond
(biology, physics, urbanism, etc.). It is secondly that the very meaning
of those disciplines would be lost if they were not capable of addressing
these problems. Consequently, the very justification of knowledge is fun-
damentally transdisciplinary because it is about real-life problems. Such
problems are, for instance, climate change, urban explosion, extreme
poverty, etc. The idea was clearly stated by Gary D. Brewer in 1999:
‘The world has problems, but universities have departments’ (Brewer in
Hirsch Hadorn et al., 2008: 4). Problems are things of the world; aca-
demic disciplines are things of the mind. But the mind is nothing other
than an instrument to facilitate the interactions of an agent within the
world. If a discipline is not capable of addressing these problems, it loses
its justification. Therefore, academic research can only fulfil its own
essence, if it i) solves problems and ii) deploys itself within some trans-
disciplinary horizon. Instead of a conception of knowledge as being
object-centred and discipline-bound, we must have a conception of
knowledge as being problem-centred and across disciplines.
This conception draws more or less directly from the work of Alan
Newell and Herbert Simon (1972) in their attempt to account for intel-
ligence in general as problem-solving. A problem is a situation that
appears as negative to an agent who is capable of a) having representa-
tions of this situation, b) having representations of a better situation than
the actual one she is perceiving, c) deploying strategies to fill the gap
between the two situations.1 But this conception also faces the same
difficulty as Newell and Simon’s ‘general problem solver’: the possibility
that one might desire one’s problems doesn’t seem to cross the minds of
the authors who have contributed to the literature on problem-solving.
The idea that without problems the world might not be very interesting
doesn’t seem to bother them. It should, however. For if we pushed this
line of reasoning to its ultimate consequences, it would appear that the
ideal of intellectual life is a situation in which intellectual activity is
finally over. To think, in other words, would simply be an attempt at
annulling the reasons we might have to think. To think would consist in
striving as hard as we can to reach this blessed state in which there is no
point in thinking anymore! Fortunately for the human mind, it so happens
– but this is just a contingent fact for these authors – that the world is too
strong for the human mind, and that there will always be too many
complex problems for us to be allowed to dispense with thinking at all.
I don’t wish to make fun of anyone. I think there is a real challenge
here. It is a fact that most of the authors who have tried to put the
category of problem at the centre of their account of thought maintained
a negative conception of problems – a view in which a problem can never
be in itself a goal but is always an obstacle to overcome or, on the
4 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

contrary, a lack to fulfil.2 This is not only true of the conception inherited
from Newell and Simon but of what are, to my knowledge, the three
main conceptions of problem: the Cartesian one, for which a problem is
defined by the relation between the known and the unknown; the
Aristotelian (but also Kantian-Hegelian) conception, for which a prob-
lem is a contradiction or a conflict between ideas;3 and what one might
call the cognitivist one, for which a problem is an obstacle to be over-
come in the course of solving a particular task. The paradox of these
conceptions is that they want to promote the category of problem to a
high position in the account of what it is to think – they deem it the origin
and the aim, the sense and the value, of intellectual activity in general.
Yet they maintain a concept of problem in which problems are primarily
defined with reference to what they negate, which is at the same
time what they are supposed to ground and account for (knowledge,
opinion, interest).
For example, the Cartesian ‘unknown’ is defined by difference from
the known: if we are interested in finding what the unknown is, it is of
course because we are interested in knowing. It is not the perception of
the problem that gives meaning and value to knowledge, but knowledge
itself that justifies and orients the position of problems. Likewise, if one
finds something ‘problematic’ in the existence of a contradiction between
different opinions, it is because one wants to feel secure and coherent in
one’s opinions. In the same way, it is not the obstacle that motivates and
justifies the undertaking of a particular task, but the goal that one wants
to achieve. For instance, if climate warming is a problem worth address-
ing, it is because it jeopardizes a certain number of human goals and
values that we already accept and on the basis of which we see it as a
problem. It is not the problem that is at the origin of our intellectual
endeavours but the already given, extrinsic values that we hold and to
which we subject our intellectual life. In the three cases, there is a clear
reversal of the original idea: it is not in order to address problems that we
come up with particular ideas, theories or opinions, but in order to secure
these values that we raise problems, as means to some ends.
This negative conception of problems comes with other difficulties that
might be worth mentioning to make it clearer why we need a ‘positive’
concept of problem, even if we did not a priori adhere to a Nietzschean
conception of thought as value creation as Deleuze does. One such dif-
ficulty is that this negative definition of problems cannot account for
what we know is an important dimension of thought: the critique of
problems themselves. Indeed, the problem-solving approach to know-
ledge conceives of thought only as an instrument. This is why I called
it a technocratic conception of thought, where intellectual disciplines are
nothing other than means to an end. The relevance and worth of an
intellectual endeavour would here be measured by its contribution to
the fulfilment of already given values. But isn’t the purpose of intellectual
Maniglier 5

activity precisely to criticize the goals, to determine in a free gesture the

orientations of thought itself? Isn’t it the case that in many circumstances
we stumble upon a particular problem, without realizing that we see it
as a problem simply because we don’t have a large enough view of
the matter?
To obliterate the dimension of the critique of problems, as the techno-
cratic conception does, is to lose what Kant called the self-determination
of thought: here, thought becomes an ancillary activity. Does this mean
that problems that cannot demonstrate their usefulness for particular
‘real life’ issues are simply worthless? Happily for us, our predecessors
were not bound by this demand: it is for purely speculative reasons, out
of curiosity, so to speak, that Archimedes and Apollonius worked on the
conic sections in the third century BC, a whole 17 centuries before Kepler
discovered that they could be used in order to account for the trajectory
of the planets. The history of science is rich in endeavours entirely unre-
lated to any particular ‘real-life problem’.
Another difficulty is that the exclusive attention invested in problem-
solving overshadows the issues that accompany the complex art of prob-
lem-raising. Problems are not merely given in such a way that we would
only have to look for their solutions. As Bergson (1946: 54) famously
said, ‘the truth is that in philosophy and even elsewhere it is a question of
finding the problem and consequently of positing it, even more than of
solving it. For a speculative problem is solved as soon as it is properly
stated’. Transdisciplinary studies do devote some time and space to the
issue of the construction of problems, but it is only in terms of ‘problem-
structuring’, or ‘problem-identifying’, which restricts itself to only one
part of the story – the easiest one – whereby, problems being given, the
only question is to construe them correctly, without taking seriously the
possibility that some problems might be plainly false, while others are not
even apparent and await discovery.4

Bachelard, or: Why Are (Scientific) Problems Positive?

In its account of the will to know, such a purely negative conception of
problems is thus caught in a vicious circle. Indeed, why set out to know
anything? ‘Because we need to address a particular problem.’ But why do
we have these problems in the first place? ‘Well, because we want to
know . . .’. They thus presuppose what they were meant to account for.
It thus seems that we will fail to redefine the problematic nature of
knowledge as long as we maintain a negative definition of problems.
Indeed, this is the very argument Deleuze used to propose that problems
should be construed as positive and originary. Deleuze’s conception of
problems is spread across the entire corpus of his work.5 But rather than
commenting on these texts at this stage, I would like to emphasize the
fact that such a conception is not specific to Deleuze: he inherits it from
6 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

what is known as the French epistemological tradition, starting with

Gaston Bachelard, but also including Canguilhem, Althusser,
Foucault, etc. (see Gutting, 1989; Tiles, 1984). In fact, I want to show
that this positive concept of problem is in effect nothing other than the
very concept of structure. In this section and the following one, I shall
establish, firstly, that to think is to problematize, and, secondly, that to
problematize is to structure. Only then will we be ready to understand
Deleuze’s take on the matter.
Let us start by establishing that what the ‘French epistemological
tradition’ shares with the technocratic discourse on transdisciplinarity
is an account of thought as primarily concerned with problems rather
than objects. For both traditions, to think is not to try to tell the truth
about any particular given object (be it the living organism, the thing in
motion or the structure of the air) as if there was a world out there
waiting for us to lay our eyes upon it; it is to try to respond to problems
– problems being not what is to be thought, but what makes us think: the
impetus rather than the object of thought. It is Bachelard who can be
credited for having introduced into epistemology the concept of problem
in the French context. He argues that there are singular problems that at
the same time determine thought to think (that is, shape the epistemic
subject – how we think) and determine the object to be thought (what we
think). In Le Rationalisme Applique´ he writes: ‘We must first posit the
object as a subject of the problem, and the subject of the cogito as a
consciousness of the problem’ (Bachelard, 1949: 56). This clearly means
that Bachelard replaces the correlation between subject and object by
problems that institute the correlation in its very possibility: neither the
world nor the mind precedes problems; on the contrary, problems deter-
mine ways of thinking and things to be thought about.
Thus, Bachelard commits himself somewhat explicitly to nothing less
than an ontology of problems that will find its accomplishment only in
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. Yet if Bachelard’s reasons for intro-
ducing the concept of problem are similar to that of transdisciplinary
studies, his concept of problem is radically different. For Bachelard,
problems are neither given nor negative: they are constructed, and con-
structed positively, for their own sake. To think is to problematize, to aim
at problems – or, rather, to think in a scientific way. Indeed, Bachelard
does not have a general thesis on problems (as Deleuze will), but a spe-
cific thesis on scientific problems. Crucial to what he calls the ‘scientific
mind’ (or ‘spirit’) is indeed the ‘sense of the problem’: the interest in
problems for their own sake. Thus, in a very famous passage from The
Formation of the Scientific Mind where he introduces the concept of epis-
temological obstacle, he writes:

The scientific mind forbids us to have an opinion on questions we

do not understand and cannot formulate clearly. Before all else, we
Maniglier 7

have to be able to pose problems. And in scientific life, whatever

people may say, problems do not pose themselves. It is indeed
having this sense of the problem that marks out the true scientific
mind. For a scientific mind, all knowledge is an answer to a ques-
tion. If there has been no question, there can be no scientific know-
ledge. Nothing is self-evident. Nothing is given. Everything is
constructed. (Bachelard, 2002 [1938]: 25)

He uses this expression – the ‘sense of the problem’ – again a little later
(2002 [1938]: 38) to oppose it to wonderment, which was famously con-
sidered by Aristotle as the origin of our aspiration to knowledge
(Metaphysics, 982a). Bachelard argues that wonderment is just the mun-
dane form of the problematizing attitude, utterly different from the sci-
entific form. Obviously, the French word ‘mondain’ refers here to the
laymen who think that their puzzlement before spectacular scientific
demonstrations captures the scientists’ own interests (Bachelard, 2002
[1938]: 38ff), but we might as well use it to refer to our relation to the
immediately empirical world in general (‘monde’), in a sense that is closer
to the Husserlian ‘life-world’ in which we experience our most funda-
mental practical familiarity with our own conditions of existence
(Husserl, 1970). As we shall see below, Bachelard argues that what
motivates and orients scientific activity is neither our will to possess
technical solutions to our fraught dealings with our ordinary world,
nor our bewilderment before the marvels of the world or its enigmatic
nature. Instead, it is the very desire to interrogate: ‘the scientific mind
may make us desire to know, but this from the first is so that we can ask
better questions’ (2002 [1938]: 27). If thought is a problem-solving activ-
ity, it is because it is first and foremost an effort to raise problems.
This thesis can only be fully understood if it is connected with a con-
cept eminently associated with Bachelard’s name: that of epistemological
break. The concept of ‘epistemological break’ has been subjected to so
many misunderstandings that it is necessary to clear away at least one of
them to understand what Bachelard has to say about the nature of sci-
entific problematization. Many have understood it as a sort of repacka-
ging of the Platonic distinction between Science and Opinion, in line with
a form of scientism. It is for this reason that, for instance, it has been
rejected by Bruno Latour, since it puts science in a position of radical
exception within human practices, making it unintelligible from the point
of view of developing a scientific account of scientific activity itself.
This, I contend, is a completely misguided interpretation of Bachelard,
however, who instead sought to do justice to the qualitative difference
between the scientific and the non-scientific ways of thinking.
For Bachelard argues not only that problems are constructed, but that
they are constructed against the worries we may have in our everyday life.
Thus, the more a scientific problem distances us from this everyday
8 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

matter of concern, the more scientific value it holds. Its very scientific
identity as a problem relies on this distancing from immediate experience.
Not only are scientific problems not subjected to vital interests, but they
consist in the very movement by which they demonstrate that, to para-
phrase Marx on German ideology, it is not only in the answers but in the
very questions that there might be a mystification. This is a very import-
ant point, for it shows that Bachelard does not put science against the
background of some more fundamental questioning, but values science
for the way it creates new problems and new interests. It is also important
because it shows that, for Bachelard, every science is critical (and not
only the social sciences): science does not satisfy our curiosity, it displaces
the very questions we have. We can call critical a kind of knowledge that
does not content itself with filling an already given frame with new items
of information, but one that forces the frame itself to be reconfigured.
Thus, knowledge is not only an enterprise of acquisition, it is also an
exercise in self-transformation: ‘In self-questioning rationalism [le ratio-
nalisme questionnant], the bases for knowledge are themselves put to the
test, and brought into question by the question’ (Bachelard, 1949: 57).
It is precisely because a scientific theory is never an answer to a ques-
tion we met in our ordinary life that it does not make sense to say that
science is better than everyday thinking, for that would involve judging it
by the same standards and according to the same ends. Biology is not an
answer to hunger, no more than physics is an answer to our curiosity
about why objects fall to the ground instead of flying up toward the stars.
Bachelard is adamant that all scientific practices require some radical
modifications of both the subjective way we think and the objective
domain to be thought – new subjectivities and new objectivities. This is
indeed the very gist of his entire work: if it makes sense to speak of the
‘scientific mind’, it is precisely because it is not the lay mind. To practice
science, one must accept entering into a process of re-subjectification, a
process of creation of a different kind of subjectivity, just as one must be
ready to accept that science is not about the world in which one navi-
gates, sleeps and eats. Thus Bachelard writes: ‘For knowledge to be fully
effective, the mind now has to transform itself. Its roots need to be trans-
formed so that its buds can assimilate. The very conditions necessary for
the unity of the life of the mind force the life of the mind to change, they
require a radical human mutation’ (Bachelard, 1940: 143; my transla-
tion). Bachelard might be considered as an anthropologist who tries to
characterize the difference it makes for someone to think in a scientific
way, just as an anthropologist tries to understand what it takes from a
subjective point of view to carry out human sacrifices or cross-cousin
marriages. Nobody is born a scientist, and Bachelard’s anthropology
describes the processes of self-othering and self-distancing which charac-
terize the acquisition of a scientific culture. Incidentally, this means that
there is nothing like the scientific mind once and for all; on the contrary,
Maniglier 9

Bachelard’s epistemology starts anew each time it approaches a new sci-

ence or even a new scientific invention. What we once considered as
worth questioning is always put into question, and this process is coex-
tensive with the progress of knowledge.
In sum, to speak of epistemological breaks is not to oppose some
dumb inherence within the life-world to the keen interest in problems,
but to set epistemology the aim of differentially characterizing how new
subjectivities and new objectivities are elicited along with the redefinition
of problems away from our ordinary questions.

Problematization as Structuration
At this point, however, we are faced with a strong objection. Must we
indeed conclude that scientific objects have simply nothing to do with
the world in which we live, love, suffer and meditate, or that scientific
‘subjects’ have nothing in common with the living persons who walk in
and out of the lab? Do sciences constitute such radical breaks from our
‘immediate concerns’ that knowledge has nothing to tell us about
what bothers us in our ‘mundane’ existence? Would the scientist then
be not-of-our-world? Haven’t we lost what the technocratic conception
of thought preserved?
To answer these questions we need to introduce the concept of ‘prob-
lematic’, while taking great care not to misinterpret it. The word indeed
has become so popular that everybody (at least in France) has forgotten
that it was introduced for the first time in a published work by Bachelard
in Le Rationalisme Applique´ (1949).6 Every school pupil in France today
has to learn how to ‘construct her problematic’ when she works on her
dissertation in Literature, History, Philosophy, etc. 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 neces-
sary 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 word alludes to, perhaps by opposing for-
malist 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.
Bachelard can give the impression of having something similar in
mind, as if a problematic was a set of theoretical presuppositions that
open onto a field of alternative options, consisting either in a set of
10 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

variables defined by a measurement procedure, or in a set of theories

between which experience will arbitrate.
Thus, he explains that the scientific theory of the dewpoint does not
respond to the ordinary question of whether dew comes from inside or
from outside the plant. It rather demonstrates that each particular level of
dew is determined by a more general correlation between vapour pressure
and temperature. The problem with dew is rephrased by the scientific
theory: it is the problem of the precise value of the variable as it can be
calculated according to a general law, the one correlating vapour pressure
and temperature. As Bachelard writes, ‘a scientific problem is posed by
starting from correlations expressed as laws’ (1949: 51–2). Similarly,
when he discusses Fizeau’s experiment on the speed of light and the
interpretation that Taine gives of it (Bachelard, 1949: 52), he wants to
show that the problem behind this experiment does not consist in the
wish for an accurate description of a given reality (whether light is faster
or slower in air than it is in water), but in its contribution to a decision
between alternative scientific theories: it ‘decides in favour of the wave
theory of light against the emission theory’ (1949: 53). In these two
examples, it seems that a problematic for Bachelard is a set of theoretical
hypotheses, which determines a field of hesitation or oscillation, either
between different values for well-defined variables, or between different
theories competing with one another.
However, this interpretation is incorrect and would lead Bachelard
into straightforward contradictions. How can scientific theories be pro-
visional solutions to problems if problems are conditioned by scientific
theories? Problems would merely be means to an end, negative
moments in a process that fundamentally consists in selecting the
right propositions. We must in fact understand that a ‘problematic’
does not involve the substitution of one set of (bad) questions for
another set of (good) problems. It is rather an operation on the very
substance of our ordinary life, one that is best described as a ‘struc-
turation’. Scientific practices are indeed determined by their relation
with ordinary practices, but this relation is negative (dialectical) and
progressive (pragmatic).
It is negative in the sense that it only consists in diverting and empty-
ing the semantic content of the notions used in our everyday understand-
ing of the world – intuitive notions like weight, speed, volume, etc. – by
redefining them in relation to one another. Let’s take an example that
Bachelard develops in The Philosophy of the No: instead of having an
independent notion of mass, whose meaning is determined by the lived
experience of weight, the Newtonian definition of mass as a quotient of
force by acceleration defines it by its relation to the notion of force and
speed, and conversely: it thus appears that the ‘scientific mind’ is char-
acterized by the redefinition of terms through interlocking correlations.
‘The simple and absolute way of using concepts is superseded by the
Maniglier 11

correlative way of using them [defining them one by the other]’

(Bachelard, 1940: 27).
Bachelard calls this process (perhaps following Cassirer’s Substance
and Function) the ‘functionalization’ of the terms, since it replaces abso-
lute notions with functional concepts (in the mathematical sense of func-
tion where a term is defined by the relation between two variables, as in
f(x) ¼ y). This is why we must not interpret what Bachelard says about
the dewpoint as meaning that dew is investigated by the scientist only
insofar as it confirms or refutes an already given scientific law. It is rather
that the phenomenon itself becomes a variant, or the value of a variable,
in the correlation between co-determined concepts. It is problematized in
the sense that it is determined by its possibility of being otherwise, i.e. by
alternatives to itself. The shape of the drop of water on the leaf no longer
is an object that means anything in itself, but a value, a term that only
exists in a series and defines itself relative to other values. Scientific
theories problematize the world not because they generate alternative,
independent propositions between which we hesitate, but because they
fold the entire world onto itself, so that all dimensions of reality now
refer to one another, as in a play of echoes. That X is a only means that it
is a determined variation of y. A problematic is always a variational field,
yet it does not consist in a variation between positive and independent
propositions, but in a determination of entities as variants of one
another. Since this is made possible by the correlations between the con-
cepts, the ‘problematic’ is not the theory itself, not the set of formulated
laws held to govern any particular domain: it is the structure of the
theory, that is, the way the different concepts are diverted from
their isolated immediate ordinary semantics and redefined in relation
to one another.7 Scientific theories do not add further meaning to every-
day notions but use the latter to redefine each of them through their
correlations, at the cost of their being emptied of what appeared to
be their immediate meaning (‘mass’ does not mean anything anymore
on its own).
It is also important to note that this process is progressive and endless.
We don’t go from substantial terms to functional concepts in one stroke.
There are degrees and levels of ‘functionalization’ of the terms we use,
and no set of concepts is ever entirely functionalized. There always
remains some room for what Bachelard would call (without negative
undertones) ‘imaginary’ associations. This is why the relation between
ordinary experience and scientific problematization is a progressive one
as much as it is a dialectical one. Le Rationalisme Applique´ (1949: 55)
constantly emphasizes this element: the interesting object, for instance, is
‘an object for which the process of objectification has not been com-
pleted’. The scientific mind is for Bachelard an ever greater effort to
create within our own thought, or within our own language, a sort of
internal environment or milieu, which consists in replacing the external
12 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

relations that theoretical notions maintain with extra-theoretical entities,

by internal relations operating within the theory itself. In other words, if
we problematize the world, it is neither because the world reveals itself in
some enigmatic light nor because our theories offer different alternative
routes of empirical verification, as the technocratic conception of thought
supported by transdisciplinary studies would have it, but because
our own thought proceeds as a process that structures a set of propos-
itions. The structure is neither given in advance nor constructed: it is all
in the making.
We can see now what problems are. Problems are structures, provi-
sional states of an ongoing process of correlation between concepts.
When a theory is completely structured, it is dead: there is nothing
more to discover – all problems are ‘solved’. If problems determine our
(scientific) work, they are neither already given as if we were confronted
with them ‘in real life’ nor are they constructed as if they were mere
artefacts induced by the generation of scientific propositional activity.
The ontology of a problem is instead a pragmatic ontology whereby to be
does not mean to be finished, but to be in the making.8 In sum, to say with
Bachelard that science is a problematizing activity is simply to say that a
science is always characterized by a process of gradual structuration of a
particular domain of common sense. A theory is all the more scientific
when its semantic elements are structurally determined. Thus, it is the
concept of structure that enables us to say, at the same time, that theories
are determined by problems and that problems are determined by the
progress of the theory.

How Can Problems Be Shared? From Bachelard to Deleuze

However, we are now faced with one last difficulty. We started this dis-
cussion on the concept of problem in order to argue in favour of a strong
conception of transdisciplinarity. My argument was that thought is
transdisciplinary precisely because it is not about subfields of so-called
external reality but about singular problems. Now, if the structural con-
ception of problems enables us to give a coherent account of the idea that
science is essentially problematizing, that seems to contradict the insight
that different scientific disciplines share the same problems. Indeed, if
scientific problems express structural correlations between elements of
a theory, they rely on a dynamic of internalization of meaning within
each particular theory. The more a theory is ‘structured’, the more their
meaning is a function of the meaning of the other ones within the same
theory, the less likely it is that the concepts it uses would be translatable
in terms of another theory. Outside of the particular framework of
Newtonian physics, the notion of mass will mean something else.
Indeed, Bachelard (1949: 114–18) states that ‘common problems’ only
exist within the same theoretical framework.
Maniglier 13

To answer this difficulty, it might be useful to observe that Bachelard

reserves the notion of problematic exclusively for scientific thought, in
contrast with what he calls ‘imaginary’. This raises a number of other
difficulties. First, it does not seem possible to easily account for the
beginning of a scientific process, or for the origin of a dynamic of prob-
lematization. Why do some have the ‘sense of the problem’ while others
don’t? Is it just a particular (psychological or cultural) idiosyncrasy?
Bachelard has a lot to say about what it means to learn a particular
science and how the mind is disciplined into a problematic mindset,
but why and how can one feel the need for such intellectual exercise in
the first place? Conversely, his refusal to attribute to the ‘imaginary’ any
structural dimension is at odds with what the human sciences have taught
us throughout the 20th century. Structuralism itself has argued that the
concept of structure could be used for objects such as natural languages
(Saussure, Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, etc.), kinship systems and mythical
narratives (Lévi-Strauss, Dumézil, etc.), etc. In other words, it does not
seem accurate to reserve the concept of problem (or structure) only for
scientific domains.
All these difficulties can be dissolved by one suggestion: that every
process of structuration is at the same time a process of co-structuration.
Nothing can be structured without something else being structured in a
different way elsewhere. It is a fact that structuralism has not only been a
theory of the autonomy of the structured domains (of ‘pure’ linguistics,
‘pure sociology’, ‘pure cinema’, etc.); it has also been, in its most inter-
esting developments, a theory of the articulation of structures. To pro-
vide such a theory was, for instance, Althusser’s agenda, as Lucien Sebag
(1964), a disciple both of Althusser and Lévi-Strauss, was perhaps the
first to remark, later followed by various thinkers among whom Chantal
Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s theory of the articulation of the structures
is worth mentioning (Mouffe and Laclau, 1985). Moreover, this is
already the case for the supposedly most orthodox representative of
structuralism, Claude Lévi-Strauss himself. In his Introduction to the
Work of Marcel Mauss (1987), the French anthropologist defines a cul-
ture as a system of symbolic systems that do not converge harmoniously
with one another. Instead, these are compensated at the subjective level
by the irrational experience of wishes within ourselves that do not make
sense but whose function is precisely to conceal the incompatibility
between the different ways of making sense of the world (kinship,
myths, languages, etc.). This is not a contingent thesis for Lévi-Strauss
but one that orients his entire method, as the reader can verify by reading
‘The Story of Asdiwal’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1967), in which he shows that a
myth has no other function than to produce the illusion of compatibility
between different structures, making sense, as it were, of the different and
incompatible ways of making sense of our existence (see Maniglier,
2012). What’s more, this is also true in Ferdinand de Saussure’s
14 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

linguistics, at the very origin of structuralism: if structuralism comes

along with a generalization of the concept of the sign to account for
cultural phenomena, it is precisely because each structure is always at
least twice-structured. No system of signifieds is without a system of
signifiers that is not homologous with the former.
It is here that turning to Deleuze will prove decisive. For not only does
Deleuze have a positive conception of problems – grounded, as we will
see immediately, on a structuralist, Bachelardian, understanding – but he
clearly and constantly refers to this concept in order to account for the
essentially transdisciplinary nature of thought. In a discussion following
the publication of The Time-Image (1989 [1985]), he states:

It is not when one discipline begins to reflect on another that they

come into contact. Contact can be made only when one discipline
realizes that it has to resolve on its own terms and for its own needs
a problem similar to one another discipline is also confronted with.
We can imagine similar problems which, at different moments, in
different circumstances, and under different conditions, send shock
waves through various fields: painting, music, philosophy, litera-
ture, and cinema. The tremors are the same, but the fields are dif-
ferent. All criticism is comparative (and cinematic criticism is at its
worst when it limits itself to cinema as though it were a ghetto),
because every work in whatever field is already self-comparing.
Godard confronts painting in Passion and music in Prenom
Carmen. He makes a serial cinema, but he also makes a cinema of
catastrophe in a sense very close to the mathematical conception of
René Thom. Every work has its beginning or its consequence in
others arts. I was able to write on cinema not because I have
some right to reflect on it, but because certain philosophical prob-
lems pushed me to seek out solutions in cinema, even if this only
serves to raise more problems. All research, scholarly or creative,
participates in such a relay system. (Deleuze, 2007: 284–5)9

This text not only argues for a particular methodology in transdiscipli-

narity, one which would base itself on the identification of problems and
define problems as what different disciplines have in common. It also
concludes by arguing that all intellectual work is by essence transdisci-
plinary – not in the sense that it would evade all anchorage in any par-
ticular discipline, but in the sense that no disciplinary activity makes
sense unless it operates in a chain of relays, i.e. through its insertion in
works (or segments of work) pertaining to other disciplines.
I hold that this defense of the transdisciplinary character of problems
comes together with a profound reworking of structuralism. In spite of
the common reading of Deleuze as anti-structuralist – at least once
Maniglier 15

augmented, if I dare say, by Guattari – it must be emphasized that his

work must be rigorously characterized as post-structuralist. Interestingly
enough, the way one understands this move beyond structuralism will
also determine how one construes their conception of transdisciplinarity
(cf. Alliez, 2015). It is possible to read Deleuze’s entire work as an
attempt to provide a philosophical elaboration of what might be
called a structuralism of the diverging articulation of structures, which
comes with the interpretation of problems as moments of structuring
processes. Difference and Repetition argues at length: i) that thought is
an activity of problem-creation; ii) that the object of this creation – Ideas
or problematic objects – are nothing other than structures (this is the
argument of Chapter 4); and iii) that structures do not exist independ-
ently from one another, but communicate in the very dynamic by which
they diverge (that is the theory of the ‘discordant harmony’ of the facul-
ties in Chapter 3).
Deleuze argues that to think is not to conceptualize our experience (as
Kant would have it) or to map sense data onto concepts; we can only be
properly said to think when a faculty (sensibility, memory, thought, but
also language, sociability or life) is violently forced to encounter what is
proper to it, to its ‘transcendent object’ or Idea. This, we might say, is
Deleuze’s modernist bent: what is at stake in a medium is nothing other
than the very essence of this medium. However, the important point for
our purposes is that a faculty is not naturally oriented toward its Idea but
is converted to it by a violent process which always involves another fac-
ulty. For instance, sensibility communicates to memory the violence that
animates it, which communicates it to thought, etc. (1994: 139–40): each
faculty ‘receives from (and communicates to) the other only a violence
which brings it face to face with its own element, as though with its
disparate or its incomparable’ (1994: 141, translation modified).
Deleuze thus shows that there is nothing fatal in the opposition between
an immanent approach to disciplines, which is always at risk of secluding
each discipline within itself (as if painting was always only about paint-
ing, philosophy about philosophy, etc.), and a transcendent approach,
which risks reducing thought to a form of representation, as if the dif-
ferent disciplines were different views on the same thing, using different
sources of information to characterize it. The faculties do have something
in common, but it is not a third term: it is the very impetus that makes
them part of one another. This is the purpose of the very important
theory of ‘common sense’:

There is thus a point at which thinking, speaking, imagining, feel-

ing, etc., are one and the same thing, but that thing affirms only the
divergence of the faculties in their transcendent exercise. It is a
question, therefore, not of a common sense but, on the contrary,
of a ‘para-sense’ (in the sense that paradox is also the contrary of
16 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

good sense). The elements of this para-sense are Ideas, precisely

because Ideas are pure multiplicities which do not presuppose any
form of identity in a common sense but, on the contrary, animate
and describe the disjoint exercise of the faculties from a transcen-
dental point of view. (1994: 194)

An Idea is not only the proper object of a faculty that grants it its
autonomous dynamic. It is also that which articulates this faculty with
others in their very divergence.
It would be wrong to believe this to be characteristic only of the first
period of Deleuze’s work. The methodology of the encounter was sys-
tematically developed in the later works on cinema and painting in terms
clearly reminiscent of the theory of the faculties presented in Difference
and Repetition (cf. Zabunyan, 2007). This is clear in the excerpt of the
interview on cinema cited above, where Deleuze argues for transdiscipli-
narity on the grounds that Ideas must be defined as the ‘same shock
waves’ in different terrains, as he talked in Difference and Repetition of
the ‘same violence’.
There are, nonetheless, some important differences between Difference
and Repetition and the later works. First, whilst in 1968 Deleuze’s theory
of Ideas was deployed in the framework of a theory of faculties, he now
talks directly in terms of disciplines. This goes with the second remark:
along with the project of a theory of faculties, he seems to have com-
pletely renounced the idea of a linear order within the Ideas and the
faculties, from sensibility to thought. The encounter is now directly
between ‘disciplines’, which meet one another through completely decen-
tralized, unpredictable, non-linear, transversal problems. There is there-
fore no need for one Idea to cross the entire chain of faculties, one after
the other. The encounter can be construed as a much more local and
decentralized process, as between Godard and Thom or Bresson and
Riemann. Thought is no longer a matter of transcendental activity, but
immediately distributed within the cultural fields in which we live and
come to exist.
It should now be clear how this version of structuralism gives a deep
philosophical foundation to transdisciplinarity in its account of the
essentially problematic nature of thought. It maintains that to think is
to problematize and that to problematize is to intensify a movement of
structuration of oneself. But it also posits that each authentic problem
requires the construction of at least two structuring processes. In fact, the
problem is nothing other than the difference between these structures.
The problem cannot be formulated in a third medium, by some ‘common
sense’ – to use Deleuze’s term; its identity and its nature can only be
perceived by the very way the disciplines can be articulated with one
another in their divergence. To have a problem is to have two – or at
least to be caught in two dynamics of structuration. Problems, therefore,
Maniglier 17

are intrinsically equivocal objects, which are always two-pronged. This is

why Deleuze can say that Kurosawa and Dostoyevsky, or Godard and
Thom, have ‘similar problems’, even though these problems exist
nowhere other than in the films that Kurosawa made and the mathem-
atical objects that Thom created. However, if one wants to understand
what Godard does, one must compare his work to that of Thom, and vice
versa. This is what the idea that ‘all criticism is comparative’ means. The
notion of ‘criticism’ should not be restricted to the arts. In the same way
that film criticism is bad when it locks cinema within itself, we can only
understand what a mathematical theory is about by comparing it to
something altogether different from mathematics. Thom’s problem can
be better formulated as a problem when it is seen as similar to Godard’s.
Mathematicians are certainly right to want to resist wild external inter-
pretations of what they do, insofar as they want to produce mathematical
theorems. They would lose the very sense of what they are doing, how-
ever, if they refused in principle all attempts to compare their creations to
an artistic one (for instance) as being both about the same problem.
Of course, to compare, here, cannot mean to identify a kernel of fea-
tures recurrent in both disciplines. To compare is to identify the very
dynamic of divergence between the two domains. The Brazilian anthro-
pologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2009) has recently offered an
account of the comparative method that can be of great help here.
To compare consists in experiencing, within one’s system of categories,
a variation of the very type that functions as the heading that makes the
comparison possible. For instance, practicing comparative kinship
anthropology is not trying to classify kinship systems within types; it is
trying to relativize our own notion of kinship as it expresses itself in the
grid of categories and types, so that it appears as a variant of other
notions and systems (see also Maniglier, 2016). Similarly, problems
must be conceived as the loci within a particular discipline where this
discipline experiences the existence of a radically different version of
itself: when mathematicians realize that filmmakers do what they them-
selves do too, though in a radically untranslatable way, they experience
what makes them work, the very problem that they try to address – and
there is no other way they can encounter this problem.
In the same way as the comparative notions in anthropology (e.g.
kinship, exchange or power) are also clear cases of misunderstandings,
transdisciplinary problems are necessarily misunderstood, since what
mathematicians for instance understand by a ‘local’ space is not what
we find in Bresson. But this misunderstanding is not a failure of com-
munication but, on the contrary, the very condition of a relation to
alterity, that which ensures that we can pass from one to the other
and, in this very passage, understand what is at stake for each of them.
It is thus clear why transdisciplinarity cannot come at the expense of a
strong disciplinary embeddedness: it is from within each discipline that
18 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

this radical variation makes sense, precisely in the same way that trans-
culturality only makes sense from within a particular ‘culture’ and as ‘an
experiment on one’s culture’ (Wagner, 1981: 12). It appears that prob-
lems are not given outside, in the real world, but in between, in the
morphisms by which a discipline or, more generally, a particular way
of thinking, experiences the possibility of its identity with a completely
heterogeneous way of thinking, without this identity being realized
elsewhere than in the dynamic of their divergence. Such would thus be
the foundation that transdisciplinarity might find in the concept of prob-
lem. This ‘Deleuzian’ take on the matter has significant consequences for
transdisciplinary studies, which can be summarized as follows: practicing
transdisciplinarity does not consist in an attempt to take seriously a
certain number of real-life issues, it rather points to the introduction of
comparative methods across the disciplines.

Conclusion
By exploring the case of an odd encounter, around the concept of the
problem, between the emergence of ‘transdisciplinary studies’ and
the French epistemological tradition, in this article I have shown how
Deleuze’s work can be read from the outside, and in what sense it pro-
vides a strong philosophical foundation for the idea that thought should
be transdisciplinary – because it is essentially about problems, not about
objects. It is thus clear that problems must not be conceived as negative
and external facts that we bump into in ‘real life’ but as conceptual
localities in which disciplines experience within themselves that each of
them is just one way of constituting a structured conceptual space which
could be structured differently (as another discipline), even if this differ-
ence is incommensurable. It is clear then that disciplines are necessitated
from outside (i.e. that problems are not internal constructs but on the
contrary semiotic limits) although, as Deleuze constantly emphasized,
this outside is not an external reality.
More work, of course, would be needed to show how this could help in
reworking our approach to typical transdisciplinary issues such as cli-
mate warming or global poverty. It might also be useful to contrast this
reading of Deleuze’s post-structuralism with other, more Guattari-based,
understandings of its bearing on transdisciplinarity (see Alliez, 2015;
Guattari, 2015). But all this would exceed the scope of this essay.
Let me rather conclude with a remark that will show how this reflection
on transdisciplinarity helps to shed light on some central aspects of
Deleuze’s philosophy. The philosophical tradition of the 20th century
has given a particularly dark response to the idea that thought must be
necessitated from outside, when it is not about representing any already
given external reality: what makes us think would be nothing other than
our own finitude, the very nothingness that ‘surrounds’ us and from
Maniglier 19

where we emerge. Problems and questions would not express any object-
ive incompleteness in our knowledge or life but rather the relation we
have to the fact that there is nothing beyond this very finitude. This is
for instance what Heidegger and Lacan both argued in different ways.
The significance of Deleuze for us consists in having opened up a third
way: what he calls the Outside is neither external reality nor the pure
nothingness out of which we pop ‘into the world’ – it is the very variation
of the different ways of thinking and living. This, ultimately, is one
of the most important ideas one should retain from the ‘philosophy of
difference’: the fact that we could think differently is precisely what
makes us think.

ORCID iD
Patrice Maniglier https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7210-4760

Notes
1. The literature on problem-solving is immense but agrees on the definition of
problems as tasks. See for instance: ‘In each case ‘‘where you want to be’’ is
an imagined (or written) state in which you would like to be. In other words,
a distinguished feature of a problem is that there is a goal to be reached and
how you get there is not immediately obvious’ (Robertson, 2001: 2).
2. An interesting case is William James, who seems to hesitate between a
negative conception of problems as gaps and a positive conception of
problems as superpositions between at least two incompatible views, i.e. as
equivocations of some sort – not lacks but excesses (see in this issue
Savransky, 2019).
3. This includes Ernst Mach’s (1976: 185) definition of problems: ‘Problems
arise when thought and fact, or thought and thought, no longer agree.’
4. Marres’s (2005) concept of ‘issue’, in the context of the social study of con-
troversies, is one of the few to insist on the idea that problems only exist when
the matter of concern gets displaced, recruiting in the process new, heteroge-
neous stakeholders.
5. It can be found virtually everywhere: in his books on Nietzsche, Bergson,
Proust, but also in Difference and Repetition (particularly Chs 3 and 4), Logic
of Sense (series 9), A Thousand Plateaus (Plateau 12) – there are very few
important books by Deleuze where the importance of the category of prob-
lem is not emphasized.
6. It seems to have been actually invented by a young philosopher named
Jacques Martin, who was a very close friend of Louis Althusser at the
Ecole Normale Supérieure, both writing their MA dissertation on Hegel
under the supervision of Gaston Bachelard. Martin’s memoir is in the process
of being at last edited and published (see Martin, 1947).
7. This structure is not purely conceptual. It is also materialized in the experi-
mental apparatuses, which are famously, for Bachelard, ‘theories materia-
lized’. This view is therefore in no way opposed to the turn to practice that
has characterized science studies since the 1980s, with its emphasis on experi-
mental systems, epistemic cultures and forms of laboratory lives.
20 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

8. It is thus clear that the opposition between pragmatism and structuralism is

based on rather poor understandings of both currents.
9. See also the important lecture ‘What is the Creative Act?’, particularly the
comparison between Kurosawa and Dostoyevsky on ‘a shared problem’
(Deleuze, 2007: 317).

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Patrice Maniglier is Maı̂tre de Conférences at the Philosophy

Department of Paris Nanterre University. A former student at the
Ecole Normale Supérieure, he was a Lecturer at the University of
Essex before joining Nanterre. He has written on Saussure, Lévi-
Strauss, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou
and Latour. He is the author of La Vie e´nigmatique des signes:
Saussure et la naissance du structuralisme (2006), La Perspective du
Diable, figurations de l’espace et philosophie, de la Renaissance à
Rosemary’s Baby (2010) and Foucault va au cine´ma (2011).

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special issue on
‘Problematizing the Problematic’, edited by Martin Savransky.