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the “noise” we filter out become something to which we decide to pay attention? How do things
previous thought incontestable suddenly become open to doubt, to debate, to criticism? In other
words, how do ideas and events get reframed as “problems”?
Michel Foucault, too, is interested in this reframing process. “Problematization” is his
term for it. In his later writings, Foucault uses the term, problematization, in two ways. First, he
uses it to describe what he wants to study: How, he wonders, have certain ideas, practices,
attitudes, and institutions been framed as “problems” historically? What conditions led to these
particular problematic formations and what were the various responses given in reply to the way
the problem was posed? In the introduction to The Use of Pleasure, Foucault argues that an
examination of these problematizations are the proper job of what he calls the “history of
thought”: “to define the conditions in which human beings ‘problematize’ what they are, what
they do, and the world in which they live.”
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On the next page he adds:
It was a matter of analyzing, not behaviors or ideas, not societies and their
“ideologies,” but the problematizations through which being offers itself to be
necessarily thought – and the practices on the basis of which these
problematizations are formed…. There was the problematization of madness and
mental illness arising out of social and medical practices and defining a certain
pattern of “normalization”; a problematization of life, language, and labor in
discursive practices that conformed to certain “epistemic” rules; and a
problematization of crime and criminal behavior emerging from punitive practices
conforming to a “disciplinary” model. And now I would like to show how, in
classical antiquity, sexual activity and sexual pleasures were problematized
through practices of the self, bringing into play the criteria of an “aesthetics of
existence.”
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True to his word, Foucault goes on to categorize and analyze different ways sexual behavior was
framed as a problem in antiquity. However, this is not the only way Foucault refers to
problematizations. Problematizations are not only the object of Foucault’s investigations; they
can also be an effect of such investigations.
Thus, the second way the term, problematization¸ functions for Foucault refers, not only
Convention