The Poverty of Theory - Discussion (on behalf of deRaismes Combes)

deRaismes: Even after reading these articles/chapters, not to mention last week's book and others besides, I STILL DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT (exactly) THEORY IS. What. The. Heck??!!!

Bleiker: Don’t drink the cool-aid, deRaismes.

Guilhot: Easy for you to say. You’re coming decades after the first debates took place over what IR theory should be. The post-war struggle between liberal historians/legal scholars, the political science rationalists/behavioralists (all with a big case of invidia homo economicus scientificus), and finally the realists searching for a way to understand the complexities, contingencies, and irrationalities of the world laid the groundwork for future work like the stuff you’re doing…

Zalewski: OK, but reading your history is sort of akin to being lulled into an Enlightenment-induced stupor (less Kant, more Descartes) that Toulmin and Inayatullah/Blaney have already called attention to. This early 'battle' for determining the scope and direction of IR still held several assumptions about the world and how it works that we have since seen problematized, particularly in critical theory and constructivism. For instance –

Guilhot: Oiy, Marysia! Take a chill pill. Mine was an unearthing of an alternative historical narrative of realism, not a treatise on all the ways realist theory sucks. I know you’re going to start talking about those three ideal typical definitions of theory you like so much –

Zalewski: Yes, theory as tool, as critique, and as everyday practice.

deRaismes: Like any competent semi-tech-literate human, I googled ‘political theory’ to get a baseline for this discussion, and the first thing that popped up was this definition from Princeton: "Political theory is the study of the concepts and principles that people use to describe, explain, and evaluate political events and institutions." Wow. Not satisfying. Don't people remember from elementary school that the word being defined should never appear (in any of its forms) in the definition??!

Also, Marysia, you seemed far more critical of the first (theory as tool) than you were about the other two. But I think each assumes a certain moral high-ground: the first – as you say – distinguishes between theory, theorists, and the real world and ascribes a value judgment on these distinctions even while it hides behind a façade of rational valuelessness; But the second seems to imply that critical theory is morally superior to other theories since it unveils inequalities promoted by the existing system; and the last collapses the distinction between the real-worlders-as-actors and theorists-as-observers, implying that an Enlightenment-influenced conception of theory/theorists as mind/world dualists is morally inferior to being a monist. 

Zalewski: Your point?

Bleiker: The point is that a critique of orthodox IR practices and theories is not enough because it still exists within the confines of that orthodoxy. Instead, you should argue like I do that a genealogical critique of orthodoxy can be supplemented with a process of forgetting that very doctrine – leaving us able to theorize world politics without being constrained by the agendas, issues and terms preset by traditional IR – in any of the varieties you or Nicolas mention (58).

deRaismes: I agree with Roland, but it seems that one can never totally escape having a foot within that orthodoxy. Otherwise, wouldn’t it be like Wittgenstein’s private language?

In any event, I'm still struggling with why I should care about being able to specify what theory is... after all, isn’t it enough that I use it in my own work? Haven't I already delimited certain topics as 'theory'? And doesn't this simply mean that they serve me as a framework with which I examine and attempt to make sense out of some thing or event or behavior I see going on around me? 

Guilhot: That reminds me of a definition of theory I once read by Michael Oakeshott. Perhaps it will help you: “‘Theorizing’, then, is being represented here as a continuous, unconditional activity of trying to understand. It begins with an occurrence which is both understood and waiting to be understood. It is making more sense out of what already has some sense. And its principle is: ‘Never ask the end’. It will go on until the occurrence becomes transparent, until the last vestige of mystery has been dispelled, until the theoros runs out of questions.”

deRaismes: But how can any occurrence become truly transparent? That seems impossible. … And don’t start talking to me about Habermas…

Bleiker: But conscious forgetting opens up possibilities for a dialogical understanding of our present and past (59).

deRaismes: What does that even MEAN??

Bleiker: language frames politics. Form turns into substance (60). Our quest is to find out where the ideas and underlying principles that influence our life emanated from, and then reveal how the dilemmas of contemporary world politics are not actually immutable, but part of a historically constructed system of exclusion (61).

deRaismes: Wow, talk about drinking the cool-aid. At least the post-modern mix.

Guilhot: But he’s right.

Bleiker: Of course I’m right. Or even write. Ha, ha, see what I did there? But seriously, academic disciplines are powerful mechanisms to direct and control the production and diffusion of discourses (63). Perfect example being KKV.

Zalewski, Guilhot, Bleiker, deRaismes: [collective shudder]

Guilhot: The contemporary doorkeeper of IR!

Zaleswski: Let’s not forgot the ‘lovely’ discussions we’ve had at ISA conferences, too, with our more positivist-oriented friends… Or the oh-so-helpful comments from our policy brethren about hiding in our ivory towers and ignoring all the dead bodies below us. As if ‘bodies’ only represent the physical here-and-now, and IR theory is just the psychic inner-workings of academic minds who are somehow dis-embodied! Pshaw!

deRaismes: I guess it does seem as if we ‘do’ theory to ‘act on’ the physical world. Are you saying that you can’t separate theory from the ‘real world’ or the mind from the body? And getting back to my other question: why does this matter? Seriously, so what if one person sees the world as a realist, and another sees it as a feminist? Shouldn’t this add to our collective [theoretical] body of knowledge? Really, I truly don’t know the answer… I feel like I should care that most IR scholars – at least in the US – think Foucauldian discourse/post-structuralism is a waste of time…. And yet I don’t. Frankly, it’s their loss-

Bleiker: Until you want to get tenure.

Zalewski: You should care because the narrow focus of IR scholars on what is appropriate theory or application of theory propagates a very small boundary of what is considered acceptable IR work-

Bleiker: Think of it this way: A statement has to be ‘within the true’ before one can even start to judge whether it is true or false, legitimate or illegitimate (64). This means that things like your little dialogue here are not even considered proper IR because they are not immediately ‘within the true.’

Zalewski: Instead, we need to rethink the discipline in ways that will disturb the existing boundaries of both what we claim to be relevant in international politics and what we assume to be legitimate ways of constructing knowledge about the world (352).

deRaismes: That sounds a lot like Inayatullah & Blaney’s book. Sigh. I agree that pushing the accepted boundaries of ‘normal’ is a good thing. Hence this conversation and not a traditional response to the readings ([aside to audience] and you should all be grateful I elected to go this route versus haiku, by the way). And, like you say Roland, I certainly believe in investigating “why certain language games become dominant, how they have framed our political realities, and how alternative forms of thinking and speaking may reframe these realities” (68) or have been excluded altogether from what is considered ‘possible’. But I’m not comfortable with the implicit value judgments going on here. Why is one form of theory or theorizing better than another? Why is critical theory ‘better’ than realism? Isn’t someone, or group, or category always being excluded somewhere, even in emancipatory frameworks?

Zalewski: Perhaps. But engaging in theory as everyday practice – similar to theory as critique but very different from theory as just tool – implies that one theorizes as a way of life – that we all do it, all the time. This means that the theorizing that matters in terms of affecting and/or creating international political events is not limited to academics or policy-makers but could include small groups, individuals, etc. and that all of these are also global actors. Moreover, if theorizing is a way of life, then a lot more activities than ‘strictly’ political ones may be relevant as topics of study…

Bleiker: You must disenchant a topic or concept by refusing to define it monologically – concepts should achieve meaning only gradually, in relation to each other (71). And most importantly, you cannot eliminate the contradictory, the fragmentary, and the discontinuous. Contradictions are only contradictions if one assumes the existence of a prior universal standard of reference. What is different appears as divergent, dissonant, and negative only as long as our consciousness strives for a totalizing standpoint, which we must avoid if we are to escape the reifying and excluding dangers of identity thinking” (71).

deRaismes: My head hurts… dangers of identity thinking?... No idea…

Guilhot: Yeah, but if you follow Bleiker here and embrace linguistic contradictions be prepared to fail in your attempts to make a difference. It didn’t work out so well for Morgenthau now, did it?

deRaismes: Though we still talk about him. He might not have changed the field, but he left an imprint on it. And even if many misunderstand his motives or what he was trying to do, it is out there to be seen and read. After all, can’t this go both ways? Can’t past theory – like Roland’s poetry – fulfill the task of a critical memory by assuring “a presence beyond death and beyond the current, historically delineated moment” (Bleiker, 76)?

Bleiker: Like I always say: Practice IR as follows: Forget. Listen. Feel. For(to)get a new angle on IR (76).

Finis.