Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Beyond the 2x2?

At first I thought this book should have come before Ling’s. It seems clear that Ling was influenced by this work—it might have made sense to read this first. As I think on it more and more, I’m glad we didn’t. Having Alker’s analyses fresh in our minds we might have failed to allow ourselves the opportunity to fully inhabit the worlds Ling created for us.

 

One key point of discussion last week had to do with Ling’s choice to place us in a hierarchical, socially stratified world of kings, nobles, and peasant farmers. We struggled to understand why a story meant to help us imagine alternative possibilities would take this form. I appreciate Alker’s explanation that “story grammars” of this kind likely have greater resonance as a result of their seemingly timeless simplicity (287). After all, collective change can only take place if everyone understands the story. We might even argue that collective change can only take place if everyone participates in constructing the story. As Alker points out, folktales are traditionally collectively owned (he discusses Soviet efforts to reconstruct and preserve peasant folktales after the revolution). Folktales/ fairytales tell of the “hopes and longings of a people,” and in this way they fulfill “the role of a social utopia” (287). So even though we were in a world of kings and nobles, everyone participated in the creation of knowledge/ culture on equal footing—thus no one was subject to false consciousness.

 

As Ling reminded us in our discussion, knowledge must be kept separate from power otherwise knowledge becomes an instrument of power (is it possible to separate knowledge from power in capitalism?). Though this is not an explicit focus of Alker’s, he does devote some consideration to this topic in his discussion of Orwellian Laswell’s distrust of intellectuals—particularly in their affiliations with the state and other oppressive social institutions (even to understand the word doublethink involves the use of doublethink). This reminds me of Sandra Harding’s call for the democratization of science. Alker also identifies Marx’s “communal historicity,” as an early vision of “a new era of unalienated, unsuperstitious, unblocked collective action and shared self-understanding” (224). Uncoerced Habermasian dialogue is a kind of continuation of this line of ‘emancipatory’ thinking. It remains unclear, however, how, exactly, we go about achieving this kind of a democratization of discourse. Though Alker clearly demonstrates connections between folktales and ‘high theory,’ it’s almost as if he simply assumes that scholarly debates have some kind of bearing on the ‘real world’—Habermasian dialogue is a great idea, but why should we have any faith that it will actually happen? To give another example, Alker has “no doubt” that “studies of exceptional successes and failures at conflict management or conflict resolution by the UN conflict management system will shed new light on possibilities for, and conditions of, significant improvements in that system” (349). This is a bold statement in my view. Whose studies? And why will they yield improvements as opposed to say disastrous misunderstandings and ill-informed, self-serving policy-making?

 

In some ways Alker’s ancient connection between humanistic understanding/ interpretation and scientific explanation constitutes a call for pluralism—broadening and widening a la PTJ and, of course, Weber. Though, for Alker, it is essential that we recognize that all knowledge creation is story-telling (though based on truths publically identified as such). Any “adequate discussion of the truthfulness of ‘scientific’ theories must address the interpretive and fairytale-like character of their originating traditions and current practices” (304). “Even mathematical economists tell stories. And in doing so, they join themselves with the rest of the human race which has, since before recorded history began, made sense of their lives in such terms” (303). Alker demonstrates that this tension is, and always has been, the crux of International Relations/ World Politics. He sees the understanding vs. explanation debate as a false dichotomy (and he believes current debates attempt to “transcend” this distinction).

 

Alker’s (re)formulations are postmodern in that they refuse to find their bearings in the Enlightenment project’s traditions, choosing instead a historically self-aware textual (narrative) approach—which Alker shows is much older. Social science’s connections with humanism spiral in and out toward unity and distinction over time. Modernity’s behavioral sciences often forget this because they fail to reflect upon their own historicity. Alker wishes to remind us of the emancipatory potential of appeals to human emotion too often left out of modernity’s equation (narrative story-telling can have this effect). Alker makes a compelling case but I can’t help but wonder: Is this kind of thinking about science and humanistic methodology antithetical to PTJ’s 2x2? Though an ideal-typical heuristic, doesn’t the 2x2 presuppose a certain insurmountable distinction between understanding and explanation—again, a kind of false dichotomy for Alker who rejects Hollis and Smith’s own somewhat similar 2x2 on p. 417?

It's interesting how Alker circles back around to "the return of practical reason" much like how Onuf circles back around to rational choice. So many connections between the various texts in this course my head is spinning.

Sihar & Shenya: a fable for our times

I think I am probably not alone in finding Sihar & Shenya unlike anything I have ever read in IRT classes. Although we do find excerpts of things like Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War in many manuals (as we can see described in the Epilogue/Introduction) they are normally brief and used to illustrate a point of some particular theory. So the task of writing this discussion post was a difficult one: how does one go about critiquing a fable? The usual "avenues of attack" (methodology, concepts, and so on and so forth) are not readily available. 

My main question, than, would be this: Is Ling's work theory? And, perhaps more importantly, does it want to be? As the author itself argues, Sihar & Shenya is not "filtered through what we call "the West", "modernity", "realism" and "science" (xviii). Although it is unarguably a very interesting teaching/learning tool, what does it leave us beyond that? It seems four of the five elements in book II (wealth, power, security and knowledge) could - if we wanted to that - be easily translated to the "normal language" of IR. But what about Love? How does it come in a conversation about world politics?

My second question is about the "feminist" aspect of the book. It describes itself as a "non-western feminist perspective on world politics and international relations" (back cover). Yet its idea of feminist seem to differ from other readings we have had. It seems to accept  a more "traditional" view of the feminine/masculine, even as it argues against this dichotomy. This appear in some instances of the fable, such as when the women, becoming entrusted with control of the household accounts, are shown to be more compassionate and fair than the men (p. 14). 

Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations

        Rather than taking the body as an apolitical body as often seen in IR, Wilcox argues that "we can theorize the body as an effect of practices of IR" and that the body is not only acted upon by violence but is "constituted in and through violence" (p. 6.). Her key arguements are that bodies are not just key to understanding the practices of violence, but that bodies are political and constituted in relation to "historical political conditions" (p.3). Bodies also act upon the world. She critically places her views in contrast to both IR realist assumptions about sovereigns protecting bodies and liberal assumptions about human rights as freedom from bodily violence and populated by rational and autonomous individuals sovereign over their own bodies. She also contrasts her views with a Wendtian constructivism that places the body as a "brute fact" in a mind-world dualist position that serves as an analogy for the state as an individual body. (Although she does not engage with Onuf, I am curious how she finds his use of the three bodily senses in his elaborate system of three's, even though they seem to share a similar mind-world monist position.).

       To support her view that bodies are produced by and productive of political relations, she explores four key cases: torture, hunger-strikes, and force feeding in Guantanamo Bay, Suicide Bombings, Airport Security and "bodies of information," and drone warfare and other forms of technologically enhanced invulnerable bodies targeting weak human bodies. I am curious how we might describe her methods in this book, whether as discourse analysis, theoretical reading of current events, or something else? Clearly represented in her book are deep engagements with the works of Judith Butler and Foucault, including disagreements she notes, as well as a clear affinity with critical theory. It would be helpful for me for us to explicitly specify this a bit more, especially as it relates to her findings.

Her rethought notions help her reconsider the neoliberal discourse of "Responsibility to Protect." She re conceptualizes this important doctrine to a view that as bodies, "we are mutually entangled with each other such that we cannot seperate" and "our bodies themselves do not precede social entanglements, and thus we cannot consider an ethics of violence differently from existing frameworks that separate bodily existence from power" (p.189). This page of the text outlining a clear ethic has interesting echoes of our book on "IR and the Problem of Difference," our discussion of Ubuntu as either an ontology or ethic, and the IR constitution of less than human explored in White World Order: Black Power politics - connections that might be useful for us to explore together. It is interesting to notice how interwoven an ethical sensibility is throughout the whole book, and I suspect the "empirical" chapters would make little sense without that ethnic sensibility.

     Before tackling that larger question however, we might want to unpack some key terms:
1. Biopower as contrasted with Sovereign Power (pages 17 and 52 for example - tied to Foucault)
2. Ontology of vulnerability (pages 15, 167, tied to Butler)
3. "bare life" homo sacer, homines sacri (p. 23, and 42 - Ziarek)
4. her frequent uses of the words "constituted," "embodied/disembodied," "embodied subject", "feminized category." (i.e. "the male body of the soldier has been feminized, p.40, force-feeding as a gendering form of violence with "trapped bare life" as feminized category p.75).
   Her explanation of body also might be useful to comment on: "bodies must be understood as both material and cultural, both produced by practices of International Relations and productive themselves. Bodies are thus not fixed entities, but always unstable and in the process of becoming. They are ontologically precarious, existing only in virture of certain material/political conditions that allow them to be intelligible to others."

 (On a final selfish note I was happy to note that her four chapters fell nicely along the four categories I recently proposed for researching eventually in my dissertation, specifically traditional violent conflict (Ch 5 on body counts), suicide protest (Ch 2. on hunger strikers), suicide bombers (Ch 3), and nonviolent action (Ch 4. on the fleshmob nonviolent disrobing in protest of body scanners). Although I conceive of these four as a two-by-two table separated by harming self/not harming self, and harming other, not harming other, I wonder if she would strongly object based on her ideas of mutual entanglement between self and other as well as not being able to understand the bodily self outside of a historically situated political moment. Help me fix my eventual dissertation prospectus and lets discuss this friends.
-Brandon