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.