Wednesday, March 23, 2011

The Logic of Anxiety, or, the Anxiety of Logic, Pt. I

After a much welcomed change of pace this semester, I return to this neglected blog with some thoughts on the recently concluded annual ISA conference in Montréal. By far the most active ISA on my part, the conference was ridiculously huge, with over 5,000 people in attendance, over 1,000 panels, spread across 3 hotels, in the span of four full (8AM to 6PM) days. While it would be interesting to look at this year's ISA as yet another excellent example of how academia participates in the global economy, there is always much more to learn from these exercises for young scholars: engaging with senior scholars; witnessing the complex development of panels, papers, projects, and even counter-projects; and especially the opportunity to provide your own feedback to fellow colleagues are all maturing experiences. In spite of how fun, exciting, and tiring these brief yearly respites are, however, I walked away from the conference with the brooding feeling that - despite the many lively things that did occur, the passionate sermons and diatribes against 'turns,' 'isms,' and 'academic power structures', and most importantly, the re-invigorating encounters with old friends and new ones - IR may be dead...

Let me qualify: the rise of zombies and zombie-panels notwithstanding (look it up here, podcast here), many scholars seem to have temporarily checked out on critically addressing the precarious craft we are a part of. There is no dearth of papers, panels, and conversations addressing the public and vocational responsibilities of IR as a philosophical and social science; nevertheless, while we keep about talking about these responsibilities, I see very little responsibility-generating work. I am of course being purposefully provocative. Though I am very aware of how tiring the self-referential (and some say self-important) debates on meta-theory have been for many, it should not strike any young scholar as dismissive to suggest here that most of our conversations ultimately take place between our colleagues and students rather than with actual policy-makers. This being said, IR is exactly the type of human science (Geisteswissenschaft) that can only move forward by negotiating/carrying forth the relation to its past - again, the undead notwithstanding.

Consider, for example, philosopher Bernard Stiegler's insights on the spatialization of language and how this space makes it possible to study history analytically (see: Technics and Time), or perhaps more relevantly, David Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah's latest volume, Savage Economics: Wealth, Poverty, and the Temporal Walls of Capitalism, where they highlight the centrality of looking to the past "so that we may heal ourselves in the present" (6). If we want to talk about the responsibility and reflexivity in the discipline, we - as IR scholars/scientists/philosophers or whatever we'd like to become - have done a poor job of looking at the way power itself has inflected our ranks and arguments, become both of our object of inquiry as well as foundational myth. It often feels as if we have already gotten so close to the trees we no longer see the forest. Thus while Patrick Jackson makes the claim that "any particular attempt to formalize what [the articulations of human explanation] share is, necessarily, ideal-typical," these are also, as Merleau-Ponty says, "fixed guideposts for determining the difference between what we think and what has been and for making evident what has been left out by any interpretation" (Adventures of the Dialectic, 10). It may be the case, as Jackson suggesta, that the battles and negotiations over theory and the type of world we claim to engage exist only "in an abstract logical space and not (ever!) in the actual concrete world of scholarship and research." I'm not quite sure, however, we can differentiate abstract logical space from the existential space in which scholarship, research, mentoring, and the development of the discipline itself takes place.

I'll cite one example from the conference: part two of "The Third Generation of Constructivist Thought" panels organized by Oliver Kessler and featuring the likes of Benjamin Herborth, Jackson, Badredine Arfi, Brent Steele, François Debrix and (apologies if I forget to mention the other presenters) a fired-up and idol-hammering David McCourt. In this panel, shots were fired across the bow in both presentations and discussion: there were laments regarding constructivist thinkers turn away from their 'classical roots', sobering claims that scholars should be careful to think of constructivism as ever having some kind of established core and not always already a project to replace a decaying neo-realism, and finally, a much-needed and bitter-sweet recognition that much of today's scholarship takes place less for its own sake than for the reality of a decimated higher education job market. The discussion that ensued was more telling: there were calls for Rawlsian pluralism/tolerance, rebukes against conspiracy-theories by newly anointed journal editors, and yes, even ad hominen attacks (scroll down for the story) on new and rising stars in the field. Readers will forgive my dancing around the specifics...

Suffice it to say here that though one could read the panel as merely a display of egos, there was much more at stake lying beneath it and indeed very little, in terms of 'lessons' a young scholar could graps from the rants, sermons, accusations, and counter-claims (these words were used at panel itself, so I am not colorfully exagerrating). Perhaps it helped that I knew many of the figures personally or anecdotally - making the antinomies a little more human, all too human - but the bitterness on display here was by no means resolved. There was no 'kiss and make-up' handshaking at the panel's closing, no collegial 'see you at the next one' or 'let's write a forum about it!!" Perhaps there shouldn't have been. What there was, however, was a sense of exasperation: that at some point we stopped listening and were just talking at each other. It is from this exasperation that one perhaps could tease out a certain 'logic of anxiety' in some of the work on display in Montréal this past week...

My point for now is not to keep harping about how we should do more of 'x', 'y', 'z' because of (insert your favorite term of irreverence here); rather, I want to repeat something that was suggested to me at last year's ISA towards the end of Daniel Jacobi's and I panel on 'Phenomenological Reflections and International Relations': "You should be careful not to speak only about the method that your paper is using, and instead concentrate on bringing the work. Show us what your method produces." Those words continue to ring in my head as I negotiate between a phenomenology of science in IR and the lived-experiences and effects of that science on inter-American relations. Regardless of this personal tension, however, just as Morgenthau had called for a demonology of foreign policy making and, indeed, a pathology of international identities, I wonder whether we have reached the point in our discipline of needing to inaugurate a similar demonology? Has IR, in spite of its very pluralization, developed a pathology of neglecting its own future? Have we taken for granted our status as an international and political community over what it means to be a science? Some may read these two terms as mutually implicated, but (perhaps, naïvely) community seems to retain some sense of primacy.

The discussions that have been generated the last few years over the status of IR as a science/discipline/practice are fascinating, but they also seem to point to a re-emerging anxiety in doing IR that had been eclipsed after the rise of the Neo-Liberal project. In many ways, feminists picked up on this anxiety right from the beginning, but (no surprise there) their insights have for too long been marginalized from the 'core' of the IR imperium (whether we take it to be the ISQ-IO nexus on one side, or the Millennium-International Theory front on the other). While these are all monumental journals, I don't quite buy the optimism behind either of their ideal-type narratives, particularly since interpretive approaches (especially Weber's) have long shown that ideal-types always risk imposing their own logic of composition on the studied 'reality'. The point is not to pick one side or the other (cue the phenomenological cop-out), but rather returning to the sociology of both the international (of the world, as well as our discipline) as a source of our inspiration and the site of our knowledge and wisdom-generating endeavors. That sociology takes place everyday - the classroom, the office, the journals - but especially in our most anticipated moments of self-celebration...

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