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Panday "[created] labour and political history and [became] one of Trinidad and Tobago's most compelling post-independence figures."

Claudia Goldin has been awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023 “"for having advanced our understanding of women's labour market outcomes." Goldin does economic history, but as a different economic historian once said to me: “History starts yesterday.” In a similar spirit, Goldin’s work (with a primarily US focus) … Continue reading Claudia Goldin: A Nobel for the Study of Women’s Labor Market Outcomes
The post Claudia Goldin: A Nobel for the Study of Women's Labor Market Outcomes first appeared on Conversable Economist.

The beginning of the new school year in many countries of the former Soviet Union, including in Russia, is celebrated on September 1st and is known as "Knowledge Day". This year, September 1st will be unique as the new educational amendments enter into force in Russia and Russia-controlled territories. These amendments introduce controversial changes to the educational process, which raise serious concerns about children's rights and freedoms. These changes include new unified textbooks on history, the legalisation of children's forced labour, and the continuation of "Conversations about the important" lessons with an enhanced militaristic element.

This episode is the second in our Brexit series, and we are joined by Lucian Ashworth, Professor of International Relations at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and author of the influential text 'A History of International Thought' (Routledge, 2014).

Back before Christmas, in Episode 14, we heard Lee Jones offer what was perhaps not exactly a 'Lexit' (or 'left exit') position on Brexit, but nevertheless a progressive position very much in favor of a full Brexit. At the core of Jones's arguments was, I think, the view that the EU is an essentially anti-democratic and unreformable project. The only way to address the problem, he claimed, was to restore British sovereignty. In this sense, Jones was critical not only of the deal Theresa May proposed, last December, but also the position of the Labour Party, with its now infamous six tests — that is, essentially, the idea that whatever deal the UK should pursue, it should be one that results in the "exact same benefits" as as those currently enjoyed by the UK, as a member of the Single Market, but with special additional provisions, including "fair management of migration."

Since we spoke to Jones, there have been a number of important developments, but little by way of clarity as to how the drama will end. On January 15, in the greatest parliamentary defeat of any PM in British history, the British Parliament rejected Theresa May's deal. Since then, following the terms of the so-called Brady amendment, passed on January 29, she returned to Brussels in order to try to negotiate "alternative arrangements." She plans now to present her new deal to Parliament on March 12, just two weeks before the deadline March 29. This is very close to the wire, but May hopes to be able to get the EU to budge on the backstop — something she must do, if she is to persuade Tory Eurosceptics to support her plan.

In this episode, you will hear Ashworth engage with a number of Jones's key points, including the 'WTO rules' issue, the importance of not overstating the power of the Far Right in Europe, and the history of reactionary politics, on the British left. But Ashworth's core arguments stem from his concerns about the future of the Irish border, and the unacknowledged costs of a return to the fantasy of 'the sovereign people' — especially in an era where complex global flows of capital have made it harder and harder for the Left to leverage the state, as it pursues its mission of defending labour and democracy, from the interests of the global financial elite.

Importantly, this episode with Lucian Ashworth was recorded on February 16. Due to technical issues, it wasn't ready for broadcast until today, February 28. This delay does not significantly effect the value of the interview, since our discussion focused mainly on the historical context of Brexit, and abstract questions about globalization, and its complex consequences for our traditional models of politics and economic life.

That said, it is worth mentioning that on Tuesday, February 26, Theresa May announced that, should her deal fail to pass the house, she is going to allow a vote on an extension of Article 50. The pressure is on, however, as we have also begun to see rebellion breaking out, and the creation in Parliament of a new 'Independent Group,' composed of rebels from both Labour and the Conservatives. Corbyn, for his part, announced his support for a second referendum — putting before the people a choice between whether to remain in the EU, or to pursue Labour's alternative vision of a Brexit deal, which includes a permanent customs union.

If you have any questions or comments about the show, you are welcome to reach out to us via Twitter: @occupyirtheory — equally, feel welcome to leave us a positive rating on iTunes, or your favorite podcast software.

Thanks for listening!

This episode comes to you on February 6, 2020, just six days after so-called "Brexit Day." That is, the day Britain legally departed from the European Union. In honor of this occasion, in this episode we talk to another returned guest, Owen Worth, of the University of Limerick. You may remember Owen from Episode 4, where we talked with him about the 2017 British General Election, and the surprising performance of Jeremy Corbyn, and the British Labour Party. In this episode, Owen is going to help us try to get our heads around not only some of the implications of Brexit but, more importantly, the implications of the 2019 election for the British left.



Now, as you know, in our last episode, we had Lee Jones of the Full Brexit blog on, giving his take on the election. And Lee's views on the election are complex, but the basic idea I think is that he sees the election as effectively a second referendum on Brexit, and an underlining of the desire of the British electorate to leave the European Union. In this sense, taking his cues from scholars like Peter Mair, Lee sees the election as a kind of revenge of those who feel themselves materially abandoned by mainstream liberal democracy.



Owen Worth doesn't necessarily disagree with Lee Jones. Yet, as you'll hear, he traces a somewhat longer history of the decline of the British Labour Party. As we will discuss, this decline isn't necessarily straightforward our easy to understand. After all, the Labour Party did extremely well in 2017, largely not he basis of a robust manifesto and a commitment to honor the results of the Brexit referendum. In this episode, you are going to hear Owen and I debate the extent to which the Labour Party's U-turn on Leave was a decisive factor in the election. Listeners to this show won't be surprised to hear that I tend to agree more with Lee Jones on this point, but Owen does present some interesting figures on the low turnout among young voters.



Leaving the immediate subject of the election, we some of Owen's recent work, applying an article he wrote in 2019 in the journal Globalizations, applying Gramsci's notion of the War of Position to the Corbyn left. We are also going to get stuck into Owen's new book, Morbid Symptoms, just out from Zed Books. As you'll hear, Owen believes that one major reason for the recent spike in popularity of far right ideas is the left's failure to mount a radical alternative to the prevailing order.



A quick plug before we get started — many American listeners may be feeling a little stressed out right now about recent shenanigans in Iowa. But look, you can't spend your whole day reading about Bernie Sanders knifed in the chest by the DNC. So, as a way of bringing a little diversity to your day, next week we are going to bringing Colin Coulter back on the show to talk about this weekend's upcoming elections in Ireland! Some of you may have heard that Sinn Fein has been surging. And, to say this is unusual would be something of an understatement. So, we've got to check in with our resident expert on the Irish left, Colin Coulter, and see what's going on there. Stay tuned!



Footnote: here is the blog post from Lord Ashcroft Polls cited by Owen, on tactical voting in the 2019 election.

This is a follow up to last month's post on the attack on education, but rather than use images of people protesting CRT I decided to post the video of the talk referred to below. As I think I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog in the spring I taught a seminar on Race, Class, and Gender. This involved an engagement with both some familiar material, Balibar's writing on race and class, and some material that I have not taught before, Stuart Hall, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Sylvia Wynter, etc. (I should say that in light of the title of this piece that I did not teach CRT specifically, but rather critical writing on race). At the same time that I was expanding my teaching and research the country, or at least parts of it were moving in the other direction, passing laws that outlawed discussions of critical race theory, intersectionality, and gender theory. This was in some sense a teachable moment, or at least should be: I kept coming back to the question of the politics of knowledge and ignorance around race.In Stuart Hall's famous lecture, "Race, The Floating Signifier" he outlines the basic point against the concept of race as a biological concept, "As we know human genetically variability between different populations, normally assigned a racial category, is not significantly greater than it is within those populations." However, as he goes onto to detail in the next section this scientific fact has never been accepted. As Hall writes, "First, [this general position] represents the by now common and conventional wisdom among leading scientists in the field. Second, that fact has never prevented intense scholarly activity being devoted by a minority of committed academics to attempting to prove a correlation between racially defined genetic characteristics and cultural performance. In other words, we are not dealing with a field in which, as it were, the scientifically and rationally established fact prevents scientists from continuing to prove the opposite."Here are my two points about Hall's two points. First, as a matter of historicization, a lot has changed since nineteen ninety seven. Race is no longer the outlier as it once was. The science of global warming, vaccines, even such basic astronomical matters as the size and shape of the Earth, all now have their doubters and alternative facts. A survey of the world of conspiracy theories and people with various crank beliefs demanding to be debated on social media only serves to illustrate Spinoza's fundamental axiom that "Nothing positive which a false idea has is removed by the presence of the true insofar as it is true." Ideas, even adequate or true ideas, have no intrinsic force or power, but must be actualized, materialized by other forces. Which brings me to my second point, if an idea or the criticism of an idea, in this case the criticism of race as a biological reality, does not take hold then the problem may have less to do with the idea itself, its own intrinsic value, than with the forces, social, political, economic, psychic, etc., that are allied against it. Sylvia WynterWhich brings me to my second point of reference, and that is Sylvia Wynter's essay (that reads like a book)"Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man Its Overrepresentation—An Argument/." In that essay which develops its own meta-intellectual history, Wynter engages with a question that seems as far as possible from the question of race, and that is why, given their mathematical sophistication were the ancient greeks incapable of developing a corresponding sophistication of physics. As Wynter writes, "In a 1987 interview, the theoretical physicist David Böhm explained why the rise of the physical sciences would have been impossible in ancient Greece, given the role that the physical cosmos had been made to play in stabilizing and legitimating the structures/hierarchies and role allocations of its social order. If each society, Böhm pointed out, bases itself on a general notion of the world that always contains within it "a specific idea of order," for the ancient Greeks, this idea of order had been projected as that of an "increasing perfection from the earth to the heavens." In consequence, in order for modern physics (which is based on the "idea of successive positions of bodies of matter and the constraints of forces that act on these bodies") to be developed, the "order of perfection investigated by the ancient Greeks" had to become irrelevant. In other words, for such an astronomy and physics to be developed, the society that made it possible would have to be one that no longer had the need to map its ordering principle onto the physical cosmos, as the Greeks and all other human societies had done. The same goes for the need to retain the Greek premise of an ontological difference of substance between the celestial realm of perfection (the realm of and the imperfect realm of the terrestrial (the realm of doxa, of mere opinion). This was not a mutation that could be easily effected. In his recent book The Enigma of the Gift (1999), Maurice Godelier reveals an added and even more powerful dimension as to why the mutation by which humans would cease to map the "idea of order" onto the lawlike regularities of physical nature would not be easily come by."In other words, progress in the physical sciences became possible only once the world, or the cosmos, ceased to play a role in the order and organizing of human social and political life, is no longer part of our sociogenesis, to cite the term that Wynter borrows from Fanon. The social order determines and limits what can be thought or asked. On this point Wynter's argument is similar to the point Marx makes regarding value in Capital. As Marx writes,"There was, however, an important fact which prevented Aristotle from seeing that, to attribute value to commodities, is merely a mode of expressing all labour as equal human labour, and consequently as labour of equal quality. Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had, therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities. The brilliancy of Aristotle's genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered, in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality. The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, "in truth," was at the bottom of this equality."While the focus is different Marx, Wynter, (and I would argue) Spinoza, are all in some sense focusing on the social and political conditions of knowledge, in order for the natural sciences to become possible or in order for Value to be discovered something had to happen in society first. In the case of the former it is the general secularization of the cosmos. We could add that this process of secularization is always fragmentary and incomplete, the continued existence of flat Earthers, who, when pressed to explain why NASA and the globe industry would lie to them about the earth, they often phrase it in terms that hark back to that old theocratic order, that a round earth spinning about in a solar system of other similar planets makes them feel small and insignificant, and not, the center of God's creation. More to the point, to Wynter's point, the end of an order predicated on the cosmos is the beginning of a new order, one predicate on humanity. To quote Wynter again,"A new notion of the world and "idea of order" was being mapped now, no longer upon the physical cosmos - which beginning with the fifteenth- century voyages of the Portuguese and Columbus, as well as with the new astronomy of Copernicus, was eventually to be freed from having to serve as a projected "space of Otherness," and as such having to be known in the adaptive terms needed by human orders to represent their social structures as extrahumanly determined ones. Instead, the projected "space of Otherness" was now to be mapped on phenotypical and religio-cultural differences between human variations and/or population groups, while the new idea of order was now to be defined in terms of degrees of rational perfection/imperfection, as degrees ostensibly ordained by the Greco-Christian cultural construct deployed by Sepúlveda as that of the "law of nature, " natural law": as a "law" that allegedly functioned to order human societies in the same way as the newly discovered laws of nature served to regulate the processes of functioning of physical and organic levels of reality."Wynter's argument is that in the modern age it is humanity, the anthropos, rather than the universe, the cosmos, that is the basis of our social order. Hierarchies are no longer between the Earth and the other celestial beings, but between different aspects of humanity, or more to the point between humanity and its own internal division, between "Man" understood as the embodiment of rationality and its others. As Wynter writes,"It is this new master code, one that would now come to function at all levels of the social order - including that of class, gender, sexual orientation, superior/inferior ethnicities, and that of the Investor/Breadwinners versus the criminalized jobless Poor (Nas's "black and latino faces") and Welfare Moms antithesis, and most totally between the represented-to-be superior and inferior races and cultures - that would come to function as the dually status-organizing and integrating principle of U.S. society. So that if, before the sixties, the enforced segregation of the Black population in the South as the liminally deviant category of Otherness through whose systemic negation the former Civil War enemies of North and South, together with the vast wave of incoming immigrants from Europe, would be enabled to experience themselves as a We (that is, by means of the shared similarity of their now- canonized "whiteness"), in addition, their segregated status had served another central function. This had been that of enabling a U.S. bourgeoisie, rapidly growing more affluent, to dampen class conflict by inducing their own working class to see themselves, even where not selected by Evolution in class terms, as being compensatorily, altruistically bonded with their dominant middle classes by the fact of their having all been selected by Evolution in terms of race." I will say as something of a parenthetical aside, one that I hope to include in my actual writing this summer, and not just my blogging, that on this point Wynter is close to André Tosel's understanding of neoliberalism. As Tosel argues the more capital justifies itself in terms of an anthropology, as an expression of mankind's rationality, productivity, and individuality, the more its hierarchies are anthropologized as well, which is to say racialized. Poor countries, and the racialized poor within the country's border, are understood to be produced not by history, including the history of discrimination, but human nature. All of which may be a long, a very long way of answering the question posed by Hall, a question which has come to light in the opposition to teaching on race from the 1619 project to Critical Race Theory. The short version of this response is that a society that still needs racism in order to justify and explain itself cannot dispense with the concept of race, with the idea of racial hierarchy, no matter how many scientific studies are published disproving it. Race, and racism, are necessary parts of our social common sense, and thus any attempt to discredit and disprove them threatens that, and, as in the way CRT is represented, can only be understood as a political assault on the existing order and not additions or transformations of knowledge. Moreover, and this is something that I discuss in the podcast below, outlawing any theoretical and historical understanding of race and racism, is tantamount to legislating racism, or, at the very least to making sure that there are no official accounts that contest the dominant common sense around race. It is the modern version of putting Galileo under house arrest, to connect the dots of Wynter's essay.

 Because actual history is rarely linear, let alone teleological, I read the repudiation of Hegel before I ever read Hegel. I had read arguments and polemics against Hegel in Althusser, Deleuze, and Foucault long before I had every cracked Hegel's books. A funny thing happened once I started reading, writing, and teaching Hegel, is that I started to warm up to him. It was not the idea of spirit that appealed to me, or even the dialectic as some overarching logic, but the more limited, finite dialectics of the different figures and moments of consciousness. If you need an example of what I am talking about just think of the famous dialectic of master and slave, the hit single of the Phenomenology of Spirit. This passage has been separated from the progression of spirit to take on a life of its own as a way to discuss everything from desire to anti-colonial violence. However, hit singles have a way of overshadowing the whole album. I have often thought that Hegel's Phenomenology and Philosophy of Right offer more than just that famous struggle, the figures of the stoic, sceptic, unhappy conscious, the struggle of culture and alienation, faith and enlightenment, could be liberated from the development of spirit, to become ways of thinking about the current state of spirit, which appears less and less as a culmination of progress than a motley accumulation of everything every believed. It is for this reason that I was delighted to learn of Biko Mandela Gray and Ryan Johnson's Phenomenology of Black Spirit. One aspect of this book is an attempt to put the figures of Hegel's Phenomenology, to work; the master and slave, but also the stoic, sceptic, and unhappy consciousness become critical figures of subjectivity, and not just moments of the development of spirit. It puts these figures to work in relation to figures of black struggle and thought from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, reading what could be called "the black radical tradition" as something more than a series of political contestations and positions, to see it as having its own intellectual foundation and development, even as counters the trajectory that Hegel charted. Gray and Johnson sometimes contrast Hegel's figure with the reality and history of black struggle. This can be seen clearly in the contrast between Douglass' struggle for freedom and Hegel's concept of the master/slave struggle. As Gray and Johnson write, "The lord' and the 'bondsman,' then are logical (dis)positions, figures who are both more and less than the historical people who were enslaved and who were exercising domination. 'The slave' had names. 'The master' did, too. And these names make a difference. They make differences." Logic and history connect and part ways. In Hegel's account the bondsman condition begins with fight, a struggle for recognition, and ends in work, work providing a sense of recognition that could not be found in struggle. Douglass' history inverts this order. As Gray and Johnson write,"With American chattel slavery, however, work was not the way out of slavery but the brutal institutions very engine. The more a slave worked, the stronger was the institution...In chattel slavery, work will never set you free. Work reinforces the chains and sharpens the sting of the whip. Douglass worked had and long, and saw himself in the fields, landscapes, ships and other objects into which he put his transforming labor. Yet freedom never came to him from work. The only way for him to set out on the path out of slavery and into freedom was to turn away from the object. on which he worked and face the master in order to fight."Gray and Johnson's analysis here cites and joins Chamayou's discussion of slave hunts, in which the historical inquiry calls into question the conceptual logic. Work cannot function as the basis for recognition in a system based on reducing human beings to their capacity for work. It is only the fight, the struggle that can break this logic. If Douglass deviates from Hegel's figures of subjectivity other historical moments would seem to not only confirm it, but Hegel's thought provides the concept that is otherwise missing. Booker T. Washington's ideas of individual freedom, merit, and self-reliance realizes Hegel's idea of stoicism more than even Hegel. The history does not contradict the concept, but confirms it and makes a case for its relevance. As Gray and Johnson write, "Here is a new form of recognition. It is not the recognition of another self-consciousness, directly in the form of self consciousness, but that of future self-consciousness, a higher form of self, or perhaps the promise of being recognized by a truly fair, just, and impartial form of subjectivity, above and beyond any particular determination of race, gender, age, etc., "No man whose vision is bounded by color can come into contact with what is highest and best" ( Washington, Up from Slavery) The recognition that the stoic seeks is not simply another person's recognition, not just recognition from this white man or Black man, but a general recognition from an ideal person. It is recognition of a hard earned merit that is mine."Reading Washington through Hegel makes it possible to see how the stoic appears not just once, as a figure of progression, but again and again, as a turn inward for recognition when the world becomes unreliable. It also makes it possible to see that Hegel's attachment to work, to work as an ethical ideal is less a matter of his own system, than the grey on grey of a philosopher reflecting the general norms of his time.  It also makes it possible to see in Washington not just a specific figure from one period, but something more of a refrain as stoicism, self-reliance, and merit, appear again and again as a conservative response to racism. The conservative attempt to reduce Martin Luther King Jr. to some future date where people would be judged only by the content of their character, to merit, is really an attempt to turn King into Washington. Speaking of King, it is with respect to King that we can see the real strength of Gray and Johnson's reading. As much as Hegel gives us figures of individual consciousness, stoicism, scepticism, etc., that can be seen not just once in the linear progression of history but appearing again and again, his real goal was to think something other than the individual, to think spirit as universality, sociality, or even transindividuality. In Gray and Johnson's reading of the black radical tradition this problem of collectivity appears again and again as the struggle of the individual, King, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis, to transcend individuality in their very individual struggle. This is what Hegel's unhappy consciousness makes it possible to think. As Gray and Johnson write:"Here is where the trouble lies: sacramental work is, undeniably the individual's work, in this case King's work. Put differently although this working is supposed to deny the self and attribute everything to God, it actually reaffirms the essentiality of the finite self, while God is reduced to a superficial element. At best, sacramental work and desire is done in the name of God. The same failure to to renounce and surrender oneself also applies to labour as a form of gratitude. The 'entire movement,' writes Hegel, 'is reflected not only in the actual desiring, working, and enjoyment, but even in the very giving thanks where the reverse seems to take place in the extreme of individuality' (Phenomenology of Spirit). The reason: we are the ones working on and changing things, while God is just a fictional idea, a fancy name, that contributes nothing to our work. We are the ones working, day in and day out; we finite persons change the world; no one and nothing but us. The individual self tried to overcome itself through work, to act merely as an instrument in God's handmade plan, but it inevitably ends up emboldening itself."Unhappy Consciousness returns from the medieval world of Christianity to become the dialectic of the modern movement and leader. The more the leader devotes him or herself in works, the more that devotion and dedication becomes the work. As Gray and Johnson argue the figures of the sixties and seventies, King, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis eventually give way to collective movements, to the Panthers, and Black Power as a new figure of reason (in Hegel's terminology), or collective consciousness, in ours. I have picked three moments from Gray and Johnson's book to illustrate the different relations between concept and history at work in the book, three different ways that it thinks the relation between its two different topics, Hegel and the black radical tradition. The relation between Hegel and the black radical tradition is sometimes one of negation, as the history of struggle in the case of Douglass negates the concept of struggle in Hegel; sometimes one of affirmation, as the philosophical concepts reveal and illustrate what is at stake in the political position of Washington; and ultimately it is one of transformation, as the dialectic of philosopher and history, contemplation and contestation, individual and community, pushes towards something else, pushes us to think through the limits of the civil rights era with its larger than life figures. As a last word I will cite a line that Gray and Johnson write with respect to Angela Davis' idea of coalition politics, but I think that such an idea can be used to describe the book's own strange coalition of Hegel and politics. "Difference, conjunction, and contradiction generate, rather than impede, political momentum." 

 Anyone who has ever taken or taught a philosophy class is familiar with the claim "[Blank] is subjective" in which the [Blank] in question could be anything from literary interpretations to ethical norms. This response effectively ends any and all cultural and philosophical discussion, which is why it is so aggravating. One response is to argue against this claim, to point out that not every interpretation of a poem, novel, or film, is authorized, that there are better or worse interpretations, with respect to cultural version. With respect to the ethical or political arguments it is tempting to point out that the very existence of ethics, of society, presupposes norms that are shared as well as debated and challenged.What if we took a different perspective? Instead of arguing against this view, ask the question of its conditions. To offer a criticism in the Marxist sense. By Marxist sense I mean specifically the criticism that Marx offers of idealism, of philosophy, in The German Ideology. In that text Marx gives the conditions of how it is that the world appears so upside down that ideas and their criticism rather than material conditions drive and determine history. So we could ask a similar question, how has subjectivity, subjective opinion and perspective, has come to appear as so prevalent and powerful. How did we come to live under the reign of subjectivity?In a move that will surprise no one who has read this blog that I find a useful starting point for answering this question Frank Fischbach's book Marx with Spinoza. In that text Fischbach argues that rather than seen alienation as an alienation from subjectivity, a reduction of a subject to an object, it is subjectivity itself that is an alienation, an alienation from objectivity, a privation of the world.  As Fischbach argues:"The reduction of human beings, by this abstraction, from natural and living beings to the state of 'subjects' as owners of a socially average labour power indicates at the same time the completion of their reduction to a radical state of impotence: for the individual to be conceived and to conceive of itself as a subject it is necessary that it see itself withdrawn and subtracted from the objective conditions of its natural activity; in other words, it is necessary that 'the real conditions of living labour' (the material worked on, the instruments of labour and the means of subsistence which 'fan the flames of the power of living labour') become 'autonomous and alien existences'"And also: "This is why we interpret Marx's concept of alienation not as a new version of a loss of the subject in the object, but as a radically new thought, of the loss of the essential and vital objects for an existence that is itself essentially objective and vital....Alienation is not therefore the loss of the subject in the object it is the loss of object for a being that is itself objective. But the loss of proper objects and the objectivity of its proper being is also the loss of all possible inscription of one's activity in objectivity, it is the loss of all possible mastery of objectivity, as well as other effects: in brief, the becoming subject is essentially a reduction to impotence. The becoming subject or the subjectivation of humanity is thus inseparable according to Marx from what is absolutely indispensable for capitalism, the existence of a mass of "naked workers"—that is to say pure subjects possessors of a perfectly abstract capacity to work—individual agents of a purely subjective power of labor and constrained to sell its use to another to the same extent that they are totally dispossessed of the entirety of objective conditions (means and tools of production, matter to work on) to put to effective work their capacity to work."At the basis of subjectivity, of subjectivity understood as an abstract and indifferent capacity, there is the indifferent capacity of labor power. Behind the figure of the subject there is the worker. I have already argued elsewhere on this blog that this reading of the Marx/Spinoza connection could be understood as one which reflects and critically addressed our contemporary situation in which subjecitivity, a subjectivity understood as potential and capacity, is seen as the condition of our freedom rather than our subjection. What Fischbach suggests through a reading of Marx and Spinoza that such capacity, capacity abstracted and separated from the material conditions of its emergence and  activity, can only really be impotence. Just as a worker cut off from the conditions of labor is actually poverty, a subject cut off from the conditions of its actualization is impotence. What now I find provocative about this analysis is that if we think of it as a general schema in which an objective relation, a relation to objects but also others, is transformed into a subjective potential or capacity it is possible to argue that the constitution of subjectivity through labor power is only one such transformation, and that the current production of subjectivity is itself the product of several successive revolutions in which subjective potentials displace objective relations. One could also talk about the creation of subjectivity as buying power, as a pure capacity to purchase. I know that criticisms of consumer society from the fifties and sixties today seem moralistic and often passé. I am thinking here of Baudrillard, Debord, Lefebvre, and of course Horkheimer and Adorno. It is worth remembering, however, that some of the early critics were less interested in moralizing criticisms of materialism as they were in this kind of constitution of subjectivity. As Jean Baudrillard wrote in The Consumer Society, 'It is difficult to grasp the extent to which the
current training in systematic, organized consumption is the equivalent and extension, in
the twentieth century, of the great nineteenth-century long process of the training of rural
populations for industrial work.'One person who continued such an an analysis is Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler even uses the same word, "proletarianization" to describe both the loss of skills and knowledge by the worker and the loss of skills and knowledge by the consumer.  As I wrote in The Politics of Transindividuality:"At first glance, the use of the term proletarianisation to describe the transindividuation of the consumer would seem to be an analogy with the transformation of the labour process: if proletarianisation is the loss of skills, talents, and knowledge until the worker becomes simply interchangeable labour power, then the broader proletarianisation of daily life is the loss of skills, knowledge, and memory until the individual becomes simply purchasing power. Stiegler's use of proletarianisation is thus simultaneously broader and more restricted than Marx, broader in that it is extended beyond production to encompass relations of consumption and thus all of life, but more restricted in that it is primarily considered with respect to the question of knowledge. The transfer of knowledge from the worker to the machine is the primary case of proletarianisation for Stiegler, becoming the basis for understanding the transfer of knowledge of cooking to microwaveable meals and the knowledge of play from the child to the videogame. Stiegler does not include other dimensions of Marx's account of proletarianisation, specifically the loss of place, of stability, with its corollary affective dimension of insecurity and precariousness. On this point, it would be difficult to draw a strict parallel between worker and consumer, as the instability of the former is often compensated for by the desires and satisfactions of the latter. Consumption often functions as a compensation for the loss of security, stability, and satisfaction of work, which is not to say that it is not without its own insecurities especially as they are cultivated by advertising."For the most part Stiegler considers this deskilling to take place in the automation of the knowledge and skill that makes up daily life. Everything from cooking to knowing how to navigate one's own city is now more or less hardwired into precooked meals and the ubiquitous smartphone. Other cultural critics have pointed to the general deskilling of daily life through the decline of repair, tinkering, and mending. The effect of all this is to change the consumer from someone who buys things based on knowledge and familiarity to a pure expression of buying power, an abstract potential. Just as the worker is separated from the means of production, from the objective conditions of their labor to be the subjective capacity to work, the consumer is separated from the knowledge to consume to become a personification of buying power. As with work the conditions to realize this buying power are outside the control of the consumer. We do not decide what to buy based on our knowledge of our needs and desires but on what is advertised to us as a need or desire.As much as the worker and consumer are opposed, making up two sides of economic relations under capitalism, they are unified, connected in the tendency to transform work to abstract labor power and consumption into abstract buying power. While abstract subjectivity is how these two sides of the capitalist economic relation function it is not how they are lived. They are lived as profoundly individual, subjective in the conventional sense of the word. What one does for a living is in some sense considered to be one's identity: "What do you do?" is in some sense equivalent to "Who are You?" Being reduced to abstract labor power, to capacity for work, is lived as a concrete and highly individualized condition, as my particular job and career. If for any one of the myriad reasons what one does is inadequate to constitute an identity, remains just a day job, then consumption or the commodity form steps in to supply the necessary coordinates for an identity. From this perspective we can chart not only the historical progression of the two identities, but also the structural similarities. With respect to the first, consumer society, consumption, and the myriad possibilities to construct an identity through consumption, comes after the worker, after the formation of capitalism. Any attempt to read Marx's Capital for consumer society, for the common sense understanding of commodity fetishism as the overvaluing of commodities, is going to have a hard time navigating the dull world of linen, coats, corn and coal. The consumer comes after the worker. However, it is also possible to see a similarity of a structural condition. In both case subjectivity is abstracted from, or separated from, objectivity, from not just objects, but objective spirit, in Hegel's sense, institutions, norms, and structures. This abstraction is lived as a highly individualized identity, in some sense work and consumption form the basis of individuality as such. However, it only has effects, only functions in the aggregate. As a worker one only has effects, both in terms of the creation of value, and in terms of any disruption of exploitation, as part of a collective. The same could be said for consumerism, even though it is through consumerism that we are encouraged to believe that we can have ethical effects as individuals, green consumerism, cruelty free products, etc.  Consumers only matter as a mass, at an economy of scale, even in the age of niche marketing. This can be seen in the impotent attempts to bring back cancelled products, or to change corporate strategies through boycotts. The only demands that make sense to corporations are those that are already effective in terms of buying power. I am wondering if one can see a similar structure of abstract/individual subjectivity in other aspects of society. I am thinking of politics, in which individuals are abstracted from any real connection to their communities and societies only to be constituted as "voting power," an abstract aggregate that is lived as a highly individualized identity. I will have to think more about that one. My point here is to connect the often asserted claim "that everything is subjective" back to its material conditions, to the production of subjectivity in both work and the reproduction of everyday life, production and consumption. It is not just a matter of a bad reading of Nietzsche that is behind such claims, although it is often that as well, but an effect in the sphere of ideas and discussion of what is already at work in the sphere of production. Abstract subjectivity is a material condition before it is an intellectual interpretation. The thread running through both is connection between power and impotence. If everything is subjective then I can offer any interpretation, create my own moral code whole cloth, live as I prefer, but if everything is subjective then I can do very little, nothing at all to alter or change anything. This is the fundamental point of intersection between Marx and Spinoza, subjectivity, individual subjectivity, is not the zenith of our freedom and power, it is the nadir of our subjection. Updated 4/15/24I happened to be rereading Tiqqun's Introduction to Civil War which offers the following on this last point, on the political subject as a subject constituted in alienation. As they write:"In order to become a political subject in the modern State, each body must submit to the machinery that will make it such; it must begin by casting aside its passions (now inappropriate), its tastes (now laughable), its penchants (now contingent), endowing itself instead with interests, which are much more presentable and, even better, representable. In this way, in order to become a political subject each body must first carry out its own autocastration as an economic subject. Ideally, the political subject will be reduced to nothing more than a pure vote, a pure voice."Tiqqun offers an expression of this idea, and in doing so captures what I was starting to think about before. However, they also offer me some reservations, especially in their tendency towards deriving an ontological or existential situation from a social condition. As with work and consumption, the pure subjectivity, the pure labor, buying, or voting power, is presented as the zenith of a kind of power, a capacity, maximize your labor power, express your preferences with consumer choices, and, most absurdly, vote harder, but this power is entirely determined by the existing labor conditions, market relations, and political structures. 

Paul Matzko









This global public opinion poll asking respondents whether they have a favorable view of the USA has been bouncing around the interwebs. The topline finding — the US is pretty popular! — surprised many American cultural critics who remember the bad old days of the Iraq War when global criticism of US imperialism surged.
I find the handful of countries where the opinion of the US remains more negative just as interesting. Hungary's worst‐​in‐​Europe result is amusing given how the far Right in the US fetishizes Viktor Orban's reactionary politics. American Hungary stans suffer from sublimated self‐​hatred, wishing they could be as xenophobic and culturally chauvinist as team "Make Hungary Magyar Again."
But the other outlier country on this list with a marked dislike of the US might be more of a surprise to Americans: Australia. We're almost underwater Down Under. This is in sharp contrast with how highly Americans think of Australia; if you combine all positive responses from this survey, Americans consider Australia their warmest ally. Which means the gulf between how Americans and Australians view each other would be one of the widest in the world!
As it so happens, I spent eight summers as a teenager living in Australia. That certainly doesn't make me a country expert — and it's been two decades since I was last there — but it does mean that Australian antipathy towards the US doesn't take me by surprise.
That dislike was very much on the surface when I was a 10 or 11 year old trying to make Aussie friends. The most popular country singer in Australia at the time was the man, the legend, John Williamson. I've written about Australian country music elsewhere, but I can still sing many of Williamson's top hits from memory, including his rip‐​roaring nationalist anthem "A Flag of Our Own" (1991). Williamson was a republican, which meant that he believed Australia should leave the British Commonwealth, reject the monarchy, and take the British stripes off the Australian flag. Here's the song's chorus:
'Cause this is Australia and that's where we're from We're not Yankee side‐​kicks or second class P.O.M.s And tell the Frogs what they can do with their bomb Oh we must have a flag of our own

Let me decipher that for you. P.O.M.s stands for "Prisoners of Her Majesty," or Brits, which is often amended with an adjective such as "whingeing POMs" to describe those who yearn for ye olde country and constantly complain about Australia's supposedly backward ways. This was a particularly popular complaint in Australia in the aftermath of Australia's 1975 constitutional crisis. The Australian Governor‐​General — a crown appointee in a mostly symbolic role — had invoked a long neglected royal power and replaced the elected left‐​wing prime minister with a conservative. (For comparison, imagine the hoopla if King Charles III were to kick British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak out of office and install a Labour prime minister!)
"Frogs," of course, are the French, who were on the radar of Aussie nationalists in the 90s for conducting nuclear testing in their Polynesian colonies — which Australia considered its own backyard — and doing so without regard for the effects of nuclear fallout on surrounding islands and Australia itself.
That leaves us with Yankees, commonly shorted to "Yanks," which quickly becomes, via Australia's penchant for rhyming puns, "Septic Tanks," or then shortened further to "seppos." (Aussies are world leaders in slang. It's like if Cockney wasn't just the lingo of one neighborhood in London but had been exported en masse via prison ships, transported to the other side of the globe, and then had taken over an entire continent. Oh wait…)
Maybe you're wondering why America made that opprobrious list alongside the POMs and Frogs. We weren't testing any nukes in the Pacific (at least, we hadn't for a while) and we weren't meddling in their domestic politics (though blaming the CIA for the 1975 constitutional crisis remains popular among Aussie conspiracists).
But when this song was released in 1991, the Australian military had just participated in the US‐​led Gulf War. Although suffering no combat casualties, Australian nationalists saw this as yet another example of Australia blindly serving the interests of foreign superpowers, from dying at the command of callous British generals in the trenches at Gallipoli — the subject of a 1981 blockbuster starring a young Mel Gibson — to the failed fight alongside the Yanks in the jungles of Vietnam.
Bear in mind that Australia's anti‐​Vietnam War protests in 1970 were the *largest* protests in their history; by contrast, the much feted anti‐​Vietnam war protests in the US don't even crack our top 27! Australia's involvement in the Iraq War did little to assuage critics who believed Australia should stop playing second fiddle to the US, especially after leaked documents showed that the Aussie government's primary purpose for sending troops was to cozy up to the US. All the talk about eradicating weapons of mass destruction and promoting democracy was merely "mandatory rhetoric."
However, when I was a teenager in Australia in the late‐​90s, especially while visiting rural communities in Northern Queensland, the complaint I heard the most often revolved around US trade policy, specifically US tariffs on the import of Australian lamb meat. I remember riding around the bush in a ute (flatbed pickup truck) with a local farmer who was spitting mad about US tariffs and who said that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was Bill Clinton getting his just desserts for harming Aussie sheep farmers. What a thought! Australian headlines from the time were simply scathing in their critique of Clinton's hypocrisy in signing a free trade deal with Canada and Mexico while slapping new tariffs on Australia.
Yet other than the mad cow panic, meat import policies — let alone veal tariffs, lol — have never been a major political issue in recent US national politics. But they sure mattered a great deal to Australia, which is the second largest sheep exporting country in the world (Australia and New Zealand combine for an incredible 93% of the global market). In any case, US trade policy in the 1990s fit with Australian nationalists' broader critique of the US as a bully who simply expected Australia to meekly comply with its broader geopolitical agenda regardless of whether it was in Australia's own national interest.
So Australians' mixed opinions regarding the US are grounded in real, pragmatic considerations. It's yet another situation in which our imperial entanglements and trade protectionism have provoked blowback.
It's possible that in the future those feelings might revert towards the more US‐​positive, Australasian mean given Chinese economic and military expansionism in the region. Up until now, Australia has been insulated from the downside risks of Chinese expansion — funnily enough, the intervening Indonesians have been a more significant target for Australian jingoism — while benefitting greatly as a supplier of raw materials for the post‐​Mao Chinese economic miracle. Until the pandemic, Australia hadn't experienced a recession in nearly thirty years (!).
On a more speculative note, if Noah Smith and other India boosters are correct, Australia's role as a potential trading partner with India could matter as much for that country's success as its trade with China has for the past three decades. Last year, Australia signed a new free trade deal with India and expects its exports to triple by 2035. And given the ongoing decoupling of global investment from the Chinese market, Australia could benefit from a major boost of foreign investment given its proximity and ties with India, Vietnam, and other high growth South and Southeast Asian markets (nicknamed "Altasia"). There's little in the way of Australia enjoying another thirty years of torrid economic growth.
The US should forge a new, peer relationship with Australia, signaling that it takes Australia seriously as a vital regional ally rather than treating it as a junior partner in our foreign misadventures. We have a golden opportunity to do so right now. As Doug Bandow has noted, China has foolishly kicked off a trade war with Australia, and while Trump considered following suit with new tariffs on Australian exports, he was finally persuaded not to. We should take advantage of China's mistake by expanding our 2005 free trade agreement with Australia and lower rates on agricultural products that are feeling the pinch from Chinese tariffs.
This is a crosspost from the author's Substack. Click through and subscribe for more content on the intersection of history and policy.

Balibar print from All Grim Prints An ongoing albeit sporadic project of mine is trying to understand the systematic nature underlying the conjunctural interventions of Etienne Balibar. This semester this investigation dovetailed with a reexamination of his writings on race for a seminar on Race, Class, and Gender. With respect to the latter it seems that there are two elements that are central to Balibar's thinking of race. First, as I have already stressed in a previous post, racism has to be understood as an entire way of thinking, a mode of thought, and not, as is often the case a bias or stereotype, an aberration in thought. As Balibar writes in "Racism and Universalism, ""I think that racism is a genuine mode of thought, that is to say, a mode of connecting not only words with objects, but more profoundly words with images, in order to create concepts. Therefore to overcome racism in one's personal experience or in collective experience is not simply a matter of abandoning prejudices or opening one's eyes to reality with the possible help of science; it has to do with changing one's mode of thinking, something much more difficult." As a mode of thought racism not only defines a particular way of thinking, but one that is indexed to the immediate demands of living. When Balibar writes that racism combines misrecognition with a "will to know,' a violent desire for immediate knowledge of social relations," I understand that violent desire to have something to do with the fundamental questions of social life, who should I trust? who should I fear? who can I desire? etc. Racism promises an answer to all of these questions, one that is immediately legible, written on the body and skin. Racism is as much a way of thinking and a way of living. This is why all challenges to it threaten not just what counts as knowledge, but also what counts as politics, as collectivity, even if the collectivity in question is not divided or demarcated by race. "As feminism has progressively started to demonstrate, the issue with sexism is not, or not merely, to resist male chauvinism or to struggle against male domination: it is to have the male community destroyed from the inside. Similarly, the issue with racism, in the long run and in everyday situations, is to destroy the racist community from within, a community which is both institutional and spontaneous, based on collective privileges (many of them—but not all—imaginary) and the individual desire for knowledge."The connection between a mode of thinking and a mode of living, the order and connection of ideas and the order and connection of things, is a profoundly Spinozist. As André Tosel argues, Spinoza's thought has as its center not a hierarchy between praxis, poiesis, and theoria, as in classical thought, but their mutual implication, a way of thinking is a way of living and producing. As Tosel writes, While the ancient tradition interrogates the nature proper to humanity from the triplet poiesis, praxis, theoria, supposed to represent the hierarchy of distinctly human kinds of life, Spinoza recomposes poiesis, praxis, theoria in the unity of the same form of life. Every form of life, every bios is a specific unity of poiesis, of praxis, and theoria. Or rather, in each kind of life, in each individual body, there is a relation to other bodies in nature (poiesis), and to other bodies of the same human essence (praxis), corresponding to a modality of the existence of the mind or spirit of knowledge (theoria). (That is from Du Materialisme de Spinoza, and I still have plans to work out how Balibar and Tosel arrive at their understandings of race and citizen from Spinoza). For his part, and as I have argued before, Balibar draws a great deal of support for his thought on race from his reading of the dual foundations of the city in Proposition Thirty Seven of Part Four of the Ethics. Here is a long passage on that point from The Politics of Transindividuality. (pg. 92-93 of that book). "While Spinoza's dual foundations of the city cannot be immediately connected to base and superstructure, economics and politics, it does, however, prove useful for understanding politics, the state. Its constitutive ambiguity is not that of the tension between economics and politics, but within political belonging and individuation itself. The state, especially the modern state, which has inherited the ideal of the citizen, of a universal dimension, is always split between nation and state, between an imagined identity and a legal or institutional unity. The imagined identity, 'what makes a people a people,' crosses the same terrain as Spinoza's ingenium, in other words every nation, every nationality, is formed by an organization of the aspects that constitute collective and individual identity. Language and memory play a central role in the formation of nations. In the attempt to constitute a people, to generate a fictive identity, the nation intersects with race as the quintessential fictive ethnicity. Race and nation constantly traverse each other: modern racist organizations consider themselves to be first and foremost national organizations, protecting the purity of the nation, and the national unit and belonging is impossible without the fantasy of a common language and heritage. However, the nation is not synonymous with the state, the modern state, the state that begins with the democratic revolutions, also have an irreducible universalistic dimension, an ideal of the citizen that is not tied to national belonging. Balibar goes so far as to see this division, a division not between bourgeois man and political citizen, but between nation and state, as constitutive of modern political conflict. As Balibar writes, For my part, I consider the demarcation between democratic and liberal policies and conservative or reactionary policies today to depend essentially (if not exclusively) on attitudes towards ethnic discriminations and differences of nationality on whether pride of place is given to national belonging or emancipatory goals (the rights of man or citizen). The dual foundation constitutes two different subjects, two different transindividual individuations. The first is that of homo nationalis, the human individual defined not just through his or her specific language, but most of all, through shared customs, habits and memories. The second is the citizen defined by an open transindividual process, by rights and obligations, which exist only as a collective project that is by definition universal. These individuations coexist, constituting the conflictual basis for different individuations and different politics. National belonging, national identity, especially as it is connected to shared language, history and memory, comes close to racial identity and race, which it can never fully extricate itself from. For Balibar, race is not just a matter of a fictive unity, as a definition of belonging, but is also integral to the manner in which modern democratic societies deal with, or represent, the persistence of hierarchy and division. Hierarchy and division are always a scandal to a society organized according to the citizen, to an individuation of the citizen. There is thus also a proximity of race to class; class can always be racialized, not in the sense that it is ascribed to different races, but becomes attached to a rigid and permanent division in society. The division of mental and manual labour is inseparable from a division of society into 'mind men' and 'body men,' with all of the expected ambiguous connections to animality. Race reinscribes social divisions on divisions of the body, making social hierarchies justified and visible at the same time. Race (and the racialization of class difference) resolves the incomplete nature of the democratic revolution; it is the revival of anthropological difference in societies that have declared such differences to be null and void. As much as race plays a fundamental role as an alibi, explaining the persistence of inequality in a society that claims to be otherwise, it also plays an important role in the social imaginary, a term that is justified in terms of the Spinozist idea of the imaginary. Race is an inadequate idea of social belonging and social division. Racism is an imaginary, an inadequate idea in the full Spinozist sense of the term, it is both immediate, combining affect and imagination and fails to comprehend its causes. It offers an immediate understanding of society, a transparent account of the social divisions and conflicts mapped onto the most superficial signs of bodily or cultural difference."It seems to me that two conclusions follow from thinking about racism as an articulation of thinking and living, of knowledge and politics. First, such politics should not shy a way from the radical nature of what is at stake. Anti-racism is not just a challenge to a few lingering prejudices or biases, but to a whole way of thinking, a way of thinking that is integral to our society. (this is too long to go into here, but I am thinking also of Sylvia Wynter's "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom" and the connection she makes between knowledge and politics, between what can be known and lived). Second, this way of thinking is also a way of living. Which is to say that the reactionaries that have perceived in anti-racism an assault on their way of living, as in the case of Florida, they are right. It benefits no one to pretend that such is not the case. Although I do think that there is work to be done on this issue, to imagine what a post-racial society would look like beyond the image of integration (which was always integration to a community defined by racial exclusion). Lastly, such a society would also entail not just a transformation of race, but of national belonging, and with it, in a longer point that I cannot make now, the class basis of modern society. 

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Ann Tickner on Feminist
Philosophy of Science, Engaging the Mainstream, and (still) Remaining Critical
in/of IR







Feminist IR is still often
side-lined as a particularistic agenda or limited issue area, appearing as one
of the last chapters of introductory volumes to the field, despite the
limitless efforts of people such as Cynthia Enloe (Theory Talk #48)
and J. Ann Tickner. She has laboured to point out and provincialize the
parochialism that haunts mainstream IR, without, however, herself retreating
and disengaging from some of its core concerns. In this Talk, Tickner elaborates—amongst others—on the specifics of a
feminist approach to the philosophical underpinnings of IR; discusses how
feminism relates to the distinction between mainstream and critical theory; and
addresses the challenges of navigating such divides.







Print version of this Talk (pdf)



What is, according to
you, the central challenge or principal debate in International Relations? And
what is your position regarding this challenge/in this debate?



I think the biggest challenge for IR is
that it is relevant and helps us understand important issues in our globalized world.
I realize this is not a conventional answer, but too often we academics get
caught up in substantive and methodological debates where we end up talking only
to each other or to a very small audience. We tend to get too concerned with
the issue of scientific respectability rather than thinking about how to try to
understand and remedy the massive problems that exist in the world today. Steve
Smith's presidential address to the ISA in 2002 (read it here),
shortly after 9/11, reminded us of this. Smith chastised the profession for
having nothing to say about such a catastrophic event.





How
did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?



I've gone through quite a few transformations
in my academic career. My original identity was as an International Political
Economy (IPE) scholar; my first academic position was at a small liberal arts
college (College of the Holy Cross) where I taught a variety of IPE courses. In
graduate school I was interested in what, in the 1970s, we called 'North-South'
issues, specifically issues of global justice, which were not the most popular
subjects in the field. So I always felt a little out of place in my choice of
subject matter. In the 1980s when I started teaching, IR was mostly populated
by men. As a woman, one felt somewhat uncomfortable at professional meetings;
and there were very few texts by women that I could assign to my students. I
also found that many of the female students in my introductory IR classes were
somewhat uncomfortable and unmotivated by the emphasis placed on strategic
issues and nuclear weapons.



It was at about the time when I first
started thinking about these issues, I happened to read Evelyn Fox Keller's book Gender and Science,
a book that offers a gendered critique of the natural sciences (read an
'update' of the argument by Keller here, pdf).
It struck me that her feminist critique of science could equally be applied to
IR theory. My first feminist publication, a feminist critique of Hans Morgenthau's
principles of political realism, expanded on this theme (read full text here,
pdf).




Teaching at a small liberal arts college
where one was judged by the quality of one's work rather than the type of
research one was doing was very helpful—because I could follow my own, rather
non-conventional, inclinations. So I think my turn to feminism, after ten years
in the field, was a combination of my own consciousness-raising and feeling
that there was something about IR that didn't speak to me. Later, I was fortunate
to be hired by the University of Southern California, a large research
institution, with an interdisciplinary School of International Relations,
separate from the political science department. When I arrived in 1995, the
School had a reputation for teaching a broad array of IR theoretical approaches.
The support of these institutional settings and of a network of feminist
scholars and students, some of whom I discovered were thinking along similar
lines in the late 1980s, were important for getting me to where I am today.





What
would a student need (dispositions, skills) to become a specialist in IR or
understand the world in a global way?



It depends on the level of the student:
at the undergraduate level, a broad array of courses in global politics including
some economics and history. Language training is very important too, and ideally,
an overseas experience. We need to encourage our students to be curious and
have an open mind about our world.



At the graduate level, this is a more complicated
question. The way you phrased the question 'to understand the world in a global
way,' can be very different from training to become an IR scholar, especially in
the United States. I would emphasize the importance of a broad theoretical and
methodological training, including some exposure to the philosophy of science,
and to non-Western IR if possible, or at least at a minimum, to try to get
beyond the dominance of American IR, which still exists even in places outside
the US.





Why should IR scholars incorporate
gender in the study of world politics? What are the epistemological and
ontological implications of adopting a feminist perspective in IR?



Feminists would argue that incorporating
feminist perspectives into IR would fundamentally transform the discipline.
Feminists claim that IR is already gendered, and gendered masculine, in the
types of questions it asks and the ways it goes about answering them. The
questions we ask in our research are never neutral - they are a choice,
depending on the researcher's identity and location. Over history, the
knowledge that we have accumulated has generally been knowledge about men's
lives. It's usually been men who do the asking and consequently, it is often
the case that women's lives and women's knowledge are absent from what is
deemed 'reliable' knowledge. This historical legacy has had, and continues to
have, an effect on the way we build knowledge. Sandra Harding,
a feminist philosopher of science, has suggested that if were to build
knowledge from women's lives as well, we would broaden the base from which we
construct knowledge, and would therefore get a richer and more complex picture
of reality.



One IR example of how we limit our research
questions and concerns is how we calculate national income, or wealth—the kind
of data states choose to collect and on which they base their public policy. We
have no way of measuring the vast of amount of non-remunerated reproductive and
caring labour, much of which is done by women. Without this labour we would not
have a functioning global capitalist economy. To me this is one example as to
why putting on our gender lenses helps us gain a more complete picture of
global politics and the workings of the global economy.



Feminists have also argued that the
epistemological foundations of Western knowledge are gendered. When we use
terms such as rationality, objectivity and public, they are paired with terms
such as emotional, subjective and private, terms that are seen as carrying less
weight. By privileging the first of these terms when we construct knowledge we
are valuing knowledge that we typically associate with masculinity and the
public sphere, historically associated with men. Rationality and objectivity
are not terms that are overtly gendered, but, when asked, women and men alike
associate them with masculinity. They are terms we value when we do our
research.





In one of the foundational texts of
Feminist IR, 'You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists
and IR Theorists' (1997, full text here, pdf),
you highlighted three particular (gendered) misunderstandings that continue to
divide Feminists and mainstream IR theorists. To what extent do these
misunderstandings continue to inform mainstream perceptions of Feminist
approaches to the study of international politics?




I think probably they still do, although
it's always hard to tell, because the mainstream has not engaged much with
feminist approaches. I've been one who's always calling for conversations with
the mainstream but, apart from the forum responding to the article you mention,
there have been very few. In a 2010 article, published in the Australian Feminist Law Journal, I looked
back to see if I could find responses to my 1997 article to which you refer. I
found that most of the responses had come from other feminists. The lack of
engagement, which other feminists have experienced also, makes it hard to know about
the misunderstandings that still exist but my guess would be that they remain. However
I do think there has been progress in accepting feminism's legitimacy in the
field. It is now included in many introductory texts.



The first misunderstanding that I
identified is the meaning of gender. I would hope that the introduction of
constructivist approaches would help with understanding that gender is social
construction - a very important point for feminists. But I think that gender is
still largely equated with women. Feminists have tried to stress that gender is
also about men and about masculinity, something that seems to be rather hard to
accept for those unfamiliar with feminist work. I think it's also hard for the
discipline to accept that both international politics as practice and IR as a
discipline are not gender neutral. Feminists claim that IR as a discipline is
gendered in its concepts, its subject matter, the questions it asks and the way
it goes about answering them. This is a radical assertion for those unfamiliar
with feminist approaches and it is not very well understood.



Now to answer the second misunderstanding
as to whether feminists are doing IR. I think there has been some progress here,
because IR has broadened its subject matter. And there has been quite a bit of
attention lately to gender issues in the 'real world' - issues such as sexual violence,
trafficking, and human rights. Of course these issues relate not only to women
but they are issues with which feminists have been concerned. Something I
continue to find curious is that the policy and activist communities are
generally ahead of the academy in taking up gender issues. Most international
organizations, and some national governments are under mandates for gender
mainstreaming. Yet, the academy has been slow to catch up and give students the
necessary training and skills to go out in the world and deal with such issues.




The third misunderstanding to which I
referred in the 1997 article is the question of epistemology. While, as I
indicated, there has been some acceptance of the subject matter, with which
feminists are concerned, it is a more fundamental and contentious question as
to whether feminists are recognized as 'doing IR' in the methodological sense. As
the field broadens its concerns, IR may see issues that feminists raise as
legitimate, but how we study them still evokes the same responses that I
brought up fifteen years ago. Many of the questions that feminists ask are not
amenable to being answered using the social scientific methodologies popular in
the field, particularly in the US. (I should add that there is a branch of IR
feminism that does use quantitative methods and it has gained much wider
acceptance by the mainstream.) The feminist assumption that Western knowledge
is gendered and based on men's lives is a challenging claim. And feminists
often prefer to start knowledge from the lives of people who are on the margins
– those who are subordinated or oppressed, and of course, this is very
different from IR which tends toward a top-down look at the international
system. One of the big problems that have become more evident to me over time
is that feminism is fundamentally sociological – it's about people and social
relations, whereas much of IR is about structures and states operating in an
anarchic, rather than a social, environment. I find that historians and
sociologists are more comfortable with gender analysis, perhaps for this reason.
I'm not sure that these misunderstanding are ever going to be solved or that
they need to be solved.





Although Feminist methodology is
often conflated with ethnographic approaches, 
in 'What Is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers
to International Relations Methodological Questions' (2005, pdf here),
you argued that there is no unique Feminist research methodology. Nonetheless,
Feminist IR is well known for using an autoethnographic approach. What does this approach add to
the study of gender in IR? What might account for the relative dearth of
autoethnography in other IR paradigms?



I think it is important to remember that
feminists use many different approaches coming out of very different
theoretical traditions, such as Marxism, socialism, constructivism, postpositivism,
postcolonialism and empiricism. So there are many different kinds of feminisms.
If you look specifically at what has been called 'second-generation feminist IR,'
the empirical work that followed the so-called 'first generation' that
challenged and critiqued the concepts and theoretical foundations of the field,
much of it, but not all, (discourse analysis is quite prevalent too), uses
ethnographic methods which seem well suited to researching some of the issues I
described earlier. Questions about violence against women, domestic servants,
women in the military, violent women, women in peace movements– these are the
sorts of research questions that demand fieldwork and an ethnographic approach.
Because as I stated earlier, IR asks rather different kinds of questions, it
does not generally adopt ethnographic methods. Feminists who do this type of
ethnographic research tell me that their work is often more readily received
and understood by those who do comparative politics, because they are more comfortable
with field research. And since women are not usually found in the halls of
power – as decision-makers. IR feminists are particularly concerned with issues
having to do with marginalized and disempowered peoples' lives. Ethnography is
useful for this type of research.



I see autoethnography as a different issue.
While the reflexive tradition is not unique to feminists, feminism tends to be
reflectivist. As I said earlier, feminists are sensitive to issues about who the
creators of knowledge have been and whose knowledge is claimed to be universal.
Most feminists believe that there is no such thing as universal knowledge. Consequently,
feminists believe that being explicit about one's positionality as a researcher
is very important because none of us can achieve objectivity, often called 'the
view from nowhere'. So while striving to get as accurate and as useful
knowledge as we can, we should be willing to state our own positionality. One's
privilege as a researcher must be acknowledged too; one must always be
sensitive to the unequal power relations between a researcher and their
research subject – something that anthropology recognized some time ago. Feminists
who do fieldwork often try to make their research useful to their subjects or do
participatory research so that they can give something back to the community. All
these concerns lead to autoethnographic disclosures. They demand a reflexive
attitude and a willingness to describe and reassess your research journey as
you go along. This autoethnographic style is hard for researchers in the positivist
tradition to understand. While we all strive to produce accurate and useful
knowledge, positivists' striving for objectivity requires keeping subjectivity
out of their research.





Robert W. Cox (Theory Talk #37)
famously distinguished two approaches to the study of international politics:
problem-solving theory and critical theory. How does the emancipatory project
of the latter inform your perspective of IR and its normative goals? And is
this distinction as valid today as it was when Cox first formulated it, over 3
decades ago?



Yes
I think it's still an important distinction. It's still cited very often which
suggests it's still valid, although postmodern scholars (and certain feminists)
have problems with Western liberal notions of emancipation. I see my own work
as being largely compatible with Cox's definition of critical theory. Like many
feminists, I view my work as explicitly normative; I say explicitly because I
believe all knowledge is normative although not all scholars would admit it. What
Cox calls problem-solving theory is also normative in the conservative sense of
not aiming to changing the world. A normative goal to which feminists are
generally committed is understanding the reasons for women's subordination and
seeking ways to end it. It's also important to note that the IR discipline was borne
with the intention of serving the interests of the state whereas academic feminism
was borne out of social movements for women's emancipation. The normative goals
of my work are to demonstrate how the theory and practice of IR is gendered and
what might be the implications of this, both for how we construct knowledge and
how we go about solving global problems.





Much of your work addresses the
parochial scope and neopositivist inclination of International Relations (IR) scholarship, especially in the United
States. What distinguishes other
'Western' institutional and political contexts (in the UK, Europe, Canada and Oceania) from the American
study of IR?  How and why is
critical/reflectivist IR marginalized in the American context? What is the
status of these 'debates' in non-Western
institutional contexts?



With respect to the parochial scope of US
IR, I refer you to a recent book, edited by Arlene Tickner and Ole Wæver,
International
Relations Scholarship Around the World. It contains chapters by authors from around the world, some of whom
suggest IR in their country imitates the US and some who see very different IRs.
The chapter by Thomas J. Biersteker, ('The Parochialism of Hegemony:
Challenges for 'American' International Relations', read it here in pdf)
reports on his examination of the required reading lists for IR Ph.D.
candidates in the top ten US academic institutions. His findings suggest that
constructivism accounts for only about 10% of readings and anything more
radical even less. Over 90% of assigned works are written by US scholars. The dominance
of quantitative and rational choice approaches in the US may have something to
do with IR generally being a subfield of political science. Critical approaches
often have different epistemological roots. And I stress 'science' because
while IR is also subsumed in certain politics departments in other countries,
the commitment to science, in the neopositivist sense, is something that seems
to be peculiarly American. Stanley Hoffman's famous observation, made over
thirty years ago, that Americans see problems as solvable by the scientific
method is still largely correct I believe (read article here, pdf).
I find it striking that so many formerly US based and/or educated critical
scholars have left the US and are now based elsewhere – in Canada, Australasia,
or Europe.



Biersteker
sees the hegemony of American IR extending well beyond the US. But there is
generally less commitment to quantification elsewhere. This may be due to IR's historical
legacy emerging out of different knowledge traditions or being housed in
separate departments. In France, IR emerged from sociological and legal traditions
and, in the UK, history and political theory, including the Marxist tradition,
have been influential in IR. And European IR scholars do not move as freely
between the academy and the policy world as in the US. All these factors might encourage
more openness to critical approaches. I am afraid I don't know enough about
non-Western traditions to make an informed comment. But we must recognize the
enormous power differentials that exist with respect to engaging IR's debates. Language
barriers are one problem; having access to research funds is an enormous
privilege. Scholars in many parts of the world do not have the resources or the
time to engage in esoteric academic debates, nor do they have the resources to
attend professional meetings or access certain materials. The production of
knowledge is a very unequal process, dominated by those with power and resources;
hence the hegemonic position of the US that Biersteker and others still see.





As methodological pluralism now
retains the status of a norm in the field, John M. Hobson (Theory Talk #71) recently argued that the question
facing IR scholars no longer revolves around the debate between positivist
and postpositivist approaches. Rather, the primary meta-theoretical question
relates to Eurocentrism, that is, 'To be or not to be a Eurocentric, that is the
question.' To what extent do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?



Given
my answer to the last question, I am not sure that methodological pluralism has
reached an accepted status in the US yet. However, John M. Hobson has produced
a very thoughtful and engaging book that asks very provocative questions. Unfortunately,
I doubt many IR scholars in the US have read it and would be rather puzzled by
Hobson's claim. But certainly the Eurocentrism of the discipline is something
to which we should be paying attention. I find it curious how little IR has
recognized its imperial roots or engaged in any discussion of imperialism. As
Brian Schmidt and other historical revisionists have told us, when IR was borne
at the beginning of the twentieth century, imperialism was a central preoccupation
in the discipline. Race also has been ignored almost entirely by IR scholars.  



To
Hobson's specific claim that the important question for IR now is about being
or not being Eurocentric rather than about being positivist or postpositivist, I
do have some problems with this. I am concerned with Hobson's painting
positivism and postpostivism with the same Eurocentric brush. Yes, they are
both Eurocentric; but postpositivists or critical theorists – to use Cox's term
– are at least open to being reflective about how they produce knowledge and
where it comes from. If one can be reflective about one's knowledge it does
allow space to be aware of one's own biases. Those of us on the critical side
of Cox's divide can at least be reflective about the problems of Eurocentrism,
whereas positivists don't consider reflexivity to be part of producing good
research. Nevertheless, Hobson has made an important statement. He has written
a masterful and insightful book and I recommend it all IR scholars.





Last question. Your recent work is
part of an emergent collective dialogue that aims to 'provincialize' the
Western European heritage of IR. In a recent article
entitled 'Dealing with Difference: Problems and Possibilities
for Dialogue in International Relations' you highlight the need for
non-Eurocentric approach to the study of IR. In IR,
what are the prospects for genuine dialogue across methodological and geographical borders?
Where do you see this dialogue taking place?



This is a very tough issue. There are
scholars like Hobson who talk about a non-Eurocentric approach, but given what
I said about resources, about language barriers, and about inequalities in the
ability to produce knowledge, this is difficult. As I've said at many times and
in many places, the power difference is an inhibitor to any genuine dialogue.
So, where is dialogue taking place? Among those, such as Hobson, who advocate a
hybrid approach that takes other knowledge traditions seriously and sees them
as equally valid as one's own. And mostly on the margins of what we call 'IR', where
some very exciting work is being produced. Feminism is one such site. Feminist
approaches are dedicated to dialogic knowledge production, or what they call
knowledge that emerges through conversation. Feminists believe that theory can
emerge from practice, listening to ordinary people and how they make sense of
their lives. I also think that projects like the one undertaken by Wæver and
Tickner (which is still ongoing) that is publishing contributions from scholars
from very different parts of the world is crucial.





J. Ann Tickner is
Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American University. She is also a
Professor Emerita at the University of Southern California where she taught for
fifteen years before coming to American University. Her principle areas of
teaching and research include international theory, peace and security, and
feminist approaches to international relations. She served as President of the
International Studies Association from 2006-2007. Her books include Gendering
World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era (Columbia
University Press, 2001), Gender in International Relations: Feminist
Perspectives on Achieving International Security (Columbia University
Press, 1992), and Self-Reliance Versus
Power Politics: American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation-States
(Columbia University Press, 1987).







Related links





Faculty Profile at American University
Read
Tickner's Hans Morgenthau's Principles of
Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation (Millennium, 1988) here (pdf)
Read Tickner's You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and
IR Theorists (1997 International Studies Quarterly) here (pdf) 
Read Tickner's What Is Your
Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations
Methodological Questions (2005, International Studies Quarterly) here (pdf) 


Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Loet Leydesdorff on the Triple Helix: How Synergies in University-Industry-Government Relations can Shape Innovation Systems





This is the sixth and last in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich 







The relationship between technological innovation
processes and the nation state remains a challenge for the discipline of
International Relations. Non-linear and multi-directional
characteristics of knowledge production, and the diffusive nature of knowledge
itself, limit the general ability of governments to influence and steer
innovation processes. Loet Leydesdorff advances the framework of the "Triple
Helix" that disaggregates national innovation systems into
evolving university-industry-government eco-systems. In this Talk, amongst others, he shows that these eco-systems can be
expected to generate niches with synergy at all scales, and emphasizes that, though
politics are always involved, synergies develop unintentionally.




Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is the most relevant aspect
of the dynamics of innovation for the discipline of International Relations?



The
main challenge is to endogenize the notions of technological progress and
technological development into theorizing about political economies and nation states.
The endogenization of technological innovation and technological development
was first placed on the research agenda of economics by evolutionary economists
like Nelson and Winter in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this context, the
question was how to endogenize the dynamics of knowledge, organized knowledge,
science and technology into economic theorizing. However, one can equally well
formulate the problem of how to reflect on the global (sub)dynamics of
organized knowledge production in political theory and International Relations.



From
a longer-term perspective, one can consider that the nation states – the
national or political economies in Europe – were shaped in the 19th
century, somewhat later for Germany (after 1871), but for most countries it was
during the first half of the 19th century. This was after the French
and American Revolutions and in relation to industrialization. These nation
states were able to develop an institutional framework for organizing the
market as a wealth-generating mechanism, while the institutional framework
permitted them to retain wealth, to regulate market forces, and also to steer
them to a certain extent. However, the market is not only a local dynamics; it
is also a global phenomenon.



Nowadays,
another global dynamics is involved: science and technology add a dynamics different
from that of the market. The market is an equilibrium-seeking mechanism at each
moment of time. The evolutionary dynamics of science and technology nowadays
adds a non-equilibrium-seeking dynamics over time on top of that, and this puts
the nation state in a very different position. Combining an equilibrium-seeking
dynamics at each moment of time with a non-equilibrium seeking one over time
results in a complex adaptive dynamics, or an eco-dynamics, or however you want
to call it – these are different words for approximately the same thing.



For
the nation state, the question arises of how it relates to the global market
dynamics on the one side, and the global dynamics of knowledge and innovation on
the other. Thus, the nation state has to combine two tasks. I illustrated this
model of three subdynamics with a figure in my 2006 book entitled The Knowledge-Based Economy: Modeled,
measured, simulated (see image). The figure shows that first-order interactions
generate a knowledge-based economy as a next-order or global regime on top of
the localized trajectories of nation states and innovative firms. These complex
dynamics have first to be specified and then to be analyzed empirically.



For
example, the knowledge-based dynamics change the relation between government
and the economy; and they consequently change the position of the state in
relation to wealth-retaining mechanisms. How can the nation state be organized
in such a way as to retain wealth from knowledge locally, while knowledge (like
capital) tends to travel beyond boundaries? One can envisage the complex system
dynamics as a kind of cloud – a cloud
that touches the ground at certain places, as Harald Bathelt, for example,
formulated.



How
can national governments shape conditions for the cloud to touch and to remain
on the ground? The Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations can
be considered as an eco-system of bi- and tri-lateral relations. The three
institutions and their interrelations can be expected to form a system carrying
the three functions of (i) novelty production, (ii) wealth generation, and
(iii) normative control. One tends to think of university-industry-government
relations first as neo-corporatist arrangements between these institutional
partners. However, I am interested in the ecosystem shaped through the tri- and
bilateral relationships.



This
ecosystem can be shaped at different levels. It can be a regional ecosystem or
a national ecosystem, for instance. One can ask whether there is a surplus of synergy
between the three (sub-)dynamics of university-industry-government relations
and where that synergy can generate wealth, knowledge, and control; in which
places, and along trajectories for which periods of time – that is, the same
synergy as meant by "a cloud touching the ground".



For
example, when studying Piedmont as a region in Northern Italy, it is
questionable whether the synergy in university-industry-government relations is
optimal at this regional level or should better be examined from a larger perspective
that includes Lombardy. On the one
hand, the administrative borders of nations and regions result from the
construction of political economies in the 19th century; but on the
other hand, the niches of synergy that can be expected in a knowledge-based
economy are bordered also; for example, in terms of metropolitan regions (e.g.,
Milan–Turin–Genoa).



Since
political dynamics are always involved, this has implications for International
Relations as a field of study. But the dynamic analysis is different from
comparative statics (that is, measurement at different moments of time). The
knowledge dynamics can travel and be "footloose" to use the words of Raymond
Vernon, although it leaves footprints behind. Grasping "wealth from knowledge"
(locally or regionally) requires taking a systems perspective. However, the
system is not "given"; the system remains under reconstruction and can thus be
articulated only as a theoretically informed hypothesis.



In
the social sciences, one can use the concept of a hypothesized system
heuristically. For example, when
analyzing the knowledge-based economy in Germany, one can ask whether more synergy
can be explained when looking at the level of the whole country (e.g., in terms
of the East-West or North-South divide) or at the level of Germany's Federal
States? What is the surplus of the nation or at the European level? How can one
provide political decision-making with the required variety to operate as a
control mechanism on the complex dynamics of these eco-systems?



A
complex system can be expected to generate niches with synergy at all scales,
but as unintended consequences. To what extent and for which time span can
these effects be anticipated and then perhaps be facilitated? At this point,
Luhmann's theory comes in because he has this notion of different codifications
of communication, which then, at a next-order level, begin to self-organize
when symbolically generalized.



Codes
are constructed bottom-up, but what is constructed bottom-up may thereafter
begin to control top-down. Thus, one should articulate reflexively the
selection mechanisms that are constructed from the bottom-up variation by
specifying the why as an hypothesis.
What are the selection mechanisms? Observable relations (such as
university-industry relations) are not neutral, but mean different things for
the economy and for the state; and this meaning of the observable relations can
be evaluated in terms of the codes of communication.



Against
Niklas Luhmann's model, I would argue that codes of communication can be
translated into one another since interhuman communications are not
operationally closed, as in the biological model of autopoiesis. One also needs a social-scientific perspective on the
fluidities ("overflows") and translations among functions, as emphasized, for
example, by French scholars such as Michel Callon and Bruno Latour. In
evolutionary economics, one distinguishes between market and non-market
selection environments, but not among selection environments that are
differently codified. Here, Luhmann's theory offers us a heuristic: The complex
system of communications tends to differentiate in terms of the symbolic
generalizations of codes of communication because this differentiation is
functional in allowing the system to process more complexity and thus to be
more innovative. The more orthogonal the codes, the more options for
translations among them. The synergy indicator measures these options as
redundancy. The selection environments, however, have to be specified historically
because these redundancies—other possibilities—are not given but rather constructed
over long periods of time.





How did you arrive where
you currently work on?


I
became interested in the relations between science, technology, and society as
an undergraduate (in biochemistry) which coincided with the time of the student
movement of the late 1960s. We began to study Jürgen Habermas in the framework
of the "critical university," and I decided to continue with a second degree in
philosophy. After the discussions between Luhmann and Habermas (1971), I
recognized the advantages of Luhmann's more empirically oriented systems approach
and I pursued my Ph.D. in the sociology of organization and labour.



In
the meantime, we got the opportunity to organize an interfaculty department for
Science and Technology Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam after a
competition for a large government grant. In the context of this department, I
became interested in methodology: how can one compare across case studies and
make inferences? Actually, my 1995 book The
Challenge of Scientometrics
had a kind of Triple-Helix model on the cover: How do cognitions, texts, and
authors exhibit different dynamics that influence one another?



For
example, when an author publishes a paper in a scholarly journal, this may add
to his reputation as an author, but the knowledge claimed in the text enters a
process of validation which can be much more global and anonymous. These
processes are mediated since they are based on communication. Thus, one can add
to the context of discovery (of authors) and the context of justification (of
knowledge contents) a context of mediation (in texts). The status of a journal,
for example, matters for the communication of the knowledge content in the article.
The contexts operate as selection environments upon one another.



In
evolutionary economics, one is used to distinguishing between market and
non-market selection environments, but not among more selection environments
that are differently codified. At this point, Luhmann's theory offers a new
perspective: The complex system of communications tends to differentiate in
terms of the symbolic generalization of codes of communication because this differentiation
among the codes of communication allows the system to process more complexity
and to be more innovative in terms of possible translations. The different
selection environments for communications, however, are not given but constructed
historically over long periods of time. The modern (standardized) format of the
citation, for example, was constructed at the end of the 19th
century, but it took until the 1950s before the idea of a citation index was
formulated (by Eugene Garfield). The use of citations in evaluative
bibliometrics is even more recent.



In
evolutionary economics, one distinguishes furthermore between (technological)
trajectories and regimes. Trajectories can result from "mutual shaping" between
two selection environments, for example, markets and technologies. Nations and
firms follow trajectories in a landscape. Regimes are global and require the
specification of three (or more) selection environments. When three (or more)
dynamics interact, symmetry can be broken and one can expect feed-forward and
feedback loops. Such a system can begin to flourish auto-catalytically when the
configuration is optimal.



From
such considerations, that is, a confluence of the neo-institutional program of
Henry Etzkowitz and my neo-evolutionary view, our Triple Helix model emerged in
1994: how do institutions and functions interrelate and change one another or,
in other words, provide options for innovation? Under what conditions
can university-industry-government relations lead to wealth generation and
organized knowledge production? The starting point was a workshop about Evolutionary Economics and Chaos Theory: New
directions for technology studies held in Amsterdam in 1993. Henry
suggested thereafter that we could collaborate further on university-industry
relations. I answered that I needed at least three (sub)dynamics from the
perspective of my research program, and then we agreed about "A Triple Helix of
University-Industry-Government Relations". Years later, however, we took our
two lines of research apart again, and in 2002 I began developing a
Triple-Helix indicator of synergy in a series of studies of national systems of
innovation.





What would you give as
advice to students who would like to get into the field of innovation and
global politics?



In
general, I would advise them to be both a specialist and broader than that.
Innovation involves crossing established borders. Learn at least two languages.
If your background is political science, then take a minor in science &
technology studies or in economics. One needs both the specialist profile and
the potential to reach out to other audiences by being aware of the need to
make translations between different frameworks. Learn to be reflexive about the
status of what one can say in one or the other framework.



For
example, I learned to avoid the formulation of grandiose statements such as
"modern economies are knowledge-based economies," and to say instead: "modern
economies can increasingly be considered as knowledge-based economies." The
latter formulation provides room for asking "to what extent," and thus one can
ask for further information, indicators, and results of the measurement.



In
the sociology of science, specialisms and paradigms are sometimes considered as
belief systems. It seems to me that by considering scholarly discourses as
systems of rationalized expectations one can make the distinction between
normative and cognitive learning. Normative learning (that is, in belief
systems) is slower than cognitive learning (in terms of theorized expectations)
because the cognitive mode provides us with more room for experimentation: One
can afford to make mistakes, since one's communication and knowledge claims
remain under discussion, and not one's status as a communicator. The cognitive
mode has advantages; it can be considered as the surplus that is further
developed during higher education. Normative learning is slower; it dominates
in the political sphere.





What
does the "Triple Helix" reveal about the fragmentation of "national innovation
systems"?



In
2003, colleagues from the Department of Economics and Management Studies at the
Erasmus University in Rotterdam offered me firm data from the Netherlands containing
these three dimensions: the economic, the geographical, and the technological dimensions
in data of more than a million Dutch firms. I presented the results at the
Schumpeter Society in Turin in 2004, and asked whether someone in the audience
had similar data for other countries. I expected Swedish or Israeli colleagues
to have this type of statistics, but someone from Germany stepped in, Michael
Fritsch, and so we did the analysis for Germany. These studies were first
published in Research Policy.
Thereafter, we did studies on Hungary, Norway, Sweden, and recently also China
and Russia.



Several
conclusions arise from these studies. Using entropy statistics, the data can be
decomposed along the three different dimensions. One can decompose national
systems geographically into regions, but one can also decompose them in terms
of the technologies involved (e.g., high-tech versus medium-tech). We were
mainly relying on national data. And of course, there are limitations to the
data collections. Actually, we now have international data, but this is
commercial data and therefore more difficult to use reliably than governmental
statistics.



For
the Netherlands, we obtained the picture that would more or less be expected:
Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Eindhoven are the most knowledge-intensive and
knowledge-based regions. This is not surprising, although there was one surprise:
We know that in terms of knowledge bases, Amsterdam is connected to Utrecht and
then the geography goes a bit to the east in the direction of Wageningen. What
we did not know was that the niche also spreads to the north in the direction
of Zwolle. The highways to Amsterdam Airport (Schiphol) are probably the most
important.



In
the case of Germany, when we first analyzed the data at the level of the
"Laender" (Federal States), we could see the East-West divide still prevailing,
but when we repeated the analysis at the lower level of the "Regierungsbezirke"
we no longer found the East-West divide as dominant (using 2004 data). So, the
environment of Dresden for example was more synergetic in Triple-Helix terms
than that of Saarbruecken. And this was nice to see considering my idea that
the knowledge-based economy increasingly prevails since the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union. The discussion about two different
models for organizing the political economy—communism or liberal democracy—had
become obsolete after 1990.



After
studying Germany, I worked with Balázs Lengyel on Hungarian data. Originally,
we could not find any regularity in the Hungarian data, but then the idea arose
to analyze the Hungarian data as three different innovation systems: one around
Budapest, which is a metropolitan innovation system; one in the west of the
country, which has been incorporated into Western Europe; and one in the east
of the country, which has remained the old innovation system that is state-led
and dependent on subsidies. For the western part, one could say that Hungary
has been "europeanized" by Austria and Germany; it has become part of a
European system.



When
Hungary came into the position to create a national
innovation system, free from Russia and the Comecon, it was too late, as
Europeanization had already stepped in and national boundaries were no longer
as dominant. Accordingly, and this was a very nice result, assessing this
synergy indicator on Hungary as a nation, we did not find additional synergy at
the national (that is, above-regional) level. While we clearly found synergy at
the national level for the Netherlands and also found it in Germany, but at the
level of the Federal States, we could not find synergy at a national level for
Hungary. Hungary has probably developed too late to develop a nationally
controlled system of innovations.



A
similar phenomenon appeared when we studied Norway: my Norwegian colleague
(Øivind Strand) did most of our analysis there. To our surprise, the
knowledge-based economy was not generated where the universities are located (Oslo
and Trondheim), but on the West Coast, where the off-shore, marine and maritime
industries are most dominant. FDI (foreign direct investment) in the marine and
maritime industries leads to knowledge-based synergy in the regions on the West
Shore of Norway. Norway is still a national system, but the Norwegian
universities like Trondheim or Oslo are not so much involved in entrepreneurial
networks. These are traditional universities, which tend to keep their hands
off the economy.



Actually,
when we had discussions about these two cases, Norway and Hungary, which both
show that internationalization had become a major factor, either in the form of
Europeanization in the Hungarian case, or in the form of foreign-driven
investments (off-shore industry and oil companies) in the Norwegian case, I
became uncertain and asked myself whether we did not believe too much in our
indicators? Therefore, I proposed to Øivind to study Sweden, given the availability
of well-organized data of this national system.



We
expected to find synergy concentrated in the three regional systems of
Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö/Lund. Indeed, 48.5 percent of the Swedish
synergy is created in these three regions. This is more than one would expect
on the basis of the literature. Some colleagues were upset, because they had
already started trying to work on new developments of the Triple Helix, for
example, in Linköping. But the Swedish economy is organized and centralized in
this geographical dimension. Perhaps that is why one talks so much about
"regionalization" in policy documents. Sweden is very much a national
innovation system, with additional synergy between the regions.





Can governments alter
historical trajectories of national, regional or local innovation systems?



Let
me mention the empirical results for China in order to illustrate the
implications of empirical conclusions for policy options. We had no Chinese
data set, but we obtained access to the database Orbis of the Bureau van Dijk
(an international company, which is Wall Street oriented, assembling data about
companies) that contains industry indicators such as names, addresses,
NACE-codes, types of technology, the sizes of each enterprise, etc. However,
this data can be very incomplete. Using this incomplete data for China, we said
that we were just going to show how one could do the analysis  if one had full data. We guess that the
National Bureau of Statistics of China has complete data.
I did the analysis with Ping Zhou, Professor at Zhejiang University.



We
analyzed China first at the provincial level, and as expected, the East Coast
emerged as much more knowledge intense than the rest of the country. After
that, we also looked at the next-lower level of the 339 prefectures of China.
From this analysis, four of them popped up as far more synergetic than the
others. These four municipalities were: Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and
Chongqing.



These
four municipalities became clearly visible as an order of magnitude more
synergetic than other regions. The special characteristic about them is that –as
against the others – these four municipalities are administered by the central
government. Actually, it came out of my data and I did not understand it; but
my Chinese colleague said that this result was very nice and specified this
relationship.



The
Chinese case thus illustrates that government control can make a difference. It
shows – and that is not surprising, as China runs on a different model – that
the government is able to organize the four municipalities in such a way as to
increase synergy. Of course, I do not know what is happening on the ground. We
know that the Chinese system is more complex than these three dimensions
suggest. I guess the government agencies may wish to consider the option of
extending the success of this development model, to Guangdong for example or to
other parts of China. Isn't it worrisome that all the other and less controlled
districts have not been as successful in generating synergy?



Referring
more generally to innovation policies, I would advise as a heuristics that
political discourse is able to signal a problem, but policy questions do not
enable us to analyze the issues. Regional development, for example, is an issue
in Sweden because the system is very centralized, more than in Norway, for
example. But there is nothing in our data that supports the claim that the
Swedish government is successful in decentralizing the knowledge-based economy
beyond the three metropolitan regions. We may be able to reach conclusions like
these serving as policy advice. One develops policies on the basis of intuitive
assumptions which a researcher is sometimes able to test.



As
noted, one can expect a complex system continuously to produce unintended
consequences, and thus it needs monitoring. The dynamics of the system are
different from the sum of the sub-dynamics because of the interaction effects
and feedback loops. Metaphors such as a Triple Helix, Mode-2, or the Risk
Society can be stimulating for the discourse, but these metaphors tend to develop
their own dynamics of proliferating discourses.



The
Triple Helix, for example, can first be considered as a call for collaboration
in networks of institutions. However, in an ecosystem of bi-lateral and
tri-lateral relations, one has a trade-off between local integration
(collaboration) and global differentiation (competition). The markets and the
sciences develop at the global level, above the level of specific relations. A
principal agent such as government may be locked into a suboptimum. Institutional
reform that frees the other two dynamics (markets and sciences) requires
translation of political legitimation into other codes of communication. Translations
among codes of communication provide the innovation engine.





Is there a connection
between infrastructures and the success of innovation processes?



One
of the conclusions, which pervades throughout all advanced economies, is that
knowledge intensive services (KIS) are
not synergetic locally because they can be disconnected – uncoupled – from the
location. For example, if one offers a knowledge-intensive service in Munich
and receives a phone call from Hamburg, the next step is to take a plane to
Hamburg, or to catch a train inside Germany perhaps. Thus, it does not matter
whether one is located in Munich or Hamburg as knowledge-intensive services
uncouple from the local economy. The main point is proximity to an airport or
train station.



This
is also the case for high-tech knowledge-based manufacturing. But it is
different for medium-tech manufacturing, because in this case the dynamics are
more embedded in the other parts of the economy. If one looks at Russia, the
knowledge-intensive services operate differently from the Western European
model, where the phenomenon of uncoupling takes place. In Russia, KIS
contribute to coupling, as knowledge-intensive services are related to state
apparatuses.



In
the Russian case, the knowledge-based economy is heavily concentrated in Moscow
and St. Petersburg. So, if one aims –as the Russian government proclaims – to create
not "wealth from knowledge" but "knowledge from wealth" – that is, oil revenues
–it might be wise to uncouple the knowledge-intensive services from the state
apparatuses. Of course, this is not easy to do in the Russian model because
traditionally, the center (Moscow) has never done this. Uncoupling
knowledge-intensive services, however, might give them a degree of freedom to
move around, from Tomsk to Minsk or vice
versa, steered by economic forces more than they currently are (via institutions
in Moscow).





Final question. What does path-dependency mean in the context of
innovation dynamics?



In
The Challenge of Scientometrics. The development, measurement, and
self-organization of scientific communications (1995), I used Shannon-type information theory to study
scientometric problems, as this methodology combines both static and dynamic
analyses. Connected to this theory I developed a measurement method for
path-dependency and critical transitions.



In
the case of a radio transmission, for example, you have a sender and a
receiver, and in between you may have an auxiliary station. For instance, the
sender is in New York and the receiver is in Bonn and the auxiliary station is
in Iceland. The signal emerges in New York and travels to Bonn, but it may be possible
to improve the reception by assuming the signal is from Iceland instead of
listening to New York. When Iceland provides a better signal, it is possible to
forget the history of the signal before it arrived in Island. It no longer
matters whether Iceland obtained the signal originally from New York or Boston.
One takes the signal from Iceland and the pre-history of the signal does not
matter anymore for a receiver.



Such
a configuration provides a path-dependency (on Iceland) in
information-theoretical terms, measurable in terms of bits of information. In a
certain sense you get negative bits of information, since the shortest path in
the normal triangle would be from New York to Bonn, and in this case the
shortest path is from New York via Iceland to Bonn. I called this at the time a
critical transition. In a scientific text for instance, a new terminology can
come up and if it overwrites the old terminology to the extent that one does
not have to listen to the old terminology anymore, one has a critical
transition that frees one from the path-dependencies at a previous moment of
time.



Thus,
my example is about radical and knowledge-based changes. As long as one has to
listen to the past, one does not make a critical transition. The knowledge-based
approach is always about creative destruction and about moving ahead,
incorporating possible new options in the future. The hypothesized future
states become more important than the past. The challenge, in my opinion, is to
make the notion of options operational and to bring these ideas into
measurement. The Triple-Helix indicator measures the number of possible options
as additional redundancy. This measurement has the additional advantage that one
becomes sensitive to uncertainty in the prediction.





Loet Leydesdorff is Professor Emeritus at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR) of the University of Amsterdam. He is Honorary Professor of the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit (SPRU) of the University of Sussex, Visiting Professor at the School of Management, Birkbeck, University of London, Visiting Professor of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC) in Beijing, and Guest Professor at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. He has published extensively in systems theory, social network analysis, scientometrics, and the sociology of innovation (see at http://www.leydesdorff.net/list.htm). With Henry Etzkowitz, he initiated a series of workshops, conferences, and special issues about the Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations. He received the Derek de Solla Price Award for Scientometrics and Informetrics in 2003 and held "The City of Lausanne" Honor Chair at the School of Economics, Université de Lausanne, in 2005. In 2007, he was Vice-President of the 8th International Conference on Computing Anticipatory Systems (CASYS'07, Liège). In 2014, he was listed as a highly-cited author by Thomson Reuters. 





Literature and Related
links:



Science & Technology Dynamics,
University of Amsterdam / Amsterdam School of Communications
Research (ASCoR) 


Leydesdorff,
L. (2006). The Knowledge-Based Economy: Modeled, Measured, Simulated. Universal Publishers, Boca Raton, FL.


Leydesdorff, L. (2001). A Sociological Theory of Communication: The Self-Organization of the
Knowledge-Based Society. Universal Publishers, Boca Raton, FL.


Leydesdorff,
L. (1995). The Challenge of Scientometrics . The development, measurement, and
self-organization of scientific communications. Leiden, DSWO Press, Leiden University.


http://www.leydesdorff.net/





Print version of this Talk (pdf)



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