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Digital ‘liquid’ consumption is delimited from solid physical possession by ephemerality, dematerialisation, and accessibility. Web3 applications (including non-fungible tokens, the metaverse and decentralised platforms) have the potential to de-liquify consumption and re-attribute the notions of ownership, longevity, and materiality to digital goods. Daniel Albrecht Nuedling writes that Web3 technologies reshape the notion of digital ownership and offer … Continued

Operations of the Global – Explorations of Dis/Connectivity
6th-8th October 2011

organized by:
Prof. Dr. Urs Stäheli
Dr. Sven Opitz
Ute Tellmann, PhD

How to Think the Global?

Recent debates on globalization have challenged the idea of the globe as a pre-existing and all-encompassing entity. The focus has turned towards different and situated modes of doing globalization. This conference suggests understanding the global as the effect of particular, fragmented and material operations. We seek to explore and compare different forms of dis/connectivity. Finance, diplomacy, law, consumption, transport and migration depend for their global reach on specific forms of connectivity. While finance is tied by networks of information; global commodity chains depend on logistical organization of space. Where political and legal norms travel by citation and standardization, security measures enlist contagious logics of affect. Each form of connectivity is constitutively linked to different materialities and media and is characterized by different temporalities and intensities. At this conference we will ask how different materialities and logics of connectivity intertwine. How do these modes differ in terms of density, speed and diffusion? How can we theorize the materiality of these connective links? Are there tipping points that turn connectivity into disconnectivity?

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 There are many different answers to the question of what Marx and Spinoza have in common, theories of ideology, materialism, naturalism, and so on, to name a few that have been discussed on this blog. To this list Margherita Pascucci adds that perhaps what Spinoza and Marx have in common is the common itself. This is is claim put forward in Potentia of Poverty: Marx Reads Spinoza (part of the Historical Materialism series, currently it is only out as a hardcover, but it will be out from Haymarket in the Spring). In making such a claim Pascucci focuses on the intersection of not just Marx and Spinoza, but the way in which they both assert in different ways, the primacy of the epistemology and ontology of relation. As Pascucci writes, "The commodity in Marx and the common notion in Spinoza are both defined through an other. This 'other' which defines them is the common among two or more things. In the case of the commodity, this common has a character of abstraction--it disappears at a certain point; in the case of common notions, this common is something material, that which, common to a body and other bodies, brings the trace of relation and allows for knowledge."As they used to say in graduate school, lets unpack this claim. First, we have the common notion in Spinoza, the second kind of knowledge, beyond the imagination. As Spinoza writes in Proposition 37 and 38 of Part Two of the Ethics:P37. What is common to all things, and is equally in the part and in the whole, does not constitute he essence of any singular thing.P38 Those things which are common to all, and which are equally in the part and the whole, can only be conceived adequately. Common notions are understood in terms of both their genesis and their logic. In terms of their genesis let us begin with the simple and most basic encounter, walking around in the house in the dark I bang my shin against something, I do not know what. This is an encounter marked by pain and confusion, by the affects of sadness and hate. Those affects give shape to what could be called the inadequate ideas in which how something affects me and what something is are confusedly muddled in my scream of "ow, shit! what the fuck?" In that encounter there is still something in common, something that can be conceived adequately, I know something about my body, its materiality, and about whatever I ran into in the dark. I know that it is matter too, it has density and hardness. This commonality is incredibly general, but it is the basis for the construction of other common notions. Later, in Proposition 40, Spinoza contrasts common notions, which do not define the essence of any singular things, with the universal. The universal is attempt to define the essence of a singular thing, to understand what quality defines humanity, as rational or political animal, or even featherless biped. However, the problem with this particular essence is precisely the variability of particulars. As Spinoza writes, "But it should be noted that these notions are not formed by all in same way, but very from one to another, in accordance with what the body has been more often affected by, and what the mind imagines or recollects more easily. For example, those who have more often regarded men's stature with wonder will understand by the word man an animal of erect stature. But those who been accustomed to consider something else will form another common image of men--for example that man is an animal capable of laughter, or a featherless biped, or a rational animal."In contrast with a universal burdened with an often unstated particularity we have the common as that which is common to all and particular to none.Okay, what does this has to do with the commodity? Here one only has to think of Part One of Capital.  Value can only be expressed in relation. This is the point of all those formulations about linen and coats. As Marx writes, "The value of linen as a congealed mass of human labour can be expressed only as an 'objectivity' [Geganständlichkeit], a thing which is materially different from linen itself and yet common to the linen and other commodities." There are a lot of jokes, and memes, about the laborious process Marx goes through to show two things: first, that the value of a commodity cannot be shown through itself, a coat is worth a coat is tautology, and that the value any commodity can be expressed through any other commodity. As much as this section seems to go on a bit too long, and with unnecessary precision, its fundamental point, a point that comes out in relation to Spinoza, is worth stressing, and that is that the common, the relational is there even at the heart of capitalism. In capitalism commodities relate even if we remain isolated as subjects of freedom, equality, and Bentham.This brings us back to Pascucci's point, that the difference between the commodity and the common notion is that while the common notion is common to all and in the part and the whole, both my shin and the end table (or whatever I ran into) have extension and mass, value of the commodity is not common to all materially, but is abstracted from it. This abstraction underscores the brief, all too brief discussion of money that takes place in Capital between the general form of value and the famous section of commodity fetishism. Money is of course the general equivalent, it is why we do not go around expressing the value coats, tea, and corn, in the form of linen. Money is the materialization of the abstract idea. As Balibar writes in his little book on Marx, "Money is then constantly reproduced and preserved by its different economic uses (unit of account, means of payment, being hoarded or held in 'reserve' etc.) The other side of this materialization is, then, a process of constant idealization of the monetary material, since it serves immediately to express a universal form or an 'idea."Here is the difference this difference makes. I often think of the opening section of Capital as Marx asking a question that we do not ask in daily life: how are two disparate and different commodities equivalent? We do not ask this question because it presents itself as already answered. Money is the answer. Money is the condition of the equivalence of the disparate and distinct. This is another reason as to why I think that Marx's commodity fetishism section covers the same problem as the Appendix to Part One of the Ethics. In other words, the common, the commonality of labor is obscured in the fetish of the money form. This is not a consideration, much less a review, of the entirety of Pascucci's book. I have not even gotten into the discussion of poverty and subjectivity, parts that I have some serious questions about, but her reflections on the common in Spinoza and Marx not only sheds light on a different commonality between the two, one that ultimately sheds light on the common itself. 

 Commander In undergrad I got really into theory, all of it, reading Baudrillard, Deleuze, Debord, Foucault, etc., most definitely etc, all the time. My theory fascination was a byproduct of reading zines and little semiotextes, the more polemical, the more outlandish its claims, the more I loved it. One little book I particularly loved was First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot by Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi. It is an odd little book, a reading of the Reagan/Bush years framed as much by the legalist philosopher Shang Yang's The Book of Lord Shang as it is by the expected references to Deleuze and Guattari. (Brian Massumi of course translated A Thousand Plateaus). That odd idiosyncratic nature is precisely what I loved about it. I dreamt of writing something similar, not on Reagan and legalism but something which brought together a variety of disparate references to think through a specific problem. I guess my book which talks about Spinoza and Marx along with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, might be an attempt to realize that wish. It does not talk about dogs though, which brings us to this post. I read with horror and interest the story of Biden's dog Commander and the number of times that he has bitten secret service agents. Part of this has to do with my own history. People who follow me on social media probably have seen my dog Bento. What people who only know him online do not know is that Bento is what some refer to as a reactive dog, or in other terms, he is fear aggressive, mostly towards humans. This pretty much fits Plato's definition of dogs in the Republic, he loves the people he knows, not just love, he adores them, but if he does not know you he is at least suspicious of you, if not openly hostile. He loves meeting new dogs, but is not really interested in meeting new people. He is generally distrustful of peopel. This is something I imagined he learned on the mean streets of Memphis (where he came from before I adopted him in Maine). In turn I had to learn how to deal with it and manage it. I have gone through three different behaviorists, eventually taking him to work with the behaviorists at Tufts, who I cannot recommend more highly. (Yeah, I spent a lot of money). What they taught me is that this is a condition than can be managed but never entirely changed. We do manage, mostly this just means that anyone coming to the house has to go through a lengthy introduction process; he wears a muzzle to the vet, and we mostly keep our distance from people out in the world. If you ask "Can I pet your dog" (and by all means you should always ask) the answer is always "No, sorry, but thanks for asking." On some immediate level reading about Commander was reading one of my worst nightmares. To be clear, Bento has never bit anyone. Like I said, we manage his reactions. Bento at his daycare where he has many dog and human friends My nightmare was always what would happen if Bento bit someone. I could only imagine a string of events which ended with Bento going to an "undisclosed location," but in his case the undisclosed location in question would be a euphemism for the final undisclosed location we are all heading towards. I guess that is what separates me from the President. The sovereign is he who decides the exception, and in this case that includes a dog that can bite people repeatedly without legal ramifications. However, it got me think of the politics of dogs again, something that I wrote about briefly with Trump.  The fabricated image of Trump putting a medal of honor on a dog stands in sharp contrast with Biden's dog taking a chunk out of secret service agents arm. One is a fabricated image of command and authority, and the other is one of a force out of control.This brings me back to Dean and Massumi's little book. In that book they draw a sharp distinction between Reagan who functions as a kind of figure of transcendence, a despot in Deleuze and Guattari's term, who manages to appropriate all of the various functions of the nation and and the state to embody them. Reagan became America. This stands in sharp contrast to Bush. As Dean and Massumi write:"Old Glory's magic dust didn't stick to Bush's lapels. Try as he might to pledge himself to it, if fell from his shoulders like dandruff. Whenever he drew attention to himself, it was in a way that highlighted his inability to rise above, or even remain seated--to maintain his presence at all. For example, Bush could never garner for himself the kind of political capital Reagan did with second-hand war stories, even though he had a true one to tell. Bush actually was a fighter pilot in World War II. The story he tells is about being shot down. It ends with him floating aimlessly in a little yellow raft thinking wistfully about his family as he waits for rescue. In his hour of danger, a raft away from death, the thought of family did not unify the Bush substance(lessness) with that of the nation, as if had for Reagan reminiscing about his birth; rather, it led him to reflect on "my faith, the separation of church and state." Church/state...mind/body, spirituality/materiality, self/other. This split, which Reagan tried to hard to overcome, was a given for Bush, his "faith." It was his ultimate element, his destiny, it was to Bush what the sea was to his doomed fighter plane."Whereas Reagan could appropriate the various machines of the state to the point where everything American seemed to emanate from him, Bush constantly lived the division between his person and his power. This is seen most immediately in the first Gulf War, in which the power of the state's war machine was split between Bush and his generals, most notably Schwarzkopf. It is tempting to read Biden as embodying a similar division, one that Commander exemplifies. It is not the division between the president and his power, but between word and actions. The story linked to above is riddled with statements from the Biden's about their concern. As the piece states, "A White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter said the president and first lady were "heartbroken" over what had happened, had apologized to those who were bitten and had even brought flowers to some of them." This division between the deep concern and the sheer number of attacks, brings to mind another, more pressing division: the division between Biden's repeated statement of deep concern for the situation in Gaza coupled with his continued support, actual military and financial support, for Netanyahu and Israel. I do not know how the Secret Service agents felt about getting flowers, but it is increasingly clear that the words of concern and heartbreak many very little to the people in Gaza, and the people in the US who want a ceasefire. Dean and Massumi theorized Reagan and Bush as transcendence and immanence, unity and division. Looking at Trump and Biden through dogs gives us another division. One between an ersatz toughness that is somehow convincing, and gestures of concern that are less so. A president who gleefully identifies with the Machiavellian beast of the state and one who does not even now how to appear to be of the people, out of touch with what it means to live with a dog, and, more importantly, with how the very voters he would count on feel about an ongoing genocide. The simulacrum of power or a division between sentiment and action, these are the choices that voters are facing. 

What follows is not a review of the entirety of Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production, something that is hard to do with collections of essays in general, trying to find some common theme or thread, but would be easy to do in this case, because not only are the essays excellent on their own they also unify around an important thread of saving Macherey's work in general and his first book on literary production from obscurity. This has also been one of the projects of this blog, and one can follow the links to reviews (or at least posts) on his books on daily life, the university, utopia, norms, Spinoza, and literary production. What I would like to do instead is pick up one of the central threads running through this collection. This thread has to do with the connection between symptomatic reading and capitalism. The term symptom carries with it a heavy Freudian influence, and with that there is the suggestion that the symptoms in question are some kind of slip reveal if not the unconscious then some other omni-historical reality, perhaps the limit of any ideology. In his essay, "Reading Althusser" Macherey makes the case that the symptom that Althusser read through Marx reading political economy had a particular structure and reality. As Macherey writes:"Symptomatic reading seeks to show between the lines not the hidden presence of a content--the essence hidden beneath appearance, which requires only that it be brought into the open and placed before our eyes--but a lack waiting for the means that would permit it to be filled, means which materially are lacking."And more specifically in the next paragraph. "Marx's discovery is that capitalism exploits an ambiguity related to that on which the notion of "power" is based; it is made possible by the ambiguity proper to a reality that may exist both potentially and actuality at the same time, and from which it has found the means to draw the maximum profit, in the two forms of extraction of absolute surplus value (an extension of the working day) and of relative surplus value (an increase in the productivity of labor power). When Marx speaks of the relation between essence and appearance, he speaks without knowing it, because, in fact he does not speak of it, all the while speaking without speaking of the relation between the potentiality and actuality, which is the secret of the function of labor power and of its exploitation by the capitalist who pretends to buy labor, and to pay what it is worth, as Ricardo insisted, while in fact he has rented the right to make use of it a certain place and time, transforming it from the potentiality to the actuality of labor power."Symptomatic reading concerns the fundamental orientation of Marx's project. It is the lynchpin around which the whole critique of political economy rests. The difference between labor, as that which is sold and bought, and labor power, gets at the fundamental relation between potential and actuality in capitalism. Labor is treated as any other commodity, it exists on a market that fluctuates with rises and fall of supply and demand, but unlike any other commodity it is not a thing, but a potential, a capacity. How much it produces, how much work it does (or really he, she, or they do) is not set, not determined by its price on the market, but is determined by how much work the capitalist can get from it by extending the time worked (absolute surplus value) or the intensity (relative surplus value). This is why, in the one section of Les Sujet des Normes that has been translated Macherey argues that capitalism should be understood as a kind of materialist metaphysics because it puts to work, in a practical way, the distinction between potentiality and actuality. This metaphysical division is also a quotidian division between the worker as an owner of labor power, as a wage earner, interpellated as such, and worker as part of the valorization process, as part of productive process and subordinated to it. In some striking passages from the essay on Reading Althusser Macherey, in a passage that to some extent annuls the gap that would separate "Althusserian" Marxism from "Autonomist Marxism" (quotes are necessary for both of those terms), Macherey argues that this division masks a fundamental relation of domination (my apologies for the picture of the text). The symptom of capital is thus wage labor, or the difference between wage labor as potential, as labor power and actuality, a difference which is also the difference between the labor market and the "other scene of production. "As much as it is possible to read other "sciences," other discourses, symptomatically it would have to do other fundamental points of schism or division, political economy can be read symptomatically to the extent that it treats labor power as a labor, treating a potential as actuality, and a relation as a given. Philosophy can read symptomatically to the extent that it, in its bourgeois variation, effaces this as well, treating the market as the paradigm of equality rather than the basis for a new form of domination. Macherey offers a striking, and a strikingly political reading of the concept of symptomatic reading. Capitalism as a mode of production rests on the paradoxical status of labor power as a commodity, and political economy, or economics, as a discipline is constituted in effacing this fact, as are other disciplines to the extent that they are under the sway of that new queen of the disciplines. What does it mean, however, to think of this as a symptom? Or, put differently where else might these symptoms manifest themselves? If capital is founded on the unique status of labor as a commodity where might we find symptoms of the repression of this fact? I would say that the capitalist class, at least the small business owner, seems to also maintain that wages have a unique status. Whenever wages go up, or there is at least a possibility of a wage increase, restaurants and other businesses will claim that this threatens their very existence. The same business owners are generally silent about other increases of the cost of doing business such as rent or utilities. (Although the current inflation has changed this a bit.) These costs are absorbed or are silently translated into increased prices. An increase of wages is treated less as just a new cost and more of a threat to the very idea of a profitable business. To give an example, during the time when the pandemic was still acknowledged the city of Portland, ME, where I live, the city imposed a hazard pay increase that raised the minimum wage for workers to $19.50.  Several restaurants increased their prices accordingly and even stated on their website menus that the price increase was a direct increase of the increase cost of wages. One could contest the necessity of this, after all it is possible to bear these increases by just taking in less money for the owners. However, I am less interested in the economics of this than the status of wages as a symptom. Higher wages are often talked about as a make or break cost, as not just another cost but almost as an existential threat to capital as such. In his contribution to the same volume Nick Nesbitt writes, "Marx seems to be telling his reader that the abstraction that is value must be thought not only as a concept but also vividly imagined, in the form of a animated manifestation in the concrete materiality that is the human symbolic order." This seems to be another way of thinking of a symptom, as much as the actual exploitation of labor must be effaced and concealed behind the image of the labor market, as a market of "Freedom, equality, and Bentham," this exploitation still appears, albeit in an inverted form, every time wages increase, or more to the point, workers seem to resist the discipline and subordination that is required of them. That every increase of wages, or every attempt to address and acknowledge the working conditions appears as a a threat to the economic and symbolic structure of capital is itself a symptom of the exploitation that the system depends upon. 

 The Best Joke in Barbie Years ago I remember encountering Félix Guattari's little essay, "Everybody Wants to be a Fascist." At the time its title seemed more clever than prescient. (Although it is worth remembering how much fascism, and the encounter with fascism was integral to Deleuze and Guattari's theorizing, well beyond the reference to Reich). Now that we are living in a different relation to fascism the problem posed by Guattari (and Deleuze) of desire seems all the more pertinent and pressing. One of the problems of using the word fascism today, especially in the US, is that it is hard to reconcile our image as a politics, a politics of state control of everything, and the current politics of outrage aimed at M&Ms, Barbie, and Taylor Swift. How can fascism be so trivial and so petty? This could be understood as the Trump problem, although it is ultimately not limited to Trump. There are a whole bunch of pundits and people getting incredibly angry about the casting of movies and how many times football games cut away to Taylor Swift celebrating in the expensive seats. The Fox News Expanded Universe is all about finding villains everywhere in every library or diverse band of superheroes. It is difficult to reconcile the petty concerns of the pundit class with the formation of an authoritarian state. I have argued before that understanding Trump, or Trumpism, means rethinking the relationship between the particular and universal, imaginary and real. Or, as Angela Mitropoulis argues, the question of fascism now should be what does it look like in contemporary captitalism, one oriented less around the post-fordist assembly line than the franchise. Or as she puts it, "What would the combination of nationalist myth and the affective labour processes of the entertainment industry mean for the politics and techniques of fascism?"It is for this reason (among others) that Alberto Toscano's Late Fascism is such an important book. As he argues in that book fascism (as well as in an interview on Hotel Bar Sessions) fascism has to be understood as kind of license, a justification of violence and anger, and a pleasure in that justification. We have to give up the cartoon image of fascism as centralized and universal domination and see it as not only incomplete persecution, unevenly applied, but persecution of some coupled with the license to persecute for others. Fascism is liberation for the racist, sexist, and homophobe, who finally gets to say and act on their desires. As Toscano argues, "...what we need to dwell on to discern the fascist potentials in the anti-state state are those subjective investments in the naturalizations of violent mastery that go together with the promotion of possessive and racialized conceptions of freedom. Here we need to reflect not just on the fact neoliberalism operates through a racial state, or that, as commentators have begun to recognize and detail, it is shaped by a racist and civilizational imaginary that delimits who is capable of market freedoms (Toscano is not referring to Tosel, but that is an important part of Tosel's work) We must also attend to the fact that the anti-state state could become an object of popular attachment or better, populist investment, only through the mediation of race." Toscano's emphasis is on race in this passage, but it could be argued to apply to sexism, homophobia, etc., to the enforcement and maintenance of any of the old hierarchies. As Toscano cites Maria Antonietta Macciochhi later in the book, "You can't talk abut fascism unless you are also prepared to discuss patriarchy." Possessive includes the family as the first and most vital possession. At this point fascism does not sound too different from classical conservatism, especially if you take the definition of the latter to be the following: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."  However, what Toscano emphasizes is the libidinal pleasure that comes with this, it is not just a matter of who is in and who is not, who is protected and who is not, but in the pleasure that one gets from such exclusion, a pleasure that is extended and almost deputized to the masses. While conservative hierarchies and asymmetries passed through the hallowed institutions of the state and the courts, the fascist deputies take to the streets and the virtual street fights of social media. As Toscano argues, pitting Foucault's remarks about the sexual politics of fascism in the seventies against Guattari's analysis,"For Foucault, to the extent that there is an eroticization of power under Nazism, it is conditioned by a logic of delegation, deputizing and decentralization of what remains in form and content a vertical, exclusionary, and murderous kind of power. Fascism is not just the apotheosis of the leader above the sheeplike masses of his followers; it is also, in a less spectacular but perhaps more consequential manner the reinvention of the settle logic of petty sovereignty, a highly conditional but very real 'liberalising' and 'privatising' of the monopoly of violence...Foucault's insight into the 'erotic' of a power based on the deputizing of violence is a more fecund frame, I would argue, for the analysis of both classical and late fascisms than Guattari's hyperbolic claim that "the masses invested a fantastic collective death instinct in...the fascist machine' --which misses out on the materiality of that 'transfer of power' to a 'specific fringe of the masses' that Foucault diagnosed as critical to fascism's desirability."I think that Toscano's analysis picks up an important thread that runs from discussions of fascism from Benjamin to Foucault (and beyond). As Benjamin writes in the Work of Art essay "The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life."Today we could say that the right of expression includes a deputization of power and the pleasure in exercising it. In a capitalist society, in which the material conditions of existence must belong to the capitalist class, the only thing that can be extended to the masses is the power and pleasure to dominate others. Real wages keep on declining, but fascism offers the wages of whiteness, maleness, cisness, and so on, extending not the material control over one's existence but libidinal investment in the perks of one's identity.All of which brings me to Taylor Swift. I have watched with amusement and some horror as the fringes of the Fox News Expanded Universe have freaked out about Taylor Swift attending football games and, occasionally, being seen on television watching and enjoying the games. It is hard to spend even a moment thinking about something which has all of the subtlety of the "He-Man Woman Hater's Club," but I think that it is an interesting example of the kind of micro-fascism that sustains and makes possible the tendency towards macro-fascism. Three things are worth noting about this, first most of the conspiracy theories about Swift are not predicated on things that she has actually done, but what she might do, endorse Biden, campaign for Biden, etc., I think that this has to be seen as a mutation of conspiracy thinking from the actual effects of an action or event, Covid undermining Trump's presidency, to an imagined possible effect. One of the asymmetries of contemporary power is treating the fantasies or paranoid fears of one group as more valid than the actual conditions and dominations of another group. Second, and to be a little more dialectical, the fear of Swift on the right recognizes to what extent politics have been entirely subsumed by the spectacle fan form. (Hotel Bar Sessions did a show about this too) Trump's real opponent for hearts and minds, not to mention huge rallies, is not Biden but Swift. Lastly, and this really deserves its own post, some of the anger about Swift being at the game brings to mind Kate Manne's theory of misogyny, which at its core is about keeping women in their place. I would imagine that many of the men who object to seeing Swift at their games do not object to the cutaway shots of cheerleaders during the same game. It is not seeing women during the game that draws ire, but seeing one out of her place--someone who is enjoying being there and not there for their enjoyment.I used to be follow a fairly vulgar materialist line when it came to fascism. Give people, which is to say workers, actual control over their work, their lives, and their conditions and the appeal of the spectacle of fascist power would dissipate. It was a simple matter of real power versus its appearance. It increasingly seems that such an opposition overlooks the pleasures that today's mass media fascism make possible and extend to so many. It is hard to imagine a politics that could counter this that would not be a politics of affect, of the imagination, and of desires. Libidinal economy and micro-politics of desire seem less like some relic from the days of high theory and more and more like necessary conditions for thinking through the intertwining webs of desire and resentment that make up the intersection of culture, media, and politics. I think one of the pressing issues of the moment is the recognizing that all of these junk politics of grievances of popular culture should be taken seriously as the affective antechamber of fascism while at the same time not accepting them on their terms; there is nothing really to be gained by rallying to defend corporations and billionaires. 

 Like so many I was saddened to learn of the death of Toni Negri. I never really knew him as a person, only very awkwardly meeting him once, but he was someone who fundamentally shaped and transformed philosophy for me. I wrote my first published paper on Negri, a paper that, as is the case with most seminar papers, was an attempt to make sense of the two books I had read, The Savage Anomaly and Marx Beyond Marx.  That it was published is not the important part, really a product of grad school hubris, the important part was that I am not sure if I would have stayed in grad school had I not written it, or found someone willing to read and discuss it with me, shoutout here to Bill Haver. Negri made it possible for me to conjoin doing philosophy and engaging the world politically, to see these as two sides of the same process, the same practice of philosophy. I should mention that this was before Empire, but just barely. I am not saying that to claim that I was into Negri before he was cool, but just that my first encounter with Negri was in some sense with an outsider. He was rarely talked about in classes, and his books were more associated with the para-academic presses of Autonomedia and Semiotexte than the presses that were translating and publishing the big names of theory, Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, etc.With the news of his death I started to think about Negri again for the first time in awhile. I had not read anything by Negri in years (the little book on Spinoza was probably the last), nor really engaged with his writings in a long time. Philosophers still have their effects, still shape our thought long after we stop directly reading and writing about them. It just so happened the day that I learned of Negri's death was the day that we met for the Spinoza and Marx seminar. We spent part of the time talking about the importance of Negri's reading. He was not the first Marxist/Spinozist, but Marx-Spinozism would be fundamentally different without him. This is because Negri puts the intersection of metaphysics and politics, ontology and history at the center of his reading of Spinoza  It is well known that Spinoza interrupted his writing of the Ethics, a book he had worked on for years, to write and publish anonymously the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, as political intervention. For Negri this interruption is also a fundamental transformation: Spinoza's engagement with politics and history, with the historical force of the imagination, with the politics of affects, and the reality of power, transforms his understanding of imagination, affects, and power in the Ethics. As Negri writes in a passage that I have cited more than once, and returned to again and again. "After the development of such a radical pars destruens, after the identification of a solid point of support by which the metaphysical perspective re-opens, the elaboration of the pars construens requires a practical moment. The ethics could not be constituted in a project, in the metaphysics of the mode and of reality, if it were not inserted into history, into politics, into the phenomenology of a single and collective life: if it were not to derive new nourishment from that engagement."Negri effectively inverted our image of Spinoza, and with it our image of philosophy, it was no longer a matter of detaching oneself from history and politics in order to contemplate the world, of thinking sub specie aeternitas, but of plunging oneself into the historical moment in order to transform philosophy.In a piece I wrote on Negri that was recently republished in The Production of Subjectivity: Marx and Philosophy I described this transformation as follows:"While the Theologico-Political Treatise constitutes a fundamental displacement of the problems of the Ethics, from order as metaphysical problem to the historicity of the organization of human desires and beliefs, it does not complete this process. The Theologico-Political Treatise does not supplant the Ethics. Negri argues that the Treatise does not follow through on its most radical insights. It begins with the materiality of the imagination, with the power of constitutive praxis, but it ultimately crashes upon the universals of 'natural right' and the 'natural light of religion', universals which undermine the constitutive process. The contract subordinates the powers of society to a transcendent order and a pre-constituted end, thereby limiting the constitutive process. However, the results of the Treatise are fundamentally ambiguous: as much as the contract is introduced as an ordering structure of society, it is modified by the idea of power. As Spinoza writes, 'Nature's right is co-extensive with her power'. This redefinition of right as power fundamentally undermines two of the constitutive dimensions of natural right that philosophy exemplified by the contract, 'the absolute conception of the individual foundation and the absolute conception of the contractual passage'. In place of the absolutely individualistic foundation that paves the way for the absolute authority of the sovereign, Spinoza introduces a new theoretical object, the 'passions of the body social'. Right is coextensive with power: there is no natural state of power nor a final goal, only the historicity of its various organizations. There is thus no transfer of power, no actual passage from potentia to potestas, there is just the organization of potentia, of the striving (conatus), desire (cupiditas), and affects of the multitude. It is precisely this organization that is examined and developed in what Negri calls the 'second foundation' of the Ethics, Parts III and IV which develop the logic and sociability of the passions. This second foundation does not only develop the idea of conatus as the essence of each individual (EIIIP7), it also develops the logic of the affects as the determination of this desire. The affects begin with the most immediate, and simple, determinations – pain, pleasure, love and hate – and gradually unfold to encompass the constitutive conditions and constitutive power of subjectivity, which is not an autonomous starting point but is immersed in the power of affects. 'The nexus of composition, complexity, conflictiveness, and dynamism is a continual nexus of successive dislocations that are neither dialectical nor linear but, rather, discontinuous'. Thus, as much as the Theologico-Political Treatise disrupts the remnants of a metaphysical order, its provocation that the historicity of desire and affects are constitutive of the world, it demands a renewed ontological speculation. It is not the Theologico-Political Treatise or the Ethics that makes up the foundational book of constitutive power, but rather the movement, the displacement, from the one to the other. In Negri's book on Spinoza this movement continues to a reading of the Political Treatise, thus passing from metaphysics (the Ethics) to politics (the Theological Political Treatise) only to return to politics (Political Treatise) which in turn informs a new metaphysics (the 'multitude' as a concept produced in the interstices of the Ethics and the Political Treatise), while at the same time stating that 'Spinoza's true politics is his metaphysics'. This statement should be read not as a choice, placing Spinoza's metaphysical works over his political writings, but as a slogan of displacement. Constitutive power as praxis is developed through a practice of philosophy as a continual displacement that moves from metaphysics to politics and back, and this movement continues beyond a reading of Spinoza."One can find a similar trajectory of movement in Negri's thought in his reading of Marx in which it is the same concepts, most specifically "living labor" that traverse a line from economics, to ontology, and then to politics. Negri reading of Marx, especially in the book known in the US as Insurgencies, but in the rest of the world as Constituent Power, reads the early Marx's idea of democracy back into the latter Marx. Marx's politics is his metaphysics, is labor as the constitution of the world. As Negri writes, "As long as we follow the political Marx, political revolution and social emancipation are two historical matrices that intersect on the same terrain—the constitutional terrain—but still in an external manner, without a metaphysical logic of this intersection being given…This necessity resides at the core of Marx's theory of capital, where living labor appears as the foundation, and the motor of all production, development, and innovation. This essential source also animates the center of our investigation. Living labor against dead labor, constituent power against constituted power: this single polarity runs through the whole schema of Marxist analysis and resolves it in an entirely original theoretical practical totality."What I have tried to focus on here is what I have called, following Althusser and Balibar, is Negri's practice of philosophy, his way of doing philosophy (this was also the focus of the essay cited above). It is a trajectory which constantly moves from history and politics into ontology and from ontology into politics and history without ever, it seems to me, using a historical moment to criticize an ontology or developing an ontology that would ground a politics. It is a trajectory of displacement and transformation in which history, politics, and economics transform philosophical speculation, ontology and metaphysics, while at the same time philosophical speculation transform and reimagine the possibility of political practice. It would seem to me that this is the fundamental orientation that defines Negri's thought, and it is this orientation which is eternal, which continues to live, even after the concepts produced by that trajectory pass away, as they would have to being products of a given historical moment. (Here I have to recommend Roberto Nigro's little book Antonio Negri: Une Philosophie de la Subversion, which I read in the week since Negri's death. Nigro reminds us that the question of the historical relevance of particular concepts, was in some sense the central political and philosophical trajectory of not just Negri's thought but of what is called autonomist thought or post-autonomist thought. Concepts like the mass worker, the social worker, general intellect, and multitude are not just different theoretical positions, but also attempts to make sense of the shifting and changing nature of capitalism itself.) What Negri proposed for philosophy is not easy, and I would even argue that not even Negri always did it well. (In some sense this is a specific version of the general problem of doing philosophy after Marx). It is easy to err on both sides, to simply let a historical, economic, or political transformation stand in for a philosophical analysis, or, on the other side, to dissolve the specificity of a historical moment into a general ontological concept. However, as Spinoza wrote, "all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare." When it is done well such a method of displacement, of pars destruens/pars construens, promises a transformation of both philosophy and politics. (I would say that Negri's Savage Anomaly, Marx Beyond Marx, and the book on constituent power to name a few are nothing less than models of this method). What Negri proposed in his readings of Spinoza and Marx (among others) was nothing less than a transformation of philosophy, to borrow Althusser's formulation, a transformation that would make philosophy radical and materialist--a transformation that is still ongoing, still striving to produce its effects. It is that aspect of Negri's thought which transformed, and continues to transform my approach to philosophy. 

Eyal
Weizman on the Architectural-Image Complex, Forensic Archeology and Policing
across the Desertification Line







Incidents
in global politics are usually apprehended as the patterned interaction of macro-actors
such as states. Eyal Weizman takes a different tack—an architect by training,
Weizman tackles incidents through detailed readings of heterogeneous materials—digital
images, debris, reforestation, blast patterns in ruins—to piece together concrete
positions of engagement in specific legal, political, or activist controversies
in global politics. In this Talk,
Weizman—among others—elaborates on methods across scales and material
territories, discusses the interactions of environment and politics, and traces
his trajectory in forensic architecture.




Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What
is—or should be—according to you, the biggest challenge, central focus or
principal debate in critical social sciences?



We
live in an age in which there is both a great storm of information and a
progressive form of activism seeking to generate transparency in relation to government
institutions, corporations or secret services. These forms of exposure
exponentially increase the number of primary sources on corporations and state
and provide also rare media from war zones, but this by itself does not add
more clarity. It could increase confusion and increasingly be used disseminate
false information and propaganda. The challenge is to start another process to
carefully piece together and compose this information.



I'm
concerned with research about armed conflict. Contemporary conflict tends to take
place in urban environments saturated with media of varicose sorts, whenever
violence is brought into a city, it provokes an enormous production of images,
clips, sounds, text, etc.



As
conflict in Iraq, Syria, Missouri and the Ukraine demonstrate, one of the most
important potential sources for conflict investigations is produced by the very
people living in the war zones and made available in social networks almost
instantly. The citizens recording events in conflict zones are conscious of
producing testimonies and evidence, and importantly so, they do so on their own
terms. The emergence of citizen journalists/witness has already restructured
the fields of journalism with most footage composing Al Jazeera broadcasts, for
example, being produced by non-professional media. The addition of a huge
multiplicity of primary sources, live testimonies and filmed records of events,
challenge research methods and evidentiary practices. There is much locational
and spatial information that can be harvested from within these blurry, shaky
and unedited images/clips and architectural methodologies are essential in
reconstructing incidents in space. Architecture is a good framework to
understand the world, alongside others.



Whereas
debates around the 'politics of the image' in the field of photography and
visual cultures tended to concentrate on the decoding of single images and
photojournalistic trophy shots we now need to study the creation of extensive
'image-complexes' and inhabit this field reconstruct events from images taken
at different perspective and at different times. The relation between images is
architectural, best composed and represented within 3D models. Architectural
analysis is useful in locating other bits of evidence—recorded testimonies,
films and photos—from multiple perspectives in relation to one other bits of
evidence and cross referring these in space.



But
'image complexes' are about interrogating the field of visibility it is also
about absence, failures of representation, blockages or destruction of images.





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



I'm
an architect, and my intellectual upbringing is in architectural theory and
spatial theory. I tend to hold on to this particular approach when I'm entering
a geopolitical context or areas that would otherwise be the domain of
journalists and human rights people, traditional jurists, etc. Architecture taught
me to pay attention to details, to materiality, to media, and to make very
close observations about the way built structures might embody political
relations.



When I study political situations, I
study them as an architect: I look at the way politics turns into a material—spatial
practice—the materialization, and at the spatialization, of political forces. Architectural
form—as I explained many times—is slowed-down force. My thinking is structured
around a relation between force and form. And form, for an architect, is an
entry point from which to read politics. So when I look at matter and material
reality—like a building, a destroyed building, a piece of infrastructure, a
road or bridge, a settlement or suburb or city—I look at it as a product of a political
force field. But it is never static. A city always grows, expands or contracts
recording the multiple political relations that shaped it.



Buildings
continuously record their environment. So one can read political force on buildings.
In taking this approach, I am influenced by building surveyors, and insurance
people going into a building to look at a scratch in a wall to piece together
what might have happened, and what might still happen. So I feel like a kind of
property surveyor on the scale of a city at times of war. But in practicing
this forensic architecture
I also work like an archaeologist: archaeology is about looking at material remains
and trying to piece together the cultural, political, military, or social spheres.
But I'm an archaeologist of very recent past or of the present. While
some of my investigations will always retain a haptic dimension based on
material examination, much of it is an analysis of material captured and
registered by various medias. Verify, locate, compose and cross-reference a
spatial reality from images of architecture.





What
would a student need to become a specialist in your field or understand the
world in a global way?



The institutes I run do not recruit
only architects. We need to open up the disciplinary bounds of education. We work
with filmmakers and architects and with artists.



It embodies a desire to understand
architecture as a field of inquiry, with which you can interrogate reality as
it is effectively registering material transformation. I see architecture as a
way of augmenting our way of seeing things in the world, but it's not for me a
kind of sacred field that should not be touched or changed.



But I'm also using architecture
across the entire spectrum of its relation to politics, from the very dystopian—with
forensic architecture, a kind of architectural pathology—to the utopian. I have
a studio in Palestine with Palestinian partners of mine, and internationals.
Alessandro Petty and Sandi Hilal
are in this group, which is called Decolonizing Architure. It's this group that is engaged in
very utopian projects for the West Bank and Palestine and the return of
refugees and so on. So I use architecture across the entire spectrum, from the
very dystopian to the very utopian. Architecture is simply a way of engaging
the world and its politics. Space is the way of establishing relations between
things. And actually space is not static, it is both a means of establishing
relations between people and objects and things. Just as material itself is
always an event, always under transformation. So that is something I have taken
from architecture and try to bring into politics, but not only in analyzing
crimes, but in producing the reality yet to come.



So what we
need from people is the desire to understand aesthetics as a field of inquiry,
not simply as a pleasurable play of beauty and pleasing kind of effect, but as
a kind of very sensorial field, sensorium, in which you can interrogate reality
as it is effectively registering material transformation. So I would look
simply for that kind of sensorial intensity and high critical approach and
understanding and speculating of how it is we know what we think we know. Of
course, you cannot see, or you do not know what you see, you do not have the
language to interpret or question what it is you 'see' without abstract
constructs. This means I don't necessarily look for theoretical capacities in
people: I see theory as a way of augmenting our way of seeing things in the
world, of registering them, of decoding them, but it's not for me a kind of
sacred field to which I submit in any way.







So
what is it you work on now?



I'm mostly trying to establish forensic architecture as a
critical field of practice and as an agency that produce and disseminate
evidence about war crimes in urban context. Recent forensic investigations in Guatemala
and in the Israeli Negev involved
the intersection of violence and environmental transformations, even climate
change. For trials and truth commissions, we analyze the extent to which
environmental transformation intersect with conflict.



The imaging of this
previously invisible types of violence—'environmental violence' such as land degradation, the destruction of fields and forests (in the tropics), pollution
and water diversion, and also long term processes of desertification—we use as new type of evidence of processes dispersed across time
and space. There are other conflicts that unfold in relation to climatic and
environmental transformations and in particular in relation to environmental
scarcity.



Conflict has reciprocal
interaction with environment transformation: environmental change could
aggravate conflict, while conflict tends to generate further environmental
damage. This has been apparent in Darfur, Sudan where the conflict was
aggravated by increased competition over arable due to local land erosion and desertification.
War and insurgency have occurred along Sahel—Arabic for 'shoreline'—on the
southern threshold of the Sahara Desert, which is only ebbing as million of
hectares of former arable land turn to desert. In past decades, conflicts have
broken out in most countries from East to West Africa, along this shoreline:
Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal.
In 2011 in the city of Daraa, farmers' protests, borne out of an extended cycle
of droughts, marked
the beginning of the Syrian civil war. Similar processes took place in the
eastern outskirts of Damascus, Homs, al-Raqqah and along the threshold of the
great Syrian and Northern Iraqi Deserts. These transformations impact upon
cities, themselves a set of entangled natural/man-made environments. The conflict
and hardships along desertification bands compel dispossessed farmers to embark
upon increasingly perilous paths of migrations, leading to fast urbanization at
the growing outskirts of the cities and slams.



I'm
trying to understand these processes across desert thresholds. There has been a
very long colonial debate about what is the line beyond which the desert begins.
Most commonly it was defined as 200 mm rain per annum. Cartographers were
trying to draw it, as it represented, to a certain extent, the limit of
imperial control. From this line on, most policing was done through bombing of
tribal areas from the air. Since the beginning, the emergence of the use of air
power in policing in the post World War I period—aerial control, aerial
government—took form in places that were perceived, at the time, as lying
beyond the thresholds or edges of the law. The British policing of Iraq, the
French in Syria, and Algeria, the Italians in Libya are examples where control
would hover in air.



Up
to now I was writing about borders that were physical and manmade: walls in the
West Bank or Gaza and the siege around it—most notably in Hollow Land (2007, read the introduction here).
Now I started to write about borders that are made by the interaction of people
and the environment—like the desert line—which is not less violent and brutal. The
colonial history of Palestine has been an attempt to push the line of the
desert south, trying to make it green or bloom—this is in Ben Gurion's terms—but
the origins of this statement are earlier and making the desert green and
pushing the line of the desert was also Mussolini's stated aim. On the other
hand, climate change is now pushing that line north.



Following
not geopolitical but meteorological borders, helps me cut across a big
epistemological problem that confines the writing in international relations or
geopolitics within the borders organize your writing. Braudel is an
inspiration but, for him, the environment of the Mediterranean is basically
cyclically fixed. The problem with geographical determinism is that it takes
nature as a given, cyclical, milieu which then affects politics—but I think we
are now in a period where politics affects nature in the same way in which
nature affects politics. The climate is changing in the same speed as human
history.





What does your background in
architecture add to understanding the global political controversies you engage
in?



We are a forensic agency that
provides services to prosecution teams around the world. With our amazing
members we ran 20-odd cases around the world from the Amazon to Atacama, for
the UN, for Amnesty, for Palestinian NGOs, in Gaza of course, West Bank, issues
of killings, individual killings in the West Bank that we do now, and much more
drastic destructions.



Forensic Architecture is unique in using
architectural research methodologies to analyze violations of human rights and
international humanitarian law as they bear upon the built environment—on
buildings, cities and territories, and this is why we get many commissions. We
produced architectural evidence for numerous investigations and presented them
in a number of cases in national and international courts and tribunals. We
were commissioned by the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights to study single
destroyed buildings, as well as patterns of destruction, resulting from
drone warfare in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Gaza. This study was presented at
the UN General Assembly in New York. We developed techniques to locate the
remains of buildings and villages overgrown by thick rain forests and presented
this material as evidence in the genocide trial of former president Efraín Ríos
Montt in the National Court of Guatemala and the Inter-American
Court. We quantified and analyzed levels of architectural destruction in Gaza
after the 2014 conflict for Amnesty International. We provided architectural
models and animations to support a petition against the wall in Battir
submitted to the Israeli High Court, helping to win the case.



Recently, we use and deal with the
reconstruction of human testimony. Witnesses to war give account of the worst
moment of their lives; times when their dear ones have died or hurt. Their
memory is disturbed, and tends to be blurred. We have developed a way of very
carefully interviewing and discussing with witnesses. Together with them, we
build digital models of their own homes. So we can see a very slow process of reconstruction
of the relation between memory space and architecture. And events start coming
back, through the process of building.



In order to develop this, we needed
to explore the historical use of memory and architecture, such as Frances Yates'
The Art of Memory (read it here), as well as different accounts on
the use of trauma, and bring them into the digital age, bring an understanding
of the relation of testimony and evidence into contemporary thinking. Single
incidents tend to be argued away as aberrations of 'standard operating
procedures'. To bring charges against government and military leaderships, it
is necessary to demonstrate 'gross and systematic' violations.
This means finding consistent and repeated patterns of
violations. Architectural analysis, undertaken on the level of
the city is able to demonstrate repetition and transformations in patterns of
violation/destruction in space and time—within the battle zone along the
duration of the conflict. Architectural analysis is useful not only in dealing
with architectural evidence—i.e with destroyed buildings—but also helpful in
locating other bits of evidence—testimony films or photos—in relation to one
other bits of evidence, and cross referring these in space.



Urban violence unfolds at different
intensities, speeds and spatial scales: it is made of patterns of multiple
instantaneous events as well as slower incremental processes of 'environmental
violence' that affects the transformation of larger territories. We aims to analyze
and present the relation between forms of violence that occur at different
space and time scales. From eruptive kinetic violence of the instantaneous/human
incident through patterns of destruction mapped across and along the duration
of urban conflict, to what Rob Nixon calls the 'slow violence' of environmental
transformation (read the introduction of the eponymous book here,
pdf).





Last question. How does your approach to research relate to, or differ
from, approaches to international politics?



To study conflict as a reality that unfolds across
multiple scales, we use the microphysical approach—dealing with details,
fragments and ruins—as an entry-point from which we will unpack the larger
dynamics of a conflict. We reconstruct singular incidents, locate them in space
and time to look for and identify patterns, then study these patterns in
relation to long terms and wide-scale environmental transformations. This
approach seeks to make connections between, what Marc Bloch of the Annales
School called 'micro- and macro-history, between close-ups and extreme long
shots' in his thesis on historical method. This topological approach is
distinct from a traditional scalar one: the macro
(political/strategic/territorial) situation will not be seen a root cause for a
myriad set of local human right violations (incidents/tactics). In the complex
reality of conflict, singularities are equally the result of 'framing
conditions' and also contributing factors to phase transitions that might
affect, or 'de-frame' as Latour has put it, changes occurring in wider areas.
Instead of nesting smaller scales within larger ones, our analysis will seek to
fluidly shift from macro to micro, from political conditions to individual
cases, from buildings to environments and this along multiple threads,
connection and feedback loops.



While in relation to the single
incident it might still be possible to establish a direct, liner connection
between the two limit figures of the perpetrator and the victim along the model
of (international) criminal law, evidence for environmental violence is more
scattered and diffused. Instead, it requires the examination of what we call
'field causalities'—causal ecologies that are non-linear, diffused,
simultaneous, and that involve multiple agencies and feedback loops,
challenging the immediacy of 'evidence'. 




Establishing field causalities requires the
examination of force fields and causal ecologies, that are non-linear,
diffused, simultaneous and involve multiple agencies and feedback loops.
Whereas linear causality entails a focus on sequences of causal events on the
model of criminal law that seeks to trace a direct line between the two limit
figures of victim and perpetrator field causality involves the spatial
arrangement of simultaneous sites, actions and causes. It is inherently relational
and thus a spatial concept. By treating space as the medium of relation between
separate elements of evidence brought together, we aim to expand the analytical
scope of forensic architecture. It is inherently relational and thus a spatial
concept. By treating space as the medium of relation between separate elements
of evidence brought together, field causalities expands the analytical scope of
forensic architecture.



Let me illustrate this a bit. Forms
of violence are crucially convertible one to another. Drying fields along the
Sahel or the Great Syrian Desert, for example, reach a point in which they can
no longer support their farmers, contributing to impoverishment, migration to
cities, slumnization and waves of protest that might contribute to the eruption
of armed conflict. These layers call for a form of architectural analysis able
to shift and synthesize information at different scales—from single incidents
as they are registered in the immediate spatial setting, through patterns of
violations across the entire urban terrain to 'environmental violence'
articulated in the transformation of large territories.





Eyal Weizman is an architect, Professor of Visual Cultures and director
of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Since 2011 he also directs the European Research Council funded project, Forensic
Architecture - on the place of architecture in international
humanitarian law. Since 2007 he is a founding member of the architectural
collective DAAR in Beit
Sahour/Palestine. Weizman has been a professor of architecture at the Academy
of Fine Arts in Vienna and has also taught at the Bartlett (UCL) in London at
the Stadel School in Frankfurt and is a Professeur invité at the École des
hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He lectured, curated and
organised conferences in many institutions worldwide. His books include Mengele's
Skull (with Thomas Keenan at Sterenberg Press 2012), ForensicArchitecture (dOCUMENTA13
notebook, 2012), The Least of all Possible Evils (Nottetempo
2009, Verso 2011), Hollow Land (Verso, 2007), A
Civilian Occupation (Verso, 2003), the series Territories 1,2
and 3, Yellow Rhythms and many articles in journals, magazines
and edited books. 



Related links





Facultyprofile at Goldsmith
Forensic Architecture homepage
Read
Weizman's introduction to Forensis
(2014) here
(pdf)
Read
Weizman's Forensic Architecture: Notes
from Fields and Forums (dOCUMENTA 2012) here
(pdf)
Read
Weizman's Lethal Theory (2009) here (pdf)
Read
the introduction to Weizman's Hollow Land
(2007) here
(pdf)


Print version of this Talk (pdf)




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Gabrielle Hecht on Nuclear Ontologies, De-provincializing the Cold War, and Postcolonial Technopolitics



This is the fourth 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 




Nuclear power has formed a centerpiece of Cold-War IR
theorizing. Yet besides the ways in which its destructive capacity invalidates
or alters the way we should understand questions of war and peace, there are
different powers at play in the roles the nuclear assumes in global politics.
Through careful investigations of alternative sites and spaces of nuclear
politics, Gabrielle Hecht has uncovered some of the unexpected ways in which
what one can call the 'nuclear condition' affects politics across the globe. In
this Talk, Hecht, amongst others,
explores what it means to 'be nuclear'; explains how we need to deprovincialize
the Cold War to fully grasp its significance in global politics; and challenges
us to explore technopolitics outside of the comfortable context of
OECD-countries.





Print version of this Talk (pdf)



What is according to your view the most important challenge
facing global politics and what is/should be the central debate in the
discipline of International Relations (IR)?



I think one of the most important
challenges in global politics is the question of planetary boundaries. In the
1970s the Club of Rome published the report 'the Limits to Growth' (read PDF here), which addressed
the finite quality of the planet's resources. It exposed the problems that
the ideology (and practice) of endless economic
growth posed for these limits. The question of climate change today really is
all about planetary boundaries. We have already exceeded the CO2 level
that is safe for the planet to sustain human life: We have just passed 400
parts per million; the desirable level is rated at 350 parts per million; the
pre-industrial level of CO2 was 270 parts per million. So we have
already produced more CO2 than is sustainable. And that is just one
indicator. There are all kinds of other planetary boundaries at play—energy
supply being the most salient one in terms of climate change. How can we even
produce enough energy to maintain the lifestyles of the industrialized north? What
about the requirements of the so-called 'rest'?



Obviously this is a huge issue and
there are many parts to it. One part of this—the piece that I have studied the
most—is nuclear power. Many people are enthusiastic about nuclear power as a
solution to climate change. Some prominent environmentalists have been
converted, because they believe nuclear power offers a way to produce a large
amount of energy with a very small amount of matter, and because they see it as
carbon free. (That's pretty clearly not the case, by the way, though nuclear
power certainly produces less carbon than fossil fuels.) But are the human health
and environmental costs worth the savings in carbon? Do the resources poured
into nuclear power—some are predicting a thousand new reactors in the next
few decades—take away resources from other forms of energy production, forms
that could potentially address the emissions problems more rapidly and with lower
costs for the environment and for human health? Moreover, nuclear power in any
one location ends up becoming a global issue. So in that sense nuclear power in
China, in India or in Japan is inherently a global problem. And the industry everywhere
certainly needs global regulation—at the moment, there is none. The
International Atomic Energy Agency is not a regulator. These are serious questions
for international relations, and should be fodder for analysis.



One can obviously put this into
perspective by comparing the death toll from nuclear power with that related to
coal—would one then actually have to be against the use of coal? The numbers of
coal-related deaths are astonishing. But the first, most obvious point to make
is that being against coal doesn't require being in favor of nuclear power! It's
also extremely important to realize that death and morbidity figures for
nuclear power are highly contested. Take the figures concerning Chernobyl. The
IAEA and WHO put Chernobyl deaths at 4,000. A study published by National
Cancer Institute in the United States puts the deaths at something like 43,000.
A meta-analysis of 5,000 Slavic language scientific studies estimates the total
number of Chernobyl deaths (some of which are yet to come) at 900,000. These
discrepancies have a lot to do with controversies over the biological effects
of low-level radiation, and also with the technopolitics of measurement and counting.
Comparing the two energy technologies is much more complicated than merely
counting coal deaths vs. nuclear power deaths.





How did arrive where
you currently are in your thinking about these issues?



Actually, the real
question is how I came to study politics. I got my bachelor's degree in physics
from MIT in the 1980s. The two biggest political issues on campus at that time
were Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative and Apartheid in South Africa
(specifically, a move to divest American corporate interests in South Africa,
the very corporations that were funding MIT research and for which MIT students
would work when they graduated). I got interested in both, and along the way I
came to realize that I was much more interested in the politics of science and
technology than I was in actually doing physics. So I took some courses in the
field of science and technology studies (STS), and decided to attend graduate
school in the history and sociology of science and technology.



I had also always had a
morbid fascination with nuclear weapons. I'd read a lot of post-apocalyptic
science fiction when I was a teenager. All of these things came together for me
in graduate school. I first hoped to study the history of Soviet nuclear
weapons but quickly realized that would be impossible for all kinds of reasons.
I ended up studying French nuclear power after I realized that nobody had researched
it in the ways that interested me. I had lived in France in the 1970s, when the
nuclear power program was undergoing rapid expansion. So it was a good fit. After
I was done with that project, I became interested in rethinking the so-called
nuclear age from a colonial and post-colonial perspective.





What would a student need to become a specialist in global studies or
understand the world in a global way?



Travel, learn languages. Remain attentive to—and critical of—the
political work done by claims to 'global' purview. Learn history—you won't understand international relations in any depth at
all if you remain rooted in the present.



Then, for those want to
start exploring the global politics of science and technology, two books come
immediately to mind. Timothy Mitchell's (Theory Talk #59) Carbon Democracy, on the global technopolitics of fossil fuels. And Paul Edwards's A Vast Machine, on the relationship
between data and models in the production of knowledge about climate change. Both
are must-reads.







The world is permeated with technological
artifacts and systems—in what ways is this relevant for approaches to global
politics? Where is the conceptual place for technologies within IR?



First, I should make
clear that I am not an IR specialist.



That said, I think it
does not make sense to think about international relations (lower case) without
thinking about the technologies, systems, and infrastructures that make any
kind of global movement possible. The flows of people, of products, of culture,
political exchanges—these are all mediated through and practiced in the technological systems
that permeate our globe. So are the interruptions and absences in such 'flows'.
I draw attention to the specific political practices that are enacted through
technological systems with the notion of technopolitics. I initially used this
concept in my work on nuclear power in France to capture the ways in which
hybrid forms of power are enacted in technological artifacts, systems and
practices. There I used the term in a rather narrow sense to talk about the strategic practices of designing
technologies to enact political goals. My paramount example was that of the
French atomic weapons program. In the early 1950s, France's political leaders insisted
that France would never build atomic weapons. But engineers and other leaders in
the nascent nuclear program were designing reactors in a way that optimized the
production of weapons-grade plutonium rather than electricity. When politicians
finally signed on, the technology was ready to go. This example problematizes
the very notion of a 'political decision'. Instead of a single, discursive
decision, we see a complex process whereby political choices are inscribed into
technologies, which subsequently favor certain political outcomes over others.



In this example, both
engineers and politicians consciously
engaged in technopolitics. By contrast, Timothy Mitchell has used the
hyphenated term 'techno-politics' to emphasize the unpredictable and unintended
effects of technological assemblages. Over the last fifteen years, I have also
developed a broader notion of the term, particularly in its adjectival form, 'technopolitical'.
I find this to be a useful shorthand for describing both how politics can be
strategically enacted through technological systems, and also how technological
systems can be re-appropriated for political ends in ways that were unintended
by their designers.  The point, really,
is to highlight the myriad politics of materiality.





Do the particular characteristics of nuclear
technologies and related research programs make it impossible to apply the
lenses of 'high politics'?



I think a
high-politics approach to understanding nuclear weapons decision-making is
extremely impoverished. It's not that there aren't high politics, of course
there are. But they cannot offer a sufficient or straightforward explanation
for how or why any one particular country develops a nuclear program.  A focus on high politics implies a focus
decision makers and moments. But that's really misleading. In pretty much every
case, the apparent 'moment' of decision is in fact a long process involving a tremendous
amount of technopolitical, cultural, and institutional work, rife with
conflicts and contingencies of all kinds. I think a more productive approach is
to try to understand nuclear capacity-building.



Itty Abraham has done
some fantastic work on India's nuclear program, which helps us think about
other cases as well. For example, he analyzes the symbolic importance of the
nuclear test, noting that IR uses 'the test' as kind of 'aha!' moment, the moment in which one knows that a country
has nuclear weapons. Instead, Abraham sees the test as a process for the cultural
production of meaning: a process in which certain meanings get fixed, but by no
means the most important moment for understanding the actual technology and
politics behind the production of nuclear weapons.





Your book Entangled
Geographies (2011) explores a plethora of places, people, and technical networks that
sustained the US and Soviet empires. Here, as in Being Nuclear (2012), you insist on investigating the Cold War as
transnational history. What difference does this move make?



In Entangled Geographies, my colleagues and I build on the work of Odd
Arne Westad, whose book The Global Cold
War was an argument for understanding the non-superpower, non-European
dimensions of the Cold War. We give that a technopolitical spin, which offers a
de-provincializing of the Cold War that's complementary to Westad's. By
focusing on places like Saudi Arabia, or Zimbabwe, or Brazil, or South Africa,
we show how even the central struggles of the Cold War were intimately bound up
in 'northern' relationships to colonial and post-colonial worlds, and in the
imaginaries that characterized those relationships.



In Being Nuclear I focus on uranium from Africa—more specifically South Africa, Namibia,
Gabon, Madagascar, and Niger. Uranium from Africa has long been a major source
of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on
Hiroshima, but it has been almost completely absent from accounts of the
nuclear age, whether scholarly or popular. This changed in 2002, when the US
and British governments claimed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein 'sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa' (later specified as the infamous
'yellowcake from Niger'). Africa suddenly became notorious as a source of
uranium. But that did not admit Niger, or any of Africa's other
uranium-producing countries, to the select society of nuclear states. Nor did
it mean that uranium itself counted as a nuclear thing. My book explores what
it means for something—a state, an
object, an industry, a workplace—to be 'nuclear'. I show that such questions lie at the heart of
today's global order and the relationships between 'developing nations' and 'nuclear
powers'.



Being Nuclear argues that 'nuclearity'
is not a straightforward scientific classification but a
contested technopolitical one. In the first part of the book, I
follow uranium's path out of Africa and analyze the invention of the global
uranium market. In the second part, I enter African nuclear worlds, focusing
on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation
exposure. In both parts, I show that nuclearity requires instruments and
data, technological systems and infrastructures, national agencies and
international organizations, experts and conferences, and journals and media
exposure. When (and where) nuclearity is densely distributed among these
elements, it can offer a means of claiming expertise, compensation, or
citizenship. It can serve as a framework for making sense of history,
experience, and memory. When (and where) network elements are absent, weak, or
poorly connected, nuclearity falters, fades, or disappears altogether, failing
to provide a resource for people claiming remediation or treatment. Nuclearity
in one register doesn't easily transpose to another: geopolitical nuclearity
doesn't automatically translate into occupational nuclearity. Yet these domains
remain connected. African uranium miners depend on the transnational movement
of nuclear things, but that movement also depends on African miners.
Ultimately, I conclude, nuclear security must be considered in tandem with
other forms of human security—food and health and environmental and political security. By placing
Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa, the book seeks to
remake our understanding of the nuclear age.



I should note that it's
not only uranium production that connects the colonial and postcolonial spaces
with nuclear things. (Also: African countries weren't the only such places
where uranium was produced. Much of the rest of the world's uranium came from the
Navajo nation in the United States, Aboriginal territories in Australia, First
Nation territories in Canada, colonized spaces in the Soviet Empire, etc.)  French nuclear weapons were tested in the Algerian
desert and French Polynesia; the United States tested its weapons on the Bikini
Islands; Britain tested its weapons in Maralinga, in Aboriginal Australia; the
Soviet Union tested its weapons on the planes of Kazakhstan. And so on.



So, understanding the
history of the Cold War—even its most
iconic technology, nuclear weapons—as a form of transnational history really calls attention to spaces that
have previously been considered marginal, even perhaps not fully nuclear. Ultimately,
it should provoke us to problematize 'the Cold War' as a frame for global or
transnational history (and social science).



Looking at those
colonized and semi-colonized spaces of mining, testing and monitoring infrastructures
gives us not necessarily an answer to the question of why the Cold War ended,
but it does enable you to ask different and possibly more interesting
questions. It can lead you, for example, to place the Cold War within the
framework of imperialism (rather than the other way around). A longer
historical view questions whether the Cold War really represents historical
rupture. What political work is done by such claims to rupture? How does that
work differ in different places?  What
are its material consequences?





Why are science and technology hardly ever studied in
the postcolonial world from a STS perspective?



I think there are a number
of reasons why STS has paid relatively little attention to the postcolonial
world. One is that in STS—like many
disciplines—the prestige of the subject
matter maps onto the prestige of the researcher. So STS researchers who study cutting-edge
science or large-scale technological systems seem somehow to be getting at 'harder'
topics, ones that that focus on active creation. Engineering and other acts of
creation appear more prestigious than acts of maintenance, or acts of
dismantling. Even studying small-scale creation seems to confer more prestige
than studying mundane practices. This brings us back to the theme of rupture
vs. continuity: studying or proclaiming rupture seems somehow sexier—and certainly more radical—than studying continuity.



Another, more trivial
answer is just that most STS researchers so far have come from Europe and North
America, and they tend not to be trained in area studies.





Does the constant ontological insecurity of nuclear
things mean that the 'nuclear' is purely a matter of social and political
construction?



No, definitely not. But
I think to explain what I mean by all this we should take a few steps back and
start with what I like to call nuclear
exceptionalism. This is a technopolitical claim—emerging immediately after the end of World
War II—that there was
something radically unique about nuclear things. From 1945 onward, both cold warriors
and their activist opponents cultivated this nuclear exceptionalism. Atomic
weapons were portrayed as fundamentally different from any other human
creation. The bomb was the ultimate geopolitical trump card, and it was imagined
as replacing empire in one fell swoop. You see nuclear scientists and engineers
gaining prestige, power, and funding far beyond their colleagues in
conventional research. In the meantime, anti-nuclear groups make their own claims
to exceptionalism by talking about the unprecedented dangers posed by nuclear
things. Everywhere you see nuclearity and morality intertwined. Nuclear things
either represent salvation or moral depravity… or the apocalyptic end of
mankind. But regardless of where you stood politically, this notion of nuclear
exceptionalism rested on the sense that the difference between nuclear and non-nuclear
things was transparent---ultimately a clear-cut, physical matter of
radioactivity.



The nuclear thus
emerges not just as a category, but also as a universal and universalizing
ontology, one that seems to apply in the same way all over the globe. And
frankly, historians, political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists
have reproduced that nuclear exceptionalism. (I did it myself in my first book,
The Radiance of France.)



All of which has made
it hard to see that what I call nuclearity—the process by which something comes
to count as a "nuclear" thing – has a history, a politics, and a geography. Things
that count as nuclear in one time and place might not count as nuclear at
another. Rendering something as nuclear and exceptional is a form of technopolitical
claims-making. It follows that insisting that certain things are not especially
nuclear, or that they are banal, is also a form of technopolitical claims-making.




You can see this in the
response of the nuclear industry to activist opponents. In the late 1960s and
over the course of the 1970s, the nuclear industry began to represent nuclear
power not as a life-saving technology for the human race, but as simply another
way to boil water. Radiation was just another industrial risk. Such
representations seek to banalize nuclear things.



Nuclearity could thus get
made, unmade and remade. My favorite example comes from a 1995 US government report
on nuclear proliferation. The appendix has a table that summarizes the nuclear
activities of 172 nations. Neither Gabon, nor Niger, nor Namibia are listed as
having any nuclear activities, despite the fact that those nations together, during
that very year, produced something like 25% of the world's uranium. So when does
uranium count as a nuclear thing? When does it lose its nuclearity? And what
does Africa have to do with it?



The argument is not that
radioactivity doesn't have to do anything with nuclearity, or that nuclearity
has nothing to do with the technologies and physical processes we typically
associate with the word. Rather, I argue that nuclearity is one thing, and radioactivity
and fission are another; sometimes they are co-terminus, but not always and not
necessarily. Understanding where (and why) they don't map onto each other is politically revealing.





Which kind of interdisciplinary
exchanges do we need between your discipline and IR to deepen our understanding
of global technopolitics?





Science
and technology studies (STS) is really good at exploring practice, and
especially at calling attention to the differences between principles and
practice—for example, between regulation on the one hand, and the actual
practices that regulations are meant to control (without ever entirely succeeding).
STS can bring to IR an understanding of how the intimate details of practice
matter politically—of how everyday technopolitical and techno-scientific exchanges can be
more important loci for politics than treaties, diplomacy, and other forms of
what you called high politics. 


I
can also answer this question wearing my historian's hat. The IR scholarship on
nuclear weapons that I'm familiar with (and again, I'm not an expert!) seems to
be quite focused on producing models—on using history to produce predictive models that
will in turn serve to shape international policy on nuclear weapons regulation.
But if history tells us one thing, it is that models are basically useless for
understanding how countries develop nuclear weapons. Instead, history and STS
both teach us about which questions to ask (in this instance, about nuclear
development). Identifying the important questions—rather than prescribing the applicable model—leaves open the list
of possible answers. It also leaves open solutions and policies, letting us be more
attentive to the specificities and uniqueness of individual cases.





Final question. Let's take the
example of Iran's nuclear program. What alternative question about the issue
would lenses of nuclear exceptionalism bring us?



Nuclear
technology has played an important role in shaping modern Iranian national
identity. This began in the 1970s under
the Shah, who – with the support of the US – developed a grandiose plan to
build a fleet of nuclear reactors. It took a different turn after the 1979
Iranian revolution. For a while, the new regime sidelined the nuclear program
as an unwelcome manifestation of western corruption. But after a few years
leaders reappropriated nuclear development and sought to invest it with
Iranian-ness. The dynamics of nuclear exceptionalism have operated in Iran much
the same way they did in France and in South Africa. Nuclear exceptionalism has
served to give material form to national identity. And materialized national
identity is most emphatically not
something that you can negotiate away in the P5+1 talks.

                                  

                                  



Gabrielle Hecht is Professor
of History at the University of Michigan, where she also directs the Program in
Science, Technology, and Society and serves as associate director of the
African Studies Center. She recently published Being Nuclear: Africans and
the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press and Wits University Press, 2012), which
has received awards from the American Historical Association and the American
Sociological Association, as well as the 2013 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities
Book Prize and Honorable Mention for the African Studies Association's 2013
Herskovits Award. She is also the author of The Radiance of France: Nuclear
Power and National Identity after World War II (MIT Press 1998 & 2009)
and editor of Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global
Cold War, editor (MIT Press, 2011). Hecht is embarking on a new book
project on technology and power in Africa, as well as new research on
transnational toxic trash. She has held visiting positions at universities in
Australia, France, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden.





Related links





Hecht's faculty profile at the University of Michigan 
Read Hecht's Introduction to Entangled Geographies (MIT Press 2011) here (pdf)  
Read
Hecht's The Power of Nuclear Things (Technology
& Culture 2010) here (pdf) 
Read
Hecht's Nuclear Ontologies (Constellations
2006) here (pdf) 
Read
Hecht's Rupture-Talk in the Nuclear Age
(Social Studies of Science 2002) here (pdf) 


Print version of this Talk (pdf)



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Daniel Deudney on Mixed Ontology, Planetary Geopolitics, and Republican Greenpeace



This is the second 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 






World politics increasingly abrasions with the limits of state-centric thinking, faced as the world is with a set of issues that affect not only us collectively as mankind, but also the planet itself. While much of IR theorizing seems to shirk such realizations, the work of Daniel Deudney has consistently engaged with the complex problems engendered by the entanglements of nuclear weapons, the planetary environment, space exploration, and the kind of political associations that might help us to grapple with our fragile condition as humanity-in-the world. In this elaborate Talk, Deudney—amongst others—lays out his understanding of the fundamental forces that drive both planetary political progress and problems; discusses the kind of ontological position needed to appreciate these problems; and argues for the merits of a republican greenpeace model to political organization.





Print version of this Talk (pdf)







What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?



The study of politics is the study of human politics and the human situation has been—and is being—radically altered by changes in the human relationships with the natural and material worlds. In my view, this means IR and related intellectual disciplines should focus on better understanding the emergence of the 'global' and the 'planetary,' their implications for the overall human world and its innumerable sub-worlds, and their relations with the realization of basic human needs. The global and the planetary certainly don't comprise all of the human situation, but the fact that the human situation has become global and planetary touches every other facet of the human situation, sometimes in fundamental ways. The simple story is that the human world is now 'global and planetary' due to the explosive transformation over the last several centuries of science-based technology occurring within the geophysical and biophysical features of planet Earth. The natural Earth and its relationship with humans have been massively altered by the vast amplifications in dispersed human agency produced by the emergence and spread of machine-based civilization. The overall result of these changes has been the emergence of a global- and planetary-scale material and social reality that is in some ways similar, but in other important ways radically different, from earlier times. Practices and structures inherited from the pre-global human worlds have not adequately been adjusted to take the new human planetary situation into account and their persistence casts a long and partially dark shadow over the human prospect.



A global and planetary focus is also justified—urgently—by the fact that the overall human prospect on this planet, and the fate of much additional life on this planet, is increasingly dependent on the development and employment of new social arrangements for interacting with these novel configurations of material and natural possibilities and limits. Human agency is now situated, and is making vastly fateful choices—for better or worse—in a sprawling, vastly complex aggregation of human-machine-nature assemblies which is our world. The 'fate of the earth' now partly hinges on human choices, and helping to make sure these choices are appropriate ones should be the paramount objective of political scientific and theoretical efforts. However, no one discipline or approach is sufficient to grapple successfully with this topic. All disciplines are necessary. But there are good reasons to believe that 'IR' and related disciplines have a particularly important possible practical role to play. (I am also among those who prefer 'global studies' as a label for the enterprise of answering questions that cut across and significantly subsume both the 'international' and the 'domestic.')



My approach to grappling with this topic is situated—like the work of now vast numbers of other IR theorists and researchers of many disciplines—in the study of 'globalization.' The now widely held starting point for this intellectual effort is the realization that globalization has been the dominant pattern or phenomenon, the story of stories, over at least the last five centuries. Globalization has been occurring in military, ecological, cultural, and economic affairs. And I emphasize—like many, but not all, analysts of globalization—that the processes of globalization are essentially dependent on new machines, apparatuses, and technologies which humans have fabricated and deployed. Our world is global because of the astounding capabilities of machine civilization. This startling transformation of human choice by technological advance is centrally about politics because it is centrally about changes in power. Part of this power story has been about changes in the scope and forms of domination. Globalization has been, to state the point mildly, 'uneven,' marked by amplifications of violence and domination and predation on larger and wider scales. Another part of the story of the power transformation has been the creation of a world marked by high degrees of interdependence, interaction, speed, and complexity. These processes of globalization and the transformation of machine capabilities are not stopping or slowing down but are accelerating. Thus, I argue that 'bounding power'—the growth, at times by breathtaking leaps, of human capabilities to do things—is now a fundamental feature of the human world, and understanding its implications should, in my view, be a central activity for IR scholars.



In addressing the topic of machine civilization and its globalization on Earth, my thinking has been centered first around the developing of 'geopolitical' lines argument to construct a theory of 'planetary geopolitics'. 'Geopolitics' is the study of geography, ecology, technology, and the earth, and space and place, and their interaction with politics. The starting point for geopolitical analysis is accurate mapping. Not too many IR scholars think of themselves as doing 'geography' in any form. In part this results from of the unfortunate segregation of 'geography' into a separate academic discipline, very little of which is concerned with politics. Many also mistake the overall project of 'geopolitics' with the ideas, and egregious mistakes and political limitations, of many self-described 'geopoliticans' who are typically arch-realists, strong nationalists, and imperialists. Everyone pays general lip service to the importance of technology, but little interaction occurs between IR and 'technology studies' and most IR scholars are happy to treat such matters as 'technical' or non-political in character. Despite this general theoretical neglect, many geographic and technological factors routinely pop into arguments in political science and political theory, and play important roles in them.



Thinking about the global and planetary through the lens of a fuller geopolitics is appealing to me because it is the human relationship with the material world and the Earth that has been changed with the human world's globalization. Furthermore, much of the actual agendas of movements for peace, arms control, and sustainability are essentially about alternative ways of ordering the material world and our relations with it. Given this, I find an approach that thinks systematically about the relations between patterns of materiality and different political forms is particularly well-suited to provide insights of practical value for these efforts.



The other key focus of my research has been around extending a variety of broadly 'republican' political insights for a cluster of contemporary practical projects for peace, arms control, and environmental stewardship ('greenpeace'). Even more than 'geopolitics,' 'republicanism' is a term with too many associations and meanings. By republics I mean political associations based on popular sovereignty and marked by mutual limitations, that is, by 'bounding power'—the restraint of power, particularly violent power—in the interests of the people generally. Assuming that security from the application of violence to bodies is a primary (but not sole) task of political association, how do republican political arrangements achieve this end? I argue that the character and scope of power restraint arrangements that actually serve the fundamental security interests of its popular sovereign varies in significant ways in different material contexts.



Republicanism is first and foremost a domestic form, centered upon the successive spatial expansion of domestic-like realms, and the pursuit of a constant political project of maximally feasible ordered freedom in changed spatial and material circumstances. I find thinking about our global and planetary human situation from the perspective of republicanism appealing because the human global and planetary situation has traits—most notably high levels of interdependence, interaction, practical speed, and complexity—that make it resemble our historical experience of 'domestic' and 'municipal' realms. Thinking with a geopolitically grounded republicanism offers insights about global governance very different from the insights generated within the political conceptual universe of hierarchical, imperial, and state-centered political forms. Thus planetary geopolitics and republicanism offers a perspective on what it means to 'Think Globally and Act Locally.' If we think of, or rather recognize, the planet as our locality, and then act as if the Earth is our locality, then we are likely to end up doing various approximations of the best-practice republican forms that we have successfully developed in our historically smaller domestic localities.





How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?



Like anybody else, the formative events in my intellectual development have been shaped by the thick particularities of time and place. 'The boy is the father of the man,' as it is said. The first and most direction-setting stage in the formation of my 'green peace' research interests was when I was in 'grade school,' roughly the years from age 6-13. During these years my family lived in an extraordinary place, St Simons Island, a largely undeveloped barrier island off the coast of southern Georgia. This was an extremely cool place to be a kid. It had extensive beaches, and marshes, as well as amazing trees of gargantuan proportions. My friends and I spent much time exploring, fishing, camping out, climbing trees, and building tree houses. Many of these nature-immersion activities were spontaneous, others were in Boy Scouts. This extraordinary natural environment and the attachments I formed to it, shaped my strong tendency to see the fates of humans and nature as inescapably intertwined. But the Boy Scouts also instilled me with a sense of 'virtue ethics'. A line from the Boy Scout Handbook captures this well: 'Take a walk around your neighborhood. Make a list of what is right and wrong about it. Make a plan to fix what is not right.' This is a demotic version of Weber's political 'ethic of responsibility.' This is very different from the ethics of self-realization and self-expression that have recently gained such ground in America and elsewhere. It is now very 'politically incorrect' to think favorably of the Boy Scouts, but I believe that if the Scouting experience was universally accessible, the world would be a much improved place.



My kid-in-nature life may sound very Tom Sawyer, but it was also very Tom Swift. My friends and I spent much of our waking time reading about the technological future, and imaginatively play-acting in future worlds. This imaginative world was richly fertilized by science fiction comic books, television shows, movies, and books. Me and my friends—juvenile technological futurists and techno-nerds in a decidedly anti-intellectual culture—were avid readers of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, and each new issue of Analog was eagerly awaited. While we knew we were Americans, my friends and I had strong inclinations to think of ourselves most essentially as 'earthlings.' We fervently discussed extraterrestrial life and UFOs, and we eagerly awaited the day, soon to occur, we were sure, in which we made 'first contact.' We wanted to become, if not astronauts, then designers and builders of spaceships. We built tree houses, but we filled them with discarded electronics and they became starships. We rode bicycles, but we lugged about attaché cases filled with toy ray guns, transistor radios, firecrackers, and homemade incendiary devices. We built and fired off rockets, painstaking assembled plastic kit models of famous airplanes and ships, and then we would blow them apart with our explosives. The future belonged to technology, and we fancied ourselves its avant garde.



Yet the prospect of nuclear Armageddon seemed very real. We did 'duck and cover' drills at school, and sat for two terrifying weeks through the Cuban Missile Crisis. My friends and I had copies of the Atomic Energy Commission manuals on 'nuclear effects,' complete with a slide-rule like gadget that enabled us to calculate just what would happen if near-by military bases were obliterated by nuclear explosions. Few doubted that we were, in the words of a pop song, 'on the eve of destruction.' These years were also the dawning of 'the space age' in which humans were finally leaving the Earth and starting what promised to be an epic trek, utterly transformative in its effects, to the stars. My father worked for a number of these years for a large aerospace military-industrial firm, then working for NASA to build the very large rockets needed to launch men and machines to the moon and back. My friends and I debated fantastical topics, such as the pros and cons of emigrating to Mars, and how rapidly a crisis-driven exodus from the earth could be organized.



Two events that later occurred in the area where I spent my childhood served as culminating catalytic events for my greenpeace thinking. First, some years after my family moved away, the industrial facility to mix rocket fuel that had been built by the company my father worked for, and that he had helped put into operation, was struck by an extremely violent 'industrial accident,' which reduced, in one titanic flash, multi-story concrete and steel buildings filled with specialized heavy industrial machinery (and everyone in them) into a grey powdery gravel ash, no piece of which was larger than a fist. Second, during the late 1970s, the US Navy acquired a large tract of largely undeveloped marsh and land behind another barrier island (Cumberland), an area 10-15 miles from where I had lived, a place where I had camped, fished, and hunted deer. The Navy dredged and filled what was one of the most biologically fertile temperate zone estuaries on the planet. There they built the east coast base for the new fleet of Trident nuclear ballistic missile submarines, the single most potent violence machine ever built, thus turning what was for me the wildest part of my wild-encircled childhood home into one of the largest nuclear weapons complexes on earth. These events catalyzed for me the realization that there was a great struggle going on, for the Earth and for the future, and I knew firmly which side I was on.



My approach to thinking about problems was also strongly shaped by high school debate, where I learned the importance of 'looking at questions from both sides,' and from this stems my tendency to look at questions as debates between competing answers, and to focus on decisively engaging, defeating, and replacing the strongest and most influential opposing positions. As an undergraduate at Yale College, I started doing Political Theory. I am sure that I was a very vexing student in some ways, because (the debater again) I asked Marxist questions to my liberal and conservative professors, and liberal and conservative ones to my Marxist professors. Late in my sophomore year, I had my epiphany, my direction-defining moment, that my vocation would be an attempt to do the political theory of the global and the technological. Since then, the only decisions have been ones of priority and execution within this project.



Wanting to learn something about cutting-edge global and technological and issues, I next went to Washington D.C. for seven years. I worked on Capitol Hill for three and a half years as a policy aide, working on energy and conservation and renewable energy and nuclear power. I spent the other three and a half years as a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, a small environmental and global issues think tank that was founded and headed by Lester Brown, a well-known and far-sighted globalist. I co-authored a book about renewable energy and transitions to global sustainability and wrote a study on space and space weapons. At the time I published Whole Earth Security: a Geopolitics of Peace (1983), in which my basic notions of planetary geopolitics and republicanism were first laid out. During these seven years in Washington, I also was a part-time student, earning a Master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy at George Washington University.



In all, these Washington experiences have been extremely valuable for my thinking. Many political scientists view public service as a low or corrupting activity, but this is, I think, very wrong-headed. The reason that the democratic world works as well as it does is because of the distributive social intelligence. But social intelligence is neither as distributed nor as intelligent as it needs to be to deal with many pressing problems. My experience as a Congressional aide taught me that most of the problems that confront my democracy are rooted in various limits and corruptions of the people. I have come to have little patience with those who say, for example, rising inequality is inherent in capital C capitalism, when the more proximate explanation is that the Reagan Republican Party was so successful in gutting the progressive tax system previously in place in the United States. Similarly, I see little value in claims, to take a very contemporary example, that 'the NSA is out of control' when this agency is doing more or less what the elected officials, responding to public pressures to provide 'national security' loudly demanded. In democracies, the people are ultimately responsible.



As I was immersed in the world of arms control and environmental activism I was impressed by the truth of Keynes's oft quoted line, about the great practical influence of the ideas of some long-dead 'academic scribbler.' This is true in varying degrees in every issue area, but in some much more than others. This reinforced my sense that great potential practical consequence of successfully innovating in the various conceptual frameworks that underpinned so many important activities. For nuclear weapons, it became clear to me that the problem was rooted in the statist and realist frames that people so automatically brought to a security question of this magnitude.



Despite the many appeals of a career in DC politics and policy, this was all for me an extended research field-trip, and so I left Washington to do a PhD—a move that mystified many of my NGO and activist friends, and seemed like utter folly to my political friends. At Princeton University, I concentrated on IR, Political Theory, and Military History and Politics, taking courses with Robert Gilpin, Richard Falk, Barry Posen, Sheldon Wolin and others. In my dissertation—entitled Global Orders: Geopolitical and Materialist Theories of the Global-Industrial Era, 1890-1945—I explored IR and related thinking about the impacts of the industrial revolution as a debate between different world order alternatives, and made arguments about the superiority of liberalist, internationalist, and globalist arguments—most notably from H.G. Wells and John Dewey—to the strong realist and imperialist ideas most commonly associated with the geopolitical writers of this period.



I also continued engaging in activist policy affiliated to the Program on Nuclear Policy Alternatives at the Center for Energy andEnvironmental Studies (CEES), which was then headed by Frank von Hippel, a physicist turned 'public interest scientist', and a towering figure in the global nuclear arms control movement. I was a Post Doc at CEES during the Gorbachev era and I went on several amazing and eye-opening trips to the Soviet Union. Continuing my space activism, I was able to organize workshops in Moscow and Washington on large-scale space cooperation, gathering together many of the key space players on both sides. While Princeton was fabulously stimulating intellectually, it was also a stressful pressure-cooker, and I maintained my sanity by making short trips, two of three weekends, over six years, to Manhattan, where I spent the days working in the main reading room of the New York Public Library and the nights partying and relaxing in a world completely detached from academic life.



When it comes to my intellectual development in terms of reading theory, the positive project I wanted to pursue was partially defined by approaches I came to reject. Perhaps most centrally, I came to reject an approach that was very intellectually powerful, even intoxicating, and which retains great sway over many, that of metaphysical politics. The politics of the metaphysicians played a central role in my coming to reject the politics of metaphysics. The fact that some metaphysical ideas and the some of the deep thinkers who advanced them, such as Heidegger, and many Marxists, were so intimately connected with really disastrous politics seemed a really damning fact for me, particularly given that these thinkers insisted so strongly on the link between their metaphysics and their politics. I was initially drawn to Nietzsche's writing (what twenty-year old isn't) but his model of the philosopher founder or law-giver—that is, of a spiritually gifted but alienated guy (and it always is a guy) with a particularly strong but frustrated 'will to power' going into the wilderness, having a deep spiritual revelation, and then returning to the mundane corrupt world with new 'tablets of value,' along with a plan to take over and run things right—seemed more comic than politically relevant, unless the prophet is armed, in which case it becomes a frightful menace. The concluding scene in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (sometimes translated as The Glass Bead Game) summarized by overall view of the 'high theory' project. After years of intense training by the greatest teachers the most spiritually and intellectually gifted youths finally graduate. To celebrate, they go to lake, dive in, and, having not learned how to swim, drown.



I was more attracted to Aristotle, Hume, Montesquieu, Dewey and other political theorists with less lofty and comprehensive views of what theory might accomplish; weary of actions; based on dogmatic or totalistic thinking; an eye to the messy and compromised world; with a political commitment to liberty and the interests of the many; a preference for peace over war; an aversion to despotism and empire; and an affinity for tolerance and plurality. I also liked some of those thinkers because of their emphasis on material contexts. Montesquieu seeks to analyze the interaction of material contexts and republican political forms; Madison and his contemporaries attempt to extend the spatial scope of republican political association by recombining in novel ways various earlier power restraint arrangements. I was tremendously influenced by Dewey, studying intensively his slender volume The Public and its Problems (1927)—which I think is the most important book in twentieth century political thought. By the 'public' Dewey means essentially a stakeholder group, and his main point is that the material transformations produced by the industrial revolution has created new publics, and that the political task is to conceptualize and realize forms of community and government appropriate to solving the problems that confront these new publics.



One can say my overall project became to apply and extend their concepts to the contemporary planetary situation. Concomitantly reading IR literature on nuclear weapons, I was struck by fact that the central role that material realities played in these arguments was very ad hoc, and that many of the leading arguments on nuclear politics were very unconvincing. It was clear that while Waltz (Theory Talk #40) had brilliantly developed some key ideas about anarchy made by Hobbes and Rousseau, he had also left something really important out. These sorts of deficiencies led me to develop the arguments contained in Bounding Power. I think it is highly unlikely that I would have had these doubts, or come to make the arguments I made without having worked in political theory and in policy.



I read many works that greatly influenced my thinking in this area, among them works by Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology, James Lovelock's Gaia, Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents (read a related article here, pdf), Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth and The Abolition, William Ophul's Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity... I was particularly stuck by a line in Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (pdf), that we live in a 'spaceship' like closed highly interconnected system, but lack an 'operating manual' to guide intelligently our actions. It was also during this period that I read key works by H.G. Wells, most notably his book, Anticipations, and his essay The Idea of a League of Nations, both of which greatly influenced my thinking.



This aside, the greatest contribution to my thinking has come from conversations sustained over many years with some really extraordinary individuals. To mention those that I have been arguing with, and learning from, for at least ten years, there is John O'Looney, Wesley Warren, Bob Gooding-Williams, Alyn McAuly, Henry Nau, Richard Falk, Michael Doyle (Theory Talk #1), Richard Mathew, Paul Wapner, Bron Taylor, Ron Deibert, John Ikenberry, Bill Wohlforth, Frank von Hippel, Ethan Nadelmann, Fritz Kratochwil, Barry Buzan (Theory Talk #35), Ole Waever, John Agnew (Theory Talk #4), Barry Posen, Alex Wendt (Theory Talk #3), James der Derian, David Hendrickson, Nadivah Greenberg, Tim Luke, Campbell Craig, Bill Connolly, Steven David, Jane Bennett, Daniel Levine (TheoryTalk #58), and Jairus Grove. My only regret is that I have not spoken even more with them, and with the much larger number of people I have learned from on a less sustained basis along the way.

                                    



What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?



I have thought a great deal about what sort of answers to this question can be generally valuable. For me, the most important insight is that success in intellectual life and academia is determined by more or less the same combination of factors that determines success more generally. This list is obvious: character, talent, perseverance and hard work, good judgment, good 'people skills,' and luck. Not everyone has a talent to do this kind of work, but the number of people who do have the talent to do this kind of work is much larger than the number of people who are successful in doing it. I think in academia as elsewhere, the people most likely to really succeed are those whose attitude toward the activity is vocational. A vocation is something one is called to do by an inner voice that one cannot resist. People with vocations never really work in one sense, because they are doing something that they would be doing even if they were not paid or required. Of course, in another sense people with vocations never stop working, being so consumed with their path that everything else matters very little. People with jobs and professions largely stop working when they when the lottery, but people with vocations are empowered to work more and better. When your vocation overlaps with your job, you should wake up and say 'wow, I cannot believe I am being paid to do this!' Rather obviously, the great danger in the life paths of people with vocations is imbalance and burn-out. To avoid these perils it is beneficial to sustain strong personal relationships, know when and how to 'take off' effectively, and sustain the ability to see things as an unfolding comedy and to laugh.



Academic life also involves living and working in a profession. Compared to the oppressions that so many thinkers and researchers have historically suffered from, contemporary professional academic life is a utopia. But academic life has several aspects unfortunate aspects, and coping successfully with them is vital. Academic life is full of 'odd balls' and the loose structure of universities and organization, combined with the tenure system, licenses an often florid display of dubious behavior. A fair number of academics have really primitive and incompetent social skills. Others are thin skinned-ego maniacs. Some are pompous hypocrites. Some are ruthlessly self-aggrandizing and underhanded. Some are relentless shirkers and free-riders. Also, academic life is, particularly relative to the costs of obtaining the years of education necessary to obtain it, not very well paid. Corruptions of clique, ideological factionalism, and nepotism occur. If not kept in proper perspective, and approached in appropriate ways, academic department life can become stupidly consuming of time, energy, and most dangerously, intellectual attention. The basic step for healthy departmental life is to approach it as a professional role.



The other big dimension of academic life is teaching. Teaching is one of the two 'deliverables' that academic organizations provide in return for the vast resources they consume. Shirking on teaching is a dereliction of responsibility, but also is the foregoing of a great opportunity. Teaching is actually one of the most assuredly consequential things academics do. The key to great teaching is, I think, very simple: inspire and convey enthusiasm. Once inspired, students learn. Once students take questions as their own, they become avid seekers of answers. Teachers of things political also have a responsibility to remain even-handed in what they teach, to make sure that they do not teach just or mainly their views, to make sure that the best and strongest versions of opposing sides are heard. Teaching seeks to produce informed and critically thinking students, not converts. Beyond the key roles of inspiration and even-handedness, the rest is the standard package of tasks relevant in any professional role: good preparation, good organization, hard work, and clarity of presentation.





Your main book, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (2007), is a mix of intellectual history, political theory and IR theory, and is targeted largely at realism. How does a reading and interpretation of a large number of old books tell us something new about realism, and the contemporary global?



Bounding Power attempts to dispel some very large claims made by realists about their self-proclaimed 'tradition,' a lineage of thought in which they place many of the leading Western thinkers about political order, such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and the 'global geopoliticans' from the years around the beginning of the twentieth century. In the book I argue that the actual main axis of western thinking about political order (and its absence) is largely the work of 'republican' thinkers from the small number of 'republics', and that many of the key ideas that realists call realist and liberals call liberal are actually fragments of a larger, more encompassing set of arguments that were primarily in the idioms of republicanism. This entails dispelling the widely held view that the liberal and proto-liberal republican thought and practice are marked by 'idealism'—and therefore both inferior in their grasp of the problem of security-from violence and valuable only when confined to the 'domestic.' I demonstrate that this line of republican security thinkers had a robust set of claims both about material contextual factors, about the 'geopolitics of freedom', and a fuller understanding of security-from-violence. The book shows how perhaps the most important insights of this earlier cluster of arguments has oddly been dropped by both realists (particularly neorealists) and liberal international theorists. And, finally, it is an attempt to provide an understanding that posits the project of exiting anarchy on a global scale as something essentially unprecedented, and as something that the best of our inherited theory leaves us unable to say much about.



The main argument is contained in my formulation of what I think are the actual the two main sets of issues of Western structural-materialist security theory, two problematiques formulated in republican and naturalist-materialist conceptual vocabularies. The first problematique concerns the relationship between material context, the scope of tolerable anarchy, and necessary-for-security government. The second problematic concerns the relative security-viability of two main different forms of government—hierarchical and republican.



This formulation of the first problematic concerning anarchy differs from the main line of contemporary Realist argument in that it poses the question as one about the spatial scope of tolerable anarchy. The primary variable in my reconstruction of the material-contextual component of these arguments is what I term violence interdependence (absent, weak, strong, and intense). The main substantive claim of Western structural-materialist security theory is that situations of anarchy combined with intense violence interdependence are incompatible with security and require substantive government. Situations of strong and weak violence interdependence constitute a tolerable (if at times 'nasty and brutish') second ('state-of-war') anarchy not requiring substantive government. Early formulations of 'state of nature' arguments, explicitly or implicitly hinge upon this material contextual variable, and the overall narrative structure of the development of republican security theory and practice has concerned natural geographic variations and technologically caused changes in the material context, and thus the scope of security tolerable/intolerable anarchy and needed substantive government. This argument was present in early realist versions of anarchy arguments, but has been dropped by neorealists. Conversely, contemporary liberal international theorists analyze interdependence, but have little to say about violence. The result is that the realists talk about violence and security, and the liberals talk about interdependence not relating to violence, producing the great lacuna of contemporary theory: analysis of violence interdependence.



The second main problematique, concerning the relative security viability of hierarchical and republican forms, has also largely been lost sight of, in large measure by the realist insistence that governments are by definition hierarchical, and the liberal avoidance of system structural theory in favor of process, ideational, and economic variables. (For neoliberals, cooperation is seen as (possibly) occurring in anarchy, without altering or replacing anarchy.) The main claim here is that republican and proto-liberal theorists have a more complete grasp of the security political problem than realists because of their realization that both the extremes of hierarchy and anarchy are incompatible with security. In order to register this lost component of structural theory I refer to republican forms at both the unit and the system-level as being characterized by an ordering principle which I refer to as negarchy. Such political arrangements are characterized by the simultaneous negation of both hierarchy and anarchy. The vocabulary of political structures should thus be conceived as a triad-triangle of anarchy, hierarchy, and negarchy, rather than a spectrum stretching from pure anarchy to pure hierarchy. Using this framework, Bounding Power traces various formulations of the key arguments of security republicans from the Greeks through the nuclear era as arguments about the simultaneous avoidance of hierarchy and anarchy on expanding spatial scales driven by variations and changes in the material context. If we recognize the main axis of our thinking in this way, we can stand on a view of our past that is remarkable in its potential relevance to thinking and dealing with the contemporary 'global village' like a human situation.





Nuclear weapons play a key role in the argument of Bounding Power about the present, as well as elsewhere in your work. But are nuclear weapons are still important as hey were during the Cold War to understand global politics?



Since their arrival on the world scene in the middle years of the twentieth century, there has been pretty much universal agreement that nuclear weapons are in some fundamental way 'revolutionary' in their implications for security-from-violence and world politics. The fact that the Cold War is over does not alter, and even stems from, this fact. Despite this wide agreement on the importance of nuclear weapons, theorists, policy makers, and popular arms control/disarmament movements have fundamental disagreements about which political forms are compatible with the avoidance of nuclear war. I have attempted to provide a somewhat new answer to this 'nuclear-political question', and to explain why strong forms of interstate arms control are necessary for security in the nuclear age. I argue that achieving the necessary levels of arms control entails somehow exiting interstate anarchy—not toward a world government as a world state, but toward a world order that is a type of compound republican union (marked by, to put it in terms of above discussion, a nearly completely negarchical structure).



This argument attempts to close what I term the 'arms control gap', the discrepancy between the value arms control is assigned by academic theorists of nuclear weapons and their importance in the actual provision of security in the nuclear era. During the Cold War, thinking among IR theorists about nuclear weapons tended to fall into three broad schools—war strategists, deterrence statists, and arms controllers. Where the first two only seem to differ about the amount of nuclear weapons necessary for states seeking security (the first think many, the second less), the third advocates that states do what they have very rarely done before the nuclear age, reciprocal restraints on arms.



But this Cold War triad of arguments is significantly incomplete as a list of the important schools of thought about the nuclear-political question. There are four additional schools, and a combination of their arguments constitutes, I argue, a superior answer to the nuclear-political question. First are the nuclear one worlders, a view that flourished during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and held that the simple answer to the nuclear political question is to establish a world government, as some sort of state. Second are the populist anti-nuclearists, who indict state apparatuses of acting contrary to the global public's security interests. Third are the deep arms controllers, such as Jonathan Schell, who argue that nuclear weapons need to be abolished. Fourth are the theorists of omniviolence, who theorize situations produced by the leakage of nuclear weapons into the hands of non-state actors who cannot be readily deterred from using nuclear weapons. What all of these schools have in common is that they open up the state and make arguments about how various forms of political freedom—and the institutions that make it possible—are at issue in answering the nuclear-political question.

                                                                                                                

Yet one key feature all seven schools share is that they all make arguments about how particular combinations and configurations of material realities provide the basis for thinking that their answer to the nuclear-political question is correct. Unfortunately, their understandings of how material factors shape, or should shape, actual political arrangements is very ad hoc. Yet the material factors—starting with sheer physical destructiveness—are so pivotal that they merit a more central role in theories of nuclear power. I think we need to have a model that allows us to grasp how variations in material contexts condition the functionality of 'modes of protection', that is, distinct and recurring security practices (and their attendant political structures).



For instance, one mode of protection—what I term the real-state mode of protection—attempts to achieve security through the concentration, mobilization, and employment of violence capability. This is the overall, universal, context-independent strategy of realists. Bringing into view material factors, I argue, shows that this mode of protection is functional not universally but specifically—and only—in material contexts that are marked by violence-poverty and slowness. This mode of protection is dysfunctional in nuclear material contexts marked by violence abundance and high violence velocities. In contrast, a republican federal mode of protection is a bundle of practices that aim for the demobilization and deceleration of violence capacity, and that the practices associated with this mode of protection are security functional in the nuclear material context.



What emerges from such an approach to ideas about the relation between nuclear power and security from violence is that the epistemological foundations for any of the major positions about nuclear weapons are actually much weaker than we should be comfortable with. People often say the two most important questions about the nuclear age are: what is the probability that nuclear weapons will be used? And then, what will happen when they are used? The sobering truth is that we really do not have good grounds for confidently answering either of those two questions. But every choice made about nuclear weapons depends on risk calculations that depend on how we answer these questions.





You have also written extensively on space, a topic that has not recently attracted much attention from many IR scholars. How does your thinking on this relate to your overall thinking about the global and planetary situation?

                                                                                                          

The first human steps into outer space during the middle years of the twentieth century have been among the most spectacular and potentially consequential events in the globalization of machine civilization on Earth. Over the course of what many call 'the space age,' thinking about space activities, space futures, and the consequences of space activities has been dominated by an elaborately developed body of 'space expansionist' thought that makes ambitious and captivating claims about both the feasibility and the desirability of human expansion into outer space. Such views of space permeate popular culture, and at times appear to be quite influential in actual space policy. Space expansionists hold that outer space is a limitless frontier and that humans should make concerted efforts to explore and colonize and extend their military activities into space. They claim the pursuit of their ambitious projects will have many positive, even transformative, effects upon the human situation on Earth, by escaping global closure, protecting the earth's habitability, preserving political plurality, and enhancing species survival. Claims about the Earth, its historical patterns and its contemporary problems, permeate space expansionist thinking.



While the feasibility, both technological and economic, of space expansionist projects has been extensively assessed, arguments for their desirability have not been accorded anything approaching a systematic assessment. In part, such arguments about the desirability of space expansion are difficult to assess because they incorporate claims that are very diverse in character, including claims about the Earth (past, present, and future), about the ways in which material contexts made up of space 'geography' and technologies produce or heavily favor particular political outcomes, and about basic worldview assumptions regarding nature, science, technology, and life.



By breaking these space expansionist arguments down into their parts, and systematically assessing their plausibility, a very different picture of the space prospect emerges. I think there are strong reasons to think that the consequences of the human pursuit of space expansion have been, and could be, very undesirable, even catastrophic. The actual militarization of that core space technology ('the rocket') and the construction of a planetary-scope 'delivery' and support system for nuclear war-fighting has been the most important consequence of actual space activities, but these developments have been curiously been left out of accounts of the space age and assessments of its impacts. Similarly, much of actually existing 'nuclear arms control' has centered on restraining and dismantling space weapons, not nuclear weapons. Thus the most consequential space activity—the acceleration of nuclear delivery capabilities—has been curiously rendered almost invisible in accounts of space and assessments of its impacts. This is an 'unknown known' of the 'space age'. Looking ahead, the creation of large orbital infrastructures will either presuppose or produce world government, potentially of a very hierarchical sort.  There are also good reasons to think that space colonies are more likely to be micro-totalitarian than free. And extensive human movement off the planet could in a variety of ways increase the vulnerability of life on Earth, and even jeopardize the survival of the human species.



Finally, I think much of space expansionist (and popular) thinking about space and the consequences of humans space activities has been marked by basic errors in practical geography. Most notably, there is the widespread failure to realize that the expansion of human activities into Earth's orbital space has enhanced global closure, because the effective distances in Earth's space make it very small. And because of the formidable natural barriers to human space activity, space is a planetary 'lid, not a 'frontier'. So one can say that the most important practical discovery of the 'space age' has been an improved understanding of the Earth. These lines of thinking, I find, would suggest the outlines of a more modest and Earth-centered space program, appropriate for the current Earth age. Overall, the fact that we can't readily expand into space is part of why we are in a new 'earth age' rather than a 'space age'.





You've argued against making the environment into a national security issue twenty years ago. Do the same now, considering that making the environment a bigger priority by making it into a national security issue might be the only way to prevent total environmental destruction?



When I started writing about the relationships between environment and security twenty years ago, not a great deal of work had been done on this topic. But several leading environmental thinkers were making the case that framing environmental issues as security issues, or what came to be called 'securitizing the environment', was not only a good strategy to get action on environmental problems, but also was useful analytically to think about these two domains. Unlike the subsequent criticisms of 'environmental security' made by Realists and scholars of conventional 'security studies', my criticism starts with the environmentalist premise that environmental deterioration is a paramount problem for contemporary humanity as a whole.



Those who want to 'securitize the environment' are attempting to do what William James a century ago proposed as a general strategy for social problem solving. Can we find, in James' language, 'a moral equivalent of war?' (Note the unfortunately acronym: MEOW). War and the threat of war, James observed, often lead to rapid and extensive mobilizations of effort. Can we somehow transfer these vast social energies to deal with other sets of problems? This is an enduring hope, particularly in the United States, where we have a 'war on drugs', a 'war on cancer', and a 'war on poverty'. But doing this for the environment, by 'securitizing the environment,' is unlikely to be very successful. And I fear that bringing 'security' orientations, institutions, and mindsets into environmental problem-solving will also bring in statist, nationalist, and militarist approaches. This will make environmental problem-solving more difficult, not easier, and have many baneful side-effects.



Another key point I think is important, is that the environment—and the various values and ends associated with habitat and the protection of habitat—are actually much more powerful and encompassing than those of security and violence. Instead of 'securitizing the environment' it is more promising is to 'environmentalize security'. Not many people think about the linkages between the environment and security-from-violence in this way, but I think there is a major case of it 'hiding in plain sight' in the trajectory of how the state-system and nuclear weapons have interacted.



When nuclear weapons were invented and first used in the 1940s, scientists were ignorant about many aspects of their effects. As scientists learned about these effects, and as this knowledge became public, many people started thinking and acting in different ways about nuclear choices. The fact that a ground burst of a nuclear weapon would produce substantial radioactive 'fall-out' was not appreciated until the first hydrogen bomb tests in the early 1950s. It was only then that scientists started to study what happened to radioactive materials dispersed widely in the environment. Evidence began to accumulate that some radioactive isotopes would be 'bio-focused', or concentrated by biological process. Public interest scientists began effectively publicizing this information, and mothers were alerted to the fact that their children's teeth were become radioactive. This new scientific knowledge about the environmental effects of nuclear explosions, and the public mobilizations it produced, played a key role in the first substantial nuclear arms control treaty, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in the ocean, and in space. Thus, the old ways of providing security were circumscribed by new knowledge and new stakeholders of environmental health effects. The environment was not securitized, security was partially environmentalized.



Thus, while some accounts by arms control theorists emphasize the importance of 'social learning' in altering US-Soviet relations, an important part of this learning was not about the nature of social and political interactions, but about the environmental consequences of nuclear weapons. The learning that was most important in motivating so many actors (both within states and in mass publics) to seek changes in politics was 'natural learning,' or more specifically learning about the interaction of natural and technological systems.



An even more consequential case of the environmentalization of security occurred in the 1970's and 1980's. A key text here is Jonathan Schell's book, The Fate of the Earth. Schell's book, combining very high-quality journalism with first rate political theoretical reflections, lays out in measured terms the new discoveries of ecologists and atmospheric scientists about the broader planetary consequences of an extensive nuclear war. Not only would hundreds of millions of people be immediately killed and much of the planet's built infrastructure destroyed, but the planet earth's natural systems would be so altered that the extinction of complex life forms, among them homo sapiens, might result. The detonation of numerous nuclear weapons and the resultant burning of cities would probably dramatically alter the earth's atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer that protects life from lethal solar radiations, and filling the atmosphere with sufficient dust to cause a 'nuclear winter.' At stake in nuclear war, scientists had learned, was not just the fate of nations, but of the earth as a life support system. Conventional accounts of the nuclear age and of the end of the Cold War are loath to admit it, but it I believe it is clear that spreading awareness of these new natural-technological possibilities played a significant role in ending the Cold War and the central role that nuclear arms control occupies in the settlement of the Cold War. Again, traditional ways of achieving security-from-violence were altered by new knowledges about their environmental consequences—security practices and arrangements were partly environmentalized.



Even more radically, I think we can also turn this into a positive project. As I wrote two decades ago, environmental restoration would probably generate political externalities that would dampen tendencies towards violence. In other words, if we address the problem of the environment, then we will be drawn to do various things that will make various types of violent conflict less likely.





Your work is permeated by references to 'material factors'. This makes it different from branches of contemporary IR—like constructivism or postmodernism—which seem to be underpinned by a profound commitment to focus solely one side of the Cartesian divide. What is your take on the pervasiveness and implications of this 'social bias'?



Postmodernism and constructivism are really the most extreme manifestations of a broad trend over the last two centuries toward what I refer to as 'social-social science' and the decline—but hardly the end—of 'natural-social science'. Much of western thought prior to this turn was 'naturalist' and thus tended to downplay both human agency and ideas. At the beginning of the nineteenth century—partly because of the influence of German idealism, partly because of the great liberationist projects that promised to give better consequence to the activities and aspirations of the larger body of human populations (previously sunk in various forms of seemingly natural bondages), and partly because of the great expansion of human choice brought about by the science-based technologies of the Industrial Revolution—there was a widespread tendency to move towards 'social-social science,' the project of attempting to explain the human world solely by reference to the human world, to explain social outcomes with reference to social causes. While this was the dominant tendency, and a vastly productive one in many ways, it existed alongside and in interaction with what is really a modernized version of the earlier 'natural-social science.' Much of my work has sought to 'bring back in' and extend these 'natural-social' lines of argument—found in figures such as Dewey and H.G. Wells—into our thinking about the planetary situation.



In many parts of both European and American IR and related areas, Postmodern and constructivist theories have significantly contributed to IR theorists by enhancing our appreciation of ideas, language, and identities in politics. As a response to the limits and blindnesses of certain types of rationalist, structuralist, and functional theories, this renewed interest in the ideational is an important advance. Unfortunately, both postmodernism and constructivism have been marked by a strong tendency to go too far in their emphasis of the ideational. Postmodernism and constructivism have also helped make theorists much more conscious of the implicit—and often severely limiting—ontological assumptions that underlay, inform, and bound their investigations. This is also a major contribution to the study of world politics in all its aspects.



Unfortunately, this turn to ontology has also had intellectually limiting effects by going too far, in the search for a pure or nearly pure social ontology. With the growth in these two approaches, there has indeed been a decided decline in theorizing about the material. But elsewhere in the diverse world of theorizing about IR and the global, theorizing about the material never came anything close to disappearing or being eclipsed. For anyone thinking about the relationships between politics and nuclear weapons, space, and the environment, theorizing about the material has remained at the center, and it would be difficult to even conceive of how theorizing about the material could largely disappear. The recent 're-discovery of the material' associated with various self-styled 'new materialists' is a welcome, if belated, re-discovery for postmodernists and constructivists. For most of the rest of us, the material had never been largely dropped out.



A very visible example of the ways in which the decline in appropriate attention to the material, an excessive turn to the ideational, and the quest for a nearly pure social ontology, can lead theorizing astray is the core argument in Alexander Wendt's main book, Social Theory of International Politics, one of the widely recognized landmarks of constructivist IR theory. The first part of the book advances a very carefully wrought and sophisticated argument for a nearly pure ideational social ontology. The material is explicitly displaced into a residue or rump of unimportance. But then, to the reader's surprise, the material, in the form of 'common fate' produced by nuclear weapons, and climate change, reappears and is deployed to play a really crucial role in understanding contemporary change in world politics. 



My solution is to employ a mixed ontology. By this I mean that I think several ontologically incommensurate and very different realities are inescapable parts the human world. These 'unlikes' are inescapable parts of any argument, and must somehow be combined. There are a vast number of ways in which they can be combined, and on close examination, virtually all arguments in the social sciences are actually employing some version of a mixed ontology, however implicitly and under-acknowledged.



But not all combinations are equally useful in addressing all questions. In my version of mixed ontology—which I call 'practical naturalism'—human social agency is understood to be occurring 'between two natures': on the one hand the largely fixed nature of humans, and on the other the changing nature composed of the material world, a shifting amalgam of actual non-human material nature of geography and ecology, along with human artifacts and infrastructures. Within this frame, I posit as rooted in human biological nature, a set of 'natural needs,' most notably for security-from-violence and habitat services. Then I pose questions of functionality, by which I mean: which combinations of material practices, political structures, ideas and identities are needed to achieve these ends in different material contexts? Answering this question requires the formulation of various 'historical materialist' propositions, which in turn entails the systematic formulation of typologies and variation in both the practices, structures and ideas, and in material contexts. These arguments are not centered on explaining what has or what will happen. Instead they are practical in the sense that they are attempting to answer the question of 'what is to be done' given the fixed ends and given changing material contexts. I think this is what advocates of arms control and environmental sustainability are actually doing when they claim that one set of material practices and their attendant political structures, identities and ideas must be replaced with another if basic human needs are to going to continue to be meet in the contemporary planetary material situation created by the globalization of machine civilization on earth.

                                  

Since this set of arguments is framed within a mixed ontology, ideas and identities are a vital part of the research agenda. Much of the energy of postmodern and many varieties of critical theory have focused on 'deconstructing' various identities and ideas. This critical activity has produced and continues to produce many insights of theorizing about politics. But I think there is an un-tapped potential for theorists who are interested in ideas and identities, and who want their work to make a positive contribution to practical problem-solving in the contemporary planetary human situation in what might be termed a 'constructive constructivism'. This concerns a large practical theory agenda—and an urgent one at that, given the rapid increase in planetary problems—revolving around the task of figuring out which ideas and identities are appropriate for the planetary world, and in figuring out how they can be rapidly disseminated. Furthermore, thinking about how to achieve consciousness change of this sort is not something ancillary to the greenpeace project but vital to it. My thinking on how this should and might be done centers the construction of a new social narrative, centered not on humanity but on the earth.





Is it easy to plug your mixed ontology and interests beyond the narrow confines of IR or even the walls of the ivory tower into processes of collective knowledge proliferation in IR—a discipline increasingly characterized by compartimentalization and specialization?



The great plurality of approaches in IR today is indispensible and a welcome change. The professionalization of IR and the organization of intellectual life has some corruptions and pitfalls that are best avoided. The explosion of 'isms' and of different perspectives has been valuable and necessary in many ways, but it has also helped to foster and empower sectarian tendencies that confound the advance of knowledge. Some of the adherents of some sects and isms boast openly of establishing 'citation cartels' to favor themselves and their friends. Some theorists also have an unfortunate tendency to assume that because they have adopted a label that what they actually do is the actually the realization of the label. Thus we have 'realists' with limited grasp on realities, 'critical theorists' who repeat rather than criticize the views of other 'critical theorists,' and anti-neoliberals who are ruthless Ayn Rand-like self aggrandizers. The only way to fully address these tendencies is to talk to people you disagree with, and find and communicate with people in other disciplines.



Another consequence of this sectarianism is visible in the erosion of scholarly standards of citation. The system of academic incentives is configured to reward publication, and the publication of ideas that are new. This has a curiously perverse impact on the achievement of cumulativity. One seemingly easy and attractive path to saying something new is to say something old in new language, to say something said in another sect or field in the language of your sect or field, or easiest of all, simply ignore what other people have said if it is too much like what you are trying to say. George Santyana is wide quoted in saying that 'those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.' For academics it can unfortunately be said, 'those who can successfully forget what past academics said are free to say it again, and thus advance toward tenure.' When rampant sectarianism and decline in standards of citation is combined with a broader cultural tendency to valorize self-expression and authenticity, academic work can become an exercise in abstract self expressionism.



Confining one's intellectual life within one 'ism' or sect is sure to be self-limiting. Many of the most important and interesting questions arise between and across the sects and schools. Also, there are great opportunities in learning from people who do not fully share your assumptions and approaches. Seriously engaging the work and ideas of scholars in other sects can be very very valuable. Scholars in different sects and schools are also often really taking positions that are not so different as their labels would suggest. Perhaps because my research agenda fits uncomfortably within any of the established schools and isms, I have found particularly great value in seeking out and talking on a sustained basis with people with very different approaches.





My final question is about normativity and the way that normativity is perceived: In Europe and the United States, liberal Internationalism is increasingly considered as hollowed out, as a discursive cover for a tendency to attempt to control and regulate the world—or as an unguided idealistic missile. Doesn't adapting to a post-hegemonic world require dropping such ambitions?



American foreign policy has never been entirely liberal internationalist. Many other ideas and ideologies and approaches have often played important roles in shaping US foreign policy. But the United States, for a variety of reasons, has pursued liberal internationalist foreign policy agendas more extensively, and successfully, than any other major state in the modern state system, and the world, I think, has been made better off in very important ways by these efforts.



The net impact of the United States and of American grand strategy and particularly those parts of American brand strategy that have been more liberal internationalist in their character, has been enormously positive for the world. It has produced not a utopia by any means, but has brought about an era with more peace and security, prosperity, and freedom for more people than ever before in history.



Both American foreign policy and liberal internationalism have been subject to strong attacks from a variety of perspectives. Recently some have characterized liberal internationalism as a type of American imperialism, or as a cloak for US imperialism. Virtually every aspect of American foreign policy has been contested within the United States. Liberal internationalists have been strong enemies of imperialism and military adventurism, whether American or from other states. This started with the Whig's opposition to the War with Mexico and the Progressive's opposition to the Spanish-American War, and continued with liberal opposition to the War in Vietnam.



The claim that liberal internationalism leads to or supports American imperialism has also been recently voiced by many American realists, perhaps most notably John Mearsheimer (Theory Talk #49). He and others argue that liberal internationalism played a significant role in bringing about the War on Iraq waged by the W. Bush administration. This was indeed one of the great debacles of US foreign policy. But the War in Iraq was actually a war waged by American realists for reasons grounded in realist foreign policy thinking. It is true, as Mearsheimer emphasizes, that many academic realists criticized the Bush administration's plans and efforts in the invasion in Iraq. Some self-described American liberal internationalists in the policy world supported the war, but almost all academic American liberal internationalists were strongly opposed, and much of the public opposition to the war was on grounds related to liberal internationalist ideas.



It is patently inaccurate to say that main actors in the US government that instigated the War on Iraq were liberal internationalists. The main initiators of the war were Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Whatever can be said about those two individuals, they are not liberal internationalists. They initiated the war because they thought that the Saddam Hussein regime was a threat to American interests—basically related to oil. The Saddam regime was seen as a threat to American-centered regional hegemony in the Middle East, an order whose its paramount purpose has been the protection of oil, and the protection of the regional American allies that posses oil. Saddam Hussein was furthermore a demonstrated regional revisionist likely to seek nuclear weapons, which would greatly compromise American military abilities in the region. Everything else the Bush Administration's public propaganda machine said to justify the war was essentially window dressing for this agenda. Far from being motivated by a liberal internationalist agenda the key figures in the Bush Administration viewed the collateral damage to international institutions produced by the war as a further benefit, not a cost, of the war. It is particularly ironic that John Mearsheimer would be a critic of this war, which seems in many ways a 'text book' application of a central claim of his 'offensive realism,' that powerful states can be expected, in the pursuit of their security and interests, to seek to become and remain regional hegemons.



Of course, liberal internationalism, quite aside from dealing with these gross mischaracterizations propagated by realists, must also look to the future. The liberal internationalism that is needed for today and tomorrow is going to be in some ways different from the liberal internationalism of the twentieth century. This is a large topic that many people, but not enough, are thinking about. In a recent working paper for the Council on Foreign Relations, John Ikenberry and I have laid out some ways in which we think American liberal internationalism should proceed. The starting point is the recognition that the United States is not as 'exceptional' in its precocious liberal-democratic character, not as 'indispensible' for the protection of the balance of power or the advance of freedom, or as easily 'hegemonic' as it has been historically. But the world is now also much more democratic than ever before, with democracies old and new, north and south, former colonizers and former colonies, and in every civilizational flavor. The democracies also face an array of difficult domestic problems, are thickly enmeshed with one another in many ways, and have a vital role to play in solving global problems. We suggest that the next liberal internationalism in American foreign policy should focus on American learning from the successes of other democracies in solving problems, focus on 'leading by example of successful problem-solving' and less with 'carrots and sticks,' make sustained efforts to moderate the inequalities and externalities produced by de-regulated capitalism, devote more attention to building community among the democracies, and make sustained efforts to 'recast global bargains' and the distribution of authority in global institutions to better incorporate the interests of 'rising powers.'





Daniel Deudney is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has published widely in political theory and international relations, on substantive issues such as nuclear weapons, the environment as a security issue, liberal and realist international relations theory, and geopolitics.





Related links



Deudney's Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins
Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Democratic Internationalism: An American Grand Strategy for a Post-exceptionalist Era (Council on Foreign Relations Working Paper, 2012) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney et al's Global Shift: How the West Should Respond to the Rise of China (2011 Transatlantic Academy report) here (pdf) 
Read the introduction of Deudney's Bounding Power (2007) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney's Bringing Nature Back In: Geopolitical Theory from the Greeks to the Global Era (1999 book chapter) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Who Won the Cold War? (Foreign Policy, 1992) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney's The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security (Millennium, 1990) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney's Rivers of Energy: The Hydropower Potential (WorldWatch Institute Paper, 1981) here (pdf) 









Print version of this Talk (pdf)