Suchergebnisse

'Tis the season, so I designed a card. (You may purchase it here if you like. Or any other comparably inappropriate product. I do feel more people ought to confound loved ones by gifting them my socks.) On to further scholarly matters! Ludwig Wittgenstein, his friends said, insisted on 'soupy' Christmas cards. In Wittgenstein in […]

John Dewey on the Horror of Making
his Poetry Public



This April's Fools interview is a preview for 'The Return of the Theorists: Dialogues with Great Thinkers in International Relations' (ed. Ned Lebow, Peer Schouten & Hidemi Suganami), now available at Palgrave.









After
various rounds of experimentation, two youthful IR scholars (the editor-in chief of this venture and Christian Bueger) bend space-time and
access an alternate reality with the ambition to conduct an interview for Theory
Talks with John Dewey. Dewey (1859-1952) was an American thinker often associated
with a school of thought that has become known as American pragmatism. He is today
largely known for his contributions to education studies, philosophy of science,
and the theory of democracy. In this Talk, the young scholars sound out Dewey
on what thinking tools his original worldview would provide for IR—after
resolving a small embarrassment.







TT Dear Mr. Dewey. Thank you so much for your
willingness to participate in this Talk. Theory
Talks is an open-access journal that contributes to International Relations
debates by publishing interviews with cutting-edge theorists. It is not often
that Theory Talks is able to overcome
space-time limitations and conduct a Talk with a departed theorist.



I am sorry—I think I have to interrupt you there…



TT Well, all right?



Yes, yes, the fact of the matter is that I am not a
theorist and refuse to be associated with that label! To purify theory out of
experience as some distinct realm, sirs, is to contribute to a fallacy that I
have dedicated my life to combat! I am afraid that this venture of yours, of
involving me in this Theory Talks, is
stillborn.



TT Dear Professor Dewey—with all due respect, we are
running ahead of matters here a little. The reason why we invited you is exactly
for you to expound your ideas—and reservations—regarding theory, practice, and
international relations. Would you be willing to bracket your concern for a
minute? We promise to get back to it.



Well my dear sirs—it is that you insist on a
dialogue—that restless, participative and dramatic form of inquiry that leads
to so much more insight than books—and that you have travelled from far by
means that utterly fascinate me, so I will give you the benefit of the doubt.



TT Thank you. And let us from the outset emphasize
that by interviewing you for Theory Talks, we don't necessarily want to reduce
your contribution to thought to the practice of theorizing. Isn't it also
correct you have written poetry?



Now I am baffled a second time! I have never publicly
attempted my hand at the noble art of the poetic!



TT It has to be said, Mr. Dewey, that the problem of
what is and isn't public has perhaps shifted a bit since your passing away. That's
something we'd like to discuss, too, but the fact of the matter is that what
you have consistently consigned to the trashcan of your office at Columbia
University has been just as meticulously recovered by 'a janitor with a long
view'.



Oh heavens! You tell me I have been uncovered as a
versifier? What of my terrible scribbling has been uncovered you say?



TT Well, perhaps you recognize the one that starts
like:



I hardly
think I heard you call

Since
betwixt us was the wall

Of sounds
within, buzzings i' the ear

Roarings
i' the vein so closely near…



… 'That I was captured in illusion/Of outward things
said clear…' I well remember—a piece particularly deserving of oblivion. I
wrote that in the privacy of lonely office hours, thinking the world would have
the mercy not to allow a soul to lay its eyes on it!



TT We are sorry to say that besides this one, a total
of 101 poems has been recovered, and published in print—and you know, given
some advances in technology, circulation of text is highly accelerated, meaning
that one could very well say your poetry is part of the public domain.



So there I am, well half a decade after my death,
subject to the indirect effects of advances in technology interacting with the
associations I myself carelessly established between roses, summer days, and
all too promiscuous waste bins! Sirs, in the little time we have conversed, I
see the afterlife hasn't brought me any good. Hades takes on a bleaker shade…



TT Well, in reality, the future has been good to you:
you are firmly canonised as one an authentic American intellectual, and stand firmly
on a pedestal in the galleries occupied by the notables of modern international
social thought. So why don't we explore a little bit why that is, within the
specific domain of political theory? Theory
Talks actually poses the same first three questions to every interviewee,
followed by a number of questions specific to your thought. The first question
we always pose is: What, according to you, is the biggest challenge or central
debate in International Relations and what is your position vis-à-vis that
challenge/debate?



I think that while it must have been noted by other
interviewees that in fact this question is two separate questions—one about
real-world challenges and another about theoretical debates—I would be the last
to do so, and I am happy you mix concerns of theory and practice. I have always
fought against establishing such a fictional separation between seemingly distinct
domains of thought and practice. It is a dangerous fiction on top of it. The
same goes for International Relations—while I have not dedicated myself to the
study of the international as a discrete field of action, I do think that this domain
does not escape some of the general observations I have made regarding society
and its politics.



I hold that "modern society is many societies more or
less loosely connected" by all kinds of associations. As I explain in The Public and its Problems, a
fundamental challenge of modern times is that the largely technically mediated associations
that constitute societies have outstretched the social mechanisms that we had
historically developed on the human scale of the village to mitigate their
indirect effects on others. During my life, I witnessed the proliferation of
railway, telegraph, radio, steam-driven shipping, and car and weapon
industries—thoroughly extending the web of association and affectedness within
and across borders. This means action constantly reaches further. People close
by and in far-off places are suddenly confronted with situations that they have
to relate to but which are out of their control. This automatically makes them
part of interested publics, with a stake in the way these mechanisations work. Now
this perhaps seems abstract but consider: the spread of a new technology—I see
you both looking on some small device with a black mirrored screen nervously
every 5 minutes—automatically involves users as a 'stakeholder'. Your actions
are mediated by them. You become affected by their design and
configuration—over which you have little control. In that regard, you are part
of a concerned public, but you have no way to influence the politics
constitutive of these technologies.



I would say the largest challenge is to amplify
participation and to institutionalize these fleeting publics. The proliferation
of technologies and institutions as conduits for international associations has
rendered publics around the globe more inchoate, while seemingly making it
easier than ever before to influence—for good or ill—large groups through the
manipulation of these global infrastructures of the public. We sowed
infrastructures, we reap fragilities and more diffusely affected publics: each
new technological expansion of the possibility to form associations leads to
concomitant insecurities.



TT How did you arrive where you currently are in your
thinking?



I have had the sheer luck or fortune to be engaged in
the occupation of thinking; and while I am quite regular at my meals, I think
that I may say that I would rather work, and perhaps even more, play, with
ideas and with thinking than eat. I was born in the wake of the Civil War, and
in times of a profound acceleration of technology as a vehicle of social,
economic, and political development. Perhaps, as in your own times, upheaval
and change was the status quo, stability a rare exception. My studies at Johns
Hopkins with people such as Peirce had tickled an intellectual curiosity as of
yet unsatisfied. I subsequently went to the University of Chicago for a decade
in which my commitment to pragmatist philosophy consolidated. Afterwards at
Columbia, and at the New School which I founded with people such as Charles A. Beard
and Thorsten Veblen, this approach translated into a number of books. In these I
applied my pragmatist convictions to such disparate issues as education, art,
faith, logic and indeed politics, the topic of your question. For me, these are
all interdependent aspects of society. This interdependence and inseparability
of the social fabric means that skewed economic or political interests will
reverberate throughout. But I am an optimist in that I also believe in the
fundamental possibility and promise of science and democracy to curb radical
change and reroute it into desirable directions for those affected. Good things
are also woven through the social and we should amplify those to lessen the
effects of negative associations.



TT What would a student require to become a specialist
in International Relations or to see the world in a global way?



A question dear to my heart. You might know that
throughout my entire life I have striven for transforming our understanding and
practice of education. Human progress is dependent on education, and as I have
learned during my travels to Russia, reform is not to be had by revolution but
by gradual education. Education is training in reflective thinking. The quality
of democracy depends on education.



Towards the end of my life I witnessed the creation of
the United Nations. This was a clear signal to me that "the relations between
nations are taking on the properties that constitute a public, and hence call
for some measure of political organization". Having this forum implied that we
saw the end of the complete denial of political responsibility of how the
policies in one national unit affect another as we find in the doctrine of
sovereignty. That the end of this doctrine is within reach means that we
require global education which will ensure the rise of informed global publics
which can develop the tools required to respond to global challenges.



In a more substantive fashion, I would insist that
students hold on to the essential impossibility to separate out experience as
it unfolds over time. The divisions and preferences that have come to dominate
academic knowledge in its 20th century 'maturing' are for me a loss
of rooting of knowledge in experience.



TT We're sorry, but isn't the task of social sciences
to offer universal or at least objective analytical categories to make sense of
the muddle of real-world experience? What you seem to be proposing is the
opposite!



I align with Weber in lamenting the acceleration of
the differentiation of understanding in society. This has made it difficult for
your generations to address social, political and economic challenges head on
while avoiding getting lost in one of its details or facets. Isn't the economic
and the political, constantly encroaching on everyday life? In the end, this
perhaps explains my insistence on democracy and schooling as the pivots of good
society: democracy to reconstruct and defend publics, and schooling to defend
individuals against (mis)understanding the world in ways that cannot be reduced
to their own lived experience. If students could only hold on to this holistic
perspective and eschew isolating subject matters from their social contexts.



TT Throughout your 70 years of active scholarship you
have written over a thousand articles and books. One commentator of your work
suggested that your body of writing is an "elaborate spider's web, the
junctions and lineaments of which its engineer knows well and in and on which
he is able to move about with great facility. But for the outsider who seeks to
traverse or map that territory there is the constant danger of getting stuck."
Many find your work difficult to navigate—what advice would you give the
reader?



Sirs why would anyone want to engage in a quest of
mapping all of my writings? You have to understand that thought always proceeds
in relations. A web, perhaps, yes. A spider's web certainly not. A spider that
spins a web out of himself, produces a web that is orderly and elaborate, but
it is only a trap. That is the goal of pure reasoning, not mine. The scientific
method of inquiry is rather comparable to the operations of the bee who
collects material within and from the world, but attacks and modifies the
collected stuff in order to make it yield its hidden treasure. "Drop the
conception that knowledge is knowledge only when it is a disclosure and
definition of the properties of fixed and antecedent reality; interpret the aim
and test of knowing by what happens in the actual procedures of scientific
inquiry". The occasion of thinking and writing is the experience of problems
and the need to clarify and resolve them. Everything depends on the problem,
the situations and the tools available. Inquiry does not rely on a priori
elements or fixed rules. I always attempted to start my work by understanding in
which problematic situations I aimed at intervening. Philosophy and academic,
but also public life, in my time was heading in wrong directions that called
upon me to initiate inquiry to resolve issues—in media res, as it were. When I
wrote Logic, I tried to rebut
dogmatic understandings. Now it appears that I am on the verge of becoming a
dogma myself. In a sense, the most tragic scenario would be if people develop a
"Deweyan" perspective or theory. Now I am curious, what problem brought you
actually to converse with me? 



TT Well, we are here today because we have been asked
to contribute to an effort to collect the views of a number of different
theorists, who, like you, live in different space-time. Now that we are here,
could we ask you to tell us how you use the term 'inquiry'? It is one of your core
concepts and in our conversation you already frequently referred to it. It is
often difficult to understand what you mean by this term and how it provides
direction and purpose for science…



It's a simple one, provided you have not been
indoctrinated by logical positivists. You, me, all of us, frequently engage in
inquiry. There is little distinction between solving problems of everyday life
and the reasoning of the scientist or philosopher. Most often habit and routine
will give you satisfaction. Yet when these fail or give you unpleasant
experience, then reasoning begins. Without inquiry, sirs, most likely you
wouldn't have been able to speak to me today! You will have to explain later
how you bended time and space and which technology allowed you to travel through
a black hole. But Albert was right, time travel is possible! Could we converse
today without Einstein's fabulous inquiry that led him to the realization of
space-time? Until the promulgation of Einstein's restricted theory of
relativity, mass, time and motion were regarded as intrinsic properties of
ultimate fixed and independent substances. Einstein questioned this on the
basis of experimentation and an investigation of the problem of simultaneity,
that is, that from different reference frames there can never be agreement on
the simultaneity of events.



Reflection implies that something is believed in (or
disbelieved in), not on its own direct account, but through something else
which stands as witness, evidence, proof, voucher, warrant; that is, as ground
of belief. At one time, rain is actually felt or directly experienced without
any intermediary fact; at another time, we infer that it has rained from the
looks of the grass and trees, or that it is going to rain because of the
condition of the air or the state of the barometer. The fact that inquiry intervenes
in ever-shifting contexts demands us to restrain from eternal truths or absolutistic
logic. Someone believing in a truth such as "individualism", has his program
determined for him in advance. It is then not a matter of finding out the
particular thing which needs to be done and the best way, and the
circumstances, of doing it. He knows in advance the sort of thing which must be
done, just as in ancient physical philosophy the thinker knew in advance what
must happen, so that all he had to do was to supply a logical framework of
definitions and classifications.



When I say that thinking and beliefs should be
experimental, not absolutistic, I have in mind a certain logic of method. Such
a logic firstly implies that the concepts, general principles, theories and
dialectical developments which are indispensable to any systematic knowledge are
shaped and tested as tools of inquiry. Secondly, policies and proposals for
social action have to be treated as working hypotheses. They have to be subject
to constant and well-equipped observations of the consequences they entail when
acted upon and subject to flexible revision. The social sciences are primarily
an apparatus for conducting such investigations.



TT Doesn't such a form of reasoning mean we'll just
muddle through without ever reaching certainty?



Absolutely correct! Arriving at one point is the
starting point of another. Life flowers and should be understood as such; experimental
reasoning is never complete. I can imagine the surprise you must feel at sudden
unforeseen events in international political relationships when you hold on to
fixed frames of how these relationships do and ought to look. That we will never
reach certainty does not imply to give up the quest of certainty, however. We
have to continuously improve on our tools of scientific inquiry…



TT Sorry to interrupt you here. Now it sounds as if
you have a sort of methods fetish. Do you imply that everything can be solved
by the right method and all that we have to do is to refine our methods? That's
something that our colleagues running statistics and thinking that the problems
of international can be solved by algorithms argue as well.



It might be that mathematical reasoning has well
advanced since my departure, and that the importance granted to the economy and
economic thinking as the sole conditioning factor of political organisation has
only increased, but you haven't fully grasped what I mean by 'tools'. Tell your
stubbornly calculating colleagues that inquiry is embedded in a situation,
hence there cannot be a single method which would fix all kinds of problems.
Second, while I admire the skill of mathematicians, what I mean by tools goes
well beyond that. A tool can be a concept, a term, a theory, a proposal, a
course of action, anything that might matter to settle a particular situation.
A tool is however not a solution per se. It is a proposal. It must be tested
against the problematic material. It matters only in so far as it is part of a
practical activity aimed at resolving a problematic situation.  



TT You emphasize that language is instrumental and reject
the idea of a private language. You also spent quite some energy to demolish
the "picture theory" of language. These arguments form the basis of
what we call today "constructivism", yet they are mainly subscribed to the Philosophical
Investigations of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein.



Earhh, I am aware of this fellow. He is an analytical
philosopher, so develops his argument from a different background. I started to
work on the social and cultural aspects of language use from around 1916. I
don't know whether Wittgenstein actually read my work when he set out to write
Philosophical Investigations, but you are quite right, there are obvious
parallels. I think my own term of "conjoint activity" expresses pretty much the
same, perhaps less eloquently, what Wittgenstein termed language games. I am
pleased to hear, however, that the instrumental view on language, that objects
get their meanings within a language in and by conjoint community of functional
use, has become firmly established in academia. I'd have reservations about the
term, 'constructivism'. It might be useful since it reminds us of all the
construction work that the organization of politics and society entails. Indeed
I have frequently stressed that instrumentalist theory implies construction. If
constructivism doesn't mean post-mortem studies of how something has been
constructed, but is directed towards production of better futures, I might be
fine with the term. But perhaps I would prefer 'productivism'.



TT That is a plausible term, but we are afraid, the
history of science has settled on constructivism. And you are right, the tendencies
you warn us of are significantly present in our discipline.



Sirs, if you permit. I have to attend to other
obligations. I
wish you safe travels back. Make sure you pick up something from the gift shop
before you leave.

 Jeremy Gilbert and I sometimes joke about TOP, the Transindividual Oriented Philosophy. The reference is obviously to the phenomenon of OOO (Object Oriented Ontology) in the early part of the millennium. As much as our joke has to do with sort of doctrinaire and polemical way the former arrived on the scene and our lack of interest in any such thing. (I should say in a parenthetical that is way too late, one of the things that always troubled me about OOO is that it emerged and thrived on blogs, but blogs with their intersection of the social and the technological seemed the last thing that the last thing that the crowd wanted to think about. Part of what makes me irredeemably a historical materialist is that I think the question of understanding where one is thinking from is paramount even if a bit quixotic--one can never see the ground that one speaks from). Despite this joke transindividuality, at least in terms of contemporary writers who use the concept, less a school of thought than a series of intersecting critiques and articulations. Or, if one wanted to be clever about it, the collection of writers who work on transindividuality are all part of a general orientation that is individuated differently in each of their specif philosophical articulations. I would say more about this but I feel like this is something that I tried to say with the examination of Balibar, Stiegler, and Virno in The Politics of Transindividuality.In that book I did not really discuss Bernard Aspe or Vittorio Morfino (at least at any length). However in the past month of so I have been reading a book by each of them that makes it clear how much they are part of the same metastable unity of philosophers. The books in question are Morfino's recently published Intersoggettività o Transindividualità: Materiali per un'alternativa  (a book I was able to work through in Italian thanks to the generous help of Dave Messing who let me look at an early draft of the English translation) and Bernard Aspe's Les Fibres du Temps  published in 2018. The two books are connected not just through their shared engagement with transindividuality, but in their use of the concept to overcome existing, perhaps even dominant, conceptions of individuality, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. However, both books do so in very distinct and different ways, with different methods and genealogies. Morfino book, like all of Morfino's work, is absolutely admirable in its scholarship and erudition. Or, more to the point, Morfino's talent is an ability to combine a radical provocation with scholarly erudition. Morfino has a remarkable ability for going deep into the philological connections of a text or problem, working out all of the intersections and implications. However these investigations never seem like purely scholarly pursuits; the tasks and problems of radical politics are always close to hand.  The history of philosophy is examined for the ways in which it has led us to our particular historical moment, and what might be done if we thought and acted differently. As the title suggests Morfino's book on intersubjectivity or transindividuality deals with an opposition between two different ways of understanding social relations. However, this opposition is not a matter of simply picking a side. As Morfino argues, even as intersubjectivity has been the dominant way of conceiving of social relations it still has for the most part been an afterthought in a philosophical tradition that has started from the individual subject. The way that the individual subject has been figured, in terms of its interiority and subjectivity, has made it difficult to grasp its relations with others, or reduces it to the general problem of how the external world can be known. As Morfino points out, Descartes the philosopher who gave us the cogito, who claimed that he could know himself prior to knowing the world, is the same philosopher who wondered if the figures under hats and coats he saw out the window might be automatic machines. As Morfino reminds us Descartes can only resolve this problem through the same way that he resolves the problem of knowledge in general; how we know other people is no different than how we know the objects in the world. The development of interiority, which begins with Descartes, has as its corollary the creation of intersubjectivity as a perpetual problem. The subject's assertion of its own certainty posits other people and with them social relations as a perpetual afterthought. Morfino charts the emergence of the dominant history of interiority and intersubjectivity from Descartes through Leibniz and Hegel, while at the same time charting its alternative, transindividuality emerging through Spinoza, Marx, and Freud, to be developed further in Althusser, Goldmann, and Pêcheux. The first trajectory passes through the concepts of cogito, monad, and subject, creating a concept of identity, interiority, and teleology, while the second trajectory, that of transindividuality has a largely subterranean dimmension. Morfino's orientation with respect to all of these problems can be considered primarily Althusserian, not just because he is influenced by Althusser but because he takes on an Althusserian labor of reading. Just as Althusser saw his task as one of reading the Marxist philosophy between the lines of Marx's critique of political economy and the political interventions of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, producing the concepts of overdetermination and structural causality, Morfino is able to excavate the concept or idea of transindividuality prior to its letter by consider the problem of relation in the history of philosophy.One of the more interesting interventions along these lines is his reading of the concept of Weschelwirking (interaction) in Marx and Engels. This concept is developed by Engels in his Anti-Dühring to complicate any linear or mechanical relation of cause and effect:....cause and effect are conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases; but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction [Weschelwirkung] in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.This understanding of the mutual intersection and interaction of effects and causes informs an understanding of the mode of production that is something other than the classical and mechanical action of a base on a superstructure. As Morfino cites a passage, which also appears in Althusser's "Contradiction and Overdetermination"The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction [Weschelwirkung]  of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.As Morfino argues this concept of interaction is not often named as such by Marx, but in some sense it is at work in other names, or other concepts such as the interaction of production, distribution, and consumption that opens the 1857 introduction. Morfino's excavation of the concept culminates in his reading of Althusser's own articulation of the concept of transindividuality without the name. In Reading Capital Althusser posits that just as forces of production cannot be reduced to technology, relations of production cannot be reduced to intersubjectivity. As Althusser writes,"While the productive forces cannot be reduced to machines or quantifiable techniques, the relations of production cannot be reduced to relations between men alone, to human relations or intersubjectivity, as they are in the historicist ideology." Beyond this assertion Morfino traces as thought of transindividuality in the disagreement of Althusser and Lucien Goldmann. Goldmann did use the term transindividuality, but, as Morfino argues Goldmann in thinking the transindividual as the "relations of production" reduces it to a collective subject, to society as a subject, returning the concept to the subject and interiority it was meant to escape. Transindividual is not the genesis of the collective, but the interrelation, or interaction, of the constitution of the collective and the individual. As such, and this is the importance of the discussion of the concept of interaction in Engels and Marx, it is as much a rethinking of causality and of relations as it is a rethinking of subjectivity and individuality. Aspe's book is punctuated by discussion of films including ArrivalBut honestly this is here because I needed to break up the postBernard Aspe begins with the similar problem as Morfino's book, the priority of interiority over relation. For Aspe, however, this problem has less to do with a historical excavation than an assumed starting point. The orienting figures of our thought are that of an interiority accessible only to us, and the interiority of the other, unknown to us and only accessible indirectly. Any connection, any relation other than a kind of analogy, in which I know the other by comparing them to myself is excluded. It is precisely this excluded space that Aspe sets himself to explore, an examination of the space of subjectivation, "such a space is constituted by a play of interiorities and of relative exteriority, which do not correspond to the play of opposition between the interiority of the individual and the exteriority of the world of the other." Aspe's formulation of subjectivation is explicitly drawn from Simondon. (of the two books under consideration his book is more Simondonian in its concept of transindividuality while Morfino's is more Althusser/Balibarian). For Simondon the subject has to be thought as the relation between the individual and its preindividual relations that constitute the common. As Aspe puts it, "a collective is constituted by the laws that put in common the potentials carried by each, and thus, by the formation of new system..given its own proper energy." Or, to put it more directly "the group is capable of acting in the world because they already act on each other." The common space of our collective and individual individuation is time. Time, or a particular relation of temporality is both the constitution of individual and collectivity. This demands a discussion of the way in which time, temporality is both the site of our individuation, our specific memories, and our shared belonging.  This is true even if we do not remember what constitutes our identity and cannot situate our place ourselves in what constitutes our commonality. As Aspe writes, "The fiber of time, it is the relation between an irreparable loss and a unlocalizable persistence. Common memory, itself without support, comes in the places of this absent space, where it inscribes memory."Aspe investigates common time by two different trajectories, first through a consideration of film. His book is punctuated by a series of inserts dedicated to films from Gaslight to Arrival. As he argues film gives us direct access to the common memory. Film is in some sense the object of a common memory, becoming part of shared references, it is also in some sense, for a limited time, a temporal object, in which the viewers experience the same images, ideas, and associations. Of course all of this is forgotten when people leave the theater (or shut their laptops), despite this loss film often documents the unlocalizable persistence of a historical moment. As Aspe writes, "The "new" American cinema (Aronofsky, Nolan, Anderson, but also for the intermediate generation, Cameron…) is not always convincing, but this is no doubt due to the bias that makes it special, according to which it is only by relying on déjà vu that we can produce new images. The situations that cinema takes for its point of view are willingly "archetypical."The archetypes can be found through a return to an American mythology (the heroic entrepreneur and radical individual of Anderson's There Will Be Blood), to the unconscious (the double as product of relation and the devouring other in Black Swan, another film of Aronofsky), to popular imaginary (super heroes)."Aside from the odd appellation of "new" American cinema, it  is unclear if this diagnosis is as much about the individual aesthetics of the different directors than it is about a general trajectory in the production and marketing of film in which the past is seen as a reservoir of images to be mined for new films. One might say, following this remark, that the current stage of production in the age of intellectual property in which even the most forgettable movies, shows, and comic books from from the past are remade, (Watchmen, Night Court, Morbius), might not be some horrible deviation from our historical moment, but its most accurate reflection. We are living in a remake in which the conflicts of the past generations are relived and nostalgia for the immediate past has replaced hope for the future. Which brings us to the second consideration of common time, that of capital as the standardization of time. Aspe goes over the arguments of E.P. Thompson and Foucault on the standardization of time, adding to this discussion the point that all conflicts over labor take place within the standardization of time. Aside from Simondon, Aspe draws from an eclectic group of thinkers, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Kierkegaard, but perhaps the most surprising is Mario Tronti who often figures in such formulations as this, in which the antagonism, the opposition, between worker and capital is understood to be central, and accepting standardized time as the terrain of conflict, fighting over more work or less, is to fight on the terrain of capital. Capital can be understood as a standardization of time, space, and culture, in order to constantly expand. However, Aspe also draws from ecological thinkers such as Jason Moore and Dipesh Chakrabarty to argue that capitals exploitation of cheap nature, its treatment of everything into an externality, means that this standardization takes place against a globe that becomes more and more chaotic. Our common time is one of both unprecedented standardization and chaos.Morfino and Aspe's books represent two fundamentally different approaches to the transindividual, one historical the other critical, one ontological and the other phenomenological. At some point it might be necessary to work out the divisions between these two ways of looking at things, team transindividual will individuate and oppose itself in terms of Balibar Transindividualists, Simondon Transindividualists, etc., However, given the predominance of individuality, interiority, and intersubjectivity over our thought and practice, I am more inclined to let a thousand flowers bloom, exploring just what happens when one tries to think outside the individual, to think social relations beyond intersubjectivity. 

Nicholas Onuf on the Evolution of Social Constructivsm, Turns
in IR, and a Discipline of Our Making






Can we really go on speaking about International Relations
as a 'discipline'? Even if social constructivism is often presented as a robust
theoretical cornerstone of the discipline, one of the thinkers that established
this theoretical position challenges the existence of IR. Surely, Nicholas Onuf
argues, we have a disciplinary machinery—institutions, journals, conferences
and so forth—but these form an apparatus built around a substantive void—in his
words, 'a discipline without an 'about''. In this Talk, Nicholas Onuf—among others—weaves an appraisal of
disciplinary boundaries through a discussion of social constructivism's birth
and growth, tells the material turn to get serious and provides a bleak
assessment of IR's subservient relation to political order.





Print version of this Talk (pdf)





What is (or should be), according to you, the biggest challenge /
principal debate in current International Relations? What is your position or
answer to this challenge / in this debate?



In my view, the
biggest challenge for IR is making good on claims (I'd say pretensions) that IR
is a discipline in its own right.  Such
claims presume that IR has a reasonably well-bounded subject matter and a body
of theory uniquely suited to that subject matter.  For 25 years I have been saying that IR fails
miserably in meeting this challenge. 
Much less do we acknowledge the challenge—there is no debate.  As it is, we have institutionalized a
so-called discipline (journals, conferences, workshops, PhD programs) that
reaches far beyond (lower case) international relations.  In short:  a discipline without an 'about.'  Were we to acknowledge the challenge, we
might be content to say:  Forget disciplines,
it's all about 'the social' and social theory belongs to us—too.  Or we might say, it's all about 'the
political,' and legal, political and
social theory also belong to us.  I'm not
sure there's much difference.  I am sure
that it's not enough to say our 'about' is 'the international.'  And I have said as much publicly, though
intemperate terms that I instantly regretted.



Given such a
negative assessment of IR, you might wonder why I stuck with it all these
years.  Why didn't I just call myself a
social theorist and (try to) publish in the few journals in which theorists
gets a hearing?  Actually, I did try a
few times, to no avail (just as I put 'social theory' in the subtitle of World of Our Making (1989) to no
discernible effect).  I think there's a
status issue lurking here.  Once
identified with IR, it's hard to get acknowledged outside IR.  Nobody reads
or cites us; we 'don't get no respect'; status ordering condemns us to be
consumers rather than producers of big ideas.  If (just perhaps) the era
of big ideas is over, then the next generation in IR may feel a little
braver than I was about jumping ship.  Not that I'm betting on it,
especially since publishing in a host relatively new, expressly interdisciplinary
journals, such as Global
Constitutionalism, International
Political Sociology and International
Political Theory, offer a safer alternative.





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



I have to say
that events have never inspired me.  In
my callow youth, Hans Morgenthau's Politics
among Nations (1948) inspired me to think about spending a lifetime doing
IR, as did my teachers Robert Tucker and George Liska—both realists with a taste respectively for
international law and international institutions.  Working as Tucker's assistant in revising Hans Kelsen's Principles of International Law (1952) prompted
a longstanding interest in legal theory. 
As a doctoral student, I got hooked on systems theory à la Hoffmann, Kaplan, Rosecrance; the
special issue of World Politics (vol.
14, no. 1) on the international system left an indelible mark, as did Waltz's Man, the State and War (1959).  Working with Richard Falk a few
years later affected me a great deal—he remains one of my very few heroes.  So did Fritz Kratochwil,
briefly a student of mine and friend ever since.



In the 1980s
I got to know a number of mavericks: 
Hayward Alker, Rick Ashley, Dick Mansbach, John Ruggie and Rob Walker
are by no means the only ones on this list. 
More important, I think, were my feminist doctoral students, who changed
my life in a great many ways and were largely responsible for my turn to social
theory.  It was in that context that I
took the so-called linguistic turn to Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin et al. 
World of Our Making is pretty
clear about its many sources of inspiration. 
The big trick was fitting everything together.  Since then (and to keep the story manageable),
working with my brother Peter is responsible for my interest in Aristotle and in the making of the modern world; republican
theory links these two concerns.  I
cannot blame Peter for my ongoing fascination with Foucault.  





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



For me at least, this is a tricky question.  As I said earlier, I am not very much
interested in events—either as theoretical fodder or as a matter of what's
happening in the world at any given moment. 
Most of my friends and colleagues are fascinated by current events—how
often I find them glued to one news source or another.  Students are too, and it seems pretty obvious
they should be.  Most people in the field
engage in the skillful assembly of events, whether in 'cases' or as
statistically manipulated patterns. 
Learning the appropriate skills takes a great deal of time and
training.  At the same time, students
also need an exposure to theory—big picture thinking—and, in my view, the
philosophical issues that lurk behind any big picture.



Theory is a seductive.  I was seduced at the age of 19 and never
gotten over it.  Shifting metaphors, I always
told my doctoral students not to succumb to the theory bug, at least to the
exclusion of what I just called 'the skillful assembly of events.'  In other words, don't do it my way—I was lucky
to get away with it.  Disposition is a different
matter.  Students must love to work hard
for extended intervals with little immediate gratification.  Machiavelli said that warriors must be
disciplined and ardent.  I used to tell
my doctoral students, you have to be 'warrior nerds.'  If you don't fit this profile, find another
vocation.





You were immensely influential in
constructing the theoretical pillar of social constructivism in IR, starting
over 25 years ago. Looking back, has social constructivism delivered on the
promise you etched out in World of Our
Making?



No way, and for all kinds of
reasons.  This was all too clear within a
decade, as I intimated in a review of Peter Katzenstein's
The Culture of National Security (1996,
read introduction here)
and spelled out in Don Puchala's Visions of International Relations (2003).
To simplify unduly and perhaps unjustly, the constructivists who came to
prominence in the 1990s made three mistakes. First, they took for granted that a
norm (as in 'the norm') is normative without asking whether, to what degree, or
how this might be so.  I'm pretty sure this
mistake came from a mindless appropriation of functional sociology and utter
indifference to legal and political theory. Second, they substituted identity
('who am I?' questions) for agency ('who acts for what or whom?' questions) in
guessing at the implications of the end of the Cold War.  In doing so, they compounded the felony by
leaping from personal identity to collective identity and unreflectively
imputing agency to imagined collectivities. Third, they treated culture as an
aggregate residual and then assigned it enormous causal significance. Had any
of them taken the linguistic turn seriously, they might have extricated those
elements of 'culture' that (one might guess) are most consequential for social
construction.



More generally, I
came to see the constructivist surge of the 90s as a liberal-institutionalist
renaissance.  Standing in for legal
rules, formal institutions and corporate personality, norms and identity look
like a conceptual breakthrough to a generation of scholars who had been taught
to dismiss old-time liberal IR.  In the
2000s, a shifting panorama of events (genocide etc.) prompted a straight-on
liberal institutionalist revival with lots of help from lawyers.  Meanwhile, a much more diverse range of
scholarship has come to be styled constructivist for lack a better label.  Finally, there has emerged a gang of 'third
generation' constructivists who now actively repudiate their predecessors from
the 90s.  They speak my language, but
I'll let them speak for themselves.





How, do you think, do 'turns' in IR
relate to the broader context of real-world historical events? If the origins
of social constructivism have been located in the end of the Cold War, is there
some kind of dialectic whereby social constructivism then impacts on the course
of history? For instance, social constructivism is by now so established that a
big part of newer generations of practitioners in IR are probably social
constructivists. How does that influence international politics? In other
words, does social constructivism as an illocutionary theoretical approach hold
perlocutionary effect on its object of study?



I have some reservations
about the metaphor 'turn.'  Do we imagine
IR as a colossal ship that turns, however slowly, all of a piece?  I've already used the ship metaphor, but in
this context it's not appropriate—we're not that put together, and, besides, no
one is steering (not even those legendary gate-keepers).  Or a herd of wildebeests, in which all the members
of the herd turn together by keying off each other once one senses danger and
turns?  I don't think so, even if we do
sometimes see signs of a herd mentality. 




Back in the late 60s, Karl
Deutsch suggested that the field had even then experienced a succession of
waves.  I like this metaphor better
because it captures both the messiness of what's going on and a sense that
perhaps not much is changing in deeper water. 
You yourself switch metaphors on me when you mention a new generation of
constructivists.  As it happens, I like
this metaphor a lot (and have a piece entitled 'Five Generations of International
Relations Theory' forthcoming in a new edition of International Relations Theory Today, which Ken Booth and Toni
Erskine are editing).  It suggests a
dynamic internal to any field of study rather than one prompted by external
events.  Inasmuch as constructivism got
its start before the Cold War ended but afterwards changed its profile
significantly tells us the story is actually rather complicated.



The more interesting question
is whether constructivism will, as you say, impact the course of history.  The quick and dirty answer is, yes, but in
ways too subtle to document.  We already
know how difficult it is to establish any impact from IR as a scholarly pursuit
on world affairs.  That is, any impact
beyond realism and raison d'état.  As we become more specialized in what we do
and so does everyone else, it seems ever less likely that we'll be able to pin down
extended causal chains.  But I suspect
that you have something more like 'mood' in mind.  Once liberal institutionalists adopted a
slick kind of constructivism, they were pretty much in sync with the Zeitgeist, at least for a decade or
so.  So, yes, as a not very helpful
generalization, we can surmise that some degree of co-constitution was then at
work.  Always is.



One last point.  I don't have even the slightest sense that my
own scholarly work has had anything have much to do with large-scale world-making,
or that it will in any near-term.  I
don't have to be told that my work is too austere and forbidding to reach very
many people—though I am told this often enough. 
Years from now, who knows?  Yet my
teaching career convinces me that there's more co-constitution going on in the
classroom than anywhere else we're likely to find ourselves.  Interacting with hundreds of MA and PhD
students in Washington DC over 28 years—during which I noodled through what
would become World of Our Making—affected
me and them in ways beyond measure.  Some
of those students became scholars, but many more have spent their lives in
public service.





What has been, to you, the biggest
surprise or exciting move in IR since social constructivism saw the light?



The biggest and most
surprising 'move' has been the move offshore. 
I speak of course as someone raised, trained and employed in the US when
IR was 'AnAmerican Social Science.'  For the
last twenty years, IR has not so much left the US as gained strength everywhere
else.  Better to say, its center of
gravity has moved.  In the process, IR
has transformed, both as a claimant discipline and as a theory-driven
enterprise.  As a participant-observer, I
see IR as an institutional beneficiary of globalization and, to a lesser
degree, those of us in IR as agents in this hugely complicated process. 



Globalization has meant,
among much else, the extraordinary growth of higher education and its
institutional apparatus.  The
proliferation of universities is an acknowledgment of cosmopolitan imperatives and an accommodation of national needs, exemplified
in programs for the grooming of managerial elites.  For IR, this large process has been colored
by an ostensible rejection of American hegemony.  One expression of this anti-hegemonial
sentiment is the fashion for post-positivist scholarship and the sort of constructivism
that is now conventionally ascribed to Fritz Kratochwil and me.  For me personally, it's just wonderful to be
taken seriously everywhere but my own country.





You recently have turned attention
towards cognitive and evolutionary psychology. This is a pretty
underrepresented field, in terms of its being mined in IR. What challenge has
this literature to pose, in your view, to dominant IR?



Long ago, I ventured into cognitive
studies as a consequence of casting a broad net in social theory.  Since then, several disciplines have
converged in making cognitive studies just about the most exciting game in
town.  I cannot imagine anyone not being
fascinated (but then I am also fascinated by advances in cosmology, however
little I understand the technical stuff).  In recent years, I have developed a more
specific interest in what cognitive and evolutionary psychology might tell
about my mind, any mind, in relation to a world that my mind cannot access
directly, the world of appearances.  As
you can see, I'm a philosophical idealist—with many qualifications, a Kantian
idealist.  Most people in IR are
philosophical realists, for whom such issues are less compelling.  



Let me comment briefly on any
challenge the cognitive revolution might pose for IR in the philosophical
realist mode.  IR's substantive concerns
are so far removed from the stuff of cognitive science (neurons and such) that I doubt scholars in IR will ever feel
obliged take the latter into account. 
Nor should they.  Positivist
science is reductive—it always pushes down levels of analysis to explain what's
going on at higher levels.  But anyone
pushing down risks losing touch with what seems to be substantively distinctive
about one's starting point, and IR and its event-manifold are a long way up
from the synchronized firing of neurons. 
I would qualify this bald statement somewhat to account for the recent interest
of emotions in IR.  At least some of the
psychological literature on emotions taps into a deep pool of research where
the age-old cognition-emotion binary has finally been put to rest.





You have a broad experience in IR.
How do you see the evolution of the field? Is it a tragedy of unfolding
rationalization and increasing division of labor, or is something else going
on?



As I intimated earlier, IR has
failed as a disciplinary project.  I'm
almost inclined to say, there's no hope for IR 'as we know it.'  Better to say, IR has lost its self-told coherence.  A hundred flowers bloom, but just barely, and
there are a lot of weeds.  I don't see
this as a bad thing (your weeds may well be my flowers), although other
disciplines, such as sociology and a resuscitated geography, cast shadows on
our scraggly garden.  I do think larger
societal processes—modern rationalization and modernist functional
differentiation—have conjoined to impose a coherence we don't see.  Crudely, we are servants to other servants,
all of us ultimately minions to run-away capital and victims of its
techno-material seductions.  I guess you
could call this phenomenon a tragedy, though its very impersonality undercuts
the sense of the term.  I have no doubt,
however, that it will eventuate in a catastrophe from we moderns will never
recover.  I have been saying this ever
since the 1970s, when the debate over The Limits to Growth
persuaded me that we would never turn the ship around.





A new 'turn' seems to be developing
in the social sciences, possibly a swing of the ontological pendulum back to
materialism—this time with a more postpositivist undertone. How do you relate
to such a turn?



I am skeptical.  It looks like a fad to me—people casting
about for something new and interesting to say. 
Moreover, the vitalist, Bergsonian tenor of so
much of the new materialism turns me off—I cannot see the case for ascribing
agency (and thus purpose) to things when the language of cause suffices.  (And I am not among those constructivists who
will not speak of cause for fear of positivist contamination.)  But there's another issue that troubles
me:  the continued power of the
materialist-idealist binary.  In IR, we
call realists materialists and liberal institutionalists/soft constructivists
idealists when it should be obvious that whatever separates them (in my view,
not as much as they think) has nothing to do with idealism and materialism as
philosophical stances.  Security dilemmas,
arms races and terrorist plots are not ideationally informed?  Norm diffusion, identity crises and human
rights are not materially expressed?  Get
serious.



 I argued in World of Our Making that the material and the social are bound
inextricably bound together.  Rules do
the job.  They turn the stuff of the
world into resources that we, as social beings, put to use.  I think I got it right then.  Needless to say, I also think students afflicted
with mindlessly linked binaries can only benefit from reading that book.





Nicholas Greenwood Onuf is renowned
as one of the founders of constructivism in International Relations. He is also
known for his important contributions to International Legal Theory,
International History, and Social Theory. Onuf's most famous
work is arguably World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social
Theory and International Relations (published in 1989), which
should be on every IR student's must-read list. His recent publications
include Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American
Civil War (2006, co-authored with his brother Peter Onuf) and International
Legal Theory: Essays and Engagements, 1966-2006 (2008). Onuf is
currently Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Florida
International University and is on the editorial boards of International
Political Sociology, Cooperation and Conflict, and Contexto
Internacional. Professor Onuf received his PhD in International Studies at
John Hopkins University, and has also taught at Georgetown University, American
University, Princeton, Columbia, University of Southern California, Pontifícia
Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, and Kyung Hee University in Korea.





Related
links


FacultyProfile at the Florida International University 
Read Onuf's Rule and Rules in International Relations
(2014 conference paper) here (pdf) 
Read Onuf's Fitting Metaphors: the Case of the European
Union (New Perspectives, 2010) here (pdf) 
Read Onuf's Institutions, intentions and international
relations (Review of International Studies, 2002) here (pdf) 
Read Onuf's Levels (European Journal of
International Relations 1995) here (pdf) 












Print version of this Talk (pdf)