Whither IR? Multiplicity,relations, and the paradox of International Relations

ABSTRACT

Justin Rosenberg rightly highlights the paucity of International Relations’ (IR) influence in other disciplines, and selected works in historical sociology demonstrate the significance of the international to others whilst also revealing problematic understandings of the international itself. In this regard, Rosenberg’s intervention is welcome. However, in staking the disciplinary credentials of IR on ‘societal multiplicity’, Rosenberg inadvertently exposes IR as part of a wider convergence on the ontological importance of relations (rather than substances) across the social sciences. Historical sociology scholarship also reveals the international to be but one part of an interconnected, multi-scalar social world that is shaped by multiplicity across all scales; multiplicity and relations permeate social scales. By exploring the Czechoslovak Corps in the Russian Revolution, the article broadens Rosenberg’s multiplicity whilst also revealing the paradox of a multiplicitous IR: the more IR acknowledges multi-scalar relations, the less distinguishable it becomes from the other social sciences.     

Reflexive modernization and reconstructing the Third Way: a response to Mouzelis1

Nicos Mouzelis has made a welcome intervention into the debate over Third Way theory and politics. The strengths of Mouzelis’ account are identified as being his incorporation of asymmetrical power relations and institutional imbalances into the theory of reflexive modernization, and his defence of the Left/Right dichotomy. Three interrelated criticisms are then made. The first is of a sociological reductionism which neglects the importance of ideology and politics in bringing about the processes of reflexive modernization underpinning the Third Way. Conversely, the second criticism is that Mouzelis drifts into voluntarism in the form of a conspiracy theory in his account of ‘cultural engineering from the top’ amidst the conditions of reflexive modernity. Further, it is suggested that it is not with regard to achieving ‘cultural rights’ against such top‐down engineering that the Left/Right distinction endures, but rather in relation to how the role of the market is analyzed. Thirdly, at the level of institutional differentiation and power relations, Mouzelis underestimates the extent to which market logic is able to ‘colonize’ other spheres of social life, and his regulatory proposals are insufficient to address this.     

From slave revolts to social death

In this article, I situate Orlando Patterson’s magnum opus, Slavery and Social Death alongside his earlier writings on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica. To appreciate fully Patterson’s contributions to sociology, comparative historical sociology, and the wider literature on slavery, readers must engage with the full corpus of his scholarly production. By reading his body of work all together, as part of a much larger whole, social death may take on new angles, depths, and dimensions. Patterson’s previous work on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica, I suggest, invites novel ways to read his formulations of social death while opening other archives through which to study the (after)lives of slavery.

     

An international politics of Czech architecture; or,reviving the international in international political sociology

ABSTRACT

Politics was long overlooked in analyses of architecture. International politics still is. Yet one of the sub-fields of International Relations seemingly best equipped to address this oversight, ‘International Political Sociology’ (IPS), is at a crossroads with leading scholars bemoaning the dominance of Sociology over the political and the international. They concur on the need revive the political, but some advocate abandoning the international. Instead, I argue that IPS scholars should embrace the international and suggest a particular way to do so via Rosenberg’s concept of Multiplicity. This transforms the international from the object of analysis into an analytical and heuristic lens through which to examine the constitutive effects on, (e.g.) architecture, of (international) societal co-existence, interaction, combination, difference, and dialectical change. Using examples from the late Habsburg period to the present, I sketch an international politics of ‘Czech’ architecture and show the value of ‘the international’ in and beyond IPS.     

‘Without Being Walt Whitman’: Vicente Huidobro,Whitman, and the Poetics of Sight

The Chilean vanguardista poet Vicente Huidobro singlehandedly inaugurated the Spanish-language avant-gardes with his 1918 poem Ecuatorial [Equatorial], and remained a dynamic and controversial global figure until his death in 1948. This essay demonstrates how Huidobro appropriated Walt Whitman’s ‘Salut au Monde’ into this inaugural poem, taking from the US poet an elevated, comprehensive poetics of sight. But Whitman’s all-seeing aesthetic seriously threatened Huidobro’s own ethics and avant-garde poetic philosophy — Creationism — leading the Chilean to reject Whitman and this poetic vision in his 1931 Altazor. If Whitman’s poetic speaker could ‘contain multitudes’, seeing the whole world in instant juxtaposition, Huidobro’s ideal Creationist poet must instead empty himself, to create anew. Finally, this textual and historical confrontation reveals not only how Whitman brought his unifying vision to bear on his nation’s Civil War, but also how the aging Huidobro, facing World War II and the imperialist shadow of the US, wrote back to Whitman to qualify and clarify what this vision might mean for ‘America’.     

The tyranny of the moral majority: American religion and politics since the pilgrim fathers

Abstract

Americans claim to be the most religious people in the Christian world. Religion has informed their politics ever since the Pilgrim Fathers, who began the tyranny of the majority which Tocqueville outlined in Democracy in America (1985), his version of Aristotle's ‘ochlocracy’. In recent times this has taken the form of the ‘moral majority’ institutionalized by Jerry Falwell and the fundamentalists who set out to capture the Republican Party under Nixon and Reagan. In fact, it was never a majority: ‘born again’ Christians, not all of the right‐wing in politics, were less than one fifth of a national sample in 1980 ‐ a third of African Americans, who voted ten to one against Reagan. Nonetheless they influenced every President from Eisenhower to Bush, and they are the major force behind the move to impeach Clinton. Since they failed, they may now give way for a more moderate politics of Christian forgiveness.     

The thanatic strain. Kojève and Rosenzweig as two readers of Hegel

In my essay, I focus on Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Phenomenology of Spirit as a peculiar thanatic interpretation of Hegel. Kojève’s apology of death is so powerful that it can only suggest a new form of a religious cult, a new philosophical theology which, because of its semi-secular appearance, we should rather call a cryptotheology. I want to demonstrate that, indeed, we deal here with a cryptotheological divinisation of Thanatos where the so-called ‘frontier experience of death’ replaces the Judeo-Christian revelation. Kojève claims that this tendency already begins in Hegel in whom revelation, albeit a central notion of phenomenology, is given a characteristic, thanatico-immanentist twist. In the first part, I concentrate on Hegel and his interpretation given by Kojève; then, I present a brief overview of the thanatic strain in Kojève’s French pupils; and finally, in the second part, I return to Hegel, but his time read through the lenses of Franz Rosenzweig who dared to oppose the thanatic tendency of twentieth century philosophy. The Star of Redemption inaugurates this opposition – a distinctly modern Jewish ‘vitalistic strain’ – by returning to the original idiom of revelation and offering us a neues Denken, a ‘new thinking.’ But this new vitalism, grown out of the polemic with the ‘thanatic strain,’ does not constitute a simple repetition of the nineteenth century Lebensphilosophie; equally critical of the Kojèvian ‘overestimation of death’ and of the old forms of vitalistic thinking, it paves the way to a highly innovative late-modern philosophy of finite life which – as I will argue here – is something we very badly need today.     

The Defeat of the Guitar Army: Don DeLillo,John Sinclair,and the Rock Revolution

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel Great Jones Street is seldom analysed as a serious engagement with the rock music and countercultural politics of the 1960s, yet these constitute its historical context, its subject matter, and its central concerns. An historicized reading positions the novel as an intervention into contemporary debates about the causes and consequences of the defeat of the 1960s ‘rock revolution’. These debates were most thoroughly synthesized by the rock culture’s chief agitator and organic intellectual John Sinclair in his 1972 book Guitar Army. Like Guitar Army, Great Jones Street dwells on the connections between the political failure of the rock revolution and the provenance and validity of rock’s anti-rational aesthetic. Sinclair finds political hope in re-emphasizing rock’s anti-rationalism, rooted equally in black music and the psychedelic experience. More sceptical, DeLillo offers a very different reading of the rock culture’s view of African American aesthetics and its use of psychedelics.     

Radical absence: encountering traumatic affect in digitally mediated disappearance

ABSTRACT

Disappearances keep appearing in the digital sphere: video circulates of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) beheading of a kidnapped journalist; MH370 vanishes into sky yet its real and imagined journeys are traced ceaselessly; friends learn someone close to them has died when Facebook ‘memorializes’ their page. Each is different: a lost airplane, unreported boat people and a deceased life. In the work of trauma studies scholars such as Cathy Caruth [1996. Unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative, and history. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press] and Shoshana Felman and D. Laub [1992. Testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. New York: Routledge], such events are felt but unrecognized, known to have happened but unable to be represented. Yet these are traumas that can be experienced with intensity and immediacy in the mediated worldings of the digital. They are encounters with radical absence. Affect theory offers the means to conceptualize this ‘vicarious trauma’ [Kaplan 2005, Trauma culture: the politics of terror and loss in media and literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, p. 87]; it bridges the conceptual gap between an event that happened and the meaning it contains. Since affect is ‘the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other’ [Massumi 2002, Parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 35], it offers a way of understanding trauma in keeping with the digital: fluid, moving, changeable, multitudinous and even contagious. This paper traces the contours of encounters with video beheadings, the vanishing of MH370, and markers of digital death as encounters with radical absence that are emblematic of the complexity of traumatic affect and mediated trauma in the digital sphere.     

Rethinking about Civilizations: The Politics of Migration in a New Climate

Abstract

In this paper, I will lay out some useful conceptual/theoretical markets that will help us to understand, and resolve, significant political challenges to ‘action’ on climate change migration. Thus, while this paper is concerned with climate change and migration responses, it is also concerned with understanding how we understand migration in the context of climate change, and how climate change forces a radical shift in such understandings. To do so, I pick up on the work of Robert W. Cox and push it in a different direction. In particular, I am interested in his work on civilizations, and how this civilizational account of world politics opens up space for thinking about climate change broadly, and climate change migration specifically. I argue that Cox’s account of ‘inter-civilizational’ politics helps us to solve a pressing analytical problem: how to rethink the coordinates of contemporary cosmopolitics in the ‘Anthropocene’, and reconsider the frames of analysis that we adopt to understand and respond to climate change migration. I demonstrate this by considering two distinctly different ‘civilizational’ accounts of migration and mobility in the Asia-Pacific/Oceania region (one territorial and the other maritime), and consider how these might reveal an important source of future change. By sketching out this approach, my intention is to mobilize the resources offered by Cox in order to further his project of envisaging alternative world orders, and post-hegemonic political relations therein.     

Multiplicity expanded: IR theories,multiplicity, and the potential of trans-disciplinary dialogue

ABSTRACT

Despite the seeming fragmentation of the field of International Relations (IR), a theoretical common ground – not yet clearly perceived in the field – may in fact exist. Justin Rosenberg suggests that existing IR theories can all be conceived of as theories of ‘multiplicity’. This article carefully considers this proposition. It is argued that we may indeed read many IR theories as theories of multiplicity. Yet, in so doing we need to recognize the wide range of – and the contested nature of – perspectives on multiplicity in the field. Crucially, this leads us to conceive of multiplicity in an expanded way, beyond Rosenberg’s notion of ‘societal multiplicity’. Developing this more contested and expanded notion of multiplicity has important implications: for how we perceive IR and its limits in the years to come and, crucially, for the kind of trans-disciplinary dialogues IR scholars will engage in.     

Disembodied politics: commitment and formal distance in Rancière*

Abstract

In light of the theme and concerns of the present collection of essays, we may ask whether ‘distance in general’, and ‘critical distance in particular’ (Fredric Jameson), has truly disappeared with postmodernity. Proposing an immediate and interruptive political engagement with local issues, Jacques Rancière’s articulation of political mobilisation does seem to confirm this claim. Upon further inspection, however, his emancipatory politics repeat the same mistake of valuing an abstract universal at the expense of a concrete particular, however paradoxical this may seem at first sight. The present article develops this thesis in three moments. On the first hand, it highlights Rancière’s notion of conflict as being institutive of politics. Secondly, it connects this ‘sensible’, and Rancière’s understanding of politics as being aesthetic, to Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetics’. The French author sees in the leading section of the first Critique the grounding possibility of (I) freeing up time and space within the social realm; (II) the representation of a common political surface that can be reshaped; (III) political equality; (IV) emancipation. The last section shows how this recourse to the transcendental subject in Rancière’s politics follows and embraces a traditional position in the history of philosophy whereby identity is denigrated at the profit of a disembodied universalism.     

History,Politics, and the Cartography of Sexed Bodies in Iurii Illienko’s A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa

Abstract

This article explores the “corporeal” dimension of Iurii Illienko’s reconstruction of cultural and historical discourses in the 2002 film Molytva za het'mana Mazepu [A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa], which focuses on the hetman’s drama, his relationship with Peter I, and the defeat of Swedish and Ukrainian joint forces at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 that signified Ukraine’s submergence into a supranational, imperial community. Illienko’s cinematic space, in which plots of history and sexual politics are mapped onto one another, allows for conceptualizing the body as a site of political and cultural construction, contestation, and radical resistance. Demanding an intertextual approach that involves an open exchange between his cinematic domain and a “universe” of intersecting historical, cultural, ideological and political discourses, his multilayered re-memoration strategies expose both the fictionality and the political dogma surrounding the inherited mythologies. As a decentred reflection of the past, the film poses critical questions about competing histories and the dynamics of historical agency in colonial and postcolonial contexts, thus making a contribution to the protracted process of decolonization in Ukraine.     

Pulping the Black Atlantic: Chester Himes’ A Case of Rape and the Limits of Expatriation

Abstract

This article examines the early expatriate career of Chester Himes, and his overlooked Paris-set novella A Case of Rape (1956). Scholars have identified postwar Paris as the locus of a ‘Black Atlantic’ cosmopolitanism that allowed African American writers to transcend American racial and literary regimes, and in particular the stigma of black ‘protest’ fiction. By contrast, this article argues that Himes’ exile was paradoxical; defined by an exchange, rather than an ‘exceeding’ of American racial and literary stigmas. First, I explore the fetishistic racial politics that energized the Left Bank’s construction of black expatriates as symbols of individualist, masculine, and specifically western transgression. Second, I examine the way in which A Case of Rape, and its narrative of the false conviction of four African American expatriates for rape, dramatizes this paradox. With supreme irony, the novella sees the expatriate celebrity merge with a central symbol of the African American ‘protest’ novel: the black male rapist of white women. Finally, I argue that A Case of Rape is of particular importance for the ways in which it anticipates Himes’ move into pulp fiction. Like his later detective series, A Case of Rape captures Himes’ own disillusionment with conventional notions of authorial autonomy, and literary instrumentality. I conclude that expatriation worked to galvanize, rather than displace, Himes’ interest in the overdetermination of African American literature within dominant western racial discourses.     

Communities in Question: Sociality and Solidarity in Nancy and Blanchot

In his early essays “Violence and Metaphysics” and “The Ends of Man”, Jacques Derrida evoked a “community of the question” when he called for a fundamental questioning of the being of the “we” in the West. This demand was later formulated by Jean‐Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe as the philosophical interrogation of the political (le politique), in distinction from the question of politics (la politique). This essay begins by arguing that what is at stake in this distinction is the very possibility of politics that is otherwise foreclosed. It then explores Nancy’s interrogation of le politique in The Inoperative Community, and compares his response to Maurice Blanchot’s response in The Unavowable Community. It is argued that both deconstructions of “community” depict a certain sociality that corresponds to Derrida’s call—a “communality” beyond or radically other than the traditional model of community as formed by sovereign individuals and as forming the sovereign state. Where they differ is that Blanchot founds the ethical relation of the “unavowable” community on the radical interruption of ontology signaled by death, whereas Nancy casts ontology itself in an ethical register, and thereby allows a certain solidarity to emerge as well.

At the very moment when there is no longer a “command post” from which a “socialist vision” could put forward a subject of history or politics, or, in an even broader sense, when there is no longer a “city” or “society” out of which a regulative figure could be modeled, at this moment being‐many, shielded from all intuition, from all representation or imagination, presents itself with all the acuity of its question, with all the sovereignty of its demand (Jean‐Luc Nancy 2000 Nancy, Jean‐Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural, Edited by: Robert, Richardson and Anne, O’Byrne. Stanford [1996]: Stanford University Press.  [Google Scholar], p. 43).     

Gandhian fictions: rereading Satyagraha in South Africa

From 1923–24, Mahatma Gandhi wrote his recollections of South Africa from a prison cell in India. This text, Satyagraha in South Africa, was intended to be ‘helpful in our present struggle’ to liberate India, as well as ‘a guide to any regular historian who may arise in the future.’ An emphatically transnational text, Satyagraha in South Africa relies upon the mode of allegory to place South Africa and India in relation to each other. As it encourages comparison, however, it discourages common cause. Gandhi places Africans as the anterior sign in a larger system of signification: South African politics prefigures Indian anti-colonial victory to come, but the African native also represents the innocent natives of India writ large.

Without the political didactics of Hind Swaraj, the journalistic interventions of Indian Opinion or even the philosophical aspirations of My Experiments with Truth, this fictionalised history has rarely been the centre of attention. Satyagraha in South Africa, however, reveals Gandhi’s understanding of imperial geography, as he places South Africa and India in a single frame but fails to imagine them as inhabiting the same historical present. This understanding is reflected in his political decisions, as he fails to connect Indian anti-colonial agitation with struggles elsewhere.