Part I: Fear

I am lucky in this room, among my colleagues. I am working in feminist political theory, not international relations, and my discipline has been advocating for and responding to feminist work that is in one’s own voice and that tells one’s own story for decades. Still, I feel a sense of paralysis. I am 27 years old. I have passed my qualifying exams. I have written dozens of graduate papers. My work is starting to get published. I am now starting to stare down my dissertation. And I am not sure that my work has ever been truly honest.

It was my Master’s supervisor who graciously began to break my training. She encouraged me to write in the first person. In her class, I had argued passionately with some of my more conventional colleagues. I had defended the overt positionality of narrative political theory, and valorized those who had the courage to write in their own voice. And yet I most often continued to write as though I was not there at all.

So I started to use first-person pronouns in my academic writing. Sometimes I even included a personal anecdote to make my writing more compelling, more convincing. I believe firmly in the importance of personal narrative for political theory, and for social sciences scholarship. I have thrown in the occasional story to illustrate a point. But I have never really, truly, made myself visible and vulnerable in my theory.

I am afraid. I have come to a place where I can no longer only speak an I that serves as nothing more than a grammatical device between abstract ideas, or a persuasive tactic to convince others of a conclusion I have already drawn. But I cannot wholeheartedly embrace autoethnography and my own narrative, either. I am afraid.

I fear that I will learn that I can write as a faceless academic, but not as a whole person. I fear that I will write a self-indulgent mess that will say much more about me than about the state of the world. Most of all, I fear that the abstract language I have used to protect myself will no longer be there to protect me from the pain of criticism, and the criticism will not be of my ideas. It will be of me. Irish novelist Frank Delaney has said that:

The telling of your story to someone else, you telling me your story, for example, is an act of trust by you that I will accept your story, that I won’t despise it or trash it in any way. So therefore the very act itself, the story telling, becomes an emotional transaction.

I have written and spoken of my ideas for many years. In the beginning, I did it to protect myself. I was a strange and bullied child. I hid myself and my ideas behind formal structures and the rules of essays, speeches, and debating tournaments as soon as I could learn how. This protectiveness served me well. I have settled into my own skin, and those early strategies have become my career. So re-learning to write and theorise is dangerous. I can never be sure what wrong move or next happening will leave me naked. I do not know when my writing will bring the fingernails of a tiny but menacing girl to scratch across my five-year-old eyes. Again.

Critique is a central part of academic work, and one that I have long valued beyond measure. It would thus seem easier to write in the abstract, to speak in the authoritative and unquestionable voice of my profession. But it no longer feels honest, and I crave honesty. In speaking of the fear he has of writing about his relationship with his abusive father, due to the effects that the act of writing will have on him, Delaney concludes that if he is “to have any honesty from now on, those are the things I have to look at.” If my work is not honest, if I am not honest, it is because I have not followed through with the implications of my own philosophical commitments. Because I have tried to obscure and eliminate my vulnerability with rhetorical tactics. Because I have not let my work implicate me.

There is some discussion at the workshop about whether graduate students should engage in narrative writing at all. Some fear punitive consequences for our careers. Others argue that such strategies must be learned somewhere, and that our needs as whole people must also be served in our academic training. As I listen to this debate, I finally come to terms with what I already knew: that I am unable to reconcile my philosophical commitments with the way I have been trained to write about them. That if my doctorate is going to mean anything, I must use it to learn to write differently. That I must allow myself to become someone different in the process. I had known this for some time, but I was, I am, afraid of it. It would be easier to not know.

But in this workshop, I am bolstered, elated, and encouraged by this group of adventurous academics. I am still afraid, but I am not alone in my uncertainty and my vulnerability. I know not that there is nothing to fear, but rather that it is better to be afraid and to do something valuable than to be confident and to do something meaningless. And most significantly, I know that the difference between the two is the support of others. What follows, for me, will be messy and uncomfortable. I am afraid, but I am relieved. I know that if I learn to be honest, I will not be alone.

Part II: Honesty

I have written my post, but I am far from finished. I am once again lucky: my supervisor is always gentle while being firm in her direction. She wants to push me on my use of the concept of honesty, and its connection to authenticity. And so I pull myself back to October 2012, to the workshop, at the same time as I try to pull myself forward, through the weeds. I intend to spread myself as I reach in both directions.

She is right, of course. What is honesty in a context of non-fiction, first-person narrative writing? Why does it matter? And does it rely on authenticity? The hole is gaping. My initial attempts to fill it are mostly noise: a little tweak here, a rhetorical device there. Plugging the holes is consistent with my training. I barely spread myself at all. She nudges again. It is certainly easy to slip into a convenient catch basin of authenticity: to assume that pouring out my soul on paper is somehow more authentic than my abstract writing. If I am not careful, my attempts at honesty will be nothing more than a cathartic pastime validated by unexamined assumptions that I would not accept if they were laid out for me.

So I must once again find a way to reconcile my instinct (for that is what it is) with both my practice and my philosophical commitments. What do I mean by honesty, and what is authenticity? Can I satisfy my craving for honesty without accepting all that comes with claims to authenticity? My training tells me that I should do a review of the literature. Authenticity is big. Whole books have been written, some by great names in my field. I want to cover it as I try to reach forward and back, but I can’t. It is too big, and I do not know enough. Even worse, in the context of this short post, it would serve primarily as an attempt to defer to big names and ongoing, unsolved debates. I could comfortably lose myself in there. That could fill at least four pages, and no one would look at me too closely.

There will be a time and a place for that in my work, I know. But for now, I will resist the urge to let myself off the hook.

I am actually struggling with the notion of authenticity as it is used in the vernacular, without long philosophical expositions. We make short and unthinking assumptions about what is authentic. With a rough glance, I can make out four different facets of the authentic in the vernacular. First, the authentic can be tied to concepts of truth. We see something as authentic if someone has actually, in fact, experienced it. It is tied to a state of the world; it has actually occurred. It is, objectively and subjectively, true.

Second, the authentic can be tied to concepts of credibility. We see someone as credible because they have personal experience of the topic at hand, and thus their knowledge of the topic takes precedence. In strands of feminist theory in which I engage, this takes the form of demands that we do not speak of the experiences of those who are oppressed in ways that we are not. In my supervisor’s context of international relations scholarship, and as she writes, the relevant question is often seen to be: “Have you been there?”. Authenticity is part of a claim to be taken seriously, and more seriously than others who are seen as inauthentic.

Third, the authentic can be tied to concepts of nature and, particularly, of the natural as opposed to the artificial. That which is authentic, in this sense, is either primordial or spontaneously generated. This relies on the premise that the authentic is distinct from the artificial.

Fourth, the authentic can be tied to concepts of quality of life. To live authentically is often seen as a qualitative measure of the value of one’s way of being in the world over the course of one’s life cycle. In existentialist terms, “the norm of authenticity refers to … a recognition that I am a being who can be responsible for who I am.” One’s choices are authentic, in an existentialist sense, if they are consistent with that which one chooses to do for oneself, rather than simply to meet social rules or expectations.

There is a lot within authenticity that I cannot accept as a goal of my narrative writing. I can’t look for truth. I do not expect my work to be seen as an objectively more accurate account of the state of the world than academic work that does not use narrative methods. I expect that it allows us to see different things, and to see things differently, but this is not a hierarchy of accuracy. I do not believe narrative methods expose more truth, or something that is more true.

I can’t look for credibility. Credibility, in the context of non-fiction narrative and autoethnography, means too much shelter from criticism, critique, and engagement. My supervisor rightly describes “Have you been there?” as a question that is “asked to dismiss and to silence”. Moreover, seeking credibility through narrative writing would mean using it as a shield once again; I would be replacing the shield of abstract writing with the shield of narrative writing, and in many ways, the narrative shield is a much tougher one to penetrate. I must avoid looking for credibility with my stories. I would be lying if I said that I did not want to protect my story, in Delaney’s sense. But I do not accept that this is an acceptable goal of my work. I feel a responsibility to actively wrestle with that desire, and constantly renegotiate where the border of my self-protection lies.

I can’t look for naturalness. I find much of Donna Haraway’s varied work to be extraordinarily compelling; I believe the borders between the natural and artificial are much more a product of mediated, discursive, and historically particular happenings than they are a reflection of some objective state of the world. There is no natural, authentic me to expose. There is only a particular, always shifting, incoherent sense of self. There may, at times, be value in exposing those particulars through narrative methods, but this value is not dependent on it being natural to do so.

So perhaps all I can look for is to improve the quality of my life. I am a poor fit with existentialism. I do not rationally accept the existence of an authentic me beyond history, discourse, and circumstances. But I cannot say I am free from a sense that I have a role “in making myself.” I am looking to write in a way that I can look back on and feel okay about: to write in a way that subjectively feels like “me.” I can no longer write in a way that is disconnected from what I believe, because it is too painful for me. What’s more, it is boring. It feels disingenuous to the way I wish to be in the world. In this way, only, it is inauthentic.

This is the honesty I want. It is hard to defend; it seems I have written myself into a corner. My need for honesty is entirely subjective. It’s not about me being more truthful, more credible, or more natural than my writing previously allowed. Indeed, I hope to use narrative writing to destabilise these three facets of authenticity in my work. It is simply because I cannot stand the disjuncture I perceive between what I believe and how I express myself in my work. What’s more, I cannot find means of justifying this need that I could reasonably expect anyone else to accept.

So it seems I cannot use my own search for honesty to make any claims about why autobiographical narrative writing is valuable in and of itself, or why others should do it. I could perhaps suggest to a colleague that they might find their own sense of dishonesty piqued if they were to examine the disjuncture between the way they write and their epistemological beliefs. I could abandon this question of honesty and write a very different post about why narrative methods are generally valuable, and what they might bring to our disciplines. I believe I could make good arguments for this position. From the workshop, I know that I would be in very good company. But my need for honesty is then incredibly limited in its application. I am unsettled to have written and examined so much, only to learn more about myself than about my method. This, too, goes against my training. Perhaps it is time for me to say that my own needs and desires are necessarily relevant to my work, and are relevant, period.

This is where it is helpful to not be alone. Consistent with his remarks in the workshop, Naeem Inayatullah has written, “We can hypothesize that no matter how and what we compose, writing emerges from our needs and wounds”. Perhaps there is no escaping my own needs and feelings in my narrative writing. I am making a choice to exchange one form of authorial discomfort for another, and I am doing so, at least in part, for my own reasons. Inayatullah’s insights further encourage me when he suggests that “exposure and disclosure of the self/selves, rather than locating some idiosyncratic ‘n of 1’ or some sui generis entity, instead uncovers events, histories, cultures, and worlds”. I want to believe, and I do believe, that I can reconcile my voice and my theory, and feel more honest as an academic, without accepting the multifaceted burden of authenticity. I want to believe that I can do so in a way that will help both me and the quality and colour of my work. I need to believe I can meet my needs while uncovering worlds.

So perhaps, as I struggle to reconcile my theory and my voice, my craving for this particular type of honesty is one over which I do not need to feel guilt. Maybe it is enough to be wary of, and to grapple with, truth, credibility, and naturalness in my narrative work. Maybe I can give myself permission to acknowledge my needs as only one of several valid considerations in my work, even if they are not abstractly justifiable. Time will tell whether there is space in my discipline, or space within me, to stop apologising for them.

‘Social Media Drawing’ by Tjarko Van Der Pol

This year’s general conference theme for ISA in San Diego centred on ‘Power, Principles and Participation in the Global Information Age’ and, expectedly, gave rise to a proliferation of papers on the value, consequences and effectiveness of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and other social media in the context of international relations and global politics. Having spent the past three years trying to disentangle the thoughts of one of the more intriguing political theorists on power and politics – Hannah Arendt – it has always struck me that she might have had a word or two to say about the supernova that is social networking as such. I couldn’t help picturing her vigorously engaging with a medium like Twitter, firing off Tweets to relevant interlocutors – @karlmarx no, I think that’s where you’re wrong and dangerous: #history is not ‘made’ by men and #violence not the midwife for a new society! Perhaps even: Yep: RT @karljaspers When #language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself – hashtag and all. Or, on the other hand, flatly dismissing platforms such as Facebook as vanity spheres of little or no substance for political interaction. So I pitched in my paper as a playful thought experiment as to how she might have loved or loathed online social networks as viable platforms and public spheres for the creation of power and conduct of politics proper. This is a somewhat abbreviated version of the full-length paper, which can be found here.

The potency of social networking sites, as channels of communication and a medium for people from all corners of the world to meet in a virtual realm and engage with shared ideas – political or otherwise – has become indisputable. Not least since the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, where bodies and voices were galvanized to part-take in various acts of revolt and revolution in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Libya, facilitated through online networks like Twitter and Facebook, have people discovered the enormous potential for a transnational coming-together in a shared cause. These networks thus appear to present themselves as a global public realm in a virtual space, transcending geographic limitations and boundaries, broadening the scope of possible political impact considerably. But with such a young medium it is perhaps wise to take a step back from the hype and ask how effective are these networks in creating actual political power? In how far can we understand the possibility to mobilize and plan in a non-spatial realm, through social networks, to constitute the generation of power and the actualization of political action? My paper sought to address these questions with an Arendtian lens – for better or for worse.

Inside the Political Twittersphere. Sysomos

Twitter-Gewitter and Facebook Fads?

Network platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube reach an online community of millions and have been growing at an exponential rate. Twitter has shot up to become one of the fastest growing Internet sites since its inception in 2006 – the possibilities for global connections and mobilization seem endless and chime somewhat with studies that have shown that an increased use of the Internet facilitates civic participation.  Specifically in the contemporary context, where a decline in political engagement among young people has been diagnosed and much documented, the potential of social networks to reignite shared social and political interests seems potent. Indeed, as some have noted, the Internet has widely been hyped as the ultimate, if not only, channel that holds the potential to garner young people’s interest in politics and public affairs today. However, it seems that studies offer mixed evidence and opinions are highly divided as to whether online social networks have the capacity to spur people into political participation or not. While some consider the mobilizing capacity of Facebook and Twitter an indispensable asset for political action in today’s web-oriented social and political context, others maintain that it cannot lead to an increase in political action proper as the consequences of assembling in a virtual realm for a social or political cause rarely translates into offline action. In other words, it is not entirely clear how virtual online activism affects the reality that is to be acted upon in an offline context. All too frequent, perhaps, the conflation of political information exchange with political action per se in this context.

In the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, social networks have been attributed as instrumental factors in the removal and / or overturn of dictatorships and bringing about democracy in its basic shape – as technology scholar Evgeny Morozov sardonically puts it: “Tweets were sent. Dictators were toppled. Internet = Democracy. QED.” It is often suggested that Facebook and Twitter have played not only a peripheral but indeed a pivotal role in the uprisings in the Arab world, in line with Wael Ghonim’s claim that the “power of the people is greater than the people in power” in Revolution 2.0. Egypt is the case in point, where the power of social networks is said to not only have initiated but also facilitated the overthrow of the Mubarak regime in 2011. In this view, the very roots of the revolution stem from demonstrations and are linked to the use of online social networks, based on the sheer numbers of socially networked potential participants. Social networks, and Facebook here specifically, thus crystallize as a proxy realm for a free public space, occluded in a totalitarian regime. Within this proxy realm of communicative freedom, social network users in Egypt (and beyond) have developed ties and relations with one another in solidarity for a shared struggle for change. But not so fast.

As the name suggests, social networks are primarily used for social purposes. Facebook specifically aims to connect people that have already existing relationships, as peripheral as they might be, and where a distinct social association is already in place. Twitter, on the other hand, has the capacity to connect hitherto un-associated and unaffiliated people from a much wider spectrum and without the explicit demand of reciprocity. Research has also shown that social networks are chiefly used for entertainment and staying connected with existing affiliations. A 2009 PearAnalytics study suggests that the core content of Twitter feeds is personal with either conversational tweets (37.5%) or ‘pointless babble’ (40%). Informational tweets follow at a distance with 8.7%, self-promoting tweets made up 5.7% and only 3.6% tweets relate to news – almost as many as spam tweets with 3.75%. Granted, the speed with which these platforms and their reach develop render them inherently tricky to capture statistically. Nonetheless, the ratio is indicative.

All this to say: based on existing studies and research, it remains obscure what online social networks can do that does not rely on offline social networks, specifically in the context of creating political action and power.

Enter: Hannah Arendt.

Hannah Arendt

Arendt in the Cybersphere, or what of Revolution 2.0?

By looking through an Arendtian lens, I am focussing on some of the key aspects in the formation of political action and power: plurality and the existence of a global public sphere. At first glance there are a considerable number of characteristics constituting social networks that naturally seem to fall into the often-strict categories that Arendt assessed in the context of the human condition: they offer a public space within which an essentially plural (global) humanity can come together in difference, they work essentially through the medium of speech, which is the constitutive character for political action in the widest Arendtian sense and, in their character as a meeting place, carry the potential for people to actualize power in a political pursuit. But we’d be amiss in taking these congruences on face value without looking at least a little more closely into the nuances.

Twitter et al as a Global Public Sphere

On a cursory reading it would seem that social networks, as a human artefact, are a natural extension of what Hannah Arendt would approvingly consider as a human made world within which all aspects of the human condition can unfold. Arendt attached great importance to this: humans are unlikely to be fully human unless they live in a duality of human-made worldly facets and the natural aspects of the earth as an environment. This human-made world of artifice also provides, in a quite literal sense, the space (as in distance as well as in sphere) for humans to interact, take up different positions and reflect in plurality upon the common world from varying perspectives. It is only in this artificial world that people, in their togetherness, can gain a “grasp of reality that nobody can achieve on their own” – Arendt’s words. The artificiality here is crucial as it provides a structure upon which the human narrative of a shared world can unfold and, unlike the perpetual cyclicality and circularity of nature and life processes, creates shared meaning and ties to a common world. In the broadest sense, social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, built by and on human-made artifice, do just that. They offer an artificial architectural structure within which humans can trade different views, perspectives, and experiences and come to constitute new beginnings for a shared world. It serves as the inter-esse, the in-between for speech and action upon which the web of human relationships is built. Furthermore, this virtual realm can serve, as we have seen in the Egyptian example, as a proxy realm to resort to when the physic public sphere has been tyrannically restricted.

However, as with most things, it’s not as easy as that. For Arendt, a shared world of human-made artifice is much more cultural than technological. She relates the artifice to its original root – art – as a model for human fabrication, rather than the scientifically rooted constructions of technology. This stems in part from a deep skepticism toward an increasingly technocratic modernity that she saw as highly problematic in a political and social context. So, as a feature of a man-made world within which humans can fully unfold, such artifices as social networks don’t meet one of the key requirements she stipulates for artefacts as constitutive of a shared and common world: durability. The ever-fluctuating and dynamic nature of an online social network architecture, may come and go in various incarnations and remain entirely intangible. Arendt has something much more graspable in mind when she considers this public sphere of human exchange and inter-action. She would be critical of the temporary nature of this realm – it is erected for the here and now, the speed with which this realm develops, enters and leaves the realities of men makes it inherently non-transcendent, it is planned for the living only. In her words: “Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm is possible”.

Another aspect might be problematic in this context: the actual scope and ability of social networks to truly connect people on a larger scale. Recent studies have shown that despite carrying unlimited potential for possible connections, both Facebook and Twitter actually appear to have immanent limitations that relate to our limitations as humans to connect. The apparent unlimited scope of social networks as global networks thus stands in question. As Chris Taylor highlights, even social networks tend toward tribalism. A study conducted by the University of Indiana has shown that Twitter users can only maintain between 100-200 contacts in order to not get overwhelmed – despite being theoretically connected to thousands more users. In other words, Twitter users only converse meaningfully with a few hundred other users before it becomes simply too much. Furthermore, as the Pearanalytics study, among others, shows, the number of people contributing within and to the global public Twittersphere is considerably less than those who consume the tweets, with 5% of Twitter users contributing 75% of the tweets. This raises the question as to how equal, egalitarian and political (in the Arendtian sense) this sphere can possibly be. It furthermore calls into question the condition of plurality in this context.

Twitter Ties: Data analysed by Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and Cornell University shows “Twitter users interact with a small number of friends compared with the total number of friends and followers declared”

Social or Political: The Problem with Plurality

When considering social networks as potentially political power creating (or facilitating) structures, we should remember that they are primarily social platforms, and not political ones. To conflate the two does not do justice to the potential efficacy (or lack thereof) of social networks as instruments. As we have seen earlier, the chief use of social networks is for entertainment and to connect with friends and acquaintances. When considering plurality in this context we must keep this distinction in mind. In society, people gravitate toward association, in a discriminatory (in the most literal sense of the word) manner, equality is not granted but rather people seek to associate homogenously – like with like.

For Arendt, perhaps controversially, there is an inherent right to discriminate in the social realm. Arendt’s argument to the right to discrimination in the social (public) realm is based on her understanding of the individual uniqueness of each person as a comprehensive ‘who’, not merely a ‘what’. This plurality in the public realm is, as I have outlined, the very cornerstone of politics in the public sphere for Arendt – it is not required for the social spaces. Only if we are to understand the social realm as a pre-political condition does her argumentation remain in line with her priority for plurality. In the social sphere, we tend to gravitate toward sameness. A social realm dominated exclusively by the drive toward association with the homogeneous thus must be primarily considered as not belonging to the political sphere per se and carries the potential to become the most treacherous realm in modernity as, in its extreme potential for conformity, difference is always in danger of becoming diminished, leaving those natural attributes that can not be made ‘conform’ an obvious parameter for inclusion/exclusion practices in societies. It is in the conflation, or perhaps confusion, of the social with the political that an inherently exaggerated assumption of the political potential of social network lurks. In other words, when heterogeneity (or plurality) is not observed and homogeneity dominates, behaviour is substituted for action and true politics can thus not emerge, in Arendt’s account. Given that, as we have seen earlier, social network users tend to have a more active exchange among a homogeneous group of people, the efficacy of social networks for political purposes remains doubtful. But even if plurality is not entirely ensured in the social network sphere – what of social networks as a channel to appear and reveal oneself to others through speech?

Could Tweets be Considered Speech?

Speech is a key aspect of politics and political action in the Arendtian account. In her writing she frequently refers to speech as essential and as action as constituted in word and deed, however, the content of what constitutes speech as political action remains obscured and we could only guess at what Arendt might think of tweets as speech acts. The social networking sphere as a disembodied realm for humans to come together in a revelatory capacity would perhaps be appealing to Arendt, while the restrictive nature of confining oneself to ‘speaking’ within 140 characters would almost certainly have fallen on def ears in the Arendtian account. Given that the majority of tweets relate to personal, conversational or trivial issues, located entirely in a social sphere, it is likely that Arendt would have considered such content not to constitute revelatory speech at all. Facebook as a medium is perhaps even less appropriate to consider as constituting true speech acts. While ‘speech’is a much broader category than action, and could or may comprise social aspects, Arendt had no time for speech acts as self-expression as contributing anything to the creation of a shared world. It is precisely this aspect of self-expression that is central to the use of Facebook and, to a degree, Twitter.

Artwork by Tang Yau Hoong

Being with others takes places only remotely and in a mediated fashion and constitutes often predominantly a broadcasting rather than an in-depth engagement – granted, there are exceptions. This begs the question: in a virtual existence, are we truly among humans? Can we be among humans in the virtual realm? Is not the scope of appearance so vastly limited that it cannot possibly be considered as a public/political act? And is not the radical selectivity as to how much we reveal (and are able to do so) inherently an obstacle to politics proper and authentic political action in contemporary society? And with all these limitation, can power truly be created through social networks? I imagine Arendt would answer these questions with a resounding “Nein”!

The Problem with Virtual Power

As with the public sphere, there are some obvious matching features of social networks in light of Arendt’s understanding of what constitutes power. Social networks are inherently contingent, exchanges are ephemeral and power created through and within social networks is actualized and only appears to last momentarily. The seemingly unlimited scope of the social network appears to be boundless, supporting the boundlessness of power as such. Activity generated through such networks appear to have a basis in potentiality as well. They adhere to dynamics that are in themselves contingent and ephemeral. During high profile events, such as sporting events or a celebrity misfortune, Twitter use skyrockets, causing servers to crash and online services to slow down. Twitter use, for example, shot up disproportionately when the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death broke. A similar phenomenon can be observed with Facebook. Similarly, as we have seen with the #Kony2012 campaign, activity can flare up in flurries, raising awareness and perhaps mobilizing people to become engaged and active in a relatively short period of time, yet dissipating almost as quickly as the phenomenon occurred.

However, the creation of power among people coming together in a virtual realm is severely dependent on access to the platform. This in turn may very well be influenced by governments who have an interest in limiting the scope of virtual assembly and the gathering and dissemination of information, as has been the case in Egypt, China and other societies on the cusp of popular flare-ups. It is also a platform that is not independent of interests – not only can governments shut down or censor or otherwise interfere with the “freedom” of this particular virtual space, but with an endless potentiality of information flow we only ever receive a selection of issues that are intended to be highlighted. The alleged limitless freedom of the cybersphere may, then, be somewhat deceiving.

The fundamental role of social networks in the creation of popular power for political revolutions may not be entirely clear at this stage. It remains questionable whether online activity in the political context can possibly translate into veritable offline activity and therein lies the crux and misunderstanding in the use of social networks for political activity.  What transpires is then essentially not a coming together of equals in a political cause but rather a flashpublic, a term Jack Bratich has coined, whereby the entertainment value and the initial “great ecstasy of fraternity”, to quote Arendt, outweigh the actual political act. Such a flashpublic relies, to a certain extent on both, homogeneity and mimicry, thus occluding the possibility for politics proper as Arendt would have it. With its call to action, the #Kony2012 flashpublic campaign resembles, here I quote Bratich, a “funhouse grotesquely exaggerating the proportions of the body politic involved”. Why? Bratich answers, “because the mobilization for action is one already determined as an instrument for someone else’s goals”.

KONY2012 network locations

It becomes increasingly clear that social networks and the political campaigns that are run on social network platforms can facilitate the information flow related to political events, but are, and can only be by their immanent limitations, one aspect, one tool in the bringing about of political proper and power. There is a difference between using social networks such as Twitter and Facebook for planning a revolution and executing a revolution. As Morozov argues, while the internet broadly is instrumental (in the most literal sense) for bringing about power and revolutions, it is merely that: an instrument, a tool. Social change, on the other hand “continues to involve many painstaking, longer-term efforts to engage with political institutions and reform movements”. And for that, it requires more permanent structures as a public sphere than the virtual realm has to offer – this would most likely be Arendt’s argument.

In conclusion, I venture to claim that Arendt would certainly have had an appreciation for the medium as a political channel to inform, transmit knowledge and information and  mobilize the power of the people and would find some redeeming aspects in social networks in that they serve as a proxy realm in which freedom may come to pass and humans can engage in speech acts for the exchange of information and appearances. But: within limits. It is a realm that is characterized by the potentiality for multiple pluralities to come together and exchange in word and create narratives. However, as a public sphere that binds human in a shared and common world and that facilitates politics proper the virtual realm is insufficient. As it related to the social aspects of human interaction much more directly than the political realm, such networks would have been albeit of limited interest and I suspect that, in the context of revolutions Hannah Arendt would have wholeheartedly concurred with Morozov that: “Facebook and Twitter are just places revolutionaries go”.

20-22 October, 2012
LSE, London, UK

Registration is now open here for anyone who wants to attend.

Scheduled Speakers:

Keynote: The ontology of global politics
William Connolly (Johns Hopkins University)

Opening Panel: What does materialism mean for world politics today?
John Protevi (Louisiana State University)
More TBC

Closing Panel: Agency and structure in a complex world
Colin Wight (University of Sydney)
Erika Cudworth (University of East London)
Stephen Hobden (University of East London)
Diana Coole (Birkbeck, University of London)

ANT/STS Workshop keynote:
Andrew Barry (University of Oxford)

ANT/STS Workshop roundtable:
Iver Neumann (LSE)
Mats Fridlund (University of Gothenburg)
Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths, University of London)
More TBC

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The annual conference for volume 41 of Millennium: Journal of International Studies will take place on 20-22 October, 2012 at the London School of Economics and Political Science. This includes 2 days of panels and keynotes on the weekend, and a special Monday workshop on actor-network theory (ANT), science and technology studies (STS), and alternative methodologies. Space for the latter is limited though, so let Millennium know of your interest in attending it as soon as possible.

The theme of this year’s conference is on the topic of materialism in world politics. In contrast to the dominant discourses of neorealism, neoliberalism and constructivism, the materialist position asks critical questions about rational actors, agency in a physical world, the role of affect in decision-making, the biopolitical shaping of bodies, the perils and promises of material technology, the resurgence of historical materialism, and the looming environmental catastrophe. A large number of critical writers in International Relations have been discussing these topics for some time, yet the common materialist basis to them has gone unacknowledged. The purpose of this conference will be to solidify this important shift and to push its critical edges further. Against the disembodied understanding of International Relations put forth by mainstream theories, this conference will recognize the significance of material factors for world politics.

The Royal Society has just released a fascinating report entitled “Neuroscience, Conflict and Security” that examines the increasing role that neuroscientific research is playing in the military today (thanks to Nick for drawing my attention to it). Indeed, as was reported by Wired’s Danger Room a couple of years ago, the US Air Force has been soliciting  research proposals for “innovative science and technology projects to support advanced bioscience research” that include “bio-based methods and techniques to sustain and optimize airmen’s cognitive performance”, “identification of individuals who are resistant to the effects of various stressors and countermeasures on cognitive performance” and “methods to degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive capabilities.” Likewise, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that gave us the Internet) has long shown significant interest in the potential military applications of neuroscience.

As the Royal Society report puts it, military neuroscience can be seen to have “two main goals: performance enhancement, i.e. improving the efficiency of one’s own forces, and performance degradation, i.e. diminishing the performance of one’s enemy” (p.1). It is with reference to these two goals that I will attempt in this post to make some sense of the wider context and implications of neuroscience’s entanglement with contemporary martial practices.

Neuroscience and the Martial Brain

The first of these objectives is essentially concerned with the imperatives that guide the constitution and operation of military force and the related procedures for the recruitment, training, and command of personnel suited to the various demands of twenty-first century warfare. It has been recognised for some time that the particular tempo, lethality, and and technological-intensiveness of contemporary battlespaces is making unprecedented demands on the combatants occupying them. So much so that DARPA would warn a decade ago that “the human is becoming the weakest link in defense systems” and that “sustaining and augmenting human performance will have significant impact on Defense missions and systems.” Of particular concern is the stress being placed on the timely and reliable execution of cognitive processes such as pattern-recognition or decision-making, at least insofar as the human cannot yet be taken ‘out of the loop.’

Thus the Royal Society report tells us that:

major areas of science and technology development, and associated military applications include neuropharmacology and drug delivery for approaches to sustaining and enhancing brain function and performance; functional neuroimaging as an enabling tool for applications such as enhancing cognition or memory and augmenting learning and training; and developing human-machine interfaces as a means to enhance cognitive or physical performance. (p.5)

In one sense, we can view these developments as the continuation of the “anatomo-politics of the human body”, the origin of which Foucault located in the seventeenth century and the modern disciplinary techniques of the military. If the microphysics of power instantiated through the martial drill of Frederick the Great’s soldiers had as their primary object the kinematics of the human body and sought to govern its posture, gait and articulations, technoscientific  developments now allow this power to penetrate and shape the brain’s electro-chemical structure and cognitive processes.

Attempts to alter and ‘enhance’ the state of mind of warriors are of course not in themselves new. Since the dawn of recorded history, the need to overcome the potentially paralyzing effects of fear and fatigue has led fighting men to absorb various disinhibiting mind-altering substances, from alcohol and opiates to coca leaves and amphetamines. Yet all of these past neurological hacks may come to be seen as incredibly crude and primitive in comparison to the possible military applications of contemporary neuroscience and the neuropharmacological arsenal it promises to unlock.  A whole galaxy of both naturally-occurring and synthetic agents is coming online with the tasks of supporting alertness, concentration, memory, and even in-group bonding and cooperation in the case of oxytoxin.

Yet perhaps the most potentially consequential developments will be found in the area of neural interfacing and its efforts to bring the human nervous system and computing machines under a single informational architecture. The report’s authors note here the benefits that accrue from this research to the disabled in terms of improvements to the range of physical and social interactions available to them through a variety of neurally controlled prosthetic extensions. While this is indeed the case, there is a particular irony to the fact that the war mutilated (which the Afghan and Iraq conflicts have produced in abundance – according to one estimate, over 180,000 US veterans from these conflicts are on disability benefits) have become one of the main testing grounds for technologies that may in the future do much more than restore lost capabilities. Among one of the most striking suggestions is that:

electrode arrays implanted in the nervous system could provide a connection between the nervous system of an able-bodied individual and a specific hardware or software system. Since the human brain can process images, such as targets, much faster than the subject is consciously aware, a neurally interfaced weapons systems could provide significant advantages over other system control methods in terms of speed and accuracy. (p.40)

In other words, human brains may be harnessed within fire control systems to perform cognitive tasks before these even become conscious to them. Aside from the huge ethical and legal issues that it would raise, one cannot but observe that under such a scheme the functional distinction between human operator and machine seems to collapse entirely with the evaporation of any pretense of individual volition.

Winning Cardiac Muscles and Prefrontal Cortexes

There is also a more immediate sense in which neuroscience is being weaponised in that the knowledge it produces is being utilised to directly attack and degrade the adversary’s neural system. The most obvious manifestation of this is the deployment of neuropharmacological  agents to incapacitate targets by inducing “loss of consciousness, sedation, hallucination, incoherence, paralysis, disorientation or other such effects” (p.43). Once again, such experimentation with ‘non-lethal’ chemical agents already has previous history, including trials with LSD such as the one below (for less light-hearted accounts, see here and here).

One of the lessons of past experimentation is that ensuring non-lethality is a significant challenge as the doses required to cause incapacitation may not differ greatly in magnitude to life-threatening ones and there remains enduring difficulties in controlling the dispersion and rate of absorption of such agents (as the Russian FSB found out during the 2002 Moscow theatre hostage crisis). So-called non-lethal weapons therefore raise serious issues surrounding the blurring of policing and military operations and the particular status of incapacitating agents under the Chemical Weapons Convention that the report rightly points to.

But the agents considered here, from opioids and benzodiazepines to neuroleptic anaesthetics and bioregulators, may be still too blunt for the most ambitious of neuro-warriors. Indeed, would the most effective neurological weapon not be that which does not even make its target aware of its effects? A 2008 report commissioned by the US Defense Intelligence Agency thus asks:

Can cognitive states and intentions be controlled? Although conflict has many aspects, one that warfighters and policy makers often talk about is the motivation to fight, which undoubtedly has its origins in the brain and is reflected in peripheral neurophysiological processes. So, one question would be “How can we disrupt the enemy’s motivation to fight? Other questions raised by controlling the mind: How can we make people trust us more? What if we could help the brain to remove fear or pain? Is there a way to make the enemy obey our commands?” (pp.16-17)

Only last week, DARPA revealed a new $4 million research project called “Battlefield Illusion” that will investigate technologies that can “manage the adversary’s sensory perception” through an understanding of “how humans use their brains to process sensory inputs.” In 2004, Colonel Michael McKim  had already argued that the military should seek to “reframe the perception-space” since in the final instance “a bridge believed to be destroyed, or felt to be unable to hold the tanks, can be just as ‘gone from the war’ as a bridge destroyed by bombs.” The holy grail of military neuroscience is therefore nothing less than the ability to directly hack into and reprogram a target’s perceptions and beliefs, doing away even with the need for kinetic force. So that when neural warfare does truly arrive, we may not even know it.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line; the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.

W.E.B. Du Bois’ lucid remark, published in The Atlantic in 1901 (and elsewhere), continues to unify and motivate thinking on race and racism in International Relations. ‘Colouring Lessons: Race, Colour, Nation and Colony in Contemporary IR Theory’, an upcoming BISA-ISA conference panel featuring Meera, Omar, Pablo, Robbie, and myself, will consider how the “problem of the color line” might lead us to think differently about the structure and processes of world politics today. There are many good questions to cover; so many, in fact, that we best start our discussions early. Here’s one: when will racism end?

Let us begin by locating the question in the wonderful world of popular online betting. Thanks to the internet it is now possible to make and take wagers on almost anything, including on the future of phenomena such as racism. Recorded in May 2003 by a certain Bill Moore under the title ‘Bet 115′, one such wager can be found on the Long Bets website (Long Bets is run by a California-based non-profit foundation specializing in public education, including “enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake”). It goes like this: “By 2100 racism will no longer be a significant phenomenon in most countries of the world”. The author qualified his thinking thus:

This prediction simply puts a date to a trend that is well underway. Racism is a set of learned attitudes and behaviour, and as such it can be eliminated. There has been a great deal of movement toward the elimination of racism in the past century. Racism plays a much less significant role in access to employment, housing, education, in distribution of wealth, etc., than it did 100 years ago. Racist attitudes are no longer acceptable in any mainstream, political, social, religious, corporate, or other public figure.

At the time of this writing, Bet 115 goes unchallenged, but thirty or so comments posted by assorted visitors to the site provide us with an interesting repository of ordinary and extraordinary language definitions of race and racism. (A discussion of the boundary conditions of the prediction follows one on human nature, which in turns follows an exchange regarding the “semantics and scope”). Also interesting is that 68% of the registered users of Long Bets (N=249) have voted “against” the prediction, suggesting that the majority expects the global colour line to outlast the end of the twentieth first century, two hundred years after Du Bois wrote (voting has been “temporarily disabled” this fall).

So what would the recent philosophical and socio-historical research on the subject say about Bet 115?

The notion that this “prediction simply puts a date to a trend that is well underway” is a testament to the dramatic changes that have taken place since the middle years of the twentieth century and the growing mainstreaming of anti-racism or opposition to the ideas, institutions, and practices that degrade individuals and groups on the basis of their putative socio-biological differences. Though racism is today almost universally regarded as a major human wrong, the degradation of human beings on the basis of their “race” remains a pervasive social and political fact. For some critics, the mainstreaming of anti-racism has had a paradoxical effect of keeping certain forms of racism alive. Large-scale racial supremacy may no longer be possible, but there is no shortage of human denigration based on separate-but-equal differentiations that operate upon race and race-like categories. For this reason, a number of theorists of race have moved away from “old” racism and toward “new” racism phenomena such as “racism and its doubles” (Taguieff) “racism without racists” (Bonilla-Silva), “racism without races” (Balibar), and even “racism without racism” (Goldberg).

In important ways, the first problem of the colour line lies with the very category of “race.” This is why the normative and political reflection over the question “what do I want race to be?” has become a sine qua non of writing about race and racism. “Conservationists” maintain that racial categories should be conserved for the purposes of public policy analysis, social reform, and/or identity-based politics, while “eliminativists” (an umbrella term that unhelpfully unites liberal and postcolonial theorists, as well as some conservative and neo-conservative pundits) argue that anti-racism is contingent on the repudiation of “race” in the first place. Debates along the continuum marked by these two positions have become a distinguishing characteristic of contemporary race theory.

Race theory debates can be helpful in thinking about the end of racism, among other big questions. A recent paper penned by Daniel Kelly, Luc Faucher, and Edouard Machery (2010) and published in The Journal of Social Philosophy, entertains three “concrete” hypotheses:

[1] the idea that disseminating scientific information about the biology of race will undermine racism (the dissemination hypothesis)…[2] the idea that increasing interracial interactions will weaken various components of racism (the contact hypothesis)… [3] the proposal that, instead of attempting to eliminate racist beliefs and prejudices, people should learn to control them (the self-regulation hypothesis).

Not unlike the author of Bet 115, Kelly et al define racism in a way that foregrounds its psychological aspects: “A mental state (an emotion, a belief, a motivation, and so on) or an action is racist if it is race-related and if it is morally problematic”. The ontology of race is of course much broader, but these three hypotheses are no worse than any other starting point for thinking about the conditions for “getting rid of racism”. (In some ways, it in fact behoves us to start with the psychological perspective on racism considering that IR theory has mostly ignored or downplayed the links between the “psy sciences” on the one hand, and the philosophies and theories of race on the other.) According to Kelly et al, various insights from the current empirical psychology (which covers everything from social psychology, which was once popular in IR, to the multidisciplinary study of evolved cognition) suggests that the dissemination hypothesis may be the weakest of the three, at least in the short run. Education aimed at demonstrating that race is an illusion in the biological sense may not actually help eliminate racism because of the pervasiveness and power of implicit biases, including the so-called “genetic essentialist biases”. In the words of Kelly et al: “Much of the cognitive machinery underlying racial thought is shot through with affect and emotion, and as a result people will be motivated to interpret scientific facts in a way that enable them to preserve racial opinions that are dear to them”.

Related is the issue of “prepared fears” and other core emotional responses (disgust, resentment, envy etc.) to the Other, some of which appear to be “encapsulated” or resistant to the otherwise consistent anti-racist beliefs expressed by the Self. Recent experiments have shown, for example, that people will take much longer to control negative emotional responses toward faces of racialised out-groups. As with genetic essentialist biases, racist emotions “might incline people to maintain some of their false racial stereotypes, and may very well motivate actions that are harmful to members of other races, even if those agents do not consciously intend that harm”. What this means for an overall anti-racist strategy, Kelly et al argue, is that education will be significantly more effective when combined and complemented by greater and “better” interracial interaction, as well as by the collectivisation of self-monitoring and self-control.

The idea that racism can be (and should be) subject to self-regulation implies that racial thought as such may never be eradicated. We can regulate the ways in which we racialise each other, but we cannot quite stop the racialisation processes in the first place. The corresponding colouring lesson is that the odds are against Bet 115 – racism is not likely to recede into social and political insignificance by the year 2100.

There is a colouring lesson for race theory as well. In addition to harmonizing with conservationist philosophies writ large, the idea of self-regulation appears to support the argument that race theorists ought to always use autoethnographic methods to examine their own racialised privileges/protections – or the lack thereof. A recent Review of International Studies forum usefully discusses the promise and pitfalls of these methods from an IR perspective (and so I’ve asked Elizabeth Dauphinee, one of the contributors to this collection, to specifically reflect on the ways in which racialisation can or cannot be self-regulated). That autoethnography is marginalized methodological perspective is not surprising: by placing the author’s own experiences, and reflections thereon, as the source of data in the analysis of a social context or culture, this research tool turns traditional social science empiricism on its head. In addition to shifting the notions of subjectivity and subjecthood, autoethnography also attempts to correct the representational bias of research by welcoming dramatic redefinitions of the dominant concepts and conceptual relationships conducted in a variety of forms, from brief vignettes to large memoirs laden with poetry and photos.

When it comes to race research, at least in the U.S. context, Alice Deck’s 1990 article is notable for reiterating an academic old saw that racialised minority authors (for the lack of a better term) studying their own groups tend to produce “better” autoethnographic stories about racialisation because they themselves have rich lived experience as objects of the said process. This argument, whatever its merits, leads us dialectically back to those interesting philosophical debates about the nature of distinctions between the personal and cultural/social, the oppressor and oppressed, and the native and outsider, including what Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant once identified as the “social and intellectual conditions for genuine social scientific internationalism”.

Materialism and World Politics

21-22 October, 2012

Abstract proposals due: 16 April, 2012

The annual conference for volume 41 of Millennium: Journal of International Studies will take place on 21-22 October, 2012 at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

The theme of this year’s conference will be on the topic of materialism in world politics. In contrast to the dominant discourses of neorealism, neoliberalism and constructivism, the materialist position asks critical questions about rational actors, agency in a physical world, the role of affect in decision-making, the biopolitical shaping of bodies, the perils and promises of material technology, the resurgence of historical materialism, and the looming environmental catastrophe. A large number of critical writers in International Relations have been discussing these topics for some time, yet the common materialist basis to them has gone unacknowledged. The purpose of this conference will be to solidify this important shift and to push its critical edges further. Against the disembodied understanding of International Relations put forth by mainstream theories, this conference will recognize the significance of material factors for world politics.

Proposed panel topics include:

• Affect
• Biopolitics
• Complexity Theory / Self-Organising Matter
• Discourse and Materiality
• Environmental Crisis
• Historical Materialism / Marxism
• Neuroscience and Politics
• Philosophical Materialism
• Political Geography
• Scientific Realism
• Technology
• The Body / Gender

Individuals interested in presenting a paper are requested to submit a 300 word abstract to: millennium@lse.ac.uk by 16 April, 2012. Submissions for panels are also welcome.

Keynote speakers will be announced in the coming months.

A selection of the conference papers will be published in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, volume 41, no. 3.

I’m thinking about something much more important than bombs.

I am thinking about computers.

John von Neumann, 1946 (via The Scientific Way of Warfare)

Modern war has become too complex to be entrusted to the intuition of even our most trusted commander. Only our giant brains can calculate all the possibilities.

John Kemeny, 1961 (ditto)

‘Extreme science’ – the science which runs the incalculable risk of the disappearance of all science. As the tragic phenomenon of a knowledge which has suddenly become cybernetic, this techno-science becomes, then, as mass techno-culture, the agent not, as in the past, of the acceleration of history, but of the dizzying whirl of the acceleration of reality – and that to the detriment of all verisimilitude.

Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (1998)

Non-Consensual Hallucinations

A recent spate of cyber-attacks, and the civilian-military responses to them, have pushed questions of collective violence, technological complexity and the very relation between war and peace into a more mainstream arena. Alongside diagnoses of the political impact of Web 2.0, the analysis of contemporary technoscience and its militarised uses seems less neophiliac marginalia than urgently-required research program. As previously indicated in Part One of this review, a number of recent works have broached this subject, and in the process have addressed themselves to the very relation between bios and technos, sometimes with the implication that the latter is on the verge of overwhelming the former. Skynet gone live!

Critical engagement with the boundaries and possibilities of Network-Centric Warfare (NCW) thus opens a range of complex problems relating to the co-constitution of war and society, the place of ethics in military analysis (and military practice) and the adequacy of standard categories of social science to world-changing inventions. To expect answers to such broad questions is perhaps to overburden with expectation. Yet it is interesting to find that both Guha and (Antoine) Bousquet, who are most concerned with the radical newness of contemporary war, implicitly operate within a rather traditional understanding of its boundaries. For both, ‘war’ means the restricted arena of battlespace, and in particular that battlespace as viewed by the soldiers and generals of the United States of America.

James Der Derian is intrigued by many of the same questions, but his view is more expansive, and his diagnosis of the connection between NCW and international politics generally more comprehensive. The second edition of Virtuous War is an update of a text first released in 2001 and, despite most of the content being more than a decade old (there is a new prologue and several fresh chapters), it stands up extremely well to the challenge of later works.

For Der Derian, new technologies of war are best conceived of, following Dwight D. Eisenhower’s designation of a Military-Industrial Complex, as part of a wider system: a Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network. Virtuous War chronicles more than a decade of investigations into this ‘MIME-NET’, and Der Derian quite explicitly sets the book up as a montage of methods and styles: part travelogue; part introduction to French ‘virtual theory’ (Virilio, Baudrillard, Deleuze); part personal history; part political critique. It is, he says, “as much a detective story as a cautionary tale”, one built on the twin figures of Friedrich Nietzsche – for recognising the nihilistic and the virtuous in the relation between real and virtual – and Walter Benjamin – for recognising the power of mimesis in virtuality and war. As well as several extended interview transcripts, there are also pictures and admissions of where the recording equipment malfunctioned or notes scribbled on a cocktail napkin got lost.

So we follow him to places that are not usually touched by traditional war studies: to Operation ‘Urban Warrior’, a grand virtual war staged in the Bay area in 1999, complete with faked (as well as real) protests; to the 2000 Republican and Democrat National Conventions and to collaborations between Hollywood producers, military planners and academics in Southern California. Der Derian most often directs us to training exercises and the rhetorics of military revolution as set out by figures like Cebrowksi, and so involves the reader in a series of overlaps between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ war. A pair of partner videos expands the journey appropriately, and captures well the feel of the book (even if some may find the cut-aways and effects a little clumsy).

In addition to this larger set of units and levels of analysis, Der Derian wants to establish the relevance of virtuous war in the age of MIME-NET. For him, virtualization is perhaps revolutionary, but only in combination with “new ethical and economic imperatives for global democratic reform and neoliberal markets”, elements which push it ‘higher’ (the scare-quotes are Der Derian’s) from mere virtual war to virtuous war. This is, citing Walter Benjamin, “a correspondence of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology”, in particular the alignment of awesome and overwhelming military power with a strong sense of ethical superiority. So a figure like Richard Holbrooke emerges as a virtuous diplomat par excellence who “practiced power politics while preaching moral responsibility”.

The approach taken by Guha and Bousquet cannot but invoke epochal and ontological shifts, new worlds conjured from the dawns of new ages through new technologies. Der Derian, by contrast, surfaces a stranger, more composite picture through his melange of sites and stories. Two-thirds of the way into Virtuous War, this approach is fleshed out as ‘a virtual theory of the global event’. Inspired by Clifford Geertz’s endorsement of ‘thick description’, virtual theory “seeks to interrogate and interpret rather than intervene or explain” and is thus:

thin on explanation and thick on description; instrumented for interpolation rather than framing; more concerned with shifting events and speculations than fixed structure, and double-blind proofs; more interested in consequences than causes; and not so much interested in how a problem is solved as why an event goes – or fails to go – critical and global.

This approach allows for the foregrounding of strange amalgamated complexes and highlights the frequent gaps of NCW: between the rhetoric of full-spectrum dominance and its reality; between ideas of the future and the surprises thrown up by accidents and events; between new model armies and “the angry global hive of real-time TV”; and in the experience of war itself: the “dirty secret of war-cum-game…that combination of fear and fun that allows the soldier to espy yet deny death, their own as well as others”, as one of the more compelling phrases has it. Of particular relevance to contemporary world order is the discussion, in the wake of Kosovo, of how the MIME-NET works in ‘Operations Other Than War’ (OOTW), a jargon recognisable in the various forms of ‘intervention’ spoken of in contemporary security discourse (and which chimes with Antoine’s comments on Kosovo and Libya).

The resulting journey is rich and suggestive, although not without gaps of its own. Questions are tabled but generally left hanging. Should we replace talk of superpower without those of cyberpower and hyperwar? What are the implications of force disparity? Can we reliably speak of revolutions in military affairs? What ethics check the use of such powers? As a text intended to gently insert us into the morass of contemporary infowar, this works well, but while the theoretical and personal tensions ratchet up other central concerns are circumvented.

For example, human suffering under MIME-NET is briefly referred to as “deferred”, rather than avoided, but this interesting ethical problem is itself then deferred. At points Der Derian worries about his positionality, or has a visceral reaction to the discourse of war ‘games’ or the situations in which he finds himself, or shows a generalised concern about the potential sanitisation of war in media-state propaganda, but declines to pursue these anecdotes into more systematically theoretical territory. In the very last lines he concludes that the ‘multiple pathologies’ of MIME-NET and the global war on terror are not worth the cost, but this is never really translated into a sustained analysis of harm in the age of information. This is all the more puzzling because of the role of the virtuous in the set-up of the book. Virtuous War thus provides neither a full-blown ethical account of NCW nor a sociological account of how the actors involved think about and deploy the language of virtuosity. Perhaps they don’t. But this in itself would be something interesting to pursue, since it would suggest that the discourses of honour and duty and human rights are rather empty and general signifiers, covers and decoys for some rather more banal and brutal activities.

The Mechanical Gods of Modern Warfare

Taken together, Reimagining War, The Scientific Way of Warfare and Virtuous War offer a crash-course in NCW and its effects. Bousquet and Der Derian in particular offer a series of compelling genealogies and unsettling provocations to those who would dismiss the technoscience of violence as so much gushing over the new, a burgeoning subfield reliant more on grand statements of immanent transformation that hard assessments of military reality. But at least five problems persist across the three volumes.

Nancy Burson's 'Warhead One' (1982), reproduced in Der Derian's 'Virtuous War'

First, there is the question of how NCW connects with political, economic and military realities in contemporary intervention and statebuilding. All three books gesture to the failures of techno-fetishism but leave relatively unexplored conflicts both within military paradigms and between them and their competitors. What, for example, does NCW mean for the practices of development? The case for a transformation in the conduct of war is solidly made, but the integration of those processes in more global patterns of contestation and control demands a further analytical move. This is not to say that a wider perspective would render NCW less important. It is entirely plausible that the radical dimension of speed and the advent of ‘coercive diplomacy’ is undermining the more high profile fora of negotiation and hegemony but, particularly for Guha and Bousquet, a strong distinction between war and politics still seems to hold.

Second, and relatedly, the shared interest in technological progress tends to cloud an analysis of distinctly traditional forms of intervention and their return. This is most notable in the case of Der Derian, who has recently worked on the Human Terrain System of the US army and makes some mention of it in Virtuous War (as in the biting aside that US soldiers require “culture reduced to a story that could be carried in a cargo pocket”). The last years have seen a distinct turn away from the solutions of technology to a heavily-criticised policy of academics embedded within counter-insurgency policy and engaged in a kind of cultural pedagogy in order to – in the hackneyed phrase of the day – ‘win hearts and minds’. This reversal, or complication, of NCW’s triumph is barely mentioned. Nor is there much discussion of the ways in which technologies that fall short of our standard expectations of them or machines which resist our desires for them.

Third, there is the spectre of modernity, post-modernity and their relation to an imagined ‘West’. Given the technologies under scrutiny, it is no surprise that Guha, Bousquet and Der Derian focus almost exclusively on the policies and experiences of the American military. More than that, it is entirely appropriate for them to do so. But the corollary is that other putative ‘ways of war’ are neglected. Following Sankaran Krishna, this is most sharply put in the charge of postmodern amnesia, which is to say that for all the criticality of the authors under examination, the lives and bodies of those on the receiving end of NCW seem to have somehow vanished in the night.This leads to a fourth problem, which is the almost complete absence in these accounts of counter-hegemonic or anti-systemic forces. Antoine opens his book with the reversal in fortunes of NCW, from ecstasy at its success in April 2003 to the come-down experienced later when the American military released that ‘the enemy’ was more networked and more decentralised than they were. All three authors make reference to Vietnam and the ways in which Robert McNamara’s fantasy of high-tech control foundered on some older modalities of combat and strategy. But beyond these asides, there is little consideration of how the same techniques and principles in the hands of actors complicates the story. How does NCW fare in a world of asymmetries where the hierarchical advantage of state power is somewhat nullified? What does NCW have to do with the recent scandals and shut-downs elicited by the activities of Wikileaks and Anonymous? And does the strategic character of NCW not undermine, rather than reinforce, the more conventional military superiority of the US?

Fifth and finally, the ethics of NCW are only hinted at. In one sense, they are present at every stage, since a good number of engineers and planners appear to have been motivated by minimising casualties (principally on their side, but sometimes among the enemy too) and figures like Cebrowski and General Wesley Clark seem firm on the need for military power to be controlled by civilian authorities. Yet Guha, Bousquet and Der Derian do not themselves push this angle or address the normative questions in any depth. Should we, as some suggest, seek to limit the uses of technoscience? How radical are the implications for rights of privacy, free speech and civic freedom? And what is the proper posture towards these spreading connections for academics concerned with war and peace?

These are not questions easily settled. But they do indicate a series of disconnections, often in spite of the explicit commitments of those working on the new ways of killing and dying. Nor are these new problems. In 1946 John von Neumann, one candidate for father, or maybe just uncle, of the nuclear age, pinpointed the nature of the shift in the relationship between bios and technos: “I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers”. The challenge for analysing the information bomb in contemporary world politics is to move not just beyond bombs to computers but further to networks and conflict in a still broader sense, one that encapsulates human needs and human horrors without reproducing a naïve anthropomorphism, and without eschewing it in favour of the gravitational pull of techno-fetishism.

I am the last in line that started with who?
With John von Neumann

If it’s the end of time so be it

But hey, it was Truman

Who set me free

I am half man

I’m almost like you

But you’ll be god-damned when I’m through

It’s a new day

So open the bay

And set this free

Black Francis, ‘Half Man’ (2008)

War is different now. On this Manabrata Guha, (our very own) Antoine Bousquet and James Der Derian agree. And their parallel accounts of the impact of technology on war – or more precisely, on the purportedly distinct Western way of war – share some other features. As is to be expected, each engages with traditions of thinking about violence and humanity’s remaking of the natural. Clausewitz looms over all three works, which could be said to share an investment in the tension derived from him between war as a kind of friction and war as a kind of instrument. All three also address a looser set of everyday ideas about (post)modern war, whether in the disconnection of bombers from their targets or the science fiction resonances found in near-instant communication, virtual reality targeting and cyborg warriors.

The question concerning technology – to put it in Martin Heidegger’s formulation, one which concerns all three authors to similar degrees – has gained considerable ground in International Relations and cognate disciplines over the last decades. In large part driven by Der Derian’s early work on post-structuralism and speed, theoretical inquiry into the nature and effects of technological progress has more recently been reinforced by considerable ‘real world’ relevance: in the explosion of social networking and its attendant ‘revolutions’, the increasing deployment of unmanned drones by the US military in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the general discourse of post-Cold War security threats from non-state actors in the form of cyber-attacks, miniaturised weapons systems or black market dirty bombs. As the impact of technology apparently spreads and metastasises, scholarly attention is turning to the sociological and ethical dimensions of digitised networks at war.

So what has the information bomb done to the modalities of collective violence?

A Metamorphosis Of Force

For Manabrata Guha, existent accounts of Network-Centric Warfare (NCW) undersell the radical dimension of its transformation of collective violence. Setting himself in favour of an ‘intuitive’ and ‘conceptual’ inquiry rather than an ‘empirical’ or ‘practical’ one, he suggests that a fundamental shift has occurred, such that crucial figures like Donald Rumsfeld and Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski (a key architect of NCW) can be said to have been engaged in “a project of some philosophical significance”. More precisely, the current crop of NCW theorists are inadequate to their object, and continually seek to restrain the radicality of the new form within the thought patterns and paradigms of the old.

The radicality of NCW (and hence the need for the ‘reimagining’ of the title) comes from two central elements: first, the speed of command made possible by new technologies; and second, the resulting ‘self-synchronization’ of action in war to a commander’s intent. This is an Age of Networks marked by ‘a new trinity’ of Speed, Sharing and Decentralisation. The theme of speed is one repeated in the accounts given by Bousquet and Der Derian, but is most forcefully emphasised at the theoretical level by Guha. Speed matters because it means that war as a practice has finally caught up with Clausewitz, who is said to have recognised the role of uncertainty at an ontological level, and who can thus be united with the figure of Deleuze, whose theoretical interest lay in the question of immanence. For Guha this seems to mean that hierarchies and distinctions – between command and control, between man and machine, between war and politics – collapse into a kind of ontological state that undoes all such moves. This is war as “absolute immanence” or “pure war”, which escapes the bounds placed on it by ‘absolute war’ (the logic of maximising the powers of violence in a direct clash) or ‘real war’ (the messy practice of day-to-day decisions on the traditional battlefield).

The connection of speed and immanence means that NCW cannot be captured and controlled by state apparatuses in the clichéd sense of war as a political tool. As Guha puts it, “the intensiveness of war is characterized by the differential play of infinite intensities of infinite magnitude” (emphasis in original), in the sense that the consequences, feedback loops and sensitivity to initial conditions which characterise NCW – and which Bousquet would call chaoplexic – resist in their essence the intentionality of the human actor. Distinguishing between the conduct and concept of war, Guha thus suggests the networked realities of instant response, battle swarms and the increasing removal of the human element from the war machine mean that NCW cannot be harnessed as technologies like the rifle or tank might have been.

So, in a typical passage, the ‘technological signature’ of NCW is already said to have found expression in:

US Navy carrier-centric fleets [which] have repeatedly demonstrated over the past decade that regardless of terrain (accessibility) and weather (visibility) conditions, they can create a remarkably diverse and mobile array of weapon-clusters – battlenodes – from where a variety of passive and active surveillance operations take place – manned and/or unmanned…the US Navy is in the process of transforming itself into a capability-based modular expression of force that can stretch and extend battlespaces into the gaps, cracks, and faultlines of the familiar dimensions of space and time (emphasis in original).

The superiority of distributed networks are said to have overwhelmed military planners, who then seek to impose a strategy of NCW by removing uncertainty and computing threats. In setting up this complicated theoretical story Guha relies on the idea of a radical break, leading to “an understanding of war where the very notion of confrontation is obviated by the fluidity of the play of forces…the abandoning of the anthropic plane”. This argument requires a certain degree of simplification. For example, it is claimed that Hugo Grotius, Emmerich de Vattel and Thomas Hobbes all reduced war to a function of the body-politic state and constructed it as rational policy, a frame now apparently superseded by NCW. Yet Grotius was not such an untrammelled statist, and a fuller account of his views (such as that provided by Eddie Keene) would recognise the ways in which he innovated international property rights for private individuals and corporate forces, bringing him much closer to the present situation that Guha would seem to allow.

This kind of detail is important principally because it unsettles the over-neat narrative of war that makes NCW seem so revolutionary. But Reimagining War is also beset by some other problems. It is badly edited, and passages are frequently repeated, in large part completely verbatim, at different points in the text. This is all the more deflating in a text that retails at £80 (and £52 on Kindle!) for only 173 pages (pre-notes and bibliography). Important concepts, like the idea of a ‘grid of operations’, are casually introduced but only fleshed out much later. Much of the conceptual vocabulary is deployed imprecisely or in contradictory ways. For example, the Real, with a capital R, appears often, implying a psychoanalytical Lacanian or Žižekian understanding, but usually means ‘the real’ in a more commonsensical vein, i.e. what actually happened in a particular circumstance.

This kind of slippage invites scepticism about other philosophically-loaded phrases and conveys the impression that they are being deployed as fluffy buttresses to the argument, investing it with a depth that is never cashed out or explained. Significant space is given to articulating a Deleuzian and Guattarian account in which war is outside of the law, outside of sovereignty and irreducible to state apparatuses, only for Guha to conclude that such theorising is “disjointed and…frankly contradictory”, salvageable only because it offers a syntax of immanence.

Compelling passages on the relationship between bios and technos in contemporary war-making; on Clausewitz’s ‘architectonic’; and on the emergence of statistical governance are thus somewhat lost amongst a central thesis repeatedly stated but never really developed, despite (or perhaps because of) the wide-ranging use of Deleuze, Guattari, Levinas, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Kant, Foucault, Liebniz, Laurelle and Descartes, amongst others. For all this there is no real mention of Paul Virilio, and no explicit engagement with Der Derian. Despite occasional nods to ethical implications, this too vanishes in a changing stream of metaphors. Even the core tension between concept and conduct emerges somewhat under-served, unrelated to an examination of institutions, practices or ethics.

Only Our Giant Brains Can Calculate All The Possibilities

Guha closes Reimagining War with a short riposte to Antoine, who is charged with falling into the trap of limiting concepts to conducts, of simultaneously noting the transformations brought about by new assemblages – assemblages which have changed the very grounds for action in the world – and wanting to hold on to the idea of war as a discrete kind of human behaviour, separable from others. This is a far less damning critique than Guha wants it to be. Indeed, The Scientific Way of Warfare draws out many of the same features, tensions and philosophical implications as Reimagining War, but under a tighter and more informative analytical typology.

The task for Antoine is to trace the technoscience of war, which is to say the close relationship between scientific discovery/practice and the techniques of battle themselves. Historicising these relations yields four distinct regimes, “characterised by a specific theoretical and methodological constellation”: mechanistic, thermodynamic, cybernetic and chaoplexic, each associated with a technology: the clock, the engine, the computer, and the network respectively.

This periodisation is persuasive and enlightening (at least for those not already steeped in the discourses of NCW). For example, in tracing the elective affinities between talk of thermodynamics and energetic resources and an age of capital and revolution in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Antoine explains how thermodynamic objects are less stable and so have the potentiality to ‘break loose’, setting an ‘energetic’ model of bodily comportment and military manoeuvre. Where Frederick the Great was the martial implementer of a mechanistic technoscience, Napoleon took the lead in the age of thermodynamics, introducing a flexibility and autonomy that gave him an upper hand and contributed in its own way to the Hegelian interest in the energies of history, one taken up in a Marxian conception of the energies of class war.

Later, the introduction of the computer to war required a ‘closed world’ of data for analysis, with uncertainty an information deficiency to be corrected in the spirit of technocratic management. The figure of Robert McNamara and the computational initiatives of Vietnam loom large in this period. On this account, we are currently at the threshold between cybernetic and chaoplexic ways of war. In chaoplexity the stress is on open systems, which include feedback loops but now in a way that give rise to new structures spontaneously and which take non-linear pathways and forms. The key phrase here, as for Guha, is ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’, a legacy traceable to Henri Poincaré and one which fundamentally denies projects of control and management.

In The Scientific Way of Warfare, this highlights a similar tension to that between conduct and concept already noted in Guha’s work, namely that commanders still seem to think of warfare in terms of a closed system. Advocates like Cebrowski seek ‘information superiority’ in the battlespace, but this neglects sensitivity to initial conditions, the need to constantly revise and adapt models to stave off entropy, and ignores that much information in war is contradictory. Such enthusiasts are really interested in an acceleration of the decision-cycle and so are prone to fall back on simplistic feedback models. One particularly example is of the NATO bombing of Kosovo, in which cheap counter-measures such as camouflage and fake smoke plumes pumped false information into the system. Whereas NATO had originally quantified its success as resulting in 120 ‘confirmed’ tank strikes, it turned out after the war that they had only destroyed 14, echoing a techno-fetishism that also failed the world’s most powerful military in Vietnam.

This analytical frame works at several levels. Mechanism, for example, is explained both as an ontological claim about nature (the Universe viewed as A Great Automaton), and as a methodological approach to enquiry which required that objects be unpacked into their component elements so that the causal relations could be better understood and controlled. Similarly, the metaphors deployed by regimes also find a more concrete reality in particular artefacts (like the clock), which always threaten to take on a fetishistic quality. As such, a ‘doubled analysis’ of both tools and metaphors becomes necessary.Bousquet’s typology will be a useful frame for many, and at times threatens to be too neat. At the conceptual level this is smartly sidestepped by addressing the different regimes as sets of ‘resonances’. Not intended as causal claims about technology determining thought (or vice versa), regimes can thus take on a subtler aspect, and one more amenable to the variable traction of different conceptual models.

Despite this caveat, periodisation has its limits. There still appears to be a conflict between thinking in terms of the linear progression of science/technology and the multiple possible constellations of mental frames and discursive categories used by war-makers themselves, in which there may be old doctrine sitting side-by-side with new, and retreats to previous modes of war-making. The recycling and reinscription of doctrines of counter-insurgency being a case in point. How do we think these confluences of memes, practices, technologies and ambiguous psychological schema?

Moreover, the content of war is itself somewhat displaced. Bousquet addresses the organisation of fighting in logistical terms (from drills to nuclear warheads), but much less is said about the forms of mobilisation, control, political settlements, gender arrangements or human suffering that go with the different kinds of technoscience. What, for example, is the relationship between a mechanistic understanding of the world and the earliest moves in European expansion? Are they imperfectly related, or was an understanding of discipline important only in restricted terms, in the same way that the clock helped with navigation but did not fundamentally alter or reflect the modalities of global power?

The bow and arrow once was the pinnacle of weapons technology. It allowed the great Genghis Khan to rule from the Pacific to the Ukraine: an empire twice the size of Alexander the Great and four times the size of the Roman Empire. But today, whoever holds the latest Stark weapons rules these lands.

So speaks Raza, stand-in for the terrorist-with-our-technology nightmare in Iron Man. For both Guha and Antoine this spectre of the technological fallacy resurfaces, if in every different ways. In Reimaging War the process seems quite straightforward, with the technological framework for pure war itself ushering in a singularity, one which will not bear the impositions of human direction and purpose, whatever comforting lies we may wish to tell ourselves. Weapons determine history, but now without human agents. In The Scientific Way of Warfare, matters are more ambiguous, and at least implicitly leave open questions around the transformation of social relations or the normative framework appropriate to our capacities. Weapons reflect and inflect military history, but in a process only partially related to our purposes. Technology transforms societies, just as it is transformed by them, with each epoch staging a new frame of confrontation between bios and technos. But what of socios and ethos?

* With apologies to Hetfield, Ulrich, Burton and Hammett.

If the major crises of the modern world are symptomatic of anything today, it is the banality that our world is complex. Compared to previous periods of history our world is more interconnected (spreading crises further and less predictably), more dynamic (diffusing risks at a quicker pace), and more fragmented (with experts becoming specialized in solving local problems rather than systemic problems). This complexity involves a massive amount of elements, non-linear dynamics, unintended effects, and feedback loops. These features of complex systems strain the limits of the human mind’s finite and embodied capacities. The 2008 financial crisis, the ongoing climate change crisis, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the 2003 North American electrical blackout – all of these point to massively complex systems which already surpass human capacities to cognize. Moreover, if rational action is premised upon the capacity to represent the problems to be confronted, then the complex systems of today’s world are threatening to undermine the cognitive basis of political action.

The relationship between the world and our capacities to think it and act in it are not entirely asymmetrical though. While the world has become increasingly complex, our capacities to work in it have also expanded.

The Problem of Cognitive Mapping

In the writings of Fredric Jameson we find perhaps the clearest articulation of the essential problem facing political actors today. According to him, we lack ‘cognitive mapping’ – the means to make our own world intelligible to ourselves through a situational understanding of our own position. Jameson draws upon the urban theorist, Kevin Lynch, who argues that in designing urban spaces one must take into account how people navigate their way around cities. In encountering a new city, the individual is left without any cognitive map of the space and is forced to develop one through habit. As Lynch argues, the urban designer can assist this process by strategically situating landmarks and other easily recognizable symbols in order to provide the grounds for the development of a cognitive map.

In Jameson’s work, this idea of cognitive mapping is taken up not as the individual’s relation to a city, but instead their relation to an entire social system. As he states, the function of cognitive mapping is “to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.” In charting through a loose set of historical periods from national to imperialist to globalized capitalism, Jameson argues that at one time the nature of capitalism was such that one could potentially establish a correspondence between our local phenomenological experiences and the economic structure that determined it. We could, in other words, establish a cognitive map of our economic space, thereby making intelligible the world around us. With the rise of globalization, however, Jameson claims that this is no longer the case. We can no longer simply extrapolate from our local experience and develop a map of the global economic system. There is a deficiency of cognitive mapping, or rather there is an essential gap between our local phenomenology and the structural conditions which determine it.

This separation between experience and the system within which we operate results in increased alienation – we feel adrift in a world we don’t understand. In this regard, Jameson notes that the proliferation of conspiracy theories is partly a cultural response to this situation – with conspiracy theories acting to narrow down the agency behind our world to a single figure of power (whether it be the Bilderberg Group, Freemasons, or some other convenient scapegoat). Despite the extraordinary complexity of some conspiracy theories, they nevertheless provide a reassuringly simple answer to ‘who is behind it all’. They, in other words, act precisely as a cognitive map.

Similarly, the extrapolation of everyday experiences to model global problems demonstrates both the necessity of cognitive maps and the distortions that limited maps introduce. The use of the household metaphor to understand national economies is particularly prevalent today – government debt is equated with household debt and the former denounced on the basis of the comparison. In the process, the unique complexities of government debt are effaced. In other cases, the problem of African underdevelopment becomes embodied in the figure of a starving child, acting as a synecdoche for the complex structural problems that maintain states of poverty. The act of ‘giving’ becomes a meaningful gesture, without ever encroaching upon a resolution of the systemic problems. The issue of cognitive mapping is crucial for political action, precisely because our actions are shaped (if not determined) by the representations we first construct of complex systems.

The solution to this situation is strikingly simple. The main thesis of my ISA paper is that it is technology which has allowed humans to extend their cognitive and practical capacities in such a way that complex global systems become intelligible.[1] Through the development, diffusion and use of various technologies, human actors have come to create novel cognitive maps of today’s world. In particular, sociotechnical systems have been constructed as filters and constructs which make the ‘global’ visible as such. Computer simulations generate representations of a global climate; specialized software produces visible diagrams of global finance; automated monitoring systems filter complex electrical grids into manageable presentations. It is through technology that humans are enriching their world and coming to terms with complexity.

In the final part of this series, crisis mapping software will be examined as one of the many ways in which technology is materially constructing world politics today.

[1] For Jameson, the answer to the problem of cognitive mapping is dialectical thought and aesthetic representations. These options are rejected here on the basis that dialectical thought is no longer sufficient for a world better characterized by complexity science, and that aesthetic representations avoid the necessity of scientific inference for epistemic claims.

Update (17 Feb): Meera’s post is now up.

Inference and Scientific Progress in International Relations

From a philosophy of science perspective, IR discussions on methodology and epistemology have always struck me as a bit bizarre. The outdated nature of most debates and the odd use of labels like ‘positivism’ have made IR philosophy of science too often seem like a muddled confusion, rather than an insightful debate. So it’s hard to overstate how fantastic it is to see a book like Patrick Thaddeus Jackson’s – precisely because it weaves skillfully through rigorous philosophy of science, and doesn’t remain bound by IR’s idiosyncratic frameworks of debate. I find myself highly sympathetic to a lot of what Jackson argues for in this book, and am a strong proponent of methodological pluralism. There are two major points I think Jackson’s book neglects though – one is more based upon my own philosophical position (an external critique), while the second is a problem more or less within Jackson’s position (an internal critique). In what follows I try to examine some missing elements of Jackson’s book, and suggest what might be an alternative approach. [1]

On Monism and Dualism

Jackson begins by setting out a 2×2 matrix of different fundamental philosophical orientations (‘wagers’). These are considered ideal types that help to clarify the vast field of philosophy of science. The first distinction is between mind-world dualism and mind-world monism. It is a distinction concerning the relationship between the researcher and his or her object. The second distinction is between what Jackson calls phenomenalism and transfactualism – or what might be also known as instrumentalism versus realism about scientific objects. The former sees empirical data as all that can be legitimately said to exist, whereas the latter argues we can deduce the existence of unobservable entities as well.

The 2×2 matrix: A scholar’s best friend.

As Jackson is clear about the ideal-type nature of this categorization, I don’t want to criticize that aspect. Rather, my point is that in his discussion of mind-world dualism and monism Jackson leaves aside one crucially important position (and the position undertaken by many in the so-called ‘speculative realist’ movement). [2] Whereas Jackson sets the empiricist, explanation-based, ‘scientific’ perspectives on the side of mind-world dualism, he sets the social constructivist, understanding-based perspectives on the side of mind-world monism. The former tries to bridge the gap between mind and world by creating accurate representations. The latter asserts that all of reality is intertwined with linguistic and conceptual baggage. (36) (This is precisely what Quentin Meillassoux will call the ‘correlationist’ position: the reduction of Being to the relation between mind and world. )

The problem is that Jackson’s discussion of the monist position neglects one crucial position – not a conceptual monism, but a materialist monism. [3] This is a monism that doesn’t accord any special ontological position to ideas or language or phenomenology. Such a monism upsets the framework that Jackson has set up, however. For one thing, it asserts a mind-independent reality (a dualist characteristic), but it also maintains the ontological sameness of mind and matter (a monist characteristic). It can still maintain a dualist separation between concepts and objects (see Ray Brassier, “Concepts and Objects”), but what is related is not made of different ‘stuff’ (a monist position). It does, however, definitively refuse phenomenalism as an anthropological conceit, so it can be firmly placed in the transfactualist category. If materialist monism doesn’t fit cleanly into Jackson’s categorization, this is predominantly because the epistemological relation must be reconfigured away from the standard story which sees scientific theories simply being mapped onto a pre-existing world via a principle of adequation.

With regards to the epistemological question there are at least two responses, both embodied nicely in Wilfrid Sellars’ work. On the one hand, there is the group now known as the eliminative materialists (EM), who emphasize the materialist side of Sellars and try to naturalize epistemology (Paul Churchland and Daniel Dennett, for instance). For Churchland, the idea here is that neural networks operate non-representationally, and adapt to their surroundings to produce usefully accurate conceptual maps. But these approximations of accuracy between the inner and the outer are themselves simply a product of a machine-like dynamic, and not any sort of logical, rational, or empiricist methodology. (See Paul Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective.)

A fancy-looking diagram that just says mental maps are created and shaped through neurological networks (in this case, of the visual system).

The second approach critiques (in my view, fundamentally) this first approach on the basis of its own self-justification. Namely, if EM is right, what are the inferential paths which would lead us to it? In other words, if EM demonstrates that all inferential paths are mere adaptations of neural networks, what can the status of EM itself be other than a simple accident? EM, from this second perspective, is self-denying. The result is a transcendental argument that there has to be a normative space of reasons that exists as well. Without this space, there is no rational justification for any position. (Pete Wolfendale’s work here has been crucial in my thinking on this.) It should be noted that the sense of normativity here is much wider than simply moral-type norms – it is the very norms of rational thought (such as objectivity, truth and falsity) which are in question. What behaviour must one follow in order to draw valid conclusions? As a consequence of these ideas, coming out of Wilfrid Sellars you get a normative (rather than a materialist) strand of thought – philosophers like Robert Brandom, most notably.

Three major results fall out of this transcendental argument for normativity. First, it negates any idea of a separation between scientific discourse and normative discourse. The former necessarily presupposes the latter as the proper conduct of thought. (Note that this doesn’t mean there are universal and pre-given norms of rational thought – Brandom will argue that there is a historical construction of rationality. Thus, in parallel with the development of empirical science we can find the development of transcendental norms.) Second, that there can indeed be a synthesis of the natural and the normative, along the lines of what James O’Shea has said about Sellars: Norms are conceptually irreducible, while being causally reducible. That is to say, we require them for consistent logical thinking, yet they are not situated above and beyond the material world and practice. That is to say, it’s not a dualism. This leads us to the third point – the conclusion that what is necessary for thinking through scientific thought is to proceed through the very notion of scientific inference.

Robert Brandom: Keeping beards in style since 1950.

On Inference

It is here perhaps that Jackson’s work falters most significantly – specifically, through the lack of any explicit means to compare and contrast the results of different methodologies. While he acknowledges that such interaction occurs, what is required is an explication of scientific inference that allows for commensurability between different methodologies. Without this, the placing of different theoretical orientations into different silos (so prevalent in contemporary IR) is inevitable. One of the more promising ways to potentially resolve this problem is through a development of inference – albeit in a much wider sense than King, Keohane and Verba give to the term. This would involve at the very least an understanding of the structure of inferential networks, how they provide meaning to terms and statements, and lastly, how their strength of connections is determined. In the work of Robert Brandom we can find important resources for the first two demands, while with Bruno Latour we can find an elaboration of the third demand.

An adequate picture of Brandom’s infererentialist position is impossible to give here (instead, there is his 740pp book that makes for a good afternoon read), but I’ll try to point out a few interesting aspects. First, inferentialism sets itself apart from the traditional truth-correspondence theories of meaning. Rather than statements matching up with some referent in the world, words receive their meaning by being situated within a network of inferential relationships with other concepts and – crucially – with objects. We can see here, then, that inferentialism already avoids the sort of mind-world dualism that leads to the logical problems that tend to surround correspondence theories of truth (what Jackson will call ‘the Cartesian anxiety’). Second, Brandom’s inferentialism is intrinsically embedded into social practices – in this sense it falls into what Jackson calls ‘analyticism’. In fact, for Brandom, the acts of giving reasons at the heart of the normative order can be precisely modeled by an elaborate game that he develops in his major work. The game of science, therefore, is a game of reason-giving that constructs the inferential networks that tie together various statements. The potential problem with Brandom’s work is that with all the focus on normativity and the space of reasons, it may fall into a (sophisticated) idealism.

The first way to avoid this is to argue that by justifying scientific practice and its results, Brandom implicitly at least lends support to the idea of science being progressive in the sense of producing more refined concepts, explanations, and predictions. If science can be considered progressive, however, then the ‘no-miracles’ argument can be employed to demonstrate that science must at least be grasping onto some real features of the world. These need not be absolute claims, incapable of being revised; instead they can simply be the best approximations we have to reality so far. But they are not simply ideal types grounded upon particular value-orientations, for instance.

As a result, the difference between Brandom’s inferentialism and Jackson’s analyticism is that whereas analyticism remains bound to the phenomenal level, the sort of inferentialism that Brandom develops can be wedded to a realist conception of science. It can produce transfactual knowledge about the mind-independent world, in other words. Thus while the inferential network may appear to be disconnected from the material world, it is in fact guided by norms of truth to produce knowledge claims that ever more closely (if asymptotically) approximate the features of real objects and their relations.

With Bruno Latour’s work, we can further tie the normative network of inferential relations even tighter to the material world. As we will see, central here is Latour’s rejection of the ‘modernist’ gap between mind and world, subject and object (or whatever one wants to call it). This will allow us to supplement Brandom’s lingustic-based conception of networked inferences, with a (paradoxically) non-lingustic type of inference. To see how this works, it needs to be understood that ultimately, for Latour, science is a matter of creating statements that are increasingly difficult to overthrow. Contra the naïve vision of science, this increased difficulty arises not simply from a theory being ‘true’ in the correspondence sense. Rather, for actor-network theory, this increased difficulty is tied up with two analytically distinct aspects. First, any particular statement must be made to fit in with things like the existing institutional structures, the various practices and standards of citation, and the personal networks between scientists. All these typically sociological aspects play a role in supporting a particular statement and making it increasingly difficult to criticize. This type of sociological influence, though, is not simply about power relations, economic interests, or cultural biases. It’s important to note that the types of sociological aspects that Latour is primarily interested in are what we would consider the everyday activities of an academic – taking note of existing theories, citing established evidence, looking for weaknesses in other’s research, etc. The sociological aspects of Latour are not straightforward distortions of the scientific project therefore.

Science? Yeah, it’s a bit crazy.

But for Latour, the stabilization of a statement also includes an important second aspect: the role of nonhuman actors as support. So the difficulty of overturning any particular scientific statement is simultaneously bound up with things like the instruments of science, the laboratory results, the products of field studies, and the outcomes of experiments. All these different aspects contribute to stabilizing a statement, and making it increasingly difficult to overturn. Similarly, the instruments used make a difference in how stable a statement is. For instance, the evidence provided by a mass spectrometer is worth more than the evidence provided by a chromatograph because the former embodies a longer line of research and theories within physics. Destabilizing the evidence it produces means destabilizing the numerous theories upon which it is built, which most scientists would be loath to do. Any particular statement, therefore, is built upon a large network of instruments and results from preceding experiments. Note that this is a non-linguistic series of inferences – put philosophically, it is about continuously transforming matter into form, and using the latter to derive conclusions (and is premised, again, on a monist ontology). (Latour’s excellent essay, “Circulating Reference” in Pandora’s Hope makes all of this clear with reference to an empirical case study.) In other words, it operates at an analytically (though not ontologically) distinct level from Brandom’s space of reasons. Crucially, there is no absolute ground here – any particular knowledge claim is contingently correct, and only supported through its support by materials, and through its role in inferential networks. Science, in other words, is always contingently revisable.

On the Progress of Science

The second oversight I see in Jackson’s position is the unarticulated notion of progress that is employed. As he rightly says, every science worth its name proclaims its progressive nature (194), yet what progress consists of for him is left aside. This is important for one crucial reason: without a notion of progress it becomes impossible to adjudicate between the competing methodologies. In fact, this is precisely Jackson’s position: the methodologies are incommensurable and each has incompatible means of evaluating progress. Yet it’s not clear then in what sense we can call this science rather than sciences in the plural. Can they really be said to be working on a common project? Furthermore, in practice the methodologies are often put in competition – an econometrics model may produce knowledge-claims about the relation between education and salary, whereas a reflexivist account may look at education as an ideological state apparatus that only relates education and salary as a result of the capitalist mode of production. How are we to say which is better? How are we to relate them to each other? Different methodologies produce different knowledge-claims, despite ostensibly speaking of the same object. Either they can speak to each other (in which case, how?) or they are divergent and we have multiple sciences. It is the notion of progress that can provide a unifying goal or measure for these different methodologies (with inference providing a unifying medium).

From what has been said above about inference and its expansion via Latour, I think it’s possible to derive a few aspects of a more general form of progress (i.e. one not limited to evaluating on the basis of a particular methodology). The first aspect of progress is the most intuitive sense: that of making conceptual, explanatory and predictive progress. Simply put, these become more accurate over time (with accuracy being measured by explanatory and predictive success, and not through correspondence). Importantly, this also allows for the overcoming of the supposedly mutually incompatible nature of different paradigms. As Philip Kitcher argues with direct reference to Kuhn, such incompatibilities are overstated when conceptual and explanatory progress are examined after the fact. For instance, the conceptual object of ‘phlogiston’ was picked out both by various experimental results as well as by a descriptive definition. While some of these characteristics were correct (insofar as they allowed for more accurate and novel predictions), others were later found to be fundamentally flawed. The downfall of the phlogiston theory of heat was not a complete rejection of a previous theory, but rather a conceptual refinement. Using this framework, conceptual progress can therefore be seen as the progressive fine-tuning of a term so that false modes of reference are dropped, and/or other modes of reference are narrowed down. A similar measure of progress exists as well for explanatory progress, where the web of dependencies between terms is given a progressive formulation on the basis of their abilities to improve explanatory accuracy and completeness.

The second major notion of progress we can derive is from Latour’s work – the strengthening of connections and the extension of supports for any particular claim. As any given knowledge-claim is only produced out of a long series of translations between matter and form, it follows that to stabilize and make stronger these connections, one can extend and expand the inferential connections supporting the claim. Thus progress in this sense can be measured via this strengthening over time.

The third type of progress stems from the embedded nature of mind into matter. This radicalizes the reflexivist position that Jackson sets out by undertaking not merely a critical reflection on the social structures that condition knowledge, but also by reflecting on the material structures as well. It is a progressive incorporation and refinement of the mind-world relation on both a scientific and philosophical level. In a long, but important passage, Gabriel Catren has formulated this position precisely in a recent work:

“Far from being an extrinsic philosophical operation capable of localizing the insurmountable limits of science, transcendental critique must allow the subject of science to identify and speculatively subsume the various transcendental conditions of scientific research. Among these conditions we can include: the (gravitational, thermodynamic, biologic, etc. conditions that make the emergence of localized and temporalized cognitive entities possible; the conditions defined by the anthropic principle; the physiological conditions of sensible intuition; the technological conditions of instrumental observability and experimental verifiability; the associated limits to the possibility of gaining empirical access to the different regions, strata, scales, and dimensions of the real; the ‘categories’ of human understanding, the available ‘imaginary’ schemata that allow us to connect these categories with sensible intuition, the formal and linguistic structures that convey theoretical reason, and the technical and conceptual operations of analysis, synthesis, abstraction, selection, coarse-graining, decoherence, and renormalization through which we can constitute finite objects and define what is relevant at a given stage of research. […] Indeed, the problem is not how to pierce a hole in the walls of the transcendental prison (built by philosophy itself), but rather to acknowledge that transcendental reflection is a necessary moment for absolving knowledge from the too human transcendental conditions of research. The infinite process of theoretical knowledge does not advance by attempting to grasp an ‘uncorrelated absolute’ through a philosophical ‘ruse’ capable of discontinuously leaping over the subject’s shadow, but instead through a continual deepening of scientific labour seeking to locally absolve it from its conjunctural transcendental limitations, expand its categorical, critical, and methodological tools, and progressively subsume its unreflected conditions and presuppositions. [4]

With Catren’s suggestion, we can begin to move away from the more or less incommensurable methodological positions that Jackson set out. Rather than accept the division between methodologies (and the inability to adjudicate between them), the scientific project can use the advances of science to reciprocally provide advances on their transcendental conditions. In other words, the progress of science is what makes possible the ability to sharpen our own philosophical (ontological, epistemological, methodological) assumptions.

While there are major difficulties remaining in the position briefly sketched out here, I hope that it can at least suggest a possible path forward that retains methodological pluralism, scientific progress, and materialist monism.

Criticisms?

The likely response to the position put forth here is that it overlooks the massively contested nature of ‘science’ and its components within the philosophy of science field. As a result, the position here attempts to unify what is (for Jackson) intrinsically plural. This is true, to a degree. Reiterating some of the arguments made above, three points can perhaps be made against remaining at a pluralist level. First, that in practice scientists (in Jackson’s expanded sense of science) are always setting claims against each other, even when having different methodological assumptions.  There is an interaction going on in practice, yet this seems to go unaccounted for by Jackson’s work.

Second, the presumably unwanted outcome of Jackson’s pluralism is that we have four different and incommensurable fields of knowledge. To call all of these ‘science’ seems like a denial of the very different claims they produce, and the very different uses they aim at. This pluralism, in other words, seems like a deep pluralism (despite Jackson’s attempt to provide an all-encompassing definition of science).

Third, to repeat what was said before, there is no sense of general progress that could be derived from all four methodologies. Instead, at best, there would seem to be progress internal to each methodology, but not in any sort of overall sense. Indeed, Jackson uses this as an argument for why there is necessarily a plurality of methodologies – since there is no overarching framework for evaluating them. (208)

Yet it is hoped that the senses of progress and inference outlined above give some suggestion to how an overarching idea of progress might be constructed. What ultimately turns out to be a ‘better’ argument (i.e. methodology) will be partially contingent upon the situation it finds itself in (e.g. the dominance of neopositivism in IR is an example of a social influence on what is currently determined as a ‘better’ argument – but this is not a historical necessity). Yet there can be (and has been) philosophical and empirical progress that gives us more precise notions of the assumptions which divide methodologies (this is the importance of Catren’s position). If this is the case – if methodologies can be made to compete at the level of their assumptions (through empirical and philosophical inferences) – then it is not inevitable that they remain separate.

On International Relations

How does this all relate to the study of international relations? In many ways, I am in agreement with Jackson that the immediate consequence should be an opening up of the methodological space within IR. The great worth of this book is precisely to counter the misguided notions of what ‘science’ is within IR. One of the primary reasons I ended up at LSE to study IR was because of its methodological and theoretical openness.  And one of the potentially major roadblocks for more traditional IR is its inability to innovate, precisely because of its methodologically conservative nature. (My favourite, if depressing, examples are of quantitative researchers who produce statistical evidence for blatantly obvious truths.) This is not a request for less rigorous work, but instead a request to recognize the multiple ways in which conceptual objects are constructed, and the multiple ways in which they fit into inferential networks. It is a call for more clarity about the relationship between different knowledge claims, and how conceptual objects can be produced that are mutually overlapping even if not directly comparable. There is scientific progress, and on the basis of this we can say there is something like scientific truth, yet formal and quantitative methods do not hold a monopoly on this.

NOTES:

[1] I should stress as well, that as is so often in writing a piece, it’s only when one attempts to work out the connections of logic precisely on paper that gaps in the flow become apparent. There are a number of gaps I’m aware of in this piece, and I’m sure there are many more others can point out. So the positive project set out here should be considered a prolegomena to an introduction, at best!

[2] Speculative realism is a relatively new family of philosophical positions, united largely by their resistance to Kant and post-Kantian philosophy. Whereas Kant attempted to set limits on the ability to know the noumenal realm, and post-Kantians have maintained this in various ways, speculative realism argues that a relation to the noumenal can be sustained. For an overview of the entire emerging field, see (blatant self-promotion warning): The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. It should be made clear that what follows is my own position in the broad field of speculative realism. Others have different and varying approaches to studying the social and while I draw on many of them for inspiration, my own position diverges from any particular thinker.

[3] To be clear, this is a ‘materialist’ monism and not a ‘physical’ monism – the latter is a specific scientific ontology (to use Jackson’s terminology), whereas the former is the more fundamental philosophical ontology that underlies theories like physicalism. It argues that what we call minds are a small piece of a much larger world – they are objects alongside other objects, rather than being the frame through which all of reality is perceived. In this sense, therefore, materialism accords no special place to minds and their characteristics.

[4] Catren, Gabriel. “Outland Empire,” in Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds.) The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Melbourne: Re.press, 2011, p. 342.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Brandom, Robert. “Inferentialism and Some of its Challenges,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 74:3.

Brassier, Ray. “Concepts and Objects,” in Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds.) The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Melbourne: Re.press, 2011.

Catren, Gabriel. “Outland Empire,” in Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds.) The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Melbourne: Re.press, 2011.

Churchland, Paul. A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science, MIT Press, 1992.

Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus. The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations, London: Routledge, 2011.

Kitcher, Philip. The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Latour, Bruno. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, 2^nd Edition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude, New York: Continuum, 2008.

O’Shea, James. Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn, Polity Press, 2007.