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Women, Culture, and International Relations, by Vivienne Jabri and Eleanor O’Gorman (eds.)
8. Typologies Toward an Unchained Medley: Aganist the Gentrification of Discourse in International Relations
First, A Story
We have lost storytelling. Georges Bataille used stories, with a récit, to discuss the pathologies of fetish and death—and sex—long before Michel Foucault came to prominence. 1 The possibility of confessional fiction and art criticism as philosophy was offered by Walter Benjamin. 2 The aphoristic koan–like writings of Émile Cioran suggest also that continental philosophy still has much to teach us about narratives of truth. 3 In this first paragraph, however, I cite the example of M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno’s retelling of the tale of Odysseus and their contention that, in the history of western literature, he was the first to realize his subjectivity. 4 For many years, inspired by this, I have sought to write about the earlier, nonwestern but Judaic figure Job and the temptations of subjectivity that came his way before he recanted the effort and God reestablished, in a great poetics of His Own Justification, His sole occupancy of subjectivity. If Job came close—was tempted by Satan to come close—but failed, how clearly or easily did Odysseus do it? Was the first subjectivity a bare breath away from the contingencies of the Olympian gods? I wonder if I might tell this tale in my own way, because I differ somewhat with Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading; but I do agree with its conclusion. This is not in itself a story. It is, at least, about a story.
First, however, a note on stories as they are found. In the Odyssey, women have a found quality; that is, they differ not at all from the women of Greek life. Not only have they no subjectivity in the story, but they had no emancipation in life. This is not meant to validate that. Even under such conditions, however, it did not mean that men as a certain universal archetype—in a hierarchical universe under the gods—had subjectivity either. Odysseus was certainly an ideal type. That anybody, man or woman, could achieve uncontingent subjectivity was an ideal. This ideal, as I try to relate later, may be no less contingent in the third world of othernesses today. It is against an interpretation of them through the lenses only of our modernity and comfort that this chapter protests.
When the Greek myths and legends come down to us, they are full of subjectivities we comprehend—that is, they come to us in interpretation. Thus, when Hamlet muses, “What is Hecuba to us?” he is not reflecting on the power of Hecuba’s grief and capacity for grief but on the Player King’s interpretation of Hecuba. It is this that inspires Hamlet to pose his own self–interrogating questions about whether he should be, or not. And, of course, what he should be. This is Hamlet coming to himself as subject. Similarly, it is Ted Hughes’s amazing rewriting of Medea that finally allows us to understand her full subjectivity of rage and revenge. Jason may have avoided death at the skeletal hands of the dragon’s–teeth–warriors, but his captured bride, Medea, ensured he did not avoid desolation afterwards. But Hughes does what Euripides and Sophocles could not do. In their original dramas, the heroes and heroines did not have anything but a highly contingent subjectivity. They could not, for instance, ask Hamlet’s question. Why could they not?
They could not because of the extraordinary, and only sometimes balancing, presence of moral self–direction and luck. You had to be lucky to live your own moral life because you could be structured by the gods to do otherwise. 5 Your agency was contingent. The Greeks used the term harmatia to depict the tragic flaw of the hero who unknowingly, and often with the best intentions, commits the crime that will lead to his eventual and terrible downfall—even if he has otherwise lived his life in full justice and love. Thus, Oedipus married his own mother and was sent blind into the slaughterhouse of the gods.
This is not fair. We feel it is only fair that we should be allowed a clean run with our subjectivity. Agency has, even if bounded by communitarian concerns, a normative value. What, however, could you do in the face of the gods measuring out luck? Other cultures that have similar senses of luck tell militating stories of rivalries among the gods. Thus, in the Viking or Norse mythology, Loki injects an ingredient that acts against determinism, and that is trickery. In west African religions, the role of the trickster, very like Loki, is of great importance. 6 In Greek mythology, it was not so much trickery as plain deceit. Thus, Hera often sought to deceive her husband, Zeus, in order to favor her preferred heroes on earth. But this meant that those heroes had merely multiplied upon them the contingencies of their free subjectivity—not merely Another’s determination, but the arbitration of that determination by Still Another’s deceit.
This is what makes the retelling of Odysseus so interesting. If he achieves his subjectivity, he does so against odds that we can scarcely imagine but that were certainly imagined long ago. He didn’t just sail a lot of sea.
All this is certainly not technological, rational, secular, or in keeping with the received tradition of the Enlightenment. However, luck is a key ingredient in almost all pretechnological–era fables and tales. For us, we have constructed via technology a countervailing power to the gods—an instrumentality for own subjectivities. Before, you were lucky or not. There was another key ingredient in those earlier fables and tales: that of desire. “I wish” stands as a defiance of “you are fated.” However, and this is where harmatia returns, you could not be sure of wishing, of desiring, in full knowledge of the consequences. Oedipus desired a woman but did not know she was his mother.
This was what, importantly, separated humanity from the gods. One of the powers of the gods was their ability to see consequence in advance and to desire in the knowledge of consequence. Zeus, in the guise of a swan (and you do not need Yeats’s poem to recognize the full subjectivity of Zeus here), rapes Leda, who gives birth to Helen, who in her youthful beauty occasions without her foreknowledge the sack of Troy. And in Troy, all the resplendent works of architects and artists, and the recital stands and podiums for poets, were brought crashing down. The high–towered city saved them not at all. But Zeus knew when he impregnated Leda, and no unconscious tragic irony redounded upon him.
It is in the face of all this that Odysseus commences his odyssey. This is, if we use the term, the first intellectual odyssey. Not that Odysseus was an intellectual—Homer describes him merely as cunning. But what he accomplishes allows us our sense of intellectual freedom. But he had to work and sweat for it. This is explicit in the prologue to the book: “Tell us about the man who labored to bring home his storm–lashed ships.” Even so, his own men unwittingly offend the sungod and, despite all the efforts of their captain, never reach home with him. He is left ashore—alone, an individual.
When Odysseus finally comes into his own kingdom—that is, when he realizes (in this order) himself at home, his son, his wife, his home itself, his kingdom—he has gathered together all of the constituents of himself as a returned person and king. But he is different from when he left twenty years earlier. Even his own son, Telemachus, does not recognize him at first; nor does his wife, Penelope. Was it just his artful disguise? Or had he changed from a determined being to a free being?
By his suffering he redeemed his key role in the sack of Troy. He also redeemed himself as a subject. We hope, at the end of the book, he lives happily ever after. We are even happy Job lives happily ever after, even though he finally forsook the chance to be a subject. To be happy on his own terms, just plain happy, at home—not gifted by luck, not determined anymore by the gods, not paying off debts incurred by his part in somebody else’s dream of the future—this was the subjectivity he achieved. It took a lot to be a freely chosen domestic person. We might remember this when we freely speak of agency and individual freedom. This casual assumption of its possibility was once almost unspeakable, and this is what makes Homer great: that he did speak it.
What does this mean for us—this use of the style of Bataille, giving the story before the récit? It means that in Other stories, the transactions of contingency are important. Not everyone has been able to escape it. Certainly in poverty and premodernity, not everyone has the technology to contemplate escape; and, as in the case related later by Partha Dasgupta, even if gifted with technology the price of acceptance may mean in fact a severe diminution of subjectivity. Second, it means that the stories of the transactions of contingency are not well known to us. We barely know our own. How many readers had to scramble for their copies of Greek myths? Third, it means the stories may have as their premises—never mind within the developing story lines—assumptions, imaginations, and reasonings that are unknown to us or that cannot be negotiated by our technologies or by technology and modernity alone.
They can be interpreted by us, just as they were to Hamlet or are by Hughes. But just what is Hecuba to us if she becomes so different to what she was? What, more precisely, is for us today the equivalent of the Trojan women—those who are dispossessed, whose families are slaughtered, whose homeland is burned, and who are about to end their lives in slavery? In the Odyssey, Helen is restored to Menalaeus after the fall of Troy. When Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, comes to visit them, seeking news of his father, Helen has rewritten her history so that she might be favorably interpreted by Telemachus and the court of Menalaeus. But this was not Helen any more than that simulacrum and succubus Helen that Mephistopheles brought to Faustus. No, there is some importance in seeing things as they are, without the mediations of our subjectivities and interpretations. It is not we who should pretend to be the gods of the world.
But, here, a final word. For many years, Odysseus was imprisoned on the island of the goddess Calypso. Surrounded by sea, he could not escape. More to the point, the god of the sea, Poseidon, had fought for the Trojans and hated Odysseus for his part in the downfall of his favorite people and city. He was determined that Odysseus should never escape. But one day, Poseidon accepts an invitation to a banquet hosted by the Ethiopians. While he is away, in Ethiopia, Odysseus escapes. In the rest of the story, we forget the Ethiopians. Yet they really permitted the whole thing. Let us not forget the thought of those who—by their minerals, reductions to slavery, elaborations into our empires, and provision of their marketplaces and their treasuries for the profits of our banks—permit our modernity, the luxury in armchairs of our discourse. Let us not forget the thoughtful Ethiopians.
Who Needs Navies and Gun Emplacements Anymore?
The Empire of Armchairs and Word Processors
J’accuse
It has all become very middle–class: the leafy campus, cocktails at one more conference, and—despite the bureaucratic paraphernalia of regulated universities—the joyful work of theorizing the international in rooms of our own. The production of texts and the reduction of the world to an intertextuality have even led to the cloistered arrogance that a philosophical statement may in itself be emancipatory. We mistake idealisms—in the (translated, summarized, from the) German sense—as labor in the fields of the poor, as redressing the naked refugee, as abolishing the boundaries of the state.
This is not, of course, to shirk the idea of the Word and its power, but merely to say that the word is not the world and that in the highly complex relationship between the two, first, there are many renditions of the word and, second, not all these renditions exist within the same discourse. Within the discourses of the world and, in this case, the world of international relations and its theory, there is a hegemonic discourse, and the metaphor of colonialism may be at least loosely applied to its outreach and attempts at settlement. Some renditions of the word are still beyond reach or have complex enough methodologies of construction and expression to be beyond easy appropriation. In an armchair discipline, “easy” had better do it—so the Indians of the Forest may be safe, though marginalized.
There have been conscious, indeed self–conscious, attempts to bring them within. Ironically, attempts to widen the IR conference circuit and the range of its habitués have resulted in the domestication of the new recruits. The Indians of the Forest learn to wear clothes; they adopt the hegemonic theoretical styles. After all, they are invited to come to the conferences of a discipline established on (for them) entirely Other—and seemingly majoritanian Other terms. The point is: They come to us and are socialized; we do not go to them; we do not live and think in the Forest.
We have forgotten stories. Stories are part of the methodologies of those we call Other. (But can it be said in an academic statement—perhaps with the vocabulary that marks our own socialization?) Here, then, is the reason for stories. It is at least a polemic. It may be a hypothesis. It is too grand to be merely a problematique. It is a point of departure. The emancipatory project of contemporary critical theory has its own telos, being both justified by and further propagating a particular philosophical discourse. I am fully conscious here of unfairness to the significant extent that there is in the vast production and histories of texts a diversity of approaches to freedom and its problematization. That to which I am referring is the selective borrowing from these texts that constitutes what might be called a “vulgar” critical theory employed in, for instance, a standardized debate between two convenient oppositional dyads: cosmopolitanism and communitarianism. The mainstream of international relations has not gone much beyond this. In this discourse, room is permitted for an Other but because the philosophy of the Other is an unknown, it is rendered as a presence that is undifferentiated and essentially unchallenging of the western academy’s notions of what emancipation involves and assumes. This is a hegemony of defaults, and the default is accomplished by the permission of the other and the simultaneous silence imposed upon it. When attempts are made to render the other as a speaker in terms of discourse it is by means of typecastings, control of the academic media and publication, and assumptions that epistemologies and languages are compatible in their ontological origins. The aim of the chapter is to contest such assumptions and to reveal a telos, perpetuated from armchairs and word processors rather than gun emplacements, but that subjugates rather than emancipates.
The telos and its perpetuation have not been as conscious as all that. Nevertheless, to summarize a starting position for this chapter, we might say that: to problematize, for instance, freedom is to free nobody; to problematize in terms of western schools of thought is not to understand everybody. This constitutes a grand ambivalence for anyone coming to the study of international relations. Having said that, there may be said to be several constituent ambiguities in the intellectual history of international relations (and not just three paradigms or three great debates). To its credit, the discipline has constructed or borrowed debates that deal adequately with the first three. These center around, first, the extent international relations is a social science (a claim most rooted in the behaviorism of both realism and pluralism in the 1960s and 1970s) 7 or a humanity (in the historical conditionality of the English school and in current interests in philosophy). Second, the extent to which international relations is a science in the pure academic sense of wissenschaft, or pure knowledge, and the extent to which it is scientific in its applied, particularly predictive 8 sense and policy 9 sense; and, third, the extent to which international relations should be positivistically based, in the realm of the senses and their sense of evidence, and to what extent it should admit to the fragmentation of knowledge, the unreliability of evidence, and that knowledge can only successfully (and momentarily) deconstruct the real. 10
These ambiguities have been dealt with by giving their various antagonisms methodological space. Each may therefore contain various methodologies and these make statements and coexist. The coexistence provides the discipline with its equilibrium, which is simultaneously its politesse. There are three interrelated ambiguities, however, that have only tentative space within the discipline. These are, first, the extent to which knowledge can be truly epistemologically based, or whether ontologies construct multiple epistemologies; 11 second, the extent to which multiple epistemologies and multiple ontologies are reflected in a West versus the rest divide, so that the discipline in its global appreciation is only partial rather than universal—but is nevertheless hegemonic; 12 and third, the extent to which the discipline itself must be seen in terms of a structure–agency problematic 13 in which the structure is more multifaceted than before because the agents are revolting, are bringing great cloves of garlic and clashing spices to all the layers of the English stew, and are seeking to stir themselves into the ingredients at the stew’s bottom while the response of the existing ingredients is, at least in part, to turn into stodge. You can have too many methodologies but, above all, you should not have foreign methodologies—so here’s stodge for you all!
The debate and, in particular, methodologies that have been used to settle (not resolve) difficulties represented by the first three ambiguities—and to declare a discipline in their name—are also the socializing agents for those entering the discipline. Those from an Outside, the generalized Other, the inhabitants of the Forest, must forsake the borderlines represented by the last three in order to achieve socialization, status, fame within whatever has been created by the first three.
In this chapter I want to say a few things about how thought in the Forest, short of being socialized, short of being taken into a profession with its variegated but not truly universal discipline, has confronted that brave new enlightened/technologized world that, because it is enlightened and technologized, considers itself the only image of the world (and in which postmodern thinkers deconstruct only the images their world has first invented and broadcast; the Gulf War may never have taken place, but hunger and poverty take place). In the process of socialization, the question proposed by western scholars has consistently been lopsided: “How much of ours has been adopted by them?” rather than “How much of theirs has been adopted by us?” The imbalance is global; socialization has been mistaken as an acceptable normative foundation in international relations.
Is it the development of a series of walled gardens, with ramparts, over which seeds drift but grow in different soils and where plants are pruned into different shapes? Is some of this related to Samuel Huntington’s clashing civilizations? 14 Must we, like the ancient Argonauts, pass through these clashing cliffs, striving to be intact, to reach the golden fleece in the land of Colchis and, even then, battle with the Hydra–dragon and her teeth–sown warrior–children? (And what is this Other in the western heritage that preexisted the Enlightenment? Why does international relations not know Jason?) We resist and repudiate incorporations beyond our disciplinary sense of tolerance.
The outreach of a western/enlightened/technological world has taken place in both space and time. Space we know about from simple maps of who colonized what and what has since gained independence. Time is more problematic in international relations. The retreat from map–based, empirically drawn strategic studies has not led to a sense of time in critical theory. Individuals in international relations who have supposed times and timings remain individuals—able, like R. B. J. Walker, to be singled out from the discipline as a whole. Outside critical theory, Modelski’s cycles, even Fred Halliday’s more recent feedback loops, do not establish a new paradigm or corrective to paradigms past. 15 We have a simple proposition: Hegemonic ideas do not colonize just like that; and, furthermore, they seek to expand into other geographical and intellectual spaces. This, however, takes time, and over time occur resistances, incorporations, applications, syncretisms, repudiations and attempted repudiations, and contingent amalgamations.
What these constitute are in fact the ingredients for a kind of “hyperdialectic,” in which various and simultaneous theses and antitheses compete with, condition, and compromise one another; and their syntheses are then fed back into an endless process contingent only upon, but not in the first instant determined by, the need for a practical association with and in the world. If merely a practical association with the world arose from this, then there is still a mediating device at least. As Dasgupta argued, what is rational can only be made rational where customs are instrumental or made instrumental for the purpose of rationality. 16 (Sometimes, of course, different rationalities are made.)
Dasgupta gives an example of a priorization of instrumentalities that explained a clash of rationalities:
There was a village in India from which the women had to walk several miles each day to collect water from the nearest stream. A visiting aid agency saw in this the perfect location for its well–drilling project and established a well within the village itself, thinking it had thus saved the women the vast consumption of time that walking took and the vast labor that carrying water entailed.
The women were very unhappy, and the aid agency was at a loss to comprehend where its rationality had failed and where its grander ambition to make the lives of Third World women easier had failed to find its echo in the satisfaction of these particular village women. The instrumental application of technology was meant to do this. Finally, the women explained to the agency what was to them, and would have been to anyone living as they lived, perfectly obvious.
First, even though not walking meant more time, it was not more free time. Their menfolk just asked for many other tasks to be performed. In this way, their sense of oppression had been increased, not decreased. Second, in the absence of any agency project being able, by itself, to change the nature of gender hierarchy, what was most important for these women was the space and time to be women (i.e., free, even if briefly, from men), to be in company and solidarity with other women, and to be able to complain together and in perfect, uninterrupted harmony reduce the image of men. The long walk to the river had given them free space and time. The shared labor had given them solidarity. And, even more, this was all they had as social life, as fun. And the aid agency had, at one rational, technologized stroke, removed their tiny and contingent but treasured freedom, discourse, solidarity, and fun—their sense of (temporary) escape, and their sense of sisterhood and social network of confidantes. For all this, labor was a small price to pay. For the agency, the labor was oppressing them. Thus, well–meaning people from a world that no longer labors saw labor as evil, set about reducing this evil, and in so doing ruined the lives of many women as women.
What was misunderstood was that in a world of contingencies, not only do contingencies differ from location to location but they are transacted differently.
Nevertheless, there is a project to socialize the complexities of Other thought, disregarding the transactions it makes, as suggested above; and the discipline of international relations is as guilty as any. Here, the project escapes the complexity of methodology, still less methodologies, by a mere insistence upon what is only a reductionism. The discipline needs (to change earlier metaphors) new additions to the wardrobe preshrunk to fit. Here there is, above all, the absence of empathy; to apply the last list to western history we see immediately a Europe where, over a period of two hundred years and still counting, constitutionally codified democracies and sureties of individual rights are resisted by various forms of monarchy and dictatorship. Here there have been clashes of thought—ideologies, to put it simply, but grounded in philosophical or theological systems all the same. What is finally incorporated may be as hybrid as Britain’s unwritten constitutional democracy, which is simultaneously an unwritten constitutional monarchy, which has simultaneously an unwritten constitutional exercise of power by the aristocracy. This, meanwhile, with its simultaneously antique and twentieth–century judiciary, must relate, feed into, and be directed by a European Court that assumes that a foundation for rights can be established within written charters. Now, if all this seems seamless now, there have been in Europe, in this century, two world wars and one cold war, an array of neutral powers, and a state–blessed array of money–laundering banks in Switzerland; there has been one failed League of Nations (based in the same Switzerland) that would not prevent rapine in Other countries such as China and Ethiopia and that could not in the end prevent the quarrel among Enlightenment–descended states within Europe itself that produced, among other things, a holocaust of technological killing of millions.
This is to put it at the level of states. If there were a history of psychological states of mind, then the Freudian and Lacanian separations and mixtures of forebodings, resistances, repudiations, transgressions, and compromises would be more starkly expressed and more readily understood. This is a world, exactly, that is complex and illustrates the complexity that ought to be found in international relations. Still, at the great socializing conferences of the discipline, the Other is assiduously courted to ensure the conversions necessary to propagate a universal discipline with its need for a universal core.
Within the discipline of international relations itself, despite the project of socializing the emergents from the Forest, there is only so much that socialization can accomplish immediately. Scholars are not autonomous from their domestic societies any more than they are no longer autonomous from international societies. If they can be socialized by the latter, they certainly have been by the former. The international relations of Home is perhaps often a little different from the international relations of Away. How may this be at least suggested? In the United Kingdom, there has been a largely unreflective importation of continental critical methodologies and postmodernisms. These methodologies have aided reflectivities but have not themselves often been reflected upon critically. Jürgen Habermas is a touchstone of debate; he may be found incomplete in the debates that center on him, but he is indispensable in debate. This cannot be the case in the Forestlands for a number of illustrative reasons. A postmodernity is ridiculous within premodernities and selective modernities. A Gramscian struggle within culture exists only within the precondition of technologized means by which to permeate culture. A Habermasian condition of ideal speech is possible only after the idea of speech at all is made possible by promoting literacy and taking steps toward the democratic possibility of speaking. The Lacanian formula/injunction that jouissance is possible only by first transgressing—breaking the Law and progressing beyond God and Freud—is possible only if, in the mind, the Law is not so embedded as to prevent transgression. It is perhaps impossible in some forms of Islamic discourse. The mind that memorized the Koran by the age of seven will forget neither the feat nor what was memorized.
This becomes a story of exceptionalities against any single universalizing discourse. What it means, however, for international relations is the existence of an internal sociology for international relations as a whole. I have indicated at least four main types for what might, residually, be noted as a discipline. 17
What I mean here is not that this is an international relations that expresses different cultural or Other foundations, but that this is the result of the outreach or project of socialization achieved by the discipline thus far. It is uneven and conditional. What I want to say by this, however, is that there is often in the international relations of Home great unawareness that it has not fully socialized all academics. It has propagated a sociology of conditionalities.
Type A is an IR that, even while written in another language, emulates the mainstream of western IR and political science. It is conscious of its social scientific origins. However, it operates in the context of definite (if not always scrutable) restraining intellectual factors. These factors are derived from indigenous senses of epistemology—which are consciously recognized as deriving from a nonwestern experiential base. Japan is an example of this type.
Type B is an IR that is published by small groupings and that is consciously western in both its theory and methodology. It seeks to present to the West an image of both modernity and intellectual normality. It seeks, however, to disguise (if not conceal) the fact of alternative and challenging systems of thought that, although not having an IR component as such, nevertheless view the global context as being (though not in any reductionist or simplistic manner) theological and eschatological. A sophisticated rendition of western thought thus takes place at least in part because there is not yet a means of rendering indigenous thought in a manner to which western IR might find itself receptive. Iran is an example of this type.
Type C is an IR concerned with its strategic utility. It arises from a large IR community that, with conspicuous individual exceptions, either has no western IR theoretical culture or sees no need for a theoretical culture at all, concerned as it is with strategic and area studies. It contains within itself, however, a normative seed—a wish one day to clarify and properly articulate aspects of a received ethos in national character and international stance as well as to overcome the contradiction between that wider international stance and its immediate regional behavior. India is an example of this type, and for the moment Pakistan and Bangladesh may be seen as variations of it.
Type D is an IR that is aware of western thought and wishes to understand and incorporate it into indigenous academic discourse, but it is unable to abandon or substantially repudiate intellectual traditions and practices that, despite having been refurbished from time to time, have governed scholarship for centuries before either the European Renaissance or Enlightenment. China is an example of this type.
Western IR has had an impact everywhere but not as a total, received discipline. It influences and is influenced by indigenous disciplines and epistemologies. It would be tempting, as shorthand, to label the above types as the 80 percent, the 60 percent, the 40 percent, and the 20 percent types, according to how much western IR was actually made visible. Under the surface, however, the interplay between western and indigenous thought systems is much more conditional, subtle, and shifting than that.
This is to pitch it generously. There are vast areas of the world, and their academies, where there has been no outreach at all and where, for instance, normative thought is, by our standards, extraordinary and arcane. Here, we are still in a form of typology that is vastly generalized and still working out of a realism in that it assumes nations that affiliate to themselves cultures—if not states that affiliate to themselves what they would certainly like to know as culture–bearing nations. There are well–worn lines of justification here; but, here at least, in the following list of international normalities—considerably beyond Kant and Hegel and Frankfurt—are glimpses of if not a magical realism (however dilute) for international relations, then syncretic realisms. There are again several “worlds” of thought here, even if for the moment it is state–bound thought. One world is where historical and philosophical “stories” are generalized, if not re–created, to underpin regimes that are to an extent authoritarian but at the same time beneficent: countries like Kaunda’s Zambia. 18 We might, on the other hand, consider the world of text–based normativities—which may be given interpretation on literal and exegetic grounds: various Islamic countries. 19 Other possibilities include the world that is text–based but given interpretation on a sectarian, even minor sectarian, basis: countries like Libya with its almost comprehensively unremarked Sanusi inheritance. 20
We move away from realisms, not in the sense that the western discipline sought to do this—fixated on legal pluralisms and institutions and forms of liberalism—but in the sense that, since a great many nonwestern states are not democratic, illegal organizations have normative agendas as at least part of their projects. Thus, many Triad groups volunteered to smuggle dissidents out of China in the post–Tienanmen months and did so both successfully and without charge. Although this moves away from the project of this essay, it illustrates how much international relations must lose—not only of its claims to instant universality but also of its gentrification.
There are, within Other thoughts, dissidents. If the Forest is an outland to the West, there are outlaws within the Forest itself. Bandit kings and bandit queens interrogate the discourse of the wardens at knifepoint. There is violence and mayhem in the Forest. Each outlaw, like Toshiro Mifune’s in Roshamon, has a different version of events, a different ethic, a different normative vision.
What then is to be done? The first thing is that we must not declare an emancipatory theory as if we had a telos. Who emancipates whom? We have a lot to learn about struggles toward freedom by those who continue to fight. The second is not to view the struggles of others as if they were Others but to link their work and thought to our own—without the mere subsuming of their work into the categories of our discourse, with its socializations and gentrifications. Time, yes, to suspend the intertextual song and dance of abstracted voyeurs (how must we seem to their anthropologists?). Without beads and trinkets and condescensions, it is time to go into the Forest. For many years our songs and theirs may not chime easily. But why not suspend this wretched Germanic neatness? Who said history was neat to the point of fastidiousness? Around a latetime fire, those who find that their Other is just another are sitting, clearing their throats for world music—an unchained medley.
Endnotes
Much of this chapter has been an effort to give a running order, a heuristic coherence to lists and distinctions that were in part assembled without coherence in Towards a Multicultural Roshamon Paradigm in International Relations (Tampere, Finland: Tampere Peace Research Institute, 1996); and to others that have been produced since then. The latter will almost certainly (exasperatingly) be collected into a second Roshamon volume.
Note 1: It was Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will, who, in the early 1960s in a paper entitled “The Pornographic Imagination,” identified not only the uses of story by Bataille but the possibilities of very unusual stories indeed. Back.
Note 2: See “One–Way Street,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings. Back.
Note 3: See Sontag, Styles of Radical Will, on Cioran. Unfortunately, some recent translations of his work do not do full justice to his literary style. Back.
Note 4: We have lost storytelling in late–twentieth–century critical theory. For an example of how it was done, see Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, where they retell the tale of Odysseus and how difficult it was for him to realize his subjectivity. Back.
Note 5: The finest study for this is Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness. Back.
Note 6: Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa. Back.
Note 7: The social scientific impulse is still with a large segment of international relations. See Webb, An Introduction to Problems in the Philosophy of Social Sciences. Back.
Note 8: Even though he now posits this as useful rather than definitive, see Nicholson, Rationality and the Analysis of International Conflict. Back.
Note 9: This was always true of strategic studies but remains so with a great deal of work on mediation and peace and conflict studies. See, for example, the final chapters in Higgott and Richardson, International Relations. Back.
Note 10: The latest outing here is Smith, Booth, and Zalewski, International Theory: Positivism and Beyond. Back.
Note 11: Here we are in minority territory; but see Der Derian, “The Value of Security.” Back.
Note 12: And here the output is very small. For a suggestive cameo, see Alker, Biersteker, and Inoguchi, “From Imperial Power Balancing to People’s Wars.” For a largely unsuccessful effort, see Mazrui, Cultural Forces in World Politics. Back.
Note 13: This is, of course, a play on Jabri’s concerns in Discourses on Violence. I apply the problematic to the discipline; Jabri applies it very persuasively to its study of war. Back.
Note 14: For an exchange, “splenetic” according to Huntington, between Huntingdon and myself, see Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations.” Back.
Note 15: Modelski’s work is well known. I have, however, given a temporal as well as spatial reading to Halliday’s “feedback loop,” in his work on revolutions in the international system: Rethinking International Relations, chapter 6. Back.
Note 16: Dasgupta, An Inquiry into Well–Being and Destitution. Back.
Note 17: This list repeats a conclusion from my article (Chan, “Cultural and Linguistic Reductionism”), reprinted in Roshamon, but it relies upon a collaborative research with seven scholars from China, Japan, Iran, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. For their names, see Roshamon, p. 141. Back.
Note 18: For a deconstruction of Kaunda’s “historically derived” philosophy, see Chan, Kaunda and Southern Africa, especially chapter 5. Back.
Note 19: An excellent but largely unremarked collection is the special Islam and Politics issue of Third World Quarterly 10, no. 2 (1988). For a brief though illuminating note on Islamic scriptural method, see Goddard, Christians and Muslims, pp. 40–44. For an example of this in action, see Sherif, A Guide to the Contents of the Qur’an. Back.
Note 20: For a most sensitive treatment, see Davis, Libyan Politics, especially chapters 4 and 5. Back.
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