International/ Intertextual Relations

Postmodern Readings of World Politics

Edited by

James Der Derian

University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Michael J. Shapiro

University of Hawaii

~~,~

~ ~

~§ ~h\~

Lexington Books

An Imprint of Macmillan, Inc. New York

Maxwell Macmillan Canada Toronto

Maxwell Macmillan International

New York Oxford Singapore Sydney

This book is published as part of the Lexington Books Issues in World Politics series, James N. Rosenau and William C. Potter, consulting editors.

Copyright © 1989 by Lexington Books

An Imprint of Macmillan, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Lexington Books

An Imprint of Macmillan, Inc.

866 Thitd Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10022

Maxwell Macmillan Canada, Inc. 1200 Eglinton Avenue East

Suite 200

Don Mills, Ontario M3C 3Nl

Macmillan, Inc. is part of the Maxwell Communication Group of Companies.

Printed in the United States of America

printing number

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Inrernational/inrerrexrual relations.

Includes index.

1. International relations. 2. World politics - 1945- II. Shapiro, Michael J.

JX1395.1573 1989 327 88-45105

ISBN 0-669-18956-1 (alk. paper)

ISBN 0-669-18955-3 (pbk, : alk. paper)

. L Der Derian, James.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments ix Foreword xiii

Donna U. Gregory

Part I Prologue 1

1. The Boundaries of Knowledge and Power in International Relations 3

James Der Derian

2. Textualizing Global Politics 11 MichaelJ, Shapiro

Part II Dialogue 23

3. The Prince and "The Pauper": Tradition, Modernity, and Practice in the Theory of International Relations 25 R.B.J. Walker

4. Freud's Discourse of War/Politics 49 Jean Bethke Elshtain

5. Representing World Politics: The Sport/War Intertext 69

MichaelJ. Shapiro .

6. The Textual Strategies of the Military: Or Have You Read Any Good Defense Manuals Lately? 97

Bradley S, Klein

viii • Internationalllntertextual Relations

7. Strategic and Social Fictions in the Prisoner's Dilemma 113 Roger Hurwitz

8. From Imperial Power Balancing to People's Wars: Searching for Order in the Twentieth Century 135

Hayward R. Alker, Jr., Thomas J. Biersteker, and Takashi lnoguchi

9. Spy versus Spy: The Intertextual Power of International Intrigue 163

James Der Derian

10. Notes on a Terrorist Text: A Critical Use of Roland Barthes' Textual Analysis in the Interpretation of Political Meaning 189

Alfred J. Fortin

11. "What's Wrong with Deterrence?" A Semiotic Interpretation of National Security PoUcy 207

Timothy W. Luke

12. Hate Boat: Greenpeace, National Identity, and Nuclear Criticism 231

Diane Rubenstein

Part III Epilogue 257

13. Living on Border Lines: Man, PoststructuraHsm, and War 259

Richard K. Ashley

14. Identity and Difference in Global PoUtics 323 William E. Connolly

Index 343

About the Contributors 351 About the Editors 355

Preface and Acknowledgments

When they gave themselves out as wise, then do their petty sayings and truths chill me: in their wisdom there is often an odor as if it came from the swamp; and verily, I have even heard the frog croak in it!

-Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Scholars", Thus SpaJu Zarathuslra

The study of international relations has recently-some might say belatedly, others unfortunately-come under the influence of continental philosophical and intellectual practices that have been loosely construed as posttnodem and poststructural. These practices, as diverse as genealogy, deconstruction, semiotics, feminist psychoanalytic theory, and intertextualism, have challenged the cognitive validity, empirical objectivity, and universalist and rationalist claims of idealist, realist, and neorealist schools alike of international relations. Through a rigorous analysis of the language and methods of international relations, poststructuralism has disturbed many of the conventions that have long stood as the natural truths of the field. Poststructural practices have been used critically to investigate how the subject-=In-·the"duarsenSesor ili.esu6ject-matteranatIIesubiec!~

....acw of intemational r~a~o.!l:~ is cOlistituted in and through the discours«;;.s and texts of world ~li~~~~. Poststructuralism has called into question the Enlightenment foundation of international relations-not to repudiate its significance for the field but to pry into and at the death-grip of a candlepower doctrine on nuclear times.

It might seem suspect, even reckless, to label the chapters that followand authors who so self-consciously resist identity-mongering-as postmodem or poststructural. Nonetheless, the prefixal "post" dominates our title and subtitle, text and subtext, because we believe that an increasingly postmodem world politics is'very much in need of poststructural readings. The basis for the claim, and our written response to its implications, can be traced to an

x • Internationalflntertextual Relations

overdetermined (yet underdocumented) "crisis" of modernity, where foundational unities (the autonomous subject, the sovereign state, grand theory) and synthetic oppositions (subject-object, self-other, inside-outside) are undergoing serious and sustained challenges ... w.e..are_witq~Jl~i!l_g_fhanges !tl._Q!lJ_jglernatiQpal ..... _inler_teXDlal,_in.ter.::buman....r.eJations.,....in....which ... obiectize, !Eili,~j_s ~_p.laced_~~wa1i~~m_£!te~_1:~~ __ ~~y to ~. anti-satellite weapons);.!!!Q~.t!_s. .. (?Lpr.QQ:Q!;tiQn._ar.~._mpplante~mQ eLof information (the assembJy line _'!Q!.~pJ!'_c~ .. !l:!r.mk~dLCQ.IJlP.utej'_and_l!l~piageiierate(rcyberspace-exp~ds); .repIes.entation..blutsJnto. simulation (Hollywood, and Mr. Smith, go to Washlil8toii);i;~-;~;;y to the Empire of Signs (the spectacle of Grenada, the fantasy of Star Wars serve to deny imperial decline). ~es.c.le.c.tonic __ shiftLne e isteniolo 'cal faultlines develo : the Ie itimac of tradition is undermined . ~ .in progress fragments, and conventional wisdom is reduced to one of many ~~lP-~~s o~wer used to shor~ up a shaky (inttmlatioIijl!) soc~ty. '[his is the postmodern moment that imbues and "j1l;~tifi~~_~~ But the authors do not pretend to break from modernity; we take advantage of historical rupture to re-present it, in the sense of critically reinscribing forgotten, repressed pasts as well as mythic, idealized Golden Ages that have become as much effects as they are causes of our present condition.

In recognition, then, of what we believe to be the growing importance of poststructuralism for international theory, and of the confusion and uncertainty that surround it, we have put together this book. Fittingly, it began a laser's tag from (and some thirty years after Ronald Reagan emceed the televised opening of) Disneyland, in Anaheim, California at an annual meeting of the International Studies Association in 1986. In a series of panels and a roundtable, papers using poststructuralist approaches were presented, and plans for future projects were initiated by many of the authors who appear in this book. Many of the participants were surprised, perhaps relieved, to fmd similar others out there who had found the study of international relations to be increasingly monochromal and monological, who had taken at some point and to various depths the French waters, who had taken up critical, poststructural approaches in their various subfields of strategic studies, game theory, international political economy, international theory. Other sessions followed: a double panel on International/Intertextual Relations at the 1987 International Studies Association meeting in Washington, D.C.; a panel on Critical International Relations Theory at the 1987 British International Studies Association meeting in Wales; and then back to Los Angeles in 1988 for a three-day workshop on Reading/Writing/Teaching Poststructuralism in International Relations, held . at the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California.

At these sessions many questions-many of them critical-were raised, and a few answers were attempted. Is poststructuralism a new method, or is

Preface and Acknowledgments • xi

it anti-method? What implications does this have for teaching international

theory Or the study of world politics in general? Does the practice of ~'hL-l't

poststructuralism lack the "rigor" required by the discipline? Is it too playful 0

and soft-headed for the "Princes" of international politics? Or is it too

apolitical and nihilistic for the meliorlsts and neorealists? Is poststructuralism,

as some critics have claimed, a hegemonic discourse, the newest colonizer of international theory? Is it undergoing-should it resist-"professionalization"?

The strategic intention (to the extent there was one) of the various ptherings and diverse questions was to fuiCi:'-study, test (and yes} some __ did rWjsh to storm) the. S8Aent~,_~( inte!,!!!uori~,feiations-its preP2nderant powers and soverei~ tru~-~~stmod~~I!!l.!..P2§;tstructural_th~ But somewhere along the way someone in the audience, evidently sated with metatheory, declaimed that we should (and here I translate from the original) get on with it or get out of the pissoir. So we got on with it: we put poststructura1ism to work, to write a book that is theoretical (but not methodological), that is empirical (but not empiricist), that problematizes (but does not problem-solve) world politics. Some might fmd the product too textual, others too political; most, we hope, will fmd it useful in their everyday encounters with the textual politics of international relations.

But now, in the words of Nietzsche (that open this book) and of Barthes (that, in closing, reopen it), the frog has croaked, as have the authors. It is up to the reader/writer to decide if there is some wisdom here for world politics, or merely a new cologne for a very old swamp.

Many are to be thanked for their contributions to this book. Several should be recognized for the work they put into the gathering of people and ideas: Richard Ashley and David Sylvan for the International Studies Association panel in 1986; Bradley Klein and Philip Lawrence for the British International Studies Association meeting in 1987; and Thomas Biersteker and Cecilia Cicchinelli for the workshop at the University of Southern California in 1988. We are grateful to everyone who provided advice, criticisms, and polemics on those occasions. We also wish to acknowledge the helpful support of the series consulting editors, William Potter and James Rosenau, and everyone at Lexington Books who made it seem (fairly) easy. Others who have provided critical readings of the manuscript include Ruth Abbey, Adam Ashforth, Thomas Biersteker, Kiaran Honderich, John Santos, Anders Stephanson, and Gerard Toal. Finally, we would like to thank Boyd Webb for providing us with artwork that aptly covers the conundrum of internationallintertextual relations.

Foreword

In many areas of the humanities and social sciences, encoun. ters between postmodern and traditional modes of writing have had some time now to become complex, and time enough for confusion to riddle their interactions. It is fair to say that the works of postmodern, poststructural thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard are more often attacked than read. It is also fair to add that their ideas often are not what their most ardent adaptors believe them to be. And it is important to acknowledge that cavalier readings and applications of poststructuralist approaches have frequently provoked heat, venom, and nonproductive controversy.

There is no reason to expect that the field of international relations, hitherto relatively untouched by this continental drift, will prove to be an exception-unless we take this book, the first collection of its kind in international relations, as an augury of things to come. Much within it may disconcert the reader, but the acuity of its insights into the knowledge and practices of international relations surely justifies the introduction of postmodem approaches into the field. For those less familiar with these approaches, I offer some theoretical and historical background.

By no means a single school or unitary approach, the several practices known under the "postmodem" or "poststructuralist" rubric-deconstruction, semiotics, genealogy, feminist psychoanalytic theory, intertextualism, and their variants-despite their differences share several common themes. Above all, they address the questions of how knowledge, truth, and meaning are constituted. In the broadest sense, their works offer an explanation for their dissatisfaction with what the constitution Enlightenment project has brought about. Philosophical in its origin and practice, poststructuralism challenges the intellec~JJ.~!i.,Qn~. uPQ!!.~hich Western rationalism an~L (!:!sitivism are based.! These tum out to be the suppositions that found modem science and its adoring foster child, the social sciences.

Poststructural critiques of rationalism by French philosophers turned out to be immensely attractive to other fields. For reasons that no one has

xiv • Internationalllntertextual Relations

adequately explained, their first enthusiastic interpreters were American literary theorists. Poststructuralist analyses pose a radical challenge to both !!Ie ,_fact/value disditctiOiland'Oiir, C.2~£~~."Q{ fa~JJs!!X~.g~I!~~y, a c~nc.9!t .that poststructuralists claim is conventi.onal and culturally constructed r~~ than founded in nature. It is their specific focus on the workings of language

thOts them reveal, ofieii'-9i!i~~'~~~!!y:'e1}i;~~~~~_~~(jnyeiiti~~ound !... "fa.£t's~~,£Q.~~.£inl~ance. _ pi~~'!;l~!lt",arnessed to powerful social forces have, in the name of scienrifi;<:; objectivity, come ~o constitute "regnnes of truth!' Poststructuralist methods of analysis purport to offer new means to critique such condominia of power and knowledge, methods potentially helpful for assessing social scientific theories as well.

One possible reason why poststructuralism found such a welcoming r home among literary theorists is that these groups' necessary tolerance for -l£. J' plurality in interpretation had taught them something important about how T" meanings get constituted as well. Un surprisingly enough, in the hands of '\ literary theorists, such methods as deconstruction or genealogy tend to be SVyJlv j;.' adapted as finely honed tools for doing some intricate textual analysis.

~

Making Strange

The chapters collected herein aim by various means to "denaturalize" the debates within IR theory and to critically interpret specifictextsPertaiDiilg to ~~ current practiceorreGiiOnS1ietWeennauons.-T1ietIrstsrepriiSliowing' how a process, a perspective, a concept, or a fact is socially constructed is to distance it, to make it seem strange. Der Derian's introductory chapter provides an example of this "strange-making," an example that makes more . accessible the more radically distancing techniques used by other authors, such as Shapiro and Rubenstein. Framing the collection for people familiar

with the postwar debates within IR theory, Der Derian localizes the chapters by referring to Martin Wight's and Hedley Bull's historically dynamic definitions of the concepts "international theory" and "theory of international relations." And yet, though he says that his chapters "begin where Wight and Bull left off," many will be surprised to hear precisely where Wight and Bull did leave-or, rather, to find it said in such an unusual way. Der Derian aims

to interrogate present knowledge of international relations through past practices, to search out the margins of' political theory, to listen for the critical voices drowned out by official discourses, to conduct an inquiry into the encounter of the given text with the reacting text.

These are strange, and estranging, ways of talking about a critique of theory. These locutions require a slow, thoughtful reading, which they repay by

Foreword· xv

opening up new ways of reading. Such new slants on familiar issues are not possible unless the vocabulary, figures of speech, and discursive formations conventional to a discipline are altered or abandoned.

But the chapters vary in their strangeness. Starting with their most difficult conceptual frame-deconstruction-can help sort out their peculiarities.

Deconstruction

The break point from structuralist linguistics occurred in 1966-67, when philosopher Jacques Derrida served a devastating critique upon linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's structuralism. The issue was how and where "meaning" resided. in language-a question crucial to all those endeavors claiming to have some purchase on knowledge, truth, and fact. What it is that gets "deconstructed" and how the process is carried out are explained. and demonstrated by Richard AshIey in his "Living on Border Lines." Jean Bethke Elshtain also illustrates the process in "Freud's Discourse of Warl Politics," though her deconstruction of Freud's concept, aggression, is much less pointed. than Ashley's of the typology of Waltz-man, state, and war. Rob Walker's chapter "The Prince and 'The Pauper'," mainly aeour Machiavelli, effects a major deconstruction-this time of the opposition realist/idealist-and subtly incorporates it into a broader set of analytical procedures. Derrida's procedure in one 'Yay or another bears upon every chapter in this book.

The deconstructionist basically tackles the fiction that . a . thing Can be knownoDty by what it is not. Fmt, -3 deconstrUi!!,ye t4~illiQ~.g!Yt!s,di;~.-, a particular text or argument deiiIlds'onan oppositional structuring. The author, or the text, reasons by antinomies, opposing terms to one" another with no analysis of middle categories or alternative or plural termsj for example, "peace" will be opposed. to "war," "truth" to "fiction," "chaos" to "order," and so on. Oppositions such as these have been common, pervasive, and even fundamental to philosophical argument: a priori! empirical, intelligible/sensible, general/particular, transcendent/immanent, mindlbody, cognitive/affective, rationai/irrational, logical/illogical, culture/ nature, selflother, determinate/indeterminate, form/matter, fact/value, reall ideal, and the like. While some of these are cast as oppositions about truth (rational/irrational, true/false), most are opposed in the sense that they are different and mutually exclusive.

_!lot mere!y_ffiffe!!.l!~~!..e~L~,g.l~!"~Jl[2!siti'?!t!o eacl!...mh~r ... the.J.s:w. .. L., ~~_~ejgb!~,!;i ... _.Qg~_h!!"Y.!gg~J}lg_U!_pg;itc;rJh!!! the other. Thus, .3S_de.c.onsJnlsIiopists,JAAlt".alrier;y'fhicaJ !'!!Ugg!; at1!;!19.s..s.uch.terminol~-,excblmges. The denigrated term essentially functions to highlight the other

xvi • Internationalllntertextual Relations

term's significance; its formal function is to signify, or identify, the dominant term. The very differentiation and exclusion of this subordinate "opposite" defines the dominant term, which, as it were, draws a boundary around. itself and declares: "This I am, and not That." "That," outside the boundary, lithe Other, the not-self, upon which "This" depends for its identity.

l'his operation (which at once differentiates one term from another, prefers one to the other, and arranges them hierarchically, displacing the subordinate term beyond the boundary of what is significant and desirable in context) typifies the~.eIUrkpr!lC.edur~,_From ancient Greek philosophy through the present time, logocentrism has been the dominant operation for constructing meaning in Western thous.!t.t. What deconstructlve tIiiDkers "deconstruct" is the structuring of paired concepts as inevitably opposed and as opposed in a zero-sum relation. Derrida explains that the deconstructive, operation requires essentially ~'!,J,lW_l'J~~;~~~ __ !be ~clw .an~ .!!;I!do th~_~.&- The r..Cd'!!~al i~~~~~ of the deconstructlve move. __ 'the . other part is to displace the entire 10gO£!:~tric_~stem for tha_tl?articular te~ or context. 2

--n;;rda deliberately uses political and martial metaphors to describe the logocentric procedure, saying that the terms are set in "violent" opposition, one "dominating" the other, "occupying" a "commanding position." The aptness of these metaphors for describing a linguistic meaning-making procedure-and one to which people can have passionate commitmentshas led many people to hypothesize that Derrida's work provides some evidence that we do shape our world somehow in accord with our discursive structures; therefore, changing the latter might help us to change the former.

What a deconstructive analysis leaves in place is a confirmation that the "meaning" of a term or concept comes into being only relative to at least one other term. However, while meaning is utterly dependent on the presence of at least one other signifier, that second or third term by which we can know the meaning of the first is not given by nature. The mistake ~!JQg~_~~!!ism_~e~ in. not seeing the cultural contingency of irs philosophical categories. M,eaning.a then a dynamic process, much more, like an interaction. between jmuc1es-a spark, a field of conductivity, the

_p!!~_<?! si~i~~!S=thail·asi~"4Y-~iht~~!I~~}ro~_~~~litary ~con. "-'-'

To illustrate, consider how Richard Ashley analyzes Kenneili Waltz's Man, the State, and War in chapter 13. Ashley first observes that throughout the analysis, Waltz conceives of "man" in ways that are directly opposed to how he conceives of "war." Waltz's "man" is "a well-bounded rational identity ... who would assert his mastery over history." Waltz's "war," which represents both war proper and the space of international relations generally, is "an aleatory domain of history that escapes the controlling influence of man's reasoned narratives and . . . is known as dangerous, violent, and anarchic, therefore." Thus, Ashley shows that underlying

Foreword • xvii

Waltz's typology is the opposition, man/war, where one term, man$ is valued preferentially over the other term,war. Moreover, "war" as a concept is deferred just as "man" is privileged: "Man is taken to be a prior rational identity-an originary presence-and the domain of anarchy and war is then known only in terms of its lack of this rational identity, that is, as a recalcitrant domain of difference that is still to be subdued by the sovereign figure of reasoning man."

Ashley's deconstruction, then, reveals that in Waltz'S paradigm, Western man's rationality achieves its sovereign status by positing an ultimate chaosa what "we" are not-as its opposite. The differem of reason in the discourse of international relations is war. Man's rationality needs chaos in order to be sovereign. Without the uncontrollable contingencies that constitute the domain of historicity and war, human rationality would have no heroic task to perform; its function would shrink in significance, its presence and importance would diminish. War's domain, then, enlarges) ennobles, and empowers reason's sovereignty. The "fact" of our sovereign rationality, then, is relative, and chaos is its necessitating partner . .(\shley thus applies Derrida's deconstructive method !~~ .... that Waltz has essentially s~dP-t_~...JL_tIiiQlY.- .. ?f histo~ based on flte lo§ocentri~ro<:edure.

Thoug&: it 1S less systematic Ashley's approach to Waltz, Elshtain

also has an interesting treatment of Waltz's well-known work, . Her deconstructive analysis is very illuminating partly for that reason. Elshtain's version of deconstruction resembles the peculiar American version exemplified by Paul de Man. Like -de Man, Elshtain works more like a rhetorician than a philosopher) a fact that should render both her prose and her methods more familiar to readers than Ashley's. Noticing a major discontinuity in two of Freud's key concepts-civilization and aggression-EJshtain draws out some implications of both and shows that Freud's own logic tacitly says something that his explicit statements deny. Freud's model of civilization and aggression, become consistent with one another when, reading them together, we hear them saying "that war flows not from our lower urges but from our civilized superegos, including the demands of Justice." This

... strategy of counterposing a text's own logics to the explicitly stipulated views Of"ifsautltor represents another analytic move common toposiStiUcturaliSi' write,Ls,-

Walker's treatment of Machiavelli tries to demonstrate that the archrealist is not what our Anglo-American political realists have portrayed him to be. In contrast to Walker's painstaking efforts to relocate Machiavelli's project in the terms of his own time and context, contemporary realists have constructed a wraithlike caricature. W~~n...llDderstanding_9i how the logocentric Erocedure works ~ts him to observe and demonstrate how "realism has been constituted historically. through the negation anddispTcemint

oT; Pno~-Uiiderstaii~Of"i~Q[ticir-life~undSrsiQO,r "111'& "&ontexiJjL

- ------

xviii • Internarimuzlllntertextual Relations

universalist aspirations" _(~m~§.il __ ~.~4~d)" .lIe~~l!!l~~_.!'!J between the known IlruLU§_QPPQsite js .. bistorica1;jLis_J:h~_m:.e~kgtifi~ understanding of political life that has been deferred.

--~.--- .. - .. , .. - .... -.- .. -~.-.---".--- .. --,,-.-=-~-=-

Semiotics, Textuality, and Surplus Meaning

The concept of "textuality" that the title of this book employs is one of the concepts over which poststructuralist writers, who may otherwise differ greatly, have no quarrel. A close..sol!~.Q_f_tl1~!~.!!!l tex~~~tj_'l!ityall those rhetorical dimensiops of l~g~J!ylt are b!1!f~.!:.ted QffLQb~11!.~~ denigrated, and ignored by readers interested only in an author's intended

~~.L4(!~!.~~~ .. E:J:~~? ... ~_~_~.!..~!!p~"'iit_~:~~~!![Q._n a_1~l!! .... £(;)llY~.l':~~9!!}~

_!!!Q~ be~~nten5~. Significantly, the very distinction between logical and rhetorical results from the logo centric procedure; some logical basis for meaning (usually a logocentrically produced logic) is privileged over the many rhetorical bases of meaning, and the -, great undifferentiated mass of dimensions excluded from the logical one is pushed to the back of the stage.

The term ~_~m£!t.~~!?_1,'!~~~~ ... ~._.~jP.').~!!~~I}.~...2~_~.,~,~~~~h .. !~ ... ~".~!¥_ .. .!2.evade this long-established opposition, to organize anew our vision of "a

t~2::'_B!!~LtO .~!l.!l:!titut~ !:~i!it[~etea.:hini1iiUn.~DWkm~j.n&. ----:

(A'$ cQiJl~.,. bY_~l!I!d Barthes,t. t]te "texUUili!I"u ... of@.u!=~sa)!·_jncllldes historical and rhetorical dimensions as legitimate ~ of the essay's se~c I!!!,d. epistemic potential. As Elshtain's analysis of Freud illustrates and as Alfred J. Fortin's Barthesean analysis of an essay by Jeane Kirkpatrick dramatically demonstrates, to see the textuality of discourse is, in part, to

recognize~~,~.~,~~!~.J...~.!..~~~~~.~~_~ __ ~.Y!f~it 'Q(iii~_ ~!.!ts author wDn~ed ~o sayJortin's chapter, "Notes on a Terrorist Text: A Critical Use of Roland Barthes' Textual Analysis in the Interpretation of Political Meaning," provides a useful introduction to the methods of a leading figure in the field of semiotics (seme = meaning, semiosis = meaningmaking, semiotics = the study of meaning-making). Fortin shows how, by dealing with the surplus meaning in Kirkpatrick's essay instead of reading only what the author stipulates, we discover a much more complex set of political assumptions and values than we would otherwise discern.

Timothy W. Luke's chapter, "'What's Wrong with Deterrence?' Semiotic Interpretations of National Security Policy," discusses the work of semioticists Barthes, Umberto Eco, and' Jean Baudrillard, showing their relevance to analyzing security policy. Interestingly, Luke's sensitivity to semiotic theory has led him to see and to trace a kind of semiotic perspective in some of the major theorists of deterrence: Kaufmann, Aron, Jervis, Snyder and Diesing, and Schelling. Luke both describes and then applies

Foreword • xix

semiotic theory in ways that should be very interesting to scholars of strategic studies.

The semiotic perspective, particularly as transmitted through Barthes, manifests itself in several other important ways in this book. It was Barthes who established the precedent of taking as a "text" for serious analysis various nondiscursive artifacts from popular culture. In his early concern to demystify what had come to seem natural and normal, Barthes turned to artifacts such as magazine advertisements, the sport of wrestling, toys, Garbo's face, wine, cookery, and phorographs.! He then inquired how it was 'that the meanings of these objects were so widely known. He "read" the objects, articulating in words what everyone knew they meant but knew without the artifact having said. anything in words; the artifact did not overtly stipulate its own meaning as we assume an essay to do. To take such subjects seriously extends the concept of a "text" as a thing that is linguistically intelligible in its having verbally construable meanings, to include all the meaningful things in the human world. Barthes thus shows how things come to have meanings by virtue of their b~pariora- cUliure and how"ineanings ottunes precede the tliiiig. He shows hOW1deoIOgre~-;;-~e .as an interpretive frame thr9us4.which we tacitly bow an~~an "read" the meanings that culture gives to objects, and he shows that the kiiOwabiliiY

. ~d apparentincontestabili'!y_ of these meaiiIngs 1;~,m:yd~,~~gM!~!~~}or ,via. frames of reference that _!lre nec~sari!Y.ld~lQgi£.al.in_th~_Al!hu5.5e.na:n_,_. sense. He thus manges our understanding of what ideology is and how it

~- ...... ----~~~-- ........... -.-- ...... '-- ... - ... ~- •• --, .. ~, ... -- ..... '.>,.._, ••

works. , -----,-"-- .. ,-.-,-

To see the world as a text is to confront the issue, Qf meaning_.!!l_ a mdicaUy- .. ~~1f things such as photographs and wrestling matches may

be said to have meanings quite independent of what the photo meant to the mother who snapped it or what the match meant to the wrestler who fought

it, then written things too may somehow have meanings independently of

the author who penned them. ~~~' ~onsept of textuality thus loosen the written text from the author and relocate authori!y within the ~e. Barthes, himself a brilliant student of rhet~rical theory, thus reversed the~_~ logic/rhetoric hierars!!r~~L,~~pl!!~~.!:ij.t~,!g8.Qf~,Il~mf." ba,~~.~:,._

Several chapters in this book follow Barthes' precedent in their examining, for example, spy novels (Der Derian), paramilitary magazines (Klein), and popular-press coverage of a political event (Rubenstein). Michael Shapiro, in "Representing World Politics: The Spon/War Intertext," demonstrates the relevance to policy studies of yet another Barthesean concept. Shapiro shows how the intertextual nature of discourse conjoins with that culturally based "stock of signs" that makes photos and wrestling ~atclleS ineiuungful to all members of the same"cUltuxe.}ledescribes the social psychological discourse that supplies the conceptual frame in which we ordinarily understand "policy" -we say it is a set of opinions or choices,

xx • Internationalllntertextual Relations

and we speak of the perceiving citizen as "a collection of beliefs, attitudes, and values" -and he contrasts this manner of representation with an approach such as Barthes'. He then makes this observation:

Psychologically oriented conceptual frames tend to be insensitive to the historically inherited discursive practices representing policy. Thus, the intelligibility that a policy discourse engages derives not merely from the cognitive orientations of individuals but from widely circulated "interpretive cedes of connotation" (in Barthes' language) that operate effectively to the extent that there is a stock of signs held by the receivers of statements, which activate the interpretive codes. (emphasis added)

The "stock of signs" is what makes nondiscursive objects intelligible. Indeed, the stock of signs alone is what enables wide popular support of public

policies; ..

Representations of public policy, then, have an ideological depth to the extent that they engage a stock of signs with which people make their everyday lives intelligible. Everyday life, as Althusser has argued, is thus ideological, not in the sense that people function within a false consciousness, but in an ontological sense; it allows subjects to recognize themselves and make intelligible Self-Other relations. (emphasis added)

J~:ve~Jife is id~logical m.!l!.£lDt9i~9!.SS.i. that whiSh we know and lVhich~m~,u:u.fi!:.M~~._Qn..Q.ur se..M~ of what i~QllgJuhese tenus, intelligibility becomes possible. But these "terms" are that "stock of signs" whose mea.mngs have -already been desi@ated by .~e culture! Thus, Shapiro is able to show how sport discourse, learned in everyday life, serves as a stock of signs. It is this stock that allows at once politics, economics, and war to be figured in the terms of sport. Sport metaphors thereby enable human sympathies and energies to be mobilized and harnessed for projects transcending the individual's immediate life world that may contravene his or her interests as well.

Barthes' concept of textuality has led not only to a greatly changed understanding of how meaning functions in cultures-a "stock of signs" from everyday life interacts with "interpretive codes" that are more intellectually based-but also of how ideology is ontologically grounded and how it functions in the semiotic process.

Archeology, Genealogy, and Constituting the

"Subject" ,

Michel Foucault's "archeologies" of knowledge and "genealogies" of power have stimulated the wide interest in how "discursive practices" shape both

Foreword • xxi

our subjectivity and our identity as individuals; in turn, they also help us understand how we might treat one another as objects. One example of a discursive practice is the logocentric procedure that Derrida illuminates. Foucault notices (a~. d~errida) that a I?!..~~~~~!.o~th.e l~goc~ntric _ procedure mkes place in the .social wo~~!y co~on iIL@~_~.Q~i.~_'YQ1!~ ~...P.t.Q$:J;:ss ,of _differentiation, marginalization, and dominati_9..n._ Thus, what takes place in the linguistic world resembles the social structuring that results in hierarchy and marginalization, and what occurs in the social world resembles a linguistic process for establishing meaning. Could linguistic meaning-making actually be connected to how social power gets constituted, or is the relationship only analogical? If anything unites the disparate poststructuralists, it is their interest in this question. ~~~.2!!£I!y!ll, analyses, there are profound interconnections between differentiations at the levels of discourse and of social action.

Foucault is the historian of such "dividing practices" in social life. As such, he is the historian of human identities or, as he prefers to put it; of "subjectivities.": Our subjective sense of, ourselves as persons, Foucault

_!qgUes, is cr~!t~d bl reco~ble djscursive p~c~tha.L.5im~eo1!~ iInplicate ?S in power-relations: we are "subjected" in a dual sense. In his concern about subjectivity as SUbjugation, Foucault is also the historian of power. Both Foucault's themes (power, knowledge, the subject, discourse, and their interrelationships) and his methods have influenced these practices and practitioners in international relations. Within the present set of chapters, we find Walker, Shapiro, Klein, Der Derian, and Ashley strongly influenced by Foucault. All these writers share an interest in learning how disC9.Y!ie_is related to the construction and subjugation of humankind. They provide §Q

J'kbJPld~ .!;:9.m'ple:lfJt.y_~rsiQ!!J!.f international relations that we are better able to see how modem simplifications can endanger our future.

-=Donna U. Gregory

Notes

1. Vincent Descombs, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge, England, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980) has a useful introductory chapter for understanding poststructural and postmodern approaches.

2. See, for example, Of Grammlltology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). A good introduction to Derrida is Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982).

3. These early ''textualizing'' experiments took place during Barthes' structuralist phase. See Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957); trans. and selected by Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972).

Part I Prologue

Power is it, this new virtue; a ruling thought is it, and around it a subtle soul: a golden sun, with the serpent of knowledge around it, -Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

1

The Boundaries of Knowledge and Power in International Relations

James Der Derian

TWO hundred years ago, international relations began with a revolution and a footnote. A genealogy of formal relations between nations would of course reveal multiple origins that predate the French Revolution: the development of elective powers in medieval Christendom (such as Venice and the Swiss Confederation); the rejection of monarchic rule and adoption of republicanism by the Dutch in the sixteenth century; the contractual doctrine of legitimacy that came out of Britain's Glorious Revolution in the seventeenth century; and in the United States, the institutionalization of popular politics by the Continental Congress in 1776.1 But it is the formal Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 that "sovereignty resides essentially in the nation", and, ironically, the imperial promulgation of that doctrine by Napoleon that effectively signal the end of interdynastic relations and the beginning of international relations.

Also in 1789, across the Channel and at the bottom of a page, international had its textual origins. The word first appears in Jeremy Bentham's Principles of Morals and Legislation, in a pedestrian sentence in which Bentham distinguishes "internal" from "international" law. But in case the reader missed the birth, Bentham provides a footnote to baptize the new word:

The word international, it must be acknowledged, is a new one; though, it is hoped, sufficiently analogous and intelligible. It is calculated to express, in a more significant way, the branch of law which goes commonly under the name of the law of nations.2

~t by rev9!!!!!9lt.M.!£J~~allX.!~~,_~_~}E._g1~_~~~..L_t1!~~Q~g. international would continue to ha~~"y'~I)'_fh~ed in~Jl~nJ_l,I.Lbis~_ To be sure, it was first tied to legal tomes and institutions, with the exemplars of Oppenheim's International Law and the International Court of Justice standing out. But there was also a reddish hue to the word, which brightened and dimmed from the creation of the International Working Men's Association in 1864 to the self-liquidation of the Third Communist International in 1943.

The marrying of international to relations is more difficult to trace, as is

4 • Intemationalllntenexmal Relations

the genesis of the discipline of thought going by the name of international relations (lR). Historically, theoretical self-consciousness about IR has not gone much beyond the debates over a proper name for a field of study. Reading the literature, one is led to believe that international relations spontaneously appeared as a self-evidently appropriate term in two books: one an anthology by A.J. Grant, An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (1916), the other by D.P. Heatley, Diplomacy and the Study of c International Relations (1919).3 Very soon after, an introductory gesture was. ritualized in the general literature. Sometimes a page but more often a paragraph in length, a definition of international relations would be provided that acknowledged that the field had inherited a misnomer ("of course, not just 'nations' but political, economic, and other legal units are actors in the realm of international relations," and so on) with which we must now live . .!rAA~'!~~g..,_!hl.~~s ".!hat ~2._~!her . .!~ li!.~1:.l.E simultaneousll_.~o the P2wer of consensus and ambigujty that has been-for the most part unself-consciously- invested in international relations. 4 -----:Mier"··twohundred~Y_eari:9.! lex_tual -accun;~ation, it is time for a the~!etical investigation of the scripted representation of international_. relations. To this end, as something .of a bicentennial bricolage, we have put

-'i:~gethe;-; collection of essays on the "space-between," the intertexts constructed between knowledge and power in international relations, between the margins and the body of international theory, between textual politics and world politics, and-i-most significantly for the issue of war and peacebetween indigenes and aliens. -.Th~ approach taken can be loosely construed

.,.u,~lW~$n and poststructur~J!~ .. ~ sense ffiat our organizing strategy is to deconstruct. or denaturalize through detailed interpretation the inherited

·l~~e) coil~~-an~-~t~~is~tliat!ave'Consti§ed ~~SCoUrSes1li'~

international relations. Not so much a metlloC:l'aS a form of mtellectual activity, this deconstructive process often alienates familiar language (to show how discourses construct rather than simply reflect reality), dismantles fixed oppositions and hierarchies (between fact and fiction, male and female, Self and Other), and challenges literary conventions (that textual meaning is exhausted by authorial intention) and positivist practices (where the scientific manipulation of facts yields objective truths) that have prevailed in the social sciences. !~;ID~thQf!)S 10 d!~urb habitu~ wl!YLq_L~~d_ac.tiug.jn. int~!:~t~~o.=~_!@.~!!?.E~i.,"Q!_~~~.~_.j~.~C2....E!'ov~~_"~ .. in~elligibilities and alternative P.Qs_s.!1]lJitja.fru" .. tI!e field. S

This should not be mistaken, however, as a manifesto for the elimination of between-ness and Otherness in international or intertextual relations. Such a state of world affairs is highly unlikely and undesirable, because in its most probable form (that is, based on constraints imposed by historical precedent and omnipresent circumstance), it would entail if not authorize the supplanting of an anarchical society by some form of supernational

Boundaries of Knowledge and Power in IR • 5

suzerainty, the displacement of a germinal system of economic interdependence by a hegemonic dependency, and the assertion of monological thinking over intellectual and cultural diversity. The intent of this book is to illuminate, rather than to p'rete~d to eliminate, the textual nature-;;rth~-:-'

r-differences that produce and are sustained by 'international relations. Thi.£_ might better. enable us to understand ourselves and others through the differences that ma~e up .~~~yaaY~~r~:§.~~~~.~~Cie!y.:;_~et serve to i!!§J!fy

." bQmi~ide' every day in the international soc~ety.

The Resistance to Theory: A Poststructuralist Proposition

The classical ruminations on the resistance of international relations to theory-and on the attempt of behavioralists to overcome thifre'sistance' through sclentlfic-'proceaures'=piovides~i"aiaIogicar'op6img~Toi'miking some poststructuralist propositions for international theory -_--parucUlarI-Y--' amenable to supplementary mterpretauon=-a sign of its "TlcIassP'siaiiire=

is Martin Wight's famous explanation of the peculiar resistance of international politics to theory:

What I have been trying to express is the sense of a kind of disharmony between international theory and diplomatic practice, a kind of recalcitrance of international politics to being theorized about. The reason is that the theorizing has to be done in the language of political theory and law. But this is the language appropriate to man's control of his social life. Political theory and law are maps of experience or systems of action within the realm of normal relationships and calculable results. They are the theory of survival. What for political theory is the extreme case (as revolution, or civil war) is for international theory the regular case."

A poststructuralist reading could ascribe a neo-Hobbesian subtext to Wight's essay: where there is no sovereign power, there can be no law-and no absolute' means of adjudicating the truth-claims of one international theory against another." Normative restraints derived from a cultural homogeneity, the mutual recognition of certain rights and obligations as embodied by the pacta sunt seroanda, and institutional mediations such as the balance of power and diplomacy have together yielded a modicum of order and intelligibility in international relations-a formal anarchy but a society of states nonetheless. Yet, with the decline and death of a central epistemological authority-God, Sovereign, and now even Rational Manthere persists a "war of all against all" in international theory.

In this state of theoretical conflict, Martin Wight's essay-which anticipates Hedley Bull's critique of scientism in international theory-

6 • Imematumalllntenextual Relations

stands out as the perfect pre-text for interpreting international theory as an intertext, described by the semiologist Roland Barthes as "a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. "8 International relations requires an intertextual approach, in the sense

qf ~fi~"'lft9~_~~9.~i!ii-.~~_Qf_Wol:igIiDYbeL~J!tereI~~!1o-fii1ar!!!?!~~~

truth, where meaning is derived from an interrelationship of texts, and power IS Implicated by the problem of language and omersigruryffij:rpii~ There is, then, a strategic aspect to intertextualism: it involves a survey of fields of battle commonly described as international theory. But victories are not judged by a theory's power to order and verify facts. Rather, an intertextual strategy attempts to understand the placement and displacement of theories, how one theory comes to stand above and silence other theories~ but also how theory as a knowledge practice has been historically and often _ arbitrarilY separated from "events," that is, the mater:i~i!!iip!re4.~pia<:tic~!L

-compr~iDg-tlie~mationarsoaetY.·Jhlsls·to'chanenge the given boundaries of the battlefield, both the geopolitical lines between the states and within systems, and the theory/practice divisions inscribed by the discipline. And to be sure, there is an aspirational element-some might see it as utopianto the intertextual strategy: by generating new interpretations of the worldtext, by calling into question the historically determined constructions through which we apprehend it, we might add new dimensions and alternatives to traditional international theory. This runs counter to the modernist attempt to narrowly define the field of contestation and thus more readily dominate it; against monological, totalizing theory, postmodernism posits heterological, multipolar grids of knowledge and practice.

This almroach, then,!).s not taken a~~C:!D_~Jor~~.J~~1:!city of international th~ITz._ b~!_E.t~2~E~!!-~.E-y it should be true- !!Iat is, ~rnally regtJ'rent-that inJernational theo!!. is alienat~.!!~ disparath_ano dissonant. both in its endogenous relations and with the reality it purportedly

OE::::; ~~~ .._.. ....... _..,~ __ ~, • ...._....._~ •• ~, ..... ,~.u,,_.·,_.=.~~"., ..• -,_ ..... ' ... - •. ,.,--

reflects. What Martin Wight offers us is a vilualile point of entry into this

"realm of recurrence and repetition."? Eschewing the contemporary slogans that often pose as international theory, seeing through the affects of realpolitik posturing and idealist denial, oblivious to cynical passivity and methodological escapism, Wight takes the long view, and in his historical reasoning identifies something of an inverse relationship between diplomatic practice and international theory: "It sometimes seems that whereas political theory generally is in unison with political activity, international theory . . . sings a kind of descant over against the movement of diplomacy."l0

We begin where Wight and Bull left off, to interrogate present knowledge of international relations through past practices, to search out the margins of political theory, to listen for the critical voices drowned out by official discourses, and to conduct an inquiry into the encounter of the given text. In sum, we un4.~~e a_~e.?re.tici!!Yes~"sation of the te!tu1!.!- iI!:!~relay_~~

Boundaries of Knowledge and Pouier in IR • 7

power politics. 11 This is our descant, a counterpoint over against the current drone of international theory and politics.

Method or Antimethod?

In this intertextual approach, there is a considerable measure of metatheory, of theorizing about the theories of international politics. This allows for a form of preanalysis that disturbs the complacency of received knowledge, its self-evident relation to events, and the "naturalness" of its language._I!rrol!s!! interpretation, metatheory promotes ,!he trru:t~~! of th~;ry from one_hislQricaL . context- to· ailother ~-Therels~"however, acommitm~nt to ·limp..=!~m~L1h~ defullii "':':_sigllificant erripificarquestions-tiUoughiIit~r~ty. Otherwise, theoreticil mvestigattondetenorates into ineihodologism, of w@ch there is already a surfeit in international relations theory. We agree with Barthes, that "at a certain moment, therefore, it is necessary to tum against Method, or at least to treat it without any founding privilege as one of the voices of plurality-as a view, a spectacle mounted in the text, the text which all in all is the only 'true' result of any research." 12

Intertextual theorizing is clearly not a process of scientific verification, Nor, however, should it be construed as intrinsically antiscientific. Rather,

it takes a self-conscious step away from the dominant formalistic and ahistorical trends in international relations theory that "naturally select" hermetic, rational models over hermeneutic, philosophical investigations. Persistend~t ~!~of the rationa1!!!!.~rol!~~~.!!!j~!~!l~tional relations, from game theory to structural realism, have taken on the appearance of simulacra: appealing· and persuasive in their --modeled abstraction, but metaphYSical and exclusionary ~ iheir-iiyperreafappii~ation.· Even the most promising recent debate in internattonaIfelations theory, between neorealists and their critics, told us much more about the politics of the discipline than about world politics. The issue was not how we, as theorists, think about the world, or even how others have thought about it in the past, but how we. think others ought to think about it. Perhaps this

I i~ symptomatic of a 'i!_sciplining of theory, the effect 9! domesticating tit@!'Y i!illL.~ for 8!!!duat~_ stu~__.!!'jnd!. and l~~ed _iournl!Js' page&-._, International_ID_e,Q,ty continu:illY. coWront~.institutiOl!!!1 Rr~ssures to_l;_o.n(QJ1ll, t9 reduce itself to the reigning dogma, to discipline insurgent antitheses.

Hence, two hundred years after Bentham and the French Revolution, at a time when some Anglo-American theorists are digging in their heels to maintain the disciplinary boundaries of international relations against continental philosophical incursions (especially those plotted by neologistic Francophiles), it is imPOrtant to reinscribe the neglected historical narratives ~ stralc:gies lying behind some of the field's ~~~d

8 • Intemationalllntenextual Relations

theories. The chapters in this book are a start, an investigation of how some ideas traveled from the footnotes and margins of international thought to a "natural" position of predominance and how some got lost in the shuffle of power politics. It should be clear from the outset, however, that this book does not constitute a school of thought. We eschew the notion that a school or a subdiscipline should or could be created from the diverse approaches and topics of the various thinkers in international relations who are

"J:epresented in this collection.

(" It is, then, probably easier to say what the collective purpose of this \ enterprise is not: namely, to affirm a new identity, authenticity, or disciplinary \ purity through opposition to another, "older" school of thought.P On the J contrary, we aim at a dialogue, with neglected thinkers and forgotten

/ footnotes, but also with the "great" texts and traditional scholars, that is

\ YI'": ") meticulously attentive to the constraints imposed by the past, critically

(,l, .! ""f~F 1 interpretive of the dominant voices of the present, and openly speculative

'(J~;,./l" J about what can-while soberly reflective about what cannot-be said and

') ~ done in the world politics of the future.

Notes

1. For detailed accounts of the systemic shift from dynastic principles of legitimacy to national principles, see M. Wight, Systems of States (Leicester, England:

Leicester University Press, 1977), pp. 153-173; H. Bull, The Anarchical society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 33-38; and R. Aron, Peace and War (New York: Anchor, 1973), pp. 73-74, 138-141.

2. See J. Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Lafner, 1948), p, 326. Also relegated by Bentham to footnote status was his acknowledgment that the linguistic leap of a Frenchman, D' Aguessau, from droit des gens (law of nations) to droit entre les gens (law between nations) prompted his own genesis of the term international. Bentham did not, however, acknowledge the suggestive evolution of the Latin usage from the traditional Roman jus gentium to Victoria's jus inter gentes to Grotius's rubric of jus gentium voluntarium inter civitates. A textualist interpretation might posit that Bentham, writing under the exigencies of authorial originality and Anglocentricity, was "constrained" to provide an immaculate conception for international. But surely also operating on the level of social theory was Bentham's belief that naming was essential to the ordering of social reality-or, to be more precise, that a new moral order for the governance of human conduct required a pure discipline with new concepts distinguishable from tainted old ones. This is evidenced in an earlier chapter on the divisions of public offenses when Bentham raised in a sensitive (if not somewhat defensive) manner the question of linguistic innovation. After coining neologisms with a utilitarian fetish-ranging in the seriousness of the offense from the phthano-paronomic (roughly, abusing a cop) to the polemo-tamieutic (sabotage of war materiel and fortifications)-Bentham addressed the issue of new words in a footnote to a footnote (p. 287):

Boundaries of Knowledge and Power in IR • 9

A number of different branches of public trust, none of which have yet been provided with appellatives, have here been brought to view; which then were best? to coin new names for them out of the Greek; or, instead of a word to make use of a whole sentence? In English and in French, there is no other alternative; no more than in any of the other southern languages. It rests with the reader to determine.

3. Although neither author attempts to defme or to give an account of the origins of "international relations," Heatley is self-conscious in his efforts to shape histories of various international practices (such as diplomacy, international law, and balance of power) as well as more theoretical texts (such as guides of diplomatic practice, treatises on international law and projects of perpetual peace) into a general field of knowledge. In the preface Heatley states:

In this work an attempt is made to portray diplomacy and the conduct of foreign policy from the standpoint of history, to show how they have been analysed and appraised by representative writers, and to indicate sources from which the knowledge thus acquired may be supplemented. (p.v.)

And in the introduction to the section "The Literature of International Relations," he says:

The student of international relations needs precise as well as vast equipment in knowledge but, not less, he needs equipment in a habit of mind. (Diplamacy and the Study of International Relations. Oxford, England: Clarendon, 1919, p. 88)

For a concise account of the development of an Anglo-American discipline of international relations, see also an essay by W. Olson and N. Onuf, "The Growth of a Discipline: Reviewed," in International Relations: British and American Perspectives, ed. S. Smith (Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 1-28.

4. There are, of course, exceptions to the usual essentialist definitions of international relations. Aron in Peace and War issues the perfunctory corrective to the meaning of international ("the term nation is not to be taken in the historical sense it has assumed since the French Revolution," p.5), but goes on to endorse the ambiguity of the term: "The ambiguity in 'international relations' is not to be imputed to the inadequacy of our concepts: it is an integral part of reality itself' (p. 8).

After presenting an argument for an autonomous discipline of international relations, Stanley Hoffmann echoes Aron's sentiments in the introduction to his Contemporary Theory in International Relations (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice HaIl, 1960):

As a discipline, international relations are [sic] not in very fine shape. There is, first of all, broad disagreement on a definition of the field. I confess that this does not worry me very much, for debates which try to determine the scope of a social science are rather pointless. Writers argue for their respective defmitions as if there were an immutable essence of world politics, or sociology, and so on. (p. 4)

5. For a further explanation of poststructuralism and postmodernism, and their significance for international relations, see the chapters which follow by Michael Shapiro, Rob Walker, Richard Ashley, and William Connolly.

6. Martin Wight, "Why is there No International Theory?" in Diplomatic Investigations, ed. H. Butterfield and M. Wight (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), p. 33-34.

7. Neo-Hobbesian because Hobbes, a relativist in considerations of power and law, was a scientific absolutist on matters of reason, as evidenced by his claim in the Leviathan "that truth considered in the right meaning of names in our affirmations"; subtext because Wight's most significant-and overlooked-plaint against interna-

10 • Isuemationalllntertextual Relations

tional theory is not epistemological but theological- "the slide-over into theodicy that seems to occur after a certain point with all international theory" (see Wight, "International Theory," p. 33). For a biographical note on the role of religious belief in Wight's work, see H. Bull's introduction, "Martin Wight and the Study of International Relations," to Wight's Systems of States, pp. 1-20.

8. "The Death of the Author," in R. Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. S.

Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 146.

9. Diplomatic Investigations, p. 26.

10. Ibid., p. 29.

II. Given the particular array of authors in this book, and the challenge to authorial intentionality in general, I will not assert an authoritative definition of international theory. However, at the starting gate I generally concur with Wight and Bull's appraisals of the track to be run. Writes Wight:

By "international theory" is meant a tradition of speculation about relations between states, a tradition imagined as the twin of speculation about the state to which the name "political theory" is appropriated. (Ibid., p. 17).

States Bull:

By the "theory of International Relations" I mean simply the leading ideas that have governed and do govern our thinking about International Relations or World Politics . . . how we relate them to their historical context and examine their truth and their bearing on our present political concerns, in relation to past practice and to present practice . . . I am inclined to argue that the second cannot be done effectively without the first, that we cannot consider "is it true" without first engaging in historical exercises. (Oxford University lecture notes to Theory and Practice of International Relations 1648-1789)

12. "Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers," in R. Barthes, Image - Music - Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 201.

13. See D. LaCapra, "Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts," in Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, and Language (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 23-71, for a useful exposition of textual analysis and the dialogical relationship between the historian and history.

2

Textualizing Global Politics

MichaelJ. Shapiro

Language and Text

Much of modem literary theory operates with the recognition that literary texts have a mediated relationship with the social reality they represent, that indeed what is "social reality" emerges in the writing of the text and bears

_ traces of its previous constructions in the history of the literary genre. This engenders an interest in "intertextuality," which, as one literary theorist puts it, "denotes ways in. which works of art-especially of literature-are produced in response not to social reality but to previous works of art and the codes of other conventions governing them."! Therefore, thl!~~_)Yg.g~t given to us by the modem novel, for example, results from characteristic ways of representing gender, famil~~;!~~ijll r~atiOi!s_,. aI:ld these novd1irlc· representational practices are governed to a large ext~.! b>:. ~irIg=ru):es. ~~~tioJ]..s.Mr~cte.ri~.ti£.9i.YtJ!_I!.Q!~; they are not sim.N_ commanded by an immediate. social context.

-This ~;ight"~~-&·"g~ner3IIie(r~lcross··Writiiig genres and related to more epistemologically explicit issues. Insofar as "social reality" emerges in various writing genres, invl!.~Jions of how the .wo..r.ld is apprehend~_teq.uire jnguiries into various pre-texts of apprehension, for the meaning and value imposed on the world is structured not by one's immediate consciousness but by the various reality-making scripts one inherits or acquires from one's surrounding cultural/linguistic condition. The pre-text of apprehension is therefore largely institutionalized and is reflected in the ready-to-hand language practices, the historically produced styles-grammars, rhetorics, and narrative structures-through which the familiar world is continuously interpreted and reproduced. wpeth'£LLg!y~!l-.M!~_Q.tM>cial r~ matter of contention or is regarded as natural and unproblematic, meanjng is alwals .!!!!_posed, not discovered,J2!._the f~_world .£!DD'll.~_!ep'arat~d from the interpretive practices through which it is made. As Michel Foucault has aptly put it: "We must not imagine that the worid turns toward us a legible face which we would have only to decipher; the world is not the accomplice our our knowledge.t" To regard the world of "international

12 • IntemationaYlntertextual Relations

L!~lation(~...!1~ a text,.JJ1~~f.oreJl!...!Q. in9!!!!:~ into the s!yle Qfl{s scripting. to _ ~Y~,tI:t.~'!Ily'.i~ .. ~~.~~~~tl:!~<,l_,~y,_~~~_(?!i-~@Y- .s~~£s_c:~p~~.governing_. the interpretations through which it has emerged ...

-----";....-.------------- - ._ - ------

The "Political"

Given that our understanding of conflict, war, or, more generally, the space within which international politics is deployed is always mediated by modes of representation and thus by all the various mechanisms involved in text construction-grammars, rhetorics, and narrativity-we must operate with a view of politics that is sensitive to textuality. While much of political thinking is exhausted by concern with the distribution of things thought to be meaningful and valuable, our attention is drawn to another aspect of political processes, that aspect in which the boundaries for constituting meaning and value are constructed. Political processes are, among other things, contests over the alternative understandings (often iiiiplicit)itiiiiiiiiieIit in the representational practices .that implicate the actions and objects one-

'~~iiiQWi£~~~_!ftl!_e··v3rious sliif~' '''-"elsme:j!QiIS~~IiilCaJ.~'y!!~_;:_P~~

within which P!'rso~s and things take ()lLm~_ir_i_de»!ijj~s. Although it tends to operate implicitlY, tlle'- separation of"theworIa'Ulto -kinds of space is perhaps the most significant kind of practice for establishing the systems of intelligibility within which understandings of global politics are forged.

This insight was nowhere better formulated than in Aldous Huxley's Grey Eminence, his story of the activities of Cardinal Richelieu and his foreign emissary, Father Joseph, that precipitated the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century.! Father Joseph represented a medieval mentality. For him, the world was a more or less vertical set of spaces organized into the mundane present and a transcendental eternity. Within this apprehension of the world, both space and time in the here and now had a symbolic content, for the "real" and what was deemed valuable lay in the transcendental, spiritual realm. Because earthly events took on their significance in connection with a domain of divine prescriptions, Father Joseph was initially interested in reaffmning the significance of those prescriptions, which included liberating the "Holy Land" and ridding the world of all heretics, Protestants among others. Ultimately, however, Father Joseph complied with Richelieu's plan to take the Protestant side in the Thirty Years War. In effect, Richelieu succeeded in enlisting Father Joseph's assistance in behalf of a horizontal conception of the word, for Richelieu was an early representative of the modem, geopolitical mentality interested in French control of the European continent. Among other things, Huxley's story is a chronical of the waning of the medieval and the waxing of the modem spatialization of the world, an effect so powerful that, ever since, people pursuing statecraft have been

Textuolizing Global Politics • 13

able to subjugate and direct ecclesiastic authority in behalf of policy that unfolds within a horizontal, desacralized world. Indeed, much of the §ubsequent history of world politics involves the demise of the authorities" connected ~..!~I1!_~cc.~Qrl(t_!!!l9._t;h~ .. "a.!iC.en_$jQIU)Ltho5e-Connected-to a horiiontal; ~~lit!..~E:~:_

Within this scenario, the 1969 landing on the moon takes on immense significance, for it can be read as an extension of strategic space and a further diminution of the sacred mentality. The "heavens" have since been increasingly populated by both strategic and commercial vehicles. In a sense, the horizontal axis has been pivoted, and the old vertical dimension of the Middle Ages has become a geopolitical extension of the horizontal territoriality

that has subjugated it. If the spa~tiQn of the world is still the s.~~ of _

..lbs cross, that cross has been largely desacranzed, for the powers that control the readings of the world's text identify themselves with mundane, nationalistic world histories rather tfulii sacred mythologies. -

Politicizing the World Text

Once we give adequate recognition to the texts within which the world emerges and provided an understanding of politics that focuses on such impositions of meaning and value, we can appreciate the intimate relationship between textual practices 'and politics. It is the dominant, surviving textual practices that give rise to the systems of meaning and value from which actions and policies are directed and legitimated. A critical political perS""pective is, according!l, one __ that questions ~e privileged fOmlLQf. rePt:.tsentation whose dominance has led to the unprob~!!~,~~t:_ance of subjects, objects, acts, and themes through which the political world is constructed .:

Inasmuch as dominant modes of understanding exist within representational or textualpractices, criticism or .~i~!!'!!..f<?,.rm,~_"Q_L~!~!p.!~!.~l!~n_are conveyed less through an explicitly argumentative form than through a writing practice that is resistant to familiar modes of representation, one that is self-reflective enough to show how meaning and writing practices are radically entangled; in general or one that tends to denaturalize familiar realities by employing impertinent grammars and figurations, by, in short, ~_l!~~.2[Y1Lm.~~naLtext.l!BlltY.

To appreciate the - effects of this textuality, it is necessary to pay special heed to language, but this does not imply that an approach emphasizing textuality reduces social phenomena to specific instances of linguistic

expression. I(.:u~~tualize a domain of analysis is ML!!S?~(t!;t of all, ~~ty·:.!~E1~!~E.:=~l~~_~od..! of ..!~resentaUoll , ond, that representauons are not desc"Eptions of a world orracti~~ut ar<:_!!..~s. oT

14 • Internarionlll1Intertextual Relations

making facticity. Their value is thus not to be discerned in their "Correspondence with something, but rather in the economies of possible representations within which they participate. Modes of reality-making are therefore worthy of analysis in their own right. Such analysis can be a form of interpretation in which one scrutinizes the effects on behavior or policy that the dominance of some representational practices enjoy, or it can be a form of critique in which one opposes prevailing representational practices with alternatives. Therefore, a concern with textuality must necessary raise issues about the textuality (the meaning and value effects) of the language of inquiry itself. In order, then, to outline the textualist approach, we must develop further our understanding of the language analysis.

Textualist or poststructuralist modes of analysis emphasize "discourse" rather than language because the concept of discourse implies a concern with the meaning- and value-producing practices in language rather than simply the relationship between utterances and their referents. In the more familiar approaches to political phenomena (including the empiricist and phenomenological), language is treated as a transparent tool; it is to serve as an unobtrusive conduit between thoughts or concepts and things. In contrast, a discourse aperoach treats lan~e as opaque and encourages an analysis

of both the linjUistic p'ractice~ ~ithin wqi.f!LY!rismu~!t~1!9mJ;I!8 ~

economic, social, biological, and so on-are embedded and of the language

~Q(!iiiY!!i!!seilThai"anaiysrs'canbe prinUiriiy-strUctUraI (emphasizing the

grammatical, rhetorical, and narrative mechanisms responsible for shaping the phenomena treated as the referents of statements in various disciplines) or more historical (emphasizing the events through which various phenomena have found their way into language) .

. m.~~ID~!,.£,It~~",.Q.l!fe_m~."~!P..~~~£r~~tI!P~!>.E for lan~agejs ex~~~~"_ for the opacity metaphor, analysis becomes linguistically reflective and serves :tQ-oyercomeadetuslon·iliat-a-Viewonanguage·as·"triiisparent~commiirilCatlon-- cre8.teS:--One aspect of ilii8 aelusion' baS-heen etaborated-by·"Derrida "Under . the "rubric of phonocentrism. Derrida argues that because of our proximity to the process of signification as we speak, we tend to think that our utterances are wholly present to us: "The subject can hear or speak to himself and be affected by the signifier he produces without passing through an external detour, the world, the sphere of what is not 'his own'."4

.M_uch of ]Jerri4.a's analysis h!_s. been devoted to disclosing this delusion ~f.~e,?\\1Il~r§!ri.p_~[~.~!"'Jr.t.g:J!~~~J~"Q.Q_~..QlQY~escripted~·.-structure of signification upon which speakers must draw to be intellig!bl~

~~r::ili:@]iiJJi.:l;!~.&JH!~j~l. In support of this, he has shown, for example, that the linguist Benveniste was deluded into thinking that he was inquiring into the question of whether thought and language can be regarded as distinct, while he had unwittingly already accepted the distinction; he

Textualizing Global Polirics • IS

employed a philosophical vocabulary, including the concept of the category, that already holds them to be distinct. 5

This form of analysis, known as a deconstructive method of critique, is

moretiiiiU a -=~Ji~~!~~I<>'~::~~~~---~!!l!f3-1ia_s_:_£~e(r~~tJ!~~!aPl1y.sics~of-----pmence.'~.~iven. ~at .am~ng the political pr~sses that take place in an order is one of legitimating Its structures of meanmg, Derrida's deconstructive criticism can be shown to disclose how every social order rests on a forgetting

of the exclusiOn-pmctkes-"ilirough-"whlch'one"set- 'oC"<mearungs -hilS been

inStiiUiiOil8liZed" a:Jidvanous'otliei'--jxJssiblliues-otner possi6re--fOrDiSof me!.~j!2s=!T!y~~~~=~~~rOne"Oway"to"-capniii~"'ihlsprocess·'is--iO avoid. the familiar epistemological vocabulil!Yand become rhetorically im~rtinent. We can use a financial rhetoric to speak of the legitimation language that supports prevailing institutions. Working with this rhetoric, Wlad Godzich has argued that in' order to maintain their legitimacy, "institutions behave as if they did not carry this debt"; instead of acknowledging it, they "collect interest on it, thereby fostering the formation and maintenance of a privileged class."6

This insight can be applied effectively to the area of international studies.

The "foreign policies" of nation states are based on what have been shown to be representa,1iOiiilpractiCeS-tfiIo-ugb-WhIch various foms "of"giobat otherness have been created. For example, to refer to "LatiilAmerica"n'-is not just to refer to an area on the globe; it is to help reproduce an institutionalized form of dominance, one in which the minority, Hispanic part of populations in the region control the original indigenous groups. Even the use of the name of a recognized nation is a political gesture. For example, in an analysis of what is. now called Guatemala, it was noted that to say "Guatemala" is to "let oneself be governed by the prevailing geopolitical mode of representation and . . . to engage in the continuation of a complex, historically developed practice."?

To use the ordinary subjects, objects, and general grammars through which Guatemala is ordinarily apprehended is, in effect, to license a forgetting of the history of struggles through which such entities have come to be domesticated within modem international space. Such a forgetting is not a psychological but a textual phenomenon, for it is a scripted or institutionalized forgetting that exists in the dominant modes for representing international entities. Moreover, .to- ~~ this .. difference .~ ~ psycqological ang .al form of forgetting is to 0pSll !!te !BY for a more politicized form of

ys;, for ksoTar as one recognIZes that the language of inquiry is also a @jaung frame, one is encouragea' to qijes"fi()ii-iIleTeitiiii1ifflliea:i~ t;;0f th~ mvesngator, an to come sensitive to whether it is complicit and am.12gwor"'i"SYSteiil orp:o-werandiUtlioruyor diilIenging to it. -----~ This was demonstrattiCin a textually oriented reaiUilysis oT psychologist Irving Janis's treatment of the Kennedy administration's Bay of Pigs invasion

16 • InternarWnalJlntertextual Relations

decision. Janis had argued that the badly conceived decision was a result of the phenomenon he calls "group think," a tendency for the spirit of camaraderie or esprit, "an atmosphere of presumed consensus" (in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s terms) to prevent a critical questioning.s

The reanalysis is based on an attention to Janis's sources: Schlesinger's A Thousand Days and Theodore Sorenson's Kennedy. It is shown that Janis "tended to read his source-texts as documents which represented social reality straight-forwardly and unproblematically," and was unaware "of the variety of purposes that texts fulfill, and to have assumed the possibility of their having a real meaning rather than meanings constructed by varying interpretive resources."? Failing to heed the mythological element in the accounts published by Kennedy's intimate advisors, Janis neglected the motivation of the texts and uncritically adopted the ideological mechanisms built into the textual practices of his sources. In the terms of the more selfconscious writing of the analysts of Janis's text, Janis's work has an "intertextual dimension" in that his analysis incorporates the mythifications undertaken by Schlesinger and Sorenson.

Turning to the Schlesinger and Sorenson texts, the analysis shows how the rhetoric of the former is primarily oriented toward a se1f·justification of the author's role and a vindication of Kennedy, while the latter is built around a narrative in which Kennedy's mistakes are caused by an organizational context inherited from the Eisenhower administration. "The account is subtly orchestrated both to acquit Kennedy of stupidity and blame and to extract the maximum heroic potential from what has otherwise been called a 'perfect failure.' "10

There is a more thoroughgoing way in which textually oriented approaches apply discursive rather than psychological analysis and produce highly politicized modes of understanding. For example, rather than measuring attitudes to test propositions about what social and psychological characteristics account for various individual attitudes, political and otherwise, a discourse app!~ch would encouras..e rais&.~t:._q1;l£~tiOI!. of h~w it j~. that JJ!s: phenomenon ,?f the "~' found its way into the ~peech and!E~ .J1tictices and analyses of ~liti~~~"'p'rof~!!I?!!.' (Indeed, it is one of the most highly funded "objects" of attention in the discipline.)

To cash in on this aspect of discourse analysis, which becomes apparent when we eschew the idea Of language as simple communication, we can use once again the financial metaphor that Foucault has employed in his analysis of statements. Consider, for example, an utterance such as "We now know more security problems than ever before," which operates on at least two levels. As communication, it is clear what is conveyed; it is those already constituted phenomena, which have come to be regarded as related to issues of "national security" (for example, there is a well-developed archive on the security implications of past international events, which have been coded in

Textuolizing Global Politics • 17

terms of the security-oriented discourse.) But what remains silent and thus unthought within such a communicative perspective are the processes wherein the idea of "security" came to be a dominant reading strategy for spatia1izing the world and locating the United States as a knowing subject within such a world.

for ~t!;:3g~~;~a~~~~T6~~?p~~~t~~~'~lIirL:n~oa~tJ~f

chance and riSk, through the consolidation of national protection under the rubric of defense, to the highly surveillant notion of security is a passage that reflects the imposition of a dominant form of understanding on the world.ll As has been noted in the just cited study of Guatemala:

Modem "security" represents the ultimate in leaving nothing to chance. The number and intensity of interests congregated in modern super powers, for example, bas resulted in a comprehensive level of surveillance and intervention aU over the globe. Within this intensification of the securityoriented gaze, the meanings of landscapes and people everywhere are subjected to an intensified form of objectification. 12

It is therefore appropriate to think of security talk as a kind of discourse '\ ~t ~£~!1ts~~~'!~!l!i,ty.ru!!!5:9,q~take such a perspective, t) we have to overcome the disabling view of discourse as transpar~l { communication between subjects about things, a view within which the value ( ~l tlie statements of a discourse -lswhouy absor~ staien;;nt;;'-~th ,; value. FoucaUft;-stressm:g'thedlSCiirSlve"eCoDoiiiiesOf language, suggested ~a l ~g~:J9""W.~~J!~9it!9».rure«.c.\lP;wQn .. w.irb the:tr.uth..YA1ut= \ of individual statements and discursive formations as a whole: J

To analyze a discursive formation is to weigh the "value" of statements, a value that is not defmed by their truth, that is not gauged by a secret content but which characterizes their place, their capacity for circulation and exchange, their possibility of transformation, not only in the economy of discourse, but more generally in the administration of scarce resources."

This view of discourse alerts us to the political content sequestered in the slib)eCtSTk1iids~2.1?~s~,ana lrl~'J.lotisfup.s ~bO.YLWIiiClLi$_,~ ~. It shows that statements can be evaluated as political resources, for discourse is, in Foucault's terms, an "asset." Moreover, this approach to analyzing discourse (which represents a shift from the familiar rhetoric of epistemological language to a figuration related to distribution, exchange, and control) is characteristic of poststructuralist ways of textwilizing social phenomena. But there is more to the approach than the textual metaphor. To understand the world as mediated through textual practices is to

18 • IntemlltWnalllntertextual Relations

encourage some modes of questioning and inquiry that are unfamiliar within more traditional empirical and interpretive approaches.

What . poststructuralist approaches have shown so far. is . that the orthOdoXies'-ofoW:'sociaI an(r'politrcarworlds-are'recreate(nn'ihe~process of'

wrigng, in_t!!~style o{thetexts-ihrOiiihi!~~~-o~~~_~~~_~_,!~~tan~,_,_ ,9L!!t~",~~!.Jg_"~~Y~._~A.E9~~!!I!£~~~:_And no form of wri~ is exe~t; analysis itself is a textual practice that is intimately related to the political practices it ilims to disclose. In order to exemplify analysis as a f~

. textual-practice, it is useful once again to turn to a contrast between a textually oriented mode of reading and the more familiar, political psychology. The psychological approach to international relations, has focused, among other things, on the cognitive components through which individuals "perceive" aspects of policy. In. order. to t~!tualize ~litical_e_~~~olo.gy_~~,

at the same time, demonstrate the difference in problematization between a_

. psychological and texwarapproach, we offer-a brief readiii'goC-whai-could best be termed the politics of fear. We begin this reading with the recognitro; that individuals, in theiC contributions to the meanings shaping public life, cannot be understood simply as mentalistic information processors, but rather as socially and temporally situated beings, connected to each other in a network of practices. This means, among other things, that we must resist many of modernity'S professional and academic discourses that have produced modem "man" as psychological being (as Philip Rieff pointed out a few decades ago). Were we to treat this psychological identity as a fact rather than as a historically produced text, our analysis would be paralyzed in the same way as are these psychologizing practices. ~:. than f~usin!L9D individual beliefs or other cognitive components, then, we argue that it is more enabling to understiiia-:bow-iiilaersWidiiigs-are situated m aomams of Eractic~InStead of exploring people'~~beliefs, for example, ~.~~.~aJl -do a

__ g~~28.Y. of belief itself, locating beliefs in the context of the his~Q_Iy_9f .£!"!ctices related to the management of danger. Beliefs, as an identity for persons, are a kind of data, providing a way of reading the script of modernity, rather than an analytic device aiding interpretation. To note that modem individuals have "beliefs" is not to take cognizance of a fact about persons, but to notice the contemporary way of constructing them. !h:

~nalyzin8.lM!LP.!~E!I~I?f9!'.~()~9.~~ .. ~!? ... J:J1~~~.~~ .. '!~.~~ ... ~~()_~~y~j!!_ the direction of disclosing the more cryptic modes of legitimation for public

(and "foreign"l ~=~~ ... "." ... '--- ... -."."-~.~-- .. --.--.--- ... --.---. .--,~-

A genealogical gloss on beliefs is almost inescapable when we heed a conversation (described in Barry Lopez's work on the Arctic region) that took place early in the twentieth century between the Danish anthropologist, Knud Rasmussen, and an Eskimo shaman. It becomes clear, in Lopez's treatment of the exchange, that Eskimos use the concept of fear rather than

Textualizing Global Politics • 19

belief as a central epistemological category because of the relatively intimate connection between knowledge and their face-to-face experiences:

Eskimos do not maintain this intimacy with nature without paying a certain price. When I have thought about the ways in which they differ from people in my own culture, I have realized that they are more afraid than we are. On a day-to-day basis, they have more fear. Not of being dumped into cold water from an umiak, not a debilitating fear. They are afraid because they accept fully what is violent and tragic in nature. It is a fear tied to their knowledge that sudden, cataclysmic events are as much a part of life,' of really living, as are the moments when one pauses to look at something beautiful. A Central Eskimo shaman named Aua, queried by Knud Rasmussen about Eskimo beliefs, answered, "We do not believe, We fear." 14

The first interpretive dimension of our reading is phenomenological, for the shaman's response encourages questions about the ontological conditions and premises of the question. What is it, one can ask, that has made the concept of belief so significant in those cultures that have produced such social sciences as anthropology, or, in more theoretical language, what are

. the historically produced practices that we must understand to di~los.~_!!t.~ discursive economies immanent in the way we l!S;!;, the idea of ll_e:l,i.d._,

The distance that the shaman's response gives us from our own practices helps, for we can recognize that among what he is saying is that for the Eskimo, beliefs are an extravagance. The pattern of need fulfillment and the survival demands placed almost daily on the Eskimo make-it sensible to link knowing with fearing, in contrast with an agricultural/industrialized society in which knowledge of possible dangers is bureaucratized. Given the layer of mediation between what there is to be feared and the more immediate experiences of the average person, it is difficult to have fear function as an effective, epistemological category as it does for the Eskimo.

"Bel!.~r' _~~!p-~_~_~~lev2!!~!1Um...!!!i~nti!Y_9f wple w1!p _l}ave, ~ong o.ther things, a complex division of labor with respect to survival and even with res~t .to lower-level value issues. The sheer size of industrialized and centralized populations-along with the growth of mediated strUctures of communication-make cognitive categories for receiving information more significant than the kind of alertness that fear implies. When face-to-face ways of coordinating collective action and maintaining authority are surpassed, and legitimation for such things as national-level policy requires media such as print, voice-at-a-distance, and remote visual signs, attributes of the receptivity structure, related to a person's acceptance of remote authority, becomes relevant. In short, "we" in modernity have beliefs because there e.!i!t_institutionalized interests willi respecttOnoww~tion

.!_bout ~;note-experien~~~~"~"·~-'-·'-"-'·-'~---'-~··""··~·- ....

20 • lmemotionalllnterl8Xtual Relations

Whether or not one finds this brief genealogy of belief wholly plausible, it serves to .!!9~..£9,n;,1!L~1?£!9,1!.~J1~l!Lt;!l~}!~=~~~~~~t.!~!!!.,~L9~~tioning that is relatively unfamiliar inJ~ltemation~.~~~ The historicizing gesture with which we situated the exemplary cross-cultural conversation was aimed not at discovering a causal nexus in order to explain something. Arid it was not an effort at interpretation in the traditional sense; it was not an extended account of the Eskimo culture so that one can locate the meaning of an event within an elaborated model of the whole of which it is a part. Rather,

~it..£ex:.v.esLt!U!is~....f!.Q.m the present in su~ a way that wha~~e often. se.m.....M..R.Ctrennial and naMal ~ (a person's beliefs)~ so that we recognize that "beliefs" are the result of the historical~

or:_~_.~~~molop.£~ c~~~ is, ~eeR~cated ~~sto~

_~e,:,~Jop~~~~~ Wl.!!~~~~)s J~~~'!iE!-l~ w:!!l .~_~a.!.s.~~~ di,~~ connect with a knowledge p_~cticc: that we want to c€?nsider JX!1,iticizing. _

As a first step in this direction, it is important to note that the context for textualizing modernity's subjects, objects,and thematics is a recognition that what is unusual about the present is the degree of distance between experience and knowledge such that one must increasingly depend on knowledge agents nominated within modernity's knowledge-related discourses (the prevailing, authoritative representational practices through which experience is mediated and evaluated). Thus, what the scenario concerning the genealogy of beliefs provides, among other things, is an intimation of how representational practices relate to policy issues. More specifically, because we live in a world in which:,~. is J.!!~t!!!!~o..g~,.pgsQns interested in relating their fears to situations of danger have to become consumers of representations from mstttutlons -OOt 1iave-tli(n~cy tE produce interpretations of danger. However, when something is recognized as a representatioDil practice raTher than an authoritative description, it can be treated as contentious. It is simplyJh~_<;@~~~J.JPSt~LID!~tj9.~J'?~s of political analysis help to naturalize reigning interpretations rather than ··repiiiiil.'gtneIrmeaning- and value-constituting effeet8.lli- contiistWfth such unreflective modes is Paul Virilio's analysis of the modem text within

which problems of international 'danger are produced.

~kili.q,. the modem text of international danger is scripted

----···-. ·_. • 'e."·."_".,,,,,,, .".~ ".:IT'!:=-

..bxJQSistifal experts, for we are in what he calls "the age of logistics,' in which all seemingly noiliDilitary SOCial processes are c'C"'vec"ionzeaw' in aCg)i~c~~.!h preparation for war .Tr"r:n:-tliiSera;-iii-wlilcli""ogistica1 thinking is hi~e "civilian" is given no status in the discourse within which defense against nuclear surprise attack (one of the primary interpretations of the danger) is presented. As Virilio puts it: "The civilian fmds himself discriminated against in favor of a kind of crystallization 9f th~...§£!entjfi~~ili!!!1."16

The . preeminence of this mode of military intelligence amounts to a

Textualizing Global Politics • 21

deplliticizing of international danger insofar as it de privileges anything but

~tiflcTriiiI1taifstanQpomt asvilidKnowiedge:Amongthemosi·promlnent" concepts that belong to t:hiSlogistical mode of representing nuclear danger is that of deterrence. The age of deterrence, in which planning is skewed in the direction of reducing the threat of sudden nuclear annihilation, is characterized by the masking of other kinds of war or modes of violence between states that, ironically, deterrence thinking encourages. Deterrence thinking is thus what Virilio calls an "intelligence of war that eludes politics. "1

The -mystifying of the state of war that now exists is the illusion that war itself is only full-scale nuclear combat. While logistical thinking preoccupies itself with the avoidance of such catastrophies, the armed hostilities that go on are represented not as war but as some form of "interstate delinquencies," as "state terrorism."18 The modem politics of Fcupation wi~ extermination ~ounts!. ~en~ to a. depo~~~~!l~J all VIolent coiiffijnfittons that stop S!fu..rt:- 9.f ,gM£l~pat.

This pattern of representation allows, increasingly, what Virilio calls "acts of war without war": the taking or rescue of hostages, retaliatory raids for ship movements interpreted as hostile or transgressive, and so on. The point is that these acts of violence, which elude the obloquy of being "acts of war," operate within a mystified zone, within representations monopolized within logistical thinking and thus outside of a broader, politicizing impetus.

According to Virilio, this demise of political perspective on the production of international danger is owed in part to the "dwindling of the last commodity, duration."19 The privileging of speed-understood as the reduced time one has to make decisions in a nuclear confrontation-has encouraged the technicalizing of the state conflicts. As long as danger is identified within the ambit of state conflicts, with the status of the decisional issue reduced to the problem of making "electronic decisions," interpretations will remain depoliticized.l" A politicizing textual eractice is thus not ~L

ner of introducing an alternative epistemological voca....EmI!..~LiLj~ intimately connected with a . oroughgoing opposition to frames. of meaning that deteXtiialiieanQ1lie'reDy"sequester(orID~r-and 'autii~i!iY:~· .. ,..

Notes

l. Thomas Sebeok, "Enter Textuality: Echoes from the Extra-Terrestrial," Poetics Today 6 (1985), p. 657.

2. Michel Foucault, "The Order of Discourse," in Language and Politics, ed.

Michael Shapiro (New York: New York University Press. 1984), p. 127.

3. Aldous Huxley, The Grey Eminence (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944).

22 • InternatWnallIntertextual Relations

4. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 78.

5. Jacques Derrlda, "The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics," in Textual Strategies, ed. Josue Harari (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 82-120.

6. Wlad Godzich, "Mterward," in Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 162.

7. Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography and Policy Ana6lsis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 92.

8. Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).

9. Jonathan Potter, Peter Stringer, and Margaret Wetherell, Social Texts and Contexts: Literature and Social Psychology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 101.

10. Ibid., p. 106

11. Bradley S. Klein, "Strategic Discourse and Its Alternatives," Occasional Paper no. 3 (New York: Center on Violence and Human Survival, 1987).

12. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation, p. 94.

13. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 120.

14. Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Scribners, 1986), p. 201.

15. Paul Vnilio/Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark Polizotti (New York:

Semiotext(e), 1983). p. 16.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., p. 18.

18. Ibid., p. 26.

19. Ibid., p. 28.

20. Ibid., p. 29.

Part II Dialogue

There is no first or last discourse, and dialogical context knows no limits (it disappears into an unlimited past and in our unlimited future). Even past meanings, that is those that have arisen in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (completed once and for all, finished), they will always change (renewing themselves in the course of the dialogue's subsequent development, and yet to come). At every moment of the dialogue, there are immense and unlimited masses of forgotten meanings, but in some subsequent moments, as the dialogue moves forward, they will return to memory and live in renewed form (in a new context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will celebrate its rebirth.

-Mikhail Bakhtin, "Concerning Methodology in the Human Sciences"

3

The Prince and "The Pauper":

Tradition, Modernity, and Practice in the Theory of International Relations

R.B.J. Walker

In canvassing the problems and achievements of contemporary thinking about international relations, Kal Holsti has repeated a familiar refrain. "International theory," he says, "is in a state of disarray."

In the past decade, the three-centuries long intellectual consensus which organized philosophical speculation, guided empirical research, and provided at least hypothetical answers to the critical questions about international politics has broken down. New conceptions and images of the world, and how it works in the diplomatic, military, and commercial domains, have arisen. Scholars have offered trenchant criticisms of the "realist" tradition, which goes back to Hobbes and Rousseau, severely challenging the assumptions and world views upon which it is based. Some have outlined alternatives, not so much because they promise better understanding through methodological innovation, but because they are supposedly more consistent with contemporary realities. The continued underdevelopment of many new states, combined with the startling pace of technological transformation, have raised new kinds of questions about international politics.equestions which were not relevant to the kinds of problems contemplated by our intellectual ancestors and most of those working within the realist, or classical tradition.'

In this passage, Holsti stresses three themes that have been common to many other attempts since at least the mid-1970s to take stock of how we ought to examine the "realities" of international relations. There is the observation about "paradigm proliferation," about the loss of a clear

I am indebted to all those who responded to earlier drafts of this chapter that were presented at the British International Studies Association annual meeting held in Aberystwyth, Wales, in December 1987 and at the Workshop on Post-Structuralist ReadingIWriting(feaching in International Relations at the Center for International Studies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in April 1988.

26 • InrernatiunaUlntertextual Relations

consensus as to what the study of international relations involves, both substantively and methodologically. There is the connection between this tendency toward paradigm proliferation and a sense that the phenomena being studied are changing in the ways that are inadequately grasped by established theoretical orientations. And finally, there is the reference to "the tradition:' specifically the classical or realist tradition, in this case linked explicitly to the names of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rosseau,

Enormous literatures now exist on both the proliferation of research orientations and the claim that the substantive character of international relations is being transformed. However, both literatures rest upon a st\mce toward the prior claim that there is a tradition. This claim has been subject to relatively little attention-especially in the United States, where the analysis of international relations has absorbed the unfortunate habit, characteristic of political science in general, of treating "the tradition" as both somehow naturally given in the "great texts" and largely irrelevant to the analysis of modern human affairs. Even where the history of political thought is taken seriously, and where the difficulties in the way of understanding any particular text are well known, it remains almost a truism to claim that there is an identifiable tradition of international theory against which current tendencies in both theory and practice can be situated, measured, and judged.

Reference to such a tradition may be justified as a simple practical convenience. The story to be told has to begin somewhere. But it is not always easy to begin at the beginning, if only because the identification of a point of origin depends on where we think we are now. Thus, a practical convenience is always liable to turn into a powerful myth of origin. Other points of departure are closed off.2

The identification of a tradition of international relations theory has now become especially problematic. We Jive in a world in which there has been a proliferation not only of research paradigms in the academic analysis of international relations, but more generally, of myths of origin. The Hegelian trek to universality still echoes as "progress," "development," or "modernization," but living within "modernity," we are just as likely to be bemused by histories as seduced by Geist. Even from the centers of fading empires, amid ample evidence of fundamentalist self-righteouness about past and future, origins shift and recede. Reified temporal horizons give meaning to where we think we may be going. They also provide a sense of who this "we" is. All too often, "we" turn out to be those who have "progressed," "developed," or "modernized," to be distinguished from "they" who have not. These horizons seem increasingly tenuous, certainly inadequate as a way of orienting either serious academic analysis or progressive political practice.

Contemporary claims about intellectual traditions in general are caught

The Prince and «The Pauper' • 27

between an awareness that our dominant myths of origin-all those stories about a move from backward to advanced, from passionate to rational, from barbarism to enlightenment-harbor an embarrassment of subtexts (ethnocentrism, racism, the arrogance of empires, the butchery of wars and extermination camps) and a realization that these stories still inform the most basic categories through which we understand and act in the world. The term deoelopmeru, for example, now demands quotation marks, a distancing of accounts of what is going on in particular societies from the evolutionary teleology with which the term is indelibly associated. Caught in this way, contemporary social and political thought has become embroiled in far-reaching debates about modernity and the promises of enlightenment. A questioning of received temporal horizons-of myths of origin, of accounts of continuity and discontinuity, of reified teleologies-has become a precondition for engaging with the literature on contemporary social and political thought at all.

The questioning often leads to familiar answers. Marx could resolve a critique of the achievements of capitalism through a Hegelian claim about the universal subject of history. Even the pessimistic Weber could resolve his deep ambivalence about rationalization through an appeal to a new hero, the protoexistential individual. Drawing on both, while also displaying a deep nostalgia for the universalizing aspirations of Kant, Jurgen Habermas can still see ways of fulfilling the promises of enlightenment through practices of communication.

Yet anyone now trying to come to terms with Marx, Weber, or Habermas, not to mention the ingrained habits of Anglo-American liberalism or "common-sense," quickly fmds that the promises of enlightenment seem very elusive. For those-such as Theodor Adorno, Iean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and the many others loosely identified as poststructuralists or postmodernists-the grand Hegelian trek (whether written as a Hebrew parable of fulfillment in time, a Greek story about the journey from becoming to being, or an enlightenment claim about universal reason) must be put into radical doubt. AU its guarantees, such writers suggest, no longer reassure.! Meanwhile, and in a less rarified atmosphere, we are becoming increasingly aware of other stories, of people who have been written out of the Hegelian script. For those drawing on other chronologies, other cultures, and other traditions, dreams of a universal history appear more convincingly as the particular claims of a culturally specific history, as claims arising from historical practices in which universalist aspiration is closely entwined with the legitimation of domination,"

To move from a seemingly innocent reference to a tradition to these large questions about the philosophy of history is obviously to enter upon very murky and contestable terrain. Most scholars trying to make sense of the contemporary world are likely to tum back very quickly. This is

28 • IntenlQtionalllntertextual Relations

especially the case among theorists of international relations, who show a certain pride in their immunity to theoretical and philosophical diversions. Whether they defend their claim to hardheadedness and realism in an empiricist account of socioscientific explanation or by reference to the supposed pragmatism of public-policy analysis, they are likely to suggest that loose references to a tradition are indeed just a convenient place to start, a polite way of locating their concerns within an established disciplinary matrix. If pushed, such scholars are likely to suggest an appropriate divimon of labor, just as there is between, for example, political science and political theory, except that the distinction between political theory and political science is itself grounded in a number of highly dubious assumptions about the possibility of distinguishing between normative and empirical concerns. If we have learned anything at all from those innumerable debates about science and values from the }%os and 19708, it is that empirical theory or policy analysis cannot be arbitrarily isolated from the metatheoretical and philosophical assumptions that are simply drowned out by loud appeals to "objectivity" or "reality."

References to a tradition of international relations theory are by no means innocent. This is not to say they are entirely misleading. They offer a number of important clues about the historically constituted nature of both the theory and practice of international politics. But-particularly as they are inserted into textbooks, passing references, and obligatory footnotesaccounts of a tradition legitimize and circumscribe what counts as proper scholarship. They are thus an obvious subject for inquiry by anyone concerned with developing critical perspectives on contemporary international politics. Indeed, I shall suggest, the silences and limits engendered by claims about a tradition of international relations theory should be of interest to students of contemporary political life in general.

Two aspects of the way this tradition is usually rendered are of particular interest here. The first concerns what is on the face of it the rather Peculiar relationship between theories of international relations and other areas of contemporary social and political inquiry. This peculiarity is highlighted by contrasting responses to the problems posed by the claim to a tradition. For although the twentieth century has seen many attempts to lay Hegel's Geist to rest (with poststructuralism as the latest funeral oration), the defenders of modernity remain in the ascendent. For most contemporary social arid political analysts, it still makes sense to speak of a tradition of social and political thought, whatever unfortunate anachronism or deification of great texts has occurred) simply because it is possible-even necessary-to interpret history as a long march to modernity. From the high groun.d of modernity, the critics may then be dismissed as dangerous relativists, as unwilling to recognize the obvious achievements of progress or at least to put up with the costs of disenchantment with sufficient Weberian fortitude.

The Prince and "The Pauper" • 29

In the case of theories of international relations, however, the high ground of modernity quickly gives way to shifting sand more easily. The "tradition" of international relations theory, with all its claims about necessities of state and the priority of power over ethics, is often articulated in opposition to a modernist reading of historical progress. The contrasting attitudes toward modernity presumed possible within and between states continue to inform the way we appropriate scholarly strategies are justified. This has become especially apparent as a consequence of recent attempts to insist on the need for greater critical and philosophical-as opposed to merely methodological-rigor in this context. For ironically perhaps, but significandy, both defenders of the tradition and many of those engaged in working toward a critical perspective on international relations share a deep distrust of the grand trek to universalism. Contrary to all those portrayals of the great debates in international relations theory as a contest between a relativist realism and a universalist idealism, the self-identified realists have found themselves being challenged precisely on the ground of historicism and difference. And whether in terms 01 scientific method, or of the categories of liberal political economy, many contemporary (structural or neo-) realists have been caught trying to defend a tradition that can be traced back to Thucydides while also laying claim to the universalist categories of modernity.! It now seems clear enough that the conventional juxtaposition of a tradition of international relations theory with the claims of modernity within and between states must be put into serious question.

The second aspect of the presumed tradition of concern here is Machiavelli. More than almost anyone else, certainly more than either Hobbes or Rousseau, it is Machiavelli who most symbolizes what the tradition of international relations theory is all about. I want to suggest that it is possible to take Machiavelli very seriously indeed and that he gives crucial insights to those seeking to develop a critical perspective on contemporary international relations in particular and political life in general. However, to take Machiavelli seriously is to confront not the caricature of tradition, but someone who can be read in ways that problematize the most basic assumptions on which claims about the tradition are based. Contrary to both the so-called realists who treat Machiavelli as one of their own and the so-called idealists who castigate him for his supposed realism, Machiavelli poses questions about political community and practice that may still be pursued even though his answers expose his own historical and conceptual horizons. This is emphatically not a matter of making a claim about "what Machiavelli really said" that may be counterposed to the caricature of the tradition, nor to demonstrate once again that Machiavelli. was not a Machiavellian. It is, rather, to indicate one way of identifying some of the discursive practices that have turned a historical problematic into an ahistorical apology for the violence of the present. It is also a way of

30 • IntemQtionalJlntertextual Relations

suggesting a connection between the attempt to develop a critical dimension to international relations theory and emerging forms of political practice.

n

Although references to a tradition of international relations theory are common enough, they are far from monolithic. Some start with the Greek city-states, others with the Italian Renaissance, and others with the mature states-system of eighteenth-century Europe. There are also minor variations in the way representatives of the tradition are selected. Beyond this, however, it is useful to distinguish three rather different ways in which the tradition has been described. Although they are all closely related, the first two have been particularly susceptible to reification into an ahistorical claim about the unchanging realities of international politics. In the third version, we come closer to the central issue that is at stake in the way the claim to a tradition of international relations theory has been articulated.

There has been, first, the account of a permanent debate, the persistent confrontation between the houses of realism and idealism. E.H. Carr's rendition remains paradigmatic. Ian Clark's identification of Rousseau with a "tradition of despair" and Kant with a "tradition of optimism" is a fairly typical recent version," With varying degrees of qualification, it informs surveys of the discipline and the way the main theoretical traditions are categorized in the textbooks. This account many feign sympathy for both sides, or it may be openly partisan. In either case, we fmd something rather similar to all those textbook histories of philosophy in which the eternal debate between rationalists and empiricists bears an uncanny resemblance to categories popularized as a consequence of Kant's attempt to synthesize them. In this case too, it is not unreasonable to suspect that claims about an eternal debate rest upon a historically specific framing of the available alternatives.

This account of the tradition as a two-way debate has often been challenged. From one direction, we fmd the Martin Wight-Hedley Bull triad in which something identified with Hugo Grotius acts as a kind of sensible middle road.? However, as with all appeals to a middle road, the intended compromise reinforces the legitimacy of the two poles as the limits of permitted discourse. From another direction, similar problems beset Stanley Hoffman or even Hans Morgenthau who, while rejecting the house of idealism, feel uncomfortable with a pure power .politics and thus seek refuge in a Weberian "ethic of responsibility." But again, as with Weber himself, the "ethic of absolute ends" remains the silent possibility against which necessities and responsibilities are articulated. While dismissed as

The Prince and «The Pauper" • 31

Unpractical, universalist aspiration provides the horizon against which the Sisyphean efforts of statespeople are to be judged. 8

In a second formulation, the partisans of realism claim victory. The eternal dialogue becomes an essentialistic monologue, although a number of theatrical figures-such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, Morgentbau, and Carr-are invited to read the script. Here terms such as power, state, and national interest appear with great regularity, interspersed with claims about human nature or political necessity, structural determinism or the tragic condition of human existence in general. For the 1D0st part, the list is constantly repeated as an article of faith, although the odd complaint about anachronism or even gross misrepresentation can certainly be found. Occasionally, serious attempts are made to justify the linking of names in this way into a continuous tradition. R.N. Berki's 1981 text or Friedrich Meinecke's classic account of the doctrine of raison d'itat stand out in this respect."

In the third formulation, the tradition is defined by negation, by what it is not. And what it is not, by most accounts, is political theory. Sometimes this is intended to suggest that it is concerned with human relationships that are not subject to a centralized authority, as if centralized authority were a precondition for political life in general rather than characteristic of some forms of political life in particular. In its more important rendition, however, the account of a tradition by negation-perhaps best represented by Martin Wight's celebrated essay on why there is no international theory-suggests that theories of international relations theory are marginal to political theory.l'' They are said to be characterized precisely by a refusal of the Enlightenment vision of universal progress, by a willingness to face up to contingency, pluralism, and violence. Instead of an appeal to a tradition of classic texts, there are references to the "relative scarcity," "unsystematic nature," and "intellectual and moral poverty" of the scattered writings of historians, people, and the occasional philosopher. Like the other two versions of the appeal to a tradition, Wight's account sets important constraints on what theories of international relations can or cannot be, But instead of a prohibition against idealism or utopianism in general, the limits are defmed by a particular form of idealism: the political theory of life within states. International relations theory must therefore avoid the "domestic analogy," It must not transpose the universals, the teleology, the Whiggish history characteristic of accounts of political life within the states into accounts of relations between states,

Wight argues an explicit case for what is more usually rendered as a simple and ahistorical contrast between political community. within and international anarchy without. Moreover, Wight's simultaneous appeal to a middle ground, whether one reads this as a reclamation of Hugo Grotius or of David Hume, makes the contrast less sharp than usual. Most significantly,

32 • Internarionalllntertextual Relations

Wight situates his analysis in an account of the historical context in which this spatial differentiation became constitutive of modem political life in the transformations of the late medieval era.'! The myth of an eternal tradition almost collapses in the face of a serious historical analysis. Unfortunately, the myth of an eternal debate remains in the background. Wight's three categories seem as deeply reified as those of Carr. Historical analysis gives way once again to a tradition that provides us with both a myth of origin and a clear boundary beyond which theories of international relations should not trespass.

Even so, in Wight's rendition, the problem at least becomes a little clearer. The difficulty is not the dubious list of names or the endless great debate, but rather the way theories of international relations become framed as a counterpoint to another great tradition-that other long list of names and texts that populate courses in the history of political thought. It seems that theories of international relations are always destined to be the poor relation of something somehow more "authentic," more "political," more "critical" -or at least to be always struggling to catch up with all those

r concepts, techniques, and aspirations that can be taken for granted by those concerned with human communities within states.

m

Machiavelli enters into this problematic in a way that is at once straightforward and disconcertingly complex-much like Machiavelli's own writing. At the simplest level, Machiavelli appears as the paradigmatic "realist." He has become the most privileged icon, the most resonant symbol,' the name (almost) at the top of the list of names, the writer of the text that more than any other has become synonymous with "the tradition." Read as the paradigmatic realist, he is immediately reduced to instant formulas-about the priority of power over ethics, about the necessity of violence and intrigue in the affairs of state, about ends justifying means and raison d'etat.

All of which is clearly not to read Machiavelli at all, but to endorse a caricature, a product of a long, complex, and particularly suspicious interpretive history. For many scholars, in fact, this interpretive history is at least as interesting as anything Machiavelli himself ever wrote.P As part of a reified tradition, Machiavelli remains elusive, embedded in layer upon layer of translations, anachronisms, interpretations, and reinterpretations. Perhaps more than any other figure who has been implicated in the tradition of international relations theory, Machiavelli's name is indicative of the way claims to "realism" are intricately bound up with textualizations, reifieations, idealizations, and mysiifications.

It is true that The Prince is a seductive text in more ways than one.

The Prince and "The Pauper" • 33

Countless students have been impressed by its seemingly timeless grasp of the way people act. Too many of these students, one might say, have gone on to teach international relations. Yet the difficulties with this typical initial impression are clear enough.

The seemingly straightforward insistence on the necessity for deception and dirty deeds if a prince is to remain in power-the things that usually leadto claims abut the way Machiavelli distinguishes power from ethics-is immediately rendered problematic by the attempt, in chapter 8, to distinguish between violence in general and the minimum recourse to violence in pursuit of 'Virtu. The concept of virtu itself explodes with meanings and resonances that render any straightforward translation into modem terms extremely precarious. The historically specific resonance of the term 'Virtu is paralleled by the specialized focus of the entire text. The first few chapters of The Prince, with their binary classifications of different types of states, make it clear that this particular text is referring only to the special problems of the new states. The text that is so often treated as the unproblematic origin of tradition is itself obsessed with the highly problematic nature of origins, of ~ foundations, of the establishment and subsequent politics of traditions. Moreover, The Prince turns out to be one text among many. To read the Discourses on Livy, History of Florence or The Art of War is to become even more aware that Machiavelli writes in the context of some very particular circumstances and that he has to be understood within the broader context of Renaissance life and culture.

Far from being someone in touch with some timeless essence of political life, Machiavelli appears within this broader perspective as someone trying to make sense of historically specific circumstances and attempting to do so in the discursive categories then available to him. As, say, Quentin Skinner and John Pocock have argued at considerable length, Machiavelli had to struggle to speak about an emerging form of political community-the citystate-in categories dominated by the sensibilities of Christian universalism. To read Machiavelli in the light of even a superficial acquaintance with this kind of literature is to see that while it may be possible to trace a "tradition" that may be called Machiavellian, it is one concerned less with "realism" or "power politics" than with "humanism," "republicanism," or "civic virtue." It may also be possible to trace a number of important antecedents, but such an exercise does not take us automatically along a mythical highway back to Thucydides. Instead we encounter Roman historians and interpreters of Plato such as Polybius.P

Still, despite this more complex figure who emerges from the specialized literature of the "new historians" and other interpreters of the Italian Renaissance, it might be argued that the traditional caricature is not entirely without foundation. One might admit that while Machiavelli may be invoked too frequently in a crude and unscholarly way, it does make some sense to

34 • Intemationalllntertextual Relations

identify him as someone who managed to articulate the most pressin problems of international relations theory in a forceful and provocativ manner. After all, whatever else he may have written, he did write specificall about the prince (read statesman) in a situation of extreme danger (rea, international relations). He did speak of the dangers of allowing a universalis ethic to override the pluralist or historicist ethics (as opposed to a simpl power politics) necessary for creating and sustaining a community of 'Dirt, (read civil society or state). Thus, while the identification of MachiaveU with a crude. distinction between idealism and realism (understood as ; distinction between ethics and power) must be called into question Machiavelli might still be saved as the theorist who most incisively articulate the fundamental distinction between two ontologically distinct forms 0 political life, whether this is understood as public and private ethics or a: political life within states and international relations between states.

Furthermore, his distinction between necessary and unnecessary violence his insights into what Sheldon Wolin has called an "economy of violence,"!' may even be invoked as a link between the Machiavellian sense of virtu anc Weber's ethic of responsibility. In this sense, Machiavelli might even hi; rescued from the more extreme renditions of "the tradition" and adoptee by all those who seek some middle ground between freedom and necessity: is and ought, reality and possibility-except that, as Machiavelli himsell kept insisting, it is no easier to work toward the middle than to begin at the beginning.

None of these lines of argument permit us to classify Machiavelli as the archrealist. They suggest, on the contrary, that his primary concern was not international relations at all. To the extent that he was concerned with international relations and military affairs-and they certainly preoccupied him extensively-it is as a consequence of his account of the possibilities of political life within states. If it is useful to identify him with a tradition at all, it is a tradition concerned with the possibility of establishing a life of virtu within autonomous political communities. The reference, quite obviously, is to a classical conception of the polis, to a specific understanding of the location and character of political life within a bounded territorial space. Because this bounded space is identified as the location of political community, as the container in which. republican virtu can flourish, the outside comes to be understood as the place where political community-as opposed to hegemony-is impossible.

In this sense, Machiavelli does confirm the account of a tradition suggested by Martin Wight. It is a tradition by negation. But if it is a tradition by negation, it make little sense to speak of a tradition of international relations theory as such. If we are to take Machiavelli, or Wight, seriously, it is necessary to come to terms with the conception of political community that is being negated. There can be no meaningful

The Prince and «The Pauper" • 35

reference to a tradition of international relations theory without specifying what one means by a tradition of political theory. But even here, references to Machiavelli can have sharply contrasting implications. Machiavelli both affU1I1S a particular understanding of what a political community can be and, equally important, suggests how that conception of political community must be brought into question. While from one direction Machiavelli can usefully be understood as someone who participates in a conception of political life that depends on a capacity to distinguish between life inside and outside a spatially organized political community, between self and other, and between Community and anarchy, from another direction the very terms that Machiavelli is led to deploy can also be read as calling this distinction into question.

IV

Although Machiavelli spends a considerable amount of energy writing about military affairs, his observations in this context are an expression of his conception of political community at least as much as of the character of international relations. Take, for example, his discussion of fortresses in the twentieth chapter of The Prince. Fortresses, he says

are either useful or not, according to circumstances: if they benefit you in one way they injure you in another. This matter may be dealt with as follows: that prince who is more afraid of his own people than of foreigner should build fortresses; but one who is more afraid of foreigners than of his people should. not consider constructing them • . . although you may have fortresses, they will not save you if the people hate you; for once the people have taken up arms, they never lack for foreigners who will aid them.

Concluding his discussion, he writes:

Considering all these matters, therefore, I praise both those princes who build fortresses and those who do not; and I criticize any prince who, trusting in fortresses, considers the hatred of the people to be of little

,

importance.

Two themes are conspicuously absent from this analysis although they do not entirely escape his attention elsewhere. There is little sense that Machiavelli is concerned with treating fortresses as elements of an inventory of forces, as part of some strategic balance of power. Nor is there any concern with the way new technologies might render fortresses obsolete. Rather, Machiavelli's primary emphasis is on two other themes, both of

36 • I ntemationali I ntertextual Relations

which illustrate his understanding of the possibilities of political community rather than his distillation of the enduring realities of international relations.

The first involves the way he makes a direct connection between military affairs and the idea of civic virtu, between the qualities of skill and courage, virility and virtuosity, and the requirements of citizenship within the political community;" While it is true that the virile warrior may be required to engage in conflict outside the community, the qualities represented by the warrior, the man of virtu, are presented first and foremost as the qualities necessary for effective participation and citizenship within the community.

The second theme is closely related to the first, but is usually framed in a more abstract way. It concerns Machiavelli's insistence that political affairs, whether these concern fortresses Or princes, must be understood and judged "according to circumstances." His fundamental complaint about fortresses is that they are fixed, that it is too easy to rely upon them as a guarantee of permanence. They inhibit a capacity to respond to changing conditions. Similarly, the 'Virtu of a prince is understood in terms of a capacity to respond to fortuna, to the capricious bitch goddess who is "the arbiter of one half of our actions." Fortuna is in turn compared to "one of those ruinous rivers that, when they become enraged, flood the plains, tear down to the trees and buildings, taking up earth from one spot and placing it upon another.t"? Thus, the concept of virtu invokes not only the military qualities of the warrior and civic qualities necessary for citizenship, but also the qualities through which the virile hero is able to seduce fortuna, to prepare the banks and dykes against the oncoming flood.

In short we have, in a specifically Renaissance-humanist language, in the images and metaphors of Machiavelli the poet rather than of Machiavelli the prototypical political scientist or realist, an account of political life as occurring in time.18 This is not the linear time of universalist history. Machiavelli's understanding of time involves cycles and returns, contingencies and unpredictabilities. It is distinctively premodern. Yet although it is possible to trace the roots of Machiavelli's own understanding of time, it is more useful in this context to understand what conception of time it is articulated against. Most obviously, Machiavelli repudiates the prevailing Christian doctrine that political life is subordinate to eternity. Where Christian tradition, especially St. Augustine, had downgraded political life as merely temporal, as at best a preparation for the universal kingdom of God, Machiavelli reverses the polarity. For him, politics is in the end a greater passion than God. In the context of an all-pervasive discourse of universals, Machiavelli thus draws upon a number of traditions in classical political thought that insist on the importance of the world of. time and becoming, not least Aristotle's account of man as a political animal and Roman conceptions of the republic as permitting the highest form of political life.

The Prince and "The Pauper" • 37

Where the Christian tradition saw everything that occurs in time as tainted with original sin; and where the Platonic tradition saw everything that is not understood as participating in Being-as unchanging form-as merelY occurring in the world of flux, doxa, and illusion; Machiavelli insists on the possibilities of greatness in time, a greatness that is not in need of completion of either philosophy or grace. These possibilities do not depend

. on unchanging laws. Machiavelli's image of time as a river in flood contrasts sharply with Hobbes' deterministic image of liberty as a river necessarily descending a preordained channel.l? Instead, Machiavelli offers maxims, mere tennis playas Hobbes would insist, advice about how to prepare for the coming of fortuna: establish institutions, create respect for laws and customs, secure the support of the people, create' an armed citizenry, and, above all, expect change to occur. Once fortuna arrives, even such maxims . are of little use. Political greatness depends on a capacity to judge whether it is better to lie low, to submit to fortuna, or to "command her with audacity." Once fortuna departs, Machiavelli cautions against giving in to eitherse1f-esteem or self-pity, for fortuna is sure to return again.

Committed to a politics that responds to the temporal contingency of

. life in this world, Machiavelli is prepared to face up to the consequences that, according to what we have come to learn from both the classical and the Christian inheritance, must be drawn once one abandons the possibility of transcending the contingencies of time through an appeal to being or eternity. Political life, according to Machiavelli, requires a capacity to recognize and manipulate illusions, rather than erase them in favor of 'goodness, truth, and beauty. It also involves being prepared to resort to violence, to understand the positive benefits of class conflict, and to see an armed citizenry as a necessary component of a political community worthy of being remembered and imitated at some other time. Or, to put this less negatively, political life calls for the special skills appropriate for confronting ftmuna: the skills of civic virtu, prudence, caution, and the capacity to generate a lasting and stable' order in the midst of temporal flux and contingency.

None of this has endeared Machiavelli to those for whom temporal contingency is intolerable and for whom the story of modernity as the trek touniversa1ity is so comforting. For them, even time has a meaningful order plus promises of fulfillment, reason, justice, and peace. It is within the discursive politics that are thereby established that Machiavelli is enshrined in the account of the tradition as a great debate. The historical problematic confronted by Machiavelli comes to be framed in terms of another historical problematic. Machiavelli's specifically Renaissance-humanist attempt to .articulate a politics of time occurs in the context of historically constituted discourses-both classical and Christian-in which time is understood as a

38 • IntenUltimuzlllnte1Uxuuzl Relations

problem to be overcome either through fulfillment in time or by fixing a home for humanity in space-the state.

v

According to this kind of interpretation, Machiavelli articulates an account . of politics in time against the prevailing universalistic categories of the medieval world. Yet it is these very universalistic categories that provide the broad context in which Machiavelli, and the Renaissance humanists more generally, could work, could attempt to articulate an alternative account of the possibilities of political life. This is why the history of Machiavelli interpretation is so interesting. The most influential accounts of what he was doing have for the most part been grounded in precisely the kind of universalistic categories that Machiavelli challenges. Once read without the prior disposition to insist that human conduct ought to be guided by some underlying universalist ethical norm, it is not difficult to see that Machiavelli goes to some trouble to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Machiavelli's political ethics may not be persuasive, but it requires a fair degree of interpretive violence to treat him as simply unethical, as the evil genius of realpolitik. Where Machiavelli himself may be understood as struggling to articulate a politics of time against a dominant discourse of universalisms, it has been fairly easy for those drawing upon some variant of those universalisms to reconstitute this struggle as merely a capitulation to relativism, evil, or sophistry. This move is not exactly rare in the annals of the histories of rationalism and monotheism.

It is especially interesting to see how this move has occurred in the context of international relations theory. For here, we can see a displacement of the "problem of Machiavelli" onto the distinction between political community and international relations. Despite the way Machiavelli's positive political theory only makes sense if read in the context of the classical account of life within a. political community, Machiavelli has come to be associated primarily with theories of the relations between states-the realm in which it has become more or less legitimate, even if distasteful, to abandon universalist principles in favor of an amoral realpolitik. Not only has the conventional interpretation turned Machiavelli into a simple relativist, but he has been given a particular space in which to act: not the community in which peace and progress are possible, but the supposed home of pure power, the so-called international anarchy.

This move is crucial, and it allows us to see what is at stake in the formulation of a tradition of international relations theory as, in Martin Wight's sense, a negation of a tradition of political theory. It also indicates what is being obscured by constantly repeated claims about a tradition

Tire Prince and "Tire Paupd' • 39

understood as either an eternal debate or an eternal monologue. Simply put, Machiavelli has come to symbolize both a negation and a displacement of tradition of political thought, a tradition that explicitly links a meaningful political life to the pursuit of the universals within a territorially bounded space. As a negation, Machiavelli has been forced to occupy the ground of pluralism, relativism, and power politics that is defined against the possibility

. of an ethical universalism. As a displacement, he has been pushed into the space of international anarchy, into that realm of "relations" rather than of "politics,"· of barbarians, of others who are understood to be beyond the limits of our political community, our political identity, our peace, justice, and good government.

To put this more provocatively, if one is to identify a tradition of international relations theory, then the most appropriate candidate is not "realism" but "idealism." For what is systematically obscured by the reifying claims about realism as a tradition is that realism has been constituted historically through the negation and displacement of a prior understanding of political life understood in the context of universalist aspirations. For all that self-styled realists may complain about the dangers of idealism, of cosmopolitanism, or of the misplaced domestic analogy, the tradition of realism as we have come to know it is unthinkable without the priority ascribed to universalist claims within political theory. Conversely, political theory, while generally silent about what goes on beyond the boundaries of the sovereign community, itself depends upon the silences of international relations theory to make its own claims to universalism plausible. Rather less provocatively, perhaps, if one is to speak meaningfully of a tradition of international relations theory at all, it must be an account that places the discursive practices of negation and displacement at the center-that is, one that insists on the mutually constitutive nature of thinking about life within and between political communities. 20

The significance of Machiavelli in this respect is rather ambiguous.

Three themes are relevant here. First, Machiavelli himself is quite clear about the continuity between life within political communities and relations between them. Conflict with other communities is, for Machiavelli, an integral aspect of the armed citizenship necessary for civic virtu. Second, despite the way Machiavelli has been interpreted as merely a theorist of relativism and contingency, of doxa and illusion, he did struggle to articulate a meaningful politics in time. In doing so, he drew upon conceptions of time that make little sense to us. Yet we too are in many ways caught in a predicament that would have been familiar to Machiavelli-not a predicament of international anarchy, but a crisis of political consciousness arising from a loss of faith in universalist history. Third, while Machiavelli· may have reversed the polarity among the conventional categories available to him, his own rejection of the dominant pole did little to undermine the way in which

40 • Internationalllntertextual Relations

a politics of time could be erased by a politics of space. It is no accident that the next icon in the tradition is Hobbes-not the theorist of an international state of nature, but the theorist of political community as architecture, as the embodiment of sovereign and geometric reason.

VI

That Machiavelli should have been the subject of such a highly contested, not to say passionate interpretive history, and yet have been placed so comfortably in the received tradition of international relations theory is more than passing interest. Claims about such a tradition in general or about Machiavelli in particular are by no means innocent. They identify the nature of the problem to be addressed and situate it within a discursive space that both defmes and limits the legitimate responses to the problem that has been identified. Even from these brief remarks here, it should be clear that Machiavelli especially can be read in ways that undermine any simple claim to a tradition. As a point of departure, he ought to be profoundly unsettling. There is both less and more in Machiavelli's writings than is usually implied by the claim that international relations is essentially Machiavellian in nature.

There is less in that Machiavelli does not present, say, a structuralist account of international anarchy such as the one so often attributedfalsely-to Hobbes. Structural accounts of the international system draw upon ontological (and thus political) commitments that are significantly different from those to be found in Machiavelli's writings. Contrary to some translations, there is no clear statement to the effect that the end justifies the means. There is no clear notion of national interest defmed as power. It may well be possible to read these things into Machiavelli's writings, but this is to engage in a rather different enterprise, one that is difficult to reconcile with established scholarly procedures.

There is more, in that Machiavelli draws upon a range of themes (especially those associated with classical conceptions of the polis) that are concerned with the establishment of a political community, one that aspires to virtu, to the good, although obviously not to a conception of ethical life that would fmd favor with followers of, say, Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, or John Rawls. There is more also in that Machiavelli insists on the problematic of establishing human communities in time; rather than of the need to fmally abolish time in favor of a kingdom of ends, a metaphysics of being, a transcendent universal to be labeled as Reason, or Justice, or Peace. The significance . of this insistence is not restricted to thinking about international relations. It applies also to those who understand political life as the attempt to seize the centers of state power, who understand the .state as the fixed point of identity, whether as the prince acting boldly against

The Prince and "The Pauper" • 41

fortUM, as the legal sovereign claiming legitimacy through reason, or as the Weberian hero standing resolutely "able to do no other" before the intensifying clash of values within a rationalized modernity. For ironically, while Machiavelli contests the universalism of the static universals of his time, and contests it on the ground of the temporality of human existence, the Machiavellian community, the state, has itself become the static universal, the fixed point from which the world may be commanded by the latter-day heroes who claim power and legitimacy in a world of evident flux.

It is in this context that the contrast between the typical practices dw>ugh which Machiavelli is inserted into the tradition of international relations theory and the key moment of Machiavelli's analysis in The Prince is so striking. For even though there are scholars who resolutely insist on a more historically and textually sensitive reading of theories of international relations, it is the brief references, the short assertions, the accumulating textbooks, the obligatory footnotes, and the revealingly short-tempered responses to the idealists and critics that are more relevant in practice. Here we find the insistent assertion that there is a tradition, an origin, a code, a center, a home from which one can set out to explore the contingencies and transformations of the world outside. It is exactly the politics of such a claim that are challenged by Machiavelli's observations about fortresses: one should not rely on a fixed point of reference. What has worked before may not work again. Even though one might imitate earlier expressions of 'Virtu, there can be no reliance on a tradition that makes claims about how things have always been, still are, and always will be. "The man who adapts his course of action to the nature of the times," says Machiavelli, "will succeed, and likewise . . . the man who sets his course of action out of tune with the times will come to grief."21 To establish a tradition, as with establishing a long-standing community of 'Virtu, is, for Machiavelli, a challenge, a matter of political practice, something to be achieved through action. Inheritor of the classical theory of the polis that he is, he knows that once such a community, such a tradition, is established, it is bound to succumb to fortuna, probably sooner rather than later. Machiavelli is just obsessed with endings as he is with beginnings.

Even recognizing that Machiavelli is more usefully understood as a theorist of political practice, of the possibility of creating new forms of political community, rather than as the theorist of the unchanging realities of realpolitik, it is still evident that his own understanding of what political practice entails has distinct limits. To begin with, not only is his attempt to articulate a politics of time predicated on an archaic cosmology, it also embodies a degree of male chauvinism that is even more embarrassing than is usual in the great texts of political theory. 22 Beyond this, for all his attempts to articulate a politics of time, his vision of political practice is constrained within two crucial horizons. These horizons also may be

42 • lntemationalllntemxtual Relations

understood as historically contingent rather than eternally fixed, Consequently, Machiavelli's politics of time may be turned against his own commitments to a politics of space. On the one hand, there is the horizon of scholastic universals against which Machiavelli articulates his conception of a political community in time. On the other hand, there is the space of the state, within which it is possible to aspire to virtu, even if only for a brief period. Both of these horizons have been subject to historical change.

Scholastic universalism gave way to a more secular universalism associated with the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and modernity in general. There are certainly connections between these universalisms, but the history of Western thought is rather full of stories about how particular accounts of what constitutes a universal have been challenged by others. There is little reason to expect such challenges to cease; there may even be some hope that any future rethinking of what it means to make a universalistic claim might not be so insistent on subsuming all differences into an all-embracing unity. The difficulty confronting those who try to understand contemporary patterns of integration and internationalization on a global scale is not a lack of empirical evidence. It is rather the temptation to speak about global processes within historically and culturally specific, and by now seriously misleading accounts of what universality must entail. Those who invoke an empiricist legitimation of liberal utilitarianism under such rubrics as "interdependence" or "international regimes" are no less susceptible to this temptation than those who express a more normative aspiration for "world order.' In my judgment, the empiricists have shown a consistently greater willingness to succumb.

Similarly, the horizon presented by the spatial form of the state has changed historically. It was only after Machiavelli that the principle of state sovereignty came to be framed within the context of the Euclidean-Galilean principle of absolute space rather than the complex overlapping jurisdictions of the medieval era. There is no reason to expect that understanding of political community to remain unchanged; with global flows of capital and the internationalization of production, we live in a world in which the complexity of spatial relations is more obvious than the simple legalistic maps of state sovereignty. Moreover, it was only after Machiavelli that it became possible to pretend that the state is a fixed form, a pretense expressed initially in the legal codes of territorial sovereignty, and found more recently in the reifying categories of so much of he socioscientific analysis of international "balances of power" and "foreign-policy decision making." The difficulty with realism in this sense is not the insistence on the importance of the state, but the lack of much serious analysis of what a state is. Bald assertions consistent with the ahistorical claims of state-sovereignty have all too easily been accepted as a substitute for a properly theoretical

The Prince and "The Pauper" • 43

account of the state as a historically constituted and constantly reconstituted form of political life.

None of this is to suggest that the state is withering away, that pluralism is giving way to universalism. It is to insist that our understanding of what it means to engage in particular communities (whether particular is understood in local, cultural, or regional terms) is just as likely to change as is our understanding of what it means to claim universality. If one is to engage in an analysis of "change" in international relations, for example, it is probably more helpful to examine the relationship between these changing conceptions of particular and universal rather than to assume that change must involve a move from particular state to universal global community. Whatever problems there may be with contemporary forms of international political economy, the political-economy literature is certainly more sensitive to historical change in this sense than are either realist or idealist forms of international relations theory.

It is in this context, I think, that one can understand the intersection between aspirations to develop a critical theory of international relations and contemporary challenges to the high ground of modernity that currently occur under the banner of poststructuralism. For the poststructuralist critique of the principle that difference (pluralism, becoming, time) is only to be grasped. as a moment of identity (unity, being, space) undermines the logic through which a tradition of international relations (the realm par excellence of pluralism) is constituted as the negation of a tradition of political theory (the realm of universalsj.j"

It is in this context also that it ought to be possible to make a connection between the critical analysis of international relations and contemporary concerns about political practice. For if, as for Machiavelli, the most important and certainly the most interesting political question concerns how new forms of political community are to be established-the question for which Machiavelli saves his "most illustrious examples" -it is clear that Machiavelli's own answer is historically contingent. If we are to treat Machiavelli seriously, then we might bring his question to bear on our own era, without becoming obsessed with the limits of his own answers. Neither the realist appeal to an eternity of states nor the idealist appeal to a universal community tell us very much about politics in this sense. The myth of a tradition of international relations theory, like a myth of a tradition of political theory, makes it very difficult to think about politics at all. Both affirm answers to questions that they no longer take seriously.

Neither the politics of contemporary debates about modernity nor the problems of political practice in an era of rapid and confusing transformations are to be taken lightly. But they do take the concerns of those engaged with international relations into the center of contemporary thought and practice, rather than leave it at the margin, the pauper ever subservient to the glories

44 • InternationaUIntertextuaI Relations

of the prince and his substitutes. Not least, they point to yet another way in which Machiavelli might be reconstituted in a tradition, this time one in which he is coupled with, say, Plato and Marx as well as with some of the most persistent themes of philosophical analysis in this century.

In this rendition, Machiavelli would appear not as one of a group of realist protototalitarians, but as an important theorist of language or discourse, Plato understood very clearly what was at stake in the declining credibility of Homeric myth and articulated an alternative language of philosophy, of general concepts, of universals. 24 Marx understood very clearly the processes through which human labor came to be reified into commodities, into the abstract generalities of money to be exchanged in a market, abstract generalities that found their expression in the class-specific universalisms of political economy. Machiavelli struggled to articulate a language of particulars, of 10 stato, against a discursive hegemony of scholastic universals. It is interesting that in a century when so much political thought has been obsessed with language, and when so much of international life occurs as "strategy," "games," and other discursive formations, theorists of international relations should have shown so little concern with Machiavelli's insights into the politics of language.

But then, one should not feign innocence about this rendition of a tradition either. Those concerned with the politics of language encounter another debilitating account of the relation between language and world, between idealism and materialism. We return to the dilemmas of modernity and to the last-ditch attempts by the defenders of modernity to hang on to the promised certainties of scientific method and the philosophy of identity. Perhaps the pragmatists, empiricists, and policy analysts are right to turn away in order to deal with more manageable topics. But they cannot do so innocently. And those engaged in encouraging more critical rigor in the analysis of international relations are certainly justified in uncovering the plays of power that are obscured by sloppy references to a tradition. But to interrogate Machiavelli in particular is to understand the extent to which critique is itself caught up in the discursive politics being criticized. The dilemmas of modernity are not abstract. They return us to precisely the problems . of political practice-of struggles to reconstruct relations to universality and particularity in an era of profound transformations of political space-without which Machiavelli's texts would make little sense at all, not matter how open to mystifying reification and hermeneutic or deconstructive reinterpretation they have now become.

Notes

1. K.J. Holsti, The Dividing Discipline: Hegemony and Diversity in International Theory (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 1.

The Prince and "The Pauper' • 45

2. Meditations on this theme constitute the staple fare of discussions about the charaCter and method of history of ideas, especially the history of political and philosophical thought. They extend into complex metatheoretical problems involving the politics and epistemology of interpretation as weD as into ontological controversies about history and time. This chapter skates over the surface of these more complex themes. My intention is simply to insist on the highly problematic nature of any reference to a tradition in the context of one specific academic discipline, one that is constantly relegitim.ized by what ought to be embarrassing claims about the origin, continuity, and transformation of a tradition of theory about international relations

or politics. ..

The underlying problems involved have been sharply articulated both by those associated with the hermeneutics (such as R.G. CoUingwood, Paul Ricoeur, and HanS-Georg Gadamer) and those associated with poststructuralism (such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida). Relatively accessible general discussions include John GunneD, "The Myth of the Tradition," American Political Science Revi4w 72: 1 (March 1918), pp. 122-134; Gunnell, Between PhilOSophy and Politics: The Alienation of Political Theory (Amherst, Mass: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986); John S. Nelson, ed., Tradition, Interpretation and Science: Political Theory in the American Acatlenu' (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); Richard Ashcraft, "Political Theory and the Problem of Ideology," Journal of Politics 42:3 (August 1980); Richard Rorty, J.B. Sehneedwind, and Quentin Skinner, eds., Philosophy and History (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Jonathan Ree et al., Philosophy and its Past (Brighton: Harvester, 1918); Linda Orr, "The Revenge of Literature: A History of History," New Literary History 18:1 (Autumn 1986), pp. 1-22; Edward Said, Beginnings (New York: Basic Books, 1915), pp. 29-78; D. LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts and Language (Ithaca, N.Y.:

CorneD University Press, 1983); and Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

It is worth noting that much of the discussion of this theme in U.S. political science has involved challenges to the specific version of a tradition associated with Leo Strauss; not least for the role "Machiavelli" plays in Strauss's story as the point of coUapse in the "great tradition" that Strauss counterposes to modernity. This specific version of a tradition is arguably of overriding importance for the way the "American science of international relations" has been constituted since 1945. The differing responses by Strauss and Hans J. Morgenthau to Max Weber's rendition of modernity, and their role in the institutionalization of the academic disciplines of political theory and international relations in the United States, are particularly interesting in this respect. So is the erosion of sensitivities to the underlying theoretical/philosophical problems as a result of the continuing barrage of appeals to a universal scientific method. The largely unacknowledged contradiction between the c1aim that international relations is fundamentally (ontologically) different from political life within states and the claim that aU forms of political life are amenable to the same kind of scientific investigation has been crucial here. It has played much the same role as the contradiction, characteristic of so much comparative political analysis, between the recognition of cultural differences and the insistence on the

46 • IntematiorulllImerrextrl41 Relations

possibility of measuring such differences according to some universal standard of comparison (usually "modernity" or "liberal America"). None of these subsidiary themes are addressed explicitly in this chapter, despite their significance for the way the dominant U.S. approaches to the study of international relations have been shaped. However, the overall argument of the chapter is intended to suggest ways in which these themes might be taken up.

3. For accessible introductions to this theme, see, for example, Geoffrey Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Social Theoty, 2nd ed. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Richard J. Bernstein, ed., Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985); Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J .M. Harding (Cambridge, England:

Cambridge University Press, 1979); Nancy S. Love, Marx, NrelZsche and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Posmwdern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); David Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and John Rajchtman, Michel Foucault (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

4. See, for example, Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1982); George E. Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979); Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); Ashis Nandy, Traditions, Tyran~ and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987); Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recomy of the Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); and Partha Chatterjee, Natiorullist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed!UNU, 1986).

5. As with the path-breaking work of Richard K. Ashley: "The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space: Toward a Critical Social Theory of International Politics," Alternatives 12:4 (October 1987), pp. 403-434, and "The Poverty of Nco-Realism," Intematiorull Organization 38:2 (spring 1984). See also Ramashray Roy, R.B.J. Walker, and Richard K. Ashley, "Dialogue: Towards a Critical Social Theory of International Politics," Alternatives 13:1 (January 1988), pp. 77-102; and R.B.J. Walker, "Realism, Change and International Political Theory," Intenwtiorull Studres Quarterb> 31:1 (March 1987), pp. 65-86.

6. E.H. Carr, The Twenty-Years Crisis, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1946); Ian Clark, Reform and Resistance in the Intematiorull Order (Cambridge, England:

Cambridge University Press, 1980).

7. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977); Martin Wight, "An Anatomy of International Thought" (1960), Review of Internatiorull Studw 13:3 (july 1987), pp. 221-227.

8. Weber's essay on "Politics as a Vocation" and the controversies generated by Weber's power politics in the 19208 and '30s provide an indispensable background to any useful reading of writers such as Morgenthau, Aron, and Hoffman.

9. R.N. Berki, On Political Realism (London: J.M. Dent, 1981); and Friedrich

The Prince and "The Pauper" • 47

Meinecke. Machiavellianism: The Doctrine of Raison D'Etol and!u Place in Modem HistorY (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957).

10. Martin Wight, "Why Is There No International Theory?" in Diplomatic I7If1IStigalitms. ed. H. Butterfield and M. Wight (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966,) 17-34.

11. Martin Wight, Systems of Staus, ed. Hedley Bull (Leicester, England:

Leicester University Press, 1977).

12. See, for example, Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli: A CIumging Inurpretation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984); and Isaiah Berlin, "The Originality of Machiavelli," in Against the Cumnr, ed. Berlin (Oxford, England:

OXford University Press, 1979).

13. See, for example, J .G.A. Pocock, The Machiawllian Moment: Florenti1l4 Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975); Pocock, "Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Ancients and Modems," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 2:3 (Fall 1978), pp. 93- 107; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modem Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Skinner, Machiavelli (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1981). See also, among a vast literature, Felix Gilbert, Machiawlli and Guicdardini (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965); Hans Baron, Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early ltolian Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966); J.H. Hexter, "The Loom of language and the Fabric of Imperatives: The Case of II Principe and Utopia," and "The Predatory Vision: Niccolo Machiavelli, II Principe and 10 SI01o, in Hexter, The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation (NeW York: Basic Books, 1973) pp.lSO- 172, 179-203; Mark Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Cary J. Nedennan, "Nature, Sin and the Origins of Society: The Ciceronian Tradition in Medieval Political Thought," Journal of the History of Ideas 49:1 Ganuary-March 1988), pp. 3-26.

14. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960). "Economy" here should be read in an aesthetic rather than a utilitarian sense.

IS. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. P. BondaneUa and M. Musa (New York: Oxford University Press. 1984,) pp. 72-73.

16. The significance of this for a critical understanding of contemporary strategic thought is explored in Bradley S. Klein, "The Politics of the Unstable Balance of Power in Machiavelli, Frederick the Great, and Clausewitz: Citizenship as Armed Virtue and the Evolution of Warfare," dissertation manuscript, University of Massachusetts, 1984.

17. Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 25.

18. On this general theme, see John Gunnell, Political Philosophy and Time, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.) In the specific case of Machiavelli, see Robert Orr, "The Time Motif in Machiavelli," in Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought, ed. M. Fleisher (New York: Atheneum, 1972,) pp. 185-208; and Thomas M. Greene, "The End of Discourse in Machiavelli's 'Prince'," Yale French Studies 67, pp. 57-71.

19. Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 21.

48 • ImematWnallIntertextUlll Relations

20. In this context, it is instructive to compare Martin Wight's traditional refusal to do more than describe and reify the contrast between "inside" and "outside" with Richard Ashley's incisive exploration of the practices of negation and displacement in "The Powers of Anarchy: The Domestic Analogy and the anarchy Problematique," forthcoming in After Ne&-realism: Anarc4Y, Power and International Collaboration, ed., Hayward R. Alker, Jr., and Richard K. Ashley. Not the least significant point of comparison is the way that, in Ashley's account, the concept of "sovereignty" is turned into the site of critical discursive politics, rather than the silent but constitutive code that has been surrendered to lawyers and constitutionalists. For a parallel account of the way the concept of "security" might also be reclaimed from the silences of realist discourse, see R.B.J. Walker, "The Concept of Security and International Relations Theory" (San Diego: University of California, Institute for Global Conflict and Co-operation, Occasional Paper no. 3, 1988). In the case of the concept of "peace," see Bradley S. Klein, "After Strategy: The Search for a PostModern Politics of Peace," Alternatives (1988). For an attempt to draw on the concept of "alienation" as the basis for a critical theoretical account of "diplomacy" as the "mediation of estrangement," see James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western ESlTangemem (Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1987).

21. Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 25.

22. See the important study by Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, FortUne Is a Woman:

Gender and Politics in the Thlmght of Niccolo Machitwelli (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1984).

23. I have explored this from several different directions. In the context of the academic literature on international relations theory, see "Realism, Change and International Political Theory," "The Concept of Security and International Relations Theory," and "The Territorial State and the 'Theme of Gulliver,' .. International Journal 39:3 (summer 1984), pp, 529-552. In the context of the discursive politics of "peace" and "war" see "Contemporary Militarism and the Discourse of Dissent" in Culture, Ideology and World Order, ed, Walker (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 302-22; and "Culture, Discourse, Insecurity" in Towards a Just World Peace: Pmpectivesj"romSocial Movements, ed. Saul A. Mendlovitz and R.B.J. Walker, (London: Butterworths, 1987), pp. 171-190. In the context of the political practices of contemporary social movements, see One World, MWU' Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1988); and Warren Magnusson and R.B.J. Walker, "Decentering the State: Political Theory and Canadian Political Economy," Studies in Political Economy (1988).

24. See Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963); and Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Plato and the Poets," in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies in Plato, trans. Christopher Smith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 39-72.

4

Freud's Discourse of War/Politics

Jean Bethke Elshtain

And now turn your eyes away from individuals and consider the Great War which is still laying Europe waste. Think of the vast amount of brutality, cruelty and lies which are able to spread over the civilized world. Do you really believe that a handful of ambitious and deluding men without conscience could have succeeded in unleashing all these evil spirits if their millions of followers did not share their guilt? Do you venture, in such circumstances, to break a lance on behalf of the exclusion of evil from the mental constitution of mankind?

-Freud, JnlrOduckny Lecture: on P,wcIurAna(ysis

The impression one had of her analysis was not unlike that of a hypnotic treatment, where the resistance has in the same way withdrawn to a certain boundary line, beyond which it proves to be unconquerable. The resistance very often pursues similar tacticsRussian tactics, as they might be called-in cases of obsessional

neuroses.

-Freud, "A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman"

Freud, the creator of his own legend. Freud, a conquistador of thought. The Freud who once described being in the throes of theoretical labor as occupying a "primitive trench" and embarking on "severe battles" against stubborn enemies in the form of such riddles and difficulties as "Anxiety, Hysteria and Paranoia," which, however, ultimately capitulated to his superior force.! We flash on the cover photo that graced the Norton paperbacks of Standard Edition translations of Freud's work for many years: Freud, eyebrows furrowed, staring remorselessly into the eyes of the reader/patient, a gaze to frighten little children and sear all the silliness out of anyone with courage enough to stare back .: As for those who lacked spunk, Freud has no use for them in any case-thus the photo proclaims. War, we are led to assume, would not take Freud by surprise.

Freud, the "constitutional pacifist." Freud, the 'cosmopolite who refuses to elide foreign with enemy. Freud, shocked at the horror of World War I until, that is, he tames it and brings it within the circle of his own understanding. This is the Freud of disillusioned, but not bitter, old age.

50 • Intemtztionalllntertextual Relations

Ever the war horse, he wins his fmal "battle" by instructing his physician, Max Schur, to administer a lethal dose of morphine when the suffering does not "make sense anymore," A perhaps less familiar Freud than the stern and rather fearsome figure we also know, what this Freud shares with his young warrior-of-thought counterpart is a deep immersion in those tropes that characterize the Western discourse of armed civic virtue with this caveat: armed it may be, virtuous it is not.2 Freud strips war of its glory and reserves triumph to a struggle 'Within the self and between the self and the forces of necessity, most importantly mortality.

Freud's war/politics is a grand story that, in his telling of it, also inscribes him as "an uncanny writer who created a new and enormous facticity for all of us, whether or not we are aware of it" in the words of Harold Bloom. Bloom goes on to characterize our literalization of Freud's tropes "every day of our lives, and we have no way of freeing ourselves either of the tropes or of our literalizations." Criticism, then, "cannot teach us to be Freud, or even how to avoid imprisonment by Freud. . . . But criticism alone can teach us to stop literalizing our cultural dilemmas."! This chapter is an exercise in antiliteralization that aims to defamiliarize us with formulations on "why war" that have become overly rote, including those derived from Freudian theory. The appropriation of Freud to standard war/ politics discourse turns Freud into a too-comforting figure. For have we not grown to love our bearers of bad tidings? Do we not require them, whether to reinforce our own antiutopianism or as a springboard from which utopianism might spring as a mirror of that which we oppose?

Freud's Wars: ThoughtIBattles

Ernest Jones, Freud's biographer, tells us of Freud as a twelve-year-old beginning to exhibit what became a lifelong identification with Hannibal, the conquering Semite who occupied a "permanent place in his fantasies." Freud's adolescent preoccupations are described, perhaps overdescribed by Jones, as an "unmistakable militarist phase." The young Freud reads Thiers' Consulate and Empire and pastes onto the backs of wooden toy soldiers labels bearing the names of Napoleon's marshals. (Napoleon was a great hero to educated European Jewry for his demolition of older traditions that were restrictive of Jewish aspirations to nonascriptive citizenship.) Freud's favorite Napoleonic marshal is one Ma'ssena, "usually believed to be a Jew." When the Franco-Prussian war breaks out when Freud is fourteen, he keeps a large map on his writing desk and follows the campaigns in detail. Evidently, Freud "discourse[s] to his sisters about the war in general and the importance of the various moves of the combatants." Freud dreams of becoming a

Freud's Discourse of War/Politics • 51

"great general," a dream that "gradually fade[s)"-as does Freud's dream of becoming a cabinet minister. 4

These childhood identifications, Jones continues, forever mark Freud.

As a medical student, later a daring pioneer, he thinks of himself as a conquistador-this time of science-and military metaphors are scattered throughout his work. There is more: when the Great War breaks out, Freud's first response is "one of youthful enthusiasm," characterized by Jones as a "reawakening of the military ardors of his boyhood." Freud himself describes the phenomenon-in letters, not in his "official" work:

"All my libido is given to Austro-Hungary." For the first time in thirty years, he notes, he feels himself to be an Austrian and he sympathizes with the Central Powers for whom two of his three sons are fighting. He even, temporarily, turns against his beloved England. Jones is roused to a fever pitch of excitation in depicting Freud's unusual mood: Freud becoming "excitable" at the outbreak of the war and "making slips of the tongue all day long." This outburst of mania lasts about a fortnight and then (we are invited, with Jones, to breathe a sigh of relief), "Freud came to himself."?

The "himself' that Freud is restored to is expressed in an Autumn 1914 letter to Lou-Andreas Salome, written several months after the episode Jones has detailed. He writes: "I and my contemporaries will never again see a joyous world. It is all too hideous. And the saddest thing about it is that it has come out just as from our psychoanalytic expectations we should have imagined man and his behavior." Freud concludes that human beings are "organically unfitted" for "the highest civilization of the present'" (with a few exceptions-including Freud and Einstein, as we shall learn). The warrior of thought resists war/politics as corrosive of the possibility for the internal battles he construes as inevitable as well as the on{y slow route toward a somewhat less violent world.

I can find but a single pre-World War I reference to the phenomenon of war and its bearing on clinical phenomena in Freud's work, and that appears in an extract from the Fliess papers, 1886-99. In pressing his theoretical preoccupation with structural analogies-close to homologiesbetween individual and collective constructions, he insists that there are cases of mass paranoia, or individual paranoia writ large; his example is drawn from the Franco-Prussian war with which he was enthused as a fourteen-year old. Freud writes "The 'grande nation' cannot face the idea that it can be defeated in war. Ergo, it was not defeated; the victory does not count. It provides an example of mass paranoia and invents the delusion of betrayal."? Later, the war will provide much clinical evidence for Freudor anecdotal support for clinical categories. Freud's own construction of his agitated tongue-slipping described in the Jones biography appears in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and in Introductory Lectures on PsychoAna{ysis, respectively:

52 • Internarionalllntertextual Relations

When war broke out with Italy in 1915 I was able to make the observation upon myself that a whole quantity of Italian place-names which at ordinary times were readily available to me had suddenly been withdrawn from my memory. Like so many other Germans I had made it my habit to spend a part of my holidays on Italian soil, and I could not doubt that this largescale forgetting of names was the expression of an understanding hostility to Italy which had now replaced my former partiality."

A short time ago I found that I was unable to reproduce the name of the innocent Moravian town of Bisenz; and analysis showed that what was responsible for this was not any direct hostility to it but its resemblance in sound to the name of the Palazzo Bisenzi in Orvieto which I had repeatedly enjoyed visiting in the past.'

War produces many such slips of the tongue, which, Freud insists, one has little difficulty understanding. Why? Because one's libido is invested in one's identification with the nation. When this identity/identification is challenged by a foreigner turned enemy, psychic life as distilled in the semiotics of slips and dreams will reflect the subsequent libidinal disturbance. Freud tells a number of stories along these lines, drawing from his patients. There is the woman who, when asked what regiment her son was with, replied "with the 42nd murderers," having substituted Miirder (murderer) for Marser (mortarsj.P Another woman of fifty dreamt of offering "love services" during the war. Liebesdienste, or services performed for love, could have a meaning either respectable (rolling bandages) or less respectable (sexual ministrations). In the case of the respectable fifty-year-old, Freud decides that "by way of fulfilling a patriotic duty," she was able, in her dream, to "put herself at the disposal of troops" for the satisfaction of their erotic needs.U

In addition to spawning various psychopathologies of the innocent (more or less) everyday sort, the Great War engendered its own specific war neuroses. Freud spent a bit of time-not much-on war neuroses, mostly using them as evidence of theses either already dear to his heart in 1914 or later essential to the structural account of mind once he developed the notion of an "aggressive drive" working to ally with, or to checkmate, libido. The grand struggle of Eros versus Thanatos characterizes Freud's post-Beyond the Pleasure Principle work and there seems little doubt that the war played a role in shifting Freud's thinking in ever more mordant directions.

Prior to the revised instinct theory, however, in a brief piece on the war neuroses, Freud finds that they have the special characteristic of "traumatic neuroses, whose occurrence has been made possible or has been promoted by a conflict in the ego. . . .. The conflict is between the soldier's old peaceful ego and his new warlike one, and it becomes active as soon as the peace-ego realizes what danger it runs of losing its life owing to the rashness

Freud's Discourse of War/Politics • 53

of its newly formed, parasitic double."12 The primary motivation of the destructive conflict engendered by the war revolves, in this formulation, between the threat the war ego-or Self (bearing in mind that das I ch became ego in the English translations of Freud's work)-poses to the selfpreservative and narcissistic nature of the peacetime Self.

A theoretical precondition for this conflict lies in the concept of "narcissistic libido," an amount of sexual energy attached to the Self. But there is also, in Freud's view, a social precondition-a national, conscript army forged out of essentially civilian selves, noncombatants thrust suddenly into military life and the dangers of combat. A civilian Self must antedate the war Self before the latter can pose a deadly threat to the former. Thus, Freud insists that no war neuroses could emerge in "an army of professional soldiers or mercenaries," there being no possibility of the clash between selves in the identities of those for whom the only Self is a war Self.

Bits and pieces of turn-of-the-century liberal internationalism lie imbedded in this formulation. I refer to Freud's conviction that what has been created in the "high civilization" of the West over time is a noncombatant civilian culture now thrust into the decivilizing activity of war and coming up with neuroses. Where Freud would part company with the liberal internationalist is in his insistence that the vast majority were not dragged into war unwillingly, but somehow lusted after it or took advantage of it as an occasion for the unleashing of aggression-the beast within-on a mass scale. Thus, Freud would urge later that we are not so civilized as all that as he turned his scathing skepticism against liberal hopes he found brittle and naive.

One other brief item: to his consideration of the war neuroses, Freud appended a "Memorandum on the Electrical Treatment of War Neurotics," which shows him at his most critical and humane. He objects to the treatment in no uncertain terms because it requires that the physician serve "purposes foreign" to the essence of his vocation by treating someone, in order to restore him, not to health, but to fitness for service. The physician's task is confounded when the physician is tom between "the claims of humanity, which normally carry decisive weight for a physician, and the demands of a national war." Freud finds this repugnant, just as he would fmd extraordinarily repellent the medicalized killing of inmates in U.S. prisons in the 1980s. Freud also gets in some licks against the Germans, whose militarism he always decried, when he claims that physicians in German hospitals were so severe in their treatment of war neuroses that the death or suicide of the patient/soldier sometimes resulted. For Freud, placing a patient in a situation where fear of treatment overrides fear of losing one's life in battle is yet another sign of the general breakdown of civilized morality and professional ethics in wartime.

An intriguing twist enters this discussion: those soldiers suffering from

54 • IntemotioMUlntertexrual Relations

war neuroses experienced a dash between unconscious emotional impulses, primarily self-preservative, and other motives including "patriotism, the habit of obedience and the example of others." This is the norm for the vast majority of soldiers. But, Freud continues, the soldier in whom his own "affective motives were very powerful and clearly conscious"-the ideal of the properly psychoanalyzed self- "would, if he was a healthy man, have been obliged to desert or pretend to be ill," He, this healthy man, would undertake consciously what in run-of-the-mill humankind takes place unconsciously. Freud seems to be suggesting that if they gave a war nobody would come if and only if all the nobodies joined Freud in his (using his own self-description) "constitutional pacifism. "13 Such an ideal self is he who has won a battle over his internal demons, who has freed himself from the burden of revenge, Deflecting one's energies from this task decivilizes the Self, in the first instance, and the wider world forged from the concatenation of selves in the second.

Freud inlAnd War Discourse

When he is treated as a political thinker, Freud is most often construed as a Hobbesian, credited or blamed with having a dour, pessimistic view of human nature and, hence, of human prospects. As between the "realists" and "idealists" of international relations discourse, Freud would be one of the leading realists-tough and no-nonsense-in the same camp as Machiavelli and, as indicated, Hobbes. For Freud, on this reading, war would be an expectation, an outburst flowing from the human propensity to aggression, something that one must, alas, anticipate, human beings being what they are. Freud has been either assimilated at least somewhat to a generic realism or inscribed as the prime proponent of a psychological explanation of why war.

That there are tensions in this appropriation of FreudlFreudianism is apparent if one considers Freud within the frame established by Kenneth N. Waltz in his classic, Man, tlu State and War.14 Waltz develops at length "three images" that purport to explain "why war!' That is, wars have been variously located (1) within man or human nature itself, (2) within the structure of individual states, and (3) within the international state system. Each of these images yields more or less pessimistic or optimistic conclusions concerning war and its inevitability.

Briefly, those embracing the first image argue that wars result from man's bellicose nature, with hard-liners insisting this nature cannot be changed, hence wars cannot be eliminated, and optimists holding out for a malleable view of human nature, hence extolling the possibility that we might socialize human beings away from brutality and aggressivity. Waltz

Freud's Discourse of War/Politics· S5

does not have much use for the first imagers, finding them guilty of trivially true claims. For Waltz, wars cannot be against human nature if human beings participate in them, just as peace cannot go against our nature either because we have periods of it. To locate both war and peace in human nature strikes Waltz as a trite and inviting reductionist psychologism. If, in fact, human nature is fixed, we are required to look beyond it to what can be changed, to shift our attention to social or political institutions. Nor does Waltz put his money down on the "second-image" explanation. Although it evokes political, social, and economic determinants, whether a state is republican or socialist tells us little about whether, or under what circumstances, it will resort to war.

Instead, Waltz opts for the third view: wars occur because there is nothing to stop them, given a system of international anarchy. What is interesting and worth a brief reflective pause is where Freud fits into this Waltzian schema. That is one issue. Another is whether Waltz has framed the matter in the most apposite way. First, Freud would seem, on the standard reading, to belong in the "first-image pessimist" camp. But Waltz does not place him there; indeed, he does not locate Freud anywhere although he cites Freud at several points in his text, twice in foot-notes deployed to criticize simple-minded behavioral scientists, then again for the quote that frames his own discussion of the implications of the third image. Here Waltz uses Freud as an authority to back up his own claims that the third image is the only logical, explanatorily adequate way to go if we would understand "why war" and go on to offer a remedy for it. IS

That Freud hovers in Waltz's text but alights, or is allowed to alight, nowhere within the three images surely has something to do with the fact that Freud's views do not mesh tidily with Waltz's categories. Waltz poses the following questions early on in Man, the State and War: Does man make society in his image or does his society make him? Can man in society best be understood by studying man or by studying society?

But something is wrong with these questions and that something is the stark antinomies Waltz sets up between man and society. In his search for causes, Waltz avoids the reductionisms he so acutely blasts in his criticism of the first-image approach, but he remains pinioned within a strong presumption of causallinearality: isolating the x that produces the y. Freud's discourse does not lend itself to causal propositions of this sort; indeed, his arguments concerning war are aptly located within each of Waltz's images simultaneously.

For Freud finds the roots of war within human nature, complicatedly so, and within the nature of individual state orders, as well as an international system that lacks a final arbiter to settle disputes nonviolently. Freud transgresses Waltz's categories rather than homing in on anyone. To the question "why war?" then, Freud would reply: "man, the state and the

56 • InternatWnalllntertextual Relations

international system" -each and all at once rather than one or the other or one then the other. The texts that invite this claim are "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" (written by Freud in March and April 1915, less than a year after the outbreak of World War I) and "Why War?" (a 1932 exchange with Einstein). War, for Freud, is a specific instance of aggression, one of those circumstances favorable to its release. The human propensity to aggression does not so much cause war-as for Waltz's first-image pessimists-as take advantage of war's occurrence to play out horror on a grand scale. All of social life, for Freud, is a struggle within the self and between the self and the constraints of community. War is that struggle projected outward in an exaggerated and deadly form. And to the extent that the battle is against enemies without, we are disarmed in our war with the enemies within, the only authentic terrain for struggle, in Freud's view.

Here, then, is Freud's first take on war, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," divided into two parts: "I: The Disillusionment of War" and "II: Our Attitude towards Death." (Note that this is pre-Thanatos Freud, Freud at a point in the development of the instinct theory when he is still working with the libidinal and self-preservative instincts and has not yet formulated an independent aggressive drive.) The essay shows Freud the dislbeliever, one who shares liberal internationalist hopes but has been disillusioned in a salutary way that he urges upon others. As rhetoric, the essay draws the reader into the horror Freud first tries to account for and then draws away from by telling us that we-and he-should have known better all along. The war has given us the chance to grow wiser and sadderthe two, it seems, are the same.

Freud proceeds in this manner. No event, he tells us, has "ever destroyed so much that is precious . . . or so thoroughly debased what is highest." Two factors are responsible for the mental distress of noncombatants, an individual and collective state of being Freud feels the need to explain. The soldier is easier to account for, he believes. Why are "we" disillusioned? Because the war in which "we had refused to believe" has broken out and the "great world-dominating nations of the white race upon whom the leadership of the human race has fallen" have let us down.l" The "we" is not just any old noncombatants, but those cosmopolites who saw all of Europe as a "new fatherland," a "museum" for the cultured; who chose thinkers of many tongues and who did not find these "ancient greats" foreign simply because they "spoke another language." One could revere great men of other cultures without considering oneself a renegade within one's own language community. Moreover, civilized societies had laid down "high norms of moral conduct," demanding "much self restraint, much renunciation of instinctual satisfaction." In turn, this instinctual renunciation (a kind of "saving" of instinctual energy then made available for cultural purposes) created the basis for "civilized states." It seemed we had so much

Freud's Discourse of War/Politics· 57

in common that ''foreigner'' and "enemy" no longer merged. And, we believed, if war did come, it would be civilized, it would spare civilian life and amenities, not interrupting the development of ethical relations between peoples and states. (Freud here displays one feature of what James Der Derian, following Hedley Bull, describes as that "diplomatic culture" that becomes self-evident "when the values and ideas of one society are estranged from another." One of the "boundaries of alienation," according to Der Derian, is "the vertical estrangement between 'high' [civilized and Western] and 'low' [barbarian and nonwestern] cultures.t'j'?

Instead, we are plunged into a cruel, implacable war that disregards all peacetime restrictions, ignores the civilian/military distinction, and tramples "in blind fury" everything that stands in its way, cutting "all the common bonds" and leaving such a legacy of bitterness that it all but precludes cultural renewal "for a long time to come." What happened? Why? What bas happened is that the state only seemed to forbid wrongdoings. In fact, forbidding it to individuals, the state monopolizes it for itself. "A belligerent state permits itself every misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual," treating its citizens "like children." When the moral ties "between the collective individuals of mankind" (states) break down, there are "repercussions on the morality of individuals." The collective superego says, "Thou shalt not kill," and punishes those who do. Suddenly, it raises no objections to killing and rewards those who do. The upshot? "Evil passions" are no longer suppressed as the low morality shown by states in their relations to one other is matched by the "brutality shown by individuals. "

This arouses discontent and embitterment. But should it? Perhaps things are not so debased as they seem, Freud cautions, because our view of what was consisted of an illusion that the war had destroyed. (And destroying illusions is, for Freud, almost always a good thing.) Freud then moves into a reprise of his account of moral development as a fragile process that does not eradicate "the deepest essence of human nature," those "instinctual impulses" that are not so much evil as amoral, requiring shaping, constraint, condemnation, and praise. Civilization is attained through the renunciation of untrammeled individual satisfaction: the war within/without. But many who "behave well" have not really renounced the urge to unleash instinctuality-they are simply afraid of punishment; they are constrained by external compulsion, but have gone through no authentic inner transformation or restructuring of their instinctual economy. In appearing to be good, most human beings are not really following their own nature-sthey are more and more estranged from their essential (one is tempted to say "real") instinctual dispositions. This results in hysteria and hypocrisy. The war revealed the level of that hypocrisy.

For Freud, there is a bright side in all this unmasking-namely, the

58 • Inrematitmalllntertexrual Relations

fact that our mortification at the depths to which humanity has sunk is unjustified because "In reality, our fellow-citizens have not sunk so low as we feared, because they had never risen so high as we believed." (Whew.) Freud deploys his archeological metaphor here-with its image of the buried depths that never go away and can be returned to given the right concatenation of circumstances. War invites regression and people begin to obey their primitive, lower passions. (They must be lower in the image of an archeological dig, a layering over that also builds higher.) Freud is shocked to see large numbers of his fellow citizens, "many of them the best of their kind" blandished by war in this way. Maintaining his distance, Freud concludes part I by noting that so long as nations "still obey their passions far more readily than their interests," the latter will inevitably become a rationalization for the former. For Freud, it is a mystery why the "collective individuals" of humankind should "despise, hate and destroy one anotherevery nation against every other-and even in times of peace."

War has also brought about another change: it has swept away the conventions surrounding death, the widespread refusal to accept and to acknowledge its reality. "Death will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in it" as tens of thousands die in a single day. Death, for Freud, is a complex construction. For our primitive forebears, it was the starting point of serious speculation as man experienced the conflict of feelings "at the death of loved yet alien and hated persons") The earliest ethical commandment, "Thou shalt not kiU," was necessary because we were tempted in that direction and only slowly was it extended from loved ones to strangers and finally even to enemies. This helps us to understand why modem man, stripped down to the barest essentials in war, becomes, in a sense, more primitive, as Freud represents the primitive. He loses all universal moral constraint. He kills enemies-eagerly. And, returning to the near and dear, to "his wife and children," he goes on his way "undisturbed by thoughts of the enemies he has killed." This makes modem man worse than primitive man, who had to expiate and be purified if he killed.

But we are the kin of the primitive in not believing in our own death save abstractly-unconsciously we exist in disbelief. Freud suggests that the war has impinged even to this level, it has lain bare "the primal man in each of us." Since it seems we cannot abolish war, we can, at least, give death its due in light of war. He concludes on a typical, eloquent downbeat: "We recall the old saying: Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want to preserve peace, aim for war. It would be in keeping with the times to alter it: Si vis vitam, para mortem. If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death."!"

Freud's second major excursion into why war occurs in 1932 as Europe and North America struggled with the aftermath of World War I while attempts are made to rebuild a demolished internationalism. The occasion is a letter from Einstein to Freud-two great scientists exchanging views.

Freud's Discourse of War/Politics· S9

Einstein queries Freud: "Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?" Einstein, it turns out, has a few ideas of his own. He would set up a legislative and judicial body to settle conflict and each nation would abide by the order issued. But what if there were insufficient force on the part of this impartial, overseeing tribunal to enforce its verdicts? A dilemma. As well, Einstein calls attention to the "small but determined group," arms manufacturers, who no doubt want war. And as if that were not enough to dash optimism, Einstein also detects a "lust for hatred and destruction" lurking in man that bursts out as a "collective psychosis." Can you help? he asks Freud.

Einstein's letter is a perfect foil for Freud, who begins by disarming the reader rhetorically, portraying himself as a humble doctor, not a man of the world. He flatters Einstein (and us) by insisting that Einstein has pretty much said all there is to say. But perhaps Freud can add a thing or two. What follows is a curious essay that puts us on notice that we generic human beings are clearly Freud and Einstein's moral inferiors; gives Freud an opportunity to repeat his revised version of the instinct theory that locates an aggressive drive as an eternal foe of Eros; and takes additional swipes at state and church. The individualJcollective analogy is central to his argument here as elsewhere.

Exploring the relationship between right (Recht) and might (Macht) . helps us to understand the events through which we have passed, Freud insists. For the origins of right or the rule of law lie in violence-the violence of the primal horde if we go back to how it all began. The original state of things is "domination by brute force." Repeating the "scientific myth" of origins he laid down in Totem and Taboo, Freud traces the path from violence to right or law as the many (the band of brothers) combined forces to defeat the unchecked one (the frightful primal father). Once the many consolidated in this way, their might became the right of the community, a rule-governed order that must be organized and maintained. Neither fear alone, self-interest alone, nor the two taken together can accomplish this.l? What is required are communal feelings, the growth of emotional ties among members of the group.

This is a complicated process indeed as Freud unpacks it, requiring the ability to identify with others and, via this identification, to move beyond self-absorption.P The central way group identification is forged is through the activity of taking some one in common whether, as in the primal horde, literally (as well as literarily) by consuming the patriarch or, later, by sharing in some vertical link to a great leader, institution, or idea.

Now this justice or might of the community contains inner tension and discontent from its birth as each individual is required to surrender his personal liberty to turn his strength to violent uses.21 Those who do not will fmd the compulsion of the community turned against them. Moreover, the

60 • Internationalllntertextual Relations

community from the start comprises elements of unequal strength: men and women, parents and children, victors and vanquished. It follows that the community's justice (which bears down on all) reflects "unequal degrees of power" and leaves scant room for the rights of those in subjection. Two sources of unrest are built in: (1) some, usually those who come to rule, will try to exempt themselves from the prohibitions that apply to everyone and (2) oppressed members of the community may press for "equal justice" and may do so violently. Right, for Freud, is one form of might.

Freud's account of the movement from brute force to the might/right of group locates complex interconnections between the psychic transformations of individuals and the coming together of collectivities. Each evolves from a situation in which compulsion eventually gives way to rule-governance. The analogue in individual development of the move from violence to justice in the narrative of the species, is that process whereby the child evolves from a stage in which he or she is dominated by the more powerful parent, as well as by his or her drives, to one in which the youngster has internalized the parents' might and made it his or her right: the law rules the drives from within. The cop does not have to be at the door in order for me to behave decently toward others. The nasty truth underneath remains: below the civilized surface, most individuals are frustrated and unconsciously searching for some instinctual release-just as below the civilized surface, most collectivities are prepared to take advantage of turmoil and any breakdown in right to return to the brute law of might.

Justice, then, comes at a price just as peace often is bought at a terrible price, requiring a period of war and bloodshed for its instantiation. Freud's example is the Pax Romana during which evil and violence got transformed into law by establishing "larger units within which the use of violence was made impossible." War can be a vehicle to peace, to the creation of more universalistic orders. In other words, Freud sees hope in the absorption of smaller units of rule by larger units, a process that reduces points of possible interstate conflict by lowering the number in the game. If state x absorbs states y and a, they are then subject to the internal order of state x and to its law is law backed up its police rather to the vagaries of wars fought by the competing armies of x and y. Freud seeks a stronger, wider, more universal cultural superego; war, tragic as it is, has been one way to achieve this end.22

Having linked together first- and second-image phenomena through his analogy between individual psychic development at the origin and maintenance of the group, Freud goes on to opt strongly for a Waltzian "third-image" solution: wars can only be prevented if humankind sets up a central authority to which the right of giving judgment in all conflicts of interests between states is handed over. One not only requires a supreme agency, but it must, have the necessary power-the League of Nations does not fit this bill. As I

Freud's Discourse o/War/Politics • 61

Waltz might argue, Freud's solution-that of the third image per se-is logically unassailable but practically unobtainable. Yet we seem to require it, for only when wars are prevented will it be possible to alter the inner organization of states (violence no longer being an option) and this, in tum, would play a direct role in transforming individual human drives in pacific directions, in strengthening Eros in its cosmic battle with the forces of ThanatoS.23

For Eros unites and coheres, forging individuals and groups; Thanatos breaks down and divides. One cannot eliminate the aggressive drive. Most of our actions and emotions are alloys of Eros and Thanatos. It is extremely rare for any human action to be pure~ loving or hating. Human beings are complex. Their motives are always both noble and base, including those motives that propel people toward war. Somehow we should not be daunted at the task of strengthening Eros, of promoting progressive displacement of the aims of the drives in the direction of enhancing the intellect, fortifying the core of das Ich or the Self, and in internalizing aggressive impulses.

How do we achieve a wider community of feeling-for therein lies the rub? Freud allows himself to hope that the long, indirect wiles and ways of Eros might promote such identifications, might incite people toward more pacific modes. Also important, not as a substitute but as an end in itself as well as a vehicle for further change, is the education of an elite with independent minds free of church or state. Freud's notion that there exists a select group of disillusioned few and that their numbers can be extended comes through very clearly: it is his version of Plato's guardian elite. This splendid few is disabused of archaic notions of heroism; they have truly undergone transformation of their drives. Finally, then, genuine psychic substitutions are necessary to the end of a more peaceful world-an arduous process, but until it is achieved, the necessary precondition for the penultimate solution to "why war" will not have been met.

Freud winds down by indulging in a piece of rhetorical self-congratulation.

Why are he and Einstein so special, he ponders? Curiously, he gives neither of them much credit for their achievement of an essentially pacific Self. They are pacifists who rebel against violence "because [they] cannot help doing so." By constitutional pacifist, Freud means someone who is so thoroughly disabused of the motives for instinctual unleashing that it is no particular moral burden for him to keep himself reined in; basically, he has become one of Freud's truly civilized men. Psychic modification, the displacement of instinctual aims, is more developed in some than others. Those few, including Freud and Einstein, will react against war as they do "because everyone has a right to his own life, because war puts an end to human lives that are full of hope, because it brings individuals into humiliating situations, because it compels them against their will to murder

62 • Intemationalllntertextual Relations

other men, and because it destroys precious natural objects which have been produced by the labours of humanity. "24

Eloquent, curious, simultaneously off-putting and engaging, "Why War?" was Freud's last direct engagement with the topic of war although he remained preoccupied with the "problem of aggression" to the end. I will now spin off in several directions, noting a problem with "peace" (including Freud's vision tied to the unifying teleology of Eros writ large), questioning Freud's image (a standard trope in his time) of the "unleashing of the beast," and pondering whether or not one can square Freud's bestial metaphors with his theoretical argument that men, not women, are the true carriers of civilization, a theme most fully developed in Civilization and its Discontents .

Freud calls up peace and thinkS/writes "Pax Romana." A strange peace. (Or is it? Read on.) Here is Augustine: "Peace and War had a competition in cruelty; and Peace won the prize." Augustine deploys biting irony where the follies and fancies of the Roman peace are concerned: "F9r the men whom War cut down were bearing arms; Peace slaughtered the defenceless.t'<' The Roman peace, for Augustine, is a bitter and violent order, an imposed totality. Freud valorizes Rome's civilizing mission. He mistrusts the claims of the particular, whether small, parochial states or small, parochial families (the world of women). He desires wider unities. But he ignores the problem with peace, a concept, as I previously put it, that is "onto logically suspicious. "26

Too often peace seems a world without liminal enthusiasms and possibilities, a world in which difference itself has been eliminated. For example, Immanuel Kant's representation of peace in his great essay is a solipsistic dream that can "exist among like kinds and equals" only, making of the mere existence of "otherness" a flaw in the perfect scheme of thingsP Freud's peace, or so I am suggesting, is similarly problematic if one traces out the thread/threat of a subtext that runs through Freud's work. I refer to grand Eros, bringer of civilization, forger of unities, drawn upon to comfort us and to protect us from the ravages of Thanatos. Samuel Weber suggests that Freud thought he had found Eros in Aristophanes' story of ancient fused beings, before they sundered to form "two" or to be "different." But this urge to come together is, instead, "nothing other than Thanatos, in the purest and most irresistible of forms," for fusion brings death. The mythical being in Aristophanes' tale dies because it cannot separate and hence cannot take nourishment. It is fixed in a unified death grip.28

For Freud, Thanatos is the harbinger of an urge to dis-integrate, to return to an earlier form of being, simplex not duplex, merged with the primal ooze. Eros draws together both individuals and civilizations. But Weber suggests that the unity is itself deathlike, that the uncanny Freud (not our tamed Freud) knows this, that his texts work against themselves to

Freud's Discourse ofWarlPolitics • 63

display this possibility if one is true to their subversive playfulness. Additional support for Weber's disorienting thesis comes from Greek tragedy in which (if we are to believe Euripides) Thanatos was armed with a sword. Nicole Loraux's exploration of Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman informs us: "This was certainly not pure chance. If death, the same for all, makes no distinction between its victims, . . . it was for Thanatos, the male incarnation of death, to carry the sword, the emblem of a man's demise."

And more. For it is primarily by men that women meet their deaths or because of men that they go to death by their own hand. And the "place where women kill themselves . . . that is the marriage chamber, the thalamos." Strange. Putting to death is represented as marriage-a fusion with nonbeing or a calling into nonbeing. Thanatos and Eros come together, not as opposites, not as a principle of difference, but as allies. Writes Loraux: "In the shared understandings of social life, death is a natural metaphor of marriage because, in the course of the wedding procession, the young girl renounces her self."29 The unifying teleology of Eros requires the sword of Thanatos to fuse the being of the woman with living or dead renunciation. Is the urge to come together doomed to be a death-grip? Here is a thought soberer even than Freud suggests explicitly but throws up implicitly through his texts, in his ironic deployment of representations. Peace/War; ErosfIbanatos: the same, a one-way street, difference effaced.

What about the beast? Images of the beast lurked in the hearts of civilized Europeans of Freud's era. Think of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for example. Whenever Jekyll metamorphoses into Hyde, his behavior is described by Stevenson as "ape-like." Recall Kafka's chilling story, itself called "The Metamorphosis," as the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, turns into a hideous bug. Ever popular was "The Beauty and the Beast," imagery of a handsome prince beneath the bestiality, a mirror image of the dominant motif.

In the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud refers to "all the evil spirits lurking within" society. If you doubt their existence, he tells his audience, just think of "the phenomena accompanying the war that is now raging in Europe" and this ''will perhaps give you some notion of what legions of these evil spirits there may be."30 In another reference, this time from Civilization and its Discontents, discussing aggression and its release, Freud comments that once the mental counterforces to its outpouring have been forced "out of action" (another military metaphor), "it [aggression] manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien. "31

Freud has a name for this cultural manifestation of aggressive urges: regression. A reversion back to earlier, more drive-dominated stage of development allows for the unleashing of the beast. This later became the so-called drive-discharge model of aggression and it is one of the most widely

64 • Internationalllntertextual Relations

accepted models used to "define the relationship between war experience and normal social life" in the words of Eric Leed. Although it is encountered most commonly in psychoanalytic theories of war, the drive-discharge model also finds expression in the work of historians and anthropologists-the notion that collective violence is a world of "instinctual liberty that contrasts starkly with the social world of instinctual renunciation and deferment of traficiation." Leed describes the drive-discharge model as a "deeply rooted cultural assumption" of the World War I era, ongoingly reinscribed and encoded into our current perspectives.F

There are many reasons to be dubious of this model. It cannot account for the experiences combat soldiers themselves relate in anything approaching completeness and, for the first World War, it seems particularly inapposite, for in that war aggression was not unleashed without restraint so much as it was frustrated, immobilized, and literally entrenched.P There is, however, some element of delight in danger and destruction that war provides an arena for and that one must take account of, or that any account must account for, to put it even more awkwardly. Whether "regression" is the name we choose to give the phenomena I have in mind is open to contestation, but the phenomena are pervasive as part of war experience.

J. Glenn Gray, whose The Warriors is the greatest of all reflective books on men and war, notes one of a cluster of impulses war engenders or helps to make visible in a stark way-delight in destruction. This delight is not so much that of an egoistic warrior giving himself over to blood lust as a collective recognition of war's power and grandeur. Gray writes of astonishment and wonder at displays of awesome force, noting that war offers these human capacities an exercise field par excellence. There is the terrible discovery in war, by "thousands of youths who never suspected" it, of the presence in themselves of the "mad excitement of destroying." Somberly, Gray reflects: "Men are in one part of their being in love with death, and periods of war in human society represent the dominance of this impulsion." William Broyles, Jr., reinscribing Gray's analysis to help himself understand his own Vietnam experience, writes: "The love of war stems from the union, deep in the core of our being, between sex and destruction, beauty and horror, love and death. War may be the only way in which most men touch the mythic domains in our soul. It is, for men, at some terrible level the closest thing to what childbirth is for women: the initiation into the power of life and death. "34

Whether it is best to characterize the powerful dynamic and structure of experience recounted by Gray and, later, Broyles as a psychological phenomenon seems dubious. Gray would insist that one here touches on a profound and troubling ontology that contemporary notions of "psychology" cannot capture. What Freud does not treat, and his account fails to capture, is the defensive and the sacrificial dimensions of war. He recognizes the dogs

Freud's Discourse o[WarlPolitics • 65

of war, but he cannot see the selfless martyrs, the compassionate warriors. What would Freud make of the dramatic fmdings of S.L.A. Marshall in his path breaking Men against Fire! Even in high-morale combat units, Marshall found that fully 75 percent of soldiers "will not fire or will not persist in fuing against the enemy and his works. These men may face the danger but they will not fight , . . the act of willingly firing upon the enemy is of itself an instance of high initiative on the battlefield," not, it seems, a routine and an eager event.36

One final perplexity. Freud insists in Civilization and its Discontents and repeats in a somewhat ad hoc way in other narratives that the male of the species is the true carrier of civilization. By this, Freud means that men are more capable than women of attaining a disinterested sense of justice and acquiring a wider vision of civilization and its demands. Women, tied to the particular-to families and to the immediate-are less capable of sublimation, less distanced from certain structures of the drives. Freud does not argue this to condemn women, but to understand a phenomenon. (Whether he has appropriately described the phenomenon is, of course, another matter.) My point, for now, is not to debate this assumption with Freud, but to ask whether, staying within Freud's narrative, one can square his unleashedbeast hypothesis of collective regression with his construction of the male as the exemplar of civilized morality.

If, indeed, men have gone further in that process of instinctual transformation Freud outlines so carefully in his exchange with Einstein, it suggests that they should be more capable than women of resisting appeals to instinctual regression. It is counterintuitive to argue, first that men are more civilized and, second, that men are more subject to regression to the beastlkiller. Freudmakes this work by suggesting that civilization is a veneer for most men. But if this is the case, and the vast majority are struggling just to meet the demands of instinctual renunciation, how can there be any "left over" for the grand civilizing tasks that are also the responsibility of, and a possibility for, men more than women?

This line of questioning puts pressure on Freud's stories of war and civilization. Either his account of war, or his paean to male-civilizers is destabilized if one attempts to reconcile the two. Were Freud to jettison that portion of his account of war what construes it as a case of collective, individual regression, and move toward a more Hegelian construction of war as the expression of the universalism of the state, he would confront the rather unhappy possibility-more unhappy by far than his unleashing-of-the beast argument-that war flows, not from our lower urges, but from our civilized superegos, including the demands of justice. For one of these demands has been that one serve and sacrifice and subordinate one's own particular aims and ends to the common goodand the survival of the group.F

Freud, it seems, was more hopeful than he knew. But his texts know

66 • InternationaJ/Int6textual Relations

better and work to undermine his own explicit arguments in vital and interesting ways. The unconsoling thought with which, for now, we are left is this: if war is not so much a collective breakdown as the moment when the collective, in fact, realizes itself in the modem world of states, we are in very deep water indeed.

Notes

1. Cited in Ernest Jones, Tire Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, ed. and abridged by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus (New York: Basic Books, 1%1), p, 359.

2. The locution, "discourse of armed civic virtue," is drawn from my book, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987). I deploy it as a way of tracing genealogically the taut assimilation of war/politics in the strongest current of Western political thought, from the Greeks through the civic republicans, Hegel's Kriegstaal, and beyond.

3. Harold Bloom, "Criticism, Canon-Formation, and Prophecy: The Sorrows

of Facticity," Raritan (winter 1984, 1-20), pp. 17-18, 20. 4. Jones, Freud, pp. 20-21.

5. Ibid., p. 356.

6. Ibid., p. 358.

7. From vol. I, "Pre-psycho-analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts" in the Standard Edition, p. 210.

8. From Tire Psyclwpatlwlogy of Everyday Life.

9. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Standard Edition, vol. 15, p. 74.

10. Does this fit the mode of "libidinal disturbance"? It seems more a moral flurry, stripping the official designation off the task her son was performing to locate more precisely its result-killing.

11. The episodes are detailed in The Psychopatlwlogy of Everyday Life, p. 71; and Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, pp. 137-138, respectively.

12. "Introduction to Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses," Standard Edition, a vol. 17, pp. 208-209. Freud is here just on the verge of formulating the "death instinct" with "the compulsion to repeat" as one of its potent signs.

13. "Memorandum on the Electrical Treatment of War Neurotics," Standard Edition, vol. 17, pp, 212-215.

14. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959.

15. The quote from Freud that prefaces chapter 7 in Waltz is: "So long as there are nations and empires, each prepared callously to exterminate its rival, all alike must be equipped for war."

16. Freud indicates that we should not be surprised at wars between "primitives and civilized peoples."

17. This idea is developed in "Hedley Bull and the Idea of Diplomatic Culture," a paper presented at the annual meeting of the British International Studies Association (December 1986) and extends arguments from Der Derian's On

Freud's Discourse of WQT/PQlitics • 67

Dip/l)m4cy: A Genealogy of Westm! Estrangemmt (Oxford. England: Basil Blac.kweU, 1982.)

IS. All quoted material is drawn ftom "Tlloughts for the Times on War and Death," Stattd4rd EdIWm, vol, 14, pp. 273-330 inclusive.

{9. Here, as elsewhere, Freud distance.s biInsclf from. Hobbes.

ZO. The dynamic of identification is explored most fully by Freud in Group Psychology and" ,he Analysis of Ego and CiviJiJlatUm and 115 Discontents.

21. A word about «his": it seems appropriate to stick with the male pronoun at this point in the exposition for the "he's" ate the primary agents of thill PI()cess, as Freud unpacks it.

22. This helps to explain Freud's extreme animus toward Woodrow Wilson.

He believed that Wilson's msistence on independence for the nations imbedded in the Austro-Hungarian state was a recipe for future disaster.

23. Once the collective superego is transformed, the level of cultural hypocrisy Freud earlier located as ODe source of World War I is muted.

24. AU.material in this account of Freud's essay may be found in SrandMJ Edition, vo1. 22, pp. 196-215 inclusive.

25. Augusrine quotes are drawn from The City of God, ed. David Knowles

(Baltimore. Md.: Penguin Books, 1972).

26. See Women and War, p, 253.

27. See the discussion in ibid. pp. 255-256.

28. Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud {Minneapolis: Univemty of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 159.

29. All citations are from Loraux'a suggestive essay, Tragic WlIYS Df Killing a Woman, trans. Anthony Forster (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 223, 37.

30. Standard Edition, vol, 15, p. 16.

31. SfIl1II1Drd Edition, vol. 21, p. 112 (emphasis added).

32. Eric J. Leed, No Man's Land. Combat and IdentitY in World War I (Cambridge, Bngland: Cambridge University Press. 1979), pp. S-6. It became d~ply rooted in large part because of the efforts of psychoanalytically oriented thinkers, then and DOW, to root it~ See, for example, Ernest Jones, "War and Psychology," in ESS4)'s in Applied Psyclwwgy, vol. I (New York: International Universities Press, 1964), 55-76.

33. On this, see Leed and discussions scattered throughout my book, Women

and War, particularly chapter 6.

34. This paragraph is lifted from my Women and Wor, p. 200.

35. S.L.A. Marshall, Men against Fire (New York: Willism Morrow, 1947).

36. Ibid., pp. 50,59.

37. See my di~ussion in Women and War. pp. 73-76, for brief comments. A mere complete account is offered in Shlomo Avineri, Hegel's Theory of the Modern Suae (Cambridge, England: Catnbridge UniversitY Press, 1974).

"':.'~~

5

Representing World Politics: The Sport/War Intertext

Michael]. Shapiro

Any text is an intenext; other texts are present in it at various levels in more or less recognizable forms: the texts of the previous and surrounding culture.

-Roland Barthes

The language of Sports, its organization, its values, its class system, its discipline, its energies, are used by politics, by business, by all the factors that engineer our daily lives, to justify, vivify, enhance, sometimes obscure nonspons activities, and then these words and concepts and values reenter sports, changed, and insidiously they affect our games.

-Robert Lipsyte

The provocation for this analysis can be found in Paul Fussell's masterful study of the British experience on the "Western Front" in World War I, a study he describes as an analysis of "the literary dimensions of the trench experience itself."! In rendering this literary analysis, Fussell strikes a note of puzzlement at the power of the various ways that the war was figured or given mythical, rhetorical, and narrative elements by British participants and onlookers. He states that if the book were to have a subtitle, it would be "An Inquiry into the Curious Literariness of Real Life."2 Although much of Fussell's emphasis is on the imaginings of Self and Other, which were part of the representational practice that lent coherence to the strategies and tactics in the fighting itself, he conveys effectively the considerable sociocultural depth of the imagery used not only to direct fighting styles and engagements but also the legitimation of the war effort as a whole carried in the various domains of British print journalism and literature.

The particular figuration that inspires this inquiry is Fussell's description of the way British conceptions of a person's relationship to competitive games directed much of the ideational impetus and content of what the British fighting forces believed was involved in dealing with the Germans.

70 • Internationolllntertextuol Relations

For example, citing a contemporary "quasi official and very popular work of propaganda," Lord Northcliffe's War Book, Fussell demonstrates the sporting figuration involved in the British sense of superiority over German counterparts.

Our soldiers are individuals. They embark on little individual enterprises. The German . . . is not so clever at these devices. He has never been taught them before the war, and his whole training from childhood upwards has been to obey, and to obey in numbers .... He has not played individual games. Football, which develops individuality, has only been introduced into Germany in comparatively recent times. 3

The power of Northcliffe's particular form of sporting imagery comes from the ideational depth that certain forms of the gaming culture had acquired in British society. British sporting figuration entered into the war with manifestations well beyond mere legitimation for regarding the Germans as the kind of less-worthy others that would place them as appropriate targets of violent confrontation. Indeed, in some comers of the British military mentality, confusion over or at least mixing of the sport versus war forms of agonistics reigned. Some of the commanders treated battles as sporting contests, with disastrous results for their soldiers. In the Battle of the Somme, for example, Captain W. P. Neville brought footballs to the front and offered a prize to the one of his four platoons that at "the jumpoff' could kick its football first to the German frontline during the "attack." Among the many who failed to survive this attack was the sporting Captain Neville.!

While a good case an be made against the wisdom of mixing the genres of gaming and fighting in the case of actual battles (as did Neville, who perpetrated an irrational enactment of a figural representation of the war), this analysis strikes a somewhat different note from Fussell's evocation of wonderment at such seemingly strange or irrational imaginative enactments. This particular aspect of the literariness of war, the effects of a sporting figuration, should not be regarded as curious for two reasons: one a fairly specific historic standpoint and the other a more general, epistemological one.

First, that sports imagery should characterize the thinking in international conflict is not surprising when one takes note of the origin of many sporting contests in military activities. The leaves from the sports and war text have been sorted together in human societies for centuries. Since early antiquity, the sporting and warrior dimensions of the social body have been intimately conjoined, and both have had a similar relation to social status. That in modernity, this intermixing of the ideational and, thus, policy dimensions of the sporting and warring bodies retains considerable import was shown

Representing World Politics· 71

rather dramatically in the famous Central American Soccer War described by LaFeber: "When a soccer match between Honduras and Salvadore ended in a bloody riot, Lopez's government seized the opportunity to expeU all Salvadorans. War broke out between the two nations. It ended after both sides suffered heavy casualties and the Central American Common Market began to break down."5

Second, and more generally, conflict, war, or any domain of human understanding is always-already textua1ized or shot through with figuration that has a venerable history. To understand the current text of conflict and war, then, one has to go back to its earlier inscriptions in the "archetypal body metaphors" stretching back to antiquity, 6 It is therefore less useful for us to adopt an attitude of curiosity than it is to adopt a particular kind of textual analytic, to seek to detail the textuaIized modes of thought whose historical development and current powers of delegation are implicated in constituting the objects, events, and processes we contemplate.

However, it is important to recognize that to employ a textualizing approach to social policy involving conflict and war is not to attempt to reduce social phenomena to various concrete manifestations of language. Rather, it is an attempt to analyze the interpretations governing policy thinking. And it is important to recognize that policy thinking is not unsituated. While it is expressed in various dominant forms of representation, those representational practices arise out of a society's more general practices (for example, the modes through which various social spaces are produced) ,7 Therefore, this analysis seeks both to discern the representational practices that construct the "world" of persons, places, and modes of conduct and to inquire into the network of social practices that give particular modes of representation their standing.

Because, moreover, this kind of analysis exists in part in the writing practice of the analyst, it is necessary to employ a particular grammar, one that helps to historicize phenomena that are ordinarily accepted as timeless and thus unproblematic. For example, to demonstrate (and denaturalize) the current power of the psychiatric mode of representation, Michel Foucalt has spoken of the "psychiatrization of criminal danger." This shift from an atemporal noun to one conveying temporality indicates that what we now take as ordinary-psychiatric discourse in the courtroom-represents a dramatic shift in the politics of criminal danger in the nineteenth century. Just as the psychiatrization of criminal danger sprung in the nineteenth century from a set of power relations, wherein health and penal officials together allocated legitimate versus illegitimate social identities and activated related forms of social control, the "sportization" of the understanding of international conflict springs from another broad set of social relations." The language of psychiatry is now lodged in so privileged a place that its discursive practices are naturalized, and the allocation of deviant identities

72 • Intemationalllntertextual Relations

relatively unchallenged. Its privilege derives not only from the increasing importance of the scrutiny of "criminals" and other deviants in the modem age, but also from the depth to which psychiatric language has penetrated into the language of everyday life such that psychiatric talk is wholly intelligible and relatively uncontested as the language for allocating marginalized identities.

Similarly, sports talk is pervasive both because of the social depth of sporting activities-almost everyone has an identity related to competitive games, whether it is active or passive, current or a matter of past personal history-and the degree of overlap between the spectator-oriented sport culture and culture in general. Sports talk, shaped by the current structure and social relations of contests and by the related broadcasting culture, has a significant "figurability" as a representational practice; it encounters interpretive codes that are widely held because they have been so widely disseminated." Moreover, the figurability of sports talk has a depth that goes beyond the broad attention to sporting contests in the American culture. In the United States as elsewhere, the culture of sport is radically entangled with the norms of other aspects of the social formation. Sociologists of sport have discovered increasingly, as Eichberg has summarized it, that:

The single sport disciplines. the games and exercises of people all over the world. are more than just interchangeable techniques. They are by no means incidental. Recent research on behavioral patterns and social configurations in sports showed that important relations exist between the games of a people and its social structures. its forms of cooperation and conflict solution. its concepts of social space and time. etc. 10

Therefore, an understanding of the effects of the contemporary version of sports discourse requires an appreciation of the evolution of sporting activities and their developing connections to the other practices in the social formation. Among other things, that evolution in the Western world has involved what Elias has called the "sportization of pastimes," the increasing tendency for ruling classes to take over, centralize and control, through an elaboration of rules, competitive games that often had their origins in folkish pastimes.'! However, before turning to the relevant parts of the evolution of competitive games, it is important to elaborate on more general aspects of representational practices as they relate to the issue of foreign policy and to offer an account of the society that receives and incorporates such representations.

Representational Practices and Policy

The emphasis on the representational practices that help to both create and vindicate public and foreign policy provides access to aspects of policy

Representing World Politics· 73

legitimation that are less obvious when we operate within the more traditional, psychological metalanguage of policy studies. For example, traditional social psychological approaches impoverish the understanding of policy legitimation insofar as they give us "policy" as a contentless set of opinions or choices and construct the perceiving citizen as a collection of beliefs, attitudes, and values. Within such a conceptual frame, both "policy" and the consciousness of the policy audience is radically dehistoricized and decontextualized. Psychologically oriented conceptual frames tend to be insensitive to the historically inherited discursive practices representing policy. Thus, the intelligibility that a policy discourse engages derives not merely from the cognitive orientations of individuals but from widely circulated "interpretive codes of connotation" (in Barthes' language) that operate effectively to the extent that there is a stock of signs held by the receivers of statements, which activate the interpretive codes. 12

Representations of public policy, then, have an ideological depth to the extent that they engage a stock of signs with which people make their everyday lives intelligible. Everyday life, as Althusser has argued, is thus ideological, not in the sense that people function within a false consciousness, but in an ontological sense; it allows subjects to recognize themselves and make intelligible Self-Other relations. Ideology within this Althusserian frame is therefore a kind of representational practice, a "lived relation to the real," and insofar as persons naturalize their lived structures of intelligibility , they fail to appreciate the historically developed structures of authority and legitimation resident in those structures. This renders them uncritically open to the persuasive force of representations that accommodate to the naturalized forms of the "real."

What a perspective oriented toward ideology-as-representation suggests is that the understanding of policy and its legitimation requires us to historicize the production and acceptance of the prevailing representational practices and, perhaps more significantly, to understand the economies of those representational practices, the meaning-constitutive attention getting, and valuational effects they enjoy. Part of this understanding is supplied by a particular view of the epistemology of figuration. Within a traditional view, the use of figuration such as sport talk used to represent violent conflict is the employment of a mode of representation to express something that is not a representation (that is, an unmediated presence.) But as both Derrida and de Man (among others) have shown, the real is always mediated by one or another representation. Recognizing this, the issue becomes not one of the fidelity of the representation to the real, but the kind of meaning and value a representation produces.P The lending discourses, those from which imagery is taken in the figuring of a domain of meaning, do their valuational work whether they contain active and thus recognized figures or dead and thus implicit, unrecognized ones.

74 • Int:emarionaUlntertextual Relations

For example, consider the well-known strategic discourse operating in the center of ideational orientations of powerful nations, a discursive practice that Karl von Clausewitz helped to create. Now, as at its inception, it provides a good example of rhetorical or figurative legitimations for violent policy options. In this particular passage, which is rich in effective, legitimation figuration, Clausewitz states that war is

a strange trinity. It is composed of the original violence of its essence, the hate and enmity which are to be regarded as blind, natural impulse; of the play of probabilities and chance, which make it a free activity of the emotions; of the subordinate character of a political instrument, through which it belongs to the province of pure intelligence. The first of these three sides is more particularly the concern of the people, the second that of the commander and his army, the third that of government. The passions which flame up in war must be already present in the peoples concerned. The scope and the play of courage will get in the realm of probability and chance depends on the character of the commander and the army; the political objects are the concern of the government alone."

It is unnecessary to linger over the invocation of the trinity, which has the effect of sanctifying war by absorbing it into one of Christian theology's most sacred symbols, for this metaphoric sanctification is a minor part of the figuration of the passage. Undoubtedly, the most effective aspect of the legitimation is the narrative built around the three sides of Oausewitz's trinity. It is not simply the case that Clausewitz is theorizing the passions and enmity of the population as part of the war; he is placing it at the beginning of a narrative. The conflict process seems to begin with a (natural) , enmity, which by Clausewitz's account then becomes rationalized and regulated by the other sides of the trinity: the military, which enacts the enmity, and the leadership of the state, which supplies the overall strategic direction, aiming the military force at the appropriate objects.

Certainly anyone with more than a storybook familiarity with the course of events in the Thirty Years War, the historical event that inspired much of Clausewitz's theorizing, would resist Clausewitz's narrative. At a minimum, the enmity of the populations involved, to the extent that they had any unified and articulate affect toward the states engaged in the war, was epiphenomenal to the strategic machinations of leadership in both the militaries and governments, whose greater object of Christianizing the globe and lesser one of breaking the power of Catholic or Protestant nations created a shifting pattern of a friend and foe that would defy the enmity formation of even a sophisticated, policy-attentive population.

This sample of Clausewitz's musings, like his more celebrated pacifying of war by making it a benign verb (a policy action), should be read as a laundering of violence. The people's passions serve as a legitimating device.

Representing World Politics. 7S

There are certainly historical cases of long-held grievances that help to construct a sometimes enduring popular enmity, but in most cases, articulate enmity is epiphenomenal to a leadership-induced constitution of enemies. Nevertheless, we should not simply dismiss Clausewitz's thinking, because in theorizing the population and placing it, as he did, at the center of the justification of war, he was expressing something that has since become integral to the modem understanding of the strategy of conflict and war. The modem importance of the people (or better, the "population") is underlined by Foucault in an analysis of another domain of policy, the surveillance of sexuality.

One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of "population" as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded. Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a "people," but with a "population."16

This privileging of the population as a major actor and identity in the modem nation state provides much of the impetus and legitimation for conflict and war. However, as modernity has witnessed the demise of the mercenary army, whose unreliability Clausewitz deplored, and the production of the citizen-soldier, whom Clausewitz helped to theorize, there has developed the need for a different kind of currency to recruit and mobilize an army. Citizens have to be encouraged to support the strategic understanding among competing states and be willing both to mobilize for war (offer their bodies) and support that mobilization (offer their political acquiescence). And we can understand the production of that acquiescence by appreciating the discursive economies within which international strategy and war are represented. As Foucault has shown, the discourses that contain understandings are not simply linguistic expressions to be viewed on the basis of representational adequacy; they are power-related resources. In deploying identities for actors and producing the overall meaning frame within which they operate, they constitute and reproduce prevailing systems of power and authority in general and direct the actions flowing from those systems in particular .

However, in addition to appreciating the discursive economies of strategy, it is important to appreciate as well as the structure of the meaning-culture within which discourses can become effective. For example, while it is the case that modem Western populations think increasingly with sports imagery (the particulars of which are elaborated shortly), a more venerable mode of thinking is a thinking with animals. Certainly, given the proximity of animals and their significance in diet, leisure, war, aesthetics, and so on, and the

76 • Internationalllntertextuol Relations

range of difference they provide as a semiotic system, people have found them useful to develop modes of representation for the Self and the Other (as Levi-Strauss has pointed out). And this representational practice has not abated. For example, animal names are frequently used to distinguish ability groups in elementary schools (for example, bluebirds, squirrels, and moles, which represented, in descending order, the reading-ability groups in my rust-grade class).

Apart from the mere source of differentiation the language of animal difference provides, however, it can be shown that thinking with animals resonates with various social cleavages. For example, observations of predatory behavior in the animal world have been used historically to supply ideational support for human social inequality. And, with the rise of bourgeois society, there developed ways of distinguishing the bourgeois from the peasant classes on the basis of the way animals were treated by the different classes. Bourgeois society distinguished itself from lower classes by pointing proudly to its more humane treatment of animals. How this could provide a coherent self-understanding appears mystifying, given the remorseless bourgeois attitudes toward animals when they are objects in either cullinary or industrial-production activities. However, when we recognize the sharp division that developed between spheres of leisure and spheres of production in bourgeois society-with the former. reserved for humane treatment of household pets and so on-the seemingly contradictory mode of thinking becomes more coherent.F What this illustrates is not simply the ability of different social classes to tolerate contradictions, anomalies, or incoherences in the discursive modes through which thinking is produced, but rather one's need to situate the thinking or representational practices of a society within the other aspects of the social formation, which collaborate in producing their effects and consequences.

The Social Body

The depth of the social penetration of sports discourse relates to two opposed aspects of the social body: those processes that produce consensus and solidarity and those that produce or reinforce cleavage and difference. Modem sport contests, like ancient sport contests, partake of both of these processes, which Levi-Strauss has described in terms of the significance of rituals versus games.

Games. . . appear to have a disjunctive effect: they end in the establishment of a difference between individual players or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality. And at the end of the game they are distinguished into winners and losers. Ritual, on the other hand, is the

Representing World Politics • 17

exact inverse; it conjoins, for it brings about a union .•• or in any case an organic relation between two initially separate groups. IS

Sport does not fit entirely into either the ritual or game conception as Levi-Strauss constructs them, although modem sport contests have lost much of their original, ritualistic origins, which were based on their connections with religious rituals, seasonal fetes, and so on. To the extent that they retain ritualistic dimensions, these are largely secular, invoking symbols of national unity, for example, in their preliminary or ending ceremonies. However, it is not enough to say that sporting practices and discourse impact on a social formation involved in both solidarity-and difference-creating processes. One must characterize the social body in a more specific way.

Apart from what is perhaps the most obvious aspect, class difference, which connects primarily with aspects of occupational stratification and political power, the various sub sectors of the social body distinguish themselves not simply on the basis of their concrete positions in economic, social, and political hierarchies, but on the basis of the possession of an ability to participate in various language games. Here, Lyotard's assertion that the observable social bond is composed of various language "moves," fragmented clusters of "performativity" is useful." Whether or not one believes that the modem (or postmodern as Lyotard puts it) condition consists primarily of such localized meaning groups in the absence of a generalized metanarrative such as that supplied by religion (Lyotard's position), or whether the metanarratives have simply gone underground, creating what Jameson has called a "political unconscious" (Jameson's position), there is evidence of a fragmentation of meaning systems within modem sports cuhures." For example, the rules relating to the role of the contemporary British football fan operate within a limited, working-classmale subculture. Despite the recent eggregious levels of violence that may well be syptomatic of some broad level of social strain, in general, a shared social competence has governed football-fan rowdiness, and there are compelling arguments to the effect that violent acting out by football fans is more a local, class-based semiotics than a measure of an intensification of class warfare or a general culture decline. 21

With the observation of the actual process of football-fan rowdiness, a picture emerges of football rowdiness in its milder forms as a rule-governed phenomenon that limits violence. In many cases, "the apparently unrestrained aggressive behavior of the fans is in fact tightly structured and rule boundthese seemingly disorderly actions are guided by a shared social competence. "22 Part of this shared competence has involved a semiotic or language game of aggression in which a lot of lesser hooliganism such as chasing goes on, with an episode of someone being chased off serving to communicate

78 • InlemtlrionalllntertextlUll Relations

toughness and submission while avoiding injurious confrontation.P Even the case of more extreme forms of football violence seem to be based on shared codes and a relatively tight, rule-governed structure.P' Football rowdiness is, in effect, an extreme form of factionalism in which hooligans derive their identities less from their affiliation with a particular football club than from the extraspectator violence they effect.

However, we must not neglect the other aspect of social process that sports attachments involve: cleavage. Before exploring relevant aspects of the history of sports factionalism, however, it should be noted that despite evidence of fragmentation in subcultures in their relationship to sportsrelated language games, it is highly problematic whether one can, after Lyotard, construe the "postmodern condition" as one more of fragmentation than of centralization with respect to practices and codes. In the case of sports discourse, much of the trend has been toward centralization for reasons that will be elaborated shortly.

Historically, sports partisanship has, since ancient times, been a major force in the production of cleavage as well as civility and solidarity. This is not the place to offer a comprehensive history of sports partisanship. It is worth noting, simply, that sports partisanship has frequently reached deeply into the social formation, attaching itself to other cleavages-class, ethnic, religious, political, and so on-becoming a vehicle for a radical production of forms of Otherness based on abiding affiliations.

For example, there is significant evidence that the color-coded circus factions articulated with deep and abiding religio-political cleavages. By the first centuries of Byzantine supremacy, the political order was significantly affected by both debates and episodes of crowd disorder based on attitudes toward the divinity of Christ. These cleavages which also reflected economic and social divisions, tended to coincide with the major chariot-racing factions of the Byzantine hyppodrome. The "Blues" tended to be orthodox trinitarians, and the "Greens" the dissident monophysites who ascribed to God a single, composite character. 2S

Although the evidence for the endurance and consistency of these cleavages is equivocal, it was undeniably the case that these ancient sports factions had in certain periods (most notably the sixth century) a marked political significance.26 At a minimum, they articulated with religious cleavages that in that age had a significant, even controlling, effect on the reigning political discourse. Not incidental to all of this was the fact that the emperors of the period were identifiable as Blue or Green partisans.

The long history in which sports partisanship has enjoyed a significant place in the play of identity and difference, which produces the identifiable social groupings in the social order, has continuously manifested itself in the history of politics, policy, and persuasion. And what is perhaps most significant in the modern period is the waxing of the influence of sports-

Representing World Polilics • 79

related discourse, which has paralleled the waning of the influence of religious discourse, to the point where today the average citizen arguably can be more easily summoned and engaged by sports talk than by religious or God talk. (Recognizing this, a television sports network ad for the Sunday professional football game says: " Join our Congregation".)

Both of these developments-the waxing of sports talk and the waning of God talk-undoubtedly owe much to the history of print and broadcast media as well as to the history of sport, especially sports-related commerce. The media story begins of course with the development of print media. Before that, modes of representation were primarily visual and aural, and the only general language for structuring mass-based interpretive codes, Latin, privileged a centralized ecclesiastic authority . Not surprisingly, then, the development of print aided the development of codes for identities and subjectivities based on vernacular languages and more local, secularized connections.

Anderson places the development of print media in a privileged place in the production of the kind of imagination oriented more to consciousness of nationality than Christendom." Certainly, at a minimum, the vacuum left by the waning of the influence of ecclesiastic modes of representation must be thought on the basis of what has taken its place. And the story develops to the point where modem sports news not only claims an increasing share of the media, but also articulates itself with identities that tend to be far more active than religious affiliations in modem industrial societies. Without going into a detailed historical chronology, it should suffice to recognize that not only is sports news far more pervasive and closely attended in all modem media than other traditional sources of identification, but also that it has played a role in shaping both modem sports consciousness and the structure of modem sports.

The Historical Development of Modem Sport

The modem sports discourse (and thus consciousness) is explicable only when we recognize that what we have as a sport reflects who we are and further that who we are is constituted as a set of practices, sporting practices among others. Moreover, to recognize the modem ontology of the social body as a set of practices, it is necessary to historicize the present and thereby see it as an evolved set of practices that could have been otherwise. Turning specifically to the sport dimension of that ontology, it is the case that the present structure of sports discourse is an authority-reinforcing practice that, in its effect in constituting identities-sports virtuosos, spectators, amateurs, professionals-as wen as activities thought of as sporting versus non-sporting, participates in the discursive economies that

80 • IntematiotwlllnterUxtual Relations

create and orient us to modem social and political reality. To interpret the role of sports discourse in shaping and managing that reality, we need to treat seriously the "economies" of the sports discourse.

The codes or discursive practices regulating modem sports events contain silences. Sports discourse, like any discourse, sits atop a history of strife or at least contention in which the resulting practices represent only what has dominated. Most notably, two kinds of pressures involved in shaping modem sports are no longer evident or easily recoverable in what remains in the way sporting contests are structured and represented. One is the military or warrior dimension and the other the dynamics of class struggle. The legacy from the military origin of many modem sports presents an irony. In a sense, the use of sports figuration to represent international conflict, strategy, and war-related thinking is a movement in which sport has come full circle. When sports talk becomes the lending discourse for war/strategy talk, it is a case of sports talk coming home rather than being estranged from its wholly separate meaning context.

To put the case briefly, most sporting events had their origin in military engagement or at least military-training activities. A historian of sport, reading the available traces of the earliest sporting contests recorded in western civilization, concluded that the Sumerian civilization, "official sport served only military or paramilitary purposes. "28 And in general in the ancient world, sporting practices were designed primarily as preparation for war. Certainly the Greek and Roman civilizations added dimensions to sport, the former being oriented primarily to an idea of body culture that expressed interests beyond mere war preparation and the latter absorbing sport-asspectacle into stadium festivities designed to amuse crowds and create political capital for the event's sponsor(s). But the sporting activities themselves still remained closely tied to "skills" that took on their primary significance in war.

It appears that the beginning of the estrangement between sport and war, at a level of explicit practice, was technologically produced. Such events as the development of gunpowder and artillery reduced the need for the warrior/athlete and opened up "physical education" for play and other dimensions of competition. Of course, technology still leaves space for the warrior/athlete if the idea of athletics is confined to a person's reflexes and the hand-eye coordination dimension of sports. Given the newest military technology (heralded in a 1987 news-magazine article, "One Shot, One Kill:

A New Era of Smart Weapons"), modem warfare can be likened to a vast video game with deadly strikes guided by laser weapons.P For war constituted as this kind of "contest," the most appropriate warrior/athlete would be the teenage video-game virtuoso. And the U.S. film industry, whose imagination usually exceeds that of the Pentagon, has already figured this out. One science fiction film, The Last Starfighter, has a teenage video-game expert

Representing World Politics • 81

summoned into a space war with battles whose technology is wholly congruent with the structure of the video game on which he had excelled. Mter helping to win a space war, he is returned to his (postmodern) culture.

But, to return to the historical narrative, technology has not been the only influence affecting the sports/war relationship and pushing sports military origins more into the shadows. There are ideational contributions as well, such as the Renaissance commitment to physical education as part of the "whole man. "30 In any case, by late in the sixteenth century, changes in the pattern of war were reflected in sporting activities. Noblemen ceased tilting, and modem horse racing is all that is left of the old iousts.v And, in general, the aristocracy began changing their forms of play, dismounting from the horse in favor of paid riders and indulging in games that belonged to a cult of the gentleman, such as bowling.

It is at this point that the other silence becomes recoverable. The shape of modem sport has been intimately connected with the dynamics of class, the structure of which is of course closely connected with various social and economic developments. To understand this part of the narrative, it is useful to evoke some of M.M. Bakhtin's insights on the social dimensions of discourse. In speaking of the ideational effects of the novel as a genre of writing, Bakhtin sets up a tension between what he calls the "centripetal forces" in a society, those "forces that serve to unify and centralize the verbal-ideological world," and the "centrifugal forces," which he sees as operating against or in resistance to this unifying and centralizing tendency. 32 The contrasting tendencies operate within the general pattern of voices in a society that Bakhtin called "heteroglossia" or a plurality of contending voices.

At any given moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word . . . but also • . . into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, "professional" and "generic" languages, languages of generations arid so forth. 33

Something very much akin to Bakhtin's understanding of the contending social forces immanent in the discursive practices of a society has not been obscure to ruling classes. While, as previously suggested, much of the development of sport culture has come from above and operated, in Bakhtin's terms, to reinforce the centripetal forces involved in the official, centralized verbal-ideological system, there has also been a development of the sporting culture from below, which has operated in a centrifugal mode, pulling away from the center.

Through the early part of the nineteenth century, workers festivals and religious holidays in Britain involved sporting contests which had evolved from folkish pastimes, and they frequently contained an anomie dimension.

82 • Internatiorwlllntertextual Relations

The sporting activities of the eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century crowds often spilled over into agitation against official authority and "tended to incapacitate the existing means of social control. "34 In contrast with the pacific and rule-governed gentleman games of cricket and even rugby, whose violence was tightly controlled, was an event such as Shrove Tuesday football, pitting village against village and frequently creating violence whose boundaries were never clearly defined, Such events posed at least a symbolic threat and often a more immediate one to the public order, as it was defined by ruling classes, for, as E.P. Thompson has noted, there was not enough cohesion in the ruling classes to produce a consensus and therefore the budgetary means to police crowds until well into the nineteenth century. 35

Thus, in general, the forms of sporting play that took place in public space during this period were plebeian-sponsored and often oriented toward or causing elements of protests against privilege. At this stage, in any case, the sports culture that developed from below represented what Bakhtin calls centrifugal forces. Certainly, contemporary control over public space has been consolidated, and sport from below has largely lost its forum. The recent banning of visiting Americans' softball games from Hyde Park is simply a small reminder of the extent to which both sport and its venues have become domesticated and controlled both commercially and politically.

At the beginning of that process, class dynamics in the eighteenthcentury England weighed in heavily. One of the first significant political developments was the breaking away of the ruling classes from the monarchical state. King James had created space for sports by subduing Puritan protest against Sunday games and had declared Sunday a day for sporting activities.P Then, subsequently, as the ruling classes exacted a greater degree of independence from the monarchical state, the result was that they ceased observing traditional constraints that had relegated sports to highly stylized and ritualized courtly festivities.F In addition, the process of industrialization created an interaction between aristocratic and bourgeois classes, which was to have an overwhelming effect on the development of sporting contests, for it was in this class dynamic that there developed the still significant values that organize British amateur sports and thus sports on much of the globe.38

However, even more significant that this bourgeoisification of sporting competition as gentlemanly sports evolved into competitive sports was the bourgeoisification involved in what Elias has called the "sporticization of pastimes. "39 This process consisted mainly in the process of controlling lower-, peasant-, and working-class violent protest and resistance by "civilizing" them. While this was to some extent a benign socialization process in which rules of equality and fair play were imposed to make games accord with the principles of justice and fairness constitutive of the peaceful transition to parliamentary power in the eighteenth century (Elias'S

Representing World Polirics • 83

"civilizing" reading), and it is also the case that one modem theory of sport has owed something to the development of liberalism.e? a more politically acute reading would emphasize social control and the centralization of political discourses. And certainly this centralization was in part politically motivated as attempts increased to suppress such games as folk football. It was one among the many processes of domesticating the insurrectional aspects of village life.41

At a minimum, this bourgeoisification saw the development of uniform rules and careful score and record keeping, which shifted control over the shape of the games away from local groups who had made t:b_eir own rules and had thereby absorbed sports consciousness into the generalized meaning frames with which they had created local solidarity and differentiation from centralized authority. Bourgeoisification thus meant loss of control over a discourse in which the local subject could use sports talk as a form of resistance to the centralizing verbal-ideological system. The boundaries of games, the rules governing play, and the subsequent inscription of results and records had become centralized and more subject to both governmental and commercial control.

With an increasingly commercial, spectator-oriented dimension of sporting contests, which played into this centralization of control over sporting activities and discourse, there developed sharper boundaries among the identities of the athlete versus the nonathlete, amateur versus professional. And as an increasingly intensified process of surveillance over the rules of the game developed, eligibility to play was more closely monitored and record keeping became more complex and more highly valued. Fairness in competition was still a value as sport became increasing commercialized, but the idea of fairness had to do mostly with ensuring good, even competition lest contests become too one-sided and therefore boring to paying customers and disruptive of gambling practices. This latter practice has had an extraordinary impact on the shape of games. As Brailsford has noted: "It is sobering to consider that the rejuvenation of games grew up not from noble motives of 'fair play' or even merely out of a desire for tidiness, but to protect the financial investments of gamblers. "42

The current preoccupation with video replays of close or controversial official judgments during American football games is simply one of the recent manifestations of this kind of surveillance/fairness preoccupation. Certainly this commercialization of sport has an added centralizing impact on "pastimes." One could here reproduce Huizinga's now famous lament that modem games have shifted away from play (or the realization of the body's capacity for gaming) toward display (or the shaping of contests to maximize spectator enjoyment). But more significant for understanding the impact on public policy or "foreign" policy is the centralization of control

84 • Intemationalllntertextual Relations

over the sports discourse that commercialization of sporting activities has aided and abetted.

Certainly there remain some local dimensions of sports, but this now amounts, not to a definition of self and membership group as local compared to a more centralized authority, but rather to a local sports partisanship amplified by the media, which rarely intersects with politically significant cleavages. For example, Philadelphia fans oppose New York or Los Angeles fans, especially when their teams compete in professional-level sports. And in 1984 when the Chicago Cubs played the San Diego Padres in the playoffs for the National League baseball championship, the media helped to create a contest over which of the cities was worthy of having a World Series contender. Serious doubt was raised as to whether the Padres, a franchise relatively new to professional baseball, had yet adequately established itself as a baseball tradition worth watching or backing.

And certainly at the level of modem amateur sport, international competition in the Olympic Games and Worldcup Soccer Championships evoke deeply rooted aspects of international competition, some of which connect to the history of deadly quarrels. This level of partisanship has an undeniable amplifying effect on the more directly political forms of internation partisanship. But both within and between nations, sports partisanship has far less significance in sports discourse as a political text than the sociogenesis of modem sports that is discernible in the shape of the modern sports contest and the social configurations it evokes.43

The relevant discursive amplification of sports, then, is not so much the contemporary forms of partisanship with which sports partisanship may coincide, but the actual shaping of the social body represented in modem sport, which gives sports discourse its figurability and thus its ideational effects. The more relevant way to amplify the effect of modern sport is by relating its socio-genesis to the socio-genesis of the modem workplace, for amplifying the centripetal discursive tendencies of modem sporting activities, which has involved the loss of local control over games, is the remarkable parallelism between the sporting contest and the workplace. The history of the factory is, among other things, a history of two developments shaping the working environment. The first is related to the pattern of release versus control in the workplace. For example, the twentieth-century worker's forms of release such as drinking alcohol or playing games are wholly after-work phenomena, whereas in the earlier workplace, up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such forms of release were integral to the factory space, which manifested alternatively release and control within its confines.r'

Adding to the tighter regulation of the factory space has been the increasing individualization of tasks in which jobs involve fewer and fewer kinds of operation, with the result that each worker has done just one

Representing World Poluics » 85

monotonous, repeatable, and thus more easily measurable and regulatable task. Work has thus, for many, lost all of its ritualistic and craft dimensions that give labor an expressive quality controlled at least in part by the laborer.

Quite similar is the movement in sports "from ritual to a record," as Guttmann has put it.45 Both of the dimensions of the work space are characteristic of the evolution of the modem spectator sport. Indeed, regulation of athlete's release habits (such as drug testing) even off the field has increased significandy in recent years, and innovation on the field by the "player" has been decreased by the coming to prominence of remote forms of control and pre scripting (for example, the "play book"). Moreover, the "player" has changed, increasingly being restricted to a limited part of the game. Accordingly, there are more and more "special teams" in American football, "role players" in basketball, and "platooning" (here war terminology finds its way back into sports) and such things as short-, middle-, and longrelief specialists in baseball.

Indeed, so radical has been the shift in the role of the athlete-who (like the worker) bas been subordinated to corporateteam success of the business/sports franchise-that the result is clearly readable in a variety of texts. One such text is the contemporary sports page, which brings us a very different text from its predecessors. For example, a New York Times pregame report on a football game between the New York Giants and Cleveland Browns in 1953 stressed the play of the participants, using such expressions as the "Giant eleven," while a pregame report for a similar contest thirty years later never referred to the number of players on the field. The figuration used was more remote and business-oriented, referring to the team owners, the recent successes and failures of the franchises, and so on. In short, what one might as well have been reading in the more recent pregame report was the fmancial page, for the article from the 1980s dwelled on what seemed to be a clash between the Giant and Brown corporations.

The modem sports text, so clearly readable in a variety of sites, is not without its broad institutional supports. It gets written increasingly in the feeder organizations, the most notable of which is the contemporary school system, which reproduces the practices and modes of evaluation that will articulate with the workplace in general and the sports franchise in particular. Both academic testing and placement as well as "physical education" migrated significandy if not totally away from the old Renaissance ideal of the "whole man," which fed an aristocracy-dominated society, and toward a student-worker/athlete, which feeds into the modem capitalist workplace! sports business.

The Evocation of the Sports Discourse

The historical account of what sport has become and how it has been shaped by the development of the contemporary form of the social body helps us to