The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Theory, Modern Power, World Politics

Critical Investigations

Nevzat Soguk, Scott G Nelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317195849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Deliberately eschewing disciplinary and temporal boundaries, this volume makes a major contribution to the de-traditionalization of political thinking within the discourses of international relations. Collecting the works of twenty-five theorists, this Ashgate Research Companion engages some of the most pressing aspects of political thinking in world politics today. The authors explore theoretical constitutions, critiques, and affirmations of uniquely modern forms of power, past and present. Among the themes and dynamics examined are textual appropriation and representation, materiality and capital formation, geopolitical dimensions of ecological crises, connections between representations of violence and securitization, subjectivity and genderization, counter-globalization politics, constructivism, biopolitics, post-colonial politics and theory, as well as the political prospects of emerging civic and cosmopolitan orders in a time of national, religious, and secular polarization. Radically different in their approaches, the authors critically assess the discourses of IR as interpretive frames that are indebted to the historical formation of concepts, and to particular negotiations of power that inform the main methodological practices usually granted primacy in the field. Students as well as seasoned scholars seeking to challenge accepted theoretical frameworks will find in these chapters fresh insights into contemporary world-political problems and new resources for their critical interrogation.

1
Introduction: The Measure of Modern Theory in World Politics

Nevzat Soguk and Scott G. Nelson

Introduction

In an essay published in the on-line edition of the London Review of Books a few years ago, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek reflected on the political meaning of the riots in the United Kingdom in the summer of 2011. The title of Žižek’s essay was itself suggestive, appropriating as he did the The Smiths’ 1987 song title, “Shoplifters of the World Unite!” (2011a). His objective in the essay was not to give an account of the street demonstrations and the riots following the shooting of 29-year-old Mark Duggan in the streets of North London that summer. Žižek barely considered why rioters and protestors took to the streets, and neither did he question the political ideals (if ideals there were) reflected in some established program that can be said to have stood in necessary relation to the aims of the protesters as well as the violent. He did not find in the riots any sign of organized, deliberate rebellion, certainly no portent of Marxian revolution. Regrettably, Žižek concedes, no revolutionary subject appeared in the making here. Instead, what the philosopher saw in the Tottenham protests, and the ensuing mayhem in North London, were actions that recall Hegel’s notion of a “rabble”—actions of those who stand “outside organized social space,” those “who can express their discontent only through irrational outbursts of destructive violence—what Hegel called ‘abstract negativity’” (Žižek 2011a). Rabble, Žižek reminded his readers, was the characterization Hegel used in The Philosophy of Right to name the dark underside of an emerging civil society.

When the standard of living of a large mass of people falls below a certain subsistence level—a level regulated automatically as the one necessary for a member of the society—and when there is a consequent loss of the sense of right and wrong, of honesty and the self-respect which makes a man insist on maintaining himself by his own work and effort, the result is the creation of a rabble of paupers. At the same time this brings with it, at the other end of the social scale, conditions which greatly facilitate the concentration of disproportionate wealth in a few hands. (hegel 1967: 150)

Hegel’s rabble is such a memorable moment in early-nineteenth-century political philosophy; it has been a common coda in liberal thought ever since (Connolly 2011; Ruda 2013). One reason for its lasting significance is that it provides a reference point, a way of grasping the “unfortunate” consequences of a political philosophy, an ideology, a societal ideal, a “civilizational advance” (Connolly 2011: 124). Today the idea invites consideration of the precarious globalizing vision of world order: neoliberalism. The U.K. demonstrations and riots, as seen through a theorization of a political body that now aspires to global proportions, serve as an especially powerful reminder. They represent an unsettling beginning, Žižek suggested—the beginning of a future political analysis of the deep structures of global capitalism.

In his essay, and in a subsequent article that followed a few weeks later in the print edition of the Review (Žižek 2011b), Žižek commented on various knee-jerk reactions issued in response to the U.K. uprisings, and later on, to the Occupy movement. He gestured to alternative discussions that might have followed the protests and riots, discussions devoted to understanding any number of protest and resistance movements, especially those that followed the most momentous, and now iconic, world-historic revolutionary periods—1989/1991. Looking back today, it is quite striking that the revolutions that helped bring about the end of the Cold War seem all but forgotten in the contemporary political imagination. Yet, struggles of resistance, mass demonstrations, and political uprisings against existing orders have today become something of the norm rather than the exception. What is essential to grasp in each one of them, Žižek argued, is a structural phenomenon that is central to people the world over, and especially to their experiences with global capitalism and the forces of ideological necessity that work alongside it as capitalism produces yet another crisis in its centuries-long historical arch. This structural phenomenon should be grasped, Žižek seemed to suggest, as horizons of understanding in the Nietzschean sense—that is, as self-imposed limits that can help us see what is vital about the world’s political history, generally speaking, and about political and economic relations which are today so violently in the making in many localities and across entire regions of the world. (Think, for instance, of China in Africa). These relations aspire to some kind of global-political status, however vaguely defined and uncertain in its political outcome.

Žižek’s concerns, then, lay with the abject failure of political thought and analysis, and its incapacity to give a proper political account of the U.K. riots in a uniquely post-Cold War, neoliberal “world” so rife with claims and assumptions about an alleged post-ideological, post-national, even post-political condition. The right and the left together, as if in lockstep, offered the predictable pronouncements of what was “out of sorts” in this or that place and time. Politics was scarcely given as a reason for the protests-turned-violent in North London. The structural forces underneath the common pronouncements were themselves scarcely questioned. All one found were crude slogans—“Shoplifters of the world unite!”—that yielded little more than an attitude of resignation and at best (or worst) complacency and passive participation in what amounted to a ritualization of collective observance.¹ Those who cared enough to look at all were witness to an apolitical spectacle, an exhibition lasting little longer than a fortnight. Therein, Žižek argued, lay one of the main dangers of capitalism:

although by virtue of being global it encompasses the whole world, it sustains a ‘worldless’ ideological constellation in which people are deprived of their ways of locating meaning. The fundamental lesson of globalisation is that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu to Buddhist, from West to East: there is no global ‘capitalist worldview,’ no ‘capitalist civilisation’ proper. The global dimension of capitalism represents truth without meaning. (Žižek 2011a)

Acknowledging this critical paralysis—an incapacity of thought and action born of some post-political malaise, a feeling of widespread political quiescence—Žižek proceeded to express his disgust with the uncritical stock-taking while the ranks of the rabble continue to grow. His concern with the British rioters (and demonstrators) anticipated much of the reaction received by the protesters who would struggle in the coming years under the elusive banner of Occupy. Not in an altogether separate category, Žižek told us, were the political uprisings that spread across the Arab world beginning in January 2011, followed by protests in Spain and Greece, Venezuela, Thailand, and more recently in Ukraine and Hong Kong. The latter uprisings and revolutions share a political dimension that, according to Žižek, the street riots and looting in London significantly lacked. Nonetheless, capitalism’s “deep politics” can be seen as drawn into association with what may have appeared to many as simple nihilism.

Although Žižek was not explicit about it, what remains significantly absent in examinations today of each of the above political moments, uprisings, and revolutions is a sense of the political, an indication of something radically out of joint in the political experiences people are so commonly told that they share today. The structural forces of globalizing capital have offered few political resources to the masses. Uprisings and citizen-led protest movements remain so seemingly distant from one another, and each one is expressed by way of such disparate concepts and categories, each being represented through such radically different mediums of correspondence and mass-market communications. The struggles may occur more or less contemporaneously, but our sense of the historical contingencies that distinguish them, as well as those that connect them, is at best fleeting and episodic. And all the while so many of us grow more discontent with the many rifts in the domestic and geopolitical orders of the day. Hegel’s rabble is but one of the few growing constants amid the tumult. Hence, Žižek’s summoning of a prominent voice from the past to help put in perspective the hamfisted, flat-footed analyses that pretended to give meaning to the riots, uprisings, protests, and revolutionary movements around the world. What, politically, do the North London uprisings and the various Occupy protests in the U.S. and elsewhere mean in the context of global-political dynamics? For Žižek, “they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a positive programme of sociopolitical change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution” (ibid.).

Once this conclusion is reached, Žižek’s analysis abruptly ends. No more critical observations or claims, barely anything more than an ever-so-slight (and quite forgettable) nod in support of a possible future political course issued principally for the purpose of elaborating the significance of some residual geist that may find itself on offer in the fateful politics of the times. Instead, we hear Žižek mourn the wasted potential of the Arab uprisings, pointing especially to “the Egyptian summer of 2011” as having marked “the end of revolution, a time when its emancipatory potential was suffocated.” Yet, “against … cynicism,” including his own, presumably, Žižek remarks: “one should remain unconditionally faithful to the radical-emancipatory core of the Egypt uprising.” The protests in Greece are “promising” in terms of the ability for “self organization and sustaining of the resistance.” But plainly unsatisfied by the reach and impact of the protests, and unable to offer something more himself, Žižek closes his essay with a call to arms that is largely rhetorical, an enigmatic “will to power.” To impose a “reorganisation of social life,” “one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness” (ibid.). Is it possibly significant that Žižek deems the quality of this life as embodying something essentially social in character rather than political?

Several things can be gleaned from Žižek’s discussion, most importantly his effort to reach back into political theory to illuminate something apparently unique about what, too often, we are presented with as the “global political present.” Žižek’s twin essays reveal much more than an explanation for the potential promise or the evident limits of the protests in London, New York, and everywhere else that the structures of capitalism are being confronted and challenged by ordinary people. Žižek’s reflections suggest in part the very limits of contemporary political and economic analysis today, an incapacity to say anything more than what can be issued by way of slogan. After all, we live in a time of slogans and catchphrases offered as not-so-thinly-veiled commentaries that may, in the best of times, give grudging support to any political struggle that appears to dislocate, unsettle, or exploit a rift in the emerging system. Once again, it seems, Žižek’s gesture demonstrates that while world-political changes over the last two decades have been substantial, our analytical horizons for apprehending their political meaning remain considerably impaired. Perhaps political struggles of recent years and of many kinds can be lent support by the development of alternative “measures of our measures.” Perhaps alternative accountings of political experience, as Jacques Derrida observed some years ago in a not entirely different context, might be brought forth in excitement as well as despair (Derrida 1994).

Political Time and Its Representation

of government the properties to unfold
Would seem in me to affect speech and discourse,
Since I am put to know that your own science
Exceeds in that the lists of all advice
my strength can give you. Then no more remains
But that to your sufficiency …
… as your worth is able,
And let them work. The nature of our people,
our city’s institutions, and the terms
For common justice, you’re as pregnant in
As art and practice hath enriched any
That we remember. There is our commission,
From which he would not have you warp.

—Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (2008: 87)

How goes the world?—It wears, sir, as it grows.

—Derrida (1994: 78)

“The time is out of joint. The world is going badly. It is worn but its wear no longer counts” (Derrida 1994: 77). So Derrida remarked in his Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. By invoking Hamlet, and by gesturing to all those “wears and tears” of the world that have been cast to the unthought, the unaccounted for, in those all-too-pervasive stories about the world and its politics from ideology to political economy to capitalism—Derrida mourns the loss of perspective and political meaning in a time of neoliberalization. It is not merely that the unaccounted wears and tears can no longer be grasped, or that they somehow are made not to count in the present. Rather, they were actively forced out of serious consideration long before they appear to have arrived on the scene. They constitute from the start a residual rabble whose emergence is deemed, at the very least, politically untimely. At best they are regarded as too intransigent or troubling to take note of, even to name. In fact for Derrida, conceptual inadequacy—just as much as a political unwillingness to account for the many wears and tears of the world—is something of the definitive attitude of the contemporary age. Highlighting this condition as a collective malady, yet wanting to articulate and affirm a new critical engagement with the present, Derrida remarks that “our age,” with its characteristic assumptions and obsessions about having arrived at some well-defined telos, some “advanced state” of humanity, is not the world’s only age. “The world,” he reminds us, “has more than one age” (ibid.: 77).

How, as theorists of world-political events, trends, upheavals, and transformations, are we to grasp the significance of such an insight with all its implications for the ways we would take account of the politically meaningful in world politics, seeking to account for the “wears and tears” as themselves being worthy of theoretical analysis?

Derrida’s response reveals what are perhaps the limits of the modes through which we imagine, and through which we labor to enact ourselves as subjects and collectivities of our multiple times and spaces of so many experiences of the political today. We too often treat modernity’s “greatest commodities” as the master measures of our age, of our time, and of our subjectivity, and all the while we ignore that “we” too often lack a necessary “measure of the measure” itself. We have become captives of “modernity as the measure,” of all that is said to count in the world even as we can no longer measure modernity’s wears and tears that manifest themselves daily as the very limits to a common political experience. Derrida’s essay, then, continues to take on some urgency: “The world is going badly. It is worn but its wear no longer counts.” “We lack the measure of the measure” is Derrida’s response to the observation that wears and tears no longer must be given an accounting for. He stops short of stating that we thus stand in need of a single new measure. Instead, Derrida avers that while “[neither] maturation, nor crisis, nor even agony” obtain [today], “[s]omething else …” is “happening to age itself.” It has to be taken seriously, for it “strikes a blow at the teleological order of history. What is coming[?] …” Something else! (ibid. 77). What has to be done? Something else!

Derrida doesn’t name that something else. As a theorist with a certain appreciation for the power of the name, we should not find this surprising. Nonetheless, Derrida does suggest several fruitful lines of thinking, unusually new or in any case recoverable modes of thought in both the singular and the plural sense of “something else …” In the singular sense of “something else,” many have endeavored to free critical inquiry from the “modern as the sole measure” of the world’s wears and tears. In the plural sense, “something else” has meant striving on multiple fronts to account for the wears and tears that are as yet unaccounted for, or unaccountable—treated as unfamiliar, untimely, estranged from “our age” and “its time,” and thereby silenced, pronounced non-existent, deemed inescapably irrelevant, trivial. Dead. The residue of rabble in a time of acceleration, dramatic temporal and spatial movements, and perhaps most important of all, new strategies of forgetting that have become so well learned (the question is why) and so well practiced (the question is how) in the discourses of world politics today.

A first set of critical efforts may be noted, efforts that are borne of new theoretical openings in contemporary discourses of world politics, from constructivism to postcolonialism, from indigenism to poststructuralism...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword (Avante!)
• 1 Introduction: The Measure of Modern Theory in World Politics
• PART I THEORETICAL INTERVENTIONS
• PART II SECURITY, REPRESENTATION, AND SUBJECTIVITY
• PART III THE ANALYTICS OF WORLD POLITICS
• PART IV VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES
• Epilogue: Political Judgment in International Relations Theory
• Index