Abstract
Invited by the editors to respond to Professor Neumann’s inaugural lecture,1 in this article I take issue with his core, unquestioned assumption, namely, whether IR should be considered as a science. I use it as a starting point to re-open the question of how the stuff that humans are made of should be studied in IR today. Beyond Neumann’s piece, I critically engage with two emerging trends in the discipline, the so-called new materialisms and the interest in the neurosciences, and articulate my concern that these trends have not addressed the deterministic fallacy that threatens to undermine their relevance for the study of a world made by humans. To the latent anxiety as to whether the discipline has finally achieved recognition of its epistemological status as a science, I respond by recalling that other grand tradition in IR, interpretive methods. The study of meaning from within, without reducing it to countable ‘things’ or to neuronal traces, is, I suggest, better attuned to capturing the contingency, indeterminacy and freedom which constitute key characteristics of the constructed, social world that we study in IR.
I would like to take issue with a particular variety of determinism that is taking shape in Iver Neumann’s inaugural lecture, 2 which stems from his attempt to posit the material as a reference point for knowledge construction, for the explicit purpose of securing IR’s future as a science. It is also, however, relevant to the field more broadly, given a recent surge of interests of various stripes in the material, notably with the rise of so-called ‘new materialisms’. Hence my hope is to flag what I see as an important pitfall to be avoided in taking this turn. This determinism is born, to borrow Neumann’s own words of warning, from his having ‘reduced to a given assumption what should have been the very focus of political enquiry, namely’ whether IR should ‘be taken for granted as a social science’ in the first place, which constitutes the assumption upon which the entire lecture rests. 3 Thus my concern here is with the ways in which Neumann implicitly blurs the boundaries of the social, or, at the risk of using an old-fashioned term, between the social and the natural. Specifically, it is with what I would call an uncritical physical determinism that carries over into the study of the social as a result.
The root of this determinism is a strategic move, prolonged here but started a decade ago, to artificially excise the discursive from the material, in order to claim ‘practices’ as a novel and discrete concept for the study of IR. Buried away in the origins of what is now a highly successful research programme known as the ‘practice turn’, this move, attributed to Neumann (in a piece in the pages of this journal), 4 has now become what Pierre Bourdieu would call one of the field’s unquestioned doxa. Yet, as I have shown elsewhere, 5 it turns on a straw-man construction of the discursive. The concept of ‘discourse’ by definition encompasses meaning-making practices, including material ones. Whaling discourses, to name those I know best, are inseparable from very material, indeed bloody, practices. To assume that discourses can be studied without analysing practices (including economic, diplomatic, activist, military, etc.) 6 is to misunderstand not only the concept of discourse but also its analytical purchase, the unique ways in which ‘discourse’ captures and foregrounds what is distinctive about the social, namely its constructed-ness (not its immateriality). In this lecture, Neumann once again retrieves the material contra the discursive, by way of the body, then advocates turning to those (non-social) sciences that are thought to be able to appraise it, psychology and biology.
Whither Contingency?
The constructed-ness of the social is of course the very kernel of the interpretive or constructivist contribution to IR. Its deeper philosophical implication, however, is that contingency and indeterminacy are the defining features of the social. This in turn is bound up with the fact that the social demarcates the site of human freedom (and not simply the ‘agency’ that Neumann focuses on). The constructed-ness of the social marks the fundamental ontological difference between the social and the natural world. In the latter, identical conditions are seen to produce identical outcomes; herein lies the possibility of making universal laws and predictions. In the social world, things could have been constructed otherwise. In IR, because of the history that Neumann reminds us of, this constituted nothing short of an epistemological revolution, albeit one whose methodological consequences we have yet to fully unravel. The fundamental challenge it poses is how to develop concepts and methods that can adequately capture this otherwise-constructed-ness. These are necessarily different from those that measure given regularities. 7 Arguably also they are more challenging, since by definition the otherwise-constructed remains difficult to unearth. After all, we only have this world to hand, not the one that was not constructed. Yet in many empirical cases there are also moments where other possible constructs, those that were evacuated in the construction of this world, can be glimpsed. These cracks in the processes of social construction, and breakdowns in the power relations that sustain them, are particularly precious for the researcher as they offer moments when this indeterminacy surfaces more clearly.
This contingency and indeterminacy are also what, along with discourse, the concept of performativity captures. The same (male or female) body is inscribed with different constructions of gender in different locales and at different historical moments. Butler-bashing is fashionable nowadays, even in the disciplines from which she hails. Yet there, 8 as in IR, 9 we are witnessing a revival of the old determinist spectre of a universal human nature that she and Derrida (and Foucault) had sought to chase out of the closet of the human sciences. Neither Butler’s nor Derrida’s point was to ‘erase’ the physical body, as Neumann puts it, 10 but rather to cease to always pine after it as yet another natural (or physical or material: these are equivalent terms in the deterministic logic I am attempting to lay bare here) referent point for the construction of knowledge about the social. An old mechanism of the social that we do know quite well, thanks to them, and that speaks directly to what Neumann captures as ‘the integrity of enquiry’, has been the resort to human nature to anchor discourses regulating specific relations of dominations (racial or gendered, for example). Hence considerable caution is required when seeking to uphold the body once again as the pegging point for our ‘scientific truths’.
One of the common ways of doing so today has been to turn to the brain, which has become ‘a major icon of contemporary culture’. Fernando Vidal and Francesco Ortega have analysed ‘the rise since the 1990s of various “neuro” disciplines (… neuroesthetics, neurotheology, neuroeconomics, neuroeducation and neuropsychoanalysis) that conquer ground previously occupied by the human sciences’. 11 Are we, then, if we follow Neumann, to develop, belatedly as usual, a ‘neuro-IR’? Then we ought to pay attention to a particular conception of the human subject that is taking shape in the turn to brain sciences as the new cornerstone for explaining human behaviour.
Brain Damage
Take neuromarketing, one of these new disciplines born of the conjunction of neurosciences and emotions, two areas of interest that Neumann explicitly flags for IR. As Mark Andrejevic has shown, it holds at its core ‘the notion that bodies are … more truthful than the words they utter’. 12 The erasure that is happening, then, is of the interpretive dimension of human experience – what these bodies actually have to say. This, as a result of holding up the physical; the ‘nature’ of human nature; or again, the body ridden of any signifying dimension, which is precisely what Neumann’s twist on ‘performativity’ seeks to effect; as the ultimate grounding for explanations of human behaviour. Neuromarketing apprehends human subjects or rather ‘consumers’ as ‘bundles of nerve centres that respond to different kinds of stimuli and form triggerable pathways as a result’. 13
Although it may be one of its more extreme epistemological products, neuromarketing is useful here for revealing not merely its economic drivers, but also a deeper shift in the conception of the human that underpins the neuroscientific turn. In mapping out its genealogy, Fernando Vidal traces how since the 1990s, which was dubbed the Decade of the Brain, ‘brainhood’ has progressively taken shape as the new ‘essential property’ of being human. 14 The human subject, that classical figure of political theory, for which liberty is intimately bound up with speech (it is a ‘speaking subject’), 15 is slowly morphing into ‘the cerebral subject’, to borrow his expression. This ‘essence’ is now more physicalised than ever, it seems, lodged in the measurable workings of the brain (rather than the ‘mind’ or ‘psyche’ traditionally studied by psychologists and psychoanalysts respectively). Likewise, (in Neumann’s piece, a mouse’s) memory and transmission are located exclusively in the (a mouse’s) genes. This is hardly conducive to apprehending it as a complex of signifiers passed down from one generation to the next through individual and collective histories, to draw on the Lacanian psychoanalytic understanding of the work of memory.
Hence the brain has become the new material pegging point for a universal human nature. Vidal also unearths the powerful fantasies of control underlying this ‘ideology of brainhood’. 16 These are useful for exposing the dangerously deterministic logic at work in the way human subjects are apprehended, as exemplified by neuromarketing, where the path has already been travelled from measuring emotions via their somatic markers, to treating them as a set of buttons that can be pressed to push people to consume. Although neuromarketing’s success has so far (fortunately) remained limited, as Andrejevic shows, 17 this is nonetheless the explicit logic of its sales pitch (its ‘neuropromises’, as he called them). It is also that of cognate disciplines and techniques that Andrejevic also studies, 18 ‘affective economics’ and ‘sentiment analysis’. What Andrejevic’s work shows is that, regardless of whether this logic is realistic or purely fantasmatic, whether it works or not, there is a powerful demand for it.
The turn to the neuroscience of emotions in the humanities and social sciences, or so-called Affect Turn, has, more broadly, been subject to a critical backlash in the humanities. Even as Damasio’s work sought to undo the Cartesian binary of reason and emotions, for the purposes of carving out space for the too long neglected latter, Ruth Leys has shown how the Affect Turn has created fresh sets of binaries that lock in these deterministic logics. 19 Specifically, she exposes how the affective has been shorn off from meaning, intention and cognition; that is to say, the agentic dimensions of human freedom. This stems from holding up the materiality of affects against the interpretive. Indeed for Brian Massumi, one of the Affect Turn pioneers, affects, as opposed to emotions, are non-signifying intensities. Their materiality or ‘irreducible bodily’ nature is what founds the ‘autonomy of affect’ and what constitutes their purchase. 20
Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard, for their part, have extensively critiqued the humanities’ engagement with the givens of the biological sciences (which they nicely dub ‘biology’s gifts’). 21 They show how, on the one hand, the appeal of affects lay in their promise of a new, ‘afoundational foundational biology’, distinctly removed from ‘the model of biology-as-destiny that was such a target in the previous regime of cultural theory’ (that of Butler and Derrida). 22 On the other hand, they also show the humanities’ naivety in assuming ‘an emancipatory script’ built into the neuroscientific research programme, 23 which has blinded them to some of these more reactionary and deterministic logics. They thus also call into question the uncritical recourse to the biological sciences to legitimate the productions and existence of the human sciences. The humanities, then, have already exposed the determinist pitfalls and the instrumental motives at work in the materialist turn to affects.
My regret is that this early pioneer of the interpretivist turn has dropped the challenge altogether, and fallen back to the temptations of ‘naturalism’ in social science enquiry that Charles Taylor warned us against. 24 In this piece Neumann never actually tells us what the social is, despite insisting that the social must be explained by social factors. I couldn’t agree more. Yet by the end of the lecture we are left more confused as to what constitutes the social or where it stops, as the explanans is increasingly relegated to the other, ‘non-social’ side. It is located, that is, in a given, albeit evolved, human nature, taken to be the ultimate source of ‘general human phenomen[a]’, and presumed accessible by other (more legitimate?) sciences that we’d better turn to. Nor is paying lip service to Weberian ‘understanding’ enough to capture what is specific to the social: the interpretive, which is by definition contingent, local, unpredictable, ultimately indeterminable, and, if I may coin the term, non-universalisable.
No doubt there are a lot of institutional reasons why it may be desirable to be recognised as a science. To paraphrase a classic of the science and technology literature, science is power. 25 Yet as Neumann himself underlines, IR is thriving today, its existence fully secure. Nor is student demand for understanding the international about to wane. Perhaps, then, it is time to shake off this old yearning. Philosophy and History don’t seem to bear it. Instead I suggest (re)turning to the other direction, towards those disciplines that have grappled with the interpretive for much longer than we have, namely the humanities, and not simply because they can offer us historical ‘cases’ upon which to sharpen our ‘scientific tools’, in Neumann’s terms. Rather because, as we have seen, in literary and cultural studies this deep understanding of the interpretive ‘from within’ is bound up with an exemplar practice of self-critique. Perhaps we have something to learn from disciplines that are under threat. Fortunately, the interest in the interpretive seems alive and well in IR, if the launch of the Journal of Narrative Politics in 2014 is anything to judge by, or the recent interest in the narrative in Security Dialogue. Hopefully it helps to remind ourselves why keeping our sights on the interpretive is so central to our endeavours as students of the social.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
1.
Iver Neumann, ‘International Relations as a Social Science’, Millennium 43, no. 1 (2014): 330–50.
2.
Ibid.
3.
Ibid., 340 and 332 respectively
4.
Iver Neumann, ‘Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn: The Case of Diplomacy’, Millennium 31, no. 3 (2002): 627–51.
5.
See Charlotte Epstein, ‘Constructivism or the Eternal Return of Universals in International Relations: Why Returning to Language Is Vital for Prolonging the Owl’s Flight’, European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 3 (2013): 499–519.
6.
See Charlotte Epstein, The Power of Words in International Relations: Birth of an Anti-whaling Discourse (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). For examples of discourse studies that apprehend practices co-constitutively, see for example, Lene Hansen, Security as Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) and Megan MacKenzie, Female Soldiers in Sierra Leone (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
7.
Although, as I indicated earlier, there is no reason why both sorts of methods cannot be mobilised to reveal particular aspects of a case, as I have shown in the case of whaling; see Epstein, Power of Words.
8.
9.
Charlotte Epstein, ‘Constructivism or the Eternal Return of Universals’.
10.
Neumann, ‘International Relations’, 345.
11.
Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega, Neurocultures (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 8.
12.
Mark Andrejevic, ‘Brain Whisperers: Cutting through the Clutter with Neuromarketing’, Somatechnics 2, no. 2 (2012): 199.
13.
Ibid., 202.
14.
Fernando Vidal, ‘Brainhood, Anthropological Figure of Modernity’, History of the Human Sciences 22, no. 1 (2009): 5–36.
15.
See my ‘Who Speaks? Discourse, the Subject and the Study of Identity in International Politics’, European Journal of International Relations 17, no. 2 (2011): 327–50, and my ‘Theorizing Agency in Hobbes’s Wake: The Rational Actor, the Self, or the Speaking Subject?’, International Organization 67, no. 2 (2013): 287–316.
16.
Vidal, ‘Brainhood’.
17.
Andrejevic, ‘Brain Whisperers’.
18.
Mark Andrejevic, ‘The Work That Affective Economics Does’, Cultural Studies 24, nos. 4–5 (2011): 604–20.
19.
Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 434–72.
20.
Brian Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 89.
21.
Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard, ‘Biology’s Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect’, Body and Society 16, no. 1 (2010): 29–56.
22.
Ibid., 33.
23.
Ibid., 47.
24.
Charles Taylor, ‘Human Agency and Language’, in Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
25.
Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).