5o Encontro Nacional da ABRI
Redefinindo a Diplomacia num mundo em transformação
Belo Horizonte (MG), 29-31 Julho 2015.
Área Temática: Teoria de Relações Internacionais
CRITIQUE, SUBJECTIVITY, AND THE TRADITION OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY
Natália Maria Félix de Souza
IRI/PUC-Rio e PUC-SP
Work in progress – Please do not cite without permission
Abstract
The paper will start an investigation on the role of critique in the history of international relations theory. It will do so by developing two arguments. First, the paper will address, along Foucauldian lines, what critique as a generalized practice distinct from philosophy might entail. Through this movement, the paper will argue that sustaining a “critical attitude” means not only understanding the epistemological aspect of critique, i.e. accepting the separation between noumena and phenomena, or the thing in itself and the thing as it appears to us; a critical attitude also involves a question of the production of subjectivity involved in the reflexive moment inaugurated by Kant, one which brings into question a problem of ethics and aesthetics. Far from trying to decipher this colossus that is Kant’s work, I believe Foucault may offer us a much more readable and interesting avenue for thinking through this aspect of critique, and inquiring the discipline of IR in its ability to account for it. Having delineated what this critical attitude means, the paper will briefly turn to the trajectory of international relations theory in order to understand whether its authors have been able to sustain a critical attitude in both its epistemological and subjectivity aspects. Specifically, the paper will engage the works of early IR theorists such as Hans Morgenthau and E. H. Carr in order to investigate how a certain critical attitude that was present in their political and academic positions was lost or diluted specially during the 1960s and 1970s, having an impact on the whole tradition of international relations theory.
Keywords
international relations theory; critique; subjectivity
2 Work in progress – Please do not cite without permission
Critique, Subjectivity, and the tradition of international relations theory
Natália Maria Félix de Souza1
International relations theory today: between critique and crisis Recently, international relations theory has begun another concerted round of inquiries into its status as an academic enterprise, a body of knowledge with its ontological, epistemological and methodological commitments. This has been especially evident in two recent issues of important “critical” journals in the area – the European Journal of International Relations2 (EJIR) and Millennium: Journal of International Studies3 – which bring forth to the academic community a series of questions and discussions concerning the current practice of international relations theory4. The 2013 EJIR issue, enquiring about “the end of international relations theory?”, features contributions ranging from a multiplicity of conceptual positions – including well- known authors such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, David Lake, Christian Reus- Smit, Chris Brown, Stefano Guzzini, Christine Sylvester, Michael C. Williams, Arlene Tickner, amongst others. A range of other scholars further debated their articles during a Symposium promoted by the international relations blog “Duck of Minerva”5, broadening the debate among the academic community. At the center of EJIR’s provocations were questions concerning a possible state of “stagnation, crisis and end”6 of theory and theorizing in international relations, questions which seemed to be triggered by the end of the “paradigm wars” which characterized the so-called “great debates” in the discipline, a moment of accepted “pluralism”, in which “theory testing”, rather than “theory development” seems to be the case across the multiple traditions, or “isms” that characterize the discipline (Dunne et al., 2013). In their contribution to the issue, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel Nexon (2013) argue that the field is living through a “post-paradigmatic era”, in which “the health of international relations theory” must be assessed from a different perspective: one should no longer look for the methodological wagers that characterized previous decades – which have declined – but should instead understand international relations theory in terms of “scientific ontologies”. According to the authors, the different theories in international relations consist
1 PhD Candidate at IRI/PUC-Rio. Assistant Professor at PUC-SP. E-mail: [email protected] 2 Available at: < http://ejt.sagepub.com/content/19/3.toc> 3 Available at: < http://mil.sagepub.com/content/current> 4 Both of these special issues are compilations of papers and discussions that previously took place during important Conferences – the 2011 ISA Conference in Montreal, in the case of EJIR; and the 2014 Millennium Conference on method, methodology and innovation in IR. 5 All of the contributions are available at:
of “(social-) scientific claims about the ontology of world politics, including its actors, proper units of analysis, and how such elements fit together”. Seen from this standpoint, one can have “a cautiously optimistic diagnosis of the health of international theory.” (Jackson, Nexon, 2013, p. 544-5). Partaking of such an optimistic account, David Lake (2013) believes the end of the “paradigm wars” and “great debates” represents an exclusively positive development for the discipline, since it allows the different camps – positivism and post-positivism – to stop with disciplinary and academicist wagers between themselves and engage with a much more productive mid-level theorizing, which promises to bring forth progress in both of their research programs. Mearsheimer and Walt (2013), on their turn, present a grim account of such a state of theorizing in the field. The authors strongly lament the abandonment of grand theorizing in the name of middle-range theorizing and hypothesis-testing, for they strip theory from its policy relevance. Brown (2013) concurs with this negative assessment concerning the current state of international relations theory, pointing out however, that progress is much more evident in the standard cannons of the discipline – liberalism and realism – than among “critical/‘late modern’” scholarship. According to him, critical theory has been unable to produce “action-guiding and world-revealing insights”, whereas problem-solving theory, despite being progressive, has been of no value for those at the margins of society. Brown calls, then, for the development of “critical problem solving” theories, that can engage reality – as realists and liberals do – but considering the problems of the dispossessed. After a period of enthusiastic celebration of the opening up of the field of international relations to accommodate multiple instances of critical theory7, these insights show that we have begun to question the implications of our pluralism for the future of international relations theory. Among other things, this development indicates a sense that “critique” has reached some sort of limit – precisely when “critical accounts” seem to proliferate across the discipline – which makes it necessary to inquire about its future in terms of its past. The 2015 issue of Millennium picks up on some of the same questions that emerged around the EJIR issue, more specifically “issues related to what constitutes science and how IR scholars relate to these debates” (Lacatus et al., 2015, p. 769). The Millennium contributions aim, more specifically, at deepening investigations concerning “method, methodology and innovation” in the discipline, reflecting on a question posed by Cynthia Weber to the editors of the journal: “where do we go from here?”. This concern with methods and methodology comes from a shared assumption that individuals’ choice of how to treat data and proceed with research always carries deeper philosophical presuppositions. In this
7 See: Ashley, Walker (1990) 4 Work in progress – Please do not cite without permission
sense, “the belief that all research of international politics ought to be self-reflexive” (Lacatus et al., 2015, p. 778) propels the Millennium editors to try to shed light on the profound links between methods-methodology-epistemology-ontology. Not everything that comes out of these different (yet somehow related) questions that are being posed by international relations theorists today is of a kind. Yet a number of them remind us of some enduring problems with which international relations theory has struggled since its very articulation as a discipline. When the EJIR issue poses anew the question of “crisis” or “end” of international relations theory and Millennium brings back, once again, the problem of science; or when Jackson and Nexon want to assess the “health of international relations theory”; or even when Brown and Williams, in different ways, speak of some limit of contemporary critical approaches to think politically about the future; they all seem to be rehearsing some familiar themes which have animated international relations theory – one in particular that I would like to take up, which is the question of crisis and the future of modern politics. A gnawing sense of crisis has in fact been a constant feature of the discipline. When one looks back to the works of Norman Angell, or E.H. Carr, Reinhold Niebuhr, or even Hans Morgenthau, one is struck by the fact that, despite their significant differences, they all shared a certain sense of urgency to respond to some impending political crisis, both conceptually and politically. For all of them, it seemed clear that the ideas men held about the world had a direct impact into the workings of such a world, and therefore, creating a better world – or simply countering the development of a tragic future – depended on the ability to formulate ideas, concepts or theories that could adequately comprehend and address the grave issues that afflicted politics in the twentieth century. Paying attention to this “self-reflexivity” tied to the diagnosis of crisis present in the works of international relations’ “classical theorists”– which seemed to disappear from disciplinary discussion during the 1970s and 1980s – has allowed some contemporary scholars to understand, contrary to more conventional accounts of the disciplinary history, that such an all-encompassing sense of crisis does not ensue from the specificity or exclusivity of international relations as the realm of violence and disorder. Rather than being a characteristic or specificity of the field of international relations, this sense of crisis – at once moral, political, intellectual – refers to a much bigger and more profound aspect of modern politics and modern subjectivities.8
8 A growing body of literature has been reengaging classical theorists – especially Morgenthau –with a concern in writing the “normative moment” back into international relations theory. This constitutes important part of the context for this discussion on critique and crisis in international relations theory that I try to engage in the larger scope of my research. This literature includes authors such as: Richard Ned Lebow, Michael C. Williams, Oliver Jütersonke, William Scheuerman, Sean Molloy. 5 Work in progress – Please do not cite without permission
As such, the questions posed by these journals point to the growing recognition among international relations theorists of the normative commitments and political implications of their theories in the constitution of reality. Furthermore, they tie international relations theory to a much wider problematization about the relationship between our forms of knowledge of reality and reality itself – and thus to the limits and possibilities of human knowledge and action. They ultimately point to international relations theory’s involvement with the questions of the Enlightenment – something Williams’ article (2013) clearly tries to articulate. In his renowned “Critique and Crisis”, Reinhart Koselleck has offered one of the most encompassing accounts of the crisis of modern politics and its relationship to the Enlightenment’s criticism of the Absolutist state. According to Koselleck, crisis emerges in the eighteenth century as a result of a rigorous process of critique spanned by the bourgeoisie against the Absolutist state. By producing a separation between state and society, and the consequent distinction between politics and morality – and the latter’s submission to the former – Absolutism had fueled a form of utopianism that believed itself capable of ridding moral man and moral society from the nasty implications of politics. Such utopianism, then, was responsible for laying out those philosophies of history that, departing from specific European territories, promised however to unify humanity through a process that would create a new, better and more peaceful world. But it is Michel Foucault’s thoughts about the importance of the Enlightenment and the kind of questions it spanned that allow me understand the role critique – and its ensuing sense of crisis – plays in international relations theory. The central figure here is not Foucault: it is Kant. It is rather the way a Foucauldian approach to critique – or what he calls a “critical attitude” – allows us to understand the two great traditions that, engaging with Kant’s questions on the limits of knowledge and on the modern subjectivities, have divided modern philosophy for the past three centuries. With that in mind, in what remains of this essay I will attempt to provide a preliminary formulation of the relationship between critique and crisis in the modern world, one that might help us understand international relations theory – as the account of a process of internationalization as internalization of the world – as a philosophy of history (born out of a critique of tradition, Christianity, the state) that is constantly trying to overcome the crises it itself creates.
Criticism in Reinhart Koselleck: Modern politics as a state of permanent crisis
Etymologically, the words criticism and crisis derive from the same Greek word meaning “to differentiate, select, judge, decide” (Koselleck, 1988, p. 103). “Crisis”, for Aristotle, referred both to a situation that called for a decision and to the political choice through which
6 Work in progress – Please do not cite without permission
the citizen participated in the political decision, i.e. the crisis as the moment defining citizenship (Dodd, 2005, p. 45). However, Latin largely restricted the sense of crisis to medical usage. In medical terminology, from which contemporary uses of crisis owe their meaning, a crisis marks the turning point of an illness, when the patient’s condition cannot be treated in the same way, and therefore demands a fundamental change of treatment. This is the point in which a decision must me made, but it has not yet been reached. (Koselleck, 1988) Through this process, Koselleck narrates a separation between the meanings of “objective crisis” and “subjective criticism”, in which “criticism” retained the sense of decision, judgment, discrimination, whereas “crisis” came to refer to the diagnosis of a crucial, critical moment which demands a solution, but not to the solution itself. In this sense, for Koselleck, a “political crisis” – by recognizing the need for a judgment, a decision, yet leaving this judgment open – always brings with it the question of the historical future (Koselleck, 1988, p. 127): it demands an urgent solution which, however, cannot be arrived at. As both diagnostic and predictive, however, the crisis is not amenable to rational direction; the demanded solution cannot be predicted or intended (Koselleck, 1988, p.159) However, what is central for Koselleck is to show how critique and crisis are related in a more fundamental way under modern politics. His aim is to understand how the political crisis that pervades the twentieth century – a crisis manifested in two destructive wars, the ascendance to power of criminal regimes, the confrontation between two superpowers, both of which deemed to encompass the future unity of the world – how this “state of permanent crisis” that ravages the world might be the enduring consequence of a process of critique which inaugurated the Modern age – the Modern age as the age of crises. The absolutist state and its raison d’état are seen as the condition of possibility, as well as the main targets, of this emerging critique during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to Koselleck, “it was from Absolutism that the Enlightenment evolved – initially as its inner consequence, later as its dialectical counterpart and antagonist, destined to lead the absolutist state to its demise” (Koselleck, 1988, p. 15). This is because the authority and legitimacy of the princely state was sustained by a drastic separation between the realm of politics and the realm of morality. In face of the destructiveness of civil and religious wars of the sixteenth century, the state founded its authority on the idea that people’s consciences were the main culprits for the insoluble state of war; i.e. what the situation needed, peace, could not be arrived at through the free play of people’s consciences. It rather demanded a secular authority above which nothing presided. In Hobbes, the absolute ruler became the bearer of the responsibility for putting an end to that state of war and securing peace inside the state. But the fear of descending back into war never leaves the state, so “the need to found a state transforms the moral alternative of
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good and evil into the political alternative of peace and war” (Koselleck, 1988, p. 25). The state was meant to check the political effect of private mentalities: war. Hence its laws had to come from authority, not be prescribed by private morality. By making use of reason, morality could perceive that authority – the state – was needed to deliver man from evil. The private and public realms thus became separated; and the individual was split between the citizen and the human being. Through the interplay of these split realms of political necessity and moral conscience, Hobbes built the authority of the state; through the same move, he however put into motion what the Enlightenment would finally turn against the state. According to Koselleck, Locke becomes the spiritual father of the Enlightenment by transforming individual, private conscience into a kind of law of society. With Locke, the individual as citizen is no longer subordinated only to the state; citizenry is raised to the status of a supreme tribunal. “The citizens no longer defer to the state power alone; jointly they form a society that develops its own moral laws, laws which take their place beside those of the state”. (Koselleck, 1988, p. 55) Morality is no longer a function of politics; rather, politics now becomes subject to the moral authority of society, even if indirectly. Historically, the Republic of Letters and the Masonic Lodges became the two social structures that advanced the cause of Enlightenment against the absolutist state. The incongruity between the social and financial power accumulated by the bourgeoisie and their exclusion from participation in the political realm fueled what would further constitute the capacity for this stratum to move against the state. Preserved by the state in the private, moral, and social realm, the bourgeois institutions could develop into a potentially political force – one that, however, claimed to be operating completely outside of politics. “Freedom from the State was the real political appeal of the bourgeois lodges”, a freedom guaranteed by the secrecy that was supposed to protect its members. “This protective function of mystery found its mental correlate in the separation of morality and politics” (Koselleck, 1988, p. 73), and rejection of the raison d’état became its social glue. Secrecy, claim to neutrality and a dichotomous opposition to the State9 are, thus, the force that puts criticism in motion. […] the [moral] stage becomes a tribunal. Its verdict divides the world into two parts by presenting and making tangible the dominant dualisms of the century […] It separates the just from the unjust and in the course of this separation the ‘mighty’ and the ‘rulers’ […] At the point at which the dualistically segregated dominant politics are subjected to a moral verdict, that verdict is transformed into a political factor; into political criticism”. (Koselleck, 1988, p. 101)
Absolutism had created a separation between the two spheres; now, it became the most fundamental target of this dual worldview, aggravated by bourgeois criticism. Criticism, for its
9 According to Koselleck, a series of concepts and counterconcepts structure the enlightenment against its enemies: reason vs. revelation; freedom vs. despotism; nature vs. civilization; trade vs. war; morality vs. politics; decadence vs. progress; light vs. darkness. See: Koselleck, 1988, p. 100 8 Work in progress – Please do not cite without permission
turn, oblivious to its own history, and hiding under its claim to neutrality, becomes hypocritical: it does not recognize its political role. Criticism became the catchword of the eighteenth century, and little by little it came to be associated with reason, against revelation and towards the achievement of truth by tracking down contradictions. The critical process was first directed to the realm of knowledge and kept away from politics, leaving the state out of its reach. However, while claiming to occupy a neutral, objective, detached position in order to arrive at the truth of judgment of mankind, criticism would eventually arrive at the doors of the state, once it subjected secular laws to its judgment. In this sense, “criticism set itself apart from the state as non-political yet subjected it to its judgment” (Koselleck, 1988, p. 114). But in order to guarantee its non-partisanship in the process of critiquing the state, a new historico-philosophical consciousness had to be forged, in which the realization of peace and morality through the end of the state were transformed into a rational, inevitable process which would come about without man intending it whatsoever. A battle between morality against politics – of good versus evil – could only lead, according to the rational plan, to the victory of morality and the disappearance of the state. Philosophy of history, the main product of the eighteenth century, was born. Christian eschatology in its modified form of secular progress, Gnostic-Manichean elements submerged in the dualism of morality and politics, ancient theories of circularity, and finally the application of the new laws of natural history to history itself – all contributed to the development of eighteenth century historico-philosophical consciousness (Koselleck, 1988, p. 130).
This consciousness, devoted as it was to preserve the interests of the bourgeoisie as the interests of the entire society, did not acknowledge a growing political crisis that opposed parties with contrasting interests. According to Koselleck, concealing the political aspect o morality’s claim was the historical function of the bourgeois philosophy of history – a philosophy of history which conjured up the revolution at the same time that it tried to deny its political stand. The revolution, rather than being recognized as a political struggle, a civil war, was portrayed as the evidence of moral progress. Civil war, whose laws continue to govern us to this day, was recognised but made to appear harmless by a philosophy of history for which the intended political resolution only represented the predictable and inevitable end of a moral process beyond politics. This guise of harmlessness, however, served to intensify the crisis (Koselleck, 1988, p. 185).
In this sense, Koselleck set himself the task of showing how the creation, in the eighteenth century, of a utopian, bourgeois philosophy of history to counter the Absolutist state was responsible for conjuring up the political crisis precisely by trying to hide, or ignore it. For him, this philosophy of history was utopian precisely because it ignored its political role and, in ignoring it, alienated history from its philosophy, turning it into a “sort of legal
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process”. Enlightened criticism targeted the Absolutist state – and, with it, condemned politics to immorality; it targeted the Christian religion – and secularization turned eschatology into a history of progress. The future became the locus of salvation: the time and place where the morally just and rational man and society would finally rid itself from the tensions and aporias of politics. Having said that, I do not see Koselleck’s work as an attack on the idea of critique altogether; rather, I see him discussing how a certain form of criticism that emerged in opposition to the Absolutist state, and which was used specifically by a bourgeois strata which tried to equalize the entire society with itself; how this specific form of criticism that inaugurated the Enlightenment and which created, so to speak, what we came to understand as modern politics has in fact remained oblivious to a grave political, moral, historical and intellectual crisis which can only be aggravated as long as criticism does not become critical of itself – the image of reflexivity comes to mind. And in this sense is that I would like to side him with a whole critical tradition that includes authors such as Nietzsche, Weber, Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault. As problematic as it its to put all of these authors together, I do think, with Foucault, that we can see among them a similar “critical attitude” – one that is concerned with the ontology of ourselves and to which I will turn in the next section. As I see it, Koselleck is narrating one of the legacies of critique in our world. He narrates the legacy of critique as utopia, as philosophy of history, as the champion of reason. Critique as the response to the possibilities of human finitude in an immanent world that finds completion in the future – in progress, the realization of peace and morality. And this certainly maps an entire tradition of philosophy and politics that have been known to us under the rubrics of “science” and “liberalism”. However, and this is where my investigation turns to Michel Foucault, such criticism has spanned a second critical possibility, the counter side, or counter history of such a “history of criticism”, which relates specifically with the question of subjectivity.
The other side of the Enlightenment: the discourse of war and the governmentalization of the state In the series of lectures at the Collège de France between the years 1975-1979 – “Society Must be Defended”, “Security, Territory, Population”, and “The Birth of Biopolitics” – Foucault offered important reflections about power and the constitution of liberal governmentality which have made the most substantial inroads into the discourse of international relations. These lectures offer his most compelling case for the need for political analysis “to cut off the head of the king” – which means getting over the sovereign juridical theories of power and understanding the entire field of procedures of governmentality that run through state and non-state institutions alike, and which function less as repressive
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mechanisms allowing and forbidding subjects to act, than as ways through which the conduct of individuals and groups can be directed, structuring the possible field of their actions. In these lectures, Foucault begins an investigation that encompasses the same historical period of Koselleck’s study, looking however at the articulation of a different discourse about power, which he calls a historico-political discourse. Different from the utopian criticism leveled by the bourgeois stratum against the Absolutist state – and which grows out of Hobbes’ attempt to make peace more than a desire, even while denying the state as a solution – the discourse Foucault follows constitutes, according to him, a counter-history of power that is aristocratic, and which considers war as the grid of intelligibility of politics. According to this discourse, peace cannot be the end of any rational process, since behind its laws and institutions, a constant struggle takes place. (Foucault, 2003) Both Koselleck’s and Foucault’s histories speak of the formation of this thing called “society” – a new realm which was not the state; and both saw how the new discourse of and about this society – either comprehended through the bourgeois or the aristocratic lenses – posed a threat to the state. However, if the bourgeois discourse discussed by Koselleck was a discourse that denied its political grounding and claimed to speak as the voice of reason and morality – claiming to be the discourse of this “society” as a whole – the historico-political discourse to which Foucault alludes is one that refuses the unity of “society”, recognizes the indissoluble link between morality and politics, and therefore, denies any substantive peace, seeing war, instead, as the principle of intelligibility of politics, society, history. The emergence of this “somber, critical” and also “mythical” discourse about the war that runs through society is, according to Foucault, concurrent with the expulsion of war to the limits of state at the end of the religious wars of the sixteenth century. For this reason, it has remained a marginal discourse during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gone unrecognized by the emerging bourgeoisie, “precisely because its negation is the precondition for a true and just discourse that can at last begin to function – in the middle, between the adversaries, above their heads – as a law.” (Foucault, 2003, p. 57-8) If the monarchy had created the concept of society – of nation – to legitimize its claim to power, the bourgeois discourse had appropriated the concept to itself, and emancipated it from the state – turning the Absolutist state’s guns against it, as shown by Koselleck. According to the bourgeoisie, the nation was prior to the state – it was a function of the commonalities shared by some people (language, customs, habits, interests). By giving itself a law, this people would create itself as a nation under a common law and a legislature. This juridical existence of the nation would then have to be historicized: a nation is also this unity characterized by its works (agriculture, handicrafts and industry, trade and liberal arts) and its functions (army, justice, church, administration). Through this move, the Third State, as the
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main responsible for fulfilling these works and functions, became the precondition for the nation. The state was thus reclaimed by the bourgeoisie, separated from the monarchy and legitimized by its laws and administrative capacities. A great nation had to be able “to administer itself, to manage, govern, and guarantee the constitution and workings of the figure of the state and of state power. Not domination, but state control.” (Foucault, 2003, p. 223) The double threat posed by the historico-political discourse – of both a war without end and domination as the element of history – was, thus, “colonized […] civilized […] and up to a point pacified” (Foucault, 2003, p. 215). What we do now have, or what we may have, is a history of a rectilinear kind in which the decisive moment is the transition from the virtual to the real, the transition from the national totality to the universality of the State. This, therefore, is a history that is polarized toward the present and toward the State, a history that culminates in the imminence of the State. Of the total, complete, and full figure of the State in the present. And this will also make it possible […] to write a history in which the relations of force that are in paly are not of a warlike nature, but completely civilian, so to speak. (Foucault, 2003, p. 224-5)
History, then, no longer is seen as a war for domination, but a civil struggle striving toward the universality of the state. If Koselleck had characterized the creation of a philosophy of history as the moment in which criticism became hypocritical, Foucault will reach a somehow similar conclusion. For him, this “dialecticalization” of the discourse of war – a war that, as revolution, became the realization of history – represented, also, its “embourgeoisement”. War and struggle were subsumed under law and governmentality.10 What is important here, however, is how this reassessment of power that Foucault performs by genealogically retracing the emergence of a discourse of war before the Enlightenment allows him, in the next years’ lectures, to decentralize the state, “to cut off the head of the king”. This analysis shows that the survival of the state after the Enlightenment implicated securing its sovereignty through multiple mechanisms and techniques – which many times worked against the formal sovereignty of the state. Foucault will more clearly delineate this process of “governmentalization of the state” in the lectures “Security, Territory, Population” and the text “The Subject and Power”. In these texts, specifically, he will tie the form of government through which the state came to exercise power in the last centuries to the “art of governing” historically exercised by the Christian pastoral. This form of power no longer targets the territory, but the conduct and government of individuals and the population – omnes et singulatim. According to Foucault, this governmental form of power which was secularized and exercised by the state has four main characteristics: i. it is directed towards individual salvation; ii. it involves the sacrifice of
10 War would reappear, later, in the medical discourse of racism that was mobilized by the state as an internal war to prevent society against threats posed by its own body. Through this move, Foucault will further develop his ideas about biopolitics, especially in “The birth of biopolitics”. 12 Work in progress – Please do not cite without permission
the pastor for the flock; iii. it exercises power over all of the population collectively, and each subject individually; iv. and it necessitates knowledge over people’s minds. Such a form of power is concerned, above all, with the administration and government of the conduct of individuals. I will now turn to how this reassessment of the relationship between war, power and the state will help Foucault, in his later work, to formulate an account of critique which may offer important insights for thinking international relations theory.
Beyond the blackmail of Enlightenment: the doubled tradition of Critique
In the last decade of his life, Foucault reengaged the work of Kant and the theme of Enlightenment through a more positive assessment, in what has been a very criticized and debated move. At this moment, Foucault tried to clearly associate his oeuvre to the political position taken by first generation Frankfurt School, which rendered multiple engagements with – and criticism by – Jürgen Habermas. Also, at this moment he performed another change in the focus of his investigations: if at first his archeological concern with discursive practices that encompassed the frames of possible forms of knowledge had been displaced by a genealogical investigation of power relations and regimes of governmentality, at this point his thought was refocused on the different forms through which the individuals constitute themselves as subjects – what he called “forms of subjectivation through techniques of the relation to self”. (Foucault, 2011, p. 5) But, what is more important for the purposes of this investigation, a somehow different account of critique began to emerge, one which I believe can be very helpful to understand the constitution and role of international relations theory. Foucault’s account of critique, at this point, came to be framed between the Nietzchean genealogical critique of the earlier phase – which emphasized struggle, war, and the recovery of counter-narratives, counter- histories and counter-memories that had been silenced by normalized structures of power- knowledge – and a Kantian critique concerned with the limits of knowledge and the possibility of human autonomy – if only by redefining its borders and historicizing its a priori. In order to delineate this account of critique – which Foucault will call a “critical attitude” that performs an “ontology of ourselves” – it is important to consider three lectures in which he formulated more clearly his reengagement with Kant and the Enlightenment: “What is critique?”, delivered in 1978; “The art of telling the truth” (1983), which was published as the first lecture in the volume entitled “The government of self and others”; and “What is Enlightenment?” (1984), which engaged Kant’s homonymous text, published in a German newspaper in 1784.
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In the lecture “What is critique?” (2007b), Foucault will clearly formulate a positive account of the Enlightenment, as a period without fixed dates, with multiple points of entry (Foucault, 2007b, p. 56) not as some historical period that was left in the past, but as inaugurating a “critical attitude”: “a certain way of thinking, speaking, and acting, a certain relationship to what exists, to what one knows, to what one does, relationship to society, to culture and also a relationship to others” (Foucault, 2007b, p. 42). This attitude emerges in opposition to another change introduced during the fifteenth and sixteenth century in the ways power was exercised. According to Foucault, this critical attitude is a response to the “governmentalization of life” which had secularized and multiplied the “art of governing” employed by the Christian pastoral over its subjects, and which depended on a certain direction of their conduct. This attitude is not characterized as an abstract, general practice, but as an emergence, a strictly historical attitude which found its conditions of possibility in the opposition to the practices of governmentality. In this sense, this critical attitude involved a disposition and an imperative “not to be governed too much”. For this reason, this critical attitude is defined not by its content, its meaning, but for its form, its function: it is always an “act of voluntary insubordination”. According to Foucault, “[…] one tries to find unity in this critique, although by its very nature, by its function … it seems to be condemned to dispersion, dependency, and pure heteronomy, after all, critique only exists in relation to something other than itself” (Foucault, 2007b, p. 42). In this sense, Foucault likens the critical attitude with “virtue in general”. Ultimately, according to this definition, there is a fundamental interplay between governmentality and critique:
[…] if governmentalization is indeed this movement through which individuals are subjugated in the reality of a social practice through mechanisms of power that adhere to a truth, well, then! I will say that critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth in its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth. (Foucault, 2007b, p. 47)
But, what is interesting, for Foucault this practice, which is put forth in Kant’s negative description of the Enlightenment as “a way out” of immaturity, of his condition of tutelage, is not directed only outward, but also inwards. After all, man’s minority, his incapacity to make use of his own understanding without the guidance of others, is not to be imputed only into the excess of authority. Man’s minority is also a condition of his lack of decision or courage. For man to escape such a condition of minority, he cannot expect the powers to release him; he has to be courageous, to dare: sapere aude! Thus, the critical attitude is at the same time an external and an internal disposition; it is a defiance of authority which ultimately has to come from the subject’s own capacity to know, and to know up to what limits he can know. As Foucault points out, critique and authority are not incommensurable. Critique for Foucault,
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then, will involve a repositioning of Kantian critique in relation to the attitude demanded by him from the Aufklärers:
[…] in Kant’s eyes, critique will be what he is going to say to knowledge: do you know up to what point you can know? Reason as much as you want, but do you really know up to what point you can reason without becoming dangerous? Critique will say, in short, that it is not so much a matter of what we are undertaking, more or less courageously, than it is the idea we have of our knowledge and its limits. Our liberty is at stake […] once one has gotten an adequate idea of one’s own knowledge and its limits […] one will then no longer have to hear the obey; or rather, the obey will be founded on autonomy itself. (Foucault, 2007b, p. 49)
However, this doubled heritage of critique – as both a recognition of the limits of knowledge and a resistance to a form of power which tries to govern our conducts – will be undone in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Three developments allow us see how this unbundling will proceed. First: the development of positivist science, and the further subsumption of reason and rationality to positivist criteria. Second: the development of the state and the state system, which was legitimized as the ultimate rationality of history. Finally: the articulation between positive science and the state which gave birth to a science of the state. The intertwining of these developments and the effacement of their historical articulation gradually encouraged a suspicion towards the Enlightenment: “for what excesses of power, for what governmentalization, […] is reason not itself historically responsible?” (Foucault, 2007, p. 51). The nexus knowledge-power was discovered and resisting it – resisting the form of rationality associated to the science of the state – became a stance against the Enlightenment. […] making the Aufklärung the central question definitely means a number of things. First, it means that we are engaging a certain historical and philosophical practice which has nothing to do with the philosophy of history or the history of philosophy. It is a certain historical-philosophical practice […] in this historical-philosophical practice, one has to make one’s own history, fabricate history, as if through fiction, in terms of how it would be traversed by the question of the relationships between structures of rationality which articulate true discourse and the mechanisms of subjugation which are linked to it. This is evidently that question which displaces the historical objects familiar to historians towards the problem of the subject and truth about which historians are not usually concerned. (Foucault, 2007b, p. 56)
In this sense, for Foucault, posing the question of the Enlightenment is questioning the relationship between power, truth and the subject; understanding the correlation “between the art of being governed and that of not been quite so governed” (Foucault, 2007b, p. 57) This double heritage of critique inside of Kant’s work would then drift apart in the nineteenth century – maybe even because he introduced a separation between critique and Enlightenment. Thus, the Enlightenment trajectory since then has been one tied to the problem of discovering the limits inside which all knowledge can found its legitimacy – and all the effects of power which would emanate from this question through “objectivism, positivism, technicism”. This analytical tradition, by seeing a fundamental illegitimacy behind
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the association between knowledge and power, tried, through rigorous “scientific” procedures, to undo any links between a knowledge that was true and legitimate from a knowledge that exceeded its limits and became associated to forms of power and domination. By accepting, however, the indivisibility between knowledge and power, one can reassess the Aufklärung, and question the relationship between knowledge and power from a critical attitude, “from a certain decision-making will not to be governed” (Foucault, 2007b, p. 67). In his 1983 lecture which inaugurates the course “The government of self and others” (2011), Foucault will further expand his understanding of the possibilities released by Kant’s response to the question of the Enlightenment in terms of formulating this problem of critique as an attitude one should constantly reactivate before articulations of regimes of truth and their effects of power. Two questions will be further articulated in this point. The first refers to what I have called the inwards operation of the critical attitude, by which I mean Foucault will return to the question of courage and its call for a certain work of the subject in itself. Second, by reading Kant’s text on the Enlightenment together with his considerations on Revolution, Foucault will present Kant as posing the question of the present for the first time – a question which he believes accompanies us until today. Differently from Descartes, who posed the question of the subject in a timeless manner – the thinking man is the figure of the universal man – Kant’s considerations on the Enlightenment and Revolution pose a new type of question concerning the present reality and the philosopher both subject and object of this present reality – what are we in a very precise moment of history. To this effect, Kant would be introducing the present as a philosophical event to which the philosopher who speaks of it belongs, which puts both the present and the subject in a process of becoming. Modernity itself appears not as something to be accepted or rejected, celebrated or lamented, but as a question.
[…] it seems to me that philosophy as the surface of emergence of present reality, as a questioning of the philosophical meaning of the present reality of which it is a part, and philosophy as the philosopher’s questioning of this “we” to which he belongs and in relation to which he has to situate himself, is a distinctive feature of philosophy as a discourse of modernity and on modernity. (Foucault, 2011, p. 13)
Later, when Kant poses the question of Revolution, again he will be introducing some new elements in the discourse of modernity. For he presents the Revolution not in terms of its content – which is always historically bound – but as a spectacular event that indicates something, that performs a function in the very process of enlightenment. The way the revolution is greeted not only by its actors, but also by the observers, shows that man finally realized that is the right of every people to give itself a political constitution, one that avoids
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all offensive wars. And this, according to Kant, is a guarantee of the forward-moving process of history and, therefore, of the constant progression of the human race. By posing the question of the present reality, both through the question on Enlightenment and on Revolution, Kant would have inaugurated not only one, but two critical traditions that ran through modern and contemporary philosophy: the first one, the “analytics of truth” of the Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy, has followed from Kant’s critical oeuvre and concerns itself with the question of true knowledge; the second, coming out of his texts on Enlightenment and Revolution, pursues an ontology of the present and of ourselves, asking questions about the field of possible experiences and looking for ruptures. In face of this doubled heritage of critique, Foucault demands a choice:
We have to opt either for a critical philosophy which appears as an analytical philosophy of truth in general, or for a critical thought which takes the form of an ontology of ourselves, of present reality. It is this latter form of philosophy which, from Hegel to the Frankfurt School, passing through Nietzsche, Max Weber and so on, has founded a form of reflection to which, of course, I link myself insofar as I can. (Foucault, 2011, p. 21)
Critical international relations?
These preliminary inquiries into the heritage of critique and crisis in modern political thought suggest some important reflections about the wagers – at once political, normative, intellectual, methodological, ontological – which have marked the history of international relations theory. What I want to start arguing in the next steps of this research is that international relations theory, rather than being a marginal discipline in the history of the sciences and a petty one for the insistence on disciplinary debates, should be understood as a discourse – with its rules, and functions – where powerful articulations of power-knowledge are at work. Rather than celebrating or condemning such articulations, I aim to understand how they work inside this doubled heritage of critique – and thus how international relations might be an insightful place to look for forms of domination and possibilities of resistance. The so-called “Great Debates” will be important places to look for critique in international relations. This is less because of their role in the progressive constitution of the field – a view towards which I am profoundly skeptical – than as moments of rupture or discontinuities in which theorists were resisting particular forms of knowledge, power and subjectivity. As such, looking into those moments can be a way to shed light into positions that were silenced or marginalized in the discursive construction of international relations theory.
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References
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