Writing the Self and Transforming Knowledge in International Relations

Towards a Politics of Liminality

Erzsebet Strausz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351402644
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book emerges from within the everyday knowledge practices of International Relations (IR) scholarship and explores the potential of experimental writing as an alternative source of 'knowledge' and political imagination within the modern university and the contemporary structures of neoliberal government. It unlocks and foregrounds the power of writing as a site of resistance and a vehicle of transformation that is fundamentally grounded in reflexivity, self-crafting and an ethos of care.

In an attempt to cultivate new sensibilities to habitual academic practice the project re-appropriates the skill of writing for envisioning and enacting what it might mean to be working in the discipline of IR and inhabiting the usual spaces and scenes of academic life differently. The practice of experimental writing that intuitively unfolds and develops in the book makes an important methodological intervention into conventional social scientific inquiry both regarding the politics of writing and knowledge production as well as the role and position of the researcher. The formal innovations of the book include the actualization and creative remaking of the Foucaultian genre of the 'experience book,' which seeks to challenge scholarly routine and offers new experiences and modes of perception as to what it might mean to 'know' and to be a 'knowing subject' in our times.

The book will be of interest to researchers engaged in critical and creative research methods (particularly narrative writing, autobiography, storytelling, experimental and transformational research), Foucault studies and philosophy, as well as critical approaches to contemporary government and studies of resistance.

1 An experience book of ‘sovereignty’

Dear reader,

These are the first words of my PhD thesis. You might be asking which ones exactly? I promise I will come back to the difficult question of the temporality of writing and how there is this constant delay in putting things into words and thinking them (and on regular days, in the reverse order). This is something I have been trying to negotiate in my work through the hardship of titanic struggles and, occasionally, the mind-blowing lightness of spontaneous realizations in the past four years. So for now, I will only say what I can say (hoping that I will be able to say more and more of what I want and need to say as we go along). For instance, that I am the one writing this text and I have to admit that there are many, many things that I do not know (a lot more in fact than what I would ever, actually be able to know). There is, at least, one thing that I know (almost) for sure though, and it happens to be quite crucial for what I am trying to do here. And that relates to you, and as we shall see, it has powerful implications and consequences for my writing and me, and hopefully for you as well. As I learn from Judith Butler’s work, and also know from experience, there is one important truth (among the many) that surely cannot be ignored here, namely, that you are there, and not only when you are reading this, but also when I am writing this text; you are there in the text and in the whole process of my writing.

I am going to tell you in a minute what I mean by all that exactly, but if we could pause for a moment, like now, and if you wanted to choose, where would you like to be in this text? Where could you see yourself? Would you prefer to be somewhere, say, in-between the lines, or in the spaces between words, like here [], or maybe you would like to do something more active and fun in this text, perhaps climb up the B-s, swing from one T to the other (and if you are adventurous, from one I to the next), or perhaps you would just prefer resting somewhere, on the top of the o-s or d-s (or somewhere more comfortable?), or you would like to sit in front of the screen perhaps (maybe a microscopic you), at a critical distance, watching how these lines are unfolding on the page? The reason I am asking this is that I don’t usually think or imagine things like that and probably neither do you. We are used to doing things in a certain way, there is a routine to what we do when we write, read, speak or just simply think in our academic lives. And in my experience at least, there is not very much playfulness involved in that. As many have observed before me, the ‘professional voice’ that we develop in the practice of academic work is a very particular kind of voice, one that requires an ‘objective, neutral style of writing’ that does not leave too much room for spontaneity, randomness or ease.¹ There is not very much space for you or for me either, let alone for you and me. The particular style that we are required to adopt and follow in practicing ‘science,’ indeed, does many different things to us so that we appear (and more importantly, disappear) in some curious ways in the text and in the course of writing. First of all, it asks me to pretend that I am not really, fully there. Or more precisely, it asks me to write as if it was only the analytical functions of my thinking that played a key part in trying to understand the world. The person, her personal experience, personal views and other personal belongings must go so that universal logic can take her place and uncover how the world really works. Me as ‘author’ and ‘knower’ will have to position myself, in Naeem Inayatullah’s words, ‘in a space beyond the world,’ as if ‘not somehow part of the world we study.’² We are all too familiar with this ‘fictive distancing’ that guarantees the power and legitimacy of the kind of knowledge ‘social inquiry’ produces: as Inayatullah remarks, the promise of the academic style of writing is that ‘with personal disengagement, with an apprehension of the world from a purported neutral and objective stance, we can remove our personal biases from our descriptions and theorizations.’³ Authorship, yours and mine, in texts like this is supposed to ground its authority in a strange paradox: the ‘omniscient social scientific prose’⁴ may claim to know and set out to explore everything except for the very place of its emergence. That particular and always idiosyncratic microcosm of the person vanishes into the background as it makes space for a universal tone of voice that is a bit too ready to ‘think big’ and appropriate the world, always at large. It also never looks back. Before ‘science’ there might have been a ‘me,’ there might have been an ‘us,’ maybe not even so separate.

Less than a year ago I gave the following, somewhat bitter account of how I came to concern myself with the everyday practices of what Raluca Soreanu calls the ‘disciplinary life’ of International Relations.⁵ My experience of the practice of academic inquiry, and in that, the practice of writing, something I am performing right now and something that also writes the discipline, its rituals, habits and the people within and outside, revolved around a deep sense of alienation. I wrote:

My project started as an attempt to rethink what we do when we act as scholars, the everyday, banal, usually unreflected practices of academic life such as thinking, writing, speaking, as well as the strange relationship of such a life to the life it writes, speaks and thinks. I was bothered by the queer disconnection between the sunny, sometimes gloomy days in the academic ivory tower and the so-called ‘out-there’ of ‘realities’ and ‘social phenomena’ that we ‘find’ in ‘society’. However, it was not only the impersonal distance separating the subject, object and observer that made me wonder about ‘the order of things and words’ in human sciences. It was also the distance from myself, the distance within re-enacting the distance without, in the person, in me, separating me in life from a scientific self in a passage from ‘I am’ to ‘I am something’, where ‘I’ also becomes ‘something’, something to be avoided and hidden, the inappropriate surplus of the self that gets in the way of scientific objectivity.⁶

Without doubt, in the world of science the world has stopped being a whole. It seems that if I hang around in school for long enough, in a certain context and at the appropriate time (when I have successfully proved that I am all grown-up and serious), I am trained to create a bubble, a pretty little island where my academic persona grows and flourishes, quite afar from my ‘real’ life, or so she claims, yet that’s how I feel, too. The ‘fictive distance,’ in fact, feels very much real. As it happens, this is what my real life looks like: a life that entails something like a pseudo-life in it. ‘Knowing’ the world as I have learnt to know it doubles the world, within and without. ‘Inside’ and ‘outside’ now proliferate to the infinite and I can barely live with my academic doppelganger: such high-maintenance, this one!

So when my scholarly subjectivity looks around in the world, what does she see? She may or may not be able to see you, for instance, depending on where the research question directs her gaze, and even then, what she can find are not more (and certainly not less) than ‘objects of inquiry,’ things that carry useful information when looked at from the right methodological angle, and for the purpose of answering a question that had been in place long before an encounter face to face, eye to eye. If she were ever able to see you, you would have to fit into her ‘grid of intelligibility.’ She is a committed Cartesian; she sees and knows in a distinctive style. She preceded me here, in the business of ‘knowledge.’ She is an epistemic comrade born out of a particular relationship in which thought offers itself to be thought in modernity, and through which we think (we know) the world and ourselves in it. Descartes’ cogito, the famous maxim and ultimately, the state of mind of the ‘I think, therefore, I am,’ as Edward McGushin explains, is ‘a mode of subjectivity that does not appear to be linked to any particular way of living.’⁷ It is grounded in a particular way of thinking; it is grounded in the very activity of thinking itself. This is how my scholarly subjectivity can detach from both you and me so easily, and from an experience of life that is mysterious, abundant, accidental and scarily alive, the one that resists capture. We all know (don’t we) that not everything can be thought, nor should it be thought only. Yet for her the whole world translates into ‘objects’ with distinct existences and relations to be explained between them. This is ‘objectivity,’ she claims (and I make sure to insert one more reference, just to be on the safe side). After all, she has never been part of these equations, so there is nothing to worry about. She just carefully processes what she finds and makes sense of it: that’s all that ever happened.

But you know what? Perhaps we have had enough of this distancing game already. To distance my ‘scholarly persona,’ address it in third person and offer an analysis of her behaviour (!) is exactly what I might be accusing her of (and along with her, inevitably myself). It is perhaps the same logic, the same distancing mechanism, the same style of thinking that I might just be performing and re-enacting here. It feels somehow wrong to create another object out of ‘her’ (and in the same move, as I am beginning to realize, of myself.) Or at least to do so without a gesture of reconciliation, or whatever may lessen the distance between us (and me and myself).

It is so incredibly hard though to escape the comfort of thinking like that, and to move away from the routine of separating out subjects and objects, positioning them in an analytical relationship vis-à-vis each other, and at a secure (fictive) distance from oneself. Why is it so hard? I honestly wonder (while I keep slipping back into the same routine). As I have been writing this, for instance, all I wanted to do is somehow bring into the discussion the question of scholarly subjectivity and render the notion real and actual through my own experience. My point is that ‘scholarly subjectivity’ is far from being an abstraction: it is this messy, yet bizarrely predictable thing (A mask? A mode of being?) that’s probably operative even right now! I suppose I managed to do this then, only just not quite how I had in mind it might happen. It would be difficult to show that I hadn’t actually set this narrative up in this way, and I hadn’t planned the moves through which I would manoeuvre myself to the place where I am at now (or where I was half a page ago). In writing everything is already past tense, I am constantly catching up with the impulses that tell me there is something to say yet ‘sense’ is made out with hindsight, at my second, third and twenty-third attempts to edit and clarify, which makes anything spontaneous and incidental incredibly hard to make felt for what it is, let alone when it emerges. (I couldn’t even make this up). It only struck me towards the end of what appears now to be a paragraph that the account I was giving of my scholarly self was animated by a strangely similar (and all too familiar) logic to the one I was being so critical of. However exaggerated my topography might have been of some of the routines of scientific mindsets I am still amazed at how straightforward it was for me to adopt a narrative style nonetheless that, in some ways, still demarcated a particular terrain (in this case: a part of myself) and re-presented it as an ‘object.’ Even more so, this object was knowable, controllable, and easy to mock. Who is speaking then to whom, about whom exactly? This is where the game (and the arbitrary separation of ‘selves’) breaks, collapses, scatters into pieces. How does one carry on after such a U-turn (quite literally)?

In any case though, I think it is time for a new paragraph.

One of the consequences of what I have just tried to put into words above is that we might have to wait for a bit longer before I could bring Butler into this text and perhaps provide some explanation as to why I am writing in this manner and why I keep referring to you as ‘you.’ (Having said that, if I wanted to take some of Butler’s words very seriously, I could say that, just like you, she has always-already been here, in this text, from the very beginning). Turning back to the problem of disciplinary and social conditioning, there is surely more to be done (and undone) when it comes to how we come to repeat and reproduce certain patterns, modes of acting and habitual ways of being unknowingly and inadvertently (and I suppose it must have been a lucky coincidence that I have picked up on one small instance of how I fall into the grips of the same logic of objectification, probably time and again). Critical agendas and politically sensitive causes might not be all that we need. I feel I have given a decent go to try and ‘think outside of the box,’ and look for what is non-familiar and non-obvious (to me, at least) among the many easily identifiable battles of academic research and their collateral damage. I have been trying to listen carefully to the silences, sometimes in silence, sometimes armoured with a thick shield of critical concepts and the urge to intervene; I have tried to dwell in the gaps between the things said, unsaid and swallowed. I am not suggesting any of this might have been properly reflected and thought through, and that I didn’t jump on ‘critical’ bandwagons when it came to resisting and challenging what others convincingly argued should be resisted and challenged at particular times, and by such-and-such means. What frightens me is that I could go far enough without thinking much about ‘knowledge’ as such, that it is a relationship in which I am, too, involved, that it fundamentally shapes how I relate to myself and others, that it has its rituals and politics, that only a privileged few can be in the ‘know,’ and that all of these aspects are present and perpetuated in everyday, banal acts such as thinking, writing, speaking, that is, in the daily ‘stuff’ of normalized academic routine that I never actually think about. Put crudely, ‘thinking outside of the box’ doesn’t necessarily leave that ‘box’ behind. While my gaze might be scanning the horizon for new exciting sights, it feels my body is still clinging onto the comfort and odd intimacy of what is familiar and recognizable, and therefore fundamentally safe. As I am beginning to realize habits can run surprisingly deep and I can’t just un-think them. Unlearn maybe? Hopefully, but more pressingly though, how can I ever disentangle myself from these conditionings if most of the time I don’t even realize they are there?

To be clear, I have been as prepared as one can be to address and discuss the question of the epistemic conditions of knowledge. This has been a pivotal aspect of my PhD research and I have been meaning to develop it in far greater detail. What I was not quite sure of, however, is how exactly this question would unfold in the process of writing and where it would leave its marks in the text; and p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements and affirmations
• Signposts
• Two three years after (or who knows)
• 1 An experience book of ‘sovereignty’
• 2 Reading and writing (with) a Foucaultian ethos
• 3 Self in discourse, discourse in self
• 4 Narrative voice from a liminal space: I as ‘I’
• 5 Writing sovereignly
• Preface/postscript: May I walk with you for a while?
• Bibliography
• Index