Ontology and World Politics

Void Universalism I

Sergei Prozorov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135011284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Together these two companion volumes develop an innovative theory of world politics, grounded in the reinterpretation of the concepts of 'world' and 'politics' from an ontological perspective.

Ontology and World Politics presents a new approach to political universalism, grounded in the reinterpretation of world politics from an ontological perspective. In the discipline of International Relations the concept of world politics remains ambivalent, functioning both as a synonym of international relations and their antonym, denoting the aspirations for the overcoming of interstate pluralism in favour of a universalist politics of the global community or the world state. Rather than distinguish 'world politics' from 'international politics' by its site, level or issues, Prozorov interprets it as another kind of politics. Drawing on Martin Heidegger's account of world disclosure and Alain Badiou's phenomenology of worlds, this book posits world politics as a practice of the affirmation of universal axioms across an infinite plurality of limited and particular situations or 'worlds'. Prozorov reinterprets the familiar principles of community, equality and freedom in ontological terms as attributes of pure being, subtracted from all positive determinations, and presents them as axioms of universalist politics valid in any world whatsoever. This approach to world politics serves as the groundwork for a comprehensive reconsideration of the central themes of political and international relations theory.

Systematic and accessible, these works will bekey readingfor all students and scholars ofpolitical science and international relations.

Part I

The World and worlds

1

Three Concepts of the World

The constitutive ambivalence of world politics

The contemporary discourse on world politics in IR theory oscillates between the two extremes of unproblematic presupposition and sceptical denial. On the one hand, the studies of global governance, norms, regimes and institutions take as a point of departure the existence of a worldwide dimension of politics, which is then specified in various ways. According to this logic, which is at work in e.g. idealist, liberal and constructivist theories, the referent domain of world politics exceeds the state-centric realm of ‘international relations’ and permits to incorporate into the discipline such formerly ignored problematics as gender, culture or identity as well as such formerly ignored actors as social movements, indigenous peoples and other minorities. In this manner, politics moves from the narrow confines of the international society of states to the widest possible, presumably universal domain of the world as a whole (see Lipschutz, 1992; Linklater, 1998; Albert, 1999; Wendt, 2003). On the other hand, realist approaches as well as critical orientations, from neo-Marxism to post-structuralism, maintain their scepticism about the very possibility of attaining such a universal dimension of politics or remain wary of the hegemonic aspirations at work in any attempt to practice politics on a ‘world’ level (Calhoun, 2002; Rasch, 2003; Odysseos and Petito, 2007; Mouffe, 2009; Dillon, 1995; Edkins, 2000; Edkins and Pin-Fat, 2005; Vaughan-Williams, 2009). While the debate between these two orientations has taken a myriad of forms throughout the history of the discipline (see Walker, 1993; Thies, 2002), what interests us is the status of the very idea of world politics, which oscillates between a presupposition that is so self-evident as not to merit a conceptual explication and a problematic phantasm, only accessible to thought in the form of a hegemonic pretension (cf. Walker, 2009: 20–28). We either do not need to know what world politics means, since it is ‘common knowledge’, or we cannot know it, since such knowledge is inaccessible, inconsistent or plain false. In this chapter we shall argue that this undecidable oscillation is due to the inconsistent concept of the world at work in the discourse on world politics in IR. We shall analyse three possibilities of conceptualizing the world and present the concept of the world as the void, which alone provides an ontological ground for overcoming the ambivalence of world politics in political and IR theory.

This constitutive ambivalence of world politics may be illustrated with the help of two influential monographs on the subject, Jens Bartelson’s Visions of World Community (2009) and R.B.J. Walker’s After the Globe, Before the World (2009). Both of these works offer highly sophisticated meta-theoretical interventions into the discourse on world politics that nonetheless persist in the oscillation between presupposing and denying its very existence. For Bartelson, the problematic status of the concept of the world community in the disciplinary discourse has to do with the differential logic of identity that has been constitutive of the discipline (Bartelson, 2009: 9–10). According to this logic, every identity is constituted by distinction from an ‘other’. Since a world community would lack such an other by definition, it is henceforth held to be impossible other than as a hegemonic imposture that claims for itself the universality it can never attain.

[As] long as we remain committed to this particularistic ontology, we will have a hard time making theoretical sense of any kind of human community over and above the plurality of particular communities presently embodied in the states system. As long as we regard the logic of identity as a predominant source of human belonging and identification, the formation of a community of all mankind will look highly unlikely because there are no human Others left that could provide it with a sense of sameness.

(ibid.: 42–43)

In his historical analysis of the visions of world community, from Dante to Kant, Bartelson demonstrates that this logic of identity is a relatively recent invention and can therefore be overcome by a return to an earlier understanding of world community as a wider cosmological context, in which a plurality of human communities are always already embedded.

[It] is not meaningful to distinguish categorically between communities of different scope, since all human communities derive from the same underlying and species-wide capacities. Human beings as well as the communities to which they happen to belong, are essentially embedded within a wider community of all mankind, within which the totality of human relations unfolds across time and space.

(ibid.: 11)

This emphasis on embeddedness directs Bartelson’s attention to the cosmological visions, within which the ideas of world politics and world community have been articulated since the Middle Ages. These visions escape the differential logic of identity by ‘positing a larger social whole within which all human communities are embedded as well as a vantage point over and above the plurality of individual communities, from which this larger social whole can be understood’ (ibid.: 20). Simply put, in order to break out of the pluralistic and particularistic logic of identity, it is sufficient to posit the world ‘as a universal and boundless phenomenon’ (ibid.: 43), within which all other communities as well as their individual members coexist. As a result of this move, the pluralistic logic of identity is brought back to its proper place within the overarching universality of the world community. Bartelson brilliantly demonstrates the way this logic of identity emerged as a result of a series of conceptual appropriations that he calls ‘nationalizations’, performed on the Medieval understanding of the world community as always already there, a ‘larger whole’ immanent to human existence as such (ibid.: 86–113, 167–170). While this appropriation has been remarkably successful both in theory and practice, it is possible to ‘restore the default settings of political thought’ (ibid.: 175) and reaffirm the world community no longer as an obscure telos of international politics, but as its very condition of possibility, something that is already here in the form of the presupposition, as long as human beings inhabit the same planet and share a common destiny. Yet, this reaffirmation ‘depends on its coherence and persuasiveness on the existence of a cosmological vantage point situated over and above the plurality of human communities and the multitude of individual human beings’ (ibid.: 181). In order to inspire resistance to all ‘forms of authority that keep mankind divided’ (ibid.: 181), the idea of the world community must be grounded in a cosmological concept of the world.

Moreover, according to Bartelson, the relationship of grounding here is mutual:

[The] relationship between cosmological beliefs and conceptions of human community is contextual in character, insofar as knowledge of the former helps us make sense of the latter and vice versa. One of the challenges posed by the idea of world community is that of constructing a cosmology common to all mankind, so that all human beings will eventually come to inhabit the same conceptual world.

(ibid.: 12)

In other words, our cosmologies of the world contextualize our conceptions of community and the other way round. Given the sheer diversity of cosmological visions of the worlds that Bartelson considers in his study, this argument cannot but appear paradoxical. If it is only in the context of a particular cosmology of the world that the concept of the world community can arise in the first place, it must logically be particular as well. We are thus back to the logic of identity, which, for all its historical contingency, ends up working even in the historical contexts where it was presumably absent. Having linked the concept of world community to the cosmological vision of the world, Bartelson must admit the historical plurality of ‘cosmological vantage points’ and is thus left with a myriad of particular figures of the ‘greater whole’, some of which admit of a world community more readily than others. While Bartelson does not identify with any particular historical cosmology and defers the question of the world community into the future when the ‘challenge of constructing a cosmology common to all mankind’ is successfully overcome, this deferral evidently does not resolve the question of what, if anything, could render this future cosmology more genuinely universal than its historical antecedents that, after all, also constructed worlds ‘common to all mankind’, which did not prevent the articulation of particularistic communities within them.

According to R.B.J. Walker’s After the Globe, Before the World, this is merely one of the aporias that await any discourse on world politics and make any invocation of a universal politics of the world highly dubious. Walker addresses the ways in which numerous attempts to move from international relations to world politics remain caught up in what they try to transcend, i.e. the ontopolitical tradition of modernity, which is itself already an attempt at resolving the antinomies, whose resolution we now associate with the idea of world politics (e.g. universalism/ particularism, nature/culture, individual/community, etc.) (Walker, 2009: 54–94). The ‘seduction’ and ‘temptation’ of world politics belong to the very tradition of the ‘international’ as its inherent transgression, something simultaneously desired and held impossible, or perhaps desired precisely and only as impossible (ibid.: 24, 83). For Walker, the question of world politics is always more difficult than it seems and the task of critical discourse is, in full accordance with Kant’s critical project, to guard its object against the illegitimate application of the powers of reason to it.

Thus, any inquiry directed by Walker’s approach is only bound to take us further away from the knowledge of what world politics is, while enhancing our knowledge of why this knowledge is impossible. Wherever we are, we are always ‘before’ the world, facing it as distant and inappropriable. Universalist claims are always ‘[enabled] within a particular array of boundaries, borders and limits’ and a ‘politics of the world’ that promises to do away with those remains ‘necessarily beyond reach’ (ibid.: 257–258). Thus, ‘anyone seeking to reimagine the possibilities of political life under contemporary conditions would be wise to resist ambitions expressed as a move from a politics of the international to a politics of the world, and to pay far greater attention to what goes on at the boundaries, borders and limits of a politics orchestrated within the international’ (ibid.: 2–3, see also 184–257). While there are numerous possibilities for political experimentation at these liminal sites, we would do well to remember that this experimentation always takes place on this side of the borderline. Thus, while Bartelson seeks to ‘deproblematize’ the question of world community, trying to rid it of logical paradoxes by enfolding the problematic of community into an explicitly cosmological context and thus making the world the a priori site of any community whatsoever, Walker hypertrophies this question, making it practically impossible to exit the condition of the international at all. World politics thereby appears to be endlessly oscillating between being presupposed as self-evident and unmasked as impossible.

It is easy to see that this perpetual debate cannot be restricted to the domain of ‘IR theory proper’, since it pertains to the conditions of possibility of the very disciplinary discourse of IR that necessarily remain inaccessible to this discourse (Foucault, 1989: 146–147). Nor may this debate be resolved within the domain of political science understood as the study of ‘domestic politics’, delimited from the international realm. As Bartelson (1995) has demonstrated, the disciplinary discourses of political science and international relations are constituted by the mutual exclusion of each other’s objects, whereby the positive delineation of political science is made possible by the delimitation of politics from the field of the international and its confinement inside the state, while the constitution of the discipline of international relations is enabled by bracketing off the conditions of possibility of the very objects, whose relations this discipline investigates. Thus, the two domains of knowledge are ‘united in a symmetrical relationship to each other: each discourse takes for granted exactly that which the other takes to be problematic’, the internal and external aspects of state sovereignty (Bartelson, 1995: 47). IR theory accords ontological priority to the state, which implies the givenness of internal sovereignty as the defining property of the antecedently present entity. Conversely, political science has external sovereignty as its unproblematic foundation, whereby the origins of the state are explained away with reference to exogenous dynamics of the ‘international’, the state emerging in the course of consolidation of power through perpetual warfare.

As long as the domains of political and IR theory remain constituted by what remains outside them, they can at best illuminate their own limits by pointing to each other’s blind spots. The overcoming of these limits requires a move to the level that precedes the very delimitation between inside and outside, external and internal, domestic and international, political science and IR. The question of world politics must be posed anew, no longer as the question of the possibility of the ‘domestication of the international’ in the form of the world state or the ‘internationalization of the domestic’ in the form of globalization, but rather as the question of a politics that precedes and exceeds this very distinction and has its locus and the source of its contents in the world as such. This question must therefore be relocated from the positive fields of knowledge, constituted by the prior division of the world into the domestic and the international, towards the ontological terrain, in which the being of the world as a domain of a possible politics may first be questioned.

The move beyond the positive sciences of (inter)national politics entails that world politics may no longer be conceived in terms of the expansion of an already constituted domain of politics to a new, higher level or in terms of the articulation of new political content in the already constituted domain of the world. Both politics and the world must be problematized and redefined if the question of world politics is not to relapse into the familiar setting of (inter)national politics. The question of world politics is not merely a question of a possible passage ‘beyond’ the international that necessarily presupposes it as a point of departure but abandons the international even as a presupposition, its only legitimate starting point being the world itself. Thus, the ontological inquiry into world politics must proceed in three steps. First, we must elaborate the ontological concept of the world that may be a logically consistent ground of any possible politics. Second, we must define the notion of politics in general on the basis of this concept of the world as opposed to any distinctions drawn within this world. Only then, third, may we pose the question of world politics as a mode of politics that fully corresponds to its own concept. In the remainder of this chapter we shall take the first step by focusing on three possible concepts of the world.

The world as everything

Despite their diverging conclusions about the possibility of world politics and the world community, Bartelson and Walker appear to converge in the basic assumption about the sense of the ‘world’ in world politics. Bartelson’s world, which is already ‘behind’ us as an all-encompassing whole, within which we are embedded, and Walker’s world, which stands ‘before’ us as an unattainable universality, are indeed one and the same world, understood in the sense of the Whole, a cosmos, universe or totality, in short, everything. It is precisely this understanding of the world as the whole that accompanies the discourse on world politics from the very emergence of the IR discipline (see e.g. Morgenthau, 1948: Chapters 29, 30; Carr, 1981; Schmitt, 1976; Burton, 1972; Boulding, 1985). Whether or not one approaches world politics as already present or radically impossible, desirable or threatening, the world remains thought as the whole, the sum of all there is. Yet, what could possibly be wrong with this understanding of the world as the universal totality, which, after all, seems perfectly in accordance with common sense?

Let us posit the world as the whole, the sum of all beings. Such a totality must by definition count itself among its members, otherwise it would not be the sum of all beings, since it would remain outside itself. The world as the whole is thus endowed with a property of self-belonging. It should then be possible to divide it into two parts: the parts of the world that belong to themselves, such as the world itself, and the parts that do not, such as e.g. a set of five apples, which is not itself an apple. Let us then assemble the latter parts into a group of all parts that do not belong to themselves – a perfectly legitimate and even banal grouping, given that most multiplicities that we can think of are precisely not self-belonging. Yet, despite the banality of the predicate, this grouping turns out to be problematic as soon as we pose the question of whether it belongs to itself. If it does, it must count itself among its elements, which are defined by the property of not belonging to themselves. Yet, if it does not belong to itself, it must also count itself among its elements, which, after all, compose all the parts that do not belong to themselves. Whatever answer we choose, we end up with inconsistency, hence we must revise our original assumption and affirm that the world as the sum of all beings does not exist.

It is easy to recognize in this example a reformulation of Russell’s paradox, which has been foundational for the formulation of axiomatic set theory in the early twentieth century. Yet, how is set-theoretical logic relevant to the grand debates on world politics? After all, as twentieth century Continental tho...