Politics of Difference

Epistemologies of Peace

Hartmut Behr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138933873
• eBook ISBN: 9781317690757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book develops a notion of differences and 'otherness' beyond hegemonic and hierarchical thinking as represented by the legacies of Western philosophical and political thought.

In doing so, it relates to the phenomenological discourse of the twentieth century, especially to Georg Simmel, Alfred Schütz, Emmanual Lévinas, and Jacques Derrida, and drafts our understanding of difference as a genuine human experience of a social and political world that is in motion and transformative, rather than static and predictable. On this basis of temporalized ontology and its normative consequences, differences are drafted as a positive social and political force and as powerful capacities of transformation and change. In practical terms, this understanding is most important for our theorizing and acting upon peace, peace-building, and conflict solution. Differences now appear not as obstacle to peace and reconciliation, but as lively and constructive articulations of 'otherness' and as a positive power of transformation, emancipation, and change.

This book will be of interest to students of international relations, philosophy and political theory.

1 IN DEFENCE OF ONTOLOGY

1.1 Introduction

This chapter sets out to discuss and reflect upon the methodology and epistemology of this study. While the methodology is seen in the discussion of questions that relate to reading and writing (i.e., what kind of reading and writing is applied here; and what kind of interpretations and conclusions seem possible from the kind of reading and writing applied?), epistemological concerns (i.e., why do we believe that certain conclusions can me made; what are the normative implications of such conclusions; and what, generally speaking, can we know; and why do we think that we can know what we believe to know?) relate to the assumptions and conditions that underlie the methods applied. The kind of reading and writing as the methods of this study is thus both conditioned as well as it is the consequence of certain epistemological views. This introduction to Chapter 1 will begin with discussing questions of reading and writing and then introduce their epistemological conditions. Doing so, it will present, first, the methodological idea of relational reading, that is, second, enabled by thinking the ontological question of Being as the modality of being-in-time.

In both reading and writing we have many reasons to believe that human interests are at play in the reader as well as in the author of a text. The same awareness of interest-drivenness applies to political action, why we can speak of reading (receiving and perceiving) and writing (acting in, enacting, and drafting) politics. A huge body of literature argues that reading and writing, acting and reacting can never be neutral and value-free. The argument is therefore made in the first part of this chapter that human beings as observers (i.e., readers) and en-actors of politics and texts (writers) find themselves not only in a hermeneutic situation of the permanent exegesis of meaning (speak: of interests and their motivation, intent, norms, etc.), but in a double-hermeneutic exegesis of both perceived and produced meanings of texts and politics and their repercussions into new productions and perceptions of meanings. Reading and writing thus require the awareness, acknowledgement, and contextualization of interests of ‘reader’ and ‘author’. Those interests can neither be neglected, nor done away with. One consequence of this appears to be that we can never be sure what the real meaning of a text is (likewise of a political action and a certain policy), but that we always encounter a multitude of possible meanings and relations between interests, motivations, intentions, norms, implications, and consequences etc. that unfold with the text/policy/political action. We thus need to accept this and proactively engage them. The social and political trait of double hermeneutics therefore demands a method that takes account of respective multitudes and relations, without claiming, however, that it would have grasped them. Such a method is seen in relational reading (and writing).

Relational reading and writing is the deliberate attempt to avoid definite interpretations and closed language, but rather to keep the cycle of interpretations, creations of meanings, and their exegeses open, evoloving, and permanently ongoing. Thus, critical, unsettling, dismantling, and deconstructive perspectives become crucial, and there is a permanent demand for relational reading and writing to prevent open exegesis falling victim to closed language and ideological statements; the latter always an attempt to reduce the multitude of and relations between interests, motivations, intentions, norms, implications, and consequences to a package of well-known and possessed familiarities at best, and an attempt to dispose of them and to replace them with one’s own beliefs and world views at worst.

As such, relational reading and writing genuinely are not, and cannot be, an attempt to provide a coherent, consistent, and rational analysis and version of a text (and/or politics). Rather, relational reading is skeptical of those attempts, since they always tend to close and reduce meanings instead of enabling them and opening them up. Strictly speaking, relational reading and writing are averse to concepts and attempts to conceptualize for exactly the same reasons, but find their limitations and chances in the engagement of a certain problématique and the discussion of related questions that are discussed in a text (and/or with which politics and a distinct policy are concerned with). Relational reading and writing are thus more of an engagement, a discussion, and a deliberation of questions and concerns, trying to keep them open and possibly unanswered, than they are the provision of concepts, systems, rationalities and reason(s), and definite answers. Relational reading and writing describes thus, too, an ethics. But what enables such reading and writing; what are the conditions of such reading and writing? Put differently, what epistemological view of a text (and/or of politics, society, and history) grounds such methodology of reading and writing? And finally, what is the advantage at all of such a methodology of reading and writing as applied in this study and of its founding epistemology?

The epistemology that founds relational reading has been developed in the context of the twentieth-century phenomenological discourse and its philosophical engagement with the ontological question of Being. The main representatives of this discourse are Georg Simmel, Alfred Schütz, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Jacques Derrida. This study will mainly draw upon their writings and find inspiration in these authors’ engagement with a certain problématique, namely the ontological question of Being and its relevance for thinking the political and social question of difference(s) and “otherness”. A politics of difference as developed here, thus rests upon a methodology of relational reading and an epistemology, i.e., an awareness of the conditions, possibilities and limitations of knowledge, that result from the question of Being as it was addressed and discussed in the phenomenological discourse. The kernel of this discourse, whose representatives’ texts unfold a net of cross-references, shared concerns, and critiques, consists of a critical review of the orthodoxies of Western philosophy and their overwhelming approach to the ontological question of Being in the form of essentialisms. Such essentialisms would exactly develop concepts, systems, rationalities and reason(s), and definite answers outlined above as contrary to relational reading, and, epistemologically speaking, pretend to know what is ‘real’, ‘actual’, and ‘true’ due to definitions of the (ontological) nature – i.e., the ‘Is’ – of human fellows, politics, society, history, and development, in short: of all forms of Being. Instead, the phenomenological discourse engages the question of Being as being-in-time (Dasein) which temporalizes and processuralizes human fellows, politics, society, history, and development (and, too, texts) instead of defining these ‘things’ as having a fixed nature, identity, and meaning. These ‘things’ then become fluent, transcience, temporal, and, consequently, impossible to define, grasp, fix, and close-off. It is impossible to term them ‘true’ and/or ‘false’; they are subsequently only tangible hermeneutically in their multiple meanings. If there is any rationality of humanity, politics, and society (and texts), then it is their perennial (re)production of meaning, tangible only through interpretation and exegesis. Being becomes being-in-time, time becomes temporality, history becomes historicity, development becomes genealogy, identity becomes transformativity, and the meaning of texts turns into textuality. Ontology that defines, essentializes, teleologizes, metaphysicalizes, and thereby closes-off ways of Being and their multitude of meanings, i.e., that limits the being-in-time of human fellows, politics, society, history, identity, and development (and texts) through its own interests and world views, violates them in their potentially multiple ways of being. As the phenomenological discourse holds, temporalized ontology not only describes the Being of ‘things’ as being-in-time, but even more than this describes the condition of the possibility of even their understanding and acting accordingly. The phenomenological answer to the question of how to understand and act upon something that is in flux is that our means to understand and act must be open and flexible for movement, too. Therefore, reading and writing needs to be relational, history needs to become historicized, development needs to become genealogized, and identity needs to be re-named as transformativity.

However, we have to admit that no one is in a position to know the nature of ‘things’: ‘are’ they temporal, fluent, transient; or do they have some essential, fixed, and determined – and determinable – nature? Finally, the statement that ‘things’ are temporal is, on the one hand, a statement that makes an ‘is’ characterization of ‘things’ themselves and therefore assumes to possess some vantage point necessary for such a statement. Such statements, however, should, on the other hand, be avoided. So, what counts for temporal ontology and for discussing and dealing with humans, society, and politics as transformative and reading and writing as relational, therefore is not the rightfulness of such ontology – finally, we can neither know what, nor how ‘things’ ‘are’ – or the wrongfulness of essentialist ontology. What counts is rather and only the normative advantage of temporal ontology over essentialist ontology, because, as argued above, the latter violates, while the former de-liberates, i.e., liberates through deliberation, discourse, negotiation, relationism, contextualization, and eventual initiation of meanings. Temporal ontology thus opens-up and enables ‘things’ to be. Working towards a politics of difference thus prefers and builds upon temporal ontology, because differences, exactly in order to be, need to be not-fixed, not-determined, not-essentialized, not-subsumed, not-identified under some principles other than from themselves. However, these principles or differences ‘themselves’ are unknown, otherwise they would not be differences, or different.

Relational reading/writing and temporal ontology in relation to the question of difference and “otherness” have two consequences that are path-breaking principles for a politics of difference: (1) difference(s) has/ have no essentialist ontological substance, but are a genuine human experience whose articulations, according to temporal ontology, can adopt all kinds of colourations. Accordingly, “otherness” has no essence, either, but appears simply as an attribution and construction, i.e., as one colouration among many possible articulations of the experience of difference. However, this experience can be attributed in many ways, thus, “otherness” is a discursive formation and as such has no reality beyond language and discourse. Such discourses, however, are many and socially and politically influential, and therefore questions of ‘the’ “other”, the ‘stranger, the migrant and the homecomer’, of l’Autre, and of différance are of great importance for the phenomenological discourse as well as for our discussion of a politics of difference. (2) Within the phenomenological discourse and the engagement of the question of difference(s) and “otherness”, one question becomes especially problematized. This is the question of intentionality, touching upon the relation between an observer (or, subject) and a ‘thing’ oberved (or, object). The notion of intentionality assumes that there is a stable relation between a ‘subject’ and ‘object’, and that therefore the ‘object’ would be cognizable for the ‘subject’. This notion is shared by Simmel, Schütz, and Heidegger, but dimissed by Lévinas and Derrida, the latter explicitly critizing the former, mainly due to their observation that this stable relation between between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, i.e., a simultaneity between observer and a ‘thing’ observed, does not exist under conditions of temporality when ‘things’ are (potentially) permanently transforming, transient and fluent – they withdraw not only from fixation and determination, but also from cognition.

This critique will be further discussed in Chapter 3, but is important to keep in mind throughout. The question of different modes of temporality and how they influence the articulation of the human experience of difference will be the main focus of Chapter 2.

1.2 From relativism to relationism: on reading and normativity

This chapter is about reading; more precisely about the epistemological conditions of reading politics in the twenty-first century. To write about this, seems like too huge a task for one chapter. Indeed, we know accounts of hermeneutics from religious traditions of reading and interpreting the socio-political and legal implications of holy texts¹, the legacies of philosophical debates across centuries and continents and their interrelated discourses², and explicit treatments of reading (and writing) in methodological and epistemological texts in modern and postmodern academia³. So how can one write about reading in one chapter without conceit? An attempt:

Reading politics in the twenty-first century oscillates between two epistemological frames: much of our political vocabulary is tied up with imaginaries of the nation (state). This link pre-determines the fundamental epistemologies that socialize our reading, creates the contexts in which our world interpretations and explanations are embedded, and contains their understanding. Thereby, nationalism is not just one storytelling about the essence of the world. It (still) operates as THE epistemological determinant for readings of history and their respective constructions of the past, present, and future.⁴ Key political ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Epigraph
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1 In Defence of Ontology
• 2 The Problem of “Otherness” and Modes of Temporality
• 3 Phenomenologies of “Otherness”
• 4 From E Pluribus Unum to Fatemini Pluribus Pluribum
• Conclusions Conditions of the possibility of peace
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects