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Article Excerpt
This experimental essay attempts to show how alternative methods and approaches are valuable in interrogating the ways in which orthodox theories of international relations (IR) approach peace. Drawing on a broad variety of critical traditions, it seeks to encourage the development of creative and experimental interdisciplinary approaches as well as to underline the deficiencies of more instrumentalist theories and methods. It especially tries to show how eclectic and experimental theories and methods produce sophisticated insights that are capable of reorienting analysis so as to respond to dynamics that must be understood if sustainable and multiple variations of peace are to emerge. Keywords: Dadaism, peace, differend, international relations, experimental eclecticism
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The life we led, our follies and our deeds of heroism, our provocations, however "polemical" and aggressive they may have been, were all part of a tireless quest for an anti-art, a new way of thinking, feeling, and knowing.--Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti- Art (1)
Is IR theory antipeace? Certainly, for a long period any notion of peace has been submerged behind the debates about states, sovereignty, institutions, norms, identity, and representation. (2) On the institutionalization of this discipline after World War I it was hoped it would help discover a postwar peace dividend, especially through idealist and, later, liberal approaches. Whether this occurred is debatable. Certainly, orthodox analyses of international relations have failed in this respect, although they have been instrumental in developing a liberal discourse of peace since 1945, albeit one that has been as an expression of Western interests, rationalism, and culture. Even peace research has been criticized for having the potential to become "a council of imperialism," further implicating the discipline in the "tragedy" of international relations. (3)
This tendency is indicative of a "differend," a reminder that institutions and frameworks may produce injustices even when operating in good faith. (4) Many researchers interested in this problem often blame the "muscular objectivism" (5) that has dominated the analysis of international relations in Western scholarship and policy. This has resulted in a narrow discipline, prone to lose sight of a broadly emancipatory notion of peace and insulating it from the contemporary culture wars that are raging across many other disciplines. The survival of the demand for reductionism and parsimony through "research" in liberal institutions without need for a broader ethical exploration is of especially great concern, given that methodological pluralism has become a generally accepted objective across many disciplines as a way of avoiding parochialism. (6) As with premodernist art, orthodox analyses of international relations represent the world mimetically, so that repetitions of the lessons of history become a self-fulfilling prophecy. (7) In order to gain a multidimensional understanding of international relations, this article argues, it will be necessary to embrace an ironic eclecticism in the manner of the Dadaists and of many other antimimetic approaches to representation that recognize universal subjectivity, rather than trying to replicate an eternal truth or reality. (8)
Thus, in the context of various critical turns in the analysis of international relations, this article experiments with search, rather than research. It considers the implications of a genealogy of examples engendering resistance to an accepted norm of, or institutional approach to, knowledge that has implications for a critical discussion of peace. It especially seeks to engage with orthodox claims to be able to interpret the "unknowable other," (9) while also opening up alternative perspectives that add previously hidden dimensions to a disciplinary discussion of peace. Using a collage of cases (in the performative sense of Dadaism), (10) it illustrates how an approach based upon experimental eclecticism in method and theory can be used to contribute to a broader understanding of the key problems of international relations. (11) This allows for the juxtaposition of apparently unconnected events, issues, or dynamics in order to try to navigate around the differends to which independent events, issues, or dynamics have long been subject.
Even an experimental and eclectic genealogy such as this provides important theoretical and methodological insights into the problem of the differend generated by the dominance of a discourse about international relations that lacks ambition beyond a negative form of peace, illustrating a failure to address social and political particularities and a tendency to assume dominant universal patterns.
This article examines the evolution of these dynamics in the context of the (lack of) debate on peace in the analysis of international relations by juxtaposing a number of radical texts, movements, aesthetic expressions, and thinkers so as to produce an account of peace and emancipation that also addresses the problem of the differend. (12) It develops and deploys Dadaism's antiart/antiwar movement in order to open up a discussion about a variety of other sources. It then turns to an investigation of those sources. They include the parable of Easter Island; Gilgamesh's attempt to defeat mortality; Beowulf's epic struggles; Tony Harrison's hyperreal critique of the Gulf War in his epic poem A Cold Coming; Nansen's association of geographical exploration with humanitarianism; and primate violence and culture. Finally, it outlines the benefits of such experimental eclecticism for the analysis of international relations.
A "Dadaist Moment"
Much of orthodox IR theory is antipeace because, with its emphasis on sovereignties, states, and institutions, it generally fails to deal with, or empathize with, everyday human life. (13) Such reductionism might be useful in considering conflict in a Westphalian, state-centric world, but it omits any consideration of other knowledge systems not local to the elites of the West or North. (14) Indeed, orthodox IR's representational habits (15) and knowledge systems explicitly isolate themselves to maintain their unity, (16) at the expense of diverse issues of everyday life. This removes or deprioritizes such issues as culture, identity, gender, class, race, language, children, and the environment by claiming to faithfully reproduce the "real" as something immutable. This means that IR theory replicates a discourse of violence and war. Roland Bleiker and others have shown how the hegemonic mimetic representation that lies at the heart of orthodox IR theory is used to perpetuate its myths. (17) Bleiker argues that "direct aesthetic encounters with the political can contribute to a more inclusive and just world order." (18) A range of thinkers from Foucault to Deleuze effectively challenge the attempt of orthodox theory and methodology to represent and interpret through an appeal to a narrow range of scientific approaches that mimic a hegemonic aesthetic and claims it as truth.
Such myths may be conducive to the claims of Western or liberal hegemony as well as mainstream theories of international relations, regardless of whether or not they arise purposefully or through the uncritical replication of biased or flawed knowledge systems. This is captured by Jean-Francois Lyotard's work on the "differend," which identifies the dilemmas of institutions and frameworks that produce injustice for their members or components even when operating in good faith and with consensus. (19) They inevitably marginalize some participants as a consequence of the underlying ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions and frameworks they represent and that inevitably favor participants with similar assumptions.
Feyerabend once rather flippantly called for a Dadaist moment in response to such restrictive dynamics:
A Dadaist is convinced that a worthwhile life will arise only when we start taking things lightly, and when we remove from our speech the profound but already putrid meanings it has accumulated over the centuries ("search for the truth"; "fight for justice"; "passionate concern," etc.). And when he is prepared to initiate joyful experiments even in those domains where change and experimentation seem to be out of the question (example: the basic functions of language). I hope, therefore ... the reader will remember me as a flippant Dadaist and not as a serious anarchist. (20)
Feyerabend favored theoretical pluralism as a way of contending with representation and escaping the monotonous certainties and eternal truths sought by positivism. In a letter to Imre Lakatos and his writings "Against Method," he addressed exactly this problem of how formalism in method led to methodological rigidity and to ontological and epistemological assumptions that might lead to the failure of science. He argued that being deferential to concepts and ideas allowed them to gain their own structural existence, therefore creating bias in academic life. Along with many great artists and thinkers, Feyerabend faced intellectual resistance in his attempt at radical innovation in thought and epistemology. He responded with irony, cynicism, and humor. For him, Dadaism meant humor and an inability to be deferential to concepts and ideas that had gained a life and a seriousness of their own.
The Dadaists of the early twentieth century aspired toward "antiart" as a response to what were seen as stifling conventions and formalism that they felt inhibited an embrace of change, development, and new technologies. Dadaists opposed convention, attempted to develop radically new approaches, accepted the political nature of art, and resisted the acceptance of war and violence. Dadaism (and later surrealism) emerged at a time of great stress and change in the period during and after World War I. (21) It emerged in Zurich--"the peaceful dead centre of the war"--at the Cabaret Voltaire (22) and, through intellectual contacts and minor publications, spread to Paris, Berlin, and New York. This avowedly antiwar movement was appalled by the recent war. Hans Arp, a member of the Zurich Dada movement, wrote:
Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages, and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals to cure the madness of the age, and a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell. We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds. (23)
Dadaism represented many attempts to disrupt forever a formal way of thinking, a belief in scientific progress as always positive, and a dialectic driven only by power, which some felt had led to the horrors of the war. Ironically, Hans Richter, one of the founders of the movement (according to his own account), said that the relative freedom of Zurich even during the war benefited Lenin (who lived opposite Cabaret Voltaire) and his friends; indeed, the Swiss authorities were more suspicious of the Dadaists than of the Communists, who were at that very moment fomenting world revolution. (24) Out of this maelstrom of imagination, social and political comment, radical rejectionism, and antifoundationalism was born an antinationalist, internationalist, and unsettling movement that...
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