Interventions on Investigatory Epistemology
Chair: Professor Ronnie Lippens
Corey Walker-Mortimer
PhD Candidate
Keele University
c.b.walker-mortimer@ilpj.keele.ac.uk
Title: The Biopolitics of Design
Abstract: My intervention isolates the epistemology of design as a space for exploring the political. Whilst necessarily posing the question of “what is design?” the intervention is hesitant to accept any one definition of design as definitive. This is because of my observation with regards to the tensions within design practice, theory and history that there are a multiplicity of design epistemologies that are historically contingent and relate to different ontological understandings. As orders of the real that concern themselves with the very possibility of ordering the real, design epistemologies, my intervention argues, play a fundamental role in the creation of the political.
The intervention will outline a preliminary sketch of a research methodology for exploring the political through design epistemologies. This would be a sceptical critique that could explore how the myriad of epistemological modalities that design has become since the 18th century have operated as ways of ordering the world. This critique allows this intervention to problematise how epistemologies of design became crucial to the operation of power, governance and rule in the 18th century when ‘population’ became the object of governance, and population welfare came to be posed as a practical objective of government. As such this intervention opens the possibility of exploring the relationship between the ontological and the epistemological by questioning how biopolitical governance as an order of the real may be interrogated through the different epistemologies of design that target the changing ontologies of life that biopolitical governance targets.
This intervention is particularly concerned with a design epistemology at work within contemporary neo-liberal urban design and illustrates much of the above through this example. It concludes with some reflections as to what can be learnt of the political by interrogating this urban design epistemology targeting futurity, complexity and virtuality.
Rhys Machold
PhD candidate
Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo Canada
rmachold@balsillieschool.ca
Title: Urban Security “Best Practices”: Toward an anti(political) epistemology?
Abstract: My intervention is based around preliminary conceptual research for my proposed PhD dissertation which seeks to elaborate on the ways in which specialized forms of urban security knowledge are established and disseminated on a global scale through the constitution of so-called urban security “best practices”. Borrowed from business management literature, the notion of best practice has been increasingly appropriated by security agencies in an effort to learn from the experiences of cities facing major security challenges. However, rather than simply reflecting the inherent superiority of certain tactics over others or the existence of common threats, the growing salience of best practices across a wide range of governmental and private institutions can be better understood as a form of governance through standardized rulemaking. In line with this broader research programme, my intervention seeks to develop the notion of best practice as a novel modality of urban security governance that allows for the depoliticized constitution of specialized security knowledge based on the experience of paradigmatic cases and “lessons learned” from various global cities. It reflects on how the adoption of expertise, allegedly proven to be effective and legitimate may be sought out in order to evade vigorous debate about which security approach may be most appropriate to each particular context. I suggest that this is achieved by securing the efficacy of certain militarized strategies as self-evident and therefore immune from political contestation through an appeal to previous experiences beyond the local political environment. Accordingly I seek to develop notion of urban security “best practices” as a technology of governance that can be best defined by its antipolitical characteristics, in ways that make the acquisition of knowledge a forgone conclusion rather than a reflexive and ongoing process.
Erzsebet Strausz
PhD Candidate
Aberystwyth University
ees08@aber.ac.uk
Title: The epistemology of (IR) ontologies: life on the “/” of power/knowledge
Abstract: Drawing on Foucault’s early works on aesthetics, The Order of Things and his late lectures on ethics, truth and desubjectivation, this intervention envisions an alternative to (re)think power/knowledge: one that looks into the broader context of such conceptualization of structure or the ‘grids of order’ by focusing on the blank spaces of this grid, the spaces that make such orders (and their scholarly perceptions) ‘hang together’.
Order, understood as a compound of different ontologies of what can be thought or known of the factual world in our contemporary episteme, can be unmade and exposed in its contingency by going beyond conventional uses of the power/knowledge trope: what does the “/” stand for in this particular scholarly imagination of the social and the political? What does the visuality of this sign tell us about what is no longer articulated but only assumed?
Taking seriously the scholar’s embeddedness in their present, the possibilities of being political are located precisely at the limits of such (ontological) concepts, Foucauldian or other, through which we understand (and re-make) the world in its logic and factuality. Being political, that is, transgressing ontologies without producing counter-ontologies, observing order in its dynamic (un)making, grounding ourselves in what permits but also escapes grounding calls for such a limit-attitude: to push ourselves to the limit of thought through which we both inhabit and understand order.
The promise of a critical/sceptical epistemology might be such a destabilizing move that unmakes order as power/knowledge and contests our subjectivity as scholars applying such ‘concepts’ to ‘facts’ – that is, the experience, truth and ethics of life on the “/” of power/knowledge.
The intervention ends with a story of IR’s recent representations of ‘authorship’ and the utilization of ‘governmentality’ as two prominent (but often disconnected) axes of engagement with power/knowledge, retold from the thought-space of the “/”.
Interventions on Reflexive Epistemology
Chair: Dr Luis Lobo-Guerrero
Andrea Rossi
PhD Candidate
Lancaster University
a.rossi@lancaster.ac.uk
Title: The making of Man: Human sciences and the politics of subjectivity
Abstract: This paper focuses on the epistemic-political stakes of the set of disciplines known as the human sciences. In The Order of Things (OT) Michel Foucault provides an account of the role of the sciences of man in the modern ‘analytic of finitude’, detailing the way in which they participate in the making of Man in his positivity. However, OT mainly concentrates on the epistemic status of these disciplines, only hinting indirectly at the concrete relations of power they engender. This paper explores this latter issue by looking at the normative effects of the human sciences and the relation they entertain with biopolitical mechanisms of security. It will be shown how the sciences of man participate in the governance of Man, a ‘figure of population’ (Security, Territory, Population), through the representation of the ‘curves of normality’ inherent to biological-economic processes. It will also be seen in what way they imply, by their very nature, the proliferation of ‘controlled differences’ (arising in the space separating functions from norms and conflict from rules - the constituent models of psychological and sociological sciences according to OT), rather than the mere equalization of subjectivities. The paper will go on illustrating the ontological ground sustaining the human sciences, arguing that is in the cross-reference game between transcendental and empirical finitude, in the articulation of Man as subject and object of knowledge, that the human sciences intervene as an epistemic surface for the development of mechanisms of governance. Throughout the paper, the science of homo oeconomicus will be used as an example of the specific way in which the ‘analytic of finitude’ has given rise to what might be called a modern ‘politics of subjectivity’.
Dr Joscha Wullweber
University of Kassel
joscha.wullweber@uni-kassel.de
Title: The post-positivist paradox. The power of mainstream science and the struggle for objectivity
Abstract: One of the basic differences between positivism and post-positivism is that for the latter there is no ahistorical and transcendent explanans (such as universal laws), which exhibit a (socially) independent variable. Instead, theory itself is located within a particular spatio-temporal and social setting. Moreover, the application of a theory changes the theory itself. It follows that there is no objective reality. Rather the form (the concept) of an object has to be differentiated from its existence (its substance). The explanandum (the thing to be explained) is always contextualized, i.e. socially embedded.
However, post-positivism is not anti-positivistic. Indeed, some analyses are more plausible than others. Not because they are closer to a transcendent reality, but because these analyses resonate more than others with a certain horizon of truth. It follows that a post-positivist analysis cannot avoid locating its explanation within the hegemonic system of evidence. Hence, even though post-structuralists are eager to criticize truth claims, their ontology as well as epistemology has to rely on the hegemonic horizon of truth - at least to a certain degree. I call this the post-positivist paradox.
As Gramsci would say, there is a struggle for objectivity. It is one of the major challenges for post-structuralists that this struggle is being waged on the grounds of a hegemonic order of reality. Based on theories of hegemony and discourse, and inspired by Glynos and Howarth, I suggest a retroductive circle as a means to approach epistemological questions. When framed in this manner, the relation between ontology and epistemology is a hegemonic relation and therefore always political. Hence, it is less a question of being political than of being critical.
Eddy S. Fang
Doctoral Candidate
University of Cambridge
Sf391@cam.ac.uk
Title: International Political Economy, Post-structural Politics and Islamic Finance
Abstract: Islamic finance, which less than two decades ago was percieved as an obscure set of financial practices with an uncertain future, has by now been propelled to fame as the latest financial innovation in global markets. Not only private financial institutions, but also monetary and public authorities in non-Muslim countries all around the world have started to expand their activities to Shariah-compliant finance. This, however, came as quite a surprise as the rise of these alternative financial practices ocurred in a time when international financial disocurse casted financial convergence as the only ’proper’ and ’rational’ course of economic management.
The present research project focuses on the emergence of Islamic finance in global markets to illustrate the contingent, constructed and contested nature of economic knowledge. I argue that in order to conduct a thorough investigation into the encounter between ’conventional’ and Islamic financial representations, one needs to go beyond the traditional boundaries of the ’economic’ realm. Indeed, it is only after all claims of economic ’rationality’ have been dispelled that the political interaction between the two competing bodies can be studies.
The contribution of this investigation, hence, will be two fold: First, a new epistemological framework will be introduced to the study of alternatives in the global economy. This potentially encovers a new level of analysis and brings to the surface a series of new research inquiries, which were up to now largely overlooked. And second, not only can an interpretive approach enrich the study of Islamic finance, but Islamic finance itself, by displacing the locus of discursive authority in global finance, also provides compelling evidence to highlight the contingency of the ’natural order’ of international economic interactions.
Interventions on Performative Epistemology
Chair: Dr Pete Adey
Catherine Charrett
PhD Candidate
University of Aberystwyth
cwc@aber.ac.uk
Title: The Agency of Threat: Acting politically in the performativity of securitizing terrorism
Abstract: This intervention aims to invigorate a debate on how we understand “threat” in approaches to terrorism. It argues for a performative account of threat, whereby discourses of securitization bring into being the recognizably “threatening” through the interpellation of “threat” and “threatened” into a new social positionality. Engaging with epistemologies of threat through this performative lens opens up the possibility of addressing agency within conceptualizations and representations of threat. The agency of threat within the securitization of terrorism is contended to be harboured in the space between the interiorization of cultural and temporal fantasies and fears of threat and the performance of threat through the encounter with the “terrorist” other.
By turning to the theory of performativity as developed in the works of Judith Butler this paper argues for a conceptualization of ontology through actions, whereby the subject is constituted through the “stylized repetition of acts”. These actions, however, are only readable through the “matrix of intelligibility”, here argued to be, that which makes the “terrorist “recognizable. Actors repeatedly perform their subjecthood and in turn reinforce the boundaries of intelligibility of “threat and threatened”/ “security actor and terrorist”. Building off Butler’s turn to the “political” and beyond, this intervention argues for the possibility of resistance in “acknowledging” the terrorist threat. It endeavours to present a performative epistemology of threat in order to observe how the “terrorist” can be represented or encountered otherwise. This intervention argues that by observing the disturbance of sovereignty within the securitization of terrorism the potentiality for being political emerges. Through this discussion of the performativity of securitizing terrorism this paper will firstly, address how epistemologies of threat constitute ontologies of threat and secondly, speak to the possibility for resistance by exploring the displacement of sovereignty and thus agency within performances of securitizing terrorism.
Dr Deirdre McKay
Senior Lecturer
Keele University
d.c.mckay@esci.keele.ac.uk
Title: Everyday epistemologies of the global
Abstract: In my current research among irregular Filipino migrants working in London, I am examining the ways people talk about ‘the global’ in the intercultural, contact zones of everyday life. My aim is to draw connections between the popular epistemologies of globalism that migrants and employers draw on to justify work in London’s informal economy and academic ontologies of the concept. I’m interested in the ways the global in migrant work is being used to frame and legitimate extra state, post-citizenship routes and pathways to a flexible and contingent belonging. And curious about where this belonging fits into popular political maps of national citizenship and globalization.
My questions are: Do popular epistemologies of the global share the same ontological roots as academic debates on the concept? What ontologies of the global do these everyday, justificatory epistemologies I’m collecting reveal? If there are discrepancies between popular and academic ontologies, which seem to be emerging in my analysis, what might contention over ways of knowing and the scope and definition of the global itself tell us about sphere of politics?
Thus my work examines what the realm of the empirical – the ethnographic quotidian – can tell us about the performative power of the epistemologies of academic discussions, potentially showing how the interplay or friction between the two shapes the emergence of ‘the global’ as a realm of political action.
Dr Cathy Elliott
Teaching Fellow
University College London
cathy.elliott@ucl.ac.uk
Title: A Pakistani Spring? The Lawyers’ Movement and the Articulation of Democracy
Abstract: All around the world, in recent months and years, we have witnessed large-scale pro-democracy movements on the streets of countries with authoritarian regimes, tempting international commentators and academics to conclude that democracy is indeed a universal value that transcends contexts and cultures. One such popular mobilisation took place in Pakistan in 2007 in support of the deposed Chief Justice and against the military regime of General Musharraf; this became an important rallying point for a diverse range of pro-democracy supporters who soon after celebrated the return of civilian governance and democratic elections in Pakistan. I suggest that a useful starting point for understanding this movement is Ernesto Laclau’s theory of “articulation” (2005), which shows how a set of demands, however ill-fitting on the face of it, can become linked, thereby enabling political struggle. Diverse political demands are no longer isolated, but rather are joined together in resistance to oppression, their equivalence constituted by what Laclau calls the “empty signifier”: in this case, “democracy”. However, I argue, using Foucault and his never-ending alertness to the micro-tactics of power, that before celebrating these equivalential chains in an unquestioning way we need to be more attentive to why the activists demand the concrete things they do and with what consequences. If democracy is articulated with other institutions familiar from the liberal democratic states, such as an independent judiciary or the primacy of elections, does that limit how we know what democracy is in ways that elide alternative models and practices of democracy, including local institutions like the jirga or panchayat? I suggest that an investigation into the micro-practices of pro-democracy movements reveal a discursive securing of Western ontologies and epistemologies about democracy that shore up a particular liberal order. The same investigation may also give us some tools to contest it.
Dr Martin Coward
Senior Lecturer
University of Newcastle
martin.coward@newcastle.ac.uk
Title: 'Network thinking and the normalisation of a politics beyond ethico-legal constraint'
Abstract: This intervention focuses on the manner in which the network has come to structure thinking about security and governance in the contemporary era. As an order of the real the network presupposes surpassing the methodological territorialism of the international. However, the webs of interconnected nodes that characterise the network are de-territorialised in a way that precludes referring to them as properly ‘global’ (even if they are ‘globalised’). Indeed, one of the key epistemological entailments of the network is that it structures thought in a de-territorialised, non-linear fashion that is constitutive of a spatiality at odds with the classical territorial orders of the real that have dominated thinking about international or global politics. As both a description of empirical dynamics and an explanatory category, the network has been seen as apt for a critical reappraisal of the contemporary period precisely because of the manner in which it seemingly surpasses the classical territorial orders of the real.
However, recent deployments of the network trope in counter-terrorism should make us think about the unquestioned political entailments of the network as an epistemological trope. The network re-enchants warfare presupposing a precise use of force that has no effect on its territorial surroundings. Social network analysis presupposes a focus in individuals to the detriment of the cultures and contexts within which they are situated. The network trope filters what is considered extraneous to focus simply on a set of key, interconnected nodes. That which is extraneous is rendered invisible, as is collateral damage inflicted on it. Moreover, since our ethico-legal limits on the use of force are predicated on a methodological territorialism, the network surpasses the historically sedimented norms that have traditionally constrained organised violence.
In this intervention I will look at the way in which the network begins as an epistemological category that naturalises a certain spatial understanding. This spatiality then translates into ontological suppositions about the manner in which disruptive intervention (or force) is to be deployed in or against socio-political structures. As epistemology, the network thus naturalises a certain politics by providing the ground on which a certain action in the world is predicated. I will illustrate my comments with reference to the ongoing war on terror, particularly the escalation of drone warfare in the so-called AF-PAK theatre.
