Methodological ‘limbos’ and the post-Cartesian toolbox

If we assume that the traditional ontological boundaries are too restricted, how could we account for additional levels and dimensions of reality? Explorative realism, first of all, involves a move that merges theoretical insecurity with research methods. The reason technological innovations pose challenges to research is because common conceptual dichotomies fall short in capturing their real intricacies. Against this backdrop, methods such as thick description (Geertz 1973), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 2002, Maynard and Clayman 1991), and Actor-network Theory (ANT) (Mol 2012, Barry 2001, Latour

2005) provide us with tools of inquiry that do not take any categories for granted and lead away from prescriptive social science. In this vein, Bruno Latour argues,

“anthropologists, who had to deal with premoderns and were not requested as much to imitate natural sciences, were more fortunate and allowed their actors to deploy a much richer world. In many ways, ANT is simply an attempt to allow the members of contemporary society to have as much leeway in defining themselves as that offered by ethnographers. If, as I claim, ‘we have never been modern’, sociology could finally become as good as Anthropology” (Latour 2005, p. 41).

James Der Derian, who investigates the interplay between technological innovations and war perhaps more closely than any other IR scholar, emphatically reaffirms this view. Recalling his seminal research into the hybridization of war, ethics, virtual technology, and media-entertainment, a complex that he labels “virtuous war”, he notes about maps:

“As I went deeper into the MIME-NET, the more often I felt the need to leave the map behind, not because it was flawed but because it was taking me to the wrong place, in which the illusion of command and control squeezed out the rich contingencies of life. In short, I'd rather get lost, at some subliminal level, than end up where the map was taking me. (...) Looking back on my efforts to map the military-industrial-media-entertainment network, I realize that getting lost produced some of the most important insights. (...) Getting lost forced me to reconsider the interdependent relationship between map-making and map-reading; it illuminated the shadow space between the landscape and the map, revealing why and how the modern map-reader would prefer the inaccurate map to a recalcitrant landscape. In my travels I often found the most interesting perspective—and interesting people—at the edge of the map, where the monster lurk, where the distinction between the representation and the real thing begins to break down but is not yet overwhelming.” (Der Derian 2009, pp. 279-280)

This vivid description comes close to Galison’s “critical opalescence” that we have encountered in the second chapter. Like Galison (2006), Der Derian stresses the inexorable mingle of reality that seems bottomless. Analytically, he makes no attempt to foreground “social” actors over technologies or vice versa. He tries to circumvent the very dualism of these notions. In Der Derian’s sensitive reading, the lines between

military strategy, public relations, pictures, computer-simulation, soldiers, virtually augmented battlefields, and the muddling-through of global high-tech warfare are blurred or have collapsed entirely (Der Derian 2009). Through his methodological attitude Der Derian stresses a fundamental insecurity about a world filled with real-virtual, human-cyborgs, war-entertainment, and virtuous violence reality where we are getting lost and our categories easily become fuzzy.

Interestingly, these observations reverse the ontology-epistemology nexus as it is often discussed within IR (see Kratochwil 2000, Wendt 1999). The predominant epistemological concern is no longer the legitimacy of scientific truth-claims, but whether a theory of knowledge enables the comprehension of a complex reality. The function of foundational collectors is thus to open up windows into complexity instead of foreclosing them for the sake of parsimonious puzzles or usable expertise (Der Derian 1990). Its prominence among many anthropologists and critical geographers notwithstanding, this sort of sensitivity, arguably, is of limited appeal to IR scholarship.

The sense of deep insecurity that persists because the researcher deliberately avoids presupposing any specific order of difference constitutes what I want to call “limbo”.¹¹⁹ In relation to epistemology, the idea of limbo conveys two meanings here. First, it denotes the mind-set at the starting point of research that is not tempted towards reductionism but aims at unearthing unexpected differences. Turned into a methodical guide, limbo suggests probing into unstable/stabilizing differences and heterogeneous identities through empirical tests. This implies three complementary paths of exploration:

1) Exploring controversies about agency, group-belonging, and fact/value distinctions (Venturini 2010, Barry 2012, Jasanoff 2011). 2) Following the circulation of things, their movements, fluidity, agency, and employment within and across collectives. 3) Following human actors in their engagements within collectives and their shifting agency during processes of assembling and reassembling (Latour 1987, Law 2004). Obviously, these paths require not only a considerable conceptual repertoire, but also the full range of empirical research methods including ethological fieldwork, observational research, extensive interviews, and archival studies.

119 Thanks to discussion with Peer Schouten for attending me to this term.

The other meaning of limbo refers to the status of knowledge itself, which is in a phase of stabilization and thus prone to disruption, translations, and shifts. This comes close to the understanding of theory that Annemarie Mol suggests: “a ‘theory’ does not necessarily offer a coherent framework, but may as well be an adaptable, open repository.

A list of terms. A set of sensitivities.” (Mol 2012, p. 265) If we assume a gradient between limbo (the concerns at the beginning of our research activities) and the matters of fact that should be its end point, then theory is flexible and adaptive in order to enable the navigation through a complex landscape. Rejecting the object-subject schema frees us from the obstacles and intricacies of correspondence models of knowledge. As a consequence, scholars do not impose hierarchical research methods onto their “objects”.

However, this does not imply that consistency in our conceptualizations and precise empirical work is no longer warranted—the opposite is true.

The important point here is that practices of empirical research and “theory” are not separated in the first place. Instead, the methodology of explorative realism assumes that we can easily relate and associate with actors and follow their relations. There is simply no prima facie reason to anticipate limits of access, as Kantian constructivism would content. In contrast to critics of using ethnographical methods in IR, it is plausible assuming that we can listen and talk to people, can observe and participate in processes and practices. Simply, we can become entangled in networks of humans and non-humans in multiple ways. Sound knowledge actually is always based on mingling with and possibly changing thereby the world that we want to explore—we contribute to the constitution of our subject matter in as much as the practitioners we engage with.

Different forms of entanglement are unavoidable for conducting research and producing stable knowledge (Vrasti 2008, Rancatore 2010, Neumann 1996, 2011). Political engagement is normal and activism happens often—just consider the life experiences of Hume, the Humboldt brothers, Einstein, Heisenberg, Marx or Foucault. None of them has shied away from entanglement for a mistaken fear of distortion of “science”.

In brief, entanglement is both a product and a condition of sound research. As historians of science have shown indeed, scholarship and reality have never been divided into two domains (Shapin and Schaffer 1985, Galison 2006). In practice, concepts and buzzwords are moving among diverse academic disciplines, the public, and political

discourse back and forth. Ideas, metaphors, and theories do not only help to explain phenomena, they also, over time, strongly influence them and vice versa (Latour 2005, Polanyi 1943). In international politics, as in other fields, this relationship rather constitutes a two-way expressway and often a seamless web (Litfin 1994, Mitchell 2005).

Similarly, classical traditions in IR are “constitutive rather than merely reflective forces in international politics (…) they are part of a constant making and unmaking of history through interrogation, interpretation, and narration.” (Der Derian 2009, p. 301, Ashley 1988) By implication, the construction of scientific knowledge needs to be evaluated by its actual entanglement precisely because it does not only flourish in an isolated scientific domain. But it helps in fact with assembling the common reality.

Does this mean that explorative realism leads one to merely describing what is to be found in the field or what is perhaps the latest political fashion? The answer clearly is no.

In contrast, explorative realism advances quite distinctive methodological motives. But let me shortly restate what it does not claim: it neither aims at finding regularities and correlations/causality as positivism suggests; nor does it have to introduce “counter-phenomenality” or “trans-“counter-phenomenality” as Wight (2004, p. 270) suggests with reference to Marx. The latter view presumes that critical social scientists resemble a kind of vanguard, who possesses deeper knowledge and thus can tell appearance from reality (Wight 2004). The imperative of such a claim to superior knowledge boils down to an anti-superstition priesthood that has never really tasted the limbo experience. Against vanguardism, I propose two alternatives: on the one hand, to learn from the visible and accessible controversies that occur when practices or collectives change or become unstable. This approach is post-Cartesian in the sense that it aims at a pre-disciplinary view questioning the validity of disciplinary boundaries. It is the opposite of the rigorous compartmentalization that belongs to the mainstream understandings of theory in IR.

Regardless of whether the understanding of theory is a positivist, critical realist or constructivist one, the subject matter is always neatly divided and ordered to begin with (Smith 1996, Waltz 1997, Wight 2006, Wendt 1999). Instead, the state of limbo is suggested here as default position where methods and methodology collapse (Aradau and Huysmans 2013). It resembles a pre-disciplinary ontology in which Beate Jahn sees the great advantage of classical writers:

“I think it is more promising to use a pre-disciplinary approach. I use a lot of classical authors and to me, the most valuable thing about classical theory is that a lot of it is pre-disciplinary. What does that mean? It means that these people did not actually start out from the assumption that economics was separate from politics and that politics was separate from, say, religion. And so, what you can get from classical theory is actually a theorization of the relations between all of these different dimensions of political life. That gives us a starting point in which these dimensions are connected. And we can then trace the fragmentation that arises subsequently, identify its roots but also the continuing connections that we miss when we begin with an already separated or fragmented point of view. (…) So, in classical texts, what strikes you most, is that politics, economics, religion, domestic and international are not separated from each other, and it gives you a good understanding of where society and international society is coming from in an integrated way. We can use classical theory to look at what actually inspired people to properly distinguish and separate out domestic from international politics: what actually led to the separation between politics and economics? And this is what we can’t really do so easily when we start from today, because we’re going to read the present fragmentation back into history.” (Schouten 2012a)

On the other hand, I agree that there might be “hidden” things—yet quite different from a Marxist or critical realist understanding. The bottom line is that the big elephant in the room often resembles a black box that is taken for granted by actors and scholars alike.

That is, it is stabilized to the extent that it functions as a mere intermediary. Contra Kantian idealism and methods of theoretical deduction, we therefore need to explore by empirical testing in situ which (human and non-human) actors really make a difference.

Latour (2005) argues that finding out which actor figures as mediator and which one is an intermediary replaces theorizing invisible structures of the “social” and systemic forces of “structures”.

The limitations of “theorizing” based on such an epistemology and methodology presented above are obvious. It does not lend support to notions of causal or constitutive explanations. It does not reveal hidden meanings. Nor does it examine intangible social forces or invisible structural power. In contrast, the task of foundational collectors can be summarized as follows. They should enable us to produce a thick and detailed description of the real multiplicity of the world without shortcuts. The promise of foundational

collectors lies in their ability to assemble actors, agencies, and connections whose identity and differences are unclear or contested. Writes Latour:

“All those questions are raised not only by scholars, but also by those they study. It is not that we, social scientists, know the answer that would reside behind the actors, nor is it the case that they, the famous ‘actors themselves’, know the answer. The fact is that no one has the answers—this is why they have to be collectively staged, stabilized, and revised. This is why the social sciences are so indispensable to the reassembling of the social. Without them we don’t know what we have in common, we don’t know through which connections we are associated together, and we would have no way to detect how we can live in the same common world.” (Latour 2005, p. 138)

Ultimately, research should represent the collective to all its participants. The post-Cartesian twist that is involved here renders these textual accounts to transcend a purely

“social” comprehension of the world. Against purified accounts by social scientists, the world is made to presents itself as various entanglements and networks of humans, animals, material things, ideas, images, language, and artifacts—a crazy mixture that cannot be separated without performing ontological violence. In this sense, thick descriptions pose a considerable task. They involve theoretical infra-language and require a methodological tool-kit that aims at generating research puzzles, typologies, and generalizing from phenomena in a mingled world.

This chapter has developed a post-Cartesian approach of how we access our subject matters. Any conceptualization of the politics of technological innovation can accordingly be assessed in two different ways: first, concerning its ability to capture insecure differences (of groupings, boundaries, agencies, facts, and so on) and, secondly, with respect to the extent to which it embodies the principle of symmetry. The idea of foundational collectors consequently breaks with the ontological logocentrism of IR theories. In short, explorative realism demands that we test empirically how all sorts of actors—and not just humans—relate to each other; it foregrounds process and hybrid elements in our collectives. How this can be undertaken in a conceptually systematic way with regard to technological innovations is developed in Chapter 7. A two-dimensional frame renders different options for ontological expansion intelligible.