Two quotes help frame this chapter. The first comes from a 2013 essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘I don’t believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don’t even believe in an arc. I believe in chaos. I believe powerful people who think they can make Utopia out of chaos should be watched closely’ (Coates 2013). The other was issued by Nicholas Onuf, in a concluding essay to a recent special issue on the next generation of constructivist research. Onuf observed about that generation, my generation, how ‘They wander in the woods, trip on this or that rock, stumble around. The arrow, la fleche, points nowhere … there is no boundary, no way ahead, no help to be had’ (Onuf 2016, 116).
Although no doubt dour on their surface, I think the quotes will make sense as I proceed, as they contain a hopeful quality I intend to bring forth in this chapter regarding tactics, methods and Constructivism. I explore here my evolution both in terms of where I think we should focus our methods as constructivists, and to what end (tactics for, or versus, strategy) we should put those methods to use. On the former, while I began as a verstehen constructivist in my first works – trying to get ‘inside the minds’ of international actors, my eventual concern with what I once titled a ‘politics of interiority’ led me to both embrace the public and social contestations of language, bodies and emotions, as well as engage (sometimes critically) the intentions-divining methods of past constructivist works. My methods were a tactic for developing an increasingly more explicit politics of exteriority, not only for analyzing the ‘world out there’ but also for politically grappling with it.
The second evolution involved how I’ve viewed methods as tactics, and even being tactical itself, over the years. In graduate school I started out thinking very strategically (strategy was everything back then) – about my research questions, my ontology, my epistemology, and especially my methods, and therefore about what ultimately should be the ‘point’ of my analyses. I had to convince others that what I had was not only another take on a case, but something superior to other explanations. If I couldn’t convince (largely positivist) audiences (including especially those in my graduate program) of that with my methods, then the methods were the problem – and I as a scholar, and perhaps Constructivism as I practiced it, was ultimately flawed. This situated my methods in my first studies onto positivist grounds, although it also provided opportunities as well (as I note in a moment).
Yet, since my first studies, the strategic purpose of my methods and my trajectory as a scholar has been much more ambiguous and even unknown. Strategies are whim to so many forces – political, macroeconomical, and the like – that are simply out of our control. I have thus begun to revisit the notion of whether we should have strategies at all in today’s academia – since I am not sure I believe, in the words of Coates above, not only in an ‘arc of justice’ but even an ‘arc’ anymore. I now view tactics instead as something both modest and aspirational. Tactics on the one hand are all we have, all we can if not control at least condition, as our entry point out into the ‘social’, the exteriority where political construction happens. Tactics are furthermore all we can plan for in an increasingly fragmented field of IR, as well as a chaotic (global) political condition. Yet tactics have a surprising and even hopeful quality to them, as the Introduction to this volume notes. Opposed to the certainty that comes in the ‘strategic narratives’ of both policy-makers (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Roselle 2013, 2017) and fellow academics I am now a believer in nothing but tactics and letting the chips fall where they may. As I wander in these woods, I am therefore about practicing tactics all the way down.
I develop these arguments in the following pages through four sections. In the following section, I provide some minimal autobiographical reflections, with a focus on where I see Constructivism in its recent past and where I’d place myself in its unsteady present. I also reflect upon my changing views regarding ‘being strategic’. I then discuss my transformation from a verstehen constructivist (a common approach for constructivist students in the early 2000s), to methods focused on developing a politics of exteriority. In my penultimate section, I discuss three ‘positional’ methods – exposition, interposition and juxtaposition – that I first developed in my book on the Scars of Violence. But beyond their application in that book, these methods can be considered useful for understanding how I approach not only my work on aesthetics and the body, but also textual (re)interpretation, and, finally, where I think we make the biggest tactical (and, ironically, ‘world-making’ strategic) impact, our classrooms via instruction, teaching and discussion. I conclude with some thoughts organizing this discussion in light of both Onuf and Coates’ quotes that opened this chapter.
I will begin my reflections on (for me) familiar analytical ground via the generation (Steele and Acuff 2012). I have thought generationally not only about the world ‘out there’ but about Constructivism itself in some recent studies (see McCourt and Steele 2017; Steele 2017; Steele and Kessler 2016, as well as the Ish-Shalom contribution to this volume), and this referent of the generation has come packaged with benefits but also costs. Perhaps the key benefit has been recognition and then further reinforcement of a social kinship (a very international one as well) with constructivists of my generation, many of whom are included in this volume. This kinship’s origins derive from not only similar outlooks on how to practice IR, but also for more mundane reasons unique to all generations. Put succinctly, it’s because we’ve often gone through the same stuff at the same time and bonded over those experiences. We’ve traversed similar professional, social, political and in many case personal experiences.
The referent has also allowed me to ontologize my cohort of constructivists – which has been tagged in a variety of (diverse but accurate, in my view) ways, as the ‘Baghdad generation’ (Leira and de Carvalho 2016) or the ‘Farcical generation’ (Kratochwil 2016) or simply an extension of Generation X (Steele 2010a, conclusion). The generational referent thus allowed me to further disentangle Constructivism from the monolithic ‘norms and discourse’ Constructivism that often passes for (capital C) Constructivism in textbooks and graduate syllabi.
Further, the generation has allowed me to reflect not only upon how our common formative experiences have shaped the methods I use, the ontological assumptions I make about the world, and even the politics I have tried to smuggle into my studies. It has also allowed me to think about the difficulties as well as benefits of writing against previous generations of constructivists, and in ways that probably would have eluded me otherwise. It has revealed the power dynamics involved in trying to break ‘into’ an academy one is told divides along paradigmatic lines (the realists are your enemy!), but often situates itself instead in generational power struggles.
Yet another benefit for thinking generationally has been a begrudging recognition that no generation has a corner on the truth. In this sense Kuhn (1962) really did have it right – each generation can write against a more established one and pick apart the flaws or holes in the latter’s arguments. But being socially conditioned and constructed an emerging generation will find that it, too, is a prisoner of its own formative experiences and thus biases in engaging the world. Or, as Alexander Barder and Daniel Levine, in their own generational take on Constructivism, rightly note, ‘To paraphrase Ranke: is not every generation “equally distant from God”?’ (2012, 603). My generation, this farcical group of scholars, has its shortcomings, too (perhaps we haven’t taken ourselves and the world seriously enough?), and an emerging generation of constructivists, that may not label themselves that way at all, will point out to us where we are desperately, explicitly, wrong, before jettisoning us from the academy and taking their own places within it.
However, thinking generationally has probably conditioned me to overlook the differences that exist within my generation of constructivists, especially when it comes to what ends (strategies) our tactics and methods should serve. I have distinguished myself against the second generation of constructivists in numerous ways, but especially with the notion of needing to be strategic in the first place. I have become, as I will note below, increasingly less strategic for all kinds of reasons. Being strategic is what the second gen’ers did in bonding with the positivists (Kratochwil 2016), and formatively this made sense since there was seemingly some kind of ‘there’ out there that was moving history and thus progressive social scientific IR in a direction.
In doing so, I have also come to embrace Kratochwil’s label of ‘farcical’. But what is farce? A farce is ‘a certain mix of different and contradictory elements within a single genre’ (Kratochwil 2016, 121). I have indeed ‘mixed’ it up methodologically in my work, combining aesthetics and visual analysis with discourse analysis, poststructuralism with classical realism,1 and so on. The farcical mode may seem less focused and therefore irresponsible, evincing in the words of deRaismes Combes’ contribution to this volume ‘an air of methodological devil-may-care nonchalance’. But its value is that it opens up possible avenues of inspiration and inquiry otherwise unconsidered when in a purely strategic, and more highly specialized and professionalized mode.2
Yet some of my fellow third-gen constructivists, while more chastened vis-à-vis the world, no doubt think that in order to get ‘our’ message across, there need to be more constructivists in higher positions in the academy, and we need to be more strategic than farcical.3 No doubt the concerns raised by both McCourt (via the strategy of MCA methods), and Subotic (in gaining better positions in the US academy), in this volume speak to that uncomfortability of Constructivism in especially the US academy.
So I would characterize these intra-generational distinctions on ‘being strategic’ in terms of different sensibilities and anxieties – for lack of a better binary I call it the ‘uncomfortable’ versus ‘comfortable’ camps of Constructivism. I am not suggesting one tier or pole is better than another – on the contrary they both fulfill important functions and holes in academia and for Constructivism more broadly. Indeed, despite their tensions, they can somewhat complement one another but they differ in their views of strategy, and thus what our methods should be ultimately serving as tactics.
The uncomfortable constructivists believe in strategic possibilities, they believe that the field of IR can be transformed, perhaps because they saw their second-generation mentors do that in the 1990s, or because they know their work is simply good enough to break through (which it often times is and does). But they are uncomfortable precisely because they have to get into the best journals, work at the best Ph.D. programs (and, before that, in an ever-more cutthroat academic environment being corporatized to death by the neoliberalization of higher education – get the best Ph.D.s themselves). They have to place their own Ph.D. students and get their own coveted positions and recognitions in the academy as a whole. And if their work doesn’t get published in the top journals, or the top presses – if folks aren’t talking about it in their studies, on their Facebook pages, and on twitter – then the work simply doesn’t exist. In essence, the weight of Constructivism’s past, present and future is on their intellectual shoulders.
Those in the comfortable camp of Constructivism will hardly think they’re comfortable. In late modernity it’s pretty hard to be comfortable about anything, let alone if you’re a parent, or a junior scholar looking for a job, or an inhabitant of planet Earth in an era of Brexit, Trump, climate catastrophe, democratic crisis and increasing inequality. But by ‘comfortable’ I mean folks who are scattered all around academia who are trained and steeped in Constructivism but being ‘a constructivist’, let alone reproducing Constructivism, may not be their primary joie de vivre. In the US academy, this includes folks I consider elite scholars who are in liberal arts positions and/or more teaching-focused ones (like our fellow contributors Amy Skonieczny and Jamie Frueh – see the Skonieczny, and then Youde and Frueh, contributions to this volume), or those bouncing from one to another of several temporary positions, or people like myself. We are folks who didn’t ‘make’ it in the prosaic research rockstar sense, or in the institutionally elite sense, but who are allowed – perhaps even authorized – to focus on Constructivism precisely because our primary focus lies elsewhere. These constructivists are comfortable because while they are not getting read, cited and lauded as much as the uncomfortable tier is, they are in good positions in the US academy and likely doing good enough research to keep their jobs. They have decent students, enjoy teaching, and keep grinding out their research in the venues that take it.4 I would consider myself part of this ‘comfortable’ camp, although some further reflection is appropriate.
What explains the uncomfortable tier specifically within third-generation constructivists? It’s hard to say, but I would posit that there are some third-generation constructivists who see the need to be just as strategic as our second-generation pioneers, and this is likely a result of some of those uncomfortable constructivists still finding the career-ist advice of their second-gen mentors useful. I, on the other hand, couldn’t be more distant geographically, socially and politically from my second-gen mentor, and for over a decade sought out ‘lateral’ mentoring (for lack of a better term) with members of my own generation beginning with two fellow contributors to this volume who were my grad colleagues at Iowa (Jeremy Youde and Jack Amoureux), extending thereafter to, again, many of the scholars contributing to this volume. Further, I took to heart the baseline assumption that many positivist IR faculty in my graduate program (the University of Iowa) articulated time and time again – constructivists (in the mid-2000s) would never get any jobs in the US academy. I had little understanding of the academy at that time so I actually believed them but charged on anyway. This baseline set the bar low for my expectations.
Further, I soon discovered at ISA meetings, and many international meetings thereafter, that I could develop a network of scholars within but also outside the US academy. This included a network of scholars who did Constructivism but didn’t have to label themselves as such, whether that was in Europe, the UK, Global South, Israeli, Australian or Asian academies, who published in all kinds of venues and rock their own work with reckless abandon (see in this vein the Leira and de Carvalho contribution to this current volume). These were scholars I had already read, and ones I began to cite and engage in my own work. I organized my social activities at conferences with them in mind. Yet not only were these scholars comfortable being outside of the ‘elite’ US programs us US-academy constructivists had been told to target for our own careers, some didn’t need (or want) to be in the US at all. It was like a whole other world of comfortable Constructivism had opened up for me. I ditched the ISA receptions where people ‘generously’ provided you their university-logo business cards, and started meeting what would become a welcoming and vibrant professional and social network elsewhere.
Soon enough, I figured out that developing a professional (and personal) social network somewhere, getting published somewhere (but not just anywhere), getting a job somewhere (still, not just anywhere), teaching and being impacted by students somewhere (but not just anywhere), getting tenure somewhere (yeah, anywhere would be fine on that front), getting cited somewhere and getting promoted somewhere – these accomplishments were, and still are, ‘enough’ for me and my own career because they falsified the narrative of those positivist IR faculty from my graduate program. That seems petty, but again there is a more hopeful twist to it. For while I was not ‘reproducing Constructivism’, I was still getting to practice it, and engage in conversations with this whole world of folks who became my friends, colleagues and collaborators. And I was having a helluva lot of fun ‘stumbling about’ (in the words of Onuf above) in the process. Yes, I was insecure over certain things (and still am), but I wasn’t uncomfortable because I’d set my sights so parochially, rather than prosaically. Even as low of a bar as it was to clear, this was satisfying enough for me, at least in how I viewed my own social construction as a scholar and how I thus viewed the ‘strategies’ we should use to shape our career paths.
This returns me to my prioritization of tactics over strategy. To get to that evolution I should review which ‘strategies’ I did pursue for a time, and how methods were involved in those. Specifically, methods have been tactics serving four sets of purposes: instrumental, analytical, emotional, and political.
Methods are of course tactics for instrumental purposes – for getting a job and all that you have to do before that like getting a publication. This purpose is the most important for junior scholars, but it basically comes down to convincing others that you are serious and not ‘polemical’, persuasive and not overtly ideological. Could I generate trust with my methods – conditional trust of course? Methods were also important for a second purpose – analytically. They were important in this respect for academic inquiry and for situating my work vis-à-vis a scholarly audience, but also for the purposes of pedagogy, although I have rarely written about the latter in any published venue, a self-lacuna I hope to rectify in the following section. Third, I once titled methods (in a talk at the ISA-Northeast interpretive methods workshop),5 a way to ‘control my rage’. Or, perhaps less dramatically, methods are a way to keep our emotions in check, to keep us as ‘honest’ as possible – a critical distance from our subject.6 Fourth and finally, methods served a political set of purposes or functions. Methods were in short a political tactic, but one that I often didn’t explicitly recognize.
That said, and as noted at the start, I have become much more skeptical regarding pursuing tactics solely in the service of broader strategies, and I’ve become almost singularly tactical for at least two reasons. First, strategies are limiting. In focusing our purposes on a teleological ‘end point’ and a horizon that cannot be interrupted along the way, they limit the unexpected possibilities we may encounter, but otherwise wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t have time to notice because we are focused on getting to that strategic end point. They make us myopic, exclusive and closed to the world around us, and not only in our approach to studying the world but in our conversations with fellow academics (think of the dreadful ‘elevator pitches’ that get tossed out left and right at conference receptions, or the people who look at your nametag first at those receptions before moving quickly to another, more senior, person to ‘pitch’ their work to). They make us exclusive in our relationships with academic others.
But this isn’t just about professional relationships with fellow academics. And so, second, strategies are problematic because they are unidirectional. If we are social beings we need to recognize the possibility of not only impacting the world, but being impacted by it.7 In other words, tactics all the way down means we not only talk, but listen. We not only study how the social constructs the world, but how the social world constructs us. Not only what our students and readers learn from us, but what we learn from them in their assertions, discussions, ‘feedback’ and critiques. I return to this theme in my conclusion, but for now, let me discuss the second evolutionary process I went through as a constructivist.
When I started out in grad school and maybe my first year as an assistant professor (in the early to mid-2000s), Constructivism was still fairly well-situated as an approach that could ‘explain’ or understand what the neo’s could not (Waever 1996). This is not to say it was easier to be a constructivist back then (I’m not sure it’s easy to be anything nowadays), but one could still get a few publications here or there by setting up a ‘puzzle’ that could not be explained by neorealism or neoliberalism, and then explain it using identity, or norms, or discourse, or something else. That’s what I did in my first solo-authored study using ontological security to explain Britain’s decision not to intervene in the US Civil War (Steele 2005).
I found the approach to identity in ontological security theory promising – but even after publishing that study I was bedeviled by the age-old ‘levels-of-analysis’ or ‘aggregation’ problem – how could I, like other constructivists before me, ascribe individual level dynamics to states? For me, it was through the verstehen approach, which proved useful at least on a first pass – not only for assessing ‘identity’ but within that the role of ethics, emotions and affect in the behaviors of state agents. It also conveniently fit within the ‘Explanation versus Understanding’ binary (Hollis and Smith 1991) we had been baptized in by our second-generation constructivist mentors, and reinforced through comprehensive exams.
I drew from Mervyn Frost’s work especially (1996, 26–8), and what he titled the ‘requirements’ for the verstehen investigator. I’ll note the three I found most important for my early work (see especially Steele 2008, 6–8): (1) that the interpretations of the investigator be tested against the self-understandings of the investigated (self-identity – or ontological security – proved useful here); (2) that the investigator stresses the importance of the constitutive language of the investigatees (narratives and discourse); (3) and that the investigator take notice of the value systems of the investigated (or the broader context regarding ‘values’ and notions of ‘right’ and wrong’). For Frost, what made the intentionality of the social actors we investigate graspable for the social scientist was that the latter, being a human being, can interpret intentions in light of the context within which they are stated by the social actor. That is, by becoming an internal observer, ‘embodying’ the subject of study, the scholar begins to ‘learn what would count’ as an intention.
So, equipped with my early and somewhat stripped-down understanding of ontological security, I sought to reconstruct the motives and intentions behind the actions of state agents in empirical cases. I could divine their intentions because I was a human like them, and I could see how their contexts influenced those motives and intentions because I could explicate the emotional effects (and affects) of those contexts as well. Or so I thought …
I soon discovered all kinds of problems with what I titled this ‘politics of interiority’ that I found quite prevalent in Constructivism and in my own work especially. So, in my second and especially my third books (Steele 2010a; 2013a), I focused on the methodological problems that were also tactical/political problems with interiority. I’ll re-state two of those here (for a broader review see Steele 2013a).
My epistemological concern was that it proves nearly impossible to ever make a determination of what ‘counts as knowing’ what intentions are in international politics.
A whole bunch of constructivists had noted this in the past and throughout the 2000s. Kratochwil, for instance, observed in his classic 1989 text that neither the ‘brute facts’ approach to observation, nor the ‘language of intention’ – ‘reconstructing the purposes of the actor [which was precisely what I did in my early work] can explain many practices we seek to understand in global politics’ (Kratochwil 1989, 27). This is because, according to Kratochwil, we simply ‘need not necessarily mean what we say’.
Further, we cannot depend on ‘private’ accounts – where the constraints of the public sphere are removed – because even here power operates amongst the players in a private meeting (Jackson 2006, 22). Thus, those ‘insider’ testimonies which might help us determine the truth (through authentication or refutation) behind a publicly stated intention, are wrought with dubious authenticity. Finally, as Karin Fierke (a constructivist critic of verstehen) once noted, some constructivists who seek to ‘get inside the heads’ of actors run afoul of other key constructivist precepts: ‘how often are we really looking for “individual” motives at the international level that do not have some kind of intersubjective expression?’ (Fierke 2001, 117).
This epistemological or analytical concern overlapped with my increasingly political concern, which has especially animated my work in international ethics ever since. When it comes to group forms of intentions and organized violence, we are faced with several obstacles which are only overcome if we invest some amount of ‘trust’ in the agents of power. For example, in torture, a process that I have focused on in a number of studies, citizens are told that the ‘intent’ was to ‘extract information’ which we are only privy to after the fact, and usually via the accounts of the torturers (or those who ordered them to torture).
Pivoting away from this focus on ‘mental states’ and interiority, I sought to promote a ‘politics of exteriority’ with methods that reflected that and tactics that attended to that. Where can we express a ‘politics of exteriority’? What does this entail? Let me focus on what I once titled three ‘positional’ methods: exposition, interposition, juxtaposition. These have proved important for my work on aesthetics and visual politics (Steele 2010a), the Scars of Violence (2013a), but also my work on textual (re)interpretation (as seen in work on ‘reflexive realism’, Steele 2007, 2013b) and, finally, the classroom environment where I think I’ve made a far broader impact on ‘the world’ than anything I’ve done as a scholar. In what follows, I will discuss these three methods, the politics involved in utilizing them, as well as some examples from my own work but also the work of other constructivists over the past decade (or so) that dovetail with these methods.
Exposition is a method of presentation by the analyst (see also the Skonieczny contribution to this volume). Initially, an exposition (as it was used in the 19th century – so-called ‘expos’) entailed ‘a large-scale public exhibition or show, as of art or manufactured products’. Exposition here is exhibition, it is the ‘the act of expounding, setting forth, or explaining’.8 This entails a description of the site, process, text, author, reading or concept we are exposing (description which can become, almost inevitably, contentious). The key to an exposition is its publicity.
Although we are only ‘presenting’, getting started, in an act of exposition, this method is still shot through with politics, and it is a method that involves both inclusion and exclusion – we choose this space, or image, or person, or time, or process or text, or author, over others that could have been exposed.
While we may, then, distinguish exposition as presentation, on the one hand, from the methods of inter- and juxtaposition as methods of re-presentation, on the other, it should be noted that the line between the two ‘steps’ is often blurry. In fact, the process of re-presentation sometimes precedes exposition, wherein a highly conditioned ‘framing’ of the exposed topic is at the same time inclusive and revelatory (drawing us into its image) and exclusive and concealing (‘cropping out’ other parts of the image).
Work on aesthetics – of which I’ve contributed modestly (at best) – I think can be subject to this critique – focusing only on the viewpoint of the ‘Westerner’ and even within that the US-American.9 In textual interpretation, exposition involves the ‘restoration’ of a text that we wish to analyze, but of course we have to defend both how and why we focus on it over other potential resources for our work. And in our teaching, exposition is also both inclusive and exclusive, involving what we choose to include (or not) in our syllabi and in our lectures. Thus, an exposition is a political act, and the most (I think) that we can do in justifying our choices is being up front about why we have made those choices in the first place. Is it because we are entering a conversation that others started before us on a topic or theme? Is it, rather, because we think something is being overlooked, or ignored, or occluded in our understanding of politics past or present?
A second positional method is interposition. Interposition entails placing ourselves in-between two subjects that we want to engage, feeling around and describing that social space and the flows and processes within. Interposition is most relevant at first blush for the field researcher who stands in-between the spaces or subjects she seeks to investigate, to notice how they use the space (or contest it). I did this while investigating the agency of Lidice, and physically standing upon its empty and altered landscape. Lidice was a village which was demolished by the Nazis in 1942, and getting to physically stand in that space shaped how I described it for readers in ways that wouldn’t have been possible without being there. But interposition can also be animated by theory, and especially Constructivism which has a focus on the ‘in-between’ in a number of ways. As Jarrod Hayes, recently characterized it constructivists focus on
Or if we think of the work by Jackson and Nexon (1999) and those who have sought to follow them on ‘relationalism’ (which David McCourt titles part of the ‘New Constructivism’ by another name, 2016), we might think about how Constructivism unfolds quite naturally into interpositional methods.
Oded Lowenheim’s (2014) The Politics of the Trail represents an iconic example of interpositioning. Lowenheim documents his mountain bike ride from his suburban home to the Hebrew University campus each day. In doing so, Lowenheim positions himself in-between the points along his ride which include the Israeli-Palestinian border fence and the ruins of a Palestinian village razed in 1948. But he also in his encounters with people places himself in-between the IDF soldiers and those they are on the lookout for, or between a former Jordanian officer and the space he once defended (and then relinquished) in the 1967 Six-Day War, or a Palestinian he meets along the way and the Israeli territory he cannot walk into (but Lowenheim, as an Israeli, can and will). Borders are thus a good process, and practice, for interposition, investigating how the spaces that open up within the ‘intersubjective constructions’ constructivists study (whether they be through narratives, discourses, identities or norms), may be reinforced or, if not, will be re-politicized, and reinscribed.
But interposition can be utilized in the space of the classroom as well. In a more anodyne way, interposition is of course what we all note we will do the first time we write a teaching statement when we say that we will be the ‘Devil’s Advocate’ in fostering ‘discussions’ on politically sensitive topics no matter who or what we’re ‘arguing against’. More recently, I have interposed myself into the audience of my students, with notes detailing a reading or topic placed on the whiteboard (written by myself and/or the students themselves) serving as one bookend and the students and their views as the other. My role is to facilitate the discourse not with myself but between and amongst the students, and the text or reading or topic.
Interposition is animated then by a whole host of questions: How long will it be before discourses of power intervene (as they inevitably will) to categorize a relational space? Who gets to do the speaking on this meanings-making activity? From this in-between space, we can place our analytical ‘heads’ on a swivel to take note of the different angles, distances, to and from which these discourses engage the spaces, shocks, disruptions we are interested in – whether those are territory, bomb sites (Heath-Kelly 2016), terrorist attacks (or just attacks before they are ‘deemed’ or labeled a terrorist), financial crises (which do not start out as either financial or a crisis until the discourses intervene), or the classrooms we inhabit that are increasingly, and violently, being consumed by neoliberal values regarding ‘outcomes’ and ‘output’.
The third positional method – juxtapositioning – is the most representational and the most political, it provides the most agency for the scholar using it but also a host of risks. Rosemary Shinko, in a presentation given at the 2008 annual meeting of the International Studies Association, called juxtapositioning as the creation of
The contrast between the two ‘things’ being juxtaposed is what opens up the space – but this space is also a disruption and even a disturbance. In my work on scars, I argued that what creates the disruption of a scar on skin, buildings and landscapes is the contrast between the impact site and its surroundings. The scar is thus both an absence and presence, it is an ‘internal’ juxtaposition.
Another way to consider juxtapositioning more directly involves the active configuration that Shinko notes above – here it can be the scholar, but it can also involve writers (think literature or commentators), artists, activists and protestors. For instance, in the 2009 Iranian Green revolution, and in the 2011 Syrian protests during the Arab Spring, protestors often carried placards with pictures of healthy and young protestors juxtaposed with pictures of them bloodied and deceased, a practice that was utilized as well during the Ferguson protests of 2014 and other incidents of racial violence. The beauty of life juxtaposed with the starkness, and horror, of death.
Or the horror of death, for that matter, juxtaposed with the narratives of heroism and nirvana promised by politicians. In my work on aesthetics (Steele 2010a), as well as on the device of irony (2010b, especially as it is treated in the work of Richard Rorty), I focused on how aesthetic images of violence can be juxtaposed with idealistic and ideological discourses of heroism, as exemplified by the discourses of neoconservatism. The ‘jarring space’ created in this contrast is to be sure, analytical – one can take the ‘pauses’ such juxtapositions create for such discourses that have to re-work their narratives (or reinscribe them) and focus on this narrative practice as a site for analysis. But juxtapositioning is also a political endeavor that discloses the reflexive import of (some) Constructivism that asserts how we are no longer separate from the world we study, nor have we ever been. The world impacts us and we impact the world, and thus we issue our politics through the disruption that is found in a juxtapositioned statement.
Further, juxtapositioning is a method found through both textual analysis as well as in teaching. Michael Williams’ famous re-reading of realism (part of a trend of studies I titled ‘reflexive realism’), included two passages by two scholars that seemed to disclose very similar political points about identity, McCarthyism, and American politics during the Cold War (Williams 2005, 162–3). Williams puts the passages one after another, and then informs the reader that the first one is by poststructuralist David Campbell from his Writing Security, the second from one of the ‘founding fathers’ of realism, Hans Morgenthau. To what end is this juxtapositioning of two seemingly distinct scholarly thinkers put? For Williams, it is an academic but also political point: ‘my goal here is simply to point to the extraordinary shared interests and insights that may exist, and above all to call for an acknowledgment of the diversity of thought and call for a greater degree of openness in its light’ (164). But it’s even more than that, it’s a key ‘alliance’ move that Williams seeks to advance as part of his fashioning of a Wilful Realism that could (at that time) provide a check and counter-force to neoconservatism.
Finally, I often use juxtapositioning in fostering my discussions in classroom settings, and I imagine I’m not the only one. Juxtapositioning can create spaces previously considered unthinkable both through the friction generated by ‘opposing positions’ that can be sharpened by a mediator (like an instructor), but also by bringing together, in the same fashion as Williams does with poststructuralism and realism, two otherwise opposing views that may share rare common ground on a particular point. Either direction of space-creation is still, no doubt, jarring. The former jars students who may not be prepared for disagreement; the latter for students who have disagreed on topics all semester but now find themselves in (temporary) agreement.
Let me return to the quotes that opened the chapter – Coates’ skepticism regarding both justice and an ‘arc’, and Onuf’s invocation of La Flèche as pointing nowhere for my generation of constructivists. In that same essay, Onuf concluded: ‘Constructivism leads to an ambivalence toward ethical theories purporting to apply to a real world possessed of fixed and certain properties … There is no such world’ (2016, 117). That’s damn right, and only those who believe in such a world could really promote the notion that ‘strategies’ can be pursued with any certainty. But what are we to do with that?
Tactics all the way down provides a response to certainty. As a sensibility, tactics all the way down calls us to stop and appreciate the surprises we encounter in this vocation along the way – both in global politics and in the academic micropolitical settings that become a part of our routines (either daily in the classroom, or annually at conferences, workshops and meetings). Tactics all the way down can make us appreciate the contingencies of politics – and embrace our fortune when we ask a whole set of counterfactuals that centralize these contingencies. How much different, for instance, our careers and even lives would have been (and those of our colleagues and students, for that matter) … if we hadn’t been placed on the same panel, way back when, with someone who became one of our key collaborators and friends? Or if we hadn’t agreed to have that random beer with a new academic acquaintance following the workshop or dinner? If we hadn’t seen that random picture of destruction, or hope, that humanized the world we study? If we hadn’t picked up that one journal article and read it by someone who would become a mentor and friend? Or if we hadn’t put that one reading on our syllabus that had never been assigned before? Or if a cohort of students had decided to work with another professor, or at another university, or chosen a different line of work entirely?
I do not deny the importance of some strategic focus – and no doubt I’m calling for a ‘tactics all the way down’ approach because of a set of my own privileges that’s eluded many in the academy and outside of it. But the importance of surprise and contingency that tactics all the way down discloses means that I must also admit how contingency, and not ‘just’ strategy, blind luck, and not just ‘skill’, has placed me in this privileged position to begin with. As one sometimes hears on golf broadcasts – ‘It’s better to be lucky than good’. Well, I’ve been lucky – and luck, fortuna, is just as important as strategy. If that’s the case, our focus and our vocational drives could, and should, be altered, in ways where we not only notice but pause in front of (again drawing from Onuf), those little stones along the way, because we have no idea how important they may prove to be even if they’re not a part of our ‘strategic plans’.
As opposed to the unidirection of ‘elevator pitch’ conversations, what if we instead chatted with someone to see not only how their work is going, what they are ‘up to’, but even more immediately to find out just how the hell they are doing? Again, I won’t deny that I’ve been strategic in my career – sometimes I get uncomfortable thinking about how strategic I either was, or must have seemed, in approaching senior iconic scholars along the way for a beer or coffee. But, I am also heartened by how collegial these people were, and that I still remain not only in contact with them but am friends with them to this day.11 Tactics, although they are more immediate, have the potential to be far more social and longer-lasting, far more meaningful, and world-making, than being strategic altogether. And they can help us develop a politics I have found useful and yes, comfortable, if not comprehensively effective, in a world ablaze.
Coates’ rejoinder to the quote that opened this chapter is worth quoting as well, for it leads to one sensibility, indeed an ethical sensibility, that those of us who continue to ‘stumble around’ might consider:
I know of no better description for the Constructivism I embrace. The most we can provide, then, is an aversion to the certainty found in the strategic mindset that too often consumes both the politics we analyze and the academic contexts we inhabit. It would be an aversion to the strategic certainty that swamps, and even drowns, that chokes, and even suffocates, our creative, innovative, serious but, yes, farcical vocational impulses. Constructivism has provided me that aversion to certainty for over a decade, but where it and I will be in the future – of that I remain perpetually uncertain. And that’s how it should be.
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