Recrafting International Relations by Worlding Multiply/D

• Author: Blaney, David L.

Introduction

Over the last two decades, IR has been roiled by calls to globalize IR (1) or, for more critical sensibilities, to pluralize, de-center, or decolonize the discipline. (2) We see these critiques of IR as an extension of the post-positivist rupture that opened the space for the call to make the disciplines polycentric, as Shohat and Stam explore, and the re-imagination of knowledge production as an "ecology of knowledges", as de Sousa Santos urges. (3) A strong reading of polycentrism would suggest that knowledges are not simply different beliefs or interpretations of a singular world reality, but are transgressive of modernity's production of "a one-world world" that is sealed against other alternatives, better expressed through multiplicity or the idea of the pluriverse. (4) We therefore resist efforts to tame the processes unleashed by calls for globalizing or decolonizing IR as just another in the line of great debates and wonder whether IR as a claim to universal knowledge will (or should) survive this roiling. (5) We respond to the calls for globalizing or pluralizing IR by advocating ontological commitments that allow a recrafting of our very being and doing as scholars and teachers to support more diverse processes of worlding.

We follow Nicholas Onuf and Richard Sennett in deploying the notion of craft and, by implication, re-crafting. Onuf speaks directly of IR as a "craft" in order to focus our attention on the rules, tools and models that we must master and the senses we must hone as part of practicing IR. (6) This mastery must be acquired, and, in the case of IR, we all know that this training is both enabling and narrowing. Despite the power-infused nature of knowledge production, disciplines as crafts are neither uniform nor fixed, as Onuf suggests. We develop Onuf's and Sennett's ideas in the second major section of this paper to set the stage for thinking about recrafting IR.

That section on craft builds on notions of 'worlding' or 'world making' developed in the first, where we show that the increasing interest in the language of worlding/worldism among IR scholars opens attention to the presence of worlds in the plural. We note that Onuf follows Wittgenstein and other linguistic philosophers in explaining how social worlds are built through language games, out of intersubjective rules of usage that allow us to go on in social life. Wittgenstein and Onuf limit intersubjectivity to the human, however. Others deepen our understanding of relationality and extend the notion of worlding beyond the anthropocentric, placing us firmly in a pluriverse of multiple, distinct, but interconnected worlds that transcend the human. Our discussion of worlding highlights how we are active participants in the co-creation of a co-constituted and multiple time-spacescape, which reinforces the growing feeling that scholars who claim to know the world need to learn how to engage across the multiplicity of the ontological registers of the pluriverse. (7)

Our focus on recrafting begins by acknowledging the existing plurality in the discipline and field. In the third section, we highlight the way post-positivist, feminist, and queer theory respond to conventional IR with different models, concepts and methods. More recently and more central for our thinking, posthuman IR, studies of Science, Technology and Society (STS), indigenous IR, studies rooted in the black diaspora, and decolonial approaches show us how recrafting involves developing not only new models and toolkits of concepts and methods, but also distinct forms of relations, including those with wider non-human worlds. For us, re-crafting involves the realization that we are all constantly worlding through how we direct our vital life force and that our fundamental existential commitments shape the kinds of worlds that we co-create. Here, we point to the possibility of a shift in ontological commitments to non-anthropocentric relational orientations as a way to encounter and participate in multiplicity. We then offer a preliminary sketch of what an ontological shift at the level of fundamental existential assumptions means for teaching and scholarship.

Worlding and Worlds

The notion of 'worldism/worlding' has been recurrently introduced into IR as part of critiques of dominant modes of knowledge production and being. Following Onuf's groundbreaking assertion that we live in worlds of our making, (8) Agathangelou and Ling use the term "worldism" to signal that "we live in multiple worlds and these, in turn, live in and through us": these worlds "stock our visions, guide our actions, underpin our institutions, and account for our interactions with Others." (9) While 'worlding' brings attention to the "situatedness of knowledge and experience in relation to the dominant reading of world globalization", (10) Bilgin stresses the way this language attunes us not only to the power-laden situatedness of representations of global realities, but also to practices of knowing and doing as constitutive of a world of interconnected worlds. (11) Blaney and Tickner encapsulate these varying senses of worlding by suggesting that scholars using the language of "'worlding' and 'worldism' highlight the co-existence of multiple and intersecting economic, political, social, historical and knowledge practices that are geoculturally situated and that 'make' many worlds that might be placed into conversation as equals", instead of some worlds being subordinated to others. (12)

A central concern here is how worlds come to be and how they are sustained. Onuf suggests that worlds are made through rules. (13) In the linguistic philosophy informing this view, Wittgenstein observes that the rules of a language-game give mostly unnoticed but critical shape to social interaction. As example, he observes that mathematicians can disagree fervently about a mathematical proposition but not come to blows over the language game they commonly employ to have their altercation. (14) No one questions or is even aware of the shared, almost seamless linguistic rules they follow. Consistency in meaning and practice comes through convention of use. Onuf refers to this emergent and fruitful process as "worldmaking", capturing how human beings come to be and to interact in particular timespacescapes. Wittgenstein likens these worlds to "ancient cities": meaningful landscapes within which our activities unfold but whose foundations and dimensions may be barely registered, so deeply are they buried below the surface. (15)

For Wittgenstein and Onuf, the intersubjective realm extends only as far as human collectives. As representative of the literature hinging together Andean and Amazonian ethnography and science and technology studies (STS), Mario Blaser suggests a non-anthropocentric definition of worlding. He opens up our understanding of "the processes through which a world is being brought into existence", whereby anything encountered in the cosmos--stars, extraterrestrial beings, elements, mountains, oceans, plants and animals--can be understood to be actively worlding. (16) For us, then, the verb "to world" denotes not simply a constructivist social theory, but an ontology that recognizes the active participation of all beings in bringing a world of worlds into existence--a process of cosmopraxis (17) or co-creation. (18) Recognizing that co-creation involves a sociality or relationality prior to and beyond human language-games requires a shift in the existential assumptions informing our sensing, knowing and being in relation to a world of varied beings.

The existential assumptions we make even prior to language guide more fundamentally how we are entangled in, perceive, and energetically engage the world. Making worlds in a particular way, including meaning-making and practice through language, depends on privileging certain existential assumptions over others, whether we are conscious of them or not. Just as the linguistic turn clamored to make people aware of language as a central aspect of the diverse co-constitutive process that "reproduces" the human collectives and practices we know and live within, we emphasize in addition the shaping role played by the varying existential/ontological assumptions that peoples embrace as part of participating in making the multiple time-spacescapes that scholars have come to call the fractiverse/pluriverse. (19) If scholarly 'worlding' involves not only the discursive capacity to decipher language-games and social practices, we also need to learn how to engage across the multiple time-spacescapes of the pluriverse. Recrafting IR, we will argue below, requires not only a greater awareness of the relationship between given existential/ontological assumptions and the imaginable range of possible lifeways and modes of knowing that they afford (and exclude), but also a capacity to inhabit and move through these time-spacescapes. We begin with the idea that IR is usefully seen as craft.

Crafting

Crafting can be understood as a form of worlding that includes an element of intentionality with regards to what is being created, though also always drawing from tacit collective knowing. Craft invokes artisanal notions of creative making yet can be distinguished from art. Richard Sennett suggests that "art seems to draw attention to work that is unique or at least distinctive, whereas craft names a more anonymous, collective, and continued practice." (20) Two axes contribute to this distinction. First, art is often associated with individual self-expression (though we doubt it can ever be exclusively so), whereas craft is an intentionally (and necessarily) social practice. As a specific form of practice, a craft is embedded in both particular collective networks of knowledge and culturally shaped desires for particular kinds of objects. (21) The second axis is that while the market for art emphasizes the uniqueness or originality in creative...