Mythos and Logos

The first task is to untangle and examine the aspiration for ‘truth’ through some form of linguistic coup de main. The essays in this collection, for example, especially those by Münch, Goetze, Bliesemann de Guevara, Kühn, and Dany and Freistein, raise forcefully the question of the cultural and historical locatedness of the language we use to debate world politics, and its possible ‘transcendence’ in the form of a transhistorical, universal discourse.

The second task is to explore mythos and logos in more depth. Both convey the idea of ‘speech’. But their derivatives veer in divergent direc­tions. The words derived from mythos (mythizaomai, mythikos, mytholo- geo, mythographeo) connote the idea of fable, the escape from truth, or the ‘objective’ or ‘rational’. The words derived from logos (logizomai, logikos, logistes) all lean in the direction of calculation and analysis. The observation that much of our thought is governed by ‘fables’ or myths that are part of our linguistic and cultural heritage—either Inherited or in construction—acknowledges our cultural finitude, our boundedness within habits of thought.

The progressive and optimistic answer to this question was provided by Ernst Cassirer, one of the most influential voices of the neo-Kantian resurgence in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. Cassirer introduced a significant innovation into the Kantian scheme by conceptu­alising the a priori not as fixed but as historically and culturally located and subject to evolution. He treated symbolic forms, of which myth is one, as instances of the imagination’s spontaneous creation of a priori condi­tions of thought. Symbolic expression creates its own reality. It builds an objective world that invites and enables growth, exploration, and mastery in specific cultural settings. Cassirer was a pluralist to the extent that he acknowledged that there was no conceptual limit to the array of human symbols that could provide humanity with categories, schemata, and tran- scendentals. But he remained loyal to the Kantian principle that the sym­bols of western science claimed metaphysical primacy, standing as they did at the highest stage of productive abstraction.

Transcendentalism is central to Kantian thought. It tells us that the mind is a spontaneous (not reactive) faculty that shapes the experienced world according to forms of intelligibility that it creates and imposes. Culturally located myth and symbol have their origin in the spontaneous, productive imagination. Though they emerge from the finite conditions of human experience, they can achieve objectivity and independence with regard to those same conditions. By this reading, all symbolic systems and the myths that compose them can lay claim to objectivity. They can all lift the human mind from its finitude and enable thought and the sharing of observations. There is no relativism in Cassirer’s thought, despite its pluralism. Pluralism is subject to a robust teleology in the form of rea­son’s dialectical advance from myth to modern science.

As the chapters by Bliesemann de Guevara and Goetze point out, sov­ereignty is one of the foundational myths of international politics. While there are a number of ways to treat the mythological status of sover­eignty, Jens Bartelson, in Sovereignty as Symbolic Form, draws specifically on Cassirer’s philosophical anthropology, searching for an answer to the question of how the concept of sovereignty endures in spite of the disclo­sure of its mythological nature. Despite that revelation, ‘arguments to the effect that the meaning of sovereignty is mutable and [historically] con­tingent are vulnerable to the objection that any actual account of its varia­tion across different contexts must presuppose that this concept has some stable connotations’ (Bartelson 2014, 11). Rather than seek that invari­ability in some essence, Bartelson prefers to see in sovereignty a kind of spontaneously invented concept that facilitates the acquisition of knowl­edge and understanding of modern territorial organisation. Genealogical, historicist, and deconstructive treatments of sovereignty have not freed us from our dependence on the concept. ‘If sovereignty is understood as a blueprint for perceiving and organizing the political world, the question whether it is real or constructed makes little sense...’ (Bartelson 2014, 17). Bartelson (2014, 60) adds: ‘what one contests, one always presup­poses and therefore also to an extent de-contests.’ Both citations suggest that there is something conceptually indispensable about the ‘myth’ of sovereignty, that it is somehow difficult or futile to try to imagine the ter­ritorial organisation of humanity without it.

Though Bartelson adopts elements of his argument from Cassirer, his tone is also more fatalist. There is no mention of a teleological transcen­dence that would enable us to envisage a ‘post-sovereign’ world politics.

Sovereignty is no longer a constitutive attribute of states, or an inalienable right whose ultimate source is to be found within the state. Sovereignty is no longer the prize of successful claims to self-determination or declaration of independence, but rather a grant contingent upon its responsible exercise in accordance with the principles of international law under the supervision of a host of global governance institutions and non-governmental actors who claim to be maintaining the order and stability of the international system on the grounds that this is in the best interest of mankind as a whole.

Bartelson makes no reference to rational teleologies, but prefers the term ‘fetish’ to characterise the myth of sovereignty: ‘the endurance of sovereignty in political and legal theory is due to what I will call fetishism, ascribing inherent powers to inanimate objects’ (Bartelson 2014, 40). Reverence for sovereignty-as-fetish helps us understand how sovereignty- as-myth could lose its basic connotation of immunity from foreign inter­vention and come to refer instead to the authority of ‘a thousand petty emperors acting on behalf of an imagined international community’, yet still retain foundational importance to any discursive articulation of world politics (Bartelson 2014, 87). Several authors in this volume echo this observation by noting that our status as mythographers trumps our attempts at critique.

Bartelson’s fatalism duplicates Cassirer’s own philosophical and politi­cal disappointment regarding the capacity of myth—specifically the myth of the state, race, and fate—to resist reasoned inquiry and be co-opted by the crude and historically fallacious ‘theorizing’ found in Nazi doctrine (Cassirer 1961). Cassirer attributes that resistance to twentieth century philosophy’s disavowal of Enlightenment ideals. Bartelson attributes the survival of a mythical concept to the ease with which neoliberalism co­opted the myth of sovereignty into its project of governmentality. In this way, we can also see the mythological production of related concepts of ‘the international community’ and ‘civil society’ that have taken hold in our contemporary neoliberal imaginary, and which legitimise the alleged problematique of intervention in the context of sovereignty by construct­ing the myth of successful ‘coordination’ (see chapters by Kaczmarska, Dany and Freistein, and Hensell).

Both Cassirer and Bartelson express frustration at the tenacity of the conceptual ‘line’ that divides ‘provincial’ myth from cosmopolitan tran­scendence (Cassirer) or cosmopolitan scepticism and the search for new possibilities (Bartelson). R. B. J. Walker, in a book that examines specifically the surprising longevity of the provincial, notes that lines—political, tem­poral, and spatial—that separate provincial myth from transcendent moral insight, or subjugation from future emancipation, or politically organised territories from their neighbours, become agonistic sites. In this volume, the chapter by Müller and Sondermann does similar work, noting the ago- nism—and taming—of ‘aid effectiveness’ with the incorporation of new players who are both donors and recipients of aid. For Walker, though, both adepts and critics of conceptual or temporal transcendence meet at the ‘line’ or frontier, populate it with arguments, and thus inscribe it more visibly, controversially, and emotionally, in political and academic debate.

Yet as contemporary debates about militarism, civil society, and aid effectiveness demonstrate (see chapters by Millar, Finlan, Dany and Freistein, and Müller and Sondermann), working within the lines to keep modern politics interesting continually runs up against universalis­ing attempts to shut politics down. The activity that occurs at the con­ceptual line separating provincial myth from universalising theory need not be limited to unsettling, relativizing, and imagining, however. It can also be a site of casuistry. Casuistry, the value and relevance of which was defended by Stephen Toulmin in the 1980s, and which has seen a revival in the study of religion in IR (Lynch 2009), invites us to embrace the complexity of the singular case so as to complicate and contest the value of the distinction between provincial myth and universal theory or uni­versal good (Toulmin 1992; Jonsen and Toulmin 1990). Interpretation of the singular case, especially one that appears to be ‘new’, unforeseen, or the result of crisis, requires much labour, including reconsidering and possibly reformulating the normative guidelines provided by the mytho­logical constructs that govern moral action. Just as no law applies to the facts of a case unambiguously and fairly, no theory and no myth bring light to some event in a way that ‘does justice’ to the complexity of val­ues, ambitions, and normative constraints that conditioned or caused it. The distinction between the mythical construction of the world and the demands of transcendent reason may be clear from a high altitude, but the distinction all but disappears as we descend and try to make sense of history’s details. Even the line separating modernity from postmodernity, with which casuistry is sometimes associated, becomes muddled by the historical complexity of the singular ‘case’. From this perspective, the line of separation is itself ‘located’. It is located at (mythically) high altitude, toward which our theoretical ambitions strive. As we forsake that altitude, however, we discover in casuistry a less ‘violent’ model of agonism and negotiation ‘across lines’.

Not dissimilar in spirit is the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer (2004). The word hermeneutics signifies the effort to translate or other­wise make sense of an idea or action that occurs in a ‘provincial’ universe of discourse and values that is foreign to the reader. This is a task that Yanow has taken up in much of her work on policy mythologies and meanings (Yanow 1999, 2003; see also foreword to this book). Gadamer emphasises the importance of ‘prejudice’ to that effort. Gadamer (coming from phe­nomenology) differs from Cassirer (coming from neo-Kantianism) to the extent that he makes no allowance for spontaneous leaps of intuition that create new conditions of possibility for the advance of knowledge. That perspective is itself culturally located and is itself a source of prejudice. We cannot therefore discard prejudice in favour of some transcendent perspec­tive. The ambition to do so is an illusion. Hence, from the Gadamerian perspective, the ‘line’ that Walker alerts us to is not one that separates provincialism from cosmopolitan reason, but one that locates mytholo­gies on either side. Gadamer invites us to try to make sense, interpret, and understand thinking that is foreign to our own so as to become aware of the prejudice that simultaneously inhibits us from interpreting but nev­ertheless makes interpretation possible and necessary because of the for­eignness that it inscribes in the text of the other. The interpretive effort brings prejudice to light and ‘transcends’ it in a modest, bounded sense, by introducing us to ‘foreign prejudices’, that, however ‘prejudicial’, open us up to new worlds and new perspectives. Our prejudicial, provincial horizons ‘fuse’, providing us with a broader array of concepts, values, and articulations with which to engage political life. The line that separates the allegedly provincial from the allegedly universal becomes a line not of agonism and dispute but of mutual enrichment. By Paul Ricreur’s reading, Gadamer’s hermeneutics invites agonism, not with the other, but with the prejudice that prevails prior to the interpretive exercise. Ricrcur uses Gadamer to outline the contours of a resolutely critical hermeneutics that opens productive possibilities as yet unforeseen (Ricrcur 1981).

Walker’s image of a line that is simultaneously frontier and site of mutual production is possibly most effectively explored through the thought of Jacques Derrida and of those whose writing has been influ­enced by Derrida, including Judith Butler, Marc Crepon, and Emmanuel Levinas (whose writings in turn also had an influence on Derrida’s own thinking). In addition to the insights provided by Robert Cooke (Chap. 4), two ideas are relevant here. The first is the deconstruction of the self, the radical interrogation of the autonomy, sovereignty, and coherence of the self that undergirds so much modernist thought, and which remains a core but uninterrogated assumption in the overwhelming majority of writings on world politics. The deconstruction of the self follows logi­cally from the observation that language ‘works’ interrelationally. Words assume meaning in relation to other words with which they share a con­text, whether immediate (sentence, paragraph, book) or literary (one’s education) or even broadly cultural (common sense and its critics). This interrelationality confers a palpable unsettledness on language by contin­ually enabling variety in meaning and interpretation. The meaning of the self is affected not only by this unsettledness, but by the fact that other­ness colonises the context from which meaning is derived (forever pro­visionally). Selfness and otherness are mutually constitutive, locally, and provisionally. The other is inscribed in the self. Other, self, and line of separation are all inscribed mutually, interrelatedly, precariously, locally, and provisionally.

The second idea that issues from this Derridian perspective is that of justice as hospitality. Because deconstruction applies to language, to its interrelatedness and instability, hospitality that occurs without linguis­tically expressed preconditions and reasons cannot be deconstructed. Hospitality thus provides us with a primitive, structural image of justice. Hospitality thus understood is the condition of possibility of deconstruc­tion, and therefore of our deliverance from provincialism through decon­struction. Justice ‘at the line’ effaces the line, as hospitality ‘across the line’ unsettles the language that inscribes the line. It enables the ethics of play that Cooke (Chap. 4) enjoins. In so doing, justice and hospitality unset­tle both mythos and logos. Both are spoken. Both ‘provincial’ mythos and ‘cosmopolitan’ logos participate, as language, in the corruption or denial of justice. Both indulge in what Levinas calls ‘thematizing’, to which he opposes the ‘infinite’ openness to the other (and, Derrida adds, to the deconstruction of self and other) that is hospitality (Derrida 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001a, b; Levinas 1969, 1998, 2003, 2006; Crepon 2013, 2012; Butler 2005).

Interrogating the deconstruction of the self in conjunction with justice and hospitality returns us to the limits of transcending provincialized/ universalising mythology and our status as mythographers, and to the pos­sibilities that might be opened by acknowledging these limits along with a reinvigorated commitment to deepening our understanding of the liminal politics at play. To discern and bring to light the mythical conceptualisa­tions and articulations of political life is to express scepticism regarding the universalist pretensions that we find so readily in the study of international politics, perhaps more readily than in any other discipline of the humani­ties or social sciences. But to discern myth is also more than that. It is an invitation to interrogate horizons, lines of separation, and prejudice in a way that ‘blurs the lines’ and opens the imagination to new worlds of possibility. Scepticism and hope, then, are not necessarily antagonistic (cf. Cooke, Chap. 4) but can be understood as constitutive of the agonism that this book seeks to recover.

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