Vote neg to endorse the queer art of failure in IR.

In this way, not only do traditional standards of knowledge make invisible their own impossibility, they hide the violence of IR’s denials of failure and continued insistence on traveling failed paths despite the condemnation of failure and the privileging of success. IR’s continued recursive enactment of its settled “standards” despite their obvious failure and exclusiveness makes invisible the raced, classed, and sexed impacts of those standards and their apparent objectivity. Baudrillard’s work provides a path for navigating this disjuncture between signs (IR’s “standards”) and referents (the fantastic notion that “good scholarship” exists objectively) (Baudrillard, 1975). He argues that “only ambivalence, as a rupture of value… sustains a challenge to the legibility, the false transparency of the sign… questions the evidence of the use value of the sign (rational decoding) and of its exchange value (the discourse of communication).” This ambivalence, Baudrillard argues, “brings the political economy of the sign to a standstill; it dissolves the respective definitions of symbol and referent” (Baudrillard, 1981, p. 150). Endorsing the inclusion of nontraditional perspectives, classifying and categorizing them, and assuming inclusion’s possibility may all have violent impacts (for discussions of the violences of inclusion see Haritaworn et al., 2013, 2014; Mbembe, 2019). Moving of the signification “knowledge” from any referent to which it was originally tied makes method and research performances of scholarship, rather than (the illusive) scholarship itself. If “research” is a performance of scholarship, “standards” for research serve to disguise the fantastic nature of knowledge cumulation. As such, there is no space for liminality, uncertainty, change, inadequacy, and failure in structural rather than passing senses. Yet looking beyond the discourse of certainty, those pervade IR. A Baudrillardian ambivalence toward research programs and their truth statements can reveal the recursivity of IR’s standards of knowledge cumulation. This is because condemnation or rejection of any given research program and its truth statements endorses its assumptions about truth, as well as some of its assumptions about what the international arena is and how it works. As such, the idea that IR knowledge cumulation can be nothing but fantasy is straightforward. If the reification of standards of knowledge cumulation is a signification divorced from a referent, where the recovery of the referent is conceptually and practically impossible, then knowledge cumulation is and will always remain an empty signifier. The only question is how that empty signifier directs and is directed. We suggest that, in IR, more often than not, knowledge cumulation directs and is directed by discursive seduction. In Baudrillard’s words, seduction is “that which extracts meaning from discourse and detracts it from its truth” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). What makes a discourse of knowledge, of science, and of progress seductive “is its very appearance: the aleatory, meaningless, or ritualistic and meticulous circulation of signs on the surface, its inflections and its nuances. All of this effaces the content value of meaning, and this is seductive” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). Therefore, if there could be an interpretive discourse of knowledge cumulation that reached truth value, that truth value would be self-defeating, since “the meaning of an interpretive discourse, by contrast, has never seduced anyone.” This is the fundamental contradiction, in Baudrillard’s terms, that makes standards for knowledge cumulation in IR internally impossible. He explains that “every interpretive discourse wants to get beyond appearances; this is its illusion and fraud. But getting beyond appearances is appearance, and is hence subject to the stakes imposed by seduction, and consequently to its own failure as discourse” (Baudrillard, 1991[1979], p. 54). As such, what is left in/of the failed discourse can only be the fantastic, and pretensions to success hollow. Inhabiting a Failure of a Discipline The need for success and the denial of failure depend on two things: first, both success and failure existing and being identifiable; and second, presuming a particular normative relationship between success and failure. In IR, as we discussed above, scholars are thought of as successes or failures according to a complicated metric of disciplinary prestige based on publication outlet, “scientific standards,” and perception of the change that they have caused in the discipline. Work is characterized as successful or failed based on whether it contributes to knowledge cumulation. The discipline itself is understood as successful or failed based on the aggregation of those measures. On these terms, the emptiness of disciplinary standards and the impossibility of knowledge cumulation make every piece of scholarship and every scholar in IR a failure and the discipline along with them.13 To us, the identification of success/failure is impossible. Still, we focus our approach to “disciplinary IR” around questioning the second assumption, that the normative relationship between success and failure is such that success is good and desirable and failure is bad. Failure has been insufficiently explored in disciplinary IR, both in thinking about the disciplinary enterprise and in thinking about the world “out there” which we purport to study.14 Here, we look to theorize the “upside” of the failure of the disciplinary enterprise of IR. It is, after all, failure that Baudrillard called for, in different words—a willingness to drop commitment to and passion for a certain end in the recognition that both that end and its opposite are empty signifiers. Queer theorists have suggested that this sort of failure—failure to live up to expectations which were messy, detached, or a priori untenable—might be worth celebrating (Halberstam, 2011). We build on these two understandings to embrace failure in IR. Often failure is thought about as either a final end (something has failed), as a stumbling block on a path to success (if at first you do not succeed, try, try again), or as a miscalibration (we thought this was success, but really it is failure instead). With Jack Halberstam, we suggest a normative reinterpretation. Rather than seeing failure as an end point, or as a stopping point on the way to success, it can be seen as itself a politics, “a category levied by the winners against the losers” and “a set of standards that ensure all future radical ventures will be measured as cost-ineffective” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 184). Halberstam uses the example of reproductive success. Inherited wisdom has suggested for a significant amount of time that people should have children—that a heterosexual marriage with biological offspring is the ideal of success in one’s personal life. That could be taken at face value: success (measured in biological offspring to still-married heterosexual, cissexual parents) is to be valued, and failure (measured in some other reproductive result) is to be devalued. Or the very normative value attached to reproductive success is itself a weapon, where associating failure with non-reproduction is a category levied against the losers by the winners. Redefining all reproductive results as successful or changing which reproductive results are measured as successful does not change the weaponized, normalizing character of the concept of success. This is a metaphor for IR’s disciplinary sociology, but it is also directly applicable to IR’s epistemological and methodological engagement with non-heteronormativity. Applied to IR, the normalization of “success” as the thing to which all (researchers) should aspire reifies membership in the categories of “successful” and “failed” and provides the “successful” with a powerful weapon to continue to exclude, put down, and delegitimize the “unsuccessful.” The “winners” are by definition in a normatively superior position compared to the “losers” despite the emptiness of the signification of each category. Understanding individual pieces of work, individual scholars, or research paradigms as failed (a foil to successful) is a categorization wielded by those who have already been classified as successful to achieve and perpetuate the exclusion of those whom they can constitute as inferior. In this way, research success is a category IR’s winners wield against its losers to perpetuate their position as winners, consciously or unconsciously, against a background of a disciplinary IR where the standards for research were created largely by white, heterosexual cis-men and remain largely undisturbed despite the intellectual and representational diversification of IR research and IR scholars. Failure as a category in IR scholarship serves to “reinscribe and renormalize standards of ‘research success’ which remain unchanged, unchangeable, and regressive” (Halberstam, 2011). The scholarship that makes unconventional claims to knowledge cumulation (or no claim to knowledge cumulation) not only fails but constitutes its researchers as failures—which becomes recursive when “we tend to blame each other or ourselves for the failures of the social structure we inhabit, rather than critiquing the structures… themselves” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 35, citing Kipnes, 2004). In Halberstam’s view, it is the system that privileges success, that is, the problem, and failing within it is an emancipatory possibility which “dismantles the logics of success and failure with which we currently live” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 2). Realizing the caging nature of the boundaries of disciplinary success, it is possible to think that failure might be perceived as something to celebrate and strive toward rather than something which should inspire shame. Halberstam suggests that “under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, and more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 2–3). In Halberstam’s view, it is only when the norms and metrics by which we aspire to success become both politicized and problematized that freedom becomes possible. It is not failing that we as scholars or as people need to learn to do—we fail all the time. As Halberstam notes, failure is endemic in life and work as “to live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately die,” despite denial, resistance, and constructs of success (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 186–187). Instead of needing to learn to fail, we argue, we need to learn to embrace failure, particularly the collective failure of the enterprise of “disciplinary IR” to achieve or approximate “knowledge cumulation” generally or the aspirations of particular research programs specifically. “Rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment,” Halberstam contends that it is important to recognize, embrace, incorporate, and legitimize failure (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 186–187). Lee Edelman suggests that pretenses of success and the “failure to succeed” that is their foil are actually both on the same side—“committed to futurism’s unquestioned good,” aspirational to success, and committed to a perceived normative value of success (Edelman, 2004). Edelman envisions another “side”—“the ‘side’ where narrative realization and derealization overlap, where the energies of vitalization ceaselessly turn against themselves; the ‘side’ outside of all political sides” (Edelman, 2004, loc. 97). We argue that it is in this ambivalent “side” that IR scholars should see, experience, and live IR as such. Halberstam’s account of this “side” (or “anti-side”) is “the queer art of failure.” Halberstam explains that “the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 187). If “winning has become a byword for greed, arrogance, profiting from others, and conformity” (Halberstam, 2012), losing can be the art of rejecting those things, and, with them, the normative value of the win itself. The queer art of failure wields negative affect and anti-futurity as a tool of political resistance (Ruberg, 2015, p. 114), suggesting that active rejection of not only the standards but also the idea of success constitutes the space of failure as habitable. In this view, “every experience of annoyance, anger, sadness, and hurt comes with its own value, its own message, and its own transformative potential” (Ruberg, 2015, p. 115). As Ruberg urges, there is space in the willingness to “see willful self-destruction not as pathological behavior from which queer subjects need rescuing but as an ecstatic rejection of mainstream power structures” (Ruberg, 2015, p. 115). Embracing disciplinary IR’s failures, then, has two potential advantages: recognition and resistance. Failure and Grand Theory in IR And they lived happily ever after. The end. No, really. If IR’s state-of-the-field debates are alternatively narrativized fairy tales, we have a replacement. We suggest that the fairy tales’ idealized end can be found not in success but in failure; not in agreement but in controversy; not in aggrandized claims but in careful thought; not in stability but in liminality.15 It is hitching our wagon to a failure of a discipline and acknowledging that failure that constitutes and creates the possibility of a happily ever after for IR theory. We see the answers to many of these questions bound up in a disciplinary IR that has racist, sexist, heterosexist, and cissexist intellectual orientations and remains silent about them and often the assumptions that prop them up. But even work which decenters or critiques these exclusions in IR, in our view, is positioned compared to or in opposition to the discipline’s existing structure. Rather than being disappointed that IR theories are exclusive, cannot be reduced to a single theory, cannot account for global politics as a whole, and cannot present grand narratives of their competitive advantages visa-vis other approaches, we suggest highlighting and inhabiting these failures. Questioning the terms of disciplinary success as lying in a tightly choreographed dance (peer review in elite journals) or a popularity contest (citation count), or even in the “science” of knowledge cumulation, we ask why empty signifiers continue to dictate value in a wide variety of channels in IR. But we do not think redefining success will “solve” this “problem,” no matter how well-intended or radical the redefinition is. Note that we are not denying the existence or importance of significant transgressive work within IR, work that rejects grand narrativizing, or other explicit or implicit attempts to embrace failure. We are under the impression that authors critiqued here might actually agree with our critiques, either placing themselves within them or taking exception to them. We are not looking to signal virtue or to exclude, simply to suggest an explicit alternative approach. Instead of looking for an alternative, emphasizing some of the “good” transgressions, finding another way to succeed, or recasting success, we look to deconstruct IR’s logics of success and failure, and, with them, its mimicry of reified standards and its fantasies of knowledge cumulation. We see rewards in embracing IR theory’s failure to live up to IR theorists’ expectations of it. With Halberstam, “perhaps most obviously, failure … disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between…winners and losers” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 3). Declaring, and embracing, knowledge cumulation failure (and thus, IR’s intellectual failure) “allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 3). The relevant norms in IR are the fetishization of science, the fetishization of progression and progress, and the establishment and reification of boundaries of what ideas matter to the field. In embracing failure and escaping those punishing norms that are as violent in their inclusion (e.g., Haritaworn et al., 2014) as they are in their exclusion, “queer studies offer us one method for imagining, not some fan

tasy of an elsewhere, but existing alternatives to hegemonic systems” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 89). It “can be a potent form of critique,… a refusal of the norm, an indifference to assimilation, and a route to other ways of being in the world” (Halberstam, 2012). Here, the alternative to the hegemonic system of claims of knowledge cumulation is the queer, understood as both liminal and anti-heteronormative, as a foundation for theorizing more nuanced understandings of knowledge than success or failure at cumulation. If scholars find their affirmation in (hollow) confirmations of their claims to knowledge cumulation, a queer politics of failure suggests a different direction. As Halberstam recommends, “rather than resisting endings and limits, let us instead revel in… all of our own inevitable fantastic failures” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 187). Reveling in fantastic failures, in terms of a queer critique of the fantasy of progressive knowledge cumulation, has two elements: celebrating research as failure and confronting the future given that embrace. Queer theory suggests guidelines for embracing failure; “failing is something queers do well”—not (only) in the self-deprecating sense of laughing at (one’s own) flaws, but also in the more fruitful sense of exposing the ridiculousness of norms by failing to live up to them. In this sense, queer failure is “a map of the path not taken” (Weber, 2014a, 2014b). As such, “queerness offers the promise of failure as a way of life,…but it is up to us whether we choose to make good on that promise in a way that makes a detour around the usual markers of accomplishment and satisfaction” (Halberstam, 2011, loc 3281). “Failing” to meet expectations and being fine repudiates the salvation narrative that accompanies the “right” rules and norms and lifts the often terrible consequences of falling outside “the norm” while removing the privileges of “belonging” to the category of success. The exposure and analysis of queer failure denaturalizes the coherence of knowledge-production performances to show the vapidity inside. We see the replacement of “all-encompassing global theories” with those “subjugated knowledges” which have been “buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systemization” as a key first step but insufficient by itself (Halberstam, 2011). Turning IR’s “losers” into its “winners” would both serve social justice and unsettle the binary itself, but rejecting the categories writ large would both upset the politics of exclusion in those categories and discourage the win-seeking behavior that makes state-of-the-field debates. Celebrating failure instead “provides the opportunity to use [failure’s] negative effects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life” where “the negative thinker can use the experience of failure to confront the gross inequalities of everyday life” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 3, 4). The “toxic positivity” in IR theorizing is the attachment to the utility of grand theory that cumulates knowledge which makes the inequalities in the discipline appear to be organized by some sense of objective quality, where “success happens to good people” and good research while failure happens to bad work or bad people (Halberstam, 2011, p. 3). Instead, we see those inequalities as structural and standards of success in IR as political. IR’s happily ever after, then, if it is to have one, must be in the failure, in the mess, and in rejecting both inherited interpretations of success and of the normative relationship between success and failure. It must be not only in not meeting expectations of any given state-of-the-discipline proselytizing but also in instead realizing that IR cannot and should not approximate those expectations. It is not a progressive discipline with a singular end or an exercise in progressive knowledge cumulation. It is instead necessarily undisciplined—it must put aside the straightjackets of research standards, the ego-stroking of aggrandized claims, and the authorial voice of the telling of the discipline’s past, present, and future—to embrace liminality and the necessity (and beauty) of failure. The irony of this argument is not lost on us. Halberstam, making the queer theory case for celebrating failure, has become a very successful academic by many of the traditional disciplinary standards, and The Queer Art of Failure is a successful academic text. Many of the critics and supporters cited here have built on academic success by their engagement with the argument. We are bringing the case to IR, publishing it in a academic journal, through the traditional mechanism of peer review, from the comfort of secure and permanent academic employment. We poke holes where those holes can be seen by those who would police the boundaries between winners and losers. This article does not “practice” as it “preaches,” to itself upend the “winners” and “losers” in disciplinary IR—it is couched in both necessary and unnecessary hypocrisy. But positionally at the very least, our celebration of failure is itself a failure—implicated in our interest in and disciplinary IR’s promotion of success. We are not arguing that failure can be made pure or that it should be—only that it cannot and should not be escaped, especially for the glorification of success as its perceived opposite. As we fail at failure to demonstrate the fantasy of success, we envision a happily ever after of failing, un-discipline, and diversity rather than a faux idealism of synthesis, aggrandizement, “science,” and disciplining.