Static conceptions of international relations are inherently limited. Pluralism is key to avoid slipping into reified forgetting.

Imagine a vigorous, diverse field of International Relations in which different—and mutually exclusive— ontologies, epistemologies, and methods are all constantly narrating and re-narrating events in different ways and by different means. Now situate that field in a vigorous, diverse political culture in which one finds different—and mutually exclusive—ways of identifying and conceptualizing problems relevant to it, while also contesting its own limits and nature. The structural conditions of the two fields themselves are not what would achieve pluralism in this scenario, but they do provide the possibility for a pluralist mind-set to obtain. In the case of IR, such a diverse field would not be one in which “anything goes”—in which any claim was as good as any other, or was to be judged only in terms of the political “work” it was understood to perform. Each research program—each combination of a stipulated ontology, epistemology, and methodology, with their generative intellectual, affective, and normative commitments —would still entail close scrutiny from others. Each, moreover, would be bound to the rules that it stipulates for itself. Interpretive claims of truth and hypothetical deductive ones would still be bound to their own particular methodological rules and logical warrants, even if—as Jackson and Nexon have noted—the specific knowledge claims they produce are incommensurable with one another, and hence also irrefutable in one another’s terms.99 Each, moreover, would continue to reflect the value commitments and fears—the experiences of epistemic rupture—around which their promulgators had initially constellated. If the field practiced IR in such a diverse and contested fashion, our hunch is that such a practice would do much to combat the notion of reification-asforgetting advanced earlier. If, that is, theorists writing in these distinctive veins talked to, understood the claims made by, and argued with one another from positions of roughly equal disciplinary prestige, then coming to terms with radically dissimilar ways of theorizing the political would become a matter of course. The effect of this would be to force individual scholars to think systematically about their own assumptions, concepts, and commitments: the logical warrants and a prioris that are always on the verge of passing into reified forgetting. A path would be opened for Nye’s peasants and strongmen, and for Haiti’s revolutionaries, to appear on the same terms as up-and-coming American elites and revered European philosophers. The skepticism each scholar naturally brings to the sensibilities and projects of others would be constantly turned back on their own as well. Here, then, is the wager: that the continuous assault of multiple theoretical narratives would force theorists from every quarter just slightly off balance—still able to draw conclusions from data and to advocate for what follows from them, but without forgetting their limited ontological and epistemological warrants. Research design would include that experiential aim in its deployment of different intellectual lenses. The researcher would think, partly, in the same terms as might the curator of an artistic exhibition: seeking out and deploying pictures of a complex event in ways that would buffet both the theorist and the reader of theory with a variety of unsettling and mutually incommensurable accounts. If such an approach to pluralism seems facile, that is because on some level it is—self-consciously so. The very possibility of mutually incommensurable accounts changes the epistemic status of social-scientific authority. One is no longer promising settled truth, but only provisional claims, whose partiality—again, in both senses—is constantly being underscored even as their analytical findings and policy upshots are never entirely abandoned. Not truth, but something rather less grand: what the comedian Stephen Colbert once called truthiness, or what Adorno—to return to a theme developed in the introduction—called “clowning”: The un-naïve thinker knows how far he remains from the object of this thinking, and yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely. This brings him to the point of clowning . . . . Philosophy is the most serious of things, but then again it is not all that serious.100 For philosophy, substitute social science: the attempt to systematize politics through conceptualization, explanation, and interpretation. Such efforts, as Ned Lebow and Toni Erskine—and before them, David Ricci—have noted, are inherently tragic.101 Static concepts cannot contain the vitality and contingency of politics; and yet, they are all we have. While the term clowning connotes a lack of seriousness, it is not merely goofing off. Clowning, as Adorno intends this term, does for social science what the likes of Colbert, Jon Stewart, and a host of others have done for television news: to affirm the ideals of a discursive form—the “serious business” of social science or public-interest journalism—even as it underscores how those ideals can never quite be lived up to.102 Through the juxtaposition of many perspectives, the scholar underscores the limits of her own sensibilities; scholarly authority derives from one’s ability not to capture the truth, but to mark the space between the best accounts of a complex world one can obtain, and the actual complexity and indeterminacy of things. Thus might epistemological skepticism be sustained. One could hope that such clowning would produce a change of affect or sensibility. That change can be described as proceeding in three phases. First, a sense of dislocation is hoped for, stemming from the realization that any account of a given event both discloses a sense of that event, and betrays a larger reality that lies beyond it. We might begin to wonder how that selective disclosure works, what normative or ideological worldviews it suborns or suppresses. Second, from this sense of dislocation a sense of finitude or humility might follow: that while such narratives are inadequate, they are all any of us—thinkers, policymakers, human beings—have by which to make sense of the world. Third, from this sense of finitude, a sense of compassion and fellow feeling might emerge for those bound up in conflict, and for all of us when we consider our common vulnerabilities and worldly possibilities. This, we submit, would be a pluralism worthy of the name: a helpmate to political judgment, rather than an ill-starred attempt to replace it.103