Psychoanalysis k – Sam Franz – rks seniors Cover Letter
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Psychoanalysis K - Sam - Wake 2016 RKS
IR Materialism23.An analysis of the narratives bound up with the material possibilities of the US is a prerequisite to effective IR actionSolomon ’15 (Ty, Assistant Prof. @ U. of Glasgow, “The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses,” University of Michigan Press, January, 2015, pp. 9-11) These debates among realist, liberal, and other scholars have been illuminating in their analyses of how distributions of power at the systemic level characterize the international environment in which the US operates and have been fruitful in specifying many of the constraints and opportunities facing the US. Yet if we shift our focus beyond the brute fact of the US’s material capabilities to instead ask how the US’s interests in launching a war on terror arose, material factors and broad systemic constraints alone are not enough to fully comprehend why US leaders articulated—and, importantly, why large segments of the population agreed—that a sweeping global “war” was the proper response. Interests are not automatically or naturally transmitted from systemic distributions of material power but rather are altered through complex layers of domestic politics. External pressures often account for the broad systemic constraints and opportunities facing states, yet we must delve into the domestic politics of competing narratives and identities—and the potent emotional attachments to them—to more fully account for the genesis of how a particular understanding of the “national interest” comes to the fore over other understandings. Indeed, and again, the US had a number of potential policy options to respond to 9/11 and could have understood 9/11 in a number of other ways other than a “war on terror.” Yet fighting a war on terror became solidified as the seemingly “only sensible” response for the US. Thus, despite a permissive international system structured largely around American unipolarity, statecentric approaches are often inadequate in explaining how one conception of the “national interest” prevails other others, largely because they take interests as given. Even if the international system structures opportunities in a general sense, how one “national interest” among potentially many comes to de ne the accept- able range of policy options is unclear in statecentric accounts. Instead, we are guided toward the narratives that socially construct those interests. US leaders deployed a carefully crafted discourse to construct the “national interest” in fighting the war on terror, and the powerful effects of this discourse led some foreign policies to be seen as “thinkable” or “acceptable” while others never entered the realm of political possibility. To be sure, a focus on the language of US national interests does not deny the centrality of material factors in in influencing those interests. However, as many IR scholars have increasingly shown, material factors in world politics do not speak for themselves—they must be interpreted by state actors to become meaningful (Widmaier 2007). Consequently, we must further interrogate the politics of meaning-making surrounding national interests, albeit within the confines of a broad range of systemically delineated potential routes of action. If narrative is the medium through which national interests are socially constructed, we must often look in the politics of emotions and desires to understand how such narratives resonate with or take hold of domestic audiences, crucial factors that help to account for how such political narratives are sold to a populace and set the political possibilities for specific policies to come. Such a focus does not replace but is a necessary supplement to traditional material and statecentric analyses to more fully account for the gene- sis of collective understandings of the national interest. For example, even if the structure of a unipolar system provided the US with little material incentive to proceed with moderation after 9/11, the question remains why many American audiences initially supported this approach, given the various competing foreign policy traditions—and the potential policy options that would have followed—within US politics. Even if terrorism does not pose an existential threat to US material interests, the question remains why large majorities of Americans bought a sweeping narrative of a threat not only to the US but to “civilization” itself. Such questions are inextricably bound up with notions of who we are—that is, how we interpret threats has much to do with how we see ourselves, with our identities as subjects. People react not only to physical and material threats but also to perceived threats to who they are—their sense of self, their way of life, and so on. This is precisely why the concept of subjectivity should be coupled with a thorough understanding of the emotional element of desire. How did a socially constructed war on terror become the prevailing common sense after 9/11? Why did other political possibilities not rise to become common sense? How did neoconservative narratives of expansive American power often come to have outsized influence on US foreign policy debates? Answers to such questions are key to understanding the politics of American foreign policy because they point directly to the genesis and political possibility of foreign policies. These discourses rose to dominance because they channeled certain kinds of desires and thus allowed adherents to identify as certain kinds of subjects—in particular, subjects who would feel less insecure after a national trauma. The moment when one discourse comes to be common sense is the moment when audiences become emotionally tied to that narrative through the promise of identity security that it constructs, a promise that other competing narratives fail to plausibly construct. The pull of desire to identify with discourses of national identity—discourses that attempt to define who we are (a strong nation, an exceptional nation, and so on)—is part of the emotional aspect of subjectivity that is necessary for more fully understanding the power of the political narratives of neoconservatism and American responses to 9/11. Download 169.86 Kb. Share with your friends:
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