The Clash is Back: Part I

Theoretical moribundity makes me think of International Relations—the academic field, that is—with awkward pretensions that find its practitioners caught between the 'hard science' pressure to identify independent variables (that language!) sufficiently robust to survive localized controls (i.e., that are sensible across circumstances unfortunate enough to be deemed [ahem, and produced] 'case studies'), on the one hand, and to grandly pronounce sonorous and significant theoretic narratives on the other. The IR impulse is what brought us some of those eccentric and entertaining 200-level course debates over such creations as 'rational actors' and other bewildering anthropomorphizations of the state, generally pilfered from economists and adorned with some strung out Enlightenment gestures toward 'human nature.'

These debates are so broad and therefore vulgar that one can but sympathize with the recent clamoring among IR faculty over 'game theory,' which, one supposes, is sonorous and clever enough, but which, at the same time, might remind one of set theory's deployment in early Kristeva. These fads—which may, in another context, bear a vague semblance to some Malcolm Gladwell piece in The New York Times Magazine—tend to take hold of a discipline desiring more precise-sounding adornments to explanatory powers whose capacity does not much change. Perhaps I am, after all, also writing of Political Science on the whole. Who cares? Slaking the desire for a topping of the gram with the matheme has generally produced unattractive results. The question must become: Just how many metaphoric layers must one be forced to lick to reach the center after all?

Meanwhile, I have no trouble heaping the blame for Foreign Affairs, the Washington Consensus magazine with, I suppose, a rather severe case of journal anxiety, at the door of the IR department. I will refrain from hammering home the point that virtually the entirety of Foreign Affairs looks to be ghostwritten, an observation charitable neither to the magazine nor to the would be foreign-service members sidelining for celebrity authors. The entire thing could be produced by the human relations department in the basement of State. In any event, Foreign Affairs is always given top-shelf treatment—yes, that's it, just to the right of US Weekly, the not-necessarily-less-worthwhile magazine celebrating celebrities of another variety—and it seems to give its readers the feeling of reading some thorough academic research of some sort. One can rarely be fully certain of a publication's constituency, but I would venture that the chap most likely to be impressed by Foreign Affairs would be what Christopher Guest might call 'of the catalogue generation,' replete with latte and chinos and Borders on a Sunday afternoon. Oh, the image is too much already.