How the World Stage Makes Its Subjects: An Embodied Critique of Constructivist IR Theory

Erik Ringmar

This article provides a critique of Constructivism and Post-structuralism within IR theory from an embodied, realist, perspective. Meaning is not made as much as experienced, we will argue, and subjectivity is not constructed as much as enacted. The theater illustrates the difference between constructivist, post-structuralist and embodied perspectives. By analyzing international politics in terms of a performance instead of performativity a more credible version of the sovereign subject can be identified. The world is a stage and it is only be appearing on this world stage that the state becomes real. To back up this argument the article draws from recent research in cognitive theory and neuroscience. Quote as Ringmar, Erik. “How the World Stage Makes Its Subjects: An Embodied Critique of Constructivist IR Theory.” Journal of International Relations and Development 19, no. 1 (2016): 101–25. doi:10.1057/jird.2015.33.

How the world stage makes its subjects: an embodied critique of constructivist IR theory Erik Ringmar Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden. E-mail: erik@ringmar.net This article provides a critique of constructivism and post-structuralism within IR theory from an embodied, realist perspective. Meaning is not made as much as experienced, we will argue, and subjectivity is not constructed as much as enacted. The theater illustrates the difference between constructivist, post-structuralist and embodied perspectives. By analyzing international politics in terms of a performance instead of performativity a more credible version of the sovereign subject can be identiﬁed. The world is a stage and it is only by appearing on this world stage that the state becomes real. To back up this argument the article draws from recent research in cognitive theory and neuroscience. Journal of International Relations and Development (2016) 19, 101–125. doi:10.1057/jird.2015.33; published online 21 August 2015 Keywords: cognitive theory; constructivism; neuroscience; performances; performativity; post-structuralism; practices During the past 30 years, constructivism has established itself as a dominant philosophical position among scholars of international relations. Although a naïve empiricism no doubt still holds sway in terms of the sheer quantity of scholarship produced, few naïve empiricists are prepared to stand up and defend their position. Constructivists have no similar qualms. As they self-conﬁdently declare, social reality is constituted through meanings that are socially constructed. Hence, a proper study of international relations forces us to investigate how meanings are made and disseminated. This constructedness extends also to the subjects of international life. There is no given way in which we ‘really are’; there is no ‘human nature’, nor is there an inherent nature of the state. Instead, we too, as well as the states we inhabit, are socially interpreted and constructed. And, crucially, the environments in which social subjects ﬁnd themselves are socially constructed too, including the anarchical realm in which states act, react and interact. Performances provide a major means through which such meaning is made. Much of what takes place in world politics is not just happening; rather, it is made to happen, and to appear, in a certain fashion — it is performed. Yet, constructivists disagree among themselves with regard to what they take a performance to be. According to cultural constructivists — inspired, inter alia, by the writings of Clifford Geertz, Ervin Goffman and George Herbert Mead — performances are a Journal of International Relations and Development, 2016, 19, (101–125) © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1408-6980/16 www.palgrave-journals.com/jird/ Journal of International Relations and Development Volume 19, Number 1, 2016 102 means of giving meaning to actors, their intentions, the environments they are in, and the situations they are facing. Here, performances are a way of assigning predicates to the world — a way of publicly declaring what is what. Yet, according to structural constructivists, this is a hopelessly naïve undertaking since it presupposes that social actors have a real, abiding and pre-given existence prior to the performance itself.1 Drawing on Judith Butler’s ideas regarding the constitution of identities — which, in turn, are indebted to John Austin and Jacques Derrida — structural constructivists investigate the way ‘discursive practices’ are invoked in order to create both meanings and subjects. Discursive practices are texts, or text analogues, through which actors are cited and recited into existence. That is to say, discursive practices too are performed, although structural constructivists prefer to talk about ‘performativity’ rather than a performance in order to avoid any implications of essentialism. This article will defend the notion of a performance and reject the idea of performativity as reductive and after-the-fact.2 Yet, the notion of a performance that will be defended is not the one that cultural constructivists embrace. Indeed, the argument will proceed by ﬁrst accepting many of the structural constructivists’ conclusions. There can indeed be no such entity as an abiding subject and there is no pre-given state to which meanings can be straightforwardly attached. Structural constructivists are also correct to point out that our social personæ are deeply inﬂuenced by structures of power; yet, we shall insist that this is not all that we are. Instead, consciousness is constituted by the functions of our neurological systems and we can legitimately talk about humans as possessing a certain nature that can be studied by the tools of cognitive theory and neuroscience. Scholars in the social sciences have an instinctive, and well-founded, scepticism of the natural sciences, which they regard as both reductive and deterministic. Yet, as far as cognitive theory and neuroscience are concerned, these are outdated concerns, which do not apply to versions of the disciplines advocated by a new generation of scholars. Constructivists have conclusively established that meaning matters to the study of international relations — and cognitive theory can tell us how meaning is made. Constructivists have also argued that international politics can be understood as a performance — and neuroscience can tell us how performances achieve their effects. This is why cognitive theory and neuroscience make a difference to the study of international relations.3 What more than anything is missing from constructivists’ understanding of a performance is the presence of the body.4 Although there are no abiding, pre-given, subjects that can be represented on stage, the stage is ﬁlled with abiding, pre-given bodies, and these bodies are the loci of meanings that reach far beyond what discourse, no matter how often recited, is able to capture and convey. And, most interestingly, these bodies are communicating with the bodies of the members of the audience — often in a direct fashion, unmediated by interpretation and discourse. The alternative philosophical position that backs up these claims could be called ‘embodied realism’. Embodied realism takes its basis in the body’s experiences of the environment and sees meaning as the outcome of this interaction. From this Erik Ringmar How the world stage makes its subjects 103 alternative philosophical vantage point, meaning and subjectivity can be studied in ways that are radically different from those proposed by constructivists of both stripes. The upshot is a strong claim: it is through performances that international politics comes to be imagined and it is this imagined entity that constitutes international politics. This is not to say that international politics is not ﬁlled with a wealth of material objects, factors and processes; yet, international politics only came to be imaginable once states, in early modern Europe, were placed on a ‘world-stage’ on which they were seen as ‘actors’ who acted and interacted with one another. This is a historical argument, backed up by historical evidence, which lends strong support to the theoretical argument we shall be making. To be sure, there are other ways of imagining — and other ways of imagining international politics — but the theatre is by far the most powerful metaphor available. In the theatre of predication Anarchy, according to a celebrated tenet of constructivism, has no pre-determined content (Wendt 1992: 391–425; Checkel 1998: 324–48; Wendt 1999: esp. 246–312; Adler 2002: 95–118; cf. Guzzini 2013a: 147–82). Instead, anarchy is a structural principle that describes the decentralised way in which power is distributed in the international system. As such, it is only as interpreted that anarchy can come to inﬂuence the way we act. To each of us, this interpretation presents itself as a fact — we are born into a certain naturalised, meaningful world — yet, like all human artefacts, interpretations have a history that can be retraced, if nothing else to an imaginary ﬁrst beginning. Imagine, says Alexander Wendt, an original encounter between Ego and Alter where both present themselves to the other, using gestures and other signals through which their intentions are interpreted (cf. Mead 1932/1964: 135–226; Gillespie 2005: 19–39). Through such mutual interpretations, they create an inter-subjectively deﬁned environment in which their interaction can be pursued. The setting here is that of a stage where Ego and Alter perform in front of the other, taking turns as members of the audience (Wendt 1992: 404). Perhaps we could call this the ‘theatre of predication’ since it is through the unfolding of the performance that the actors come to attach predicates to each other and their interaction, making certain interpretations more compelling than others (ibid.: 404–05). When we go on to act on the basis of the interpretations thus established, a certain world comes into being. Our interpretations are incorporated into daily habits and routines and, as a result, the interpretations are institutionalised (ibid.: 412–15). That is to say, they become parts of the social architecture that makes up what we take our societies to be. Since society is an inter-subjective fact, constituted by interpretations but independent of our own understanding of it, it will remain in place whatever we as individuals make of it. To reject the existence of a social fact is thus just as foolish as rejecting the existence of a material fact (Wendt 1999: 111–12; Searle 2006: Journal of International Relations and Development Volume 19, Number 1, 2016 104 13–14; Guzzini 2013b: 219). All social institutions are simultaneously imagined and real, and they are real because they are imagined. The aggregate collection of interpretations, practices and institutions is the ‘cultural system’ of a certain society, and the kind of constructivists who see meanings as lodged in a cultural system could therefore be referred to as ‘cultural constructivists’ (Geertz 1985a: 94–120). Among scholars of international relations, cultural constructivists insist that the international system too can be described as a society of sorts and that it too has a culture. There is a culture of anarchy into which states, their leaders and citizens are socialised and with the help of which they interpret, and act in, the world (Wendt 1999: 246–312). According to cultural constructivists, subjects are socially constructed too. As the interaction between Ego and Alter deepens, they gradually come to reveal more about themselves, and what they eventually come to recognise is not just a certain pattern of behaviour but a certain person (Wendt 1999: 329; cf. Ringmar 1996: 450– 58; Ross 2006: 210–14). Each person has a role in the unfolding of the drama, which can be elaborated in a story and narratively enacted. Identity construction too takes place in the theatre of predication, as members of the audience come to recognise a certain person as a person of a certain kind. Compare relations between states (Lindemann and Ringmar 2011; Ringmar 2014: 446–58). A state presents itself as an actor on the world stage, telling various stories about itself, and proceeds to ask for recognition of the identity thus conceived. It is then up to other states to decide whether or not to recognise the performer under this description. It is only to the extent that the state is recognised that it can take its place among other, established and accepted states in the world. Thus understood, the theatre of predication takes a number of things for granted. Most obviously, it presupposes the existence of a self who can interpret the world around her and enter the stage and present herself to others in a certain fashion. Recognition presupposes the existence of a ready-made self to whom predicates can be attached and about whom stories can be told. Recognition presupposes recognisability (Butler 1997: 5; cf. Birnbaum 2015: Chap. 2). International politics, as cultural constructivists describe it, is already constituted by clearly differentiated subjects waiting to be recognized, or waiting to extend recognition to others. This is how a Cartesian dichotomy between a self and the world comes to be built into the analysis. Much as in the philosophical reﬂections of René Descartes, the cogito becomes the very premise of the investigation. The subject is there from the start, thinking and thinking about itself, and what is at stake in the interaction is only the question of which social persona this cogito is to be recognised as.5 Wendt, for one, is explicit about his Cartesian starting-points. There are two kinds of ‘independently existing stuff’, he explains — ‘a world of ideas’ and ‘a world of material reality’ — and it is only by keeping the two apart that we can theorise the relationship between them (Wendt 1999: 112; Ross 2006: 208; cf. Guzzini 2013a: 200–01, 2013b: 219). The state provides an example. The state manifests itself in a physical form — it has a constitution, an army, a judicial system and so on — yet, Erik Ringmar How the world stage makes its subjects 105 these physical manifestations are not what the state really is. Instead, states are constituted through shared interpretations, through mutual recognition and through the practices in which they come to engage. Meaning through performativity The group of scholars that we shall call ‘structural constructivists’ agree that the social world is constructed through interpretations, yet they see this construction as taking place in quite a different fashion and they are adamant that the Cartesian subject is a metaphysical illusion. There can be no someone, they insist, who precedes, and underlies, the actions and features through which individuals come to appear in the world. It is not ‘individuals who have experiences, but instead subjects who are constituted through experience’ (Scott 1991: 779). Moreover, since the kinds of experiences available to us depend on cultural, political and socio-economic structures of power, the subject is necessarily culturally, politically and socioeconomically constituted. What we call a ‘woman’ is a function of the patriarchal system; what we call a ‘worker’ is a function of the capitalist system and so on. Thus understood, there is only a small step from analysis to critique. To reveal how ‘woman’, ‘worker’, etc. came to acquire their identities is to criticise those identities and to start constructing more acceptable alternatives (Scott 1991: 793). This is what Jacques Derrida refers to as ‘deconstruction’ — the reversal of established hierarchies, the introduction of new oppositions, the attempt to expose repressed terms and to challenge the natural and inevitable status of seemingly dichotomous pairs. Applying these deconstructivist tools to the notion of the self, we come to realise that there is no one there. Deconstruction reveals ‘the metaphysics of presence’ — the illusion that we are present to ourselves, as though beneath all the empirical jetsam and emotional ﬂotsam there really were a complete person, ready to be unearthed (Derrida 1982a: 11, 16). There can be no ‘freedom’ and no ‘authenticity’, Judith Butler explains, since ‘the ascription of interiority is itself a publicly regulated and sanctioned form of essence fabrication’ (Butler 1988: 195; cf. Butler 1989a, b; 1993: vii–xxviii; Salih 2006: 55–68). As far as performances are concerned, this conclusion forces us to revisit the notion of mimesis, or ‘imitation’. If structural constructivists are correct, there can be no real person off-stage, which the actors on-stage seek to represent. Instead, we are all copies of an original that itself is absent; there is no presence behind the representation and there is only motion where there appears to be emotion (Derrida 1982b: 16–21). Any conception of the ‘natural’, Butler concludes, is a dangerous ‘illusion’ of which we must be ‘cured’ (Butler 1989a: 92–93; cf. Bordo 2004: 290–91; Wilcox 2014). The cure, in turn, consists of recasting all biological claims within a ‘more encompassing framework’, which sees discourse as foundational and the body as ‘text’. When applied to the study of international politics, this argument turns into a critique of the state or, to be more precise, into a critique of sovereignty. There is no Journal of International Relations and Development Volume 19, Number 1, 2016 106 such thing as a state, structural constructivists among IR scholars conclude, at least if we take the state to constitute a pre-existing subject to which sovereignty can be attached as an attribute (Weber 1998: 84). Focusing on ‘institutions’, the ‘people’, or perhaps on the state as a transcendental idea, mainstream accounts always presuppose what they intend to prove. Instead, sovereignty is best understood as the process through which political subjects come to constitute themselves as such. ‘I suggest’, says Cynthia Weber, ‘that sovereign nation-states are not pre-given subjects but in process and that all subjects in process (be they individual or collective) are the ontological effects of practices which are performatively enacted’ (ibid.: 78). Even if we reject the idea of a pre-given self, however, there is still the illusion of such a being, and the question thus becomes how that illusion ﬁrst arose. According to structural constructivists, the self is created through reiterative practices, which get their meaning from their place in a semiotic system such as language. And words, as John Austin noted, do not only mean things but also do things in the world; they have a ‘perlocutionary force’ (Austin 1962: 101–32). The proverbial example is the ‘I do’ of the wedding ceremony. By speaking the words, you are not merely conveying meaning, you are also doing something, you are constituting a marriage. The words are performed and thereby enacted. Adding to Austin’s conclusions, Derrida emphasises what he calls the ‘citational’ quality of even the most pragmatic forms of language use; the texts we invoke always cite seemingly absent contexts from which their meaning is ultimately derived (Derrida 1982b: 18; cf. Miller 2007: 222–33). This is how the subject comes to be constituted. ‘The subject is inscribed in language, is a “function” of language, becomes a speaking subject only by making its speech conform […] to the system of the rules of language as a system of differences’ (Derrida 1982a: 15; cf. Coleman 1997: 321–23). The human subject is ‘a being devoid of Being until it is organized by a system of codes’. Our identities take shape, Judith Butler agrees, through the perlocutionary force of the discourse we apply to ourselves (Butler 1988: 519–31). Talking about the beings that we take ourselves to be, we quote statements that connote normalcy and imply acceptance much as a lawyer might cite supporting precedents in a court of law. By making performative statements, and applying them to ourselves, a certain person comes into being; performativity is ‘a compulsory reiteration of those norms through which a subject is constituted’; ‘subjectivity is performatively constituted by the ritualized production or codiﬁed social behavior’.6 This is the argument that Cynthia Weber and David Campbell apply to the study of international relations. ‘There is no sovereign or state identity behind expressions of state sovereignty’, Weber summarises. ‘The identity of the state is performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its results’ (Weber 1998: 89). States, Campbell concurs, are ‘unavoidably paradoxical entities which do not possess pre-discursive, stable identities’ (Campbell 1998: 11). Foreign policy discourse is ‘a persistent impersonation that passes as the real’; states state and through their statements they instate and reinstate themselves as sovereign actors. Moreover, this is Erik Ringmar How the world stage makes its subjects 107 a constantly ongoing process. ‘For a state to end its practices of representation would be to expose its lack of pre-discursive foundations; stasis would be death’ (ibid.). Weber talks about sovereignty as a form of simulation, but while simulations are deﬁned through their likeness to the real, the world politics that she describes contains no originals (Weber 1998: 92–93). Subjectivity and neuroscience There are indeed good reasons to reject the Cartesian notion of the cogito. The dichotomy between a world of ideas and a world of brute physical matter, as identiﬁed by cultural constructivists, is not tenable. There is only one world — a world in which we are simultaneously self-conscious selves and material bodies — and the challenge is how this world can be captured in one comprehensive account. This is what structural constructivists try to do but their attempts are hardly convincing. The subjects they describe are bleak, two-dimensional characters determined entirely by forces beyond their control; they are puppets on structuralist strings, formed by language, by power and by language-as-power. Subjectivity, on their account, is not the result of anyone’s lived experience but is instead mechanically produced; seeing the world as a function of the operations of semiotic systems, we are all read and recited into existence.7 For an alternative account, consider what contemporary neuroscience has to say about subjectivity (Damasio 1994, 2012; cf. Jeffery 2014: 584–89). Constructivists are characteristically weary of claims made by the natural sciences, which they regard as both reductive and deterministic. According to structural constructivists, the language of natural science is a language among others, which can claim no privileged access to truth (Žižek 2000: 9–32). And while cultural constructivists, for their part, may concede that the natural sciences provide an accurate account of the physical world, they have nothing interesting to say about society. Social life is about meaning, and social facts emerge at a social level, which is higher than the world that natural scientists study. And yet, if there is only one world, not two, we cannot allow this dichotomy to stand. We must make the conscious and the material, the social and the natural, into aspects of the same story. However, instead of following structural constructivists and basing such a uniﬁed account on linguistic structures, we should base it on the human body (Damasio 1994: 124; Brothers 1997: 74–79; Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 75–78; Johnson 2008: 114–20). Compare, for example, the account provided by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. The self-conscious self that Damasio describes is built up through inter-communicating layers. In the most basic layer, we ﬁnd a number of automatic processes that regulate various homeostatic states — heart rate, oxygen levels, body temperature, endocrinal processes and so on. Next, we have the basic neurological and cognitive processes — the ‘proto-self’ — which provide us Journal of International Relations and Development Volume 19, Number 1, 2016 108 with a sense of direction and a sense of being alive (Damasio 2012: 213–20). On top of this layer, there are more advanced processes resulting in the constitution of a ‘core consciousness’, a self that feels and desires and knows that it feels and desires. Finally, there is the ‘autobiographical self’, who appears in the stories we tell about ourselves to ourselves and to others. The autobiographical self is the narrated self, which is created, recognised and conﬁrmed through social performances (Brothers 1997: 126–41). The mistake that constructivists make is to focus only on the last of these layers. Structural constructivists see the self as constructed through semiotic systems, but semiotic systems can only have an effect late in the process of self-construction, once the physiological and neurological processes, which constitute consciousness, have produced their results and once the conscious self has come to experience the world and to orient itself in it. Cultural constructivists, for their part, make the mistake of thinking that a narrated self is all there is. But the narrated self depends for its proper functioning not only on social processes of recognition, but on both the proto-self and core consciousness, as becomes obvious whenever the normal functioning of these two happens to break down (Zahavi 2009: 559). There is only one self, of which physiological, neurological and social processes are aspects, but the aspects are integrated and they mutually constitute one another (Damasio 1994: 3–51; Zahavi 2009: 559). To be sure, human beings are socially constructed, but they are not only socially constructed, and they are certainly not socially constructed ‘all the way down’. There is a basic constitution — a human nature — which is distinctly different from the constitution of other entities that exist in the world.8 Take the example of ‘citationality’ and ‘reiterability’, which feature so prominently in the structural constructivists’ account. Social identities are constituted by such imitations, we may agree, and it is not unreasonable to argue that distributions of power are reﬂected in the models we emulate (Bagehot 1873: 92–98; Tarde 1895: 66–98). What is not reasonable, however, is to conclude that this exhausts the account of subjectivity (Zahavi 2007: 179–202). The more fundamental, neurologically grounded, process at work here is one of habituation.9 All forms of habitual behaviour share a common neural structure. This includes the body’s basic motor activity, everyday routines and social rituals, but also obsessive compulsive disorders, stereotypies and repetitive behaviours of various kinds. Citationality and reiterability are easily added to this list. ‘Many of these repetitive behaviors, whether motor or cognitive, are built up in part through the action of basal ganglia-based neural circuits that can iteratively evaluate contexts and select actions and can then form chunked representations of action sequences that can inﬂuence both cortical and sub-cortical brain structures’ (Graybiel 2008: 361). In all these cases, the brain is rewarded by a release of dopamine; if you try something once, the brain wants to try it again. As a result, grooves are formed — neural pathways along which signals ﬂow more easily. It is through such habituation that we acquire the expertise on which our lives rely. We learn to do things in a quasi-automatic, quasi-unconscious manner, and even Erik Ringmar How the world stage makes its subjects 109 obviously cognitive tasks rely heavily on such expertise. Habits originate not in us, not in the environment, but in the interaction between ourselves and the environment (cf. James 1890: 104–27; Dewey 1922: 75; Noë 2009: 97–128). Habits become habits, as opposed to occasional behaviour, once they have shown themselves to respond appropriately to the world in which we live. But note that these responses only very occasionally require the kind of explicit interpretations that constructivists emphasise. Most of the time, we take the world for granted and act in response to what the situation requires. ‘[I]ntelligence and understanding’, says the cognitive theorist Andy Clark, ‘are rooted not in the presence and manipulation of explicit, language-like data structures, but in something more earthy: the tuning of basic responses to a real world that enables an embodied organism to sense, act, and survive’ (Clark 1998: 4). Such attunement to an environment explains how we do most of what we do. ‘The bench showed up as a veritable invitation to sit down and not as something that I need to look at, categorize, evaluate, and then, only then, make use of’ (Noë 2009: 121). Emotions play a crucial role in this process of attunement. Consider, for example, what Damasio refers to as ‘somatic markers’ (Damasio et al. 1996: 1413–20; cf. McDermott 2014). A somatic marker attaches an affective value to an event, a person or a situation, telling us not what the event, person or situation mean in general but what they means to us. Once provided by an affective marker, the green marzipan coating on a creamy bun can suddenly recreate the memory of a visit to a fashionable café as a child in the last century. Our bodies rely on such madeleine effects for the ‘anticipation of situations, previewing of possible outcomes, navigation of the possible future, and invention of management solutions’ (Lehrer 2008: 75–95; Damasio 2012: 187). The emotion triggers a reaction that is remembered by our bodies rather than by our minds (James 1884: 188–205; Lange 1922: 64–83). We act before we have had time to think and it is often a good thing too since thinking, interpretation, take far too long. We see a tiger, we run, and only later do we realise what happened (cf. Pockett et al. 2009). Obviously, much of this environment is social and consists of our relations with other people. As neuroscientists can explain, the attunement that takes place in relation to the social environment relies on a range of sub- and pre-cognitive processes. Consider, for example, the multitude of unconscious ways in which our bodies are synchronised with the bodies of others. Singing in unison coordinates breathing and eventually the heartbeats of the singers come to accelerate and decelerate in sync with one another. Moving together, we are moved together (Vickhoff et al. 2013). Moreover, as scientists have demonstrated, coordinated bodies are more likely to share objects of attention, to show concern for each other, to cooperate, identify with one another, and even to think alike (Hove and Risen 2009: 949–60; Vacharkulksemsuk and Fredrickson 2012: 399–400; Repp and Su 2013: 403–52). This explains that ‘strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling Journal of International Relations and Development Volume 19, Number 1, 2016 110 out, becoming bigger than life’, which participation in synchronised activities can provide (McNeill 2008: 2; cf. Ehrenreich 2007). Another, recently much discussed pre-cognitive means of adjusting ourselves to our environment is provided by so-called ‘mirror neurons’ (Gallese and Goldman 1998; Rizzolatti et al. 2002; Pineda 2010). As neuroscientists have shown, whenever we observe someone else doing something, areas of our brains responsible for processing visual information are activated, but so are areas that would be responsible if we were to carry out the task ourselves. That is to say, the observer’s brain is not only watching, but also acting; in fact, as far as the brain is concerned, watching is a kind of acting. This is how we learn to understand what others are doing and how to ascribe intentions to others (Brothers 1997: 78). If the motor cortices of infants resonate directly when they see their parents stick out their tongues, they have no need to consciously interpret what they see. Newborns imitate before they can interpret; indeed, their ability to interpret emerges from their ability to imitate. Such embodied simulations can also explain much-discussed social science topics such as the origin of human empathy and perhaps even political solidarity (Gallese 2006: 150–53). This discussion has taken us far from the subject matter of international relations. What has concerned us have been questions regarding consciousness and the nature of human subjectivity, and although states too can be said to be subjects, they are not subjects in this way. It is consequently not possible to apply these neurophysiological ﬁndings to a discussion of states. Yet this detour has taken us very close to the shortcomings of constructivist approaches. Human subjectivity, we can now conclude, is not just a social construct; it is based neither on how we interpret ourselves nor on how we are interpreted by others; and we are emphatically not made up of citations and reiterations. Instead, we are a physiological/social compound that can only be satisfactorily described by cognitive neuroscientists who take social facts seriously and by social scientists who are prepared to acknowledge the research results of cognitive neuroscience. To be sure, the brain is constituted biologically, but since everything that happens to us leaves traces in its plastic structure, the brain has a social history (cf. Malabou 2008; Brown 2013: 441–44) The brain is situated in the body and the body is situated in an environment with which it is in constant, mind-altering contact. Meaning and cognitive theory In order to take us from neurophysiology to questions of international relations, let us next consider the question of meaning. Meaning is a topic that cognitive theorists have discussed at great length and their conclusions are quite different from those that constructivists have reached. Consider, for example, how imagination works. To imagine something is to conjure something up in our minds that is not physically present to our senses. We do this all the time of course, yet imagination is a Erik Ringmar How the world stage makes its subjects 111 remarkable process that operates with the help of what cognitive theorists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner refer to as ‘conceptual blends’ (Fauconnier and Turner 2003: 39–67, 1996; cf. Blair 2009: 92–103). In a conceptual blend, the meanings constructed in two or more input-spaces are projected onto an additional, third space, where new meanings arise that were not originally present in the inputs. The blended space exist in a subjunctive mode, as it were; it points to the existence of a possible world that is organised according to the combined logics of other, real or possible worlds. Conceptual blends are ‘as if’ simulations that we run in our minds, and the ability to run various scenarios ‘in the blend’ means that we can avoid going through time-consuming, or dangerous, processes of trial and error (Fauconnier and Turner 2003: 217). It is easy to see why animals that know how to engage in such simulations have been favoured by evolution. Take ‘the case of the missing chair’ (Fauconnier and Turner 1998: 146–49; cf. Cook 2006: 85–86). Curiously, but also self-evidently, there can be no nothing in the world since there is at least one of everything. For that reason, all absences are conceived of in a subjunctive mood. This is the case, for example, with missing chairs: the missing chair is a thing in the blend that, viewed from the outside, is a nonthing. It can be pointed to and takes up physical space. It inherits its physical characteristics of being a gap from the ‘actual’ input, in which there is not a chair in the corresponding position. (Fauconnier and Turner 2003: 241) This is precisely the reason why many cultures, including the classical Greek and Roman, operated with number systems that did not include a zero. The zero was eventually invented in India as one input space — the world of numbers — came to be blended with another input space — the subjunctive world of absences. Strictly speaking, the number zero exists only in this blended conceptual space. This is also, let us suggest, how we imagine ourselves. There is clearly no point in looking for ourselves ‘inside ourselves’ since this only begs the questions of what we are looking for and where we are to look (Zahavi 2008: 99–146). Neither will we ﬁnd ourselves inside our brains — the ‘seat of the soul’ is not, as Descartes once believed, located in the pineal gland. Instead, we exist only in the conceptual blends in which various input spaces come to be combined. We are imaginary, a useful assumption conceived of in a subjunctive mode, and as such we are no different from everything else that human beings make up. If this is worrying to us, we should remember that we are both as real and as imaginary as the number zero, or as a missing chair.10 Which images we apply to ourselves depends ultimately on how our bodies interact with the world. As cognitive theorists explain, meaning is a far broader and much richer notion than constructivists acknowledge. The world is made meaningful not as a result of explicit interpretations but through our direct bodily experiences of it; meaning is something felt, something perceived, the qualia through which we experience life (Johnson 2008: 25). ‘An embodied view of meaning’, Mark Johnson argues, Journal of International Relations and Development Volume 19, Number 1, 2016 112 looks for the origins and structures of meaning in the organic activities of embodied creatures in interaction with their changing environments. It sees meaning and all our higher functioning as growing out of and shaped by our abilities to perceive things, manipulate things, move our bodies in space, and evaluate our situation. (ibid.: 11) The world is, consequently, just as meaningful, albeit in a different fashion, to animals — be it dogs or gastropods — who engage in no explicit interpretations of their own, and it is meaningful to new-borns too who have no words with which to describe it. The point is not that a body is required for cognition to take place — everyone agrees with that — but rather that the way our bodies interact with their environments gives rise to the meanings we come up with (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 37; Thompson 2010: 54–57). To perceive and to conceive are closely related activities. Starting from these basic embodied experiences, we gradually go on to construct conceptual systems of increasing complexity and scope. A key mechanism here is metaphor, and as cognitive theorists explain, all basic metaphors are based on bodily experiences (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 19–21; Johnson 2008: 135–54). It is because of our body’s knowledge of what it means to pile things on top of one another that ‘more’ is taken to be ‘up’, or because we pour liquids into containers that our ‘hearts’ can be ‘ﬁlled with joy’ (Johnson 2008: 195). Everything else that we interpret is grounded in embodied metaphors. Consider, for example, the metaphors so heavily relied on by scholars of international relations.(Marks 2001: 358–64; cf. Ringmar 2006: 66–71). We understand the notion of ‘balances of power’ since we have an embodied knowledge of what balancing means and various metaphorical ways of conceiving of power, and we understand the notion of a ‘security dilemma’ since we have an embodied knowledge of both dilemmas and security. Meaning, conceived in this experiential, embodied fashion, implies a very different ontology than that invoked by constructivists. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call it ‘embodied realism’. ‘Our concepts’, they explain, cannot be a direct reﬂection of external, objective, mind-free reality because our sensorimotor system plays a crucial role in shaping them. On the other hand, it is the involvement of the sensorimotor system in the conceptual system that keeps the conceptual system very much in touch with the world. (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 44) Constructivists show up too late, as it were, when meaning has already happened. Meaning is not, as cultural constructivists would have it, contained in a shared, intersubjective system which is inherited from previous generations and into which each new generation is socialised. Neither is meaning, as structural constructivists argue, a function of the way the world is represented in language or in a language analogue. Instead, the reality of the world is conﬁrmed through our direct bodily interaction with it (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 17–18). But the real is, at the same Erik Ringmar How the world stage makes its subjects 113 time, not intrinsically ‘hard’ and not even ‘material’, and it does not, as cultural constructivists claim, constitute a world of ‘brute physical facts’. The real is the real as we experience it, but since experiences vary between species, other animals experience reality quite differently (cf. Gibson 1986: 128; Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 25, 104–06). This is not to deny that people also make sense together, in explicit and fully verbalised ways, and it is not to deny that power plays an important role in the constitution of social life (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 102–04). A uniﬁed account of the human must incorporate both the physiological and the social. An analysis of metaphor illustrates this combination of processes. Clearly, many metaphors are speciﬁc to a particular culture. In Thailand, ‘she walks like an elephant’ is an expression of highest praise, and in Scotland ‘my love’ can be compared to ‘a red, red, rose’. However, neither metaphor makes much sense in societies not familiar with elephants or roses. Embodied realism acknowledges these facts, but insists that embodied meaning is the more fundamental process and that all conceptual structures, no matter how elaborate and culturally speciﬁc, start from the body’s interaction with the world. After all, the most basic metaphors do not vary over time or from one society to the next (Brown 1991). Meanings are universal to the extent that human bodies, in their fundamental physiological constitution, all are alike and to the extent that we interact with the world in the same fashion. Finding ourselves in theatre Once the constructivist view of subjectivity and meaning have been properly reformulated, we are in a position to return to the theatre. The state, we will ultimately conclude, is constituted by being performed and so are international relations; yet, before this argument can make sense, we need to rethink the notion of a performance. Cultural constructivists, we have said, use performances — the ‘theatre of predication’ — as a means of attaching interpretations to the world; yet, as structural constructivists have insisted, this only poses the problem of who that someone is who appears on stage. As long as theatre is understood in terms of representation, it will necessarily fail since there is no person off-stage who is abiding, pre-given and real. Yet, the solution that structural constructivists have proposed is not acceptable, we have concluded, since the selves they have identiﬁed resemble no known selves. This is where cognitive neuroscience comes to the rescue (Blair 2010a). What appears on stage, we now see, are not copies of off-stage originals as much as bodies moving in, and interacting with, an environment. The bodies are not representations as much as presentations: they are present right there in front of us on stage and they are both abiding and pre-given. Theatre is ‘presencing’, not representing; what happens on stage is an original event, not a reference to some off-stage events, which are somehow more real (Diamond 2000: 34). Journal of International Relations and Development Volume 19, Number 1, 2016 114 It is this presence to which we as an audience react, but the spectrum of our reactions is far broader than what constructivists acknowledge. A performance is not interpreted as much as it is lived, and much of the co-living takes place through subconscious and pre-cognitive synchronisation. A performance conjures up a certain atmosphere to which the people on stage attune themselves, and we, audience members, understand what is going on as mirror-neurons ﬁre in our brains and as we come to attune ourselves to what transpires before us. What seems to be happening is really happening, lodged in the bodies of the actors and directly conveyed to the bodies of the members of the audience (Rokotnitz 2008: 415). Thus, if, in a play, a woman touches a man, our brains transform the visual stimulus into an activation of the brain areas involved in our own experience of touch; if a zipper is opened or a liquid is slurped, the same motor systems are activated in us, resulting in a whole range of anticipations and premonitions (ibid.: 412–13). Moreover, the somatic markers we associate with actions such as these, and the memories associated with those markers, are activated too, making us understand before we interpret (Damasio 1994: 180–91). Theatre makes us feel, that is, not by communicating interpretations of feelingstates, but by activating our own experiences of those very states (Blair 2010b: 11–21). The tears on the face of the actor occur in the context of a performance, but the tears on the faces of members of the audience occur in the context of their lives. ‘We imitate in order to feel’, as the theatre scholar Amy Cook puts it, ‘and we feel in order to know’ (Cook 2009: 114–15; Gallese 2009: 16). ‘[G]oing to the theatre’, says Naomi Rokotnitz, ‘is a form of active knowledge acquisition that is not as different from other experiences as was once believed’. In fact, because drama is designed for a purpose and is created deliberately in order to stimulate, and because our emotional engagement with the action is (at least) once removed, it may be argued that we learn more easily from theater than from life. (Rokotnitz 2010: 139) When they leave the theatre after two hours, audience members often unconsciously mimic the voices and bodily postures of the actors they have just observed (Cook 2007: 592). On their way home from the Tarzan movie, all the boys began to wrestle one another. This is why a performance is entirely different from performativity.11 A performance is not the practices required by a text for the same reason that our lives are not the practices required by texts. Texts are words on paper, whereas plays and lives are things that we experience and live through. Performances are rich in their expressions, conveying experiences that appeal to all of our senses at once. The bodies of the actors have posture and gait; they walk, slouch and dance; they sweat, cry and gesticulate; they whisper, their knees go weak, their eyebrows are raised, their arms embrace.12 And all of these actions, and many more, are directed by a director, put on stage by set and clothes designers, and accentuated by light and sound engineers. Erik Ringmar How the world stage makes its subjects 115 What is conveyed through this Gesamtkunstwerk is not only a series of physical movements and a story, but, crucially, also a certain atmosphere. That is, performance conveys a certain way in which it feels to be a certain person and to live a certain kind of life (Böhme 1993: 113–26; Ratcliffe 2013: 157–76). We understand the action on stage because we are attuned to the atmosphere of the performance, to that way of being in the world. Theatre provides one of the most powerful ways in which human beings can reﬂect on themselves. Cognitive processes, as cognitive theorists have pointed out, are not limited only to processes that take place inside our bodies (Clark and Chalmers 1998: 7–19; Clark 2011: 3–29). We very commonly make use of external objects in order to imagine and to think — pieces of paper, notebooks, smart-phones, and even institutions such as museums, parliaments and the legal system (cf. Ringmar 2009: 46–56, 2001: 61–79; Gallagher 2013: 4–12). In fact, there is a body of compelling evidence to suggest that human cognition made a quantum leap as a result of the invention of the ﬁrst such cognitive extensions, foremost among which was the invention of language and the pictorial arts (Fauconnier and Turner 2003: 183–87). Public performances, or theatrical displays, were another cognitive tool invented at about the same time (Armstrong 1997: 285–88). Indeed, theatre is a particularly compelling example of a ‘mental institution’, an institution that helps us imagine and reﬂect (Cook 2006: 87). Thus understood, theatre can be thought of as an elaborate blending machine — an embodied, externalised and professionalised version of the same cognitive processes that normally go on inside the human mind. Minds and theatres are projectors, simulators, that allow us to see things we would not see otherwise. Once the curtain goes up, script, actors, stage-set and props are all blended into a theatrical space that is replete with emergent properties. What appears here is a reality that is powerful enough to hold our attention and to move us, and foremost among the images is an image of ourselves. Theatre is a place where we go to ﬁnd ourselves; where we come into our own presence and into the presence of others who are like us. The advantage of seeing ourselves on stage, as opposed to seeing ourselves in our minds, is that we can observe ourselves from the outside, as presented by someone else. We go to the theatre to learn more about what people like ourselves are and what they can be. Yet, the presence that is revealed in the blend is emphatically not the presence of a metaphysical, pre-given being — the kind of ghost that got Derrida’s goat — but is instead an imaginary character that exists only in a subjunctive mode. It is as though we really existed. Actors on the world stage Let us return to matters of international politics. The sovereign state as it is featured in theories of international relations, or in the daily practices of politicians and Journal of International Relations and Development Volume 19, Number 1, 2016 116 citizens, is presented as a person through the public performances in which it comes to appear. There is nothing incidental or ornamental about these displays, and the performances do not represent some off-stage entity that is more abiding and more real; instead the performances are constitutive of the state as we know it. There are two aspects to these theatrical displays, corresponding to the two aspects — internal and external — through which sovereignty has been understood. A ﬁrst set of performances concerns the relationship between the state and its subjects, and a second set the relationship between different states as they act and interact with one another on the world stage.13 In early modern Europe, the ﬁrst rulers who called themselves sovereign all faced the problem of how to gain legitimacy for their rule, and they all responded by means of theatrical displays through which they came to appear before their subjects. The arguments to back up their pretensions were performed and not merely stated (Nevile 2008: esp. 209–63). It was only by means of a performance that a united sovereign entity could be imagined out of the various disparate inputs — institutions, administrative practices, legal claims, territorial demarcations, coercive mechanisms, tax codes — associated with the exercise of state power. As staged and impersonated by the king, sovereignty eventually came to be believed. Consider, for example, the elaborate coronation ceremonies intended to bedazzle the subjects (Strong 1977; Hunt 2008; Wills 2014) Or consider the ballet de cour performed at the French court where the sovereign himself danced the role of his country before the assembled courtiers (Apostolides 1981: 41–65; Prest 2001: 283–98). Or consider the Swedish king Gustav II Adolf who appeared in the role of Berik, an ancient Gothic warrior, in a ritual just at the time of his coronation in 1617 (Ringmar 2006: 160). Or take the ‘royal progresses’, which took all early modern rulers on extended tours of their respective countries, with digniﬁed entries into every town along the way (Geertz 1985b: 125; Strong 1999: 42–62; Ringmar 2012: 9–12). Despite what structural constructivists argue, no nation ever wrote itself into existence; they were instead all staged and performed. The nation-state was everywhere presented and legitimated in much the same, theatrical fashion. Thus, the American struggle for independence was designed as a public performance, involving boycotts of British goods, the burning of British warships, tea being thrown into the Boston harbour, and the deﬁant convening of a First Continental Congress. Our aim, as Thomas Paine has put it, is ‘to exhibit on the theater of the universe a character hitherto unknown’ (quoted in Saks 1989: 361). ‘Drama’, the historian Eva Saks concludes, ‘was the revolutionaries’ own referent and medium for the founding of the American Republic’ (ibid.: 361). Or take the well-studied case of the performances that constituted the French Revolution (Ozouf 1976; Hunt 1984). In elaborate public ceremonies, gathering hundreds of thousands of citizens, reason was fêted and liberty exalted using recycled Greek and Roman imagery together with symbols — Phrygian hats, the tricolour ﬂag, the guillotine — expressly invented for the purpose. All over France people planted ‘liberty trees’, Erik Ringmar How the world stage makes its subjects 117 sang the ‘Carmagnole’, and danced joyously together (Hunt 1984: 64–78; cf. McNeill 2008: 59–60). The nation has continued to be performed to this day — through mass rallies in city squares, in victory parades after wars and in celebrations after successful sporting events, in angry demonstrations and in outpourings of shared grief (Garlick 1999; Pearsall 1999: 365–93; cf. Szakolczai 2012). The nation is singing the national anthem, with one voice, without individual expressions, and the melody is simple enough for everyone to join in. Neurophysiology can explain what is going on here. As mirror-neurons ﬁre in response to actions that they observe and are simultaneously engaged in, our bodies become attuned to the situations they are in. The basic physiological functions of people who go through the same movements, recite the same words or sing the same tunes, are gradually entrained, that is, they gradually come to adjust to one another (Phillips-Silver and Keller 2012: 3). Without quite realising what we are doing, we raise our ﬁsts, shout slogans, throw ticker-tape and wave ﬂags. These are physical reactions, carried out by us to be sure, yet, they are in a sense not ours; we could also say that they are the reactions of a shared, public body. It is, more than anything, in this public performance and in this public body that we come across ourselves as a nation. The second, external aspect of sovereignty came to be imagined through a similar set of theatrical displays (Ringmar 2012: 1–25). It is indeed striking how the idea of the sovereign state appeared at the same time as the notion of a ‘world stage’ on which it was placed as an actor. The state as a sovereign entity among others was only conceivable in terms of its theatrical context (Berg 1985; Christian 1987; Yates 1987; Wills 2014). In its external capacity, the state was impersonated by its ruler, who acted and interacted with other rulers who in turn impersonated their states. Indeed, in early modern Europe, sovereign rulers were often described in terms that may remind us of the stock-characters of a commedia dell’arte performance. Once these characters came to engage with one another, the drama of international politics took shape as a story that unfolded in front of the eyes of audiences in each country, who easily identiﬁed, and identiﬁed with, their respective characters. We make sense of who we are by making sense of performances, and we make sense of performances by making sense of our own role in them. This is how we learned to cheer for our countries. The world stage thus conceived was endlessly replicated in diplomatic meetings and in international conferences where ambassadors, appropriately attired and bewigged, played the role of their respective countries. Occasionally — such as during the negotiations leading up to the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) — the diplomats would themselves take to the stage to perform their version of peace (Grimm 2002: 27–37). Although the twenty-ﬁrst-century politicians are far less likely to don leotards, our states still appear as actors on the world stage. Reading newspapers, or watching TV news, we see presidents and various political leaders appearing in one or another of a relatively small set of roles. Often athletes and Journal of International Relations and Development Volume 19, Number 1, 2016 118 celebrities perform similar roles, impersonating their countries and interacting with other athletes and celebrities who impersonate theirs. Or consider the latest news as it is performed in the ﬁnancial pages of the papers: ‘India loosened its stranglehold on business’; ‘France fell into a recession and Germany pulled it out’; ‘China is to reduce its dependence on foreign energy reserves’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 42). As cognitive theory can help us explain, it is through such staged interactions that international politics is possible to imagine. Much as in the case of the sovereign subject, there is no original version, abiding and pre-given, of which these performances are copies. There is no world politics as it ‘really is’ outside of the events taking place on stage. What we have instead are input spaces — states with territories and borders, military hardware, foreign ministry bureaucracies, international organisations, and much, much more — but it is only through performance that these inputs are blended together as what we identify as ‘international relations’. It is only once it is imagined, and as it is imagined, that international politics becomes real. Here, too, the stage is presencing, not representing. The stage comes to constitute something that previously did not exist. There are other ways of imagining to be sure — other ways in which cognitive inputs can be blended together — but the theatre is by far the most powerful cognitive mechanism around. The meaning of anarchy ‘Anarchy’, according to the oft-quoted credo of constructivist IR theory, ‘is what states make of it’. That is to say, the very fact that power in international politics is decentralised does not by itself mean that cooperation is impossible or that wars are an ever-present threat. Anarchy, in and by itself, does not mean anything in particular. Instead, anarchy is interpreted through public performances — through the interaction between Ego and Alter in the case of cultural constructivists, and through the performance of discursive practices in the case of structural constructivists. In this article, we criticised constructivism, in both versions, for ignoring the neurological and cognitive bases of such meaning-making, and the critique was grounded in a different ontology and founded on an alternative conception of a performance.14 Meaning is not the result of interpretations but of embodied experiences, and performances are not representations of something else but ways of coming into the presence of ourselves. To stage something in public is to imagine publicly, and it is by imaging a public self that we come into its presence. This is not to presume the existence of some collective, metaphysical entity; it is not to believe in ghosts, but it is to believe in stagecraft. It is only as performed that international politics becomes visualisable and, thereby, imaginable and, thereby, real. This is how we closed the Cartesian gap between a res cogitans and a res extensa. There are not, as cultural constructivists have argued, a world of ideas and another world of physical matter; there is only one world, a world that we make sense of Erik Ringmar How the world stage makes its subjects 119 through the experiences of our bodies. ‘Construction’ is the wrong metaphor for this process. Meaning can certainly be constructed — both as a cultural and as a discursive process — but all such construction projects will necessarily employ the building-blocs that our bodies have already identiﬁed. Meanings are, ﬁrst of all, experienced, and only subsequently made. The constructivist credo must be reformulated: anarchy is not what states make of it; anarchy is, ﬁrst and foremost, what our bodies experience and only secondarily what we come to distinguish conceptually. And crucially, what states make of something depends on what we make of states, and states, as well as the international system in which they interact, are imagined only as they are performed. This is how the world stage makes its subjects. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Jozef Bátora, Maria Birnbaum, Rhonda Blair, Karin Fierke, Stefano Guzzini, Aliaksei Kazharski, Lukas Makovicky, Matej Navrátil, Jordan Zlatev, to three anonymous reviewers, and to the participants in seminars at the Comenius University, Bratislava, and the Goethe University, Frankfurt, for comments on a previous version of this article. Notes 1 For our purposes, the category of structural constructivists includes scholars who would, no doubt, prefer to label themselves ‘post-structuralists’. This inclusion is justiﬁed by the fact that poststructuralists, much as earlier generations of structuralists, emphasise the role that language and language analogues play in the constitution of social life. In practice, post-structuralists, too, ascribe a self-contained, coherent structure to language as a system. In other words, the ‘post’ preﬁx is not sufﬁciently determinate to constitute a break with traditional forms of structuralism. 2 ‘I hold it’, as Hillis Miller puts it, ‘that it would be a catastrophe to blur different meanings of “performativity”’ (Miller 2007: 220). 3 Although several calls have been issued for a study of neuroscience and international relations — Brown (2013), Neumann (2014a) — there are (yet) few illustrations of how this could be done. One exception is McDermott and Hatemi (2014); for words of warning, see Jeffery (2014). 4 ‘[W]e cannot’, as Neumann puts it, ‘go on putting the physical body — and, by extension, biology and psychology — under erasure forever. […] Contra Butler and followers, biology has to be brought back in play’ (Neumann 2014a: 346, 350). An example of what Neumann has in mind is Fierke (2014); for a defense of Butlerian approaches, see Wilcox (2014: 359–64); see also Wilcox (2015). 5 Markell (2003: 9–38). ‘Wendt’, as Ross puts it, ‘loses purchase on modes of belief and identity that are inspired and absorbed before being chosen’ (Ross 2006: 199). 6 Butler (1989a: 95). ‘[S]ubjectivity and individuality,’ as Michel Foucault put it, ‘are not rooted in some free and spontaneous interiority. Rather, we are dealing with categories produced in a system of social organization’ (Foucault 1976: 112); for a critique, see Miller (2007: 223–26). 7 ‘Butler’s world’, as Susan Bordo puts it, ‘is one in which language swallows everything up’ (Bordo 2004: 291). For further critique of Butler from a feminist perspective, see Nelson (1999: 331–32) and Benhabib (1994: 76–92). 8 As convincingly argued, in the context of evolutionary biology, by Brown (2013). ‘Seeing that the entire social science undertaking rests on the idea that human beings have a certain sameness,’ as Neumann puts it, ‘it rests upon us to follow and relate to evolving knowledge about that sameness, Journal of International Relations and Development Volume 19, Number 1, 2016 120 9 10 11 12 13 14 as it is produced by other disciplines’ (Neumann 2014b: 368). For a constructivist response, see Sokolowska and Guzzini (2014: 142–46). Habits, a neuroscientist would explain, are ‘sequential, repetitive, motor, or cognitive behaviors elicited by external or internal triggers that, once released, can go to completion without constant conscious oversight’ (Graybiel 2008: 361). A cognitive system, the neuroscientist Terrence Deacon argues, is deﬁned by its absences rather than by its presences (Deacon 2013: 27–28). Compare Austin’s anti-theatricality: ‘[A] performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy’ (Austin 1962: 22). For a critical discussion, see Miller (2007: 226–29). David Campbell, as Ross points out, ‘tends to view performance from the perspective of the product it engenders — discursive presentations of ethnic identity — rather than the bodily performance itself’ (Ross 2006: 211). There are obvious similarities between the argument presented here and notions of ‘collective mind’ as developed within organisational studies. See, for example, Weick and Roberts (1993: 357–81); cf. also DiMaggio (1997). Wendt’s constructivism, Ross has said, is ‘intellectually over-prepared’ (Ross 2006: 206). 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Erik Ringmar How the world stage makes its subjects 125 Zahavi, Dan (2008) Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-person Perspective, Cambridge: MIT Press. Zahavi, Dan (2009) ‘Is the Self a Social Construct?’ Inquiry 52(6): 551–73. Žižek, Slavoj (2000) ‘Lacan between Cultural Studies and Cognitivism’, Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious 5(1): 9–32. About the author Erik Ringmar received his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1993, taught for 12 years in the Government Department at the London School of Economics, and worked for 7 years in China, the last 2 years as Zhiyuan Chair professor of International Relations at Shanghai Jiaotong University. He currently teaches political science and international relations at Lund University, Sweden. His most recent book is Liberal Barbarism: The European Destruction of the Palace of the Emperor of China.

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