Language, Agency, and Politics in a Constructed World.

Edited by François Debrix. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2003. 304p. $69.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

The “linguistic turn,” which had made a significant impact on philosophy by the mid–twentieth century, invaded the social sciences decades later (beginning in the early 1980s). In the discipline of political science, until quite recently, the invasion was confined primarily to the subfield of political theory. However, eventually, even the somewhat intellectually challenged subfield of international relations began experiencing the spillover effects of linguistic philosophy's challenge to empiricist epistemology. In this book, the linguistic turn's impact on international relations is taken as an accomplished fact and is explicated and implemented through its articulation in the postempiricist approaches known as constructivism and poststructuralism.

In both his introduction and his chapter on the language–IR relationship, the volume's editor, François Debrix, does a creditable job of representing the diverse influences of contemporary linguistic philosophy on IR methods, analyzing especially well both the compatibilities and tensions between poststructuralist and constructivist approaches, which he locates under the general rubric of nonfoundationalism. Debrix's first step is to argue that, contrary to foundationalist conceits, the world does not tell us what to say about it (or, one might say, as Michel Foucault has famously put it, the world does not turn to us a legible face). Thereafter, he points out that once nonfoundationalism is accepted and internalized, new domains of inquiry open up. Rather than accepting the geopolitical imaginaries articulated in official policy discourses (which traditional IR scholars have tended to recycle), those inoculated by variations of the linguistic turn have produced a diverse and critical IR literature, some of which Debrix reviews, primarily to illustrate the alternative metatheoretical predicates of their investigations.

The collection of essays that follows Debrix's shaping remarks displays the strengths and weaknesses of the anthology genre (especially because, of late, publishers demand strictly cropped contributions). On the one hand, the reader gets an assortment of interpretations of the significance of the linguistic turn for IR, but on the other, none of the treatments enjoys enough space to engage in effective inquiry. In this volume, each chapter provides a view of language philosophy (with J. L. Austin's speech act approach being the dominant choice), followed by a brief illustration of its significance for a postempiricist IR. At a minimum, the attention to Austinian speech acts throughout the volume, especially Austin's explication of illocutionary meaning—statements in which saying something is doing something—should instruct those schooled in traditional philosophies of the social sciences to rethink the radical separation between discourse and action. And readers encouraged to pursue the texts of Austin (and Wittgenstein, who also receives some attention), will be apprised not only of an alternative, inquiry-enabling view of language but also of the interpretive contexts that afflict attempts to stabilize the meaning of concepts. Karin Fierke's explication and illustration of Wittgenstein's notion of the “language game,” in a chapter on language and method in IR, is especially instructive in this respect. She also provides a compelling critique of the assumption that a focus on discourse has nothing to do with “empirical research.”

Apart from its pedagogy about contemporary language philosophy, the collection offers commentaries on politically relevant concepts. Thus, recognizing that language philosophies of Austin and Wittgenstein put pressure on a simplistic, causal view of human agency, several of the authors turn to issues of action and responsibility. For example, after doing a politically acute reading of Austin's essay “A Plea for Excuses,” Kennan Ferguson raises some provocative issues about the responsibility for warfare. He illustrates why Austin's approach to the action–agency relationship provides a more effective frame for treating issues of responsibility than can be achieved within strictly causal, intentionalist epistemological imaginaries.

Timothy Luke's chapter on discursivity and concursivity is also conceptually innovative. Addressing himself to the issue of how international events occur in the twenty-first century, he contrasts a focus on “concursity” (the discursive map of shared practices and understandings) with the neorealism of conventional IR theorists. Similarly, Siba Grovogui creatively mobilizes the concept of the postcolonial gaze, which is more familiar within the discipline of comparative literature than IR, in order to illuminate the ways in which speech act theory, wedded to a reverse (i.e, self-reflective) ethnographic stance, can issue in a politically perspicuous mode of postcolonial criticism.

At their best, the other chapters in the volume offer critical insights into historical and contemporary events—for example, Janice Mattern's treatment of the language–power nexus articulated during the historic “Suez crisis,” Katja Weber and Andrew Cowart's analysis of the discursive debate between Adenauer and Schumacher about Germany's post–World War II role, and Anthony Lang's critical sorting of approaches to moral discourse as they bear on the recent “humanitarian intervention” in Somalia.

Otherwise, much of the analysis in the various chapters rehearses the now-familiar debates between a traditional neorealism, which still dominates IR, and the increasingly influential critical margin, which has managed to achieve a conceptual release from referential approaches to language. Notable in this aspect are three chapters: Harry Gould's response to the challenge of a more causal and intentionalist theory of action, Nicholas Onuf's critique of linear identity narratives, and Franke Wilmer's treatment of the incommensurability between official discourses on war and the narratives of victims. Ultimately, especially for the uninitiated in critically oriented IR, Language, Agency, and Politics in a Constructed World provides a valuable survey of implications.