The Sublime of the Political: Narrative and Autoethnography as Theory 9783839447727

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Dean Caivano, Sarah Naumes The Sublime of the Political

Political Science  | Volume 79

To Florence Lillian.

Dean Caivano is a Professor of Political Science and History at Merced College in California, USA. His work can be found in New Political Science, Journal of Narrative Politics, and Spectra. He is currently working on a book length project titled, A Politics of All: Thomas Jefferson and Radical Democracy. Sarah Naumes is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in the Department of Politics at York University in Canada. She is also a Research Development Officer with the University of California, Merced in the United States. She has published in and on narrative and autoethnography in Millennium and Journal of Narrative Politics. Her research explores the ways that pain and trauma are experienced and theorized by veterans of the Canadian and United States armed forces.

Dean Caivano, Sarah Naumes

The Sublime of the Political Narrative and Autoethnography as Theory

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de © 2021 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Typeset by Justine Buri, Bielefeld Printed by docupoint GmbH, Magdeburg Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4772-3 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4772-7 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839447727 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements..................................................................................... 7 Introduction................................................................................................. 9 Chapter 1: Narrative and Autoethnography and its Emergence Within International Relations Scholarship................................................................................. 21 Chapter 2: Rethinking Political Theory: Storytelling, The Political, and Pedagogy.................................................. 41 Chapter 3: A Genealogy of the Sublime.................................................... 63 Chapter 4: The Sublime Aesthetic of Narrative & Autoethnography............................................................... 93 Chapter 5: Vignettes of the Banal............................................................ 127 Postscript | Revisiting Vignettes of the Banal......................................... 145 Bibliography.............................................................................................. 149

Acknowledgements

Writing this text was only possible because of encouragement from countless individuals. Many friends, family members and colleagues supported us through this process. We are especially grateful to the following individuals: Jakob Horstmann, our editor, whose patience and guidance made this project a reality; Marta Bashovski whose insightful question at the International Studies Association (ISA) conference in 2016 helped us to see the larger potential of this work; Martin Breaugh and Elizabeth Dauphinee whose professional and personal encouragement continues to astound us; Cindy Walton for shepherding us through an immensely difficult time; and finally, Yvonne Caivano and Morgan Matthews for giving us the time to write by lovingly taking care of our daughter for countless hours.

Introduction

In 2017, we wrote and published a version of the final chapter of this manuscript in Journal of Narrative Politics (JNP). The story is a stylistically jarring autoethnography detailing our experiences with the United States-Canadian border and the two healthcare systems during the period of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and election. We wrote this piece using sections of diary entries, text messages, memories, and representations of government documents. Many journals within the study of politics would neither have published our work nor regarded it as political in nature. Our intention in publishing “Vignettes of the Banal” was to illustrate through a personal story how binary systems such as borders and healthcare enact violence upon liminal modes of existence. While we maintained various layers of privilege in relation to crossing the border and accessing healthcare, we were exposed to fissure points in both of these systems during that time. What had previously been mundane aspects of our lives suddenly became sites of frustration and fear, taking on surprising urgency. The last scene of the story that constitutes our final chapter is the birth of our child. While we recognize that our experience is not universal, our entry into parenthood was a distinctly ethical and political encounter. Surrounded by medical equipment and midwives in the privacy of our own home, we were struck not only by love and beauty, but also by a vastness that is impossible to fully describe. That evening, if only momentarily, forced us away from the immobilizing horror that often accompanies global politics, and toward a notion of life as vast, intersubjective, and complex. The birth of our child was a

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sublime encounter and one that continues to provoke active political engagement. As Hannah Arendt writes, “The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born” (1998: 247). Further to Arendt’s claim, the birth of our child illustrated not only how action is ontologically rooted, but that the intersubjective responsibility to act is ontologically rooted as well. What drew this out for us can be described as none other than the sublime, which we detail in the chapters of this manuscript. While the final chapter of this book describes our own experiences, most of this text does not. Rather, the aim of this project is to bring together the discussions surrounding aesthetic theory within the study of politics as well as the narrative turn within International Relations (IR). We have been encouraged in these efforts by the rich scholarly works of Jenny Edkins, Roland Bleiker, Elizabeth Dauphinee, Naeem Inayatullah, Richa Nagar, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Michael Shapiro, and Himadeep Muppidi, among many others. Although we have valued the merits of storytelling approaches for some time, in 2017 and 2018, autoethnographic approaches to research received a scathing critique. In what is now known as the Sokal Squared hoax, the storytelling method of autoethnography was admonished and rejected. At the time, it was revealed that three individuals submitted fabricated articles to academic journals in order to test whether their claims could be published. Falsifying their names, affiliation, and asserting many times that their work had undergone institutional research board (IRB) approval, the Sokal Squared hoax sought to prove through the invalidation of certain research methods and subjects of study that various academic disciplines lack epistemological and methodological rigor. The hoaxers went as far as referring to autoethnography as “mesearch,” invoking a term meant to point to a singularizing and pejorative way of interpreting the

Introduction

approach. Of course, this was only the most recent debate about the validity of certain types of qualitative methods. Storytelling methods in the social sciences have long been subject to extensive scrutiny, even before these interventions. While the use of certain methods, particularly those that are quantitative, is taken for granted in the study of politics, narrative and autoethnography, as illustrated by Sokal Squared, are often approached with deep suspicion, if not outright repudiation. Although what stories are told and in which context is decidedly political, the norms within the study of politics dictate that storytelling belongs within the humanities, or at least the precarious humanistic side of the social sciences, if anywhere at all. Importantly, we do not endeavor to make this text a platform to dispute the possibility that autoethnography, an approach where scholars utilize their own experiences to interrogate power structures, can be used in the criticized way. Of course, it is possible to deploy any method in a way that diverges from best practices. We do, however, propose that Sokal Squared did not prove that autoethnography inherently lacks rigour by making such a claim. Rather, the hoax shows that the three individuals associated with it and their proponents have not engaged sufficiently with the present methodological discussions surrounding autoethnography (or other storytelling methods) or its theoretical basis. The expectations about how and why to engage with autoethnography are cause of some dispute, but as Sarah Naumes writes, “While we can and should celebrate the narrative [and autoethnographic] turn and the ways that it has opened IR to inquiry that was not previously possible, IR scholars should approach narrative projects in the same way as other methods. Namely, narrative [and autoethnography do] not and should not escape critical examination because of either the content or the delivery” (2015: 831). In other words, autoethnography is and should be subject to scholarly critique. While the Sokal Squared hoax is premised on a set of nontransparent assumptions, it still begs the question: why attack autoethnography? Or, why classify such scholarship as untruthful?

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The obvious answer is that autoethnography has given a platform to voices and experiences that are frequently erased within the study of politics. Storytelling asks scholars to rethink their epistemological commitments – to accept lived complexity. Taking away such a platform further entrenches the erasure of these voices and experiences. Thus, we want to make clear that invalidating autoethnography in its entirety is not about questions of rigour, but of political commitments. The Sokal Squared hoaxers promote a vision of theory as objectively truth seeking. They dismiss that the stories that we are allowed to tell and how we are allowed to tell them is always a measure of power. On this point, Robert Cox’s framing of two types of theories is illustrative. The Sokal Squared hoaxers envision all theory as necessarily problemsolving theory, which Cox claims, “takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organised, as the given framework for action. The general aim of problem-solving is to make these relationships and institutions work smoothly by dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble” (1981: 128-129). This framing takes for granted a good-faith effort in scholarship, in which of course the Sokal Squared hoaxers did not engage. Regardless, the assumption by the hoaxers that all theory falls within the parameters of problem-solving theory implies the illegitimacy of any theory that “does not take institutions and social and power relations for granted but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing […]” (ibid: 129). Cox describes this second type of theory as critical theory. If we take Cox’s framing seriously, storytelling methods fall squarely within critical theory. Looking at the manuscripts that have been published and discussed within IR in recent years as well as the content distributed by JNP affirms this positioning. The JNP website claims: Journal of Narrative Politics is less concerned with the objectivist academic analysis of narrative, and more with the expression of

Introduction

narrative itself as a mode of knowing and a form of scholarship. The journal therefore aims to operate in the overlap between the languages of science and literature with the goal of showing how theory becomes practice and practice theory. It commits to diverse ways of storytelling as knowledge appropriate to the academy, rather than as merely the objects of scholarly inquiry. (cf. JNP webpage) Thus, JNP responds to a call within academia to trouble the prominent erasures of marginalized voices and to show how “Theory is always for someone and for some purpose” (Cox 1981: 128; emphasis added). Notably, while Cox’s argument is useful, caution is needed precisely because in deploying such a framing, evaluative criteria for critical, theory are not necessarily substantiated. As Patrick Jackson writes, “[W]e learn only that theory that places the present in historical context is ‘critical’ while other theory is not, but this gives the reader very little guidance about how to go about generating good critical theory – let alone how to go about evaluating a critical theory” (2011: 183; original emphasis). To be clear, while the development of a set of discursive and ethical tools designed to evaluate narrative and autoethnography. texts is a promising undertaking, our primary concern rests elsewhere. Put differently, we endeavor to rethink the theoretical value of such efforts in order to move beyond the realm of problem-solving theory and into the domain of critical theory. This is necessary to summon a more rigorous and accurate debate on the political potential and positionality of narrative and autoethnographic texts. If storytelling methods are situated primarily within the framework of truth versus falsehood, as the Sokal Squared hoaxers would have us believe, then they do, in fact, become problematic methods. Yet, if we eschew this two-dimensional plane of truth and falsehood erroneously grafted upon them, then we come to recognize, as so many scholars have previously pointed out, that academic enterprises are always, to an extent, subjective. This is not to say that there is no difference between truth and lies, but that humans live within complicated social, political, and cultural life-worlds. Each of us is present in our research

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– recognizing and being explicit about this does not make the work weaker, but stronger. Narrative and autoethnography expose that we do not live in a world where truth simply does not exist, but one that is complicated and decidedly political. While the Sokal Squared hoaxers ostensibly misrepresented the ongoing epistemological and methodological debates pertaining to narratives broadly and autoethnography specifically, they did point out a persistent concern with approaches to scholarship that are interpretive in nature. Again, it is not our wish here to invalidate questions that might relate to that concern, but to state emphatically that this debate has been misframed in two ways. In the first mis-framing, there is already recognition that narrative and autoethnography necessitate peer scrutiny. Autoethnography is not insulated from critique simply because of the form of writing. Further, a questionable autoethnographic work – such as the hoaxers rejected paper, “Self-Ref lections on Self-Ref lections: An Autoethnographic Defense of Autoethnography” (cf. “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship”) – does not invalidate the approach in its entirety. Rather, it encourages a more substantive discussion about how we should engage with these modes of scholarship. Whether the hoaxers and others accept the use of personal narratives within their disciplines, the world outside of the Ivory Tower continues to engage with storytelling as a viable mode of human inquiry, expression, and interaction. Storytelling is an integral aspect of the human experience. Thus, erasing narrative and autoethnography from the repertoire of methods available to scholars further entrenches academic manifestations of elitism. Methodological issues with autoethnography (which we believe were overemphasized in the case of Sokal Squared) tell us not that we should invalidate some or all storytelling approaches, but that the assessment criteria for these works is perhaps murkier than other methods because discussions about best practices are ongoing. In addition to the need for a continuing and robust dialogue surrounding the methodological implications of narrative and

Introduction

autoethnography, we argue that storytelling approaches do more than give readers insight into a singular subjective experience. This brings us to the second mis-framing. Although narrative and autoethnography are methods of scholarship, they are also political theoretic texts in nature and must be treated as such. This book offers a vision of narrative and autoethnography as both methodologically and theoretically valid, looking to the aesthetic category of the sublime to show the political theoretical value of these works. In this way, we align with Jacques Rancière’s vision of the sublime qua Michael Shapiro which is taken up “not (as Kant had hoped) toward a shared moral sensibility but to an ethico-political sensibility that recognizes the fragilities of our grasp of experience and enjoins engagement with a pluralist world in which the in-common must be continually negotiated” (Shapiro 2018: 4). In this vision of the sublime, narrative and autoethnography point not intrinsically toward a new universal morality, but toward a rupturing with the dominant logics of our time that divide the ethical and the political into two distinct entities. Storytelling illustrates life-worlds other than our own that implicate each of us as actors responsible for seemingly far away geopolitical turmoil. This book, thus, celebrates storytelling as a stand-alone mode of political inquiry and an approach to political theorizing. While we engage in a discussion of textual narratives given the number of recent written projects within the discipline of IR, we view narratives as diffuse in style. A painting, film, or music video, for instance, has a similar capacity as a written work to engage with contemporary political issues, albeit in a different manner. Our intention in mainly looking at written text is not to preclude other modes of storytelling from our definition of narrative. We have, however, constrained our later inquiry to those narrative and autoethnographic works that could fit broadly within the territory of the study of politics and of which the authors have self-identified with these approaches. As a promotion of the narrative turn, we reject the vision of humanistic engagement as inferior to empirical research not because we wish to claim that stories are superior vehicles for engagement,

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but because we acknowledge the importance of methodological pluralism to the social sciences. Of course, as discussed above, we do view storytelling approaches as stand-alone forms of political theorizing. We assert further that stories in the form of narrative and autoethnography open up discussions that have been frequently silenced by popularized engagements with the study of politics. In turn, it prompts a reconsideration of the type of ethics that Western schools institutionalize through syllabi, lectures, and research protocols. Although narrative and autoethnographic stories do not offer a scientific notion of politics because they are unfalsifiable and unreproducible, this book engages with narrative and autoethnography as necessary approaches to a pluralistic study of politics. This is to say that although scientific research plays an important role in our understanding of the world, there are social and humanistic interpretations that add layers otherwise rendered invisible. The purpose of narrative and autoethnography is not to portray empirical studies as obsolete, but to engage in more complicated accounts of our life-worlds – ones that are impossible to represent outside of storytelling. While methods aiming for scientific accuracy attempt to control variables and isolate causes, storytelling accepts that life is unpredictable. To be clear, our aim here rests beyond sparking a renewed debate about which approaches are more or less valid or to reify a binary between empiricism and interpretivism. In fact, many of the major issues of our time require novel approaches where scholars and practitioners alike step outside of this methodological vision, shedding the prescriptions of our solitary disciplines in order to take up those approaches that properly fit the research questions. These approaches cannot, by definition, function as predefined. Rather, our objective is to explore the political theoretic potential of storytelling approaches such as narrative and autoethnography. The narrative turn certainly popularizes methods that celebrate storytelling and, often, foregrounds the author in an academic text. While many of the initial pieces published on narrative and

Introduction

autoethnography grappled primarily with making the case for these methods within IR scholarship, much of the discussion now focuses on the potential embedded within the narrative turn and how narrative and autoethnography ought to be deployed. From this discussion, questions have emerged about the proper way to critique narrative and autoethnography. However, little has been written about either the placement in the study of politics of narrative and autoethnography within IR or what the aesthetics of narrative and autoethnography tell us about what these methods are doing. This project addresses this lacuna by surveying the narrative turn in IR as well as how it can fruitfully contribute to political theory. Centrally, we argue that it is a mistake to view narrative and autoethnography solely through the lens of IR scholarship. While narrative and autoethnography emerged in the study of politics in response to ongoing concerns about the way the field of IR is studied and produced, this project makes clear that narrative and autoethnography should be viewed as political theory more broadly. To make space for the narrative turn within political theory, a reevaluation of the discipline is necessary to better grapple with the complexity of political life through a more diverse and inclusive field of voices. The narrative turn is already importantly achieving these goals and, thus, these works ought to be viewed as political theoretic texts. Not only does the narrative turn problematize who and from where political ref lections and expressions can emerge, it does so explicitly through a rejection of a technocratic style of academic writing. The disruption of technical norms and practices comes about from the very way that the text is presented. We argue that one of the ways that storytelling – in the form of narrative and autoethnography – does this is through the sublime aesthetics of these projects, summoning a vision of the political that is strikingly complicated, dynamic, and f luid. As narrative and autoethnography continue to gain readership and authorship, this intervention seeks to further add dialogue between scholars of IR and political theory by stressing more inclusive forms of

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theorizing. By opening up a dialogue on the content of IR and political theory, we invite other scholars to rethink their own epistemological and methodological commitments to better illustrate how disciplinary boundaries function by upholding power structures and rendering certain voices and bodies illegible. Our hope for this text is to present a wholly new perspective of the political potential of this type of storytelling through a vision of the sublime aesthetic of its presentation that brings about an encounter with the political. In an age of political turmoil and dissent, this work stresses the potential for storytelling to act in emancipatory ways and to give voice to those previously unseen, unheard, and uncounted. The plan of the book proceeds as follows. In Chapter 1, we offer a definitional framework for narrative and autoethnography, drawing upon various fields of study. We also explore how and why the narrative turn emerged in the discipline of IR. While we argue that the narrative turn was essential within IR because of ongoing debates about the subject and object of study within the field, situating narrative and autoethnography within the study of politics as IR scholarship now needs to be challenged. This chapter offers readers an understanding of the placement of narrative and autoethnography and what literature currently exists. From this position, we argue in Chapter 2 that narrative and autoethnography are not wholly new methodological approaches to IR scholarship, but are, rather, part of a lineage of political thought. Through this lens, we argue that narrative and autoethnography should not be viewed simply as methods within IR scholarship, but as political theoretic texts as well. We suggest that these texts invoke discussions of the idea of the political, not only within the text itself, but beyond, while simultaneously emphasizing the necessity for political education and mobilization through an invitation into an aesthetic experience of the sublime. To show the theoretical richness of narrative and autoethnography, we offer a broad sketch of the epistemological boundaries of political theory as a discipline. From there, we show how these texts are already present within scholarship,

Introduction

yet a more thorough recognition is necessary, particularly in the area of pedagogy. The chapter draws to a close with a pedagogical exercise to highlight how narrative admissions can be used inside and outside of the classroom. In Chapter 3, a genealogical account of the sublime is offered. We engage with the concept of the sublime to deploy a conceptual bridge from our appraisal of the narrative turn in Chapters 1 and 2 into a more comprehensive assessment of its political potential here as well as in Chapters 4 and 5. This evaluation spans from ancient to Enlightenment to postmodern interpretations – as we survey key thinkers such as Longinus, Burke, Kant, and Lyotard – in order to show how the experience of the sublime has evolved over time, importing an ethical dimension. While interpretations of the sublime have often focused exclusively on aesthetics, we show that the turn towards morality brings with it an important modification to the limits and avenues in which an encounter can be understood. This crucial revision enables us to take up the sublime in a decisively political sense: one that reveals the vicissitudes of life in common. What follows in Chapter 4 is the presentation of a new theorization of the sublime to capture the current conditions of the world; a theory of the sublime – for the many, and by the many – that offers a vantage point into the vastness and promissory quality of narrative and autoethnographic texts. Principally, we suggest that scholarship has much to gain through an analysis of how narrative and autoethnographic texts invite readers into an aesthetic experience. Following the assertion posed by Naumes’ 2015 article, “Is all ‘I’ IR?” that assessing a piece as ‘good’ narrative or autoethnography is unique from assessing a piece of literature as well-crafted, we suggest that the lens of the sublime can indicate the possibilities inherent within narrative and autoethnographic approaches. In so doing, we assess four recent narrative or autoethnographic texts to show how this form of personal-political writing offer insights into the socio-political realities with which traditional academic scholarship often fails to fully engage.

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In the final chapter, we present our article “Vignettes of the Banal” (2017), originally published in JNP, to show the theoretical and stylistic possibilities of the narrative turn. “Vignettes of the Banal” explores the liminal temporal status of bodies functioning in conf lict with the hegemonic time of the nation-state. Through an autoethnographic excavation of two simultaneous stories of the potentiality of life and death, we interrogate the function of both territorial borders and boundaries crafted around embodied experiences. Namely, as two American academics studying in Canada, we ref lect on the role of the nation-state in policing not only citizenship, but the partition between illness and wellness through our experiences of childbirth and a possibly life-threatening medical condition. These events illuminate the difficulty of navigating these life-moments as they occur not only within a defined border, but also when they transcend or cut across territorial lines, essentially leaving these categories in f lux. By uncovering the fissures rendered possible by the very inevitability of existence qua moments of life and death that operate outside of the linearity of the time of the nation-state, we might begin to to reimagine and recreate patterns of existence freed from unnecessary authority. We draw this project to a close in the postscript by offering ref lective and personal remarks on the evolving nature of storytelling, the narrative turn, and the need for political resistance. For now, we explore the emergence of the narrative turn in International Relations.

Chapter 1: Narrative and Autoethnography and its Emergence Within International Relations Scholarship “Insofar as autoethnography challenges the discipline’s objectivist paradigm of representation, it performs a political role, that of transgressing, and hence subverting, the existing disciplinary doxa as well as the tacit and explicit criteria that support its reproduction and disciplining efficacy.” – Inanna Hamati-Ataya (2014: 158) In contrast with the style of writing seen in most social scientific scholarship, Elizabeth Dauphinee begins The Politics of Exile by writing, “I built my career on the life of a man called Stojan Sokolović. And I would like to explain myself to him. I would like to ask him to forgive me before I leave this life, but I don’t know how to begin” (2013: 1). These personal and engaging words set the stage for a work that has been celebrated as part of the narrative turn within International Relations (IR) scholarship. Using first-person pronouns, explicating the complicated relationship between researcher and research subject, and introducing a level of uncertainty on the part of the scholar, this text commences in unusual and engaging ways. The Politics of Exile and other narrative and autoethnographic works ask us to reassess what constitutes scholarly work as well as how research ought to be done.

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This chapter circulates around the narrative turn in IR in order to lay the groundwork for the next chapter, which engages with what it means for a text to be considered as a work of political theory. Not only do we look here at the defining features of narrative and autoethnography, but we also detail how and why the narrative turn emerged within IR. Looking to multiple disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, and literature, in order to make this definitional clarification, we discuss the relevant methodological literature on these approaches and how the debates in various fields of study relate to the current movement within IR. After engaging in a broader discussion of narrative and autoethnography, we offer an overview of how the narrative and autoethnographic turn emerged within the subfield of IR. We argue that while the narrative and autoethnographic turn was essential within IR because of ongoing debates about the subject and object of study within the field, the broader study of politics would benefit from an engagement with these works as well because of not only their methodological potential, but their theoretical value. Importantly, positioning narrative and autoethnographic works as IR scholarship unnecessarily limits the boundaries of the discussion, isolating these works within the relative silo of a solitary subfield when the texts currently circulating within IR engage heavily with broader political theoretical debates. As we discuss throughout this book, narrative and autoethnographic works are political theoretic texts that have implications for the methodological and epistemological frameworks that are accepted within the study of politics. We make this claim not to admonish IR for the work being done there, but to point out the rich political theoretical potential embedded within narrative and autoethnographic texts.

Chapter 1: Narrative and Autoethnography and its Emergence

Defining Narrative and Autoethnography In 1976, then-President of the American Anthropological Association, Walter Goldschmidt, gave an address at the annual meeting in which he engaged his listeners in what he termed an “autoethnography” (1977: 294). Goldschmidt began his address with a discussion of Project Camelot’s impact on the field of anthropology. A United States Army counterinsurgency study using the expertise of social scientists, Project Camelot divided anthropologists whose perspectives varied about whether the discipline should aid in war-making efforts. In Goldschmidt’s telling, anthropology was on the brink of a crisis. He stated, “As we face the coming crises – crisis in our social order, crisis in academia, and crisis in anthropology itself, it behooves us to examine ourselves as a community, as a profession, as an historic development – as a subculture. […] What can we learn from our own past that will enable us to meet the challenges that lie ahead? What are our vulnerabilities and our sources of strength? Let us engage in a brief autoethnography” (ibid: 293-294). What ensued was an accounting of anthropology as a field and its differences from other social scientific disciplines – certainly an interesting space for deliberation. However, it is unclear precisely how Goldschmidt meant the term “autoethnography,” especially when taken from the vantage point of how it tends to be used in a contemporary context. Ultimately, how to capture what counts as autoethnography is not entirely clear in this case or many others. Goldschmidt seems to point to a potential area of overlap between autoethnographic and genealogical studies since the discussion that follows his invocation of the term largely deals with a history of what was then the present state of the field of anthropology. If captured more accurately as an ethnography wherein Goldschmidt is a member of the studied group, which is likely what he meant, then this raises questions about where to draw the line between ethnography and autoethnography. Goldschmidt’s telling is not particularly personal, which tends to mark autoethnographic studies, albeit, in varying ways.

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Questions also arise here about the differences between autoethnography, autobiography, and published diaries. What does autoethnography do that other types of narratives do not? Deborah Reed-Danahay, an anthropologist, tellingly describes autoethnography as distinct from autobiography: Autoethnography is not the kind of autobiography in which the author as hero or heroine is neither constrained nor assisted in life by economic, social, or cultural position; autoethnography is also not a form of writing ethnography that erases the anthropologist and his or her encounters with research participants. It is a form of writing, a method for life writing and for social analysis, which depends upon an ethnographer’s capacities for observation and sensibilities of empathy, reflexivity, and critique. Autoethnography falls squarely at the intersection of insider and outsider perspectives, and thereby encourages us to explore more fully the implications and, perhaps, misguided uses of this dualism. (2009: 43) Reed-Danahay directs our attention both to what differentiates autobiography and autoethnography as well as to one of the primary motivations for autoethnographic writing. Rather than view researchers as disconnected arbiters of scholarly inquiry, autoethnography is defined partially by a view that social scientific scholarship can never maintain complete objectivity. Even further, there are good reasons why scholars should not attempt to reify the insider/outsider binary, one that crumbles under interrogation. In many cases, making the author visible even ref lects greater transparency in the research process through the vocalization of ref lexivity. As Pierre Bourdieu claims, this is because ref lexivity illuminates the false distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, illustrating pure objectivity as impossible (2000: 119). Thus, those working with autoethnography reject the notion that academics should be compelled to write in a sanitized and esoteric form that divorces emotion and personal perspective from our subjects of inquiry.

Chapter 1: Narrative and Autoethnography and its Emergence

Andrew Sparkes asserts further that autoethnography functions within a distinctive epistemological framework. While objectivity is questioned, personal experiences become potential sites of academic intervention. Sparkes defines autoethnographies as “highly personalized accounts that draw upon the experiences of the author/ researcher for the purposes of extending sociological understanding” (2000: 21). The latter part of Sparkes’ definition is suggestive. Although the stories may be personal in nature, they capture insights into the social, cultural, and political dimensions of an observed population. By definition, autoethnographies are personal stories that go beyond individual experiences in order to tell readers something about the broader world. These stories are also interpretive in nature, showing (instead of telling) readers a perception of events. The term “narrative” is also used in various ways, giving both concepts relatively vague parameters. Sarah Stahlke Wall f lags this lack of clarity as a potential issue, particularly as it relates to providing feedback through peer review. Stahlke Wall describes reviewing one paper in which “the author used the terms ‘autobiography,’ ‘narrative,’ and ‘autoethnography’ interchangeably throughout his or her manuscript, raising questions about the specific meanings of these terms and causing me to wonder whether each of these terms indicate approaches with unique forms and purposes or whether they can appropriately be subsumed under one label” (2016: 3). While we empathize with Stahlke Wall’s point, we view narrative, autoethnography, and autobiography as storytelling modalities with significant overlap. As Marie-Laure Ryan writes: In summary: if narrative is a discourse that conveys a story, this is to say, a specific type of content, and if this discourse can be put to a variety of different uses, none of them constitutive of narrativity, then its definition should focus on story. As a mental representation, story is not tied to any particular medium, and it is independent of the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. A definition of narrative should therefore work for different media (though admittedly media

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do widely differ in their storytelling abilities), and it should not privilege literary forms. (2007: 26) Narrative is then a broad category working through many different types of storytelling media. In this way, all autoethnographies are narratives, but not all narratives are autoethnographies. Narratives are diffuse in form and style, ranging from written stories to movies to art installations. Even simply looking at the content of written narratives, these can include writing as diverse as young adult literature to the diaries of political leaders. While this gives us a general understanding of what constitutes narrative and autoethnography, Ryan offers more distinctive definitional criteria through a typology for roughly assessing what counts as narrative (ibid: 29). Through a “fuzzy set” of eight potential features derived from “prototypical cases” of stories, Ryan outlines features of narratives. These conditions are along four dimensions: Spatial dimension 1. Narrative must be about a world populated by individuated existents. Temporal dimension 2. This world must be situated in time and undergo significant transformations. 3. The transformations must be caused by non-habitual physical events. Mental dimension 4. Some of the participants in the events must be intelligent agents who have a mental life and react emotionally to the states of the world. 5. Some of the events must be purposeful actions by these agents.

Chapter 1: Narrative and Autoethnography and its Emergence

Formal and pragmatic dimension 6. The sequence of events must form a unified causal chain and lead to closure. 7. The occurrence of at least some of the events must be asserted as fact for the storyworld. 8. The story must communicate something meaningful to the audience. (ibid: 29) While Ryan creates standardized conditions through which to assess whether a project is a narrative, she also cautions against overstating the importance of a definition. In fact, Ryan claims that defining narrative is not particularly important to understanding a work – it is possible to do so without debating about and settling on a definition (ibid: 31). We agree with this point and argue that a heavy focus on definition places too much emphasis on capturing what makes narrative and autoethnography different rather than what these modes of expression are doing. Regardless, Ryan’s eight features of narrative prompt us to consider whether the study of politics (or any other study) requires altered or amended criteria for narrative and autoethnography. In the event that there are even minute differences, what does this mean for a methodological approach that troubles disciplinary boundaries? And how, if at all, should scholars account for such distinctions in their work? Arguably, while Ryan’s criteria are useful across disciplines and there is much to learn from a transdisciplinary sensibility (cf. Shapiro 2019: 8), there is something distinctive about the narrative turn as it has unfolded within the study of politics qua IR. Namely, the questions and considerations that circulate within the study of politics, compared to those within the study of anthropology, sociology, and literature, have a particular nature. The study of politics, concerned with questions about how peoples live in common, necessitates scholarship that, somewhat obviously, deals with these issues. While we certainly believe that it is necessary for those working with narrative and

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autoethnography to cultivate an awareness of the discussions surrounding such approaches in other disciplines in order to consider best practices and avoid reproducing issues with such forms of inquiry, we contend that the treatment of narrative and autoethnography from the vantage point of the study of politics cannot be considered as entirely interdisciplinary. This is particularly true where it relates to the aesthetics of narrative and autoethnographic projects. Since the form and style of narrative and autoethnographic works is not predetermined, the narrative turn has encouraged authors to be creative. Thus, narrative and autoethnographic texts reject the notion that a standardized form equates with scholarly rigor. Certainly, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank sends a substantively different message to readers than would an empirical study of Nazi Germany, asking readers to grapple with complicated ethical questions in a different way than what would come across through a traditional peerreviewed journal article. Storytelling approaches allow for inventive forms and styles that are elsewhere rejected or seen as merely supplementary. This perspective on form and style is particularly at odds with realism, one of the most well-known approaches to the study of IR. On this point, Michael Keren writes: Those who adhere to dominant approaches such as realism in the study of international relations and behaviouralism in the study of domestic politics have not necessarily ignored the gap between political objects and their representation. Everyone recognizes, of course, that Picasso’s painting Guernica is not a realistic depiction of war but rather an abstract representation of its cruelty. The aesthetic approach, however, asks for more than such recognition; it locates politics within the above gap and calls for a political science that explores it. (2015: 13) This gap is also precisely where storytelling approaches engage in the study of politics. Once objectivity is destabilized and even represented as a potential source of violence within scholarship, there is room to

Chapter 1: Narrative and Autoethnography and its Emergence

engage with approaches to the study of politics that move beyond the stylistic framework of the traditional research article. This allows scholars to ask novel questions, represent issues in engaging ways, and tie the ethical and the political back together at a point where they have frequently been ripped apart.

Further Distinctions in Defining Autoethnography: Analytic versus Evocative One of the distinctions that has been made in the literature on autoethnography is between evocative and analytic accounts. Carolyn Ellis describes evocative autoethnography as that which “connects the autobiographical impulse with the ethnographic impulse” (1997: 132). In this way, evocative autoethnography marks a method of looking at sociological and political issues through the eyes of one individual – a description that ought to encompass autoethnography generally. On this point, Ellis writes, “A story’s ‘validity’ can be judged by whether it evokes in readers a feeling that the experience described is authentic and lifelike, believable and possible; the story’s generalizability can be judged by whether it speaks to readers about their experience” (ibid: 133). Ellis importantly prompts an engagement with the “postmodern challenges” of “scientific knowledge and truth” (ibid: 115) through inquiry that breaks down the barrier separating the social sciences from the humanities. Yet, there is concern with the assessment criteria outlined here for evocative autoethnography. While the narrative turn illustrates the importance of subverting the often-arbitrary standards that mark academic inquiry, particularly as they relate to emotions, the criteria by which we should determine the quality of an autoethnographic project are not evocative. Leon Anderson claims that the primacy of evocative autoethnography overshadows other modes of autoethnographic writing. Anderson writes, “Unlike evocative autoethnography, which seeks narrative fidelity only to the researcher’s subjective experience,

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analytic autoethnography is grounded in self-experience but reaches beyond it as well” (2006: 386). Although the defining features of evocative autoethnography are somewhat vague aside from an acceptance of emotion in writing, the argument in favor of evocative autoethnography certainly promotes reaching beyond one’s own experiences. While Anderson’s concern with the impacts of limiting autoethnography is well-warranted, there is broader social scientific significance of autoethnographic pieces, whether evocative or categorized otherwise. In Anderson’s vision, analytic autoethnography is distinct from evocative autoethnography because “the researcher is (1) a full member in the research group or setting, (2) visible as such a member in the researcher’s published texts, and (3) committed to an analytic research agenda focused on improving theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena” (ibid: 375). Anderson goes into further detail about how to differentiate this approach, writing, “The five key features of analytic autoethnography that I propose include (1) complete member researcher (CMR) status, (2) analytic ref lexivity, (3) narrative visibility of the researcher’s self, (4) dialogue with informants beyond the self, and (5) commitment to theoretical analysis” (ibid: 378). Anderson promotes a clear vision of analytic autoethnography with justification for deployment by researchers; however, this distinction potentially frames the acceptability of texts within a modality that is meant to reject often arbitrary rules. The distinction between evocative and analytic autoethnography is problematic for a number of reasons. While both categories point readers toward important methodological rationales for the utilization of autoethnography, capturing the approach as either evocative or analytic reifies the notion that emotional and scientific engagement stand in stark contrast. In the study of politics this is particularly troublesome since the discipline grapples with, among other issues, humanitarian and human rights concerns. Perhaps instead of asking whether emotional storytelling is appropriate to academic inquiry we should ask why issues such as global famine, ecological degradation,

Chapter 1: Narrative and Autoethnography and its Emergence

and nuclear devastation might not invoke a visceral response from a reader. Broadly speaking, of course, this distinction relies on a prominent juxtaposition between analytic inquiry and more normative, or continental epistemological starting points. Within an analytic school of thought, especially variants of the British approach, an emphasis is placed on ensuring objectivity. This presumes to naturally f low by keeping the subjective aspects of the research at bay, preserving validity within the social scientific – or even linguistic – paradigm of inquiry. The assumption follows, then, that research that is not analytic, or empirically situated, is fraught with normative, nonverifiable, concepts and assumptions. This critique is implicit here as well. One of the concerns that proponents of analytic autoethnography hold against a more evocative, or perhaps emotive, framing is that it brings too much of the researcher into the observational field at the expense of other content. Although this certainly prompts questions of methodological rigor, it also pertains to the stylistic and technical aspects of the approach. Our point here is not to prioritize or degrade either method, but to suggest that this is an unproductive distinction for social scientific inquiry. Justifications for both approaches rely heavily on stylistic conventions, rather than pointing to more important epistemological and theoretical considerations. Autoethnography, whether analytic, evocative, or otherwise, adjusts the vantage point of scholarship from a space of objective truth to a more complicated territory wherein research can account for complex life experiences. Both evocative and analytic accounts should reach beyond the singular scholar to speak to broader social and political issues. In the case that an account does not, that is a poorly conceived autoethnography. Thus, the quality is not determined by adherence to a set of stylistic rules or interview techniques, but by the theorizing embedded within the text.

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Setting the Stage for the Narrative Turn in IR The field of IR is typically taught as a space of binary dispute. As many students learn in their early IR courses, emerging from the First World War, a series of Great Debates began within the discipline. These debates unfolded as disagreements about whose theories most accurately depict the world. Famously, all of this started with a debate between idealism and realism, advanced to a dispute between behaviorism and traditionalism, and led to the disagreement between positivists and post-positivists. In each case, there were perceived winners and losers. As Steve Smith describes, the notion of Great Debates is problematic in that it illustrates a methodological openness that simply has not existed within IR. Smith claims: They serve to suggest that there has been far more openness and pluralism than has in fact been the case and that there has been ‘progress’ as the discipline gets nearer and nearer the ‘truth’ about international relations. More significantly, they are very much views from somewhere, in that they are used to justify a particular reading of the history of thinking about world politics and to set up the terms of debate about the nature of relevance and appropriateness for current debates over the role of particular approaches. (2000: 376-377) Smith’s point illustrates how the belief in Great Debates entrenches an idea of epistemological progress within IR – with each iteration of the debates, scholars move closer to the truth about the world. Further to Smith’s point, the idea of Great Debates frames a complicated discipline as a space wherein scholars advance either one conception of the world or another. Instead of presenting IR as an international field with a global set of perspectives and voices, the Great Debates center the voices of a homogeneous group with a focus on Western politics. This illustrates what Cynthia Weber describes as “IR myths.” Weber writes, “IR theory is a site of cultural practice

Chapter 1: Narrative and Autoethnography and its Emergence

in which conscious and unconscious ideologies are circulated through stories that appear to be true. The stories we recognize and hold consciously we call IR traditions (like realism and idealism)” (2014: 6). Coupling Smith’s and Weber’s points illuminates how a lineage of Great Debates not only prioritizes one way of thinking about the world but allows some stories to be told while others are not. Of course, there have always been other stories told in the margins. David Lake writes, “Flourishing in the interstices of the Great Debates, however, has always been a rich ecosystem of other theories, often competing, that never rose to the level of Great Debates but nonetheless produced significant progress over time in improving our understanding of international relations” (2013: 568). This is one of the primary reasons why the narrative turn in IR has been so critical to the discipline. Rejecting a trajectory of binary debate, the narrative turn exploded these discussions in order to state emphatically that the world is decidedly complicated. Moreover, the narrative turn illustrates the ways in which the entire history of the discipline is a history of storytelling. As Carolina Moulin writes: Perhaps the most well-known and quoted narrative at the basis of IR is the Peace of Westphalia, a historical narrative that purports to explain the emergence of the state as the primary actor in modern world politics. According to this longstanding narrative, the modern international system began with a series of principles accorded in 1648, particularly related to the process of centralisation and autonomisation of political authority among European parties. The rise of sovereign political unities was premised on the defence of the principle of territorial integrity and non-interference in domestic affairs. This narrative tells us that the consolidation of territorial states within Europe created an independent actor (the sovereign state), that these actors are legally equal, that they have autonomy, that what states do and ‘say’ define the content of international affairs and that the domestic sphere is qualitatively distinct from the international realm. (2016: 139)

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Moulin points to the Peace of Westphalia as a story that reverberates throughout IR scholarship. While one example of how narratives were used in the discipline of IR before the narrative turn, it is illustrative of the ways that narratives existed within the field before the narrative turn. With this framing of IR as a discipline embedded with narratives, let us now look to the narrative turn in IR and how it has unfolded.

The Narrative Turn in IR In 2004, a group of scholars working in and at an intersection with IR convened for a workshop on critical methodologies that was hosted at York University in Toronto. This workshop is widely recognized as a marker point in the narrative turn in IR. At the workshop, Roxanne Doty gave a presentation of what would later be published as “Maladies of our Souls.” In the piece, Doty explores what it means to pull an author out of a text both in form and content. Doty writes: Zero-degree writing is not neutral, but a style emanating from the body of the writer, an extraordinarily powerful style that is often almost successful in mystifying the fact that it is a style that harnesses desires and intensities in the quest for theoretical progress. The identity of the writing subject as scholar becomes a faceless, formless authority positioned at a removed distance from the human element at stake in what is being written about. (2004: 389; original emphasis) This intervention illustrates a common thread shared by those writing in and on narrative and autoethnography. There is significant concern with the idea that a sanitized form of academic writing necessarily indicates objectivity and truth. Further, Doty problematizes “zerodegree writing” (cf. Barthes 2012 [1953]) as reifying the hegemony of a certain type of voice within academic scholarship. Doty is not the first scholar, by any measure, to raise these concerns and the narrative turn is not the first case when academics whose

Chapter 1: Narrative and Autoethnography and its Emergence

voices have been marginalized within the academy have questioned how forms of expression beyond “zero-degree writing” could do something different for groups that have been routinely subordinated. Notably, years prior to publication of Doty’s piece, Patricia Hill Collins wrote about the distinctiveness of American Black feminist thought. Collins writes, “Traditionally, the suppression of Black women’s ideas within White-male-controlled social institutions led AfricanAmerican women to use music, literature, daily conversations, and everyday behavior as important locations for constructing a Black feminist consciousness” (2000: 251-252). Collins describes the decision for African American women to explore “alternative” forms of inquiry as inherently linked with an epistemological division wherein “White male interests” are coded as truth while Black feminist standpoints are invalidated. Collins asserts, “Epistemological choices about whom to trust, what to believe, and why something is true are not benign academic issues” (ibid: 252). Thus, while there is something distinctive about the narrative turn within IR because of its disciplinary situatedness, such a turn draws on and is in conversation with a lineage of scholarship primarily advanced by Black, postcolonial, and feminist scholars. Since 2004, a number of texts explicitly recognized as narrative and autoethnography have been published. Notable among these is Dauphinee’s previously referenced The Politics of Exile (2013), a manuscript with two primary characters: a man named Stojan Sokolović who survived the Yugoslav Wars of Secession and a scholar studying them. The two characters engage in a series of conversations over the course of the book about Stojan’s experiences and the ethics of an outsider researching war. Notably, Stojan’s stories do not fit within the scholar’s vision of either the world or research, creating a tension in the way that the scholar thinks. In the introduction to The Politics of Exile, Naeem Inayatullah recounts a conversation with his wife, novelist Sorayya Khan. In the conversation, Khan asks why Dauphinee published her book with an academic press rather than as a novel. Inayatullah claims that the

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distinction is made evident through three questions that Dauphinee’s manuscript prompts, “How does one present fieldwork so that it highlights rather than hides the process of obtaining information? How does one fathom the other’s point of view? How does one tell the other’s stories when they conf lict with one’s own?” (2013: ix). IInayatullah puts a finger on a pulse throbbing through considerations of narrative and autoethnographic works within IR. Namely, there is an ongoing dialogue about what narrative and autoethnography add to the discipline that could not be accomplished elsewhere. Further, there are discussions about how to assess pieces that are often abstract, and that do not necessarily stake clear truth claims. The Politics of Exile did what many pieces written within IR have been unable to accomplish – Dauphinee leaves readers without a tidy package of writing that proves a thesis, but with a complicated series of questions about both the production of scholarship and what is taken for knowledge about war. While many studies within IR may not aim to achieve such a task, those writing in and on narrative and autoethnography claim, as Dauphinee does, that the narrative turn makes visible complexity that might otherwise be erased through the form of writing and the invisibility of the author. Inayatullah writes elsewhere of traditional academic scholarship in IR: This simultaneous absence and presence of the writer provides both a problem and an opportunity. Of course, fictive distancing has all the advantages that science itself offers, namely, a kind of precision that helps us to distinguish between less and more accurate perceptions of the world. The argument on behalf of fictive distancing proceeds as follows: with personal disengagement, with an apprehension of the world from a purported neutral and objective stance, we can remove our personal biases from our descriptions and theorizations. The wager in fictive distancing is that it gets us greater precision, accuracy, and insight into the workings of natural and social processes. (2011: 5)

Chapter 1: Narrative and Autoethnography and its Emergence

Inayatullah illustrates how traditional writing within IR promotes a “fictive distancing” – one that serves to position the author as objective. Narrative and autoethnographic texts dismiss this move, positioning the author as always part of the study and always culpable for any claims made. While an unknowing reader might classify Dauphinee’s text as fiction, she is clear that The Politics of Exile is not a novel. She writes elsewhere of her book: I am not a novelist. It is critically important to clarify this. There are two main reasons why this is so. The first reason is that I don’t intend for my scholarship – or for what Stojan Sokolović asked of me – to be dismissed this easily. The second is that, if I am a novelist, then I must be in the business of training a generation of novelists masquerading as social scientists behind me. And this is not the case. I want to guard against a generation of novelists just as I want to guard against the positivist tradition that entrenched an orthodoxy of knowledge production that works (unsuccessfully, in my view) to deny all traces of the self in scholarly writing and to discipline the others it encounters into rigorous categories that don’t work and never did. (Dauphinee 2010: 803-804) Dauphinee points to a common theme among those using storytelling approaches within IR – a desire for their work to be classified as IR scholarship rather than literature. We have experienced a similar impulse when friends and family have asked how our autoethnographic work could be published in an academic journal. The misstep that those querying are making is equating the style of a piece with the content. Roland Bleiker writes: As an international relations scholar I have neither the intention nor, for that matter, the qualifications to engage in literary criticism. My prime scholarly interest is and must be politics, not literature. I want to see whether literature gives me insights into politics that I cannot

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gain by other means. Literature as such is thus not my object of inquiry, no matter how passionate I may feel about it in private. (2012: 175) As Bleiker shows, disciplinary boundaries matter insofar as they bracket what type of content will be discussed and unpacked. The questions asked from within the study of politics are always about the origins, vicissitudes, and repercussions of power. Both Bleiker and Dauphinee point us toward two interrelated themes: firstly, storytelling approaches necessitate critique, just like other methods; secondly, from the vantage point of IR, the object of inquiry of storytelling approaches is politics. Elsewhere, Naumes has offered a loose set of criteria by which to approach narrative and autoethnographic works. By asking two types of questions of the text, Naumes argues that IR scholars “can open the field to novel lines of inquiry” (2015: 820). These two areas of questions are: “1) Does the narrative disrupt notions of congruity in political thought? Does it bring to light contradictions that may otherwise be ignored? 2) Does the narrative make room to incorporate those who have been otherwise excluded from political science discourse” (ibid: 822)? Similarly, Morgan Brigg and Bleiker advocate interrogating autoethnography from within knowledge communities and using a puzzle-based approach to research. They write, “Our suggestions for advancing and evaluating autoethnographic knowledge are based on the proposition that insights developed through an exploration of the author’s position should be evaluated not by some a priori standard of reference, but by their ability to generate new and valuable insights for particular knowledge communities” (Brigg/Bleiker 2010: 792). In both cases, the authors aim to set standards through which narrative and autoethnography ought to function. This illustrates that not only is the form of writing important in storytelling approaches, but the content is as well. This relates to the second point brought up by Bleiker and Dauphinee’s interventions: from the vantage point of IR, the object of inquiry within storytelling approaches is politics. While, again, the

Chapter 1: Narrative and Autoethnography and its Emergence

form of writing might take on a style that is similar to what is seen in other disciplines, narrative and autoethnographic works within the field of IR focus on relations of power. For instance, Alexandra Hyde’s (2014) autoethnographic piece published in JNP includes omitted words, poetry, and first-person narration. The focus of this piece, however, is not the stylistic choices that she makes, but the role that omissions and admissions play in research. Hyde illustrates through poetry and storytelling what Lee Ann Fujii describes as “accidental ethnography” (2015) or unexpected moments that tie into a research study in shocking or interesting ways. In this way, Hyde’s piece offers a commentary on the ethics and politics of doing research. Her focus is not on offering a literary intervention. Scholars of narrative and autoethnography have consistently approached these works from a space that accepts and welcomes critique. As Paulo Ravecca and Dauphinee write, “Of course, a narrative may essentialize or reduce the other, but the writing ‘I’ subject opens herself to this very critique. By decentering the self as an objective crafter of knowledge, the narrative ‘I’ already always invites critique, because the narrative ‘I’ cannot claim to express scholarly truth” (Ravecca/Dauphinee 2018: 129). Unlike other forms of scholarship that might insulate the scholar from critique, storytelling approaches invite it. While it is possible to make it so, subjectivity ought not be a hiding place. Ravecca and Dauphinee understand “narrative forms to be invitations to respond from different and plural perspectives” (ibid: 128). It is precisely this response that engenders critique that is potentially more productive and open. Importantly, Richa Nagar (2019a) reminds us that using the stories that others have told us – a practice common to ethnographic research in particular – ought to prompt the engagement of researchers. Researchers do not “own” these stories. Further, scholarship cannot rectify current or past ills simply by diversifying the voices within academic research, even if this may be a start. Importantly, Nagar considers what it would look like for scholars embedded within the academy to treat their research subjects as co-equals or co-authors

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of projects, taking on an activist orientation wherein what is written about is a problem worth solving. The concerns of the often-vulnerable communities that scholars write about then become issues that deserve action beyond the pages of manuscripts and articles.

Concluding Thoughts In this chapter we lay out a definitional framework for narrative and autoethnography as storytelling modalities. Autoethnography, in particular, calls into question whether scholars within the social sciences can ever maintain objectivity. However, while autoethnography relies on personal narratives, these stories go beyond the individual in order to inform us about the broader social, cultural, and political world. Narrative does the same, but might not necessarily rely on personal stories. As we write earlier in this chapter, “all autoethnographies are narratives, but not all narratives are autoethnographies.” While we view narrative and autoethnographic works as having an ethical sensibility, we warn against invoking the distinction between analytic and evocative autoethnography on the grounds that it reifies the binary notion of emotions as being in contrast to science. Rather than capturing the importance of a work through one or the other category, we view storytelling methods as potential spaces for a more robust view of the world wherein complex life experiences can be taken into account. We also look to the field of IR in this chapter in order to illustrate why the narrative turn emerged within a discipline concerned with Great Debates. From here, we describe the narrative turn in IR as well as what is distinct to the discipline. This sets the foundation for Chapters 3 and 4 where we engage with the sublime and then describe how this theoretical category is seen within narrative and autoethnographic works.

Chapter 2: Rethinking Political Theory: Storytelling, The Political, and Pedagogy “Salvation will come from writing and language. If we re-create speech, we will be able to resist.” – Paul Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst (1999: 87) Over the past decade, the field of IR has undergone a renaissance in academic writing. Deemed the narrative turn (cf. Doty 2004; Brigg/ Bleiker 2010; Wibben 2011; Muppidi 2013) this approach rejects dominant styles of scholarly research and reporting, focusing instead on stylistically and substantially alternative modes of expression that permit an inclusion of often marginalized and excluded voices. Narrative and autoethnography ask readers to consider various political experiences by cultivating a richer sensibility to public affairs. Rather than focusing on the notion of a singular authorship, these stories tell us about a world that is diverse, complex, and full of potential rupture points. While certainly interpretive of experiences, narratives also evoke the necessity to act, helping to bridge the gap between political education and praxis. As we saw in the previous chapter, central to this methodological commitment is an acceptance of storytelling across a myriad of forms, including, but not limited to novellas, ref lection-pieces, and autoethnographic entries, as genuine political theoretical texts. In refreshing and heterodox ways, narrative submissions have translated banal moments (as well as the extraordinary) of life under late capitalism into an explicitly political lexicon. Such inquiries

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would typically be coded as fictionalized-reality or even journalistic meditations outside of the discipline, yet here they find the space to offer robust discussions on topics ranging from sites of biopower to governing logics of nation-state sovereignty to fissures ripe for political resistance. Although there is much to celebrate and encourage regarding the narrative turn in IR, there also remains a concern with the way narrative and autoethnographic works have, for some, been coded as tales that tell us to think about global politics in a passive manner. From this standstill, the classification of narrative admissions has evaded an interaction with the subfield of political theory. While not necessarily indicative in all fields of political studies, political theory, particularly that of a conceptual and normative framing as well as a political inquiry situated as advocacy as Andrew Rehfeld makes note (2010: 475-476), asks us to reconsider the world in which we live and how each of us can do something to effect change. The task thereby becomes one that moves from pure interpretation to praxis, a defining feature of both Marxist scholarship and Sheldon Wolin’s (1969) invitation to rethink the epistemological and ontological foundations of the broader discipline. In this chapter, we suggest that formalized Western political theory is in need of revision. On the one hand, political theory has often struggled to properly orientate the struggles of the everyday in relation to the structures of power that continue to suppress the lives of people, particularly racialized/Indigenous/migrant/queer/mad bodies and voices. On the other hand, it has also failed to offer new visions of emancipation beyond the parameters of globalized politics firmly rooted in the grips of the global-capital system and nation-state. Scholars such as Glen Coulthard (2014), Harsha Walia (2013), and Jodi Byrd (2011) amongst many others, and lines of scholarship situated at the intersection of postcolonial and feminist thought, have taken these shortcomings seriously, offering new insights for theorizing resistance and actualizing empowerment. Yet, more work is needed to facilitate a reconsideration of the limits and potentials of political theory as a

Chapter 2: Rethinking Political Theory

subfield. This is necessary in order to shift the epistemological specter of theorizing away from an institutional perspective and towards scenes of the previously unheard and unseen. Doing so requires institutes and scholars of political theory to more fully welcome stories and recollections of existence including both the banal and the extraordinary – akin to a critical historiographical approach used by E.P. Thompson (1991) and Howard Zinn (2003) – from voices inside and outside of the academy. This chapter importantly takes up this task, offering preliminary consideration points for rethinking the mission and vocation of a new approach to political theory. Centrally, greater placement is needed on the active component of theorizing, namely its capacity to provide valuable insights to the study of politics, but also, and most importantly, to utilize an action-oriented approach. This means, centrally, that political theory ought to serve a greater audience than simply scholars. It ought to speak, resonate, educate, and relate to those outside of the confines of the Ivory Tower. While accessibility to the subfield of political theory is a key component of this vision, it requires something much deeper. Importantly, it aims to function as an integral part of politics: as a ref lective and critical strategy that challenges sites of power and authority. Political theory of this nature acquires a decisively more acceptable entry point as well as a series of new languages and voices expressed through storytelling modalities conveyed as an aesthetic undertaking that maintains a crucial sublime dimension. In this light, a rehabilitation of the role of politics permits us to rethink the valuable role that education can maintain in the discipline of political science broadly and to develop new teaching practices to help train students to be more proficient in public affairs. Essentially, this chapter aims to show how and in what ways political theory can be refreshed by taking seriously the political and pedagogical potential of storytelling as a diverse set of discursive expressions that offers new visions of resistance, emancipation, and the political.

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The Limits of Theory? Locating New Spaces and Voices for Action What constitutes a work of political theory? The title of this book claims that narrative and autoethnography fall within this classification by invoking the sublime in an explicitly political manner. Our readers might rightfully question what it is that pushes these works, often personal in nature, in this direction. How can a story of one person’s experience tell us anything at all about life in common? How can fiction speak truth to the complex social realities of our globalized world? How can a work of art invoke notions of a world worth changing? Centrally, political theory is not strictly concerned with Man in the singular, but rather with men or peoples in common, as Arendt notoriously claims in The Human Condition (1998: 7). Distinct from philosophy, which as a subject concerns itself with questions of the good life – to summon Leo Strauss (1957: 343) – entailing a compatibility between politics and order (Wolin 2004: 12) initiated in Aristotle’s Poetics, political theory takes up the task of positing how we live amongst one another. Thus, political theory is always concerned with the intersection between ethics and politics as a foundational objective found in varying schools of thought and thinkers from Baruch Spinoza to Bertrand Russell. In this way, political theory invites us to direct our gaze away from Plato’s allegory of the cave, which discusses idealized forms accessible only through transcendental meditation, and return to a common ground – the Earth that we all inhabit. As Wendy Brown has rightly remarked on the productive capacity of political theory: “[its] most important political offering is this opening of a breathing space between the world of common meanings and the world of alternative ones, a space of potential renewal for thought, desire, and action” (2002: 574). But, from this Earth, political theory has too often become an endeavor that aims to delineate the commonalities and differences between peoples. Suppositions of this order presuppose that certain entities and concepts, such as revolutionary agents to eternal truths

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to the linearity of progress, are immutable and determinate. To speak of the proletariat or of the demos affixes a sociological determinacy that proceeds along narrow lines of thought and praxis critically foreclosing the possibility of chaos, disorder, and uncertainty. In turn, we are left with a precise framing of the collective subject which functions as the mass subject capable of materializing into the revolutionary subject, and in a moment of thunderous theoretical crescendo, leaving us with none-other than the world-historical subject. This has been the great f law of political theory, particularly in the discipline’s failure to theorize beyond the confines of Eurocentric thought. Working from a postcolonial perspective, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty highlights this problematic thread immanent in the western tradition, writing, “[...] names like ‘peasants’ (Mao), ‘subaltern’ (Gramsci), ‘wretched of the earth’ (Fanon), and ‘the party as the subject’ (Lenin/Lukacs) have neither philosophical nor sociological precision” (2012: 212). These particular forms reify a marginalization or, in more noxious ways, an erasure of those who fall outside of these categories. In this way, theory functions not as a space of emancipation, but of delegitimization and conceptual messiness. The legacy of who counts and who constitutes the central political actor is featured predominantly throughout the Western canon. Central to this classification is the work of Plato and his promotion of ideal Forms, which directly relates to how an object ought to be constructed as well as who ought to be relegated to the affairs of the city. This line of demarcation is found discursively and figuratively in his allegory of the cave, which importantly asserted a prioritization of thought (vita contemplativa) over action (vita activa). Although this division functions heavily in ancient thought, it was not dispersed in either medieval or modern philosophical traditions. Instead, political theory, as a particular form of social inquiry and as a way of being in the world, maintained this staunch division and withstood against modifications from romanticism to German Idealism to historical materialism; it has also enforced a retreat away from such a line of questioning in the attempt to graft its methodological anchors into a broader, more-

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encompassing field of social scientific research. In this way, what political theory can do and what it does do are incompatible nodal points in a scholarly lexicon that has grown increasingly enamored with quantifiable, falsifiable data inputs. Plato’s primacy of thought over action has done much more than prevail in academic circles; it has triumphed as the quintessential way of existence under late-capitalism, by functioning as an inverted partitioning of body and mind, real and imaginary, truth and falsity, made possible strictly through the act of non-thinking and non-acting. The narrative turn mediates between the two. Rather than situating these phenomenological poles (thought and action; or as under the form of late-capitalism as non-thought and non-consequential action) in an antagonistic relationship, the narrative turn seeks to expose this division. One of the guiding aims of these approaches is engendering novel perspectives in the study of politics and developing new strategies of radical praxis. To illuminate the potential of the narrative turn requires a reconsideration of the extent of political theory – a fundamental reevaluation of the guiding principles of the subfield. Not only must the content of the work be widened to gain acceptability, but so too must the spaces of discursive authorship and the stylistic techniques used to engage in creations of theorization. A more inclusive and diffuse framing of what constitutes a work of political theory, one that is still susceptible and sustained by rigorous critique, thereby grants alternative modes of expression a mark of validity in an evaluative approach that embraces the multiplicity of linguistic, discursive, and emotive forms of expressions that underscores the human condition. Essentially, to engage in thinking and acting that is directly concerned with politics means to accept (and perhaps use) the various ways we come to experience power and authority in our everyday lives. By this, political theory – and by way of osmosis, the study of politics generally – calls for a much-needed recognition of how storytelling as a stylistic form of writing has historically occupied a prominent practice in the discipline that has, however, treated it in cursory and secondary fashion.

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Rethinking the Political: Storytelling and the Sublime Storytelling methods have long been integral approaches to the study of politics for their methodological and pedagogical value, and for the type of theorizing in which they engage. In this way, narratives are the democratization of theory. The theoretical value of those texts that fall within the spectrum of narrative and autoethnography in IR, and elsewhere, can be elucidated through a reading in relation to the distinctive aesthetic lens of the sublime. Through an encounter with the sublime, readers are tasked with reconsidering their own experiences with the world. This is an invitation to reexamine the political and ethical relationship between authors and readers and what lies beyond the discursive boundaries of the text. Michel Foucault nodded to such a point in the essay “Self Writing” positing, “To write is thus to ‘show oneself,’ to project oneself into view, to make one’s own face appear in the other’s presence. [...] In a sense, the letter sets up a face-to-face meeting” (1997: 216). Scholars, activists, and non-academics alike can take-up projects of political theorizing from the vantage point of narrative and autoethnography. By celebrating and welcoming such heterodox perspectives, these voices can illuminate where political theory can go in order to actualize the goal of truly taking up the question of the good life for peoples in common – meaning the shared space of our earthly dwelling – and, in turn, offer an opportunity to rethink the epistemological starting-points of the subfield. This space is already full of texts that, through the lens of (generally) singular stories, ask questions about how to live in a shared world. In his work, America: The Farewell Tour (2018), Chris Hedges presents countless personal narratives to show the very real impact of neoliberal economic policies on everyday-Americans. Bringing these stories front-and-center, Hedges’ account is strikingly critical of the Trump Administration and the logic of late-capitalism. Yet, it is conveyed in a deeply moving tale that neither trivializes nor demonizes those most impacted by the political process by giving frequently ignored voices and bodies

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a space for visibility and audibility. In this light, Karl Marx’s famous dictum was correct – the goal is not to simply interpret the world, but to change it (1969: 15). Narrative and autoethnography offer the study of politics ref lexive and critical insights into the dynamics of political issues, ideas, and policies. Many of the canonical texts of the Western philosophical tradition as well as contemporary scholarship concerning the study of politics already rely on a storytelling approach. Importantly, these works prompt us to consider, and reassess, our own unique position in relation to the local and global in stridently ethical ways, inviting an encounter with the political beyond the myopic vision of consensus that underpins contemporary politics, into the vast, unknown horizons of the sublime. Meaningfully, narrative and autoethnography invite us to think about and engage in politics. But these texts help us to approach the political in new and meaningful ways. To theorize the political as something-beyond an artificial space of management and governance, a glance away from bureaucratic and technocratic realms is necessary – one that does not evade the “disenchantment of the world,” but transcends its inherent limitedness. At the end of World War I, German sociologist Max Weber was keenly aware of an encroaching sense of disenchantment brought forth under rapidly pervasive processes of rationalization and intellectualization. Although the world has greatly changed since Weber’s astute observation, such a feeling has not yet receded in our postmodern landscape. And, still, much like Weber’s diagnosis, the 21st century, one not that dissimilar from the Weimar Republic, feels fraught with moments of commonality and fraternity. From the deficiently hollow spectacle of Trump’s impeachment to global economic downturns to enforced isolation in the face of COVID-19, our present-moment all too-often reminds us of that sense of loneliness and alienation of which Weber spoke. For what remains lost is a double-figure: a symbiotic comingtogether of words and deeds incarnate. Firstly, a world of post-truth,

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post-factual, anything-goes relativism affirms Weber’s audacious point: “the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life” (2004: 30). But precisely what were these sublime values that Weber was alluding to? Was he less concerned with the categorization and classification of values and wary of the selection of values for any given society? Or, perhaps Weber was advocating for an open horizon of competing, contesting, and conf licting values akin to Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy (cf. 1989)? Many of these points seem plausible, but principally, Weber had a clear idea of these absent values identifying them as art, religion, and the lack of a “genuine community” (2004: 30). Weber’s litany of values engenders a critical assessment of exactly how and who constitutes the appropriate agents of public affairs, and importantly, the symbolic force of the political. It points, secondly, to all that remains lost in the study and actualization of politics. For Weber, the political signified an open playing field for human agency to f lourish through an on-going creation of genuine communities. Yet, politics in our globalized, crisis-ridden world indicates a playing out of roles – a performative onslaught of data, lies, and violence – by technocrats, bureaucrats, and a real-estate mogul within the parameters of the nation-state. What is missing – to affirm and move beyond Weber’s assertion – are the people, as Gilles Deleuze suggests in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1997). If we take this framing seriously, then we must ask, how can the people, through the erection of genuine communities of solidarity, win back the realm of the political? How can they escape a vision of technocratic governance as the only remedy to national, global, and existential crises? Such a question dwells at the core of the democratic experience. To do so, new strategies and tactics must be deployed to recapture and recognize the material content of ethical issues in order to be translated into political substance, one that enables a society, as Slavoj Žižek writes in relation to a possible outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic, to “actualize itself in the forms of global solidarity and cooperation” (2020: 48). The rupturing of separated realms of politics and ethics qua the transference of a moral category

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into a political action, results in a political force consummated in community solidarity. This is not an easy task, nor will it result from a top-down approach or even from spaces outside of the state. Rather, it develops from the people within their own communities in order to address the needs and problems that they confront: inadequate access to affordable housing, increasing rent and utility costs, absence of childcare, underfunded schools, police brutality inter alia. The people alone will lead to a transcendence of the capitalist framework of hypercommodification and the reduction of all relations to an exchange mentality, by proceeding through a qualitatively different base as an expression of new human potentiality. At the heart of this vision of the political as representative of the sublime – one that is painstakingly uncertain and messy – is the issue of boundaries. Demarcated lines of legitimate space for politics to be contained. Constitutional democracies have historically delineated and constructed oscillating lines for participation, based on f luctuating criteria for exclusion. Boundaries are set, lines are drawn that collapse the people in on themselves – boxed in and boarded up the people have learned to passively play nice and keep quiet. But outside of these artificially-created spaces of suburbia, urban-sprawl, and rural collapse – functioning collectively as a Kaf kaesque settlement of locked doors and staircases to nowhere – the forces of state-power await with a conformist mass media apparatus and brute force to pounce and destroy any potential threat, both domestically and internationally. The byzantine structure of the Roman Catholic Church prior to the collapse of the spiritual, theological world, commanded that its f lock sit, kneel, stand, sacrifice is now stirringly anachronistic. This form of authority and edict of control has not yet been overcome, but merely replaced by the hegemony of the nation-state, which demands its herd to vote, pay taxes, shop, and consume ad infinitum. Boundary lines have encoded a geometric pattern to state power, dispersing the monolithic, rigid markings of the cross. So, to echo Lenin’s famous question, “What is to be done?” Conceptualizing an encounter with the political as an encounter with

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the sublime ultimately relies on an embrace of a particular mode of democratic practice that nourishes political energy while unleashing ruptures of potential that can awaken our shared sensibilities concerning commonality and fraternity. While this approach is certainly ambitious, focused on the discursive capacity of narrative and autoethnography to disrupt hierarchies of power, it remains committed to stressing the importance of a commonly used scholarly method. The reason is clear, yet simple: narrative and autoethnography invite us to rethink the political, and as a corollary, politics, not in institutional form, but as a mode of expression squarely because of its foundational points: the voices and lived-in experiences of the people that have previously been unseen, unheard, and uncounted. The corpus of the text thereby emerges as an antagonistic force against omnipotent institutional forms of power in the pursuit of constituting a political and public space that exposes the self-to-the-other. These narrative entries affirm a commitment that is central to democratic politics, albeit wholly devoid in our politics of representation, a belief that “that ordinary individuals are capable of creating new cultural patterns of commonality at any moment” (Wolin 1994: 43).

Teaching Narrative as Theory Although the narrative turn has continued to gain traction and popularity in recent years, the stylistic approach is not entirely original. The reception by IR scholars and practitioners to accept narrative entries as worthwhile and valuable contributions runs parallel to how alternative styles of political writing have maintained space within the Western political tradition. Students of Western political thought are frequently exposed to these unconventional approaches, ranging from selected works of Thucydides and Plato (found in the form of dialogues) to Machiavelli’s The Prince (as a series of letters) to The Federalist Papers (an anthology of newspaper articles).

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In courses aimed at examining historical and conceptual underpinnings of democratic theory, students as well have received an introduction to varying modes of academic analysis. In particular, discussions centered on the intersections between deliberative democracy and forms of communication often proceed along the avenues of storytelling, memoirs, and greeting, as offered by Simone Chambers, Iris Marion Young, and Noëlle McAfee (cf. Terchek 2003: 147-155). Importantly, the reified Western canon suggests that the narrative turn, broadly understood as works that convey political significance across varying modalities, already maintains a place of prominence. While there are those within the field of IR who have acknowledged such a valuable methodological commitment, the study of political theory, particularly in its normative orientation, would greatly benefit from a similar reception by bringing new avenues of pedagogy, activism, and scholarship into closer dialogue. Rethinking the manner in which political ideas and ideals are expressed in written form has the potential to open the discipline to new pedagogical methods capable of further enhancing and supplementing key canonical texts in a decisively more accessible and contemporary light. From this perspective, narrative and autoethnography become teaching instruments of cognition, not through the transferring of information from the text to the audience, but through an on-going process towards critical inquiry actualized by a praxis of ref lection and action in a classroom setting. For example, educators of political theory stand much to gain by presenting Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace alongside Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem or Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence coupled with Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” or even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto” with Ernesto Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries. In each of these cases, a juxtaposition between important foundational texts and first-person narratives prompts students to consider the ways in which political, social, and economic issues permeate everyday life

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as well as how conversations surrounding politics need not be confined to quantifiable indices. From this perspective, we offer a potentially fruitful pairing between a canonical text of political theory and a contemporary narrative admission for a course specifically designed to explore foundational works in the Western tradition. This is not to propose that narrative and autoethnographic works must be coupled with a canonical text in order for their political theoretical potential to shine through, but to illustrate the differences and similarities in the content. To demonstrate this pedagogically rich exercise, we offer Plato’s “Crito” from The Trial and Death of Socrates alongside T.J.’s “Undertow,” an autoethnographic text published in JNP in 2017. While “Crito” is a text frequently used in political theory courses, T.J.’s “Undertow” is not. The comparison of these two texts illuminates firstly that narrative and autoethnography are political theoretic works helping to elucidate the sublime encounter of the political and, secondly, that the act of citing has major implications for the epistemological and ontological possibilities of a course or discipline. In “Crito,” Socrates is visited in his jail cell by a friend after he is sentenced to death. As with other Platonic texts, the work is written in the form of a dialogue between interlocutors – in this case, Socrates, Crito, and the Laws of Athens. The brief work takes readers through a discussion wherein Crito encourages Socrates to escape his cell and move in exile to another city rather than take hemlock. Socrates, in his ever-rhetorical manner, explains to Crito that refusing his sentence would be unjust as someone who lived in Athens for his entire life, previously satisfied with the laws and norms of the city. Thus, in Socrates’ framing, there are two options when met with a dissatisfactory law: persuasion or acceptance. As such, he argues that death, in this case, is more just than exile (Plato 2000: 53). The justifications provided by Socrates for acquiescence to the laws are three-fold. The first reason concerns the issue of the faithful party: or, a normative exposition on the importance of agreement to binding

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agreements. Contracts inherently require trust, a point of which Socrates is keenly aware. They require a trust and a belief that another party is willing to uphold their side of the bargain. This, of course, has enormous implications, for anything less shatters the possibility of establishing future contracts. In a meaningful way, Socrates is pointing to the fact that a broken contract signals a social coordination problem. Even in a contemporary light, this is significant when we think of the expansive nature of contracts in economic, juridical, and political domains. Although we may think of contracts predominantly, if not exclusively, in terms of employment relations, there is much more atplay here as Socrates makes a clear distinction as to what constitutes an agreement. Instead, Socrates views the relationship between a citizen (in this dilemma, himself) and the ancient polis as transactional. But what exactly have Socrates and Athens agreed to? Well, the terms of the agreement are far-reaching, such as the configuration of political life, laws, education, tradition, and culture. To break this contract, would be to inf lict irreparable harm – as a contract violation – against the Athenian city-state. Now, Socrates’ strong promotion of the moral necessity of being a faithful party to a binding contract certainly conjures and foreshadows the very same device and line of thought employed by the social contract theorists of the 17 th and 18th centuries, yet there remains a corporeal aspect to his culpability. Here, the second justification is presented as an expression of a natural duty of consent, rejecting strictly discursive or verbal commitments. Socrates insists that his tacit agreement to the transactional exchange between himself and the city-state was established by his physical presence in the polis. Socrates suggests that he was bound by an ethical obligation that was inferred simply by the territorial location of his birth. In this way, his entry into the world, and as a result, into the polis, marks the formidable and introductory stages of his compliance. As such, a duty to support and uphold the values and traditions of the polis were handed down to him in a naturalized manner as a gestational transfer.

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Yet, this particular expression of consent did not cease simply after his physical arrival via a maternal womb. Instead, the Laws of Athens – articulated through the voice of Socrates – reminds him that his constant placement in the city, not to mention the accompanying benefits, signify an enhanced form of acquiescence to such a binding agreement that was previously triggered upon birth. In this way, Socrates’ constant habitation in the polis, not only solidified his consent, but further amplified it. Socrates stresses that this sense of duty is heighted precisely because the Laws require obedience in a manner analogous to how a child conforms to the rules of a parent. Of course, Athens functions in a manner more important than that reserved to a parent, likened to a productive force that affords entry, education, security, and culture. This is because it was the polis that birthed him; the polis that educated him; the polis that shaped him into the man that he had become. The polis is much more than simply a parent – it is the architect of his life. A relationship of this magnitude undoubtedly demands respect and obedience; it crucially requires a commitment to justice through the fulfillment of an obligation. This brings us to the presentation of Socrates’ third, and final, justification for conformity to standing laws and it concerns an important interplay between obligation and reputation. The Laws emphasize that at any point Socrates could have voided the contract by leaving the parameters of Athens. However, Socrates did no such thing, opting instead to stay, serve in the navy, and raise a family, all of which further enhances the depths of his tacit consent. It is here, that citizenship – and not just any form of citizenship, but decisively the good citizen – acquires a critically ethical dimension. Upholding the agreement is none other than the ultimate display of justice. Certainly, lines can easily be drawn from Socrates’ conception of citizenship to a contemporary perspective that equates inclusion in the nation-state to a plane of docility and conformity under the sanctification of the rule of law. Socrates’ option to f lee has now vanished before our very eyes, leaving him, conveniently, with no

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choice at all. The non-option of escape is banished from consideration tantamount to a violation of justice so severe that it would lead to a deformity of character. To f lee the city at this point would necessitate that Socrates leave in disguise; a concealment of his true nature. And even if he were successful in his exit, enjoying the company of Crito’s friends in Thessaly, he would forever wear an irremovable mark – a stain visible to all. A mark of a soiled reputation worn by an enemy of the state that is capable of exploiting the resources of a well-governed city-state only to potentially break a new contract and violate the laws of the state at any moment. To f lee the polis, would procure a fate worse than death for Socrates: it would render him stateless. If carried-out, Socrates’ act of dissent would prompt the liquidation of the good citizen, framing all subsequent subjects of state power – and importantly the figure of the philosopher – as outlaws that are vehemently unwanted, untrustworthy, and unjust. But, Socrates’ refusal to act against the authority of the Laws preserves the very thing he opposes: the illusion of freedom. Plato’s “Crito” certainly prompts engaging and fruitful questions in a seminar setting. However, it does so by foregrounding a notion of retribution within a criminal justice system that is incomprehensible by modern liberal democratic standards. Importantly, the form and content of “Crito” tell us that political theorizing already relies on a lineage wherein narratives are accepted approaches to social scientific study. We wonder what is potentially lost by sharing a story of a jail sentence without, at the very least, a more contemporary text that troubles the ideas of citizenship, justice, the good life, and death in preference to exile. Using T.J.’s “Undertow” as a textual counterpart helps to enhance the thematic tensions that underscore Socrates’ dilemma, further bringing into focus philosophical affinities between the two texts in relation to present discussions concerning justice and punishment. “Undertow” is the account of a young man who is sent to jail for unnamed crimes. Through a series of scenes from his time in prison,

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the narrator sets a claustrophobic tone for readers, illustrating the potential for incarceration to turn humans into precisely the types of people that such punishment is supposed to reform. Throughout the story, the narrator expresses his anger, resentment, and solitude as he navigates his humanity and the confines of a cell. At one point in “Undertow,” the narrator details watching a man overdose on crystal meth. As another prisoner attempts to revive this man, the narrator’s initial impulse, which is to help, is replaced with a desire to see the man die. He writes: I twist the knob, but then I hesitate. I don’t dare leave my cell. If he dies and the surveillance cameras record me entering his cell in the middle of the night, I’m in a world of shit. I slowly release the doorknob and tell myself that this is the reason I don’t help save this man’s life. The truth is I want him to die. As I watch Steven bang on his chest and breathe into his lungs, I hope that his heart has stopped and his lungs have collapsed. The longer I watch, the more I wish Steven would give up. Francis infuriated me, to the point where I considered attacking him, jeopardizing my release on good behaviour just to fuck up this piece of shit. He disgusted me, the way he spoke about women, using them, beating them. Giving them a free taste of meth or heroin just to set the hook. He would explain fucking their almost comatose bodies after they would take a hit from him. Rape, with a hint of necrophilia. I hated everything about him, the sound of his whiny voice, how his face narrowed down to a point like a rat. How tough he pretended to be. He repulsed me, he was a coward and I saw right through it. Just as I thought my prayers were answered, that son of a bitch comes back to life. (2017: 4-5) This excerpt has seemingly no place in an academic journal or a classroom setting. The vulgar language and confession of an invitation to see another person die do not conform to the most basic standards of academic jargon and civility. Even so, this narration questions the relationship between formalized ethics and decorum through a

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ref lection on life in prison. The narrator’s anger across scenes invokes a sort of horror both in the treatment of prisoners and what becomes of an individual who is incarcerated. Because of the lack of credentials listed at the bottom of the first page (as is typical of academic journals) and because of the use of a pseudonym, it is unclear whether the author of this piece is an academic. Yet, “Undertow” clearly grapples with complex issues, such as the efficacy and legitimacy of the prison-industrial complex, through a narration of the ways that incarceration instills anger, hatred, and resentment in prisoners and guards alike. In this way, “Undertow” and other narrative and autoethnographic texts trouble the idea that political theorizations must come from esoteric academic spaces. Rather, “Undertow” makes room for a narrator who has otherwise been excluded from social science discourse. Here, we see the democratization of theory taking place. In what is perhaps the most disturbing scene of “Undertow,” the narrator recounts watching a prisoner-on-prisoner murder. The narrator writes: I watch as they break his fingers, his squeals echo through the range. I’m thinking that at any moment the guards are going to enter the range and save him, surely they will put a stop to this, they have the power to – the duty. I’m wrong. They won’t enter the range at all. It is too dangerous for them. They know there are weapons on the range and they are scared for their own safety. This man will pay the ultimate price. After almost two hours of suffering I watch him beg for his life, as the last devastating blow is delivered to his temple, his body turns quiet and still. They unstrap him from the chair and dump him into a pile on the floor. They drag his limp body into the empty shower beside the kitchen, and one of them slides the shower curtain shut. He is left to die alone on the cold wet floor. (ibid: 8-9) While this and the other passage cited at length are both jarring and memorable, what is more impactful is the quiet solitude the narrator

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describes throughout the piece. In juxtaposition with the horrific expressions of violence in which the narrator both participates and witnesses, throughout “Undertow” there is an affective undercurrent. Woven throughout the text is a story that asks readers to grapple with the ethics of late-capitalist prison sentences. This happens most effectively in the discrete spaces of the text rather than in those moments that are provocative of explicit violence and dehumanization. From these hushed passages, “Undertow” ref lects on the embodied experience of imprisonment. The narrator whispers to readers about what it is like to live without human touch for “four months two weeks and five days” (ibid: 1). There are observations embedded throughout on the impossibility for the prison system to simultaneously discipline and render justice. Readers are left without a clear picture of either a beatific governing structure or neat ethical categories, as is the case in “Crito.” Instead of asking for congruency, “Undertow” is evocative of a more complicated discussion. In this same vein, T.J. marks a political space wherein the sublime nature of the piece exceeds the capacity of the eleven pages on which it is written. Herein lies the political theoretic potential of narrative and autoethnography. Our point in comparing these two pieces is not to dismiss Plato’s “Crito” as an important political text or to claim that the reified canon deserves to be supplanted by newer works. Platonic texts do hold value and still maintain significance even in today’s globalized world. There are questions at the core of “Crito” that ask readers to consider basic assumptions about duty, citizenship, and obedience. And perhaps now, more than ever, we should be asking questions about the merit of conformity to state-based laws and sanctions in the face of near total ecological collapse. However, shining light on the confines of Socrates’ jail cell in the ancient world becomes more vivid and more accessible to today’s students when read in conjunction with T.J.’s “Undertow.” This promising pairing extends as well to other varying forms of storytelling ranging from Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) to Ava DuVernay’s powerful documentary 13th (2016) to Malcom

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X’s transformative prison memoir (1965). Canonical texts offer philosophical insights into transhistorical questions of political significance, yet, even in their most idyllic form, fail to maintain a monopoly over the necessity to continuously ask new questions concerning existence on this Earth. In Politics and Literature at the Turn of the Millennium (2015), Keren shows the pedagogical value of literature as an accompaniment to more traditionally used sources in the study of politics. This endeavor is highly commendable as it makes clear the thematic similarities between different types of texts. While these couplings and the ones we describe above are fruitful and clearly encourage this type of exercise, narrative and autoethnography exceed the designation of mere supplementation, standing on their own as primary and required texts to be used in the study of politics. Whereas Keren writes, “the aesthetic qualities of literature may be used to enrich political inquiry” (2015: 19) – a point with which we agree – our argument makes clear that the aesthetic qualities of certain narratives are individually evocative of political thought and praxis. Developing a theory of augmentation conveys that literature or narratives can only ever achieve supplementary status. In our role as educators, we have often followed this route by turning away from traditional political science discourses and utilizing narrative admissions. The results have been astounding with students drawing parallels between the text and contemporary issues (and importantly, their own lives) through an intersectional lens. Narratives bring to life the conditions and problems of the world, inviting students to develop problem-posing methods by becoming interrogators of the text and activists in their local communities. This crucially enables students to perceive the way they exist in the world as it truly is while still assessing the historical and normative implications of political writing as a ref lection of transformation, and, possibly even, emancipation. While there are certainly good reasons why other modes of inquiry should continue to circulate within academia and elsewhere, this is not because narratives are insufficient. On the

Chapter 2: Rethinking Political Theory

contrary, the narrative turn shows that storytelling approaches retain a valuable political capacity. A glimpse of this potential rests in their ability to evoke the sublime, calling into question how peoples might better live in common.

Concluding Thoughts To open space for political theory to more properly include unheard voices and unseen bodies, a vision of theory must emphasize the role of politics, storytelling as a mode of expression, a return to the political, and new innovative pedagogical techniques. Narrative and autoethnographic projects are centrally achieving these goals and, thus, ought to be viewed as political theoretic texts on their accord. Discussing the potentials of the narrative turn, Naumes writes, “Narrative does here what other methods cannot: it disrupts the congruity for which IR scholars often strive in political thought. Narrative shows us that the puzzle pieces that we have been struggling to jam together actually may not fit perfectly” (2015: 825). Naumes’ analysis draws careful attention to how alternative stylistic entries have the ability to elicit questions concerning political relevance as well as to further reveal how the text functions beyond canonical approaches. In this way, narrative texts both resist and welcome. On the one hand, they resist stylistic conformity through the use of stories as a fundamentally different method to shed light on issues concerning politics and the political. While on the other hand, they welcome voices, bodies, stories, and modes of expression as a “declaration of humanity” (Gros 2020: 9) dominantly rendered invisible through inaccessible, jargon-saturated, technocratic techniques of the academy. In next two chapters, we explore the aesthetic expression of narrative and autoethnographic texts in order to stress the valuable political potential inherent within this method. By rejecting the technocratic style of academic writing, these entries invite both the author and the reader into not only a particular story, but into a web

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of relations that exist between and across the voices and words of the active participants of the text. To invite readers into a type of political theorizing that challenges settled norms and practices can often leave readers in a state of disorientation and uncertainty. This expressive, visceral reaction summons the democratic potential of aesthetics and the sublime encounter of the political. In this light, narrative and autoethnography bring the unheard and unseen into political theory, opening new spaces and exposing ruptures for the people to gain entry into decision making processes. Storytelling in the form of narrative and autoethnography does this through unconventional and heterodox stylistic and substantive decisions. The result is a bringing-together of authors and readers into an experience of the sublime.

Chapter 3: A Genealogy of the Sublime

“But, when the Imperial mantle shall have finally fallen upon the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, then will also the iron statue of Napoleon drop down from the top of the Vendôme column.” – Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1898: 81) This chapter offers a purposely limited treatment of the sublime in the history of Western philosophical and aesthetic thought. To bring about such an understanding of the sublime in relation to narrative and autoethnographic texts, we present a valuable, yet under-theorized side of the idea of the sublime. By so doing, we direct attention to its communal orientation through a mysterious, often divine, exchange between the self and the cosmos, first announced by the ancient Greeks, as seen in Longinus’ Peri Hupsous. From there, we trace how the idea of the sublime receded, only to return in a sweeping fury in the 18th century at the hands of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Burke and Kant’s account of the sublime represents a major transformation of the concept through the incorporation of bodily sensations and reason. While the aesthetic theories of these thinkers, relating particularly to the distinction between the concepts of the beautiful and sublime, were not the only attempts to engage in such a debate during this period, they importantly represent two of the dominant ways of thinking through such a striking conceptual binary. Although a more inclusive anthology of theories of the sublime would surely help to

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tease out the myriad facets of 18th century thought and later iterations, an omission of other theorizations does not nullify our contention. Political theorists and aestheticians have for nearly a millennium explored the ontological and epistemological parameters of the sublime. While a more thorough engagement with the evolution of the concept over and across the disciplines of aesthetic theory and political studies contains the potential to reveal the subordination of the sublime encounter to the rigid disciplinary boundaries of the social sciences, our intention lies elsewhere. Fundamentally, a limitation of scope is enacted in order to more squarely explore how the sublime maintains a political and ethical capacity in relation to narrative and autoethnographic texts. In so doing, this deliberately selective and focused perspective circumvents a particular typology of scholarly expectations that underscores research performed within the disciplines of philosophy, classics, and aesthetics, to name just a few. Instead, we commit more time and exhaust more space on a survey of Burke and Kant in order to point to the value that the sublime can play in assessments of narrative and autoethnographic texts, albeit with significant limitations. For sure, Burke and Kant’s theories of the sublime are distinct, yet they offer in-roads to reading narrative and autoethnographic texts and the potential capacity to elucidate questions concerning the political. Although a resuscitation of the idea of the sublime is greatly indebted to both Burke and Kant, a turn to its explicit positioning within the realm of politics and the political is a marked feature of postmodern interpretations as demonstrated by Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Rancière. While much can be gained by an examination of the Western tradition’s understanding of the sublime, this chapter concludes by assessing the inherent limitations and problematic aspects that accompany an engagement with the idea of the sublime. By exploring the philosophical lineage of the sublime, including how logics of mastery and masculinity are central to its framing, we ask: “in what ways can the sublime be situated in relation to narrative and autoethnographic texts in order to illuminate its political capacity?”

Chapter 3: A Genealogy of the Sublime

This chapter, thereby, offers an important conceptual framing of the sublime as a potential bridge for an inclusion of voices unheard through a process of academic erasure. The broad strokes offered in this chapter enable a more precise and applicable conceptual tool to be developed in the following chapter. A rethinking of the sublime when aligned with narrative and autoethnographic texts, opens up the reader to the current conditions of the world in all its multifaceted wonders and horrors. This is a theory of the sublime – for the many, and by the many, in step with Jason Frank’s articulation of an “aesthetic understanding of democratic politics” (2007: 430) – that offers a vantage point into the vastness and promissory quality of narrative and autoethnographic texts as political theoretic texts capable of exposing rupture points – and sites of embryonic resistance – between encounters of radical modes of (inter)subjectivity and embodied solidarities. From this vantage point, a specter of democracy is released in aesthetic display as an “intensity of indistinction, impersonality, nonnecessity, or indifference,” understood as the titular endeavor that gives meaning to the “forces of associations of persons, places, and things” that previously lacked symmetry and congruence as a singular entity (Panagia 2018: 81).

The Sublime and the Political The most significant discussion on the sublime found in antiquity is located in the work of first century Greek writer Longinus. Largely forgotten, Longinus’ work was rediscovered in 1698 and translated from its original title, Peri Hupsous – written around 50 A.D. (Hill 1966: 265) – into On the Sublime. It became required reading at many universities during the 18th century and was even introduced to Edmund Burke in his formal years of schooling at Trinity College. In many ways, Longinus’ ancient text helped to spur a lively and energetic scholarly debate concerning the sublime, carefully importing a discussion

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of aesthetics in relation to the political within early-Enlightenment thought. Centrally, Longinus situates his examination of the sublime as an exercise in the realm of rhetoric. Such a methodological focal point enables an analysis of the sublime to transcend rigid epistemological boundaries, producing in effect – contra arcane modes of inquiry – a new apparatus for philosophical thought. This ref lective framing functions nearly seamlessly in his account – notably jettisoning a speculative anchoring as a precursor to both Burke and Kant – vis-àvis a nearly postmodern-quality, one that crucially casts the sublime into an indeterminate nebula of aesthetics. James I. Porter makes note of the f luidity of the sublime-rhetoric exchange, highlighting an important consequence, particularly its ability to be experienced as a matter of art. Porter explains the connection to the written word, “If Longinus has any critical program at all, it is to locate and to analyze instances of right where they make themselves known, in texts” (2016: 10). Longinus’ placement of the sublime couched within a rhetorical device does not, however, as Samuel Monk contends, affix it strictly to matters of technique and style. Rather, according to Monk (1960), the sublime shatters the symmetrical ordering of form enabling a reader of written-texts, or perhaps more apropos, a witness, to an experience beyond the corpus of the text to an independent realm. While a deployment of these categories is perhaps conceptually messy and strikingly hollow of lived-in experiences, Monk’s reading of Longinus prompts us to consider the reasons why, firstly, an individual would enter into an act of textual reading and, secondly, what are the limits of an exchange between expressions of the sublime and discursive hierarchies? Longinus’ appraisal of the sublime offers insights into both lines of query. Firstly, Longinus understands the sublime as an expression of excellence – a towering achievement, so to speak – found in both written and spoken articulations (Longinus 1890: 15, 37). Greatness of this order materializes not simply through a mastery of technique or

Chapter 3: A Genealogy of the Sublime

even a refined cultivation of intellectual acumen, but precisely by an embrace of human limits. This leads us directly to the second prong of our analysis. While the sublime can now be understood in terms of excellence, the intent of an entry into such an encounter requires further clarification. Here, Stephen K. White’s work is most useful. Importantly, White asserts that Longinus’ aim was to aid those directly engaged in political affairs (2002: 24). We will see shortly how 18th century readings of the sublime, particularly Kant, eschew such a political quality, while a return to the political marks a defining feature of postmodern interpretations. But for Longinus, the sublime speaks beyond the ordinary, or banal moments of existence, a point that political theorist Jane Bennett contests (2001: 76), probing the very possibility of difference in the realms of art and politics. The sublime, then, functions as a bodily and intellectual experience that opens up the spectator to the limits of the present-moment embodied in a temporal, liminal expression of written, spoken, and somatic endeavors, while simultaneously serving as a reminder to the morality of the physical world (Longinus 1890: 68). White captures this sentiment, asserting, “[…] this passion for limitless-ness remains in tension with human limitedness, the parameters of which form when we ‘gaze up openly at the cosmos’ and when we ref lect upon the ‘hard destiny’ of fate that awaits human projects” (2002: 24). From this position, Longinus’ sublime acquires a decisively radical glossing. Significantly, the sublime finds space within art and politics as a passageway that extends beyond the current state of affairs as a mode of expression that ref lects the very possibility of human potential. And, crucially, it circumvents formalized literary, artistic, and political articulations abandoning settled hierarchies of performativity and representation by an invocation of open, indeterminate future horizons. Such a reading of the sublime, animated through a symbiotic view of human potential and the limits of collective life, thus prioritizes livedin experiences over dominant techniques in a matter directly relevant

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to speaking, acting, and doing politics across a multitude of modes of being.

Pain, Terror, and the Body In approaching Edmund Burke’s take on the sublime, we first turn to his primary text on the matter, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1798 [1757]). In this work, Burke sketches out his major understanding of the sublime, accentuating the role that pain and pleasure play in the experience. Moreover, the sublime maintains a distinctly destructive capacity; a commanding force that summons internal sources of fear and terror. Burke’s early writings on the subject resurfaced in his more-politically oriented text, Ref lections on the Revolution in France (1968 [1790]). Here, Burke, once again, returns to the role that passions play over reason and, in turn, how images of the sublime can lead to a violent upheaval of social customs and mores. In A Philosophical Enquiry Burke develops a theory of aesthetics within an “implicit naturalistic, empiricism ontology” (Shusterman 2012: 148). A framing of this order situates the body and mind in unison, while further suggesting that cognitive powers are derived from bodily sensations. This is essential to unpacking Burke’s central thesis of Philosophical Enquiry, specifically that any object capable of producing pain/terror/passion can, in return, lead to an encounter with the sublime. The feeling or experience of the sublime as transcendence can be achieved in two ways according to Burke. Firstly, an encounter with a threatening external object causes a type of “delightful horror; a sort of tranquility tinged with terror” (Burke 1798 [1757]: 257). In this case, a perceived state of safety becomes challenged, prompting an arousal of the “finer bodily tissues” to initiate cognitive faculties (Crowther 1989: 8). Secondly, an emergence of objects that actively pressure or constrict subjective perceptions produces a type of pain, notably a

Chapter 3: A Genealogy of the Sublime

pre-conscious pain. On both occasions, Burke insists that anything is capable of producing such a feeling further affirming the instinctive drive of self-preservation (1798 [1757]: 57). From this position, Burke’s understanding of the sublime stands in direct opposition to the concept of the beautiful. For the latter conforms to order and stability and is “well-formed,” saturated with an apparent “smoothness” typically found in a naturalized setting, whereas the former excites the “ideas of pain and danger” (ibid: 58; 213). Sweeping in its effect, Burke suggests that the sublime is “productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (ibid: 58). What is essential to draw out is how Burke’s theory of the sublime, and his theory of aesthetics writ large, takes on an embodied form. The somatic import of Burke’s analysis is on full display in his claim that our mental capabilities are directly derived from our bodily sensations. Burke emphasizes the impact of corporeal forces on the mind (Shusterman 2012: 149), writing: Since it is probable, that not only the inferior parts of the soul, as the passions are called, but the understanding itself makes use of some fine corporeal instruments in its operation; though what they are, and where they are, may be somewhat hard to settle; but that it does make use of such, appears from hence; that a long exercise of the mental powers induces a remarkable lassitude of the whole body; and, on the other hand, that great bodily labour, or pain, weakens, and sometimes, actually destroys the mental faculties. (1798 [1757]: 255-256) The correlation between the mind-body is further expounded upon, as Burke claims, “Our minds and bodies are so closely and intimately connected, that one is incapable of pain or pleasure without the other” (ibid: 250-251). While the mind-body distinction is certainly at-play here within his aesthetic theory, it does not suggest a primacy of the body over the mind. Rather, the dualism between these two distinct entities contains an essential division, and importantly, a crucial hierarchy. Burke insists that the “elevation of the mind ought to be the principal

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end of our studies,” (ibid: 88) in any attempt to better understand and more properly regulate the eruptive nature of the passions. This is key to our discussion of Burke’s understanding of the sublime on two fronts. Firstly, it reifies the role that cognitive faculties play sine qua non in the experience of the sublime creating an elevation of the mind over body ref lective of a further extension of Cartesian dualism. Secondly, although a prioritization of the mind remains in place, a somatic dimension is present that exposes how the bodily, or tissue-like, substance of his aesthetic theory enables explorations to be taken up in ways that the emotive-body nexus plays in the various manners we experience the sublime. This affords the experience of the sublime to be taken up in its relation to the political (cf. Wood 1964). A key substantive element of both Burke’s aesthetic theory and political philosophy exists in his elevation of passion over reason. Centrally, Burke posits that it is emotions and feelings that instruct reason. In a tone reminiscent of Montesquieu’s notion of “felt truths” found in his Lettres persanes (cf. 1973 [1721]), Burke contends that it is natural to be affected by fear, affection, and reverence. Such emotional and bodily responses are brought about in the experience of the sublime, providing a certain level of delight to the individual. The authenticity of our feelings is integral to our human nature, as they become socialized from the particular society that we find ourselves living in, enabling us to learn many great lessons (Burke 1968 [1790]: 175). With “real hearts of f lesh and blood beating in our bosoms,” Burke contends that feelings, rather than rational thought, establishes a genuine connectivity to our community (ibid: 182). For Burke, it is the wisdom of the passions, directly inf luenced from a lineage to our ancestors, that must guide politics, not the a priori politics of the metaphysical rationalists. Similar to David Hume’s account in A Treatise of Human Nature (cf. 1948), Burke also discusses at length the importance of sympathy in the context of passions and feelings. Drawing from his earlier philosophical work on aesthetics in Philosophical Enquiry, Burke contends that sympathy is a natural impulse and that the natural man

Chapter 3: A Genealogy of the Sublime

ought to feel sympathy. The absence of sympathy in circumstances that should arouse its presence detaches man from the bonds of society. Burke further articulates this premise in Ref lections on the Revolution in France referring to the lack of sympathy and compassion by Richard Price towards the violent events of the revolution directed against the royal family, stating, “This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgotten his nature. They have perverted in themselves, and in those that attend to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast” (1968 [1790]: 156). Burke furthers his puzzlement by the lack of compassion from Price and others at the dramatic capture of the Queen, rhetorically declaring, “Oh! What a revolution! and what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall!” (ibid: 169). The horror of such an image – an incarnate portrait of the obliteration of customs, traditions, and order in a somatic manner – evinces not only a lack of the natural sentiment of sympathy but transfigures an experience of the sublime upon the mise-en-scene of the political. In this manner, the political acts that in Burke’s eyes ushered in the destruction of the crown, church, and noble class, released a specter of the sublime into a plane of immanence in French society. The unleashing of the sublime into society runs congruent with Burke’s take on how passions operate at a local, or even possibly at a national level. According to Burke, feelings unfold in relation to history and community. Burke contends, “We know that we have made no discoveries; and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; [...] we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians” (ibid: 182). By this Burke praises the latent wisdom of traditions, customs, and prejudices as well as links the present temporal moment to the past. “Instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves,” Burke claims, “we cherish them because they are prejudices” (ibid: 183). For Burke, the presence of religion, or a binding document such as the Magna Carta, illuminates a sentimental feeling and respect

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for our ancestors. By looking back at our ancestors, a transmission of knowledge occurs and forms a psychological link between the members of a community throughout time. Therefore, a community existing in a specific spatiotemporal historical framework serves as a trustee of a particular society and of an entitled state.1 The ancestors of the past and the trustees of the present are united through pride, respect, and love.2 Burke’s treatment of feelings and sentiments, therefore, casts reason and, in turn, the mind-body interplay in a very different light compared to his contemporaries. Unlike other philosophical thinkers of his time, particularly Kant, who saw reason as the shining light directing the path forward towards progress, Burke finds latent wisdom ossified in traditions, customs, and institutions. Burke contends that speculative reason is dangerous precisely because it only finds calculations, imperfections, and f laws, whereas the heart

1 Burke’s initial reference of the community serving as a trustee first appeared in his 1769 work, Observations on a Late Publication (cf. 1899b). Burke further expanded this concept in his essay Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, stating: “no power is given for the sole sake of the holder” (1899c: 492). Again, Burke took this concept up in a speech, espousing: “Shew a government, and I will shew a trust” (ibid: 257). Finally, Burke’s most articulated conception of trustee can be found in Reflections: “All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awefully impressed with an idea that they act in trust; and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great master, author and founder of society” (1968 [1790]: 190). This claim is derived from Burke’s conceptualization of the social contract. 2  Breaking away from the influence of other prominent social contract theorists, Burke presents a radically new formulation of the social contract by emptying out the legal content of the contract and structuring it as a family heirloom linking generations from the past, present, and future. Burke writes, “Society is indeed a contract. [...] It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. [...]it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born” (1968 [1790]: 194-95).

Chapter 3: A Genealogy of the Sublime

illuminates the familiar, the old, and the love between friends.3 It is reason that obstructs men to the good of society, in effect destroying both the self and society. The detour into Burke’s political philosophy, especially its relation to the passions and its conservative rendering of a political community, is essential to our discussion of the sublime and its role in assessing narrative and autoethnographic texts. Firstly, it prompts us to ask: in what ways do narrative and autoethnographic texts permit a telling of the body to be told? Does the body occupy a space within and between the text? Does the releasing of the text erase both the author and the reader from the act of interpretation? Secondly, it invites us to consider: how do stylistic deformities of the written text invoke bodily responses? Do stories that retract from macro-themed accounts of war and international catastrophe that are seemingly banal still conjure up images and sensations of horror and terror? Thirdly, and finally, it forces us to challenge: what are the boundaries of the political within the text? In what ways do acts of political resistance, or alternatively, displays of political passivity and apathy, help to explain the power structures that permeate everyday life? What societal-held prejudices – as well as historical/ideological roots – does the text either directly or indirectly disrupt? Asking these questions in dialogue with Burke’s understanding of the sublime generates more questions than answers. However, reading narrative and autoethnographic texts in dialogue with Burke’s take on the sublime enables a reorientation of sorts. A conceptual shift that places a text within a somatic-collective dialectic challenging assessment of political texts from a non-participatory, esoteric, and emotionally devoid standpoint. Instead, an embrace of Burke’s aesthetic and political philosophy – points that intersect 3 Burke contends in An Appeal from the New to the Old Wings, “there is a boundary to men’s passions, when they act from feeling; none when they are under the influence of imagination. Remove a grievance, and, when men act from feeling you go a great way towards quieting a commotion” (1899a: 192).

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more frequently than expected – suggests that a radical democratic sublime (Frank 2014: 21) is possible, revealing, rather than concealing, the political nature of narrative and autoethnographic admissions. By turning away from Burke’s sublime now, we shall see how the concept undergoes an important transformation, one that imbues a decisively ethical dimension. To explore the ethical component of the sublime, a turn to Immanuel Kant’s treatment of the sublime is warranted.

A Primacy of Law Kant’s earliest attempt to develop a theory of the sublime emerged in his 1764 text, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Here, the young Kant, relying on a descriptive account, sought to explore the connections between feelings and the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime. In his later work, as we shall see shortly, Kant’s focus shifts away from the philosophical qua bodily substance of the experience of the sublime and towards its moral implications. While there is perhaps a tension between the young and more mature Kant in matters concerning the idea of the sublime, we suggest here that the framework developed in Observations is not only a congruent point of interrogation, but a move consistent with Kant’s broader analytical philosophy to situate the transcendental subject within the field of a universal account of morality. In Observations, Kant locates the feelings of the beautiful and the sublime under the subjective interpretation of the individual. External objects lack specific properties of these conceptual categories. Kant makes this point clear in the opening lines of the text, writing: “The various feelings of enjoyment or of displeasure rest not so much upon the nature of the external things that arouse them as upon each person’s own disposition to be moved by these to pleasure and pain” (1965: 45). As a result, the feelings of the beautiful and the sublime impinge upon a subjective capacity that produces “joy” or “aversion” over things (ibid: 45). Kant proceeds to examine how feelings are processed, paying

Chapter 3: A Genealogy of the Sublime

particular attention to two of the “finer feelings”: the beautiful and sublime (ibid: 46). Providing an exhaustive litany of them, Kant claims that “tall oaks and lonely shadows,” Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and the nighttime are sublime; whereas the beautiful can be found in “garden beds,” “Homer’s portrayal of the girdle of Venus,” and daytime. The emotive capacity of the sublime is to move, while the beautiful provides a quality that charms the individual (ibid: 47). He continues by shifting the descriptive examples of the sublime into a more concrete, definitional form. Expounding on the type of feelings that accompany an encounter with the sublime, Kant stresses: Its feeling is sometimes accompanied with a certain dread, or melancholy; in some cases merely with quiet wonder; and in still others with a beauty completely pervading a sublime plan. [...] The sublime must always be great; the beautiful can also be small. The sublime must be simple; the beautiful can be adorned and ornamented. (ibid: 47-48) Kant furthers his exposition on the sublime, dividing it into three subsets: the terrifying, the noble, and the splendid (ibid: 48). An example of each subset is provided, as Kant lists great heights as terrifying, a long duration of “time past” as noble, and St. Peter’s Basilica as splendid (ibid: 48-50). Although distinct in their ability to arouse sensation, what these varieties of the sublime are able to provoke is a commanding force over an individual (Pillow 2000: 41). Kant’s understanding of the sublime here – and importantly, the inf luence that it contains – already begins to point to his later work on morality, and namely, the creation of laws. For the purposes of our discussion, Kant’s descriptive account of the sublime facilitates a cognitive and bodily change within the individual, producing a noncoercive authority over the individual. The full import of this authority has the potential to impact both intellectual and physical faculties. Kant maintains that the experience of the sublime does not reduce the subject to a state of unruly obedience; instead, the sublime opens up the individual to an act of self-transcendence. This is possible because

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of the moral dimension that Kant imbues within the experience of the sublime. For example, to gaze upon the magnificent architectural delights of an Egyptian pyramid elevates our sensuous being to the level of the universal (ibid: 49). Implicit within the terrifying sublime, illustrated by a confrontation with great heights, is a moral obligation to resist the near-certain destruction that would accompany such a devastating fall. Rather, the sublime exposes the transcendental subject, the “I,” to the universal through self-transcendence. It transports the inclinations or even the passions, subjectively processed by an encounter with external objects, towards the universal and, then, in turn, leads to an internationalization of authority: the command of morality. While the linkage between the sublime and morality is only tentatively developed in Observations, Kant’s discussion on mathematics points to the turn he will make in his more mature work. In the section, “Of the Attributes of the Beautiful and Sublime in Man in General,” Kant brief ly considers an exchange between mathematics and the sublime. “Mathematical representation of the infinite magnitude of the universe,” Kant writes, “contain a certain sublimity and dignity” (ibid: 57). An embryonic nod for sure, yet the full force of Kant’s move to collapse the sublime within the realm of morality, reaches its crescendo in his later, more critical work. Beginning with Critique of Pure Reason (1996 [1781/1787]), Kant situates the Transcendental Analytic in relation to what a knowing consciousness can actually know. What Kant sought to confront was, as Jürgen Habermas contends, how a particular form of knowledge within modernity was condemned to a state of aporia as it located the cognitive subject, beyond the ruins of metaphysics, while still fully self-ref lective of its finite power, into a project that necessitates infinite power (1994: 153). For Kant, this aporia was resolved by repositioning the cognitive subject within an epistemological framework through a reinterpretation of the finite faculty of a cognitive subject as “transcendental conditions of a knowledge that progresses on into infinitude” (ibid). Since Kant’s move to position the subject as a transcendental subject, the “I” assumed a

Chapter 3: A Genealogy of the Sublime

double function. On the one hand, the ref lecting subject maintains an empirical status as one particular object within a world of other objects. The knowing subject sees and experiences the world already in existence as an external, obscure object. On the other hand, ref lective activity of the absolute “I” is situated as a transcendental subject which exists against the totality of the world by constituting the spectrum of objects available for ref lection and experience. This methodological focal point provides ref lection with a constituting force to transcend an object that exists in itself to a heightened level of awareness through the recognition of its for itself objective. With the framing of the constituent subject – the “I” – in-place, Kant returns to the sublime in his third Critique: The Critique of Judgment (2007 [1790]). Here, he abandons the descriptive approach found in Observations and the three-tier modeling of the sublime (terrifying, noble, splendid); offering instead a placement of it in relation to reason, morality, and mathematics. Kant begins his analysis by once again clarifying the distinction between the sublime and beautiful. He writes: The beautiful in nature is a question of the form of the object, and this consists in limitation, whereas the sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality. Accordingly, the beautiful seems to be regarded as a presentation of an indeterminate concept of the understanding, the sublime as a presentation of an indeterminate concept of reason. (2007 [1790]: 34) Unlike his considerations in Observations, the critical Kant here is quick to admit to the interplay between the sublime and reason. This marks a significant development in Kant’s thought. Importantly, the sublime/ reason exchange subverts the confines of both form and matter situating an aesthetic experience directly within the bounds of rational thought. The transcendental subject now, under Kant’s updated formulation

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of the sublime, engages in a metaphysical passage: a voyage from the subjective encounter of thinking and feeling qua the sublime into a limitlessness of reason, exposing the bounds of the sensuous being. The constraints of imagination qua thinking cannot be overstated here for it, as Jacques Rancière contends, opens the “passage from the aesthetic to the moral sphere” (2013: 198). Rancière further elaborates this point, positing: With Kant, the sublime does not designate the products of artistic practice. […] It simply translates the incapacity of the imagination to grasp the monument as a totality. Imagination’s incapacity to present a totality to reason, analogous with its feeling of powerlessness before the wild forces of nature, takes us from the domain of aesthetics to that of morality. It is a sign that recalls to reason the fact of its superior power over nature and of its legislative vocation in the supersensible order. (2009: 89) Rancière’s point is insightful and key to unlocking Kant’s sublime. This entryway into a universalizing system of morals is confirmed by Kant’s reclassification of the sublime into two distinct forms: dynamically sublime and mathematically sublime. Kant describes the former as an experience that confronts the “might” of nature represented as a direct “source of fear” (2007 [1790]: 153). On the other hand, the mathematically sublime relates to that which is “absolutely great” standing in comparison to the smallness of “all else” (ibid: 138, 141). The “infinite magnitude” of Kant’s Observations thus reappears, bringing with it the full force of the parameters of Kant’s metaphysical philosophy. This poses a problem for Kant’s reformulation, specifically: how can the mathematically sublime actually be experienced based from Kant’s later work? Does the experience of the sublime still impinge upon a subjective capacity of the subject as formulated in his early theorization? Kant provides an answer, stating that physical, external objects that invoke the mathematically sublime, such as mountains,

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trees, and houses, may be measured in their greatness empirically, while presentations of the sublime within the practical or theoretical spheres may be determined a priori (ibid: 139-140). In matters pertaining to the theoretical sphere, Kant is concerned with the precision of measurements; however, he fixes the practical sphere as issues directly concerned with virtue, liberty, and justice (ibid: 140). A transition is thus at-play here. An encounter with the sublime is now elevated to the dictates of a totalizing system of morality as an experience of conformity, rather than agency and indeterminacy. Kant’s treatment of the mathematically sublime transplants the emotive sensations of experience and capacity of imagination into the universal realm of morals (Myskja 2012: 197). Such a devastating move is not without consequence. The accompanying self-transcendence of the sublime reconstitutes in an image erected by the self, one that is decisively a reproduction of bourgeois social existence. The affirmation of the Kantian subject brings upon a reduction of bodily sensation and emotions to a plateau of instrumental reason. While Kant’s three-tier, modified two-tier, scaling of sublimity arouses action that is, according to his scheme, non-coercive in form, what is actually concealed, as Theodor Adorno suggests, is the ugliness of the administered society (Leach 2007: 263) enacted through a domain of disciplinary power over complacent subjects (cf. Eagleton 1988). So, what does Kant’s treatment of the sublime have to offer to considerations of narrative and autoethnographic approaches? Kant’s extension of the sublime into the realms of aesthetics and then morals is the most-noteworthy aspect of the exposition. It signals an entrenchment within political theory to shift analyses away from emotive and bodily encounters to the primacy of the mind. Such a transition further commits a violence against the political by eradicating the always immanent aesthetic dimension from its consideration. Kant’s “critical” take on the sublime certainly emphasizes an idea of greatness and vastness akin to ancient considerations. It offers a promissory, if not, messianic quality that challenges the limits of a finite existence into the mysterious interplay

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of the cosmos. But for all its grandness and wonder, Kant’s treatment of the sublime leaves the conceptual core deficiently hollowedout – a regulation of experiences of bewilderment into a normative, yet prescriptive framework, of thought and action. The rupturable possibilities of the sublime become reduced to an acquiesced feeling of obedience and control. Kant’s idea of the sublime thus offers the promise of an infinite horizon of possibility while quickly dissolving behind a veil of hierarchical forms of knowledge.

Postmodern Considerations: The Return of the Political and Politics In a nearly-zeitgeist fashion, one strongly precipitated by the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, postmodern thinkers4 have grappled with the concept of the sublime (cf. Bleiker 2006; Holden 2006; Ferguson 2009). Political and cultural theorists, ranging from Jean-Luc Nancy (1993) to Slavoj Žižek (1989) to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1991), amongst others, have analyzed ideological and material aspects of the sublime in relation to structures of power, psychoanalytic implications, existential considerations, and expressions of socio-cultural reproduction. While the concept of the sublime has been, in many ways, considerably enlarged theoretically, highlighting its conceptual underpinnings across various subfields and disciplines, we want to focus here on its discussion regarding political relevance and its ability to rupture hegemonic symbolic forces of late-capitalism and neoliberalism. To do so, a turn to the work of two indispensable thinkers is helpful: Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Rancière. Although this arrangement is certainly not comprehensive, valuable in-roads 4 This term refers to an epistemological and temporal rupture with Kant and Burke. Particularly within International Relations, this term indicates not merely a temporal and epistemological period, but a disagreement about how to think about the world.

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exist ahead to re-theorizing the political potential of the sublime. If one approaches the interplay between Lyotard and Rancière in this manner, then a presentation emerges that asserts the primacy of the body – further inscribing an important materiality to a multitude of subjects – while, at the same time, providing a glimpse at avenues of philosophical and practical importance that are intimately concerned with the political and a maturation of modes of resistance that challenge dominant logics of order and control. Understood in this way, a postmodern reading of the sublime rejects the utopian content of a project of global politics from liberal, nationalist, or cosmopolitan perspectives; instead, it offers an entry into the political, one carefully absent of singular markers of identification replaced by a differential of subjectivities as a series of events – including the extraordinary and banal – that constitute a fracture in the ordering of time, space, and bodies by the nation-state and supranational institutions. Perhaps the most prominent postmodern commentator on the sublime has been Jean-François Lyotard. Resuscitating an engagement with the idea of the sublime that had greatly dissipated since the Romantics of the 19th century, Lyotard foregrounds the concept within the parameters of his critical philosophy. In The Postmodern Condition (1984), Lyotard takes up the sublime in a direct way by Kant’s exposition. Clarifying and distancing himself from Kant, Lyotard distinguishes the beautiful from the sublime along lines of form and representability. For Lyotard, the beautiful is an actualization of Kant’s transcendental Idea in form whereas the sublime contra Burke’s formulation is unrepresentable. Here modern-art, particularly avantgarde expressions, is essential to articulations of the sublime. While Lyotard maintains that the sublime is unrepresentable, he insists that the axioms and techniques that underscore modern art strive to present not reality, but rather “that the unpresentable exists” (1984: 78). Lyotard’s theoretical pivoting places Burke’s imaginative and Kant’s cognitive grounding at a standstill. The valuable content of his analysis, for our purposes, rests in his preoccupation with stressing

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a contingency of the sublime: a move that circles back on his political intentions, one that approaches an aesthetic rendering of politics. For Lyotard, modern art reveals a critical substitution committed by contemporary aesthetics and politics. Specifically, the beautiful has replaced the sublime through an artificial, or de-realized, vision of reality produced by ideological and cultural forces. Modern art, instead, strives to expose cultural, political, and social forces that produce, and continuously reproduce, a de-realized reality understood as a mode of existence and social organization that negates the present conditions of the world and an experiential encounter of reality. This directly summons political and in, Lyotard’s view, emancipatory implications (1992: 67-74). By vacating Kant’s cognitive transmission of the sublime, Lyotard offers the concept as an unrepresentable experience that primarily shatters the myth of representation through a form that opens up new energies directly troubling the value content of the real and, correspondingly, points to new and deeper considerations of the political. Personal recollections of tragic events – and there is no shortage in today’s world – are often political in style, if not substance. Voices that express the horrors of war, terrorism, and economic exploitation, whether intentionally or not, permit political considerations to be drawn yet. While these accounts and even those that delicately express the complexity of seemingly banal moments under latecapitalism are certainly important, narrative and autoethnographic texts, following closely from Lyotard’s postulation as well as Žižek’s discussion of subliminal rupture (1989: 203), challenge the method of knowledge acquisition that underscores positivism within the social sciences. Reading these texts through the lens of the sublime allows considerations of alternative ways that we may arrive at knowledge and truth (if possible, at all). This, in return, invites us to rethink politics: to challenge entrenched patterns of governance that, as Bleiker has suggested, “reduce the political to the rational” (2012: 11) and lines of artificial division that separate the public from the private as well as the self from the other. From this light, Lyotard’s presentation of

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the sublime is most helpful in thinking through such a tentative and unexplored interplay, for it engenders a reimagining of postmodern transcendence – external to ontological, aesthetic, and epistemological considerations of the unrepresentable (1991: 74) – as a precursor to self-actualization and material representations by way of a resistance before thinking and articulation (Silverman 2016: 10). Drawing attention to this aspect of Lyotard’s thought invites us to further consider how aesthetics – and the sublime – coincide with politics and the potential for emancipation. Similarly, Jacques Rancière has made note that Marxism, and particularly Theodor Adorno, carefully linked radical autonomy to political liberation (2009: 95). To do so, a turn to the thought of Rancière is warranted. In opposition to Lyotard’s understanding of the sublime as a project to present the unrepresentable, Rancière suggests that such a formulation fails for a number of reasons. Rancière (2003) maintains that Lyotard’s effort to escape metaphysical thought simply ossifies objects as a product of historical, cultural elevation and celebration. Lyotard’s attempt to move beyond the realm of speculative thought, and, in turn, situate the sublime as an indeterminate experience impregnated with emancipatory potential, slips into Hegelian dialectics. The consequence, according to Rancière, is a reification of the sublime in terms of absolutes, seen as a further continuation of the “old metaphysics of art” (Slade 2007: 29). Further, Rancière notes that Lyotard’s epistemological framing imports not simply an axiom of the unrepresentable, but of the unthinkable (l’impensable). Although Rancière’s critique is a misstep on this front, precisely because Lyotard neither refers to the sublime as l’impensable nor does he maintain that it is unthinkable (quite the opposite, in fact), it is necessary to turn to how aesthetics, and to a minor role the sublime, is relevant to his understanding of politics. For Rancière, politics is a matter of subjects, a mode(s) of subjectification that is an ongoing series of actions which can institute a singular universal (1999: 39). This singular universal is a mode of subjectification that facilitates equality into a political shape. Since

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nothing (nor any particular social group) is inherently political, an action becomes political due to its particular form that inscribes a confirmation of equality. In turn, politics begins with a wrong as those who are not counted (or who are miscounted) engage in a conf lict over the existence of a common stage for the proclamation and declaration of their own existence. Central to Rancière’s conceptualization of politics is the presence of a wrong. Rancière writes, “At the heart of politics, lies a double wrong, a fundamental conf lict, never conducted as such, over the relationship between the capacity of the speaking being who is without qualification and political capacity” (ibid: 22). Politics, then, interrupts the logic of the police – a space of power relations that orders bodies and speech referred to as the “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2011: 7-46) – without any specific “objects or issues of its own” (Rancière 1999: 31). Equality, although not restricted only to a political form, is the sole principle of politics, as it exists through the subjectification of a wrong. A political subject is thereby a subject of a wrong requiring a wrong to precede the subject for political subjectification to occur. This conf lict – this disruption of the “natural order” by an egalitarian contingency (ibid: 18) – occurs when those who are denied existence via logos confront the order of the police, which is the system of legitimizing and ordering the acceptable ways that bodies can speak, act, and move (ibid: 29). Politics understood in this light is the encounter through an assumption of a wrong that breaks the rigidity of the order of the police establishing a scene in which the wrong (those miscounted) are subjectivized: giving names to those who previously had no name. Davide Panagia explains this point in Rancière’s work, positing: Rancière’s aesthetics and politics address emergent collective formations that arise from the active participation of individuals and groups unauthorized to partake in those same activities that constitute their collectivity. The objects and persons he recounts in his books are all objects or persons who are not authorized to express sentiments, sen-

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sibilities, and actions but who nonetheless realign affective practices of time and space, of systems of value, and in the work of expressivity. (2018: 2, emphasis added). In his often ill-ignored essay, “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization” (1992) Rancière further clarifies this process by pointing to a connection between the political and equality. Rancière here provides much needed exposition, critically lacking in his earlier works, focusing on two fundamental characteristics of the political. For Rancière, the political is: 1) an encounter between two heterogeneous processes and 2) a set of practices guided by the supposition of equality (1992: 58). Rancière continues by arguing that equality is only possible when it is enacted. The existence of equality necessitates its actualization as it is the only universal in politics (ibid: 60). Rancière’s understanding of equality acquires greater conceptual depth and refinement, and for our purposes, opens up an important entry point into aesthetics and resistance, when placed in relation to his discussion in On the Shores of Politics (2007). Here, Rancière argues that equality is an exception as an experience of the commensurability between members of a community (2007: 88). This commensurability creates a commonality amongst those formerly miscounted by way of a “shared partition of the sensible,” centered around shared modalities of sense (Wolfe 2006). The partitioning at-play renders logos visible, bringing into the light expressions of a shared existence. Such an endeavor is central to Rancière’s thinking in that it takes on a decisively aesthetic dimension intimately linked with politics. He explains in Aesthetics and Its Discontents: Politics occurs when those who ‘have no’ time take the time necessary to front up as inhabitants of a common space and demonstrate that their mouths really do emit speech capable of making pronouncements on the common which cannot be reduced to voices signaling pain. This distribution and redistribution of places and identities, thus apportioning and reapportioning of spaces and times, of the visible

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and the invisible, and of noise and speech constitutes what I call the distribution of sensible. (Rancière 2009: 24-25) Rancière’s understanding of aesthetics rejects a descriptive account, one defined by stylistic techniques and formalism. Instead, his aesthetic-political theorization prioritizes a priori forms that come to determine the structures and conditions of shared life in such a manner that relates to both cognitive and sensorial experience. Political practices, contra the logic of the police, come to be seen as a meta-politics of the sensory community (Rancière 2011: 44, 60) as a “force of equality for the appearance of words, deeds, sensibilities, and perceptibilities” (Panagia 2018: 10). A way of doing politics that brings together freedom and equality in agreement with speaking, acting, and modes of being that foster “new relationships between thought and the sensory world, between bodies and their environment, between bodies and the distribution of words” (Dronsfield 2008). It is important to note that Rancière’s aesthetic theory does contain a discussion of the sublime. Not surprisingly, based on his reliance on a priori forms to generate structures of thought and taste, his understanding of the sublime functions in many ways as a reformulation of Kant’s analytic presentation (cf. Dikec 2012). While a more thorough evaluation of his consideration of the sublime would certainly be engaging for purposes of how the logic of the police intersects with forms of cultural reproduction, the two poles of his thought – aesthetics and politics – and how they coincide is more apropos. Primarily, his understanding of aesthetics and politics as “inherently belonging to one another” (Berrebi 2008), rather than separate autonomous ontological, epistemological, and political realms, helps to tease out new approaches to textual and discursive study. Assessing narrative and autoethnographic texts as exercises of aesthetic and political practices illuminates a heterodox substance, realized as modes of expressions to converse across multitudes of subjectivities contra universal, absolute maxims.

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Michael Shapiro has noted how Rancière’s revision of Kant’s aesthetic theory, which centers around the political efficacy of secular art contra Hegel (cf. Rancière 2016), brings to the surface a necessary element of disagreement integral to politics and the conf lict of space for the political (Shapiro 2018: 26).5 Moving beyond the consensusmodeling immanent within Kant’s sublime, Shapiro isolates the political implications of Rancière’s view, further suggesting that when dissensus is paired with the sublime it assumes a political potential that is capable of bridging a division between the elites and lower-class members of society (Shapiro 2006: 665). A summoning of senses is thus a central feature of radical aesthetic politics engendering an “affective pragmatics for the realignment of the dynamics of sensibility that render anything whatsoever or anyone whosoever sensible and thus perceptible” (Panagia 2018: 10). As we will show in the next chapter, narrative and autoethnographic texts, when viewed through the lens of the sublime, invoke a kind of partitioning that cleaves lines fortified by the nation-state and norms of sovereignty. In so doing, these texts reverse, or consciously refuse, a political order delineated by a miscount. Narrative and autoethnographic projects are capable of splintering this logic of exclusion in a manner analogous to Rancière’s reading of Aristotle’s political community by way of an announcement of existence and equality through an object-form of slaves and commoners. Rather than institute a political community sui generis, as in Ranciere’s account, these texts render inaudible voices and invisible subjectivities, legible and real inter alia. They accomplish, 5 While Shapiro is faithful to the terminology (in the deployment of the term “disagreement”) used by Rancière in his article, “The Sublime from Lyotard to Schiller,” we suggest that a more complete translation is warranted. Specifically, this concerns the manner in which Rancière’s text Disagreement has been translated for the Anglo-American reception. Staying closer to the original French, a more suitable translation for the title (La mésentente) would be “the misunderstanding.” In this way, Shapiro’s claim actually becomes all the more forceful, suggestive that – instead of an already existing agreement on the terms of a dispute between disagreeing parties – the misunderstanding concerns the dislocation of sensibility.

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as the Latin origin of the sublime (sublimis) suggests, raising up, or, an elevation to a new stage. Our cursory genealogical presentation of the sublime throughout the Western philosophical and aesthetic tradition has produced – in a striking and problematic way – a recreation of a particular vision of subjectivity and space. Specifically, such a survey reconstitutes the subject-object of a sublime encounter embodied in a predominantly masculine, white-body form as feminists’ scholars have noted (e.g., Zylinska 2001; Mellor 1993; cf. Mattick 1990; Wright 2010). This should not be surprising. The Western canon is defined by a limited understanding of agency, one predicated along lines of exclusion and homogeneity. From Longinus to Burke to Lyotard, the subject stands on the precipice of a sublime encounter commanded, persuaded, and rattled by bodily and cognitive sensations of enlightenment, terror, and transformation. Yet, the spectacle of this encounter is sustained by a logic of self and spatial mastery and, in the view of the Romantics, displays of militarized events. The spatial and metaphysical dimensions of the sublime event proceeds along an uncontaminated, blemish-free plane (Outka 2008), defined by a “heroic and masculine understanding of the political” (Bleiker 2012: 76). In return, lines of erasure encircle the sublime with racialized bodies, mad voices, as well as non-binary and queer identities confined to exclusion, incapable of coming faceto-face with encounters of such enormous magnitude. (cf. Clavin 2007; Murray 2010). For Kant, in particular, morals and reasoning are distinctly non-Black faculties that occasionally extend to women and Indigenous peoples (Shilliam 2011: 654-655; cf. Armstrong 1996), yet a distance from the sublime remains intact. Using a feminist anti-essentialist epistemological lens, Bonnie Mann highlights how readings of the sublime have reaffirmed strict gender hierarchies while remaining intertwined in logics of domination and oppression. Mann writes:

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The Sublime was, for Kant, that aesthetic experience that resolved the philosophical paradox of freedom and necessity. The Kantian sublime describes the quintessential moment of Euro-masculine emancipation from and domination of nature. In its postmodern rendition, this “emancipation” is retained, but is an experience that now, like everything else, takes place in discourse. Sublime experience for Kant was occasioned by the realization of the infinite superiority of man’s reason over nature, but the sublime was also a gendered notion. The feeling of the sublime resulted from a violent encounter between the imagination (gendered female) and reason (gendered male). Lyotard neither misses, nor questions, the persistently gendered structure of this encounter. (2005: 53) The experience of the sublime has thereby been understood as an ephemeral reckoning between the physical, corporeal elements of the subject and transcendental, at times, unexplainable or unrepresentable cornucopia of sensations obtainable only by those capable of embracing such an awe-inspiring moment. From this perspective, an attainment of a sublime encounter has remained a somewhat restricted moment based on constructed markers of identity throughout its philosophical development. Broadly understood along particular lines of agency and subjectivity, the sublime, however, continues to maintain a prominent role in philosophical and aesthetic study inscribed as an indescribable and non-quantifiable event that arouses depictions of identity, often intersecting with lines of nationality and myth. For critics, the sublime represents and further reifies a tendency to justify ecological mastery (Hitt 1999; Vernon 2014), a privileged-form of agency qua the bourgeois subject (Eagleton 1988; Jay 1992), and even racial underpinnings of British imperialism (Doyle 1996; Suleri 1992) further perpetuating a “violence-legitimating mythology of the lessor cultural value of the black body” (Shapiro 2018: 43).

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Concluding Thoughts Our survey of the sublime has helped to shed light on important and nuanced differences of its reception within the Western tradition. From the ancient world to the intellectually transformative period of the Enlightenment to the deconstructive ruins of postmodernity, the concept of the sublime has occupied a special place in the history of political ideas. Turning attention to it prompts a reconsideration of the varying ways that aesthetics, politics, and ethics intersect, often producing new demarcations that cleave across markers of social status and rank. Yet, it is important to note that theories of the sublime have not always functioned along these devastatingly narrow markers of subjectivity and space. Heterodox perspectives – including, feminist and Black interpretations (cf. Freeman 1995; Battersby 2007; Lintoff 2011; Morrison 2004) – challenge a masculine and white-body encoding that encircles the sublime. For example, we can find a striking reversal of the sublime in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft as she skillfully demonstrates a malleability to the concept by way of a feminine reading (Skolnik 2003; Ellison 1991). These refreshing interpretations offer considerable value to the fields of political and aesthetic thought, helping to eschew an atomistic understanding of the sublime – one grafted upon bodily and spatial receptacles of hegemonic symbols of power. Rather, the task is to re-think how an experience of the sublime can problematize linear orderings of time, history, and space, while, importantly, offering an inclusion of bodily identities that resist disciplinary power. In the next chapter, we confront this challenge by offering a reappraisal of the political value of the sublime and situating it in relation to narrative and autoethnographic texts. Centrally, the following chapter shows how these alternative forms of expressions contain a potential to invoke the sublime and, in so doing, expose sites of rupture and resistance within totalizing logics of power and authority. In a striking way, an examination of narrative and

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autoethnographic texts will offer us a rich discussion into the myriad ways that forms of power permeate everyday life. Moreover, our exercise of textual interpretation of narrative admissions – in relation with the criterion of the sublime – will open new lines of inquiry to be considered pertaining to the “perfection” of style and form and towards the structures of power that incite, inspire, and underscore the written word. Assessing narrative pieces, not as works of beauty or stylistic conformity, but as possible encounters with the sublime, offers insight into how thinking, acting, and being political takes on ethical and aesthetic dimensions illuminating new vistas of potential for challenges against entrenched hierarchies of power and authority.

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Chapter 4: The Sublime Aesthetic of Narrative & Autoethnography “We ourselves often do the work of the state in and through our interior lives. What we often assume belongs most intimately to ourselves and to our emotional life has been produced elsewhere and has been recruited to do the work of racism and repression.” – Angela Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle (2016: 142) Following our genealogical assessment of the sublime, more questions than answers remain. If anything, the broad strokes of our philosophical examination have shown that the concept of the sublime is an illusory event: a potentially terrifying, awe-inspiring encounter that disrupts the metabolic rhythm of the subject and the body politic. In this manner, to meet the sublime face-to-face is to break with that which is considered tangibly possible – what the governing logics of power and authority accept as legitimate forms and representations of sensory, auditory, spiritual, and bodily encounters. The sublime arrives, so to speak, in trans-historical moments that separate the seemingly repetitive ordering of daily life with periods of great loss or incomprehension. Experiences that are spoken and felt across time and peoples, reminding us of the natality and precarity of existence. These moments are, of course, inherently political, erupting from the deepest pits of our unconscious as William Connolly (2002) notes. But also, in what Walter Benjamin suggests, the historical and

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ahistorical stratum forms of utopia (cf. Abensour 2017: 69). It is from the non-place of utopia that Benjamin invites us to nurture a relationship with the excesses of utopia: a task that strives to subvert a reckoning with catastrophe and its accompanying inversion of a dialectics of emancipation. Instead, in his final text, “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin envisions a reorientation of utopia, one that prevents the reoccurrence of mythic repetition, but more importantly, as Miguel Abensour has rightfully identified, breaks with “the continuum of domination” through an interruption of history, enabling the presentmoment to be born (2017: 88, 111). To think of the sublime, then, or more essentially, to rethink the philosophical concept of the sublime in relation to the political, necessitates an embrace of Benjamin’s dialectical treatment of utopia. What we mean by this connection is an understanding of the sublime as an event, encounter, or experience that ruptures the mechanistic ordering of time, space, and bodies governed by the nation-state. If we approach the sublime in such a manner – one rife with a potential to actualize a suspension of bodily linearity – then the task of politics becomes less of an endeavor to transcend utopian horizons and more about an awakening of the present, similar to Deleuze’s notion of “instant,” (1990: 148-153; cf. Bergson 1920) – pace surrealists – by the action of previously unseen bodies and unheard voices. Politics and the utopian project – or, in Charles Fourier’s account, the utopian dream (cf. 2013) – operate not on divergent paths, but simultaneously as codeterminants of an instantiation of the ordinary and extraordinary, the banal and spectacular. This perspective animates the inner core of our argument. Rethinking the sublime in terms of political rupture prompts us to consider what are the constitutive features of formalized politics of representation compared to a politics of resistance, to borrow from Foucault’s “Two Lectures” (1980). Concerned less with unpacking the salient features and problematic elements of representational politics – an area of concern for post-Marxists and post-anarchists alike (cf. Brown 2001, 2015; Mouffe 2005; Newman 2010) – more attention is

Chapter 4: The Sublime Aesthetic of Narrative & Autoethnography

needed to how resistance in pursuit of a different future assumes myriad forms, practices, and strategies, from an ethical, rather than moral standpoint. It is here that we set our sights on the political potential that underscores narrative and autoethnographic texts. The purpose of this chapter is to invite consideration that narrative and autoethnography are political theoretical texts capable of rendering a sublime effect and, specifically, works of critical theory. We propose that there remains much to be gained by reading or writing narrative and autoethnography as possible encounters with the sublime, opening up the audience to new modalities of agency, power, and resistance. Building from Naumes’ previous work (2015), we expend substantially more focus on the aesthetic dimensions of narrative and autoethnography to show the valuable contribution that these works offer to political studies and how challenges against omnipresent authority must grapple with new and unorthodox tactics of political expression. Our argument here importantly relies on a modification of our previous examination of the philosophical and aesthetic treatment of the sublime. This is necessary to properly tease out the political potential of viewing the sublime as points of ontological, epistemological, and pedagogical rupture. Following our brief turn to the conceptual possibilities of the sublime, we engage in an assessment of the aesthetic qualities of narrative and autoethnography, looking closely at the form and content – as well as the presence of the personal – of four recent texts. Centrally, we see these admissions as political theoretical texts that can function as pedagogical tools in order to enhance the study of social relations by illuminating how marginalized voices remained largely absent, if not, systematically erased within academia. Although we assert that narrative and autoethnographic approaches provide an important mode of political inquiry, they prompt those engaging with and within academia to do more than merely promote a shift in the form of writing or reading. The narrative and autoethnographic turn illuminates that textual encounters are also ethical encounters. We must ask ourselves to what extent our

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scholarship is conversant with potential research subjects and objects. Such an inquiry continues to beg the question: what are we doing and how are we doing it? Clearly, narrative and autoethnography tells us that we should be doing more.

Rethinking the Sublime: (An encounter with/against/between) Our prior intervention with the concept of the sublime requires an important clarification. As our analysis has suggested, the very idea of the sublime has, at times, been viewed in a highly political context. Both Longinus and Lyotard represent two attempts to align the cognitive, sensory, and bodily experiences of the sublime as a means to further refine, or cultivate, a sense of civic aptitude. In Longinus’ account this related directly to those engaged with the public affairs of the polis whereas Lyotard’s reading imported a crucial emancipatory dimension, one that suggested an avenue for resisting dominant logics qua transcendence. In our evaluation of Kant, an important ethical dimension came to light, enabling us to follow this analytic track of thought to the aesthetic-political exchange offered by Rancière. While these interpretations offer an important framing to help rethink the sublime, and, in turn, its political implications in a global context, we want to affirm, as a point of agreement with Ned O’Gorman, that there is nothing inherently political about the sublime (2006: 890-891). Instead, we want to revisit the sublime as a useful theoretical, pedagogical, and methodological exercise for reimagining the horizons for emancipatory politics. In this way, the sublime is understood as a passageway, or bridge, to discover new vistas of political practices and articulations intentionally constructed by speaking, feeling, and acting bodies that have been rendered invisible and non-political under dominant global logics. With these points in mind, we want to explore the political potential – or, quite possibly a politics – of the sublime as a necessary

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step in showing how narrative and autoethnographic texts can be understood as effective tools for political transformation. To do so, we offer three points of consideration for rethinking the sublime before directing attention to the technical and informal characteristics of the methodological commitment found within the narrative turn.

(An encounter with) What does it mean to confront the sublime? Or, rather, what is the relationship between the knowing-subject when arriving face-toface with a sublime experience? Questions of this nature have defined philosophical debates surrounding the issue, often focusing on the aftermath – or in terrifying moments, aftershocks – of such an encounter. While the mysterious, nearly indefinable, quality immanent in the sublime presents problems for the rigid disciplinary commands of scientific study, harkening to Vico’s proclamation of a “new science”; the indeterminacy of it enables us to consider the dynamic and creative forces between a witness and the event. In order to tease out the political-ethical content of the sublime experience, we conceptualize the narrative turn as artistic encounters evinced through a remediation of rupture points – or considered alternatively, as a series of events – that remains epistemologically f luid and without primordial ontological foundations. In a sense, the openness of narrative admissions – events that never truly end by way of uprooting determinism within a scope of historicism – points towards horizons of temporality that forgo a moral enclosure, instead stimulating the negative space of conceptual totality towards ethics.1

1 In a fascinating way, our deployment of ruptural points, or a multitude of events spatially and temporally, operates in similar circles as Deleuze’s notion of “instant” to escape the socio-historical trappings of morality rooted in the present, Arendt’s understanding of action as an ongoing, unknowable endeavor for the initiating actor, and Shapiro’s claim that artistic creations never really end, but rather continue (through constant reconstitution) as future “will-have-beens.”

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To arrive at the sublime, however, is not an isolated voyage. Moments of the sublime, even in their most puzzling and realityredefining iterations, open a subject up to the presence in – symbolic and corporeal form – of another. Eschewing the subject-deterministic orientation that defines liberal thought, let us consider the sublime as ephemeral moments that, on the one hand, reveal the agency of a subject, while on the other hand, and this is key, affirms a connectivity, or a bringing-together with others. In this way, the sublime reveals a more visible, corporeal, and auditory context of the personal sensibilities of a subject – sensibilities that are inherently political – with our larger understandings of place, custom, and relationship. Meaningfully, this complicates strict demarcations of the private/ public divide prompting us to ponder our surroundings by challenging seemingly undisputable representations of behavior. If all of this sounds intimately underscored by a political dimension, it is precisely so, because the intrinsic content of the aesthetic manifestations of the sublime are ultimately constituted in political terms. The political encounter of the sublime, thereby, comes to light when we direct attention to the aesthetics of the event. Taking aim at the aesthetic component complicates settled norms of life-worlds, challenging us to assess the varying ways that we understand and are subject to the values of the world around us. So, to move beyond the mere optics of mimetic politics of representation and to turn towards the aesthetic approaches of politics, particularly concerning sublime encounters, engenders an invaluable potential to search for what has been missing from the political. Namely, this means to suspend the ordering principles of erasure and exclusion, reversing the location of an inanimate instrumental-rationality-bound edifice of the political in order to permit those that have been excluded to be seen, heard, and counted. This is the ethical content of aesthetic rupture. Approaching the sublime along these lines brings the formalism of subject-object knowledge production to a standstill. The distance between the subject and the event, thereby, pushes the limits of knowledge and comprehension beyond one’s self to a matrix of facticity

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engendering the intersubjective nature of existence. An encounter of the sublime must, therefore, be understood from an ethical stance, not as a relation of discrete standards of morality, but rather as an opening up between the self and other modes of being. From this point of view, we see the sublime as an encounter with a radical alterity that is unrepresentable by dominant logics of cultural and linguistic ordering, bringing the spectator into a political and ethical relation with another that is meaningfully devoid of symbolic signifiers of identities. Ethics in this sense emerge devoid of an expression of a generality of Truth arrival, rather, in step with Alain Badiou’s axiom, as an ethic-of (2012: 28). The depths of the sublime render an ethic-of politics capable precisely because we must come to understand subjectivity beyond the limits of the singular, as a space of thought and action that enables the subject to come face-to-face with articulations imprinted with the contingent nature of time and existence. This encounter is not, however, a site of unification, but a space of obliteration – a topsy-turvy of hegemonic creeds – that emerges in aesthetic forms. Importantly, Bleiker and Martin Leet have drawn attention to this ethical dimension of the sublime, one that is rendered possible because of aesthetics. They write: An aesthetic engagement with the sublime inevitably contains an ethical component. But the ethics we find here is very different from the automatic and codified form of ethics that prevails in much of the theory and practice of international politics. This is so because prevailing approaches to scholarship and decision-making have stated a clear preference for the conscious in the fields of politics and ethics, to the point of imposing order in an attempt to repress ambivalence. The ethical significance of the aesthetic ensues from the effort to be mindful about the inherent violence of such forms of representation. [...] Ethics becomes a mode of being rather than a set of principles, a mode of being not closed off to the world by theories constructed out of a desperate search for order and certainty. (Bleiker/Leet 2006: 736)

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Therefore, the sublime must be seen from a holistic position, carefully drawing out the aesthetic, political, and ethical features of it as Rancière has suggested (2013: 184-202). This certainly troubles canonical spaces through a disruption of lines of congruity in political and aesthetic thought, inviting us to consider the ethical contours of the sublime. Doing so helps us to ref lect on the impact and merit of reading narrative and autoethnographic texts in a vigilant manner: a textual inspection, coupled with a keen eye towards the realities of a complex global system, that searches for moments of sublime articulations, bringing to light an ethic-of politics.

(An encounter against) In our previous section we detailed the ethical content of the sublime. Here we want to focus on the productive forces of the sublime and how it constitutes a break with sites of knowledge and power production. As such, ethics are ultimately concerned with power, particularly devastating for those rendered powerless. But what comes to pass, or, put in a different way, what remains of ossified domains of power during sublime encounters? We need not direct our query beyond the terror events of September 11, 2001 to glance into the transformative, power-altering forces of the sublime, into the “imagination-challenging” experience (Shapiro 2018: 133). To witness the crashing and subsequent collapse of the Twin Towers was – in all its horrifying and terrifying force – a direct confrontation with the sublime: a temporary suspension of the symbolic, political, and moral weight of the American megastate, to employ Sheldon Wolin’s terminology (cf. 1989: 83). A gaze upward from the lower East Side to a ruptured, ablaze sky and then down towards a nebula of broken steel, bodies, and blood proceed along a path of disbelief – a spectacular of virtual reality as Jean Baudrillard suggests (2003: 57) – that not only suspended the linearity of nationstate sovereignty, but actually fractured the tectonic structure of its totality. We mention this event neither to suggest that the hijacking

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of commercial airlines was ethically acceptable nor that the sublime only emerges in such a violent, destructive form, but to illuminate how the seemingly banal, hyper-repetitive inner workings of life in the Global North can become troubled by moments of the sublime, igniting subterranean eruptions of alternative subjectivities. Thus, we further understand the sublime as an encounter against a mastery or colonization of bodies through a refusal to conform to settled sites of control, expertise, and authority that artificially construct the social as an antagonistic force against the political. This feature of the sublime – as a scene of refusal – is further clarified, and useful to our present concern, if we turn to the work of Richa Nagar (2019b) and the concept of radical vulnerability. In so doing, our brief detour here moves beyond speculative revisionism, instead offering an important degree of practicality between envisioning the sublime as refusal and its political relevancy, specifically concerning the production, dissemination, and reification of the social scientific aspect of political studies. Principally, the intent is neither to cast doubts on effective tools of political mobilization already in use nor to collapse the totality of the conceptual depths of the sublime as refusal within the cache of political strategies, but rather to conceptualize narrative and autoethnography as inherently political theoretical texts, capable of invoking a sublime aesthetic that vitally offers alternative vantage points to rethinking politics in the present-moment. Nagar’s work looks at the production and dissemination of research as frequently erasing or silencing the subjects of academic scholarship. By enacting a framework of expertise beyond what scholarly subjects are allowed to say within the confines of the academy, scholarship too often reproduces structures of violence forged on the bodies of already marginalized communities. The narrative turn in IR acts as a rejection of such a mode of scholarly engagement. The stories that appear in JNP, for instance, adhere to two features of radical vulnerability. The first is that narrative and autoethnography necessitate a vision of subjectivity in which there is at once “a singular, autonomous self” and a vision of “co-authorship” (Nagar 2019b: 6-7). This vision of co-authorship “does

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not seek to know prior to the journey where the shared paths will lead us but it commits to walking together with the co-travellers in the struggles and dreams that we all have chosen to weave, unweave, and reweave together” (ibid: 6). In this way, storytelling as an act of sublimerefusal has the potential to trouble atomized, liberal subjectivity by exposing intersubjective life-worlds. This happens both within the stories themselves and through the mediation between authors and readers. The second aspect of Nagar’s conception of radical vulnerability contains a now familiar note understood as an act of refusal. Nagar writes, “[T]hose who share an alternative vision of ethics and justice may be able to order their everyday lives only by actively refusing to engage the structuring logics of the disciplined and disciplining minds” (ibid: 13). While narrative and autoethnographic pieces may function in various states of refusal, each one rejects the notion that theorizing must come from an elite and/or privileged space. As Nagar illustrates, however, refusal can and should invoke more than a shift in writing style and content. Prioritizing different modes of inquiry is important, but still necessitates further engagement with subjects and/or objects of study. If we place the sublime as refusal in dialogue with Nagar’s radical vulnerability, then narrative and autoethnography import a valuable contribution to the study of politics. By this, narrative texts maintain the ability to make room – in a discipline that is strikingly devoid of robust vistas of alternative bodies and subjectivities – to incorporate those who have been otherwise excluded from political science discourse. The way in which this is possible directly concerns our third feature of the sublime.

(An encounter between) In our previous sections, we offered two characteristics worth exploring when approaching the sublime. Teasing out the ethical and productive features of the sublime generates a lively and coherent

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relevance for the program of political studies writ large and for looking at politics in the present moment. Now, we offer our final remark concerning the sublime, namely the aesthetic presentation of radical modes of subjectivity and embodied solidarities rendered visible in narrative and autoethnography. As we discussed in Chapter 1, narrative and autoethnography emerged in the study of politics in response to on-going concerns about the way the field of IR was examined and disseminated, both for scholars and practitioners. Here, we want to extend the scholarly scope of narrative and autoethnography by suggesting that these texts should be viewed as works of political theory, more broadly. This modification of disciplinary alignment marks a decisive turn towards political theory when we accept that narrative and autoethnography maintain a uniquely democratic potential, one that is typically not standard, or even accepted, in mainstream circles. Central to this position is the location of these textual admissions, meaning both the geopolitical positioning of authorship as well as the introduction of new voices that speak within and beyond the text. In this way, narrative and autoethnography are not simply further examples of projects that strive to theorize from below, but rather, deliberately constructed political texts that seek to speak in the present – not by way of a subordinating demarcation of power, privilege, and agency – but rather by exceeding their epistemological points of origin. Put differently, these texts function in contrast to strict modes of inquiry necessitated by formalistic disciplinary boundaries, instead articulating a vision of theory that is normative and empirical, proscriptive and tangible, imaginative and real. To theorize from this space is, therefore, to open readers up into a dialogue that is uniquely micro and macro in political focus, purposively pointing towards the complexities of the human condition. It concerns, importantly, the spatial distance, understood in symbolic terms as well as in modes of power-production, between the representer and represented (Derrida 1997: 296-297) and a vision of utopia as ethical alterity, a return to the political, and a redistribution of the sensible pace Rancière. These

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texts, thereby, run congruently with this productive capacity when we further understand the sublime as an encounter between multitudes of voices, bodies, abilities, and patterns of expressions that make visible commonalities between modes of subjectivity, often in nontranslatable and unrecognizable ways. Taking the sublime as an encounter between another (including, but not limited to, Indigenous, Black, and migrant subjectivities) opens up the political from an ethical standpoint and asserts a primacy of active politics over technocratic, representative forms of governance. The effect is transubstantiation: a transformation of previously deemed inanimate, anti-political forms of subjectivity now made present in the f lesh and in the immediate. It is here that the sublime can be observed. Between the Indigenous body and the blanketing cloud of tear gas at Standing Rock; between the firm grip of an umbrella and shards of broken glass at the Legislative Council Complex in Hong Kong; between packed streets of protests for Black solidarity following George Floyd’s death and the militarized police force across the United States. These moments speak to a democratic potential, but they also, in nuanced and telling ways, evince a reading of the sublime of the political. A (re)construction of space made visible across modes of subjectivities reclaimed in fugitive and ephemeral moments that were assumed to be impossible, or even, unrepresentable. Political acts of this dis-order eschew an understanding of society as a constituted form, engaging rather through rupture points within the “deformation of society” as Simon Critchley maintains, with specific ethical articulations “whose scope is universal and whose evidence is faced in a concrete situation” (2005: 234). The f luidity of subjectivity in Critchley’s account (cf. 2007) – a point of commonality with the works of post-Marxists Ernesto Laclau (cf. 1990; 1996) and Chantal Mouffe (cf. 2001) – suggests that subjectivities are never fully constituted but constantly susceptible to formation ruptures. For our purpose, this incites a sublime quality concerning questions of agency and, perhaps, prompts us to view the mise-en-scene of politics as a space of rupture, paradox, and indeterminacy.

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But how do narrative and autoethnographic texts exhibit a sublime effect of this nature? This points to the heart and primary upshot of the narrative turn. Significantly, these texts function in this way through their aesthetic expressions. Unlike the esoteric, sanitized, and technocratic style of writing that has come to define academic reporting, this alternative method represents a rejection of such an approach. This is achieved when the theoretical basis of the narrative exceeds the possibilities offered through stylistic constraints that necessitate “beautiful” or “academic-writing,” and, in effect, further problematize rigid disciplinary boundaries of form and content. In order for this sublime presentation of expression to come to light, it is helpful, then, to engage in the act of textual interpretation of narrative admissions. In so doing, we are able to draw out the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical significance of these political expressions, enabling lines of inquiry to be drawn away from the “perfections” of style and form and towards the structures of power that potentially incite, inspire, and underscore the written word. The effect of this political discursive commitment and sublime interplay cannot be understated. If we understand the sublime as an encounter with/against/between, it thereby maintains a methodological grounding capable of rendering an effective pedagogical tool. What this pedagogical instrument offers by way of narrative and autoethnographic approaches is, in turn, what narrative and autoethnography provides to the subfields of IR and political theory: a methodological in-between, or passageway, between the act of political theorizing and interpretation that shifts analysis away from congruence and symmetry to discontinuity and resistance. This runs parallel with Davide Panagia’s understanding of democracy as a politics of noise, one that stresses the sensorial dimension of the political. For Panagia, reading and writing maintain a potential to disrupt entrenched arrangements of power and authority, not necessarily through a transmission of a “reasonable expression of interests,” but rather as an “interruptive noise” that challenges who and how a political subject is constituted (2009: 48). The heterodoxic and

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radical modes of expression found in narrative and autoethnographic texts proceed not in narrow terms of author and readership but strive to foster a more inclusive and diverse reception. To invite readers into this form of political theorizing that, on the one hand, helps to challenge settled norms while provoking a visceral reaction on the other hand, summons the democratic potentiality of aesthetics and its dissemination. In this way, narrative and autoethnography and their ability to be read in companion with the sublime no longer render the people missing – to invoke Deleuze’s claim of the hypothetical basis of modern political cinema (1997: 216) – but rather, transcend boundaries of disciplinary power. In an important way, we have then returned to the question of storytelling and its political potential. To grasp the meaning of the political and politics of the present means to confront an inescapable task: an understanding of the power of storytelling to both unite and divide. Storytelling in the form of narrative and autoethnography helps us to come to terms with this dilemma. By setting sight on the aesthetics of these projects and their capacity to bring about a sublime encounter, we come to witness a voyage across historical, theoretical, and real-world panoramas: an invitation between authors and readers into an experience of vastness that would not otherwise be possible. Such a capacity points beyond David McNally’s (cf. 2006) vision of another world enacted by Marxist anti-capitalist discourses and praxis and towards the creation of unknown horizons inhabited by intergenerational and intersectional (cf. Crenshaw 1989) multitudes of political subjectivities and solidarities. In our next section, we assess four narrative and autoethnographic texts, paying close attention to the heterodox substantive and stylistic approaches characteristic of their efforts. Our hope in engaging in this analysis is to show how narrative and autoethnographic works can elicit a sublime encounter between authors and audience and, in turn, maintain a valuable potential to be used as pedagogical tools to help challenge the current study of social relations. Reading and writing narrative and autoethnography, however, fails to represent

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the ultimate panacea for today’s socio-political realities. They are, nevertheless, a particular form of political expression that must be coupled within a network of strategies in the attempt to suitably formulate a radical praxis against the prevailing order of control.

Locating the Sublime in Narrative and Autoethnography While there are a number of narrative and autoethnographic works published within IR, we focus here on those that have been published in JNP, a leading site for scholarship of this nature. This is because JNP solicits narrative and autoethnographic works, requiring authors to self-identify what they are doing as narrative or autoethnography. Whereas pieces published elsewhere sometimes include a discussion about how to identify the work, they often do not. Thus, by looking to JNP, we are able to discuss the types of issues that arise through narrative and autoethnographic approaches within IR as well as how they are presented. JNP has published online, open-access articles twice a year since 2014. What currently constitutes the archive includes works by traditional academics as well as those outside of the academy. While there is a peer-review process, it is not “blind.” This is in order to encourage a robust conversation between authors and reviewers. Having gone through this process, we knew the names of the three reviewers of our piece. They were kind and encouraging, but also rigorous. The open-access nature of JNP rejects the paywall standard that has come to insulate academic scholarship from the broader public. The pieces published there are available for consumption by anyone with access to the Internet, necessitating that those writing in the journal make what they are saying clear to a lay audience. Moreover, the fact that JNP encourages non-academics to submit to the journal shifts the type of discussion present there. Frequently, JNP publishes everyday stories that tell readers something about the geopolitical context of the

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world in which we live. These range from retellings of conversations in a family living room (Reardon 2015) to vignettes on love, sickness, birth, and borders (Naumes/Caivano 2017) to journal entries from a feminist writing collective (Behl/Téllez/Stancliff/Fuse 2018) to the difficulties of academic-writing under neoliberalism (Semenec 2019). Each of these stories foregrounds the personal in a deeply complicated interrogation of culture and politics. We look at these four stories below, remaining vigilant to occurrences of the sublime.

Kristina Zdravič Reardon’s “How a Grandmother Tells a War Story” Every one of my grandmother’s war stories ends with this echo. It’s the refrain that lodges itself into every one of her songs. I want to believe that stories are tools that help the tellers to heal and help the listeners to understand. But my grandmother’s stories are circular narratives, ones with no clean beginnings or ends, no matter how many times she retells them. No matter how many times I listen, she knows one thing for certain: she was there and I was not. It’s her trauma, but it’s also her secret pride. While a war rages in the Balkans in the 1990s, we are sitting in chairs in suburban Massachusetts speaking to one another. She did something right, she thinks, to create this gap, to dislodge us from our ancestral home and from war. But I suppose that’s why she always tried to tell me her war stories: to try to close the gap between us, even as she sought to maintain it. (2015: 20-21) These are the final lines from Kristina Zdravič Reardon’s “How a Grandmother Tells a War Story,” published in 2015. Reardon’s fourpage exploration of her grandmother’s stories and the weight that they carry for both the teller and the listeners signal a departure from the dominant framing of political events in IR scholarship. While the standard form of writing used in IR journals adheres to a set of guidelines that sanitizes personal perspectives out of stories,

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framing these stories instead as indisputable facts, Reardon offers an account that engages with the inarticulable complexity of war. Namely, Reardon’s story illustrates the ways in which war narratives are not bound temporally but remain as ongoing historical rupture points to those bodies that directly live through the events. As her grandmother’s stories illustrate, war stories are often “circular narratives, ones with no clean beginnings or ends” (ibid: 20). As such, it is difficult to attempt to confine either the content that ought to belong in the story or the space taken up by the narrative retold. In this vein, Reardon’s story offers an example of the ways in which war narratives can disrupt scholarly notions of trauma as necessarily trapped within the historical moment in which said trauma was initiated. Looking in this section to Reardon’s text, let us consider the relationship between the form and content of this story – and its ability to draw out sublime moments – in destabilizing the conception that trauma adheres to a linear temporality. In Trauma and the Memory of Politics, Jenny Edkins explores a concept that she calls “trauma time.” Looking at Western practices of memorialization, Edkins distinguishes between the performative linear temporality of the nation-state and trauma time, which functions as a disturbance. She writes, “Trauma time is inherent in and destabilizes any production of linearity. Trauma has to be excluded for linearity to be convincing, but it cannot be successfully put to one side: it always intrudes, it cannot be completely forgotten” (Edkins 2003: 16). As Edkins argues, it is in the interest of the state to promote a linear conception of time. However, this system for classifying experience ignores the ways in which the past is constantly reappearing in the present. Memories of events, whether traumatic or not, inform our day-to-day activities and often present themselves without notice. The past is not something that has been buried or forgotten, but that which constantly reappears. Edkins argues that the performance of time as linear is not an accident, but an intentional way of perpetuating a disciplined order of the world. She claims “that the old Newtonian way of thinking about

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time persists not because we just haven’t got round to re-thinking these ideas in the light of new scientific analysis, but because linear, homogenous time suits a particular form of power—sovereign power, the power of the modern nation-state” (ibid: xv). Adherence to linearity is not simply about what makes the most sense or what is the most logical, but it is about what aids in perpetuating a specific world order. Any narrative that strays from this linearity does so in a way that has the potential to undermine or complicate the world order, invoking our assessment of the sublime as an encounter against. It is from this linear structuring of stories, heavily embedded in power relations that Reardon departs. Reardon uses a number of stylistic devices to signal to readers that her grandmother’s stories are not stuck in a particular historical moment, including tense changes and the use of grammatically incorrect English. In this case, the underlying message of the narrative is accessed through the form of writing. Reardon begins her narrative in the present tense. She writes, “The first time my grandmother tells me a war story, it starts with a child” (Reardon 2015: 18). Reardon continues to write in the present tense until the very end of the story when she jarringly shifts the temporal dimension. Closing, she states, “But, I suppose that’s why she always tried to tell me her war stories: to try to close the gap between us, even as she sought to maintain it” (ibid: 21). This signals to the reader that the trauma of war can never be part of “the past.” Trauma is neither a historical event nor something that can be properly memorialized since it does not remain buried. Rather, trauma is always present—it is always being triggered by various life experiences, both seemingly major and marginal as the narrative itself transcends fixed categories of the past/present/future challenging readers to reevaluate the spatial and temporal dimensions of the text. In addition to jarring tense shifts, Reardon also invokes her grandmother’s oral style of storytelling—one that is littered with grammatical errors spoken through a heavy accent. When writing about her grandmother’s assertion that her grandchildren could not understand the events that transpired in Yugoslavia in 1941, Reardon

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quotes her grandmother as saying, “You never no believe-it. You never no understand” (ibid: 18). Later, Reardon invokes the same grammatical error when discussing her opinion of the purpose of her grandmother’s stories. Reardon writes, “They are meant to remind me that I grew up American, and that I never no understand” (ibid: 18). Similarly, Reardon invokes her grandmother’s accented voice when she writes, “Vhen vas var, ve never no have-it sled,’ she says. ‘Vhat you understand now how ve go sledding” (ibid: 19). Reardon’s incorporation of the nuances of her grandmother’s voice not only helps to personalize the story, reminding the reader that we too live to some extent with the histories of our family members, but also helps to shift the narrative away from the traditional academic form of writing. By writing as her grandmother speaks, Reardon reminds us that war stories, often heavily abstracted by the academy, have a place in many (if not most) homes. In addition to the compelling stylistic devices used by Reardon, she also offers a number of engaging questions about transgenerational trauma. Reardon questions the extent to which trauma can be inherited when she writes, “I want to remember with her, to untwist strands of inherited memory from my DNA, but she reminds me that I was not there, and stories are words, not genetics. I prefer to think of them as echoes, though I know I have entered the hall of stories in time to hear only the ref lection of sound, the manifestation of its discontinuous waves” (ibid: 18). In these lines, Reardon points to the refractory nature of stories told between generations. Here, the sublime emerges as an encounter between generations showing how bodies speak (or do not) across time and in varying vernaculars. Although her grandmother, not Reardon, experienced war in Yugoslavia in 1941, Reardon’s identity is constructed partially from the stories inherited from her grandmother. Her perception of the world is painted in intersubjective colors by her understanding of war seen through the eyes of her grandmother. This is in stark contrast to her grandmother’s perception that her experience of trauma is hers alone. Reardon expresses her grandmother’s contention of solitude when she writes, “No matter how many times I listen, she knows one thing for

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certain: she was there and I was not” (ibid: 20-21). But while Reardon may not have been there, her life has been full of the reverberations of war, felt through stories told by someone she loves. While non-narrative forms of writing are also capable of describing the complexity of trauma and its incapacity to fit within linear conceptions of time, narrative and autoethnographic works offer a lens through which to view trauma as temporally unbounded. What Reardon writes is pertinent not because her account is more authentic than what could be written in non-narrative texts, but because it exposes through the lens of the sublime the way that linear time is foundational to the power relations of the nation-state and also problematic for families who have lived and live trauma.

Sarah Naumes and Dean Caivano’s “Vignettes of the Banal” In our co-written piece “Vignettes of the Banal” published in 2017, we interrogate the relationship between state borders, embodied experiences, medicalization, and birth and death. We wrote this piece, not to adhere to stylistic guidelines of what beautiful writing might look like, but in order to expose everyday sites of discipline and resistance. Our piece functions outside of clear boundaries of form and content in order to explore the liminal status of bodies functioning in conf lict with the biopolitical assertions of the nation-state. Centrally, we excavate two simultaneous stories of the potentiality of life and death, interrogating the function of both territorial borders and boundaries crafted around embodied experiences. Our intention in writing the piece was to create a sense of disorientation for readers, much as do these disciplinary sites. One of the ways that we achieve this is through the use of a line down the middle of the page to indicate a dialogue between interlocutors. We do not make clear who those interlocutors are, illuminating a sublime encounter with unknown subjectivities, and we consistently shift between a plethora of speakers, problematizing the forceful

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command of a singular voice. The one exception to this line is during a scene of interrogation with state officials at the US-Canadian border. Rather than instituting the stylistic device of the line, it is replaced with a box that points to the totalizing nature of interactions with state officials. While the particular state official is not given any character background (an absence of name and rank), the box serves as a device to enclose not only the main protagonists of the story, but the reader as a potential citizen-subject of the state. What appear as seemingly banal questions by the state official, are presented in a more heightened and threatening manner due to the containment of the dialogue and our particular stylistic choices, notably: bolding, strikethrough, all caps, bracketing, and an emoji. Although the box highlights the totalizing nature of interactions with state officials, it also illuminates the spaces within those interactions that are ripe for resistance. Through the same stylistic choices, we illustrate the ways that subjects of state-interrogation engage in a calculation of what information to provide and what information to withhold. In this example, the state official asks, “What is the purpose of your trip?” (Naumes/Caivano 2017: 163). Rather than disclosing that the trip is primarily an attempt to seek medical treatment, the interlocutor responds that they are visiting family and smiles at the state official. This is a safe and legally accepted act and one that nearly guarantees the ability to enter and exit due to citizenship status. We also aimed to disorient readers through a distinct lack of linearity in our writing. The vignettes in this piece jump around in time, highlighting the often-fractured linearity of storytelling and the ways in which disciplinary experiences layer on top of one another, making what might seem like an innocuous experience with a person of authority to one individual read much differently to another. In our case, the association of illness and death with hospitals and medical practitioners during this time period played heavily in our decision to have a home birth. This decision, taken alone, carries different associations than if excavated through a series of associated memories.

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This home birth, an event that is not often explored within IR scholarship, but which cannot be disentangled from practices of surveillance and norms of securitization, is represented on the final page of our piece. There, we close not with an attempt to draw clear conclusions, but with an implicit question: with which omnipresent logic(s) is the moment of totalizing love for another person at odds? We offer a number of potential suggestions, but end with an ellipsis to indicate uncertainty in naming this moment. We endeavor, through our representation of the events that unfolded before and after the birth of our child, to show how moments often rendered as seemingly apolitical or anti-political can be informed by power structures and, perhaps even hold emancipatory capacity. This particular vignette, speaks to the potentially sublime nature of narrative and autoethnographic texts, illustrating a common emotive rupture point with disciplinary practices – the birth of a child may very well provoke a desire for safety and conformity, but it also invites a moment of metaphysical reassessment. Additionally, this vignette invites the reader to come to their own conclusions about the text and what it offers to theorizations of the surveillant assemblage (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 614; cf. Haggerty/ Ericson 2000). We do not hold readers to our interpretation of events but create a piece that asks for an interrogation of what freedom could look like in a heavily surveilled, medicalized, and militarized world. We take from Foucault the assertion that embedded within all sites of discipline are means for resistance. These fractures became apparent to us not through the beautiful birth of our child, but through this experience taken in concert with the terror and chaos of existence in the Anthropocene. These fractures are rendered legible through the sublime.

Chapter 4: The Sublime Aesthetic of Narrative & Autoethnography

Natasha Behl, Michelle Téllez, Michael Stancliff, and Montye Fuse’s “Writing the Intersection: Feminist Autoethnography as Narrative Collaboration” Looking back at the journals now, what seems most important are the moments in which our stories reveal that in-between space (Anzaldúa’s “mestiza consciousness” or what other Chicana/o scholars call Nepantla or “in-between-ness”) that opens up the space of imagination – of creativity – which are at the core of anything like what we initially conceived of as feminist making. (Behl/Téllez/Stancliff/Fuse 2018: 43) “Writing the Intersection” highlights the novel stylistic techniques that narrative and autoethnography offer to the field of political studies. It also, in ways unconventional in academic research, presents a collaboratively written piece that is honest, ref lexive, provocative, sensible, and decisively capable of spurring praxis from its audience. Written by Natasha Behl, Michelle Téllez, Michael Stancliff, and Montye Fuse, a quartet of scholars and activists with diverse socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, the piece documents their experiences through a narrative experiment aimed at collective feminist theory building. Over the span of two years, the authors, amongst other participants, engaged in both individual and collective writing practices found in the form of journaling that was guided by the principle question of: “How have our histories of living race, gender, and sexuality informed our work as feminists, scholars, writers, artists, and activists?” (ibid: 30). Their experiences and perspectives – presented both discursively and in conversation – explores the ways that “situated experiences of intersectional positionality” produces spaces of “feminist making” and how the “making of feminists” relates to the “formative life experiences that brought us to that work/ consciousness” (ibid; original emphasis). The stories that circulated in the writing group were personal and introspective, troubling and real, hopeful and complex. Their

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personal stories and backgrounds led each of them to the collective for fundamentally different reasons. Yet, the telling (and re-telling) of affirmed commonalities emerged across an intersectional and troubled “intersecting systems of privilege and oppression” (ibid: 31). “We shared our experiences as third world scholars living in the first world,” the authors attest, “as working-class scholars residing in elite academic institutions, as transnational activists living in the borderlands, and as gendered and raced others living in the United States” (ibid: 30-31). Appraising the value of a space capable of inviting productive conversations, one strikingly freed from the stringent dictates of the workplace, the authors detail their experiences of the collective: [W]e shared stories, memories, and experiences with each other that were painful to relive, that were forgotten and unarticulated, and that had never been shared before. Our collective narrative collaboration helped us access the power of memories evacuated from academic discourse by the calculus of professionalism and unreconstructed sexism and racism and from our private lives by over-commitment, overwork, grief, refusal to grieve, and, frankly, trepidation over the difficult emotional process of critical reflection. (ibid: 31) Pointedly, the piece relies on various modes of writing. On the one hand, the opening pages – or if we consider them as a prologue to the discursive corpus – are conveyed in a style highly reminiscent of an academic article that one would find in a journal focused on radical praxis or critical philosophy. Engaging with Chicana feminists’ thinkers Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, the authors delineate the theoretical thrust of their work, paying careful attention to frame the subsequent sections of the piece in relation to envisioning a theory not purely understood in abstract terms, but as incarnate in the f lesh. While this language – an endeavor to enact a theory in the f lesh – is featured prominently in liberation theology and the work of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, here it assumes a dimension

Chapter 4: The Sublime Aesthetic of Narrative & Autoethnography

that aims at a working praxis made visible in the present that strives to obliterate structures of domination. The theoretical stage delineated in the opening pages casts an important methodological framing around the constitutive parts of the text. In return, readers are invited on a theoretical voyage engendering how writing, reading, and bringing to life the intersection is multilayered: a project that remains on-going which is sustained by lived-in experiences that push the limits of imagination towards a rhizomatic framing of feminist thought. Following the prologue, the authors shift gears, turning from a narrative-driven, academic account of the theoretical framing and interworks of the writing collective to an exposure of passages from the archives of the journals. Clarifying (and justifying) their decision to use narrative, the authors write: “We have taken a narrative approach to theory building because of the capacity of narrative to recover / reconstruct memory, to integrate memory and knowledge and feeling, perhaps discarded, rationalized, or repressed with current thinking” (ibid: 32). Importantly, the structure of the text breaks from a narrative plane to an opening up of the personal defined by an autoethnographic revealing of personal experiences centered on moments of racial injustice, sexual violence, domestic abuse, and overlapping lines of exclusion and oppression. In each of the subsequent sections, the authors present their own thoughts, memories, and embodiedaccounts – often troubling, stirring, and heartfelt – demonstrating a turn from a collective voice to individualized ref lections that cannot help but resonate across and between the printed words that precede and follow. Let us turn brief ly turn to the ref lections from each author’s journal:

Natasha Was I protecting the ideal of an inclusive, plural intellectual space? In protecting this ideal, was I complicit in creating a hostile environment for myself and for others? Was I protecting men of color who

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experience academia as a hostile environment? By protecting these men did I fail to protect myself? Did I fail to protect other victims of sexual harassment? Who was protecting me? Who was protecting the other victims? I was voiceless. I was powerless. I was defenseless...or was I? (ibid: 34)

Michael This ref lection on white masculinist violence and the conspiratorial encounters and silences of white masculine pedagogy—I mean doing the writing itself and discussing it with my co-auto-ethnographers— quickens my pulse and makes my face burn. This is the shame of guilt and the shame of trauma, and the ragged breath of discovery. How many women who suffered like Janette and Anna do I know? To how many stories of violence and abuse have I listened, and cataloguing them in a fragmented and sequestered archive of memory? Why did I never harden to these stories? I think now it is because they are my stories too. That archive of memory aches with beatings and threats of beatings, legible again first as muscle memory. My co-writing- friends and I have affirmed again and again the feminism that captures our imagination and claims our commitment as a holistic theory of power. That feminism, my feminism, provides me an analytic for understanding the development of my masculinity as a white man. (ibid: 37)

Michelle Home for me is complicated because I grew up in a border town that dichotomized my experience, delegitimized my existence and devalued my family’s way of being. The racialized and gendered memories (the racial epithets still ring in my ears: Mexican Whore, Tijuana Junkie, Beaner) of my childhood and youth had really propelled me to seek out radical change even though I didn’t know what that was or what I was

Chapter 4: The Sublime Aesthetic of Narrative & Autoethnography

seeking. Being a student activist in the Chican@ movement allowed me to think transnationally and with an intersectional lens – it gave me a language that I didn’t have previously and access to a history that I didn’t know. This all heavily impacted me and is how I ended up in jail, on the streets of Madrid and in an Indigenous community in Chiapas in my early twenties. But the imperative to think about home led me to the work of radical women of color writers and activists. (ibid: 38)

Montye Being back in St. Louis also brings back a memory from the summer when I was 12. My grandparents purchased a swimming pool pass for me at a public community pool in predominantly white St. Louis County where they lived. I would go swimming every afternoon, the only Black kid at the crowded pool. Crossing the street to the pool one day, a car full of white teenagers drove very slowly passed me as I crossed the street, yelling, “Nigger.” I remember being upset in the moment and certainly this incident has stayed with me. However, having been raised in a Southern family with Southern roots, I had an intrinsic understanding of relationships between Blacks and whites. There is a way in which whites tend to look beyond Black humanity, and it is in that blind spot that a measure of Black power exists: I also knew that Montye was not actually the nigger that the boys yelled at. They never really “saw” me. In the end, I filed this incident away as an act pure racism and ignorance never really letting it define me. I admit that incidents like this have affected how I see and interact with white people. (ibid: 41) The passages presented illustrate a slight glimpse of the powerful ref lections offered by each author. Of course, an exhibition of only a few lines of text fails to do justice to the sense of deep contemplation conveyed in their recollections; words that are deeply woven by memory, intergenerational trauma, and a writing place that is rooted in the present, yet still fully constrained by lines of privilege and exclusion.

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The f luid movement between the collective and the self (auto) – a shift from theory building to journaling – demonstrates the unorthodox stylistic and substantive thrust of the narrative turn. The authors explain this transformation of perspective and command, relying heavily on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. Highlighting the productive and regenerative potential of the approach, they attest: “autoethnography is an act of survival and self-determination through which we recover conceptual and emotional resources—many of them hard won—that would be otherwise forgotten and inaccessible as ground for political consciousness” (ibid: 31). In this way, “Writing the Intersection” reveals the malleability of the writing process enabling autoethnographers to become co-autoethnographers: partners in theory and praxis. The authors conclude by suspending the presentation of individual ref lections and returning to a collective plane. In their sweeping and optimistic conclusion, they return to the epistemological and methodological framing offered in the prologue in direct context to the project of collective writing and journaling. They assert: Looking back at the journals now, what seems most important are the moments in which our stories reveal that in-between space (Anzaldúa’s “mestiza consciousness” or what other Chicana/o scholars call Nepantla or “in-between-ness”) that opens up the space of imagination – of creativity – which are at the core of anything like what we initially conceived of as feminist making. In fits and starts, these journals have brought into focus for us this third space, that relational space between, affectively intense, typically unacknowledged. What we’ve learned exceeds this manuscript, or maybe eludes it. Working together in language amid our rationalizations, erasures and silences, and opacities, we have caught glimpses, or have maybe just suggested an affective, embodied space in which dynamic, creative impulse and paralysis are equally possible. In our best moments, in the narrative workshop of our friendships, these secret places became sites of common cause. (ibid: 43)

Chapter 4: The Sublime Aesthetic of Narrative & Autoethnography

What the final passages convey is a deep sensibility and affinity to the commonalities that bind the voices across the pages of the text. The recalling of painful, sometimes unresolved, memories of institutional and cultural forms of violence intimately incite a sense of shared vulnerability. A measure that not only comes to life in the words imprinted on the page but comes to bare an awakening in the f lesh. Struggles transverse the fixed anchoring of discursive practices empowering sojourners to envision new strategies of solidarity in the present and for the present. As the authors confirm, such an endeavor is not impossible for it requires a deeply held commitment to the transformative potential of imagination in order to make political action possible “individually, collectively, and inter-generationally” (ibid: 44).

Paulina Semenec’s “Writing In/ter/rup/tions” Interruption 1: I’m in a grade 3 classroom – my fieldwork ‘site’. I am trying to write about something that just happened, when Amy, an eight-year-old girl deemed too mature for her age by her teacher, comes over and peers over my shoulder. “Is this your diary?” she asks me. The word “diary” makes me chuckle, and I say, “yea, I guess it kind of is.” “What do you write in there?” she probes. I tell her I write about what happens during the day, so I don’t forget. Trying to move the attention away from myself and my notebook, I ask her if she also has a diary. “Yes,” she tells me,“it’s at home.” “Am I in your diary?” she probes again. “Yes, probably,” I say, to which she responds with a smile, “I’m going to be famous.” She begins to read aloud what I have written on the page, standing closely behind me. As she reads, I feel a growing sense of embarrassment and slight surge of panic swelling up in my body. In an attempt to take her attention away from what else might be written on the page, I begin to write: “Amy reads my journal and is reading it now behind me,” and we both laugh. (2019: 86) Paulina Semenec’s wonderfully ref lective meditation on the difficulties of the writing process packs a heavy punch in only four

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short pages of text. Using first-person narration, inclusive of children’s voices, schismatic breaks in the discursive linearity, and a balanced inclusion of academic sources, Semenec carefully and delicately spurs readers to consider what constitutes a necessary regimen to produce qualitative research and reporting. Unlike standard scholarly articles, Semenec uses unorthodox techniques to illustrate how the academy under neoliberalism demands much from its members, yet fails to account for the impact – particularly concerning mental health – that deadlines, the drive to publish, and the demand of high volumes of writing production places on early-career scholars. As a graduate student pursuing a doctorate in educational studies, Semenec presents a middle-of-the-night ref lection, a troubling unrelenting expression of worry over unfinished academic work and the always-looming dissertation project. Semenec injects her fraught rumination as an interruption. She writes:

Interruption 2: It’s 3 AM. I lie awake thinking about that stubborn paragraph that needs major re-writing, that manuscript I need to finish by next week, that paper I started long ago, but never finished. Oh yes, that paper. I imagine it now – stuffed in between receipts and old notebooks in my desk drawer. I could come back to that paper, I should, I must. So much time spent on it, so much energy thinking, reading, writing. Suddenly, panic sets in. Forget that paper. I have a dissertation to write! It’s been several months since I completed my fieldwork, and what do I have to show for it? I promised a chapter by January, and it’s now September... and...and... It’s now 3:30. Ideas swirl in my mind, wild and frantic like a hurricane, uprooting trees and sweeping up everything in sight – cars, rooftops, cows. My heart beats faster and faster, and I begin to sweat. I keep coming back to certain data, certain encounters that resist being known, resist any kind of ‘sense’. These data encounters are hard to grasp, they are slippery, intangible yet I feel their potency on every inch of my being. What to do with these data encounters? How to think and write about them? With them? How can I resist writing them

Chapter 4: The Sublime Aesthetic of Narrative & Autoethnography

as if I know them? What is this thing, this beast of a dissertation I am trying to write, anyway? I look over at the clock in the bedroom. Almost 4 am now. I turn over, and cover my head with the blanket, heart still pounding. It’s almost 4 in the morning, and I have writing on my mind. Again. (ibid: 87) While Interruption 2 conveys a certain stream-of-consciousness style that has come to typify non-academic writing, specifically under the proliferation of social media, Semenec’s contemplation is balanced in both tone and substance. At the core of her awakening observation is the permeating presence of writing, particularly in moments when we are not writing. From a productivity and professional standpoint, these gaps of non-writing are seen as interruptions: breaks in a metabolic ordering that necessitates scholars always be working, always be writing, always be producing more and more. Hence, an anxiety-filled night, one that disrupts the required balance of rest and recuperation in order to continuously produce, interrupts the holistic well-being of the scholar’s body and, centrally, represents a time outside of self-care that is devoid of performing job-related tasks. Under neoliberal logic these interruptions mark significant failures in research productivity and critically jeopardize a young scholar’s ability to successfully attain employment post-dissertation stage. In Interruption 3, Semenec offers a conversation during her fieldwork between herself and two third graders. The brief exchange is packed with interruptions, both linguistically and discursively: there are moments of profound confusion, silence, ref lection, and agreement. Unlike standard practices, the conversation gives voice to those virtually absent in political studies: children. We wonder how much as a discipline, especially in the field of IR, a more thorough inclusion of children’s voices could potentially shed light on the complexities and human costs of war, famine, climate change, and gun violence? Semenec’s seemingly banal interaction – a conversation centered on life in the third grade – certainly does not provide insights into macro-issues of the international. But what it does do, and rather effectively, is to illuminate a sublime encounter: a moment that reveals,

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more than it conceals, expressions between varying subjectivities, promoting readers to consider the ethical relation between a researcher and a subject and an adult and a child. These points are conveyed to a reader precisely in the way they emerged to Semenec herself: as a series of interruptions that splintered a firm anchoring in time, space, and agency. Interruptions also maintain a productive quality amounting to a force that can transform not only the writing process, but also how we come to process and digest the banal and extraordinary of daily life. Semenec advises readers to move congruently, or in harmony with interruptions of writing (and thought, for that matter) rather than attempt mitigation or a reversion towards conformity. Semenec writes: Writing interruptions happen to anyone who writes, and for writers who think with/in spaces of post-qualitative inquiry, they can also become something to play and experiment with in order to resist and/or escape writing and thinking as usual. Writing interruptions can become modes of experimentation, which, rather than trying to contain silences and complexities through a steady, uninterrupted flowing stream of writing, pick up on their affect and transgression of more positivist methods. Writing interruptions can interrupt modes of writing within social science research in ways that open up new possibilities of writing and ‘doing’ qualitative research (ibid: 89). Semenec’s text illustrates that interruptions can show us that scholars need to be doing more when it comes to data collection and reporting. Not in the sense of a further escalation of research and publishing endeavors, but differently in thinking how new approaches can challenge entrenched norms and stimulate fresh global perspectives. From journalistic exposés to fieldwork reporting to poetry, writing always entails a degree of disclosure by an author, transference of unique perspectives of knowledge and creativity that help to shape a story. The same can be said of narrative and autoethnography, yet as Semenec’s notion of interruptions suggests, there is much more at-

Chapter 4: The Sublime Aesthetic of Narrative & Autoethnography

play within these texts. A disclosure, for sure, but also, an invitation to rethink our own positionality and how lines of power and agency intersect, producing more and more new relations sustained and legitimized by processes of exploitation and domination.

Concluding Thoughts In each of the four pieces published in JNP that we selected to illustrate narrative and autoethnography, there is resistance from clean and clear conclusions. Readers engage in an experience of the world that would not be otherwise possible without the aid of these texts. Thus, narrative and autoethnography have the potential to invite readers into the sublime through a sharing of the burdens, joys, and sacrifices that are or are not being told. This invitation points to the inherently political potential of the sublime – a space that is only made possible through living in communion with others. By reading narrative and autoethnography as evocative of the sublime – or an intimate encounter with vastness, melancholy, and/ or horror – these texts engage in political theorizing, often in more palatable forms of expression. Unlike strict political theoretical texts that are often written in a non-accessible style, the stories presented in our JNP collection offer a suitable entrance for readership. But why? Our response stresses both style and substance. On the one hand, the aesthetics of narrative admissions are simply more inviting. Utilizing various forms of technical devices, readers are drawn into the text in clear and coherent paths, but also, at times, through complex and difficult contours. The presentation of the text, ranging from the printed words to unconventional layouts to vivid empty space, prompts readers to reassess the limits of writing, how discursive lines can come to speak, and how the retelling of a story persists far after the last page of text. While the stylistic autonomy of the narrative turn is certainly engaging and inviting even beyond an academic-reading audience,

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the political potential of the narrative turn directly relates to the substantive material of the works. Here, an appraisal of the aesthetic dimension of the text transcends stylistic and technical choices and rests on a dissolution of a non-speaking author. Instead, the narrative turn subverts the symbolic image of the academic-expert-as-author, signaling a transversion: an appearance of the personal. This marks a decisive break with academic scholarship. To read a narrative admission is to enter into an ontologically open world enacted by a ref lective subject(s) bringing the reader into a face-to-face ethical relationship between author and audience. Reading, thus, interrupts the governance of appearance, instituting, instead, an entirely new world of subjects and symbols. It is here that the sublime aesthetic of narrative and autoethnography rests. An expression that makes those previously unseen, visible; makes voices previously muted or ignored, heard; and, makes the academy, political; reconfiguring the relationship between the researcher-institution-and-community.

Vignettes of the Banal [Dean Caivano] [Sarah Naumes]

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I often picture myself telling my daughter the story of how her father died. It does not begin with an illness or a corpse. Rather, it is the story of a curse passed down from generation to generation of women in my family — one that allows us the sanctuary of deep and fulfilling love, but only temporarily. This curse, a mystical force in my love life, has taken the great loves of my mother, my mother’s mother, and her mother’s mother. When we found out my daughter’s father, the great love of my life, was sick, I reached deep into the genesis of my being and pulled out a story that has pulsed through my subconscious since I was a child. We’ve never met, but your arrival is my only concern. I don’t know at what hour you will come, as I wait in a different country for your point of entry. When I close my eyes I imagine the sound, timbre, and cadence of your first cry. What will you think of these stars that glow in our nighttime sky? What will you remember of me? How long will those songs that I sang to you while you were in your mother’s womb remain? I wish you knew my story, the path that I travelled, shaping me into the man that I’ve become – the hurt and loss of being born on the wrong side of the divide that continues to haunt even in the silent moments of pain. I’ve never asked for much, expected even less. But to you, I ask for the stars and moon and all the empty spaces in-between. I bestow and burden you with a request: Wait for me. Wait for this distance to vanish. And when you lay your eyes upon me, think not stranger, but rather, father.

Chapter 5: Vignettes of the Banal

I am Dean Caivano. I am doing my best to sound masculine as this insurance representative apologizes profusely for mistaking me for a woman. She asks me a series of questions to authenticate my identity. Franco, I tell her. I only know Dean’s mother’s maiden name because I wrote it down earlier today. We discover that Dean has been without health insurance in Canada for a year because Human Resources flipped his birth month and his birth day when he enrolled and they have since been virtually unreachable. The office is on a far end of York University’s campus behind a locked door. The woman gives me instructions about how to rectify this issue.

[It’s Franco.]

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I am Dean Caivano. I mumble to a disinterested graduate student also sitting in the dingy computer lab. I am a first year Ph.D. student. Hey, I’m Sarah. Did you go to Lehigh?  What an odd question, I think, completely forgetting that the distinctively brown sweatshirt I am wearing today says “Lehigh” on the front. Yes… did you? No, brown isn’t my color. I wore blue across the river. Ah, the fourth American in our program. 

Chapter 5: Vignettes of the Banal

We are sitting in the GIs office in Pittsburgh on our way down to an academic conference. Thank God that Dean still has US health insurance, I think to myself as I try to sit still under my expanding belly. Doctor House and his detectives enter the room:  The patient comes to us today from a referral by Doctor Eric Schuller. The patient is 29 years old, 5’11”, approximately 167 pounds, with no known allergies, and currently is not taking any medications. The patient has conveyed that he has been experiencing extreme lower back and abdominal pain for close to a decade now. The abdominal pain has been accompanied by extreme weight loss, poor circulation, and erratic and bloody bowel movements. Initial testing was performed in Canada in the form of an ultrasound that revealed a large, black mass in the upper right lobe of the liver. A follow-up MRI with contrast was conducted, which revealed seven tumors on the liver, ranging in size with the largest being the size of a grapefruit. His wife accompanies him and they are expecting a baby.  I could correct him, but I won’t because explaining the rules and regulations pertaining to marriage and divorce between two countries seems a bit outside of the purview of this appointment. The patient has brought copies of these test results here today. The patient knows of no other health concerns. Although, he did mention that he lost vision in his left eye for over a week approximately four-years ago. No follow-up testing was performed during that time. 

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There is a one-year wait time to sponsor a spouse or common-law partner who lives in the country to receive permanent residence in Canada. Of course, The State has shown us in recent months that even when one waits patiently, that status can be taken away from certain bodies without warning. Today, we are not those bodies. There is a moratorium on sponsorship for permanent residence if you yourself have been sponsored in the last five years. There is a one-year cooling off period before a divorce can be finalized in Canada unless one spouse can prove abuse or infidelity. (The State does not consider it infidelity if the spouses were already separated or if both partners engaged in extra-marital relationships ‒ one has to be at fault.) Typical gestation of a child lasts between 37 and 42 weeks. Neither chronic pain nor illness of the liver recognize any of these timelines. Pain ebbs and flows, wreaking havoc on the best-laid plans, often forcing bodies in motion into a state of suspended animation. While able-bodied time continues on a predictable trajectory, the time experienced by bodies in pain or bodies that are unwell melts into the earth.

[Where are those bodies?]

Chapter 5: Vignettes of the Banal

The sound of rapidly boiling water inside the teakettle nearly drowns out the beeping of an incoming text message. I gaze at my cell phone and it is Sarah. I quickly flick my thumb to open the message: I know it is late and you have to work in the morning, but could you come over?  I nearly forget to turn off the teakettle as I grab the essentials and head out the door. After a brisk ten-minute walk in the biting Toronto air, I am at her house. We sit on her couch and, as an avid cinephile, I worry that this is a break-up scene in the making.  I need to ask you something and I don’t want you to respond right away. Are you sure you want to be with me forever?   I take off my glasses and pause only for effect because, in my heart, I already know the answer unequivocally. I have always known the answer and I tell her, Yes, you are the love of my life and I couldn’t be surer of it.  I pull out the white stick with its pink plus sign and hand it to him.  I guess this really wasn’t a breakup scene. 

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I am screaming. I am fucking S C R E A M I N G in the waiting room of the ER. 

My pain is at a 10. I can barely move. I smell like I am rotting from the inside out – a yellowing carcass sweating under the florescent lights. The ER nurse at St. Joseph’s hospital in Toronto asks me for my Ontario Health Insurance Plan card. For the fifth time I explain that I am an international student and am not covered under the provincial health care system. I need pain pills. I need more of that morphine that they gave me after the first surgery.

HIS DOCTOR TOLD HIM TO COME TO THE ER IMMEDIATELY. THIS MAN IS DYING AND WHILE YOU TAKE OTHER PATIENTS ON OHIP BACK, YOU WANT HIM TOFILLOUTPAPERWORKANDPAYSOME EXORBITANT FEE FIRST?

[We can’t leave again. She could come. She will come.]

I should have never left the States in this condition. Sarah is upset. She’s in tears and we’re both frustrated and scared. I don’t want my daughter to know that I hurt this way Maybe we should drive back to Pittsburgh where they will open me up from my navel, asking if this mark accompanied me into this world.

Chapter 5: Vignettes of the Banal

To be eligible to study in Canada, you must prove: that you have enough money to pay for your tuition fees. And your living expenses and return transportation. 

That you are a law-abiding citizen with no criminal record and that you are not a risk to the security of Canada. You may have to provide a police certificate. 

You must be in good health and willing to complete a medical examination, if necessary. 

You must satisfy an immigration officer that you will leave Canada at the end of your authorized stay. 

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It’s nearly midnight and I’m sitting in the waiting room at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. Dean’s probably in the MRI machine right now. Most of the people here don’t seem too concerned about what they’re facing. Perhaps this is just how we let others see us or maybe they really aren’t letting themselves get worked up. I’ve been so frustrated for days and there’s no outlet. I just want to go for a run, but with the pregnancy, I’m exhausted. Instead, I sit around, furious with the world. How can it be that Dean and I finally found each other and now we’re facing… What? Liver cancer? A cyst? Something we’ve yet to imagine? All the while, our baby is growing, getting ready to enter this world. This room is so bright and my eyes can barely stay open. I’m strapped down as the nurses wheel me in — what are their names again? Why is it so cold in here? Where are my glasses? I think that one nurse has them. What was her name? I wonder if they can tell that I’m scared. The lights blur like headlights in the rain. The room smells still. We need to move you now, Dean. On three: one, two, three. There you go. I guess this is the table where I’ll be cut open. There’s that nurse again. She takes my left hand. What does your tattoo mean? My throat is bone dry. I think she asked me a question, again in her thick Pittsburgh dialect. Sweetheart, you’re doin’ great. That’s Latin, right? What does it mean? Yinz guys know? I fight the anesthesia plunging through every vein of my body to answer the question. My cracked, blistered lips peel open and I muster a response: love of the world.

Chapter 5: Vignettes of the Banal

I want someone to blame, but there are only borders restricting our love, our movement, and our health care. We’re battling a beast without a

form. Thousands of miles in the air, on the road, searching for a pill, a procedure to rectify my ailing body. Crossing borders, descending into the darkness of a MRI machine, receding off into a chemically induced hypnotic unconscious state, all in preparation for a baptism by perforated flesh, shredded muscles that are stitched and glued back together in synthetic wholeness, and the extraction of over one pound of a band of tissue tasked with purifying the imperfections of the human body.   Tomorrow I will wake up with a foot pressed into my ribcage and tiny fists drumming on my hips. I will lay in bed with a full bladder, but I won’t get up immediately. Something stalls me each morning. I do not want to leave my house, to engage with this world, because my world is disappearing. And tomorrow, before the sun rises, Dean will be awake in a hospital bed, preparing to have part of his liver removed, while I will lie in Toronto, alone , wondering if we said our final goodbyes when I dropped him off at the airport a few days ago, unable to cross into the US because I’m having fucking contractions.

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do you have any drugs, alcohol, or weapons? To whom is this vehicle registered? [no] [it’s mine]

What is the purpose of your trip?

Have either of you been convicted of a crime?

[medical] [surgery] [im in pain]

[NEVER – never for both of us]

[i need to see my doctor] [visiting family ]

WHERE WILL YOU BE STAYING?

Do you have anything else to declare? [not what you want to hear]

[with family]

Chapter 5: Vignettes of the Banal

In 643 days my student permit expires.  Don’t you mean “visa?”  They don’t issue visas to American students. The legal specificities around visas and permits are drastically different. And in turn, so are my legal rights.  Regardless, are we going to the conference in Baltimore? Half the department has already withdrawn for various reasons, but in part because there is concern about the safety of crossing that border.  I can’t keep talking about this, Sarah. You know that I need to make and stick to plans. Either we’re going or we’re not.  Okay… can I ask you a question?  Of course.  We have both had an uncertain relationship with the idea of a home ‒ me because I have moved so many times and the most obvious place that I would call home, Oregon, is a memory that I cannot tangibly access anymore. I go back and that desire to belong shows itself as nostalgia for something that no longer exists. We say that our home is wherever the three of us are together, but I for one have a longing for a physical space…  Are you asking me if because I’ve lost my home in the past, that I too long for an actual place to call home? Someplace beyond the limits of the room where our daughter entered this world?

I don’t know, Sarah. Fuck, I mean in less than two years I have to move back.

But back to where?

Kind of. I mean, I am not trying to compare having your parents lose their jobs and then living in a van to choosing to move, but I don’t know how to disentangle our relationships with our homeland with the politics of an immigration ban. 

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We are sitting in the waiting area of the US Consulate in downtown Toronto with our five-week-old daughter. The building looks like an artifact from the Cold War Era and there are men with guns milling about outside ‒ we cannot tell whether they are US military personnel or private security contractors. In a few months, protesters of Trump’s immigration ban will temporarily shut down the consulate.

I have just returned from changing a diaper in the women’s restroom. The men’s restroom does not have a changing table. Our daughter is hungry and I feel uncomfortable about breastfeeding on what is technically US soil even though I know that US law protects this act in federal buildings. I unbutton my shirt and no one bats an eye.

This place looks like a primary school teacher decorated it. How many bulletin boards covered in clip art do you think they need to explain the Federal Voting Assistance Program to people?

Hey, call me from that phone so we can prank call the consulate later.

This is a joke, but it is one that we can make loudly because of what we look like and how we came to live outside of the US. They are calling us to the window. We collect our documents and records, including our daughter’s passport photos, and remember the hours it took to get an infant to sit still in front of a white backdrop with her eyes open, mouth closed, and ears visible. Her application indicates that she has blue eyes and is one foot 11 inches tall.

Yes, we are both US citizens. The former wine salesman turned Foreign Service Officer tells both of us to raise our right hands and swear that we will tell the truth. Given that there is neither a constitution nor a bible present, it is unclear on what we are swearing. President Obama’s framed portrait smiles at us as the FSO asks us whether we want to obtain our daughter’s citizenship through my birthright or Dean’s. After a lengthy round of

 

Chapter 5: Vignettes of the Banal

questioning about every place I have lived since turning 18, my finances, my love life, and my employment record, it appears that we have successfully satisfied the FSO. Our application will now be sent off to the State Department in a secured dossier for further inspection. How long do you think it will take for our daughter’s citizenship and passport to arrive?

The FSO says that the process should not take long, which is a relief since the US government indicates that children of US citizens must travel under a US passport regardless of age or location of birth. As we leave the interview, the FSO says that we should consider careers in the Foreign Service.  

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Our accommodations have a high window that overlooks a cat-strewn courtyard with grey cobblestones. At night the window allows light to stream in across our floor. Jet lag has a way of toying with one’s sense of time and well being on the best of days, but when pregnant and trying to sort through potentially devastating news, it lends itself to an almost apocalyptic view of the world. We were diligent about only taking a brief nap when we landed here in Rome so that our sleep schedule was not shot for the entire duration of this conference. But even so, it is the middle of the night and I have woken up in a state of utter confusion. The calendar seems to lie. 

I should finish preparing for my presentation tomorrow. Sarah is asleep and the glow of the television illuminates a small pocket of color in the corner of the room. I can’t focus. I can’t possibly sketch out notes right now on Habermas’ intersubjective linguistic turn. I put my paper down and quietly dig through my bag looking for my pocket notebook. The cover sports a drawing of a brown and white dog. The spine reads: “D is for dog.” It was a gift from Sarah. I grab hold of it and yank it from the side pocket. I sit on the edge of the bed looking at the illustration of the dog. It strikes me that the depiction of the dog is atypical ‒ it looks nervous, uncertain, prepared to flee in a second. I open the notebook to the first page. Its emptiness unsettles me. I begin to write turning the ominous blankness into my dying wishes:

i, dean caivano, humbly request that the following wishes be faithfully honored. in the event of my death, i request that no catholic mass or service be held. i would like for my body to be incinerated and my ashes scattered at these various locations: 1) lake ontario, 2) the allegheny river, and 3) the lehigh river.  if possible, i would like for my ashes to be distributed by sarah naumes and my daughter. beyond these events, i would like no service, gathering, wake, dinner, celebration, or memorial to be held. I close the notebook and turn to Sarah. She is still asleep. I reach for the television remote.

Chapter 5: Vignettes of the Banal

You were born on a Saturday night on a mattress on the floor of our first home. We didn’t go to the hospital, a place where we spent far too much time when you were in my womb. For 20 hours my body swayed under the pressure of a life entering this world, moaning for sanctuary. Those 20 hours lasted a lifetime and yet, the only moment that mattered was the end.  You entered silently in the shadow of your mother’s cry. The three of us huddled together on the edge of the bed, in a small house on Macondo Avenue, as the midwives removed the sheets soaked in blood and quietly exited the room. We spoke softly, held you gently, and began to love you eternally. This was our beginning. Our departure, if even momentarily, from ailing bodies in suspended animation and our entry into a new world freed from boundaries for which we neither asked nor chose. [A ~moment of freedom — at odds with the

{a f leeting encounter}

omnipresent logic of academia borders bureaucracy citizenship control displacement domination fear illness/ liberalism wellness militarism neoliberalism patriarchy racialization rationality scientific knowledge securitization sovereignty territoriality the Church the clinic the law the state time tradition …]

143

Postscript ı Revisiting Vignettes of the Banal “You have experience, inwardness, the power of words, the pathos of tragedy, you know how to proffer to the afflicted the only assuagement sorrow yearns for – the expression.” – Søren Kierkegaard (1972: 238) Søren. That was the name we intended to give our second child who would have been born in the thick of writing this book. Instead, we lost him in the middle of an academic conference in which we presented the initial framework of this project. One moment he was there and the next he was gone. We had seen his heartbeat just the day before. We chose the name Søren as a nod to the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard whose work celebrates a leap toward faith – something that anyone choosing to bring a child into this world must take either willingly or unknowingly. Plagued with doubts about the state of the world, we chose to have another child, to become parents once again. Losing Søren illustrates for us another part of “Vignettes of the Banal” that is not discussed in the story. The heartache that accompanies our memories is not simply a continuation of the earlier published work, another chapter in a clear-cut linear narrative. Stories never fully end, nor do they find a place of permanent rest. What the moments of our collective pain remind us of is the interconnectedness of our stories: the rhizomatic points that fade, only to return in a sweeping fury of uncertainty.

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“Vignettes of the Banal” ends with the birth of our first child – a moment in our collective history that signifies hope, fear, and an entry into the sublime. What inspired us in those ephemeral moments of happiness was that natality signals the ever-optimistic promise of a different world – a world that is inherently fairer and more peaceful than our own. And while the spectacular nature of those moments was short lived, they sustained and nourished us in our commitment to each other and our family and the belief that a better world is possible. Our scholarship changed, focusing more on the emancipatory potential of politics coupled with an intersectional and intergenerational commitment to hearing and seeing that which was previously ignored. Call it the seductive nature of revolutionary thought or youthful bliss, but parenthood brought with it a renewed sense of optimism. Writing “Vignettes of the Banal” was an expression of this optimism. The way we engaged with this hope was by using a method outside of the clear-cut conventional modes of academic writing that afforded us the space to share our stories and grapple with complex issues. For us, writing became an avenue to engage in politics beyond the forum of consensus-based, post-democratic representative politics. What made this project political to us – and what makes the narrative turn inherently political – is not simply the personal recollection of events, but the way that each of these stories draws out normative power structures. The narrative turn makes clear the choreography of power that may be taken for granted or be naturalized. The power of storytelling helps us to express a common language. It serves to commemorate and repudiate, to contemplate and connect, to educate and mobilize. The art of telling stories – the opening up of a personal encounter or experience onto another – is an act of ethical revelation. A moment that shows both our commonalities and differences, asking an audience to do something strikingly rare in today’s world: to faithfully listen. One needs to simply scan the Sunday morning talk shows or tap into our partisan news outlets to witness the deep division of hatred and intellectual isolation in order to see how listening is strikingly absent in our political discourse. How can we

Postscript ı Revisiting Vignettes of the Banal

simultaneously listen and talk about the issues that are meaningful in our communities and world? How can we understand counter-opinions while refusing to accept the very real sites and histories of privilege and authority that have entrenched our positionality? The answer is that we cannot. Politics means disagreements – it means acting and speaking in order to be seen, heard, and counted, of disrupting the sensible order of the world through language, symbols, and agency. Stories make visible those disagreements which were previously unrepresented, capable of translating anger, frustration, pain, and complexity into a vernacular illustrative of lived-in experiences. A politics of storytelling, however, is not the panacea for a world rattled by crises and violence, a term that has meaning and application, which Judith Butler reminds us is contestory (2020: 107). Stories alone cannot bring an end to institutional racism, patriarchy, predatory capitalism, and many of the other social, economic, and political diseases that aff lict the local and global. But they can, importantly, remind us of our shared humanity – even in defiance of those that refuse the existence of another – through a bringing-together of experiences of helplessness and isolation as well as moments of fraternity. From these spaces, new bonds and relations of solidarity can emerge, training us individually and collectively to listen, ref lect, and, if necessary, resist.

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