Approaching the unsynthesizable in international politics: Giving substance to security discourses through basso ostinato?
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066116656764 |
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JR
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116656764
European Journal of
International Relations
2017, Vol. 23(3) 609 –629
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066116656764
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Approaching the
unsynthesizable in international
politics: Giving substance to
security discourses through
basso ostinato?
Felix Rösch
Coventry University, UK
Atsuko Watanabe
University of Warwick, UK
Abstract
This article addresses the question of how spatial difference manifests itself in International
Relations discourses in an effort to theorize difference in international politics. In doing
so, we focus on the concept of security in particular and demonstrate a paradox in its
conceptualization. Despite the aspiration to capture global diversity, contemporary
security discourses largely leave out the moment of subjectification in knowledge-
construction. Rather, a form of subjectivity construction is promoted in these discourses,
which is reliant on the other. In contrast, this article considers the unsynthesizable
cognitive void between the self and the other through the work of the Japanese political
scientist Maruyama Masao and his basso ostinato concept. By drafting it as a heuristic
device to avoid the potential of determinism for which basso ostinato was criticized, we
apply it to the concept of comprehensive security with the intention to demonstrate that
ostensibly similar concepts can have different meanings in different times and spaces. In
doing so, we aim to transcend the resulting misunderstandings that obstruct International
Relations scholarship from contributing to what Amitav Acharya calls ‘Global IR’.
Keywords
Basso ostinato, International Relations theory, Japanese political thought, Maruyama
Masao, security, unsynthesizable
Corresponding author:
Felix Rösch, Coventry University, George Eliot Building, Priory Street, Coventry, CV1 5FB, UK.
Email: felix.roesch@coventry.ac.uk
656764EJT0010.1177/1354066116656764European Journal of International RelationsRösch and Watanabe
research-article2016
Article
610 European Journal of International Relations 23(3)
Introduction
Security studies have progressed significantly since the early 1990s. Moving on from
traditional conceptualizations of security as the absence of (military) threat and ensuring
the survival of nation-states (cf. Bellamy, 1981: 102; Walt, 1991: 212), more recent con-
tributions have broadened our understanding of security by relating it to a wide array of
previously disregarded referent objects (Wæver, 1996). Among others, these referent
objects comprise concerns about the environment (Buzan et al., 1998) — most recently,
in relation to the Anthropocene (Dalby, 2014; Keohane, 2015) — as well as the protec-
tion of human dignity and human bodies (Chandler and Hynek, 2011). In the course of
these debates, a provocative question has been asked by Jef Huysmans (1998). Similar to
a recent intervention by Erik Ringmar (2016) for International Relations (IR) at large,
Huysmans wondered what is meant when the term ‘security’ is being used. So far, how-
ever, this question has been left largely unanswered, although it is not given that all
actors in the cognitive void of intercultural contexts refer to a putatively common term
like ‘security’ with the same meaning.
In the present article, we do not claim to provide a satisfying answer to Huysmans’s
question, but we intend to unravel one of its layers by investigating how difference is mani-
fested in analytical concepts and how this affects our understanding of international politics
in general and security in particular. Situating ourselves within recent debates on difference
(cf. Behr, 2014; Inayatullah and Blaney, 2004; Neumann, 1996; Tickner, 2011; Tickner and
Blaney, 2012), we ask if difference is fully acknowledged in terms of ‘how meanings are
made’, as Ringmar (2016: 101) puts it. By investigating the substance of differences, we
aim to demonstrate that the concept of security is a process in the form of an ‘open becom-
ing’, as Yaqing Qin (2016: 37) writes, due to ‘ever changing relations’ and ‘unlimited pos-
sibilities’, rather than a fixed entity. To be able to do so, we approach the unsynthesizable
realm of knowledge production in international politics through the work of the Japanese
political scientist Maruyama Masao and his basso ostinato concept in particular.
This concept denotes a substratum underlying human thought. Basso ostinato is in
constant flux as it is socio-historically constructed; however, it is experienced by people
as a relatively stable, yet intangible, intellectual framework, much in the way Ty Solomon
and Brent Steele construct affects as becomings by referring to Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari. However, if affect is a ‘less than conscious, embodied’ (Solomon and Steele,
2016: 10) aspect that is always in flux, how can we be conscious of the difference
between self and other in the first place? If Solomon and Steele are correct, a cognitive
void must exist in which the self and the other coexist without being conscious of this
void. This is what we call the unsynthesizable.
In order to get a more nuanced picture of basso ostinato and the unsynthesizable, we
start with Maruyama’s borrowing of this concept from musicology. As a musical term, it
connotes ‘a recurrent pattern of bass notes’ that is ‘an underlying motif that is independ-
ent from the treble part and, if the main theme appears in the treble part, it is bound to
undergo some modifications’ (Maruyama, 1988b: 27). For Maruyama, this was visual-
ized in ideologies that have influenced Japan throughout history but have evolved abroad,
for instance, Confucianism, Buddhism, liberalism and Marxism. Inspired by Karl
Mannheim’s thought-style, he argued that if they are carefully analysed, the underlying
motif can be identified, as it is never fully integrated into the general melody. It is a
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