International Relations Theory Pron Special

October 17th, 2006

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Posted by ChrisG at 3:21 pm

Amongst the daily delivery of invitations to online porn silting up my inbox this morning was this. Porn for callow analytical philosophers and IR specialists, that is, otherwise known as game theory.

The inherent voluptuousness of game theory was one theme of an excellent book by Andrew Cutrefello, Discipline and Critique, where I first learned about the now (post-Zizek) entirely commonplace link between Kant and S&M.

For Cutrefello, game theory, and its preoccupation with prisoners’ dilemmas, represents a fundamental compromise with irrationality – in the sense that the obsession with framing actual situations as inescapable prisoner’s dilemmas represents a refusal to try and comprehend how the situation came about in the first place, and whether there might therefore be an operative context in which the dilemma doesn’t appear as a dilemma at all. Which could be (for example) a shared commitment to Kantian morality, religious conviction, or just an everyday willingness to cooperate.

So what is it that actually motivates the compromise by which real situations get defined as prisoners’ dilemmas? Let’s suppose a control case, a situation involving mathematicians sitting around in an office at the RAND Corporation in the 50s just setting up PDs for the sheer fun of logic-chopping – but also for the deliciousness of vicarious betrayal: a rich stew of fantasy, sublimated violence and the ceaseless transposition of mastery and slavery, complementary opposites played out around the table. From the point of view of a common-sense cynic – someone like Celine, or indeed anyone loaded with the kind of ressentiment that resents itself above all – double-crossing someone is a very attractive proposition (‘like opening a window in a prison’, Journey to the End of the Night), especially tantalising if entertained as the object of a risk-free fantasy, but with the teasing possibility in the background that somewhere this prospect might be real.

Cross into an IR context, such as a scenario involving a nuclear arms race between two nations, and the use of PDs as a tool of fantasy brings the promise of other kinds of imagined danger and license. Along with fantasised betrayal, mastery, and domination comes the standard occupational temptation of theoreticians of strategy and online wargamers alike, a hard-on for the dispassionate contemplation of imagined slaughter (pop quiz: how many IR game theorists are women?). In this light, the amoral/’realist’ implications of game theoretical solutions to strategic problems are hooked up to a major libidinal payoff. They come from pleasure obtained through a singular experience, that of possessing a license to enjoy something really obscene – the large-scale murder of strangers – which has been obtained through discipline, the painfully accumulated capacity to not get emotionally involved in the consequences of action. Go through university, get your PhD in Decision Theory, and you’ll definitely have earnt your right to luxuriate in theories of the rationality of Global Thermonuclear War.

These and other reflections resulted from following that link from my inbox, to read the opinions of one Louis Rene Beres, who is apparently a professor of political science at Purdue. As a fan of the ‘existential threat’ thesis when it comes to envisioning Israel’s position in the Middle East (or apparently even when it comes to an individual Jew’s safety if they happen to live in any other country but Israel), Beres is of course particularly attracted to prisoners’ dilemmas, as with this thesis as his basic anchor point, the whole world is going to look like a never-ending PD rollercoaster with the threat of imminent death around every corner.

A particularly interesting feature of Beres’ analysis of ‘what Israel should do next’ is his relationship, as a fan of IR applications of game theory, with irrationality. The world, we learn early on in his contribution, is sliding ever deeper into anarchy: a situation of near total license (cue inevitable quotation from Yeats). In such a situation we are of course called on to make hard choices/enjoy imagining we have permission from Nobodaddy to use whatever normally impermissible means we consider necessary (delete as appropriate). Let’s make friends with violence. In such a world, there are no trustworthy alliances – Israel must look out for itself (otherwise the UN will of course interfere decisively to foil the Israeli State’s ‘regional strategy’ yet again – dastards!).

Yet, Israeli planners must not forget that the world hardly ever pities those who suffer; all the more those who suffer greatly. Often, suffering creates scorn. So it is today with Jewish suffering, the Holocaust and the State of Israel.

Poor little Samson, indeed.

In this situation, the major intractable factor is the irrationality of Islam/the Arabs (Beres’ axis of loopiness naturally includes Iran so it must be the former, I suppose). As a popular commentator at sites such as Frontpage, Beres obviously feels encouraged to stress this quite a lot. And also to take the cold-eyed realist line that, in order to understand your enemy, you must understand his madness (like one of Wilbur Smith’s super-fascist heroes who have always delved into the ‘darkness’ and become expert Faustian interpreters of the terrorist or Communist mind) – as opposed to his reasons. So, only Israelis react from rational motives (and conversely, rational motives are Israeli motives), whereas the Arab world is permanently disfigured by millennia of hatred that have produced a unique irrationality, where Clausewitz is augmented by de Sade, and policy decisions are taken on the basis of an underworld delight in violence.

There exists, among Israel’s enemies, a voluptuousness of their own making; the voluptuousness of conflict against the Jewish state as such. It is in Israel’s strategic interest not to lose sight of this voluptuousness. Israel’s enemies, in good part, do not read Clausewitz. They are, in good measure, animated by more primal needs and expectations

OK, paging Herr Zizek… The invariant character of the world which Israel and individual Jews face for Beres is just this: the enemy is ubiquitous, and he wants nothing more than to kill for the sake of killing (therefore the equation of the human with the non-human: Muslims=Death). This is of course deeply familiar: tick off the recent landmarks, from Ignatieff’s famously berserk ‘apocalyptic nihilism’ thesis on – you cannot negotiate with Terror because the Terrorists are finally and irrevocably not like us. It was in this connection, by the by, that Mark Elf ably minced one of Beres’ madder articles in January last year, which dealt with the subject of ‘cultural mindsets’, suggesting that Muslims are somehow uniquely culturally predisposed to suicide bombing.

Once this worldview is accepted, then we do indeed have a prisoners’ dilemma, and in the real world. Of course, if we were to ask why we got to this point in the first place, then we’d have to wonder why we’ve decided that Muslims possess this inherent property, and why (libidinally speaking) it has to be put to work in just this way, mobilising the chilly resoluteness of game theory together with the urgent tumescence suggested by the images of conflagration and escalation that Beres dwells on later in his essay, writing of Israel’s need to be prepared for a preemptive nuclear first strike against Iran (which, in a staggering display of casuistry, he claims is already at war with Israel and therefore absolutely fair game for such an attack).

Beres’ compromise with irrationality, which he supplements (like other subscribers to bipolar Civilisation/Terror fantasies) with a scenario in which everyone else is appeasing irrationality, is deep, and paralysing. So instead of going any further in humouring his argument, nodding in response to each fearless confrontation with the unthinkable that Beres pulls out of his Hobbesian hat, it’s hard not to feel tempted to just think of this whole piece as a standard couch confessional. But there is another dimension to his analysis that is more disturbing than those already examined.

Cathectically speaking, Beres definitely puts his standard-issue bellum omnium contra omnes IR fantasy to good use, pointing out with a Burkean flourish that the world is rich in death, and therefore also with the temptation to become obsessed with it through fear.

Persons, and therefore collectivities of persons known as states, have an incorrect attitude toward death that turns them to the terrible pleasures of violence.

What the Muslim world obviously lacks is the kind of virtue, when faced with corpses, which Israeli warriors presumably inherently possess.

What Beres solemnly advocates as a response to the fractured reality he has created is twofold. Firstly, the imperative of eternal preparedness for total war and the wholesale slaughter of ‘the enemy’, leavened with a disturbing mystagoguery that draws us closer to the ubiquitous presence of death:

Because the individual fails to understand the balance between destructive and creative forces, he/she is anxious about personal dissolution. [...] The current and ongoing disintegration of the world is creation in reverse. For Israel, the Jewish state, there are therefore special lessons to be learned from this disintegration. The geometry of chaos, in a strange and paradoxical symmetry, reveals both sense and form.

Now, a question: what particular strategy for modern living do those two, brought together, make you think of? A Godwins Law t-shirt on offer for the winner.