101. Interference: between political science and political philosophy
- Author:
- Garnet Kindervater
- Publication Date:
- 12-2010
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Journal of International Relations and Development
- Institution:
- Central and East European International Studies Association
- Abstract:
- This article begins by asserting that scientific and philosophical fidelities among scholars of international relations provoke a logic of antinomy that is counterproductive to the discipline's goals of understanding world politics. Through a critical introduction to some major concepts in the collaboration between Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the article assembles a relationship between chaos — understood as the infinite speed of appearance and disappearance — and strategies of thought that developed to cope with impermanence. By tracing from an empirically unknowable ontology to how Deleuze and Guattari produce a constellation of dynamic concepts that spring from change at speeds exceeding human comprehension, I suggest that different strategies for producing knowledge (among them philosophy and science) can produce generative relays between them. The relays between different methods force an 'interference', a dynamic friction in which the different strategies are productive of new relationships, both between themselves and with the complexities of political phenomena. The result is more than a pluralist perspective wherein scholarship is produced in a range of ways according to individuated claims and methodological approaches to truth. Instead, this article points toward the productivity of difference itself.