ANT and IR, Offshore: Symmetry, Space and Materiality

Philip Conway

INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................................................................... 1

OFFSHORE .................................................................................................................................................................................. 3

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM .......................................................................................................................................................... 7

SPACE/TOPOLOGY .................................................................................................................................................................... 10

CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................................................................ 12

BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................................................................................... 17

Introduction

In ‘asymmetrical’ accounts of scientific knowledge, writes David Bloor, “true (or rational) beliefs are ... explained by

reference to reality, while false (or irrational) beliefs are explained by reference to the distorting influence of

society.”1 In Bloor’s ‘strong programme,’ by contrast, questions of referential correspondence are set aside so that

truth and falsehood can be explained ‘symmetrically’ by the same, social causes. Thus SSK2 is rescued from an

ignominious fate as merely “the sociology of error.”3 However, this symmetry vis-à-vis knowledge, according to

Bruno Latour, relies upon a second asymmetry between humans and things.4 For Bloor as for Kant, Latour argues,

“things-in-themselves are there to make sure that one is not an idealist” but are themselves insignificant.

Contrariwise,5 Latour proposed a programme of “generalized symmetry” that treats truth and falsehood even-

handedly and understands scientific events as heterogeneous, hybrid complexes of human subjects and non-human

objects.6

It is important to note that an ‘asymmetry’ is more than simply a ‘binary opposition.’ An asymmetry, more

specifically, is an opposition that demarcates discrete ontological realms, which are correspondingly accorded

specific epistemic practices with their own conceptual vocabularies. This division is typically exclusionary. For

example, if only scientific falsehood is social then sociology is disqualified from exploring scientific truth, which is the

exclusive domain of scientists and their methods. And if only the nakedly human is social then sociologists are

equally disbarred from investigating non-human material things, which, once again, are uniquely reserved for

(natural) scientists7 and their methods.8

(D. Bloor, 1999: 84) 2

The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) 3

(David Bloor, 1976: 17) 4

(B. Latour, 1999); (Bruno Latour, 1993) 5

“Things make more difference than being summoned to bear witness that a philosopher (or a sociologist) has been unfairly charged with idealism.” (Latour, 1999: 119) 6

Thus avoiding the vae victis attitude of Whiggish epistemologists. Latour particularly points to the French epistemological tradition of Bachelard and Canguilhem in this regard, Bloor pointed to the same tendencies in the Anglophone world of ‘externalist’ sociology of science. 7

Or, if sociologists do stray into this territory, they must adopt the language, concepts and other trappings of the natural scientist, however naive and half-formed their understandings of that science may be. The sociologist is, of course, permitted to investigate the ‘social aspects’ of material practices so long as they don’t look too hard at the material parts of said practices.

It is also important to note that ‘symmetrical’ does not mean ‘identical.’9 Bloor doesn’t claim that truth and

falsehood are one and the same thing, only that “methodological relativism”10 must make such “first-order

judgements” the “objects of enquiry”.11 Likewise, Latour doesn’t claim that there are no differences between

humans and non-human things, only that humans and non-humans share the same, plural ontological realm.

‘Symmetry,’ in the Bloor-Latour sense, simply means that different things can and should be accorded “a common

vocabulary and a common ontology”12 so that their commonalities and their differences can be explored without

structural asymmetries prematurely foreclosing the possibilities of analysis.13

IR, no less than SSK, is structured by asymmetries. Whether states are imagined as blunt-edged billiard balls

or self-creating superorganisms,14 the very cognisability of international relations is thought to depend upon the

complete separation between sovereignty and anarchy, community and competition, inside and outside – with

epistemic labour divided accordingly. This core asymmetry is supplemented by others.15 For example, what

generally passes for ‘materialism’ in IR16 is, more accurately, a dualism where materiality is sharply distinguished

from ideality.17 The former – asocial, natural, necessary – is accorded stern, disinterested strategic analysis; the

latter – social, linguistic, contingent – is either clumsily addended to the material base or severally parsed in the

ontological cleanroom of socio-linguistic methodology.

The very existence of this panel demonstrates the growing conviction that IR is not only structured but also

constricted by its asymmetries and, furthermore, that ANT (and STS more generally) may provide the resources for

its rearticulation18 as a discourse that can treat inside/outside and social/material symmetrically, with “a common

vocabulary and a common ontology”.19 This paper explores this possibility by looking at the case of ‘offshore,’ how it

has been understood asymmetrically and how it could be understood symmetrically. As well as enjoying

considerable contemporary political import, ‘offshore’ financial markets and accounting practices provide

outstanding examples of how IR’s existing asymmetrical epistemic practices fail to adequately grasp phenomena that

are deeply pertinent to it. The following:

a) introduces ‘offshore’ financial markets and accounting practices, primarily utilising the work of Ronen Palan,

b) finds that their contradictions are poorly understood via conventional spatial topologies and social ontologies

and are

Asymmetries, therefore, are not barriers to be ‘overcome,’ chasms to be ‘bridged’ or conflicts to be ‘mediated’ – the way out of an asymmetry is to devise a conceptual scheme that can articulate all the objects of the asymmetrical schemes consistently and simultaneously. 9

It is not, therefore, an objection to binary oppositions as such, nor does it erase any differences – in fact, it emphasises differences. 10

(Bloor, 1976: 158), emphasis added 11

Such a position is ‘relativist’ because there are no absolute proofs to be had that one scientific theory is superior to another: there are only locally credible reasons.” And credibility is, in practice, highly variable. (Bloor, 1999: 102), emphasis added 12

Pickering, Science as practice and culture, 359 13

As John Law puts it, “it is not ... that there are no divisions. It is rather that such divisions or distinctions are understood as effects or outcomes. They are not given in the order of things.” (John Law, 2003) 14

E.g. (A. Wendt, 1999); (A. Wendt, 2004) 15

And, after thirty-odd years of ‘critical theory,’ it is surely only one example. 16

A discipline in which both Waltz and Wendt can be called ‘materialist.’ 17

E.g. Wendt’s ‘materialism’ or ‘idealism’ (he can’t make up his mind which it is). And this difference is a chasm since: “in the end there can only be two possibilities, materialist and idealist, because there are only two kinds of stuff in the world, material and ideational.” (Wendt, 1999: 137) 18

This is to hope that ANT’s insight that the social is made up of humans and non-human things – that things are not excluded from or to be added to the social – can be brought to bear on a discipline that has rarely met an ontological bifurcation that it didn’t like. 19

(Andrew Pickering, 1992: 359)

c) better understood through the ‘network space’ topology and symmetrical, materialist20 ontology of ANT. It

then

d) discusses the benefits and limitations of ANT in relation to ‘offshore’ and IR in general.

Offshore

The word ‘offshore’ is obviously connotatively spatial. ‘Shore’ suggests boundary, particularly that between land and

sea. The ‘off’ of ‘off-shore’ implies ‘elsewhere,’ ‘out to sea’ in the manner of oil rigs, wind-farms, lighthouses or

pirate radio stations. The association with the sea is important. The seas, beyond the three nautical miles

considered territorial waters,21 have historically been considered commons, with no formal sovereignty or granted to

any one power.22 ‘Territory,’ deriving from the Latin terra meaning land, is ‘onshore’ – the realm (in the modern

imagination at least) of secure, distinct borders and mutually exclusive political authority; the sea is extraterritorial,

‘offshore’ – the realm of wild, unruly, natural elements and complex, non-specific political authority.23 Of course,

not all (or even most) of the phenomena referred to as ‘offshore’ are in the least bit thalassic – little old landlocked

Liechtenstein is no less ‘offshore’ than are the Cayman Islands. This should not, however, be taken to indicate a

simple difference between ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’ uses of the term. The acutely frictive contradictions inhering

in the word, as we shall see, go to the heart of the matter.

For Palan, offshore is the semi-accidental consequence of “the continuing process of state formation in a

period of intensified capital mobility”;24 of a “basic incompatibility in the economic sphere, between the traditional

prerogatives of sovereigns and the smooth functioning of the liberal economic system.”25 However, the liberal,

market-centred capitalist economy is not simply hostile towards the centralising, taxing, regulating sovereign state –

it depends upon it: “Markets, as Sol Picciotto contends, cannot exist without state regulation, ‘since the state is

essential to the creation and guaranteeing of the property rights that are traded’”;26 “even the most unregulated

market is in fact an aspect of state regulation: it survives only as long as there are states and state regulation to

sustain it ... the two go hand in hand.”27 The tension arises from the fact that “while markets need the state, the

state taxes and regulates the markets.”28 As it developed, the increasingly centralised, socially integrated, legally

omnipresent state began to jar with co-emergently29 internationalising capital; this “forced a series of pragmatic

solutions”.30 We have come to know these solutions as ‘offshore’ – specific, juridical enclaves, “geopolitical

anomalies”,31 in which states partially abdicate their sovereignty in order to permit certain actors to enjoy the state’s

In what respect ANT is ‘materialist’ is an open question. John Law calls ANT “material semiotics” and “relational materialism” e.g. (J. Law and A. Mol, 1995); Bruno Latour rejects materialism as such since it is too ontologically restrictive e.g. (Bruno Latour, 2010). In any case, many have found ANT to be a valuable source of ‘new materialist’ insights due to its non-reductionist emphasis on non-human things. 21

Infamously defined by the range of a cannon ball by Cornelius van Bynkershoek. 22

Although hegemonic protection has been common. 23

The Law of the Sea itself was of the utmost importance as it established “the principle of discontinuity between legal and physical boundaries.” (R. Palan, 1998: 636) 24

(R. Palan, 2002: 153) 25

Stephen Neff quoted in (Ronen Palan, 2003: 77) 26

(Palan, 1998: 637) 27

(Ronen Palan, 2012) 28

(Palan, 1998: 637) 29

Of course this is not to suggest that there was ever a time where the interests of state and capital were ever directly opposed – only that their historical dynamics both reinforced and contradicted each other. 30

(Palan, 2002: 153) 31

(F. McConnell, 2010)

protection while avoiding its regulation; juridical spaces “in which economic transactions can be carried out with

relatively little state interference” but which are at the same time “protected space.”32

Thus emerge such practices and institutions as Export Processing Zones, International Banking Facilities,

offshore financial centres, offshore markets, tax havens and flags of convenience.33 While tax havens and offshore

markets have perhaps received the most attention of late, offshore nevertheless “consists of all sorts of ‘sovereign’

spaces essentially defined by their relative lack of regulation and taxation compared to nation-states”.34 Palan

therefore defines offshore as “a voluntary reduction of state sovereignty” enacted “so that certain areas or sectors

are treated as if a state has only limited sovereignty over them.”35 Palan calls this “having your cake and eating it:

maintaining the state system as organizer and mediator of conflict and tension, yet removing the threat of regulation

and taxation attendant with the state.”36

Importantly, this is done “by the state system itself.”37 Contrary to many globalisation narratives, offshore

emphatically does not indicate the decline of the sovereign state (or the state system), quite the opposite: “offshore

is fundamentally and paradoxically an expression of the continued salience of the ‘sovereign’ state.”38 Offshore is

“immanent to the ‘sovereign’ state form itself”;39 it “in fact operates within the realm of sovereignty”40; it “is

sustained by the very principles of sovereignty that it is claimed to have undermined: export processing zones are

territorial enclaves produced by the state; tax havens are taking advantage of the right to write the law and grant

legal title; the Euromarket is a direct result of the decision of the UK government not to apply its sovereignty over

certain types of financial operations that take place in its territory.”41 Because powerful, constitutionally disruptive

economic elements are “bracketed out of the state, the state can carry on discharging its traditional roles as if

nothing had happened”.42 Offshore is an answer to the problems of capitalists and statists alike; it is “an ingenious

device reconciling two incompatible trends”43 – allowing the persistence and, indeed, the flourishing of both

institutions despite their apparent incompatibility. Offshore demonstrates a profound evolutionary mutation in the

form of the sovereign state but in no way does it indicate its obsolescence – quite the contrary, since offshore (and,

therefore, what is poorly named ‘globalisation’) unequivocally depends on this mutated form of sovereignty, backed

up by the mutant sovereign state. Through offshore “the modern state system not only accommodates globalization

but also produces in subtle ways the infrastructure of globalization”; “the state system itself [provides] the material

and legal infrastructure of offshore”.44 “Thus, a virtual world of a state system can exist beside the ‘real’ state

system, feeding on its juridical and political infrastructure.”45

(Palan, 1998: 640) 33

Ibid. 34

(Ronen Palan and Angus Cameron, 2003: 91) 35

These spatial-legal compromises oil the wheels of “a system characterized by increasing economic integration within the context of political fragmentation.” (Palan, 2002: 154) 36

(Palan, 1998: 627) 37

Ibid. 38

(Palan and Cameron, 2003: 108) 39

Ibid., 105. 40

(Palan, 1998: 635) Emphasis added 41

(Palan and Cameron, 2003: 102) 42

In a sense, this spatial-legal purification mechanism allows the intense hybridity of state and non-state powers to bloom while remaining largely unremarkable. C.f. Latour’s take on modernist culture/nature bifurcations as purification/hybridisation. 43

(Palan, 1998: 627) 44

Ibid., 634. 45

(Palan, 2002: 172) Emphasis added

This is the abstractly dialectical explanation of the emergence of offshore. In Palan’s work it is richly

historically explicated – far more so than is possible here. Due to obvious limitations I will focus on one aspect of

offshore: the emergence of the so-called ‘Euromarkets’ in post-war London.

Offshore financial markets are “markets in which financial operators are permitted to raise funds from non-residents

and invest or lend the money to non-residents free from most regulations and taxes.”46 The first of these markets

was the so-called Euromarket.47 It is typical of offshore in that it seems to have emerged more or less accidentally.48

“[T]he circumstances that gave rise to the Euromarket are so specific that it appears more like a series of accidents,

an unforeseen result of decisions taken in response to very local issues, rather than an intentional strategy”.49 Like

offshore generally it “was neither ‘planned’ nor envisaged.”50 The story of its rise is wrapped up in the story of the

fall of the formal, geopolitical British Empire after 1945 and its replacement with a more murky, enshadowed empire

based on finance. As the journalist Nicholas Shaxson puts it, the British Empire “faked its own death.”51 Daniel Finn

refers to “the financial networks that converge on London as a recharged version of the British Empire, held together

by modems rather than gunboats and overseen by the mother of all anachronisms, the British political system.”52

Palan calls these networks the “second British empire”.53

The market stumbled into existence in the autumn of 1957 but its roots formed in the early 1950s “as an

inter-national, rather than a fully offshore market” was established to trade in the US dollars that were needed to

provide the much needed liquidity demanded by post-war reconstruction and Europe’s consequent dependence on

US exports and finance.54 However, at this time currency trading in Britain was, of course, dominated by the sterling.

After WWII Britain had re-established “the sterling area, which ensured that trade between certain countries was

conducted in sterling. It was initially established in 1932, but was broken up at U.S. insistence. However it was then

re-established in 1946. As a result, until the early 1960s about 40% of all international trade was denominated in

sterling.”55

During the 1957 Suez Crisis, that most infamous of landmarks in British imperial decline, there was a run on

the sterling. “Rumours at the time suggested that the currency crisis was partly engineered by U.S., which was

unhappy about the British and French invasion of Egypt to reverse Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal.”56 In

response the British Treasury raised interest rates and suspended lending to non-British borrowers, hoping to

strengthen the pound. “The moratorium cut many commercial banks, which specialised in lending to ex-colonies or

the ‘informal empire’, off from their business. It appears that they reached an agreement with the Bank of England

... that they could continue lending as long as they interacted in dollars (or any other non-sterling currency) and

(R. Palan, 1998: 65) 47

‘So-called’ because it doesn’t have anything to do with the Euro currency. 48

Quite simply, “there is no evidence of coordinated activity by either capital or states, but dispersed development that gradually led to offshore.” It was a felix culpa, for capitalists at least. (Palan, 1998: 637) 49

(Palan, 2012) 50

(Palan, 1998: 640) 51

(Nicholas Shaxson, 2011) 52

(Daniel Finn, 2009) 53

(Palan, 2012) 54

(Palan and Cameron, 2003: 92) 55

(Palan, 2012) 56

Ibid.

intermediated between non-British clients. Such transactions—in foreign currency, between non-British clients—

would not affect the British balance of payments.”57 “Although still ostensibly British-based, these dollar

transactions were considered to be taking place outside of the exchange rate system, reserve requirements or any

other regulations of the British state, and therefore outside all state regulation.”58 “This was the origin of

‘offshore’”59 in the global, financial sense we understand it today. Almost unwittingly bankers and bureaucrats had

consorted to create “a whole market with no regulations, a market that was truly global because it existed nowhere.

It had no boundaries. ... It simply created a new space.”60

This was a profoundly revolutionary moment, although no one could know that at the time – how could they, given

how minute and humdrum an innovation this was, materially? Ultimately the Euromarket was little more than an

accounting practice, a mere “bookkeeping device”61 that kept “foreign-to-foreign accounts ... separate from books

for domestic financial and capital transactions.”62 Under this arrangement, as Shaxson puts it: “A British bank, say,

would keep two sets of books – one for its onshore operations, where at least one party to the transaction was

British, and one for its offshore operations, where neither was British.”63 Numbers scrawled in one ledger were

onshore, identical numbers entered in another ledger directly next to it were offshore – the difference between the

sovereign territory of Great Britain and some mysterious, nebulous ‘elsewhere’ was nothing more than the thickness

of a piece of paper. Such is the phantasmagoria of offshore.

In this case the ‘elsewhere’ is really ‘nowhere’; in other cases, such as tax havens, ‘elsewhere’ is a definite

somewhere, albeit a somewhere shrouded in secrecy – for example, where a bank account is known to be in the

Cayman Islands but that jurisdiction’s secrecy laws prevent law enforcement agencies from finding out any

information about it and so-called ‘flee clauses’ cause the contents of the account to be shifted to another

jurisdiction instantly upon any agency enquiring into them. In any case, the material components of offshore are as

mundane and boring as pieces of paper, brass plaques and filing cabinets. ANT may not have much to say about the

grand historical contradictions of state and capital but now, hunkered down with some musty, dusty, prod-able

‘medium-sized dry goods’ we are finally approaching the shores of its territory!

In sum, offshore is an essential contradiction in a whole series of ways. It emerges out of a contradiction between

the tendencies of nation states towards territorialisation and capitalist enterprises towards deterritorialisation. It’s a

misnomer insofar as it refers to things and places that are not off the shore of anywhere. However, it is also spatially

contradictory in the sense that it refers to things that simultaneously happen in one place but also. Or, rather, it is

spatially contradictory in the sense in which we usually understand space – as a container, a surface or a sphere

where proximity is defined by linear distance; a distinct, three-dimensional portion of space mutually exclusive from

other spaces. Things seem to happen ‘physically’ in one place but ‘legally’ or ‘in principle’ they happen somewhere

Ibid. 58

(Palan and Cameron, 2003: 93) 59

(Palan, 2012) 60

Ibid. Emphasis added 61

(Palan, 2003: 29) 62

(Palan, 1998: 632) 63

(Shaxson, 2011)

else – spatially, this is the peculiar essence of offshore. How this last contradiction is rationalised is what concerns

the rest of this paper.

Social Constructivism

The predominant response to this problem is a dualist one that says: On the one hand we have a real, natural kind of

space in which material, physical bodies come together to perform certain acts, such as filling out a ledger with a pen

at a desk in a building in London. On the other hand we have a social, legal, imaginary kind of space where things

can flit and flicker in and out of existence, slipping between place and non-place, onshore and offshore, here and

elsewhere as if by magic – a space in which things are constructed and, therefore, anything can happen. The former

space, since it is non-human, is universal and asocial; the neutral, objective context within which things happen. The

latter space, since it is human, is artificial, social, particular and local. Through this ontological rationalisation the

event of filling out the ledger thus becomes located elsewhere only ‘in a manner of speaking.’ The space of offshore

becomes a social construct.

Despite criticising objectified notions of space, decrying “spatial essentialism”,64 Palan takes much the same

dualist tack. He argues that the offshore ‘spaces of flow’ that supposedly constitute globalisation are “materially

located in the state”;65 “contrary to the image the name offshore tends to conjure up, it exists almost wholly within

the physical and juridical boundaries of states”;66 “offshore is itself physically located within national territories”;67

“Offshore is not physically separated from on-shore ... The offshore finance market(s) therefore may be thought of

as ‘fictional’ or purely ‘juridical spaces’”;68 “the Euromarket has a material existence in various types of financial

centres. It maintains, however, its ‘offshore’ status due to a variety of provisions and legal arrangements that

different states have put in place to distinguish it from ‘onshore’ spaces of regulation. In that sense, the Euromarket

is only fictionally ‘offshore’, for it lives its life in the familiar financial centres of the world.”69

Palan is very clear that social spaces, such as the imagined, narrated spaces of globalisation (or, indeed,

onshore ‘imagined communities’), are ‘socially constructed.’ Palan (with co-author Angus Cameron) promotes “the

idea that space itself is not the natural, given substance we assume but that it is ‘produced’”.70 He dismisses the

spatial assumptions of “conventional mainstream geography,” which takes space to be “the passive backdrop against

which the events of history are played out.”71 However, for Palan, the idea of space as social construction means

“that social space has a form distinct from physical space”.72 Despite elsewhere disclaiming “the false dichotomy

between materialism and idealism”,73 Palan’s socially constructed space involves a kind of sociality that is definitely

separated from the physical or material. From an ANT perspective this is ontologically impermissible.

(Palan and Cameron, 2003: 55) 65

Ibid., 94. 66

(A. Cameron and R. Palan, 1999: 175) 67

(Palan and Cameron, 2003: 106) 68

(Palan, 1998: 632) 69

(Palan and Cameron, 2003: 93) 70

Ibid., 59. 71

Ibid. 72

Ibid. 73

(R. Palan, 2000: 577)

(It should be added that, of course, I am not disputing the above statements concerning the spatial

coincidence of onshore and offshore as such. Palan's basic point is perceptive and, given a certain spatial topology

and social ontology, these statements are unproblematic. It is the verity of that topology and that ontology that I

want to question.)

Palan’s dualist answer to the spatial contradictions of offshore events relies upon a social constructivist philosophy

which he sets out quite thoroughly in his book The Imagined Economies of Globalization (with Angus Cameron).

Their narrative-analytical approach to globalisation decries “[c]onventional social scientific praxis”, which “generally

treats the relationships between ‘words and things’ as a diversion; a noise, that can either safely be ignored, or

alternatively, should be overcome”.74 In such praxis “the task of the political scientists ... is to ‘see through’ these

ideologies and identify the real issues, material interests or thirst for power masked by ideology.”75 For Palan and

Cameron, inversely, “systems of representation, discourse and meaning” do not “obfuscate the ‘real’ data”76 – they

are the data.

Around this social scientific agenda is constructed a semiological theoretical apparatus that carefully

distinguishes between meaningful sociality and bare materiality, while being sure to keep the two attached. They

approvingly quote Daniel Bougnoux who writes: “Man ... inhabits a world not made of things, but which is a ‘forest

of symbols’ in which representations (not only verbal representations) constitute the familiar order ... this empire of

signs enfolds our natural world like a semisphere”.77 From this they argue that humans inhabit “in practical terms,

not a world of ‘things’ – if by this we mean some purely objective world prior to the symbolic assignment of the

object – nor a world of ‘ideas’ – a purely subjective world prior to objects. Rather, we inhabit ... the ‘semisphere’:

our feet may be firmly stuck on the ground, but our bodies move through a plasma of symbolic exchanges.”78

They are fastidiously eager not to fall into the ‘trap’ of idealism by elevating “words above ‘things’”79 or

giving “the impression that everything can be reduced to a mere discourse”.80 Gravity, for instance, is granted to be

more than a mere social construct: Since we all occupy particular “epistemological planes”, they argue, we should

“be reflexive about the limitations on us that they imply.” However, being reflexive about knowledge doesn't

detract from the objectivity of what is known. “Being reflexive about the existence of gravity does not mean that we

can abandon it. Unlike gravity, however, the epistemological plane is not an external reality, but an internal, social

one.”81 Gravity and epistemology are common in that we should be reflexive about our knowledge of them and that

reflexivity doesn’t preclude objectivity, however they are utterly different in their realm, one being ‘out there’ and

the other being ‘in here’; they are both ‘realities’ but of utterly different sorts. Thus they avoid “descending into the

intellectualist obscurantism of seeing everything as ‘text’ – the absolute relativism of crude postmodernism.”82 They

earnestly insist that the ‘semisphere’ is bound up with the material world in some unspecified way, that the material

(Palan and Cameron, 2003: 30) 75

Ibid., 31. 76

Ibid. 77

Ibid., 44. 78

Ibid. 79

Ibid., 8. 80

Ibid. 81

Ibid., 68. 82

Ibid., 43.

is “enfolded” with the ideal (and vice versa), yet the “plasma of symbolic exchanges” nevertheless ends up appearing

to be a quite distinct and separate substance from the gravelly earth on which we trudge. This 'plasma' seems to be

like the oil in a lava lamp, mixed up with the water yet utterly separate from it. Their ontology allows them to avoid

treating “state and globalization as ‘natural’ physical forces or entities” and instead take them to be “social forces

that require dynamic processes of institutional replication and culturalization”.83 However, this virtue comes at the

cost of the bifurcation of sociality and materiality.84

Just as with Latour's criticism of Bloor, things are there but they do nothing; they have no consequential

being, only “being-there-just-to-prove-that-one-is-not-an-idealist”.85 For Palan and Cameron, things may be real and

material but only their meanings are social. They may succeed in avoiding the “accusation of relativism” which is

invited if “one takes the notion of social constructivism to an extreme”86 but only at the cost of a severely

asymmetrical dualism, which keeps all the trappings of idealism and adds a real, material context 'out there'

(somewhere), to be rallied to one’s aid if some scientistic ruffian bellows ‘idealist!’ but to be ignored otherwise.

While social constructivism, like offshore, defies all but the most utterly superficial summary in a paper such as this it

may help point to how dualism works out in an account other than Palan. My claim (though I cannot

comprehensively support it herein) is that this tendency is widespread to the point of generality in IR scholarship.

However, again, I will keep my focus narrow.

“Social constructivism” John Ruggie argues, “rests on an irreducibly intersubjective dimension of human

action.”87 The capacity of human beings (quoting Weber) “to take a deliberate attitude towards the world and to

lend it significance” accords human beings “a class of facts that do not exist in the physical object world: social

facts”, which “include money, property rights, sovereignty, marriage, football, and Valentine’s Day, in contrast to

such brute observational facts as rivers, mountains, population size, bombs, bullets, and gravity, which exist whether

or not there is agreement that they do.”88 Constructivists promote “the view that the building blocks of

international reality are ideational as well as material”,89 that the international is comprised of social structures “that

are in part material, in part institutional”,90 however constructivism itself only deals with “the ideational realm” and

analyses international relations that are “suffused with ideational factors”.91 Citing Durkheim, Ruggie insists that

“ideational factors are no less ‘natural’ than material reality and, therefore, are as susceptible to normal scientific

modes of inquiry” but in making that point that he simply drives home the point that they are quite different

realities. Like Palan/Cameron, he wants to affirm the specificity and irreducibility of social ideality but “without,

however, lapsing into subjectivism or idealism.”92

Ibid., 45. 84

While they add that texts are components “of the very objective world that is under study”, that textual production “is a material practice like any other material practice”, the materiality of everything has already been bracketed out so that globalisation can be analysed in narrative, discourse-analytical term. Ibid., 49. 85

(Bruno Latour, 2003) 86

(Palan and Cameron, 2003: 47) 87

(J. G. Ruggie, 1998: 852) 88

Ibid., 856. 89

Ibid., 879. 90

Ibid. 91

Ibid. 92

Ibid., 877.

And Ruggie, too, explains offshore (or what he calls “the unbundling of territoriality”) in dualist terms. The

“remarkable growth in transnational microeconomic links” since the 1960s, he writes, have been “designated by the

awkward term "offshore"—as though they existed in some ethereal space waiting to be reconceived by an economic

equivalent of relativity theory. ... Financial transactions take place in various "Euro" facilities, which may be housed

in Tokyo, New York, and European financial centers but which are considered to exist in an extranational realm.”93

Social/material dualism is thus intimately implicated in the rationalisation of the spatial contradictions of offshore. If

the international is to be rearticulated symmetrically then it must cease to bifurcate between social and material

space. Consequently, I will argue, the contradiction of offshore shows that IR must embrace the ANT spatial

topology of ‘network space.’ Space/Topology

Spatiality, writes John Law, “is not given. It is not fixed, a part of the order of things. Instead it comes in various

forms.”94 There are, therefore, multiple topologies that define space and the way that objects exist in space in

different ways with each topology being ontologically equal. The conventional spatial topology that Palan criticises95

but nevertheless takes for granted imagines that real, physical space is much like a container, consisting of surfaces

or spheres, 2 or 3 dimensions (depending on the chosen metaphor). For want of a better term I will call this

‘absolute space’ in contrast to the ‘network space’ of ANT.

Absolute space is imagined to consist of surfaces and spheres defined by punctual coordinates related in 2 or

3 dimensions. Distance is defined by the shortest possible straight line between two points. Area is a zone

containing everything ‘internal’ to it and excluding everything ‘external.’ This areal definition also constitutes its

mereology: everything ‘within’ the area is part of the area. Borders are barriers that circumscribe and delimit one

portion of space and another. Absolute space is monistic insofar as everything exists ‘within’ the same, common,

objective space. Locality is a portional region within globality. The micro is just a subsection of the macro judged

according to a fixed scale. Absolute space is universal, everywhere the same; consequently, metrological devices are

generally applicable anywhere and everywhere. Absolute space transcends what it contains, thus guaranteeing its

universal homogeneity.

This is basically what Law calls the ‘Euclidean’ (but also ‘Cartesian’) version of space that in which “[o]bjects

with three dimensions are imagined to exist precisely within a conformable three dimensional space. They may be

transported within that space without violence so long as they don't seek to occupy the same position as some other

object. And so long as their co-ordinates are sustained, they also retain their spatial integrity.”96 This topology is

“regionalist” in that it assumes that “the world takes the form of a flat surface which may then be broken up into

different kingdoms and principalities of varying sizes.”97

(J. G. Ruggie, 1993: 141) 94

(Law, 2003) 95

Palan criticises those who take space qua territory for granted but nevertheless presupposes just this himself: “for all their apparent groundedness in the physical forms of the landscape, such maps – particularly ‘political’ maps outlining the boundaries of national and sub- national state spaces – represent not ‘real’ spaces but political, economic and juridical boundaries imposed by people.” (Palan and Cameron, 2003: 63) 96

(Law, 2003) 97

Ibid.