The House of IR: From Family Power Politics to the Poisies of Worldism1

Abstract

Poisies offers an alternative epistemology to understand, critique, engage with, and reconstruct international relations (IR). Generally, this Greek concept refers to “creativity” or “poetic inspiration.” We enlarge this definition by returning to poisies ' original, ancient meaning: that is, creativity that comes from an act of reverberation or putting “language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity” (Bachelard 1964:xxiii). In seizing upon the specific reality of world politics as a trans-subjective mode of imagining, poisies pushes us to recognize that becoming and being have countless forms, various voices, and changing scripts. Consequently, we move beyond an instrumental, formalistic, fixed, and narrow scientific logic that imposes a historical parochialism (e.g., Hobbes's State of Nature) for an ahistorical universal (e.g., “it's a war of all against all across time and space”). We begin to see IR in a new light. Its “vivacity” is manifested through IR's political and ideological participation in world politics, accounting for the field's social relations and structural interests. This explains why conventional IR appeals to some the way it does while affecting so many others so negatively. International relation's singularity also becomes apparent: that is, it is but one of many versions and understandings of world politics. Specifically, IR comes to resemble a colonial household. Its singular, oppositional perspective (“I versus You”) stakes out an establishment of “civilization” in a space that is already crowded with local traditions of thinking, doing, and being but proclaimed, in willful arrogance, as a “state of nature” plagued by fearful “anarchy” and its murderous power politics. The House seeks to stave off such “disorder” by imposing “order.” But the House does so by appropriating the knowledge, resources, and labor of racialized, sexualized Others for its own benefit and pleasure while announcing itself the sole producer—the …