A Documentary Theory of States and Their Existence as Quasi-Abstract Entities
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14650045.2014.913027
ISSN1557-3028
Autores Tópico(s)Multidisciplinary Warburg-centric Studies
ResumoAbstractThis article is concerned with the existence of states as a matter of fact, and it approaches that subject within the context of the ontology of social reality as a whole. It argues, first, that states do not have a place in the traditional Platonist duality of the concrete and the abstract. Second, that states belong to a third category – the quasi-abstract – that has received philosophical attention with a recently emerging theory of documentality. Documentality, derived from Austin's theory of performative utterances, claims that documents acts can bring quasi-abstract objects, such as states into being. Third and finally, it argues that the existence of quasi-abstract states should not be rejected on the basis of the Principle of Parsimony, because geopolitical theories that recognise the existence of quasi-abstract states will have greater explanatory power than theories that deny their existence. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThe author would like to thank Colin Flint, Gerald R. Webster, Richelle Bernazzoli, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. They contributed greatly to strengthening the argument presented in this article. Of course the philosophical positions, and any errors that remain, are solely those of the author.Notes1. M. Dear, 'State', in R. Johnston, D. Gregory, G. Pratt, and M. Watts (eds.), The Dictionary of Human Geography (Malden: Blackwell Publishing 2000) p. 788.2. A. Thomasson, 'Geographic Objects and the Science of Geography', Topio 20/2 (2001) p. 149.3. J. R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press 1995).4. For examples see A. Radcliffe-Brown, 'Preface', in M. Fortes, and E. Evans-Prichard (eds.), African Political Systems (New York: Knopf 1955[orig. 1940]); R. Gilpin, 'The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism', in R. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia 1986); A. James, Sovereign Statehood: The Basis of International Society (London: Allen & Unwin 1986); P. Abrams, 'Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State', Journal of Historical Sociology 1/1 (1988); J. Painter, 'Prosaic Geographies of Stateness', Political Geography 25/7 (2006); E. Ringmar, 'On the Ontological Status of the State', European Journal of International Relations 2/4 (1996); A. Wendt, 'The State as Person in International Theory', Review of International Studies 30 (2004).5. Abrams (note 4) p. 59.6. Ringmar (note 4) p. 442. Emphasis retained from original. Henceforth, emphasis and parentheses in quotations will have been preserved from the original unless otherwise specified.7. Ringmar (note 4) p. 440.8. Dear (note 1) p. 788.9. D. Knight, 'People Together, Yet Apart: Rethinking Territory, Sovereignty, and Identities', in G. Demko and W. Wood (eds.), Reordering the World: Geopolitical Perspectives on the 21st Century (Boulder: Westview 1999) p. 255.10. J. Agnew, Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics (New York: Routledge 1998) p. 129.11. W. Gordon East and J. R. V. Prescott, Our Fragmented World (London: MacMillan 1975) p. 2.12. M. I. Glassner and C. Fahrer, Political Geography (Hoboken: Wiley 2004) p. 31.13. R. Paddison, The Fragmented State: The Political Geography of Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1983) p. 60.14. E. H. Robinson, 'The Distinction between State and Government', Geography Compass 7/8 (2013). For additional argument against states being organisations of people and instead being nonphysical legal entities, see E. Robinson, 'An Ontological Analysis of States: Organizations vs. Legal Persons', Applied Ontology 5/2 (2010) pp. 109–125.15. For details on this emergence see H. Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1994). Also see J. Agnew, 'The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory', Review of International Political Economy 1/1 (1994) for a critique of analysing the state as an ahistorical entity (for example, by projecting its existence into the politics of the ancient word) and ignoring its temporal and geographic genesis.16. James (note 4) p. 6.17. Searle (note 3) p. 1.18. Searle (note 3) p. 2.19. T. Mitchell, 'Society, Economy, and the State Effect', in The Anthropology of the State (Malden, MA: Blackwell 2006) p. 169.20. M. Ferraris, Documentality (New York: Fordham University Press 2013) pp. 33–34.21. G. Rosen, 'Abstract Objects', in E. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University 2012), available at , accessed 30 May 2013.22. Ibid.23. M. Balaguer, 'Platonism in Metaphysics', in E. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University 2009, available at , accessed 30 May 2013.24. For a theory of how nonphysical social agents can act through representation, see E. H. Robinson, 'A Theory of Social Agentivity and Its Integration into the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering', International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems 7/4 (2011) pp. 62–86.25. Abrams (note 4) p. 76.26. Mitchell (note 19) p. 184.27. Painter (note 4) p. 771.28. Abrams (note 4) p. 76.29. Gilpin (note 4) p. 318.30. Ibid.31. Wendt (note 4) p. 290.32. Ibid., p. 289.33. Ibid., p. 289.34. Painter (note 4) p. 758, emphasis added. Painter does go on to add that even though states are "social imaginaries," belief in them causes people to create real objects such as passports and border posts and engage in real activities relating to them. While the study of the interaction of citizens with governmental officials is of great importance in understanding the relationship people have with their governments and the broad competence of governmental power, it does not address the question at issue in this article.35. J. Bartelson, The Critique of the State (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2001). Bartelson also explicitly recognises the distinction between states themselves and concepts of them. The literature is replete with references to the "concept of the state" (see the works of Nettle, Mitchel, and Abrams for important examples), and at times it can even seem as though an author intends the study of the concept of the state to be synonymous with the study of the state itself. Perhaps it is because of the state's nonphysical nature that there is a tendency in the literature to regard it as a concept, idea, notion, or something similarly mental. Bartelson, however, is distinctly unambiguous on this point and is careful to specify that his work is an analysis of the concept of states and that a study of states themselves would be a very different endeavour. He writes that an investigation of the concept of state is "fully distinct from questions of the state proper and its ontological status, since the former concerns a series of logical relations within discourse while the latter concerns a series of relations between discourse and what might be outside or beneath it" (p. 5). Similarly to Ringmar, he writes that the relationship between conceptualisations of states and their relationships with objects in the world is "something to be investigated rather than assumed" (p. 6). For greater detail on the relationships between concepts, ideas, and reality, see B. Smith, 'Beyond Concepts: Ontology as Reality Representations', in A. Varzi and L. Vieu (eds.), Proceedings of FOIS 2004: International Conference on Formal Ontology and Information Systems (Amsterdam: IOS 2004).36. Bartelson (note 35) p. 6.37. Abrams (note 4) p. 76.38. Ibid., p. 80.39. Ringmar (note 4).40. M. Patterson and K. R. Monroe, 'Narrative in Political Science', Annual Review of Political Science 1 (1998) p. 318.41. Ibid.; W. N. Adger, T. A. Bengaminsen, K. Brown, and H. Svarstad, 'Advancing a Political Ecology of Global Environmental Discourses', Development and Change 32/4 (2001) pp. 681–715; M. Froese, 'Towards a Narrative Theory of Political Agency', Canadian Political Science Association (2009); M. Jones and M. McBeth, 'A Narrative Policy Framework: Clear Enough to Be Wrong?', Policy Studies Journal 38/2 (2010) pp. 329–353. Being that narratives are stories, it is at least clear that states themselves are not narratives. If they were, then states and stories would exhibit the same properties, which they do not. A state is something that can act, such as by going to war. Stories do not seem to be agentive objects. Stories cannot wage war, even though a person may tell a story about a war, or the story may cause a war to be fought. States are not narratives, but, rather, narratives can be told about states.42. Froese (note 41) p. 2, emphasis added.43. Patterson and Monroe (note 40) p. 316, emphasis added.44. Ibid., p. 315, emphasis added.45. Ibid., p. 321, emphasis added.46. P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1990).47. W. C. Dowling, Ricoeur on Time and Narrative (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2011).48. Ringmar (note 4) p. 451.49. Ibid., p. 454.50. Ibid., p. 454.51. Ibid., p. 455.52. Patterson and Monroe (note 40) p. 330.53. C. Weber, 'Performative States', Millennium – Journal of International Studies 27 (1998) pp. 77–95.54. An overview of the philosophical discovery of social objects can be found in M. Ferraris, 'Social Ontology and Documentality', in G. Sartor, P. Casanovas, M. Biasiotti, and M. Fernández-Barrera (eds.), Approaches to Legal Ontologies (New York: Springer 2011).55. B. Smith, 'Searle and De Soto: The New Ontology of the Social World', in B. Smith, D. Mark, and I. Ehrlich (eds.), The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social Reality (Chicago: Open Court 2008) p. 37.56. Ibid.57. Ibid., p. 43.58. From page 344 of an English translation of the article: B. Smith, 'Les Objets Sociaux', Philosophiques 26/2 (1999). Translation available from the author's website at , accessed 30 May 2013.59. Ibid., p. 44.60. For discussion see W. I. Miller. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1990).61. B. Smith, 'How to Do Things with Documents', Rivista di Estetica 50 (2012) p. 194.62. B. Smith, 'Document Acts', in Proceedings of the Conference on Collective Intentionality (Basel, Switzerland: 2010). For reasons of space, only an abbreviated overview of the development of documentality and document acts is provided here. For a much more detailed treatment, see B. Smith, 'John Searle: From Speech Acts to Social Reality', in B. Smith (ed.), John Searle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003) pp. 1–33.63. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1962).64. Searle (note 3). Although documentality has its roots in Austin's performative utterances, as does performativity, the two are at best only distantly related. Performativity is linked to Austin through Jacques Derrida and then Butler's interpretation of Derrida. Later, Weber would use Butler's notion of the performativity of gender to build a theory of performative states (Weber [note 38]), and in the development of imaginary geographies for the analysis of security in L. Bialasiewicz, D. Campbell, S. Elden, S. Graham, A. S. Jeffrey, and A. J. Williams 'Performing Security: The Imaginative Geographies of Current US Strategy', Political Geography 26/4 (2007) pp. 405–422. But, significantly, this article largely follows Searle's extension of Austin, rather than Derrida's (though see Ferraris, Documentality [note 20] for the relationship between Searle, Derrida, and Smith). Further, it has been argued that Butler's development of performativity is based in a misreading of Austin's work; see M. Nussbaum, 'The Professor of Parody', The New Republic 22 (1999).65. Searle (note 3) p. 34.66. R. Lesaffer, 'Peace Treaties from Lodi to Westphalia', in R. Lesaffer (ed.), Peace Treaties and International Law in European History: From the Late Middle Ages to World War One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004).67. Ferraris, Documentality (note 20). It should also be noted that a broader study of recordings is also important for understanding social reality. The ability to record stories, narratives, songs, plays, speeches, films, etc., can be very important in the production of geopolitical identities, social cohesion, nations and nationalism, and in persuading populations to behave in certain ways or believe certain things. However, this use of documentation is not the focus of this article.68. In a broad sense, any action done with or to a document is a document act. As Smith, (note 61) writes, many things can happen to documents. They can be "signed and countersigned, stored, registered, inspected, conveyed, copied, ratified, nullified, stamped, forged, hidden, lost or destroyed" (p. 182), as well as much more besides. Documentality studies all of this, but this article uses "document act" in the narrow sense of being the documentary equivalent of a performative speech act.69. Ferraris, Documentality (note 20).70. This also brings up the related point that the document act might still need to be communicated to relevant audiences. Because the document can be referenced in ways unrecorded spoken words cannot, documents may facilitate communication. But, critically, the communication of the document act is not an integral component of the inscription of the act. In some cases it is explicitly forbidden for document acts to be communicated, as when a government classifies a document "top secret."71. H. de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books 2000).72. M. Ferraris, 'Documentality or Why Nothing Social Exists beyond the Text', in C. Kanzain and E. Runggaldier (eds.), Cultures. Conflict – Analysis – Dialogue, Proceedings of the 29th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium (Kirchberg, Austria: Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society 2007); M. Ferraris, 'Science of Recording', in H. Hrachovec and A. Pichler (eds.), Philosophy of the Information Society: Proceedings of the 30th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium in Kirchberg, Austria (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag 2008); M. Ferraris, 'Social Ontology and Documentality', in G. Sartor, P. Casanovas, M. Biasiotti, and M. Fernández-Barrera (eds.), Approaches to Legal Ontologies (New York: Springer 2011); and Ferraris, Documentality (note 20).73. Smith, 'Searle and De Soto' (note 55); B. Smith, 'Document Acts', in Proceedings of the Conference on Collective Intentionality (Basel, Switzerland: 2010); B. Smith, 'The Ontology of Documents', in M. Okada (ed.), Proceedings of the Conference on Ontology and Analytical Metaphysics (Tokyo: Keio University Press 2011); and Smith, 'Beyond Concepts' (note 61).74. Smith, 'How to Do Things' (note 61) p. 195.75. Smith, 'Searle and De Soto' (note 55) p. 42.76. Smith, 'How to Do Things' (note 61) p. 191.77. The development of states also coincided with that of increasingly complex and bureaucratic governments. Ferraris, Documentality (note 20) briefly, but directly addressed the importance of documents to governments and their role in political power. He writes that government "conserves its power in the management and the distribution of documents" (p. 287), that "documentality generates political power," and that particularly illustrative examples of this are the "images of Talleyrand dictating as many as six letters as once, of Napoleon dictating until midnight, of Louis XIV dividing his time and formidable energy equally between those inscriptions in the broad sense that were parties, levèes, and other spectacles, and those inscriptions in the narrow sense of the affairs of the state" (pp. 287–288). Therefore, regardless of whether one is concerned with the study of states or with that of governments, documents play an important role in understanding them.78. A. Nussbaum, A Concise History of the Law of Nations (New York: The Macmillan Company 1947) p. 86.79. Lesaffer (note 66) p. 9.80. Ibid., p. 11.81. Ibid., p. 13.82. Glassner and Fahrer (note 12) p. 14, emphasis added.83. Lesaffer (note 66) p. 17.84. Ibid., p. 17.85. C. Flint and P. J. Taylor, Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality (London: Prentice Hall 2007) p. 125.86. Quoted in L. Collins and D. Lapierre, O Jerusalem! (New York: Simon & Schuster 1972) p. 83.87. There is an important point of difference between what is being proposed in this article and the claims about the spatial extent of social objects that Ferraris [Documentality (note 20)] makes. He writes, "Social objects, such as marriages and academic degrees, occupy a modest portion of space – roughly the extent taken up by a document" (p. 33). This is because Ferraris's counterformulation to Searle's "X counts as Y in context C" is "Social Object = Inscribed Act" and because of his claim that social objects are made of inscriptions. As Smith ('How to Do Things' [note 61]) points out, if taken literally, this does not make sense. For example, it does not make sense to say that the US Constitution (much less the United States itself) "is made of tiny oxidizing heaps of ink marks on parchment, and matters are helped only slightly if we add together all the printed and digital copies of the US Constitution and assert that the US Constitution is the mereological sum of all these multiple inscriptions" (p. 195).88. B. Smith and J. Searle, 'The Construction of Social Reality: An Exchange', American Journal of Economics and Sociology 62/1 (2003) p. 305.89. Ibid., p. 24.90. Ibid., p. 24.91. Bialasiewicz et al. (note 64), p. 408, emphasis added.92. Ibid., p. 407, parentheses and citations omitted.93. See E. Robinson, 'The Involuntary Extinction of States: An Examination of the Destruction of States though the Application of Military Force by Foreign Powers since the Second World War', Journal of Military Geography 1 (2011) pp. 17–29. It would seem likely that certain kinds of military actions help bring about the necessary contexts for the social actions that could bring about the extinction of a state.94. Robinson, 'An Ontological Analysis' (note 14) p. 113.95. A. Baker, 'Simplicity', in E. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University 2011), available at , accessed 30 May 2013.96. A. Lavoiser, 'Réflexions sur le phlogistique', Oeuvres 2 (1862 [orig. 1777]) pp. 623–624.97. Radcliffe-Brown (note 4).98. Ferraris, Documentality (note 20) p. 16.99. Ibid., p. 16.100. Smith and Searle (note 88) p. 306.101. Smith, 'John Searle' (note 62) p. 27.102. See Robinson, 'A Theory of Social Agentivity' (note 24).103. For an investigation into the perception of states as intentional entities, see A. Faizullaev, 'Individual Experiencing of States', Review of International Studies 33 (2007) pp. 531–554.104. C. Philo, 'Society' in D. Gregory, R. Johnston, G. Pratt, M. Watts, and S. Whatmore (eds.), The Dictionary of Human Geography, 5th ed. (Malden: Blackwell Publishing 2009) p. 701.105. Ibid., p. 701.106. Robinson, 'A Theory of Social Agentivity' (note 24).107. Robinson, 'An Ontological Analysis' (note 14).108. P. Cox, 'VI-Proclamation', in A. L. Rush and J. Priestland (eds.), Records of Iraq 1916–1966, Vol. 2 (Chippenham Wilts: Antony Rowe Ltd. 2001) pp. 431–332.109. 'Extract from the Minutes of the Council of Ministers' Meeting of Monday the 11th July, 1921', in A. L. Rush and J. Priestland (eds.), Records of Iraq 1916–1966, Vol. 2 (Chippenham Wilts: Antony Rowe Ltd. 2001) p. 694.110. P. Cox, 'Telegram from the High Commissioner of Mesopotamia to the Secretary of State to the Colonies (Dated 23rd August)', in A. L. Rush and J. Priestland (eds.), Records of Iraq 1916–1966, Vol. 3 (Chippenham Wilts: Antony Rowe Ltd. 2001) p. 131.111. P. Cox, 'Telegram from the High Commissioner of Mesopotamia to the Secretary of State to the Colonies (Dated 25rd August)', in A. L. Rush and J. Priestland (eds.), Records of Iraq 1916–1966, Vol. 3 (Chippenham Wilts: Antony Rowe Ltd. 2001) pp. 132–135.112. This is slightly less clear regarding Great Britain given the frequent references to "His Britannic Majesty." A broader analysis of the texts of these treaties might be required, but given the historical emergence of Great Britain from medieval polities, it may be that it is more likely to maintain historical trappings, especially in such formal situations.113. M. W. Graham, The League of Nations and the Recognition of States (Berkeley: University of California Press 1933).114. See Records of the Thirteenth Ordinary Session of the Assembly, Sixth Plenary Meeting, 3 Oct. 1932, pp. 46–47, 51–52. Without a digression into the nature of sovereignty and a discussion of the possibility of nonsovereign states, this chain of events does suggest that a sovereign state can be ontologically identical to a nonsovereign entity. This might warrant further investigation.115. Mitchell (note 19) p. 91.116. A. Rosenberg, Philosophy of Social Science (Boulder: Westview 1988) p. 4.117. Ibid., p. 4.118. J. Nettl, 'The State as a Conceptual Variable', World Politics 20/4 (1968) p. 559.
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