Beyond Belief: Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in the Study of International Relations

MARK LAFFEY and JUTTA WELDES University of Minnesota and Kent State University

As presently constituted, the analysis of ideas is decient in two key respects. First, despite presenting itself as an alternative to the dominant rationalist perspective on international relations and foreign policy, the turn to ideas represents only a minor modication of that tradition, rather than a serious challenge to it. Second, the retention of the rationalist framework has had problematical implications for how ideas are conceptualized. Although explicitly dened as shared beliefs, we argue that the metaphors structuring rationalist analyses lead them to conceptualize ideas as objects. As an alternative, we offer a constructivist account of ideas as symbolic technologies that enable the production of representations. This different metaphor enables us to address directly the difculties for analysis stemming from a conception of ideas as objects. It also opens up for examination a range of empirical phenomena overlooked by rationalist analysts.

Recently, ideas have once again1 moved to the forefront of the research agenda in International Relations. The desire to account for unexplained variance in rationalist models has motivated a number of scholars to examine the effect of ideas on foreign policy,2 specically through an effort to connect ideas causally with the policies that they seem to justify and, in turn, to discover the degree of impact that ideas have on foreign policy and thus on state action (Jacobsen, 1995; Yee, 1996. On state action, see Milliken, 1995). Arguing that the explanation of political action in terms of rational actors maximizing a utility function rooted in material interests cannot adequately account for observed behaviors by state actors, these scholars have suggested that ideas have an independent causal effect on policy even
European Journal of International Relations Copyright 1997 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi Vol. 3(2): 193237. ISSN: 13540661

Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes when human beings behave rationally to achieve their ends (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 5). In short, ideas as well as interests are claimed to be important for the explanation of foreign policy. In this respect, the ideas literature comes as a welcome addition to the still growing body of work critical of the explanatory claims of Waltzian structural theory and, in particular, of its efforts to account for state action solely on the basis of the ascription to states of structurally-derived interests (e.g. Waltz, 1979). It is also a welcome effort to address the explanatory problems which ow from the indeterminacy inherent in rational choice models which display multiple potential equilibria (Keohane, 1988). Goldstein (1993: 6) explicitly frames the turn to ideas in these terms. As presently constituted, the analysis of ideas in foreign policy is nonetheless decient in two key respects. First, despite presenting itself as an alternative to the dominant rationalist (Keohane, 1988) perspective on international relations and foreign policy, this literature reprises several of the key features of the model it sets out to criticize. The turn to ideas thus represents only a minor modication of the rationalist tradition, rather than a serious challenge to it. Second, and more important, the retention of the rationalist framework has had signicant and problematical consequences for how ideas are conceptualized. These problems derive from the conception implicit in this literature of ideas as objects. This conception and its consequences for understanding what ideas are is evident in (at least) three characteristic features of rationalist analyses rst, even the most sophisticated exponents of this genre persistently and symptomatically separate ideas from interests and treat them as rival explanatory variables; second, ideas are assumed to have causal effects in the conventional, neo-positivist or Humean sense; and third, ideas have been dened, at least explicitly, as individual possessions, and usually as beliefs or shared beliefs. We discuss each of these features of rationalist analyses, and the problems they generate for analysis, in more detail below. Underpinning these characteristics and serving to make sense of them are a set of metaphors which, despite an explicit denition of ideas as beliefs, indicate that in this literature ideas are conceptualized implicitly as discrete objects, a notion expressed most clearly in the ideas as commodities metaphor. In important ways, then, as we argue below, it is the metaphors structuring their analyses that lead rationalists to conceptualize ideas in this way and undermine their usefulness for analyzing foreign policy and state action. As an alternative to this rationalist-inspired understanding, we offer a constructivist account of ideas. In particular, we argue that at least some of the phenomena referred to as ideas in this literature are more usefully conceptualized as symbolic technologies (Greenblatt, 1991: 12) that enable the production of representations. In contrast to the rationalist 194

Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in International Relations metaphor of ideas as objects, an alternative set of metaphors and analogies ideas as technologies leads to a conception of ideas as social rather than individual phenomena, implies that they should be understood as elements of constitutive practices and relations rather than as neo-positivist causal variables, and that, as such, they are inextricably involved in the production of interests. In short, deploying an alternative metaphor enables us to address directly and productively the problems we identify in the ideas literature. In addition, as we demonstrate below, it also opens up for examination a range of empirical phenomena more or less invisible in the work of ideas analysts. In order to defend these claims, the article proceeds as follows. We rst outline the form in which the return to ideas has taken place. In particular, we examine the conception of ideas which this literature employs. We then provide an extended critique of this conception, focusing on the distinction between ideas and interests, the neo-positivist causal analysis of ideas and the denition of ideas either as shared individual beliefs or as commodities. In the third section, we begin to sketch out an alternative, constructivist conceptualization of ideas in terms of symbolic technologies. In conclusion, we discuss briey the politics of model construction and choice.

Rationalism and Ideas

The basic issue in this literature is the role of ideas the empirical examination of the impact of ideas on policy through the application of the tools of social science (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 6; Odell, 1982: 13, 58, 66, passim; Sikkink, 1991: 26, 2423). The question is designed, at least in part, explicitly to challenge both reective or constructivist and rationalist perspectives on International Relations.3 The challenge to the constructivists, Goldstein and Keohane argue, is addressed to their alleged antiempiricist bias; that is, it targets constructivisms ostensible failure to generate or test hypotheses, or to conduct empirical analyses.4 The challenge to rationalism, on the other hand, stems both from the indeterminacy of rationalist models and from the empirical anomalies they generate (e.g. Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 45; Odell, 1982: 58, passim; Sikkink, 1991: 710, 1519). Rationality, in this approach, is treated as a heuristic device or preliminary hypothesis about human behavior whereby the analyst begins with the assumption that individual human action is instrumentally rational. To the extent that the explanation of political action in terms of rational actors maximizing a utility function rooted in material interests is insufcient that is, to the extent that this theory is indeterminate or produces 195

Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes empirical anomalies a more complex social theory is required (Craib, 1992: Chapter 4). In the abstract, a more complex theory might be generated in at least two ways either by identifying additional variables which account for the variance left unexplained by rationalism, or by modifying the conception of what it is to be rational upon which that perspective is based. The bulk of contemporary International Relations research adopts some variant of the former course of action, most typically by making reference to a nowextensive range of supplementary variables, including norms (e.g. Katzenstein, 1993, 1996), culture (e.g. Johnston, 1995) and ideas. This strategic choice is not surprising. Rationalism assumes a specic model of reasoning as part of the hard core of its research program (Lakatos, 1970). That model is substantive rationality, dened as behavior that can be adjudged objectively to be optimally adapted to the situation (Simon, 1985: 294; quoted in Keohane, 1988: 381).5 Because substantive rationality is assumed, the empirical examination of the mode of reasoning which the actors actually employ is effectively black-boxed.6 Rationalist approaches, at least in their typical form, are therefore precluded from positing alternative modes of reasoning.7 Goldstein notes explicitly that her ideas approach is not aimed at its [rationalisms] Lakatosian core, but rather at the inability of such analyses to explain particular political outcomes (1993: 250). Instead, it begins with this same model of rationality and introduces additional variables in order to account for deviations from expected outcomes, specically by identifying the ideas on the basis of which the actors engage in substantively rational action. This has prompted some critics to describe the ideas literature not as a challenge to the rationalist approach but rather as its completion (e.g. Wendt et al., 1992). Moreover, because rationalism typically takes the individual as its basic unit of analysis and focuses on individual rationality,8 these ideas are conceptualized in individual terms, as characteristics or possessions of individuals. Ideas, in short, function as inputs for a substantive and individualist model of rationality. As Goldstein and Keohane acknowledge, the ideas literature does not challenge the premise that people behave in self-interested and broadly rational ways (1993: 5). The rationality assumption itself, part of the hard core of the rationalist research program, is taken for granted, with the result that this literature, instead of challenging that research program, has developed largely within it. This places a number of signicant limitations on the ways in which ideas can be dened and studied, and on the forms of explanation in which they can be deployed. Goldstein and Keohanes (1993) programmatic statement concerning the analysis of ideas is consistent with this fundamental rationalist commitment. They suggest that the null hypothesis being tested in the empirical 196

Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in International Relations studies in their recent collection on ideas is that variation in policy across countries, or over time, is entirely accounted for by changes in factors other than ideas or, more specically, that the actions described can be understood on the basis of egoistic interests in the context of power realities: that variations of interests are not accounted for by variations in the character of the ideas that people have (1993: 6, 267; emphasis in the original). In other words, they propose that, even when rationality has been taken into account, ideas account for some of the left-over variation in policy over time or across countries.9 The central question in this literature, then, is Do ideas have an impact on political outcomes, and if so, under what conditions? (1993: 11). But what exactly are ideas? In much of the literature this is not clear. Odells path-breaking study of US international monetary policy provides a good example of the conceptual confusion surrounding this genres central concept. He seems to equate ideas with theory, ideologies, perceptions, and the like, and only rarely denes any of these terms. For instance, he argues that a new economic theory . . . might be explicitly cited as the source of a policy experiment. Similarly, a cognitive perspective might lead to the nding that one or another ideology . . . has been directly applied in a given case (1982: 63, emphasis added). He also claims that ideas refer to innovation in economic and political science, the spread of ideologies, the circulation of schools of thought through government by means of personnel turnover, and changes in the perceptions of specic situations and the salience of particular variables and that an ideas perspective includes the intellectual idiosyncracies of individual leaders (1982: 363, emphasis added). What exactly an idea is is obscure, but for Odell, at least, ideas seem to include anything vaguely ideational, from the intellectual idiosyncracies of individuals to theories and ideologies. And Odell is not alone in this confusion. In Sikkinks analysis of developmentalism, ideas, ideologies, beliefs, theories and models are also used more or less interchangeably. At the outset of her book, for example, she explains that
The particular type of idea that interests me here is that concerned with economic development on the periphery, what Albert Hirschman called ideologies of economic development, sets of distinctive beliefs, principles, and attitudes. I prefer to speak of ideas about development, or models of economic policy making. Sets of ideas connected by a theory or group of theories form a model of economic development. (1991: 1, emphasis added)

While Sikkink seems to be equating ideas, ideologies and numerous other idea-like entities, she also argues that ideologies can act as constraints on the adoption of ideas (1991: 23). As in Odells work, the relationships among all of these concepts remain unclear.10 197

Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes In an effort to bring order to this conceptual and theoretical confusion and to encourage further empirical research on the impact of ideas, Goldstein and Keohane have sought to dene more precisely both what ideas are and what the nature of the relationship among various idea-like entities is. To do so, they begin by dening ideas most generally as beliefs held by individuals (1993: 3), which means that ideas are equated with, and hence reducible to, mental events (Yee, 1996: 69). In addition, in contrast to much of the older analyses of belief systems, this new literature assumes that beliefs are shared.11 As Sikkink has argued, it is necessary to grapple with the inuence of ideas on the policy-making process, not only the ideas of individual policy makers, but also those . . . shared by large groups in society (1991: 19; see also Odell, 1982: 66; Goldstein, 1993: 11; Jacobsen, 1995: 287; Yee, 1996: 69). Ideas, then, refer to particular beliefs shared by large numbers of people which have implications for human action (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 7). Building on this denition, Goldstein and Keohane provide a three-tier typology of different ideas or beliefs.12 The broadest, most general type is what they call world-views or conceptions of possibility. These are shared beliefs which dene the universe of possibilities for action. Examples they offer include the worlds major religions, and conceptions of sovereignty, as well as a vaguely dened modern Western world view that encompasses individualistic and secular scientic premises (1993: 89). At the intermediate level are located principled beliefs or normative ideas. These beliefs specify criteria for distinguishing right from wrong and just from unjust. Slavery is wrong, abortion is murder and the belief that human beings have the right of free speech are the examples they provide. These principled beliefs mediate between world views and particular policy conclusions by translating fundamental doctrines into guidance for contemporary human action (1993: 9). Finally, causal beliefs or shared causal beliefs (Goldstein, 1993: 11) occupy the most concrete level of the typology. These are beliefs about causeeffect relationships which derive authority from the shared consensus of recognized elites, whether they be village elders or scientists at elite institutions.13 Examples include scientic knowledge claims that explain, for instance, how to eliminate smallpox and how to slow down the greenhouse effect in the earths atmosphere (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 10). It is this third category, the more concrete causal beliefs, which are the most important in the current ideas literature, not only in terms of doing most of the explanatory work, but also as the focus of the bulk of the empirical research carried out to date. Shared causal beliefs are assumed to be causally efcacious and therefore to play an important role in explaining foreign policy decisions or state actions. The explanatory model which these scholars employ concentrates 198

Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in International Relations on the causal analysis of the impact of ideas or shared beliefs conceptualized as independent or intervening variables (1993: 1213) on foreign policy. For instance, Ideas intervene between material power-related factors on the one hand and state interests and preferences on the other (Risse-Kappen, 1994: 186). This neo-positivist14 approach implies that the investigation of the role of beliefs should focus on the extent to which variation in beliefs, or the manner in which ideas are institutionalized in societies, affect political action under circumstances that are otherwise similar (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 26, emphasis in the original).15 The task for students of ideas is therefore, rst, to establish covariation between ideas and outcomes and, second, to identify a [causal] path leading from ideas to policy (1993: 29).

Critique: Beyond Belief

Despite the positive contribution which the ideas literature makes in highlighting both the poverty of pure rationalist models and the shared character of ideas or beliefs, it suffers from a number of signicant problems. Persistent claims to the contrary notwithstanding, this focus on beliefs does not succeed in challenging the dominant rationalist or interestbased approach to foreign policy and state action. Instead, much of the apparatus of the rationalist perspective has been reintroduced, if through the back door, in the practical retention of the distinction between ideas or beliefs and interests, in the neo-positivist causal focus of the analysis and methodology, and in the conception of ideas on which this literature rests. These closely interrelated characteristics either stem from or serve to reinforce the conception of ideas as objects which, we will argue, lies at the core of rationalist analyses. Taken together, these characteristic features of ideas analysis indicate that the turn to beliefs signals a retreat by this literature from its most useful insights and its reversion instead to an argument which is little more than a minor modication of the rationalist position it sets out to challenge. In this section, then, we argue that the conception of ideas as objects creates problems which undermine the usefulness of this literature for bringing ideas back in to the study of international relations and foreign policy. Ideas versus Interests The rst problem with this literature is that, in practice, most of these analyses treat interests as distinct from, rather than as signicantly shaped or constituted by, ideas.16 This is true even of Sikkink, who, more than other representatives of this genre, emphasizes the interconnection of interests and ideas. She claims, on the one hand, that: 199

Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes

. . . the separation of ideas and interests is fundamentally awed. Political and ideological factors [i.e. ideas] inuence the very meaning and interpretation of economic ideas and recommendations [i.e. material interests]. Except in its crudest form, the comprehension and formulation of facts and interests implies the existence of a conceptual apparatus. To conceive of ideas as intellectual justications of actions that people wanted to take anyway is to obscure the role of ideas in helping people grasp, formulate, and communicate social realities. (1991: 5; see also Jackson, 1993: 129; Katzenstein, 1993: 267; Sikkink, 1993: 140)17

On the other hand, she then immediately argues that for analytical purposes it may be useful to attempt to separate ideas and interests initially and discuss whether politics can be understood primarily on the basis of plausibly inferred interests of key actors, or whether it is necessary to know about the existence and content of ideas to understand policy outcomes (1991: 6). Treating interests and ideas as distinct and competing hypotheses is, of course, consistent with treating the rationalist model, as most of this literature does, as the null hypothesis against which the causal signicance of ideas is tested. The conceptual distinction between interests and ideas that is central to rationalism is thus retained, with two signicant and interconnected consequences. First, by maintaining this distinction, the investigation of the social construction of interests is in practice disavowed because it is assumed, despite theoretical pronouncements to the contrary, that interests are given and can be determined in isolation from ideas. In reply to the question where do interests come from, these analyses continue implicitly to answer that they are determined, at least initially, independently of, and prior to, the application of ideas, beliefs and suchlike. Even if this distinction is retained only as a matter of analytical or methodological convenience, as in Sikkinks analysis, it reinforces the notion that interests are given and can be treated as non-ideational. Serious consideration of where interests come from is thereby avoided, despite the existence of a growing body of literature addressed, for example, to the way in which structure, interest and identity are internally related, and are produced and reproduced through practical activity (e.g. Wendt, 1992; Weldes, 1996). While paying lip-service to the claim that ideas and interests are necessarily interconnected, then, this approach both in practice and as a methodological principle treats them as discrete and competing forms of explanation. Second, and related, retaining the distinction between interests and ideas creates a tendency to understand ideas merely as tools which are used by policy-makers to manipulate various audiences, such as international elites, domestic publics or bureaucracies. If decision-makers interests are dened as analytically distinct from ideas, then ideas are easily dismissed as mere 200

Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in International Relations justication, as post-hoc rationalizations of policies made on the grounds of already given material interests. The retention of this distinction reinforces rather than challenges a model of the actor as a rational, calculating decisionmaker, wielding ideas as weapons in the battle to procure given material interests. So, despite her theoretical claims about the constitutive relation between ideas and interests, Sikkink argues that ideas are means used by decision-makers for mobilizing support, that they are used by political entrepreneurs as the basis for pulling together disparate political coalitions (1991: 17, 244). This does capture an important aspect of the phenomena that ideas analysts investigate, namely, that ideas (in some senses) can be manipulated to persuade. But it does not provide a useful analytical tool for examining the ways in which interests are produced and reproduced in the course of engaging in social action because in practice it rejects the conception of interests as constituted by ideas (Weldes, 1993). Ideas as Causes The second problem with rationalist analyses of ideas concerns the neopositivist conception of causality which informs this literature. This has signicant implications for how ideas are understood. In this literature it is assumed that while the broadest type of ideas or beliefs provide conceptions of possibility, this type of idea is less important causally than the principled and causal beliefs. Goldstein and Keohane argue that analysts of shared beliefs must recognize that the delineation of the existence of particular beliefs is no substitute for the establishment of their effects on policy (1993: 11). In other words, the important questions concern not the broad conditions of possibility, which are conceptualized in such a way that they do not seem directly to affect or cause policy, but concern instead the impact of the narrower causal beliefs, which do. (The causal beliefs are thus dened as causal in two senses rst, their content is causal in that they specify causeeffect relationships and, second, their function is causal in that they can be cited in causal explanations of behavior.) Odell, for example, tacitly excludes the broader understanding of beliefs from his analysis when he argues that beliefs are not involved, that a cognitive perspective is not called for, when market conditions or other situational features are extreme (1982: 364). The implication, of course, is that market conditions are part of an external reality which can be apprehended and experienced without the mediation of ideas. Otherwise the analysis would require as well the investigation of those ideas which made it possible to understand the situational features as particular market conditions requiring a particular sort of foreign policy response. The efcacy of broader 201

Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes beliefs or world-views in explaining foreign policy and state action is thus implicitly denied. As these analysts acknowledge, the liberal world-view, for instance, sets the limits of debate about such economic policy issues as trade liberalization, agricultural subsidies or gold convertibility. But it does much more than this as well. First of all, it renders all of these other ideas intelligible; it makes meaningful arguments about exible foreign exchange markets, importsubstituting industrialization and liberalization. Second, it confers normative and moral authority on to certain policies, such as liberalization, and simultaneously makes others, such as state intervention and the adoption of subsidies, a problem or deviation to be explained. Third, it denes both the problems which these new ideas are called upon to solve and the range of acceptable responses to these problems. For example, it is within a liberal world-view that exible foreign exchange markets can become the solution to particular kinds of problems. Further, the putatively external and objective effects of market conditions are themselves only recognized as such through the lenses of a world-view they cannot be apprehended or comprehended as market conditions without the prior idea of the market and the prior belief that the international economic system is in fact organized as a market. Part of what is at issue here is the concept-dependent nature of social reality social phenomena such as markets are in part constituted by the social idea of the market (Sayer, 1992: 2943). As we will argue below, the meaningful constitution of social reality is not inconsistent with causal explanation; indeed, it is central to it. Thus, while narrower questions revolving around shared causal beliefs and particular policies are interesting and worthwhile, they are not the only legitimate and useful causal questions that can be asked about ideas. The prior questions that Goldstein and Keohane, for example, reject as having no direct causal effect on policy questions concerning the possibility conditions for particular courses of action are in fact extremely signicant. Constructing a theoretical framework which renders such questions seemingly unimportant is a reversion to the understanding of social and political reality common to the rationalist perspective these authors all claim to reject; it takes as given the same putatively objective, external conditions, constraints and interests. This literature does, however, claim that the broader world-views are consequential for the explanation of foreign policy in that they place limits on the range of narrower causal beliefs which can be adopted. That is, the broadest sets of ideas are assumed to set the conditions of possibility for the narrower. One of the central questions in this literature, therefore, is how and when are new ideas adopted? The adoption of ideas tends to be explained in terms of the t of new ideas with existing ideas and ideologies 202

Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in International Relations of important groups (Sikkink, 1991: 21)18 and such claims about t are expected to carry quite a bit of explanatory weight. Nonetheless, while various of these authors place the term t in quotation marks (e.g. Goldstein, 1993: 12, 255; Sikkink, 1991: 21, 26, 255), indicating that they are aware of the metaphorical character of their use of the term, or at least of its imprecision, none seems concerned to explain just what this means. This is particularly interesting as there exists a well-developed theoretical framework addressed to the articulation or joining together of discursive elements into a more-or-less coherent ideology (Laclau, 1979; S. Hall, 1985; Grossberg, 1992; Weldes, 1996). What this notion of articulation highlights, among other things, is that t does not just happen; rather, it is made.19 That is, the t between new and existing ideas is actively constructed rather than simply there in the ideas themselves. Neglecting the theorization of t means that this literature is incapable of specifying the degree to which existing ideas or beliefs actually place limits on the adoption of new ideas. This is a signicant shortcoming, for it means that there is no way to determine the relative impact of narrow causal beliefs and broader world-views on foreign policy outcomes, despite the claim that it is the former and not the latter which do the serious explanatory work. In order to establish that some set of ideas have in fact caused a particular policy, explanations generated by the rationalist null hypothesis are compared with the observed policy. Ideas, as we noted above, are understood as an additional variable with which to explain unaccounted for variance. The conception of causality which informs this search for additional variables has been explicated by King et al. (1994; cf. Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 28, n. 42). Causality, on this view, is a theoretical concept which refers to the difference between the systematic component of observations made when the explanatory variable takes one value and the systematic component of comparable observations when the explanatory variable takes on another value (King et al., 1994: 76, 812). So, for example, to demonstrate that ideas are causally important:
. . . the observed dependent variable (policies) and explanatory variable (ideas held by individuals) must be compared with a precisely dened counterfactual situation in which the explanatory variable takes on a different value: the relevant individuals had different ideas. (1994: 191; see also Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 28)

Causation can be inferred, in other words, only if there is an observable change in the dependent variable (policy), that change is not explicable by reference to models generated by the null hypothesis, and it can plausibly be traced to a co-variation between the policy change and the ideas of the policy-makers. 203

Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes By dening causation as a theoretical concept and linking it explicitly to observed changes in behavior, ideas scholars such as Goldstein and Keohane take sides in the debate over competing conceptions of causality (e.g. Carlsnaes, 1992, 1994; Hollis and Smith, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1994; Patomki, 1996; Wendt, 1987, 1991, 1992; Yee, 1996). The conception of a causal relations underpinning the ideas literature is clearly Humean it assumes that a causal relation may obtain only between discrete things or events which are both contingent and contiguous (Ball, 1978: 101; see also Salmon, 1989). Policy and ideas (or, more precisely, the ideas held by a specic set of individuals) are construed as individuated entities. In order to claim that a causal relation exists between such entities, it is necessary to show that the two variables have co-varied, that is, when the independent variable (ideas) takes on a new value, the dependent variable (policy) also changes. To take the most prominent competing model as a useful contrast, for scientic realists causality refers not to a theoretical concept but to a naturally necessary relation between underlying cause and observable effect. On the realist view, causality concerns not a relationship between discrete events (Cause and Effect), but the causal powers or liabilities of objects or relations, or more generally their ways-of-acting or mechanisms (Sayer, 1992: 1045; emphasis in the original. Cf. Patomki, a 1996: 11718). Causality is conceived of generatively and relationally, as something that exists in the world rather than only logically or in theory. Causal claims refer to the causal powers of social agents, which are conferred on to those agents by the social structures and relations that constitute them (Weldes, 1989). The meaningful constitution of the social, in the form of internal relations between agents and powers for instance, is for a realist integral to causal analysis. Such powers are only contingently realized and so it also follows that there is no necessary relationship between the attribution of causal powers to an object or a relation and the observation of particular empirical patterns of events. Contrasting the account of causal explanation that informs the ideas literature with the different account proposed by scientic realists serves usefully to highlight several distinctive features of the recent return to ideas. First, scientic realists are interested in how possible questions, and equate causal analysis with the search for the generative structures that produce particular effects. Ideas analysts, adopting a neo-positivist model of causality, are not interested in how possible questions save as an adjunct to why questions, dened in terms of co-variation between discrete variables (King et al., 1994: 857; 225). This occludes the analysis of how possible questions in the generative sense emphasized by realists. Second, establishing the existence of and in turn analyzing causal mechanisms is equated (erroneously) with process-tracing by King et al. (1994: 86). In 204

Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in International Relations fact, what is involved is the development of sets of concepts that operate at different levels of abstraction and ontological depth (Sayer, 1992: Chapter 3). Meaning enters into the two forms of analysis in very different ways. For ideas analysts, who adopt an essentially liberal conception of the social, meaning is ultimately reducible to a property of individuals, understood as the basic elements of social reality in part because they have bodies (Ball, 1978: 102). Realists operate with a richer social ontology which allows for the idiosyncracies of individuals but which sees those individuals as social entities. Meaning enters into the analysis as a social or intersubjective quality, constitutive of entities and relations rather than external to them. Third, the basic elements or entities presupposed by these different conceptions of causality are also different. Deploying a neo-positivist conception of causality means that ideas, for instance, must be conceptualized as discrete entities (variables). Indeed, it turns out that only some ideas are so understood, specically the causal beliefs. Scientic realists, on the other hand, are interested in establishing the relations through which objects are constituted as such. The basic elements of social reality are therefore those relations (cf. Lloyd, 1993). As a result, the broader world-views that constitute the causal beliefs are equally integral to a causal analysis. In this context, it is worth recalling, as Yee (1996) has noted, that the emerging orthodoxy within both the philosophy of science and of social science is to seek to render causal explanations in terms of the mechanisms that produced or enabled a particular event or effect. One seldom-noted but signicant consequence of this shift is to transform why questions into how questions. The sharp contrast drawn between how and why questions by Doty (1993), for example, while useful as a heuristic device for clarifying the nature of questions, is misleading. Asking how it was possible that a particular decision or course of action could happen in the rst place, and examining how meanings are produced and attached to various social subjects/objects, thus constituting particular interpretive dispositions which create certain possibilities and preclude others (Doty, 1993: 298; see also Wendt, 1987; Weldes and Saco, 1996), is integral to causal analysis rather than in competition with it. As a result of adopting a neo-positivist conception of causality, however, such constitutive questions tend to fall outside rationalist analyses or are rendered of marginal signicance for explanation. Ideas as Beliefs or Ideas as Commodities? Although in this literature ideas are often explicitly dened as beliefs, the equation is clearly strained. In fact, the term ideas appears to have at least two distinct meanings rst, as shared beliefs (i.e. as mental states or 205

Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes mental events), and second, as tools or implements. It is not clear how the second meaning can be reconciled with the rst. For example, if the term ideas is used instead of its denition (shared beliefs), it may seem commonsensical in Spanish and English language games, at least to say that ideas are tools. The implication of the term ideas is that these are somehow public (e.g. the market-place of ideas metaphor implies publicity), external to and separable from the individual, and so can be wielded as weapons. But what does it mean to say that one can wield a belief or wield a shared belief in an instrumental fashion? The implication is much less plausible for beliefs, which are more straightforwardly and commonsensibly understood to be internal to the individual. Claiming that ideas can be wielded as weapons in policy debates, in other words, makes some intuitive sense, since various forms of symbols and languages certainly can be, and often are, used in this way, but it is less clear how these can be understood as beliefs. In fact, in their discussion of the causal pathways through which beliefs can matter, Goldstein and Keohane seem implicitly to recognize that beliefs and ideas are actually quite different things. They assert at one point, for example, that ideas can have an impact even when no one genuinely believes in them as principled or causal statements (1993: 20, emphasis added).20 For this to be true, ideas and beliefs must be distinct. Moreover, despite the denition of ideas as beliefs, many of these authors continue to use both terms and to deploy the locution ideas and beliefs (e.g. Yee, 1996: 69). But this locution is redundant if they really mean to dene ideas as beliefs.21 These terminological ambiguities, we suggest, are symptomatic of the difculties in treating social phenomena in individualist terms. They stem from the failure adequately to distinguish between beliefs dened as mental states or events made possible by socially produced and dened categories and meanings (Sayer, 1992: 302) and ideas dened as elements of discourse of language-in-use. For example, while Yee explicitly discusses symbolic languages, intersubjective meanings and discursive practices, he seems to equate these with systems of beliefs (1996: 94). Precisely how this translation is effected is left obscure. In short, it seems that the denition of ideas as beliefs is quite problematical, and potentially incoherent. Perhaps, then, the underlying conception of ideas on which these analyses are based is in fact a different one. The nature of that conception, we want to argue, is evident in the persistent use of the idea as commodity metaphor.22 This rather striking metaphor, which helps to account for a number of the conceptual problems that we have outlined above, treats ideas as like commodities. New ideas are referred to as innovations (Odell, 1982: 363) which are introduced (P. Hall, 1989: 367), diffused (Goldstein, 1993: 241) and gain currency 206

Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in International Relations (P. Hall, 1989: 365). In order to be causally effective, ideas require political entrepreneurs (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 13; Goldstein, 1993: 3; Sikkink, 1993: 142)23 whose role is to select and then to market (Goldstein, 1993: 18-19), sell or peddle them (Checkel, 1993: 279, 289). The creation of ideas is not arbitrary or haphazard; instead, they are supplied in response to the demands of politicians (Ikenberry, 1993: 86). As Goldstein put it, the demand for change must be met by a supply of ideas. Once generated, ideas must be packaged in order to be sold to both elites and the mass public (Goldstein, 1993: 255). Once packaged, they circulate (Odell, 1982: 12) in society, they enter the political marketplace (Goldstein, 1989: 32, emphasis added), where they are consumed (1989: 15). Ideas although explicitly dened as shared beliefs are thus implicitly conceptualized as commodities that are supplied by political entrepreneurs on a market-place in response to demands, and then circulate through that market-place to be peddled and consumed. The metaphor of the idea as commodity is not merely a benign rhetorical ourish; it is an indication of the understanding, implicit within this literature, of what an idea is. That understanding has signicant and problematical consequences for the way in which the role of ideas in foreign policy is currently being conceptualized. Specically, it reinforces the problems discussed thus far it makes sense of the neo-positivist causal analysis of ideas; it reinforces the notion that ideas are distinct from interests and that their role, in practice, is limited to manipulation; and it obscures the constitutive function of ideas. The metaphor has these consequences because, by treating ideas as commodities, and more generally as concrete objects, it permits their methodological equation with what are typically thought of as causal variables. It thus creates, rst of all, an image of ideas as discrete objects (rather than as beliefs or mental events) which can causally inuence other objects, in this case policies. By creating an image of ideas as discrete objects, this metaphor makes sense of the otherwise peculiar claim that ideas or beliefs can be carried (Goldstein, 1993: 14; Ikenberry, 1993: 60; Sikkink, 1991: 242) and then inserted (Sikkink, 1991: 252) or injected (Jackson, 1993: 138) into politics.24 It evokes the standard billiard ball explanatory model of positivism with its discrete causes and effects, and clearly separable and identiable independent and dependent variables (Salmon, 1989). It creates an association between ideas and the discrete objects of more traditional sciences by conjuring up stereotyped images of economic explanations and, by conventional extension, of the causal explanations of the natural sciences. The metaphor ideas as commodities therefore implicitly legitimizes, and indeed makes both intelligible and 207

Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes apparently unproblematic, the application of neo-positivist methods to the causal analysis of ideas.25 Second, treating ideas as commodities and hence as discrete objects makes sense of the claim that ideas can be wielded to manipulate audiences or create coalitions. While it is difcult to understand ideas as beliefs as things to be wielded as tools, ideas as commodities are more readily understood in this way. If they are discrete objects, they can easily be seen as distinct from interests and as used, as Ikenberry put it, to provide opportunities for elites to pursue their [given] interests in more effective ways (1993: 84). This metaphor thus renders plausible the practice of offering interest-based explanations as the null hypothesis against which distinct idea-based explanations are tested. Third, the metaphor has the effect, simultaneously, of obscuring alternative understandings of ideas and thus alternative methods for investigating their role. In particular, it turns attention away from the constitutive role of ideas in generating or constructing interests, in dening the problems to which policies are the response, and in general in making possible the apprehension of the world (Weldes and Saco, 1996; Weldes, 1996). Understood as commodities, ideas are more readily seen as additional variables that account for deviations from substantive rationality rather than as being capable of generating interests. If ideas are separate, discrete variables, they do not constitute or dene; instead, in tried-and-true neopositivist fashion, they cause. In some ways, the equation in this literature of ideas with discrete objects is unsurprising. There is a considerable degree of overlap between the ideas as commodities metaphor and what Reddy (1993) has called the conduit metaphor. The plausibility of the rationalist understanding of ideas as objects is derived, we would argue, in part from the more pervasive set of understandings and analogies entailed by the conduit metaphor, which is perhaps the dominant metaphor in Anglo-American cultures for understanding communication.26 According to Lakoff, the model of communication expressed in the conduit metaphor envisions ideas as objects that you can put into words, so that language is a container for ideas, and you send ideas in words over a conduit, a channel of communication to someone else who then extracts the ideas from the words (1995: 116).27 Two features of this metaphor bear directly on our discussion of the ideas as commodities metaphor that ideas are constructed as objects; and that ideas can exist apart from people.28 Both of these are consistent with and serve to underpin the plausibility of the ideas as commodities metaphor. For example, if we accept the conduit metaphor, this not only makes sense of the claim that ideas are objects, but also renders sensible the claims that they are in peoples heads (mental events) and yet can be manipulated. The 208

Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in International Relations peculiar ambiguity of the meaning of ideas in rationalist analyses, as well as the plausibility of the ideas as commodities metaphor, appears to derive (at least in part) from an unspoken commitment to the conduit metaphor as the basis for conceptualizing what ideas are. At a fundamental level, the understanding of ideas in rationalist analyses is structured by this overlapping set of metaphors. We are not criticizing the use of metaphors per se, which is unavoidable in any case. As Lakoff and Johnson have observed, any human conceptual system is mostly metaphorical in nature (1980: 185). Rather, we are interested in the effects which the ideas as commodities metaphor in particular has had on the ideas perspective and in turn on what it tells us about how ideas have been understood. We have argued that this metaphor is both indicative of, and has served to reinforce, a number of conceptual problems. In the next section we therefore set aside this rationalist conception of ideas in favor of an alternative set of metaphors and analogies. As we will show, the redenition of ideas expressed in and entailed by such a move enables us to address all three of the criticisms we have lodged against the rationalist understanding of ideas as commodities. We return to the topic of metaphors in our conclusion.

From Ideas to Symbolic Technologies

In the remainder of this article, we propose and discuss an alternative conceptualization of ideas and associated phenomena as symbolic technologies.29 Symbolic technologies are, most simply, intersubjective systems of representations and representation-producing practices. An understanding of ideas as symbolic and representational, because it rests on a conception of ideational phenomena as fundamentally social and intersubjective rather than as collective or shared,30 alerts us to their implication in practices and to their constitutive nature. Seeing ideas as part of a broader set of linguistic and symbolic practices allows us to rethink ideas as intersubjectively constituted forms of social action. The notion of symbolic technologies, then, highlights the systems of representation metaphorically, symbolic machineries or apparatuses or implements that have developed in specic spatio-temporal and cultural circumstances and that make possible the articulation and circulation of more or less coherent sets of meanings about a particular subject matter (Fiske, 1987: 14).31 These systems of representation need not and seldom do constitute a single, perfectly integrated mimetic practice (Greenblatt, 1991: 22). Rather, the degree of integration is likely to vary from one system of representation to another. Thus, while 209

Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes the early modern European discourse of discovery, for example, was a lumbering, jerry-built, but immensely powerful mimetic machinery (Greenblatt, 1991: 23), the United Nations System of National Accounts, which we discuss below, was more deliberately constructed and internally coherent.32 Conceptualizing ideas as symbolic technologies moves us away from the problems associated with dening them as equivalent either to physical objects (whether commodities or otherwise) or to collections of individual beliefs. On the contrary, it enables us to see that they are shared forms of practice, sets of capacities with which people can construct meaning about themselves, their world and their activities.33 Symbolic technologies are capacities the existence of which can be retroduced on the basis of actual realizations. As capacities, symbolic technologies enable; they make certain kinds of action, and ways of being in the world,34 possible insofar as they are mechanisms by which meaning is produced (O Tuathail and Agnew, 1992). At the same time, because making some kinds of meaning and action possible may preclude other types of meaning and action, they also constrain. And, understood as capacities for making meaning, technologies are likely to be more apt for some purposes than for others. Understanding ideational phenomena as symbolic technologies thus allows us to ask the how possible questions occluded by the conception of ideas as neopositivist causal variables. The metaphor of symbolic technologies also highlights the implication of ideas in social relations of power. Symbolic technologies are inextricably embedded in material practices and other social relations, not least because power relations are entailed in all representational practices (S. Hall, 1985). As a result, it is not sufcient to note either that ideas can be carried and used by the powerful or that they are often adopted for their usefulness to powerful vested interests. Instead, symbolic technologies are themselves forms of power through their capacities to produce representations. In turn, depending on the circumstances of their deployment, representational practices will often have diverse and even seemingly contradictory ideological effects (Purvis and Hunt, 1993). If the idea of development (Escobar, 1995; see also Doty, 1996), for instance, is understood as a symbolic technology, the ideological effects of the representations it enables can be examined. Among these ideological effects are the creation of relations of opposition between advanced and backward societies, the debasement of the culture of the backward societies, and the legitimation of practices of aid and intervention into backward societies by the more advanced. Relations of opposition, of debasement and of legitimation are some of the ideological effects made 210

Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in International Relations possible by the symbolic technology of development.35 The essentialization of identity is also a common ideological effect of certain representational practices. Depending on the circumstances in which such representations are deployed, however, the essentializing moment in representation can contribute to processes of either liberation or domination. Consider, for example, the ambiguous effects of essentialized identity claims in struggles for indigenous self-rule (e.g. Enloe, 1990: 5464). Representations of the nation deployed in the context of the struggle against colonialism typically have served to reinforce the gendered hierarchy within the independence movement and the post-independence social formation. Further complicating any analysis of representational forms and their effects is the fact that individuals and cultures tend to have fantastically powerful assimilative mechanisms . . . that work like enzymes to change the ideological composition of foreign bodies (Greenblatt, 1991: 4). It is for this reason that the ideological content or effect of particular representations is not xed but rather depends on the circumstances of their articulation. For instance, representations of Maori in Aotearoa/New Zealand in terms of an essentialized and pre-colonial spirituality, tribalism and authenticity have been rearticulated in such a way as to have played an important positive role in contemporary and ongoing campaigns against desecration of tribal land, against development or for compensation, and for better services and funding for Maori development and education programmes . . . (Thomas, 1994: 186). As this example suggests, relations of adaptation and hybridity as well as relations of domination and subordination may potentially emerge out of the contested articulation of particular representational practices with other social relations. For these reasons, it follows that a symbolic technology and its effects are not fully determined and hence explicable by reference to the conditions of that technologys production alone, even if they are indelibly marked by it. Likewise, the ideological effects of representations are not internal to the representations themselves but are closely bound up with the contexts in which they are deployed. In elaborating on our claim that ideas can usefully be reconceived as symbolic technologies, we demonstrate how and where such a focus allows us to address directly all three of the criticisms we have brought to bear on the ideas literature. Specically, we show how our metaphor reveals the social character of ideas by moving beyond the ideas as beliefs model to a focus on practices, how this implies that ideas cannot be conceptualized as discrete objects, and how ideas on such a view are not separate from but are instead constitutive and productive of interests. We begin, however, by clarifying the relationship between a rationalist understanding of ideas and our own. 211

Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes Ideas as Capital The rationalist understanding of ideas, we have argued, is evident in the widespread use of the ideas as commodities metaphor. In order to clarify where and how our understanding of ideas differs from that of rationalists, we adopt a different metaphor of ideas as capital. The ideas as capital metaphor stands in relation to Marxs analysis of the commodity as the ideas as commodities metaphor stands to that of liberal economics.36 As Marx observed, A commodity appears at rst sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing . . . (1977 [1867]: 163). Whereas liberal analyses of the market remain at the level of appearances, understanding the circulation of commodities as a function of the freely entered into and apolitical contracting of individual consumers and producers, Marxist analyses emphasize the social relations that produce and enable apparently autonomous consumers and producers and endow them with powers and capabilities. The ideas as commodities metaphor draws attention to exchange relations, the central concern of neoclassical economics and the heart of liberal theories of capitalism. Our capital metaphor also draws attention to the realm of exchange, but points us towards the motion of capital through a social formation in various circuits, including, importantly, the circuit of production. Such a metaphor reconstructs ideas (symbolic technologies) as mimetic capital, which Greenblatt denes as the stock of images, along with the means of producing those images and circulating them . . . (1991: 6). Drawing on a Marxian37 problematic in contrast to the liberal problematic presupposed by the metaphor of ideas as commodities, we proceed to demonstrate how the capital metaphor directs attention to several signicant implications of our redenition of ideas as symbolic technologies. Thus, our aim in this section is to work through some of the implications of an alternative set of metaphors and analogies for understanding ideas, not to claim that ideas really are like capital. For purposes of comparison with rationalist approaches to ideas, we briey rehearse part of Marxs account of the social production of commodities.38 Marx began his analysis with a set of claims about the centrality of human labor in producing and reproducing social life. This process of social self-creation entailed the objectication of the products of human labor. This typically human practice of objectication was transformative not only of the social and natural circumstances of the species but of human nature itself. However, to the extent that human beings envision their products as taking on a life of their own, humans surrender their own social powers of objectication and are increasingly subjected to the violence of things (Rupert, 1995: 1718; quoting Marx). Marx referred 212

Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in International Relations to this process which was internal to capitalism as a mode of production as the fetishism of commodities (e.g. 1977 [1867]: 163). Productive labor was alienated from the worker (who was in turn alienated from her own species being) as a result of the separation between production and ownership of the commodity. The products of social labor became objectied such that human life under capitalism seemed to be governed by things rather than by people or the social relations into which they had entered. Thus for Marx, the commodity the object into which alienated human labor was displaced was a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of mens [sic] labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor (quoted in Ollman, 1976: 196). In contrast to the ideas as commodities metaphor, which implies that ideas are objects, the ideas as capital metaphor invites us to think ideas rather differently. For example, it implies that ideas are not objects at all but are in fact objectied human labor. The thing-like quality of ideas taken for granted by the rationalist metaphor is, on this view, only an appearance or a fetish, a reication of what is in fact a social product. Against the liberal metaphor of ideas as commodities, the Marxian capital metaphor challenges the tendency to reify ideas as things by inviting us to see them as processes, as relations among people39 or, more precisely, classes rather than as external objects. In contrast to the conduit metaphor, human labor is made central to our understanding of ideas with respect both to their production and to their reproduction. The capital metaphor also undermines the equation of ideas with some aggregation of individual beliefs. Like social relations of production, ideas, it might be said, cannot exist apart from human labor, nor can they be reduced to sets of individual attributes. They are social, not collective, phenomena. The capital metaphor raises a set of questions overlooked by the rationalist literature. Specically, how is it that a set of social relations and processes come to be understood as reied objects ideas in the rst place? How are those objects, and the categorizations upon which their appearance as discrete things depends, produced and reproduced? Indeed, what precisely are these social products? What is being produced? Voloinov (1986 [1929]) s argued that the word or, more generally, the sign itself was the elementary form of those phenomena reied as ideas. In a manner similar to the seemingly simple reality of the commodity, the sign was the specic material reality that had to be interrogated by a Marxian philosophy of language, the science of which meaning was the object (Voloinov, 1986 [1929]: xiv; cf. s Marx, 1977 [1867]: 138). An understanding of commodities as nothing but discrete sensuous objects, however, was for a materialist like Marx or Voloinov a form of vulgar empiricism. What had to be grasped was the s social character of the commodity, which was expressed in its use- and 213

Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes exchange-values. These were not things either but rather derived from social relations, from human species being and the capitalist organization of production, respectively. The capital metaphor, then, might be taken to imply that we should examine the signs accent, what Voloinov referred to s as the refraction of social existence in the sign itself (1986 [1929]: 223). If the commodity depends for its existence upon that set of relations through which it is constituted rather than bearing either its value or meaning as intrinsic qualities, the capital metaphor implies that we think of ideas in the same way. The metaphor here points us towards a set of questions about the ways in which particular signs are articulated one with another, and in turn how they are articulated with hierarchically organized sets of social relations (S. Hall, 1988). For example, Voloinov (1986 [1929]: 23) attributed s the multiaccentuality of the sign to the class struggle in language. It is in the context of such articulations that we might begin to talk about the ideological content or effects the value, as it were of particular sets of signs. The capital metaphor serves usefully to illustrate how pursuing an alternative to the ideas as commodities metaphor by resituating the liberal understanding of commodities within a Marxian problematic opens up new ways of thinking about what ideas are or might be. It illustrates how powerful can be the effects of alternative metaphors on received forms of theory. Redening ideas as symbolic technologies, we believe, also enables us to address directly the three central criticisms that we have advanced against the ideas literature. We have already suggested, in drawing out the capital metaphor, some of the ways in which ideas dened as symbolic technologies are not discrete objects. In the next section, we develop an analytic stance alternative to that of the ideas as beliefs approach, one appropriate to our focus on representational practices. The discussion is framed around a set of methodological questions. Locating Ideas A key problem is that students of the role of ideas must interpret what is in peoples heads . . . (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 27). How then does an ideas analyst know that a specic idea is present in a particular set of heads? A variety of different kinds of evidence could be adduced. Documents and reports can be read, policy-makers interviewed, speeches and personal letters examined, and so forth.40 In all of these cases, beliefs are inferred from a set of observable and [occasionally] quantiable behaviors (Weldes and Saco, 1996: 370). On the basis of this evidence, the analyst infers that a particular set of ideas (or beliefs or mental events) exists in the heads of a specied group of individuals. These mental events are then 214

Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in International Relations taken to be decisive for the explanation of individual and, by extension, group action. The interpretation depends on a model (usually unspecied) of human beings as the kind of entities that have internal mental states and a set of assumptions about the relationship between those states and various kinds of performance. For example, it must be assumed that answering the question do you believe X? in the afrmative, writing certain kinds of sentences in documents, and otherwise acting in particular ways are evidence that a certain belief is held by the individual in question. The translation from such evidence to justied claims about both the existence of mental states and their content is no easy matter; indeed, Quine (1976) among others has argued that such are the complexities, we would be better off doing away with mental entities altogether!41 What is relevant for our argument here is that the move from evidence to inference is complex and presupposes a particular model of the kind of entities human beings are, as well as the assumptions that mental entities (beliefs) exist and that they play a central role in explaining why individuals engage in certain performances. We have stressed the theory-dependence of this inferential process in order to clarify an analytic point. The assumed existence of mental states (beliefs) is a commonplace of our everyday experience. Indeed, the categories built into our language (English) presuppose and reproduce such commonplaces. As we have argued above, the set of ontological claims embedded in everyday language people have their own ideas and beliefs; these are to be found inside peoples heads; they explain peoples behavior; and so forth structures the ideas literature. Yee adopts such a position explicitly, arguing that ideas and beliefs [sic] [are] dened as mental events that entail thought (1996: 69), while most others in the ideas literature do so implicitly. However, such an assumption is a contingent rather than a necessary starting point for the analysis of social action. The existence and use of mentalistic categories in everyday language, and the reference to mental states, does not imply that people really have beliefs inside their heads or, more importantly, that we must posit such corresponding mental entities in our theories.42 Such categories are perhaps better seen as the legacies of what Coulter (1992: 249) has called Cartesian misconceptions of the mind , that is, a set of holdovers from a quite specic (and widely contested) set of theories and claims about the nature of human perception and its relation to the world (e.g. Rorty, 1979). The categories embedded in language might serve as evidence in and for specic theories about what people are like and their relation to the world. However, the signicance of such evidence depends on the theory within which it is articulated and/or constructed, not on whether or not such categories exist or on the number of people who claim to have beliefs inside their heads. 215

Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes The ascription to individuals of internal states that explain external behavior also produces considerable technical difculties for analysis inasmuch as it becomes necessary to construct accounts of how external phenomena are translated into, produced by or interact with internal phenomena and vice versa. A more useful posture, we believe, for the analysis of social action proceeds by situating the predicates attributed by the Cartesians to the mind in relation to the person as a social being (Coulter, 1992: 249; emphasis in the original; cf. Mandelbaum, 1973). We thus assume, as the capital metaphor already implied, that idea predicates refer to social rather than to mental phenomena. This analytic move enables us to adopt an agnostic attitude towards the existence of mental entities, and licenses a different methodological stance from that found in the ideas literature. In contrast to ideas analysts, who begin with a rationalist-inspired model of individuals as choosers, we begin with a model of people as depictors people make representations (Hacking, 1983: 132). This model derives from our metaphor of ideas as symbolic technologies. Our alternative starting point brackets the inference to beliefs and instead asks how are representations produced and what are the rules by which verbal speech, written statements, and other representations including Cartesian representations of people as individuals with beliefs inside their heads are made meaningful?43 We proceed by analyzing more closely the representations themselves, their internal logics and conditions of possibility and their effects.44 Such a move has immediate and signicant consequences for empirical analysis. For example, it implies that ideas are not located inside peoples heads. As Geertz argued a number of years ago,
Ideas are not, and have not been for some time, unobservable mental stuff. They are envehicled meanings, the vehicles being symbols (or in some usages, signs), a symbol being anything that denotes, describes, represents, exemplies, labels, indicates, evokes, depicts, expresses anything that somehow or other signies. And anything that somehow or other signies is intersubjective, thus public, thus accessible to overt and corrigible plein air explication. (1980: 135)

A focus on representations and their production also alerts the analyst to a set of empirical phenomena typically ignored by the ideas literature. It highlights the making of representations through such practices as the drafting of memos and cables in foreign policy bureaucracies, for example, the reproduction of deterrence theory among defense intellectuals (e.g. Cohn, 1987), and the deployment of accounting practices such as those embedded in the everyday functioning of the world economy (e.g. Sinclair, 216

Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in International Relations 1994). It is to such practices, among others, that redening ideas as symbolic technologies draws our attention. In order to clarify and illustrate what might otherwise seem a rather abstract set of claims and arguments, we turn briey to an analysis by Barnett (forthcoming) in which he reects critically on his experience of becoming a Rwanda expert while working for the US Mission to the United Nations. Ethnographic accounts of foreign policy bureaucracies are rare. Even less common are accounts written by professional social scientists reecting critically on their experiences within such organizations. Barnetts ethnographic account of becoming a Rwanda expert addresses directly our larger point about the social character of beliefs and the utility of redening individuals as social beings who produce representations through such practices as cable-drafting, for example. As such, it also begins to suggest some of the ways in which ideas, dened as social and symbolic phenomena, can be analyzed without reference to beliefs. As Barnett makes clear, the practice of being a foreign policy bureaucrat preceded his acquisition of the requisite set of beliefs:
Slowly I acquired more than the skills of a political ofcer I developed the mentality and mindset. After several months I became more comfortable with my position, better able to understand and share in the symbols, gestures, and utterances of my colleagues, and generally better able to t in. Said otherwise, not only had I entered the bureaucratic world, but the bureaucratic world had entered me. My long days of intense interaction with my colleagues was slowly transforming how I understood, identied, and presented myself. (1997: 11; emphasis added)

Barnett describes how he was literally transformed through his positioning within a set of practices which can be understood as modes of social relation, of mutual action (Taylor, 1987: 567). At no point in this transformation was it necessary for Barnett actually to believe in the policies that he helped promote in the name of the US. On the contrary, as his account of performing as a Rwanda expert suggests, more signicant was being able to engage in the practices appropriate to the place, the situation and his position by drafting appropriate cables, calling the right contacts, relaying the right sort of information and answering questions in particular ways (Barnett, 1997: 3).45 What Barnett describes, from the point of view of the individual social actor, are specic kinds of performances made possible by pre-existing symbolic technologies and social relations. It was through his mastery of the everyday practices, and in particular representational practices, associated with the position that Barnett was able to become an effective desk ofcer. In short, he knew how to go on. Belief whether his or anyone elses is strictly speaking unnecessary to his account of how a 217

Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes University of Wisconsin political scientist became a Rwanda expert, although a fuller treatment would require that one address also the conditions that make a Wisconsin political scientist both a suitable and a willing subject for such transformations. Once we recognize the contestable nature of the Cartesian misconception of the mind that structures the ideas literature, alternative approaches become conceivable. In addition, as Geertz pointed out, the empirical analysis of ideas becomes in some respects more straightforward. Seeing ideas as practices rather than as objects, we have suggested, is a valid and useful alternative to the analytic posture evident in the rationalist approach to ideational phenomena. In the next section, we build on this discussion and seek specically to demonstrate how redening ideas as symbolic technologies enables us to open up for empirical investigation the constitution and production of the objective world against which particular courses of action are adjudged by rationalists to be rational or not. We approach this topic through brief treatments of categorization and constitution, and illustrate our argument with reference to Warings (1988) feminist analysis of the United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA).46 Categorization, Constitution and Substantive Rationality The process of categorization is a crucial element of the meaningful constitution and practical production of social worlds (Onuf, 1989; see also Milliken, 1995). Social categories (which by denition are not individual and idiosyncratic) are human constructs that provide the basic means through which, among other things, distinctions are made, objects are picked out and then grouped in various ways. Such constructs are necessary in a world that has only continua, where, as Waltz said, everything is related to everything else (1979: 8; cf. Connolly, 1991). Much of what is conventionally understood to be policy-making is addressed to this problem Policy is centrally about classication and differentiation, about how we do and should categorize in a world where categories are not given (Stone, 1988: 309). Social categories thus enable they are a necessary precondition for policy. One of the dening characteristics of ideas understood as symbolic technologies is their role in making available sets of categories that enable practices of classication and differentiation. A particularly clear example of this role can be found in the UNSNA, which provides the means through which are produced the national systems of accounts used in calculating such central economic indicators as GNP and GDP. Measuring economic growth, which is the central purpose of the UNSNA, relies upon a categorization of some activities as economic and others as not, as well as 218

Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in International Relations a complex set of accounting practices. In turn, those practices rely on particular sets of social categories, including, among others, production, consumption, public and private (Waring, 1988: Chapters 2 and 3). The UNSNA is not simply a passive categorical instrument, however. In a very real sense, the UNSNA is a set of interwoven practices through which the world is represented, constituted and reproduced on a daily basis. Symbolic technologies, which provide sets of social categories that dene phenomena, are constitutive (Majeski and Sylvan, 1991) and at least potentially productive of social reality to the extent that they inform and structure social practice. In common with other symbolic technologies that, through being deployed, have achieved practical integration into social reality, the UNSNA sits embedded within a wider set of practices including census-taking, taxcollecting, government budgeting, defense and welfare spending, and the like which serve to put its categories into motion (Waring, 1988: Chapter 4). Moreover, not only are UNSNA categories deployed by governments and their statisticians in order to measure economic activity, but those same categories are also drawn on by social subjects to order and organize their own activities. In this way, ofcial categories become sewn into the fabric of the economy, society, and the state (Starr, 1992: 264).47 The UNSNA is thus not easily separable from the reality it allegedly measures because of the constitutive role played by its categories in organizing and producing that reality. As Waring makes clear, the UNSNA quite literally makes possible the production of representations that are highly consequential for the kinds of economic (and other) policies pursued by governments. Waring is very attentive to what she calls the boundary of conception that is, the implications of the categories deployed for who is included and who is excluded through which the UNSNA divides up the social world. Of central concern for her are the ways in which the activities of women are thereby rendered invisible. The relationship between economic growth and ostensibly non-economic activities carried out predominantly by women is obscured, for example. Given the construction of womens household activities as primarily non-economic, those representations entail a range of ideological effects, including but not limited to exclusion women are generally represented as not engaged in productive activity unless they enter into the cash economy. Such effects have direct consequences for a range of public policies, both domestic and foreign. For example, it is prima facie difcult to justify childcare for mothers who, at least according to the UNSNA, are unoccupied (Waring, 1988: 818). Similarly, by effecting a hierarchy between production for subsistence and production for market exchange, the categories built into the UNSNA help to establish and reproduce a bias in favor of foreign aid for commercial rather than 219

Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes subsistence farming. Repeated famines in the midst of bumper export harvests, as well as shifts in gender relations as males usurp traditional female roles and become bread-winners, are only two of the consequences of the policies made commonsensical and hence more likely by the deployment of UNSNA categories. If we focus on the person as a social being, two additional consequences of the representations enabled by the UNSNA become apparent. First, to the extent that these categories and representations inform social practice, so they come to participate in the constitution and production of the world as it must be negotiated by people. It is in part for this reason that social categories, and especially those deployed by governments, promote particular forms of attachment among populations (Starr, 1992: 278). As Waring demonstrates, such categories tell us who we are, what we do, and assign value (or not) to those identities and activities. These categories are not simply free-oating sets of symbols but are built into the fabric of everyday life, insofar as they are deployed and reproduced across a range of sites and practices. Whatever a particular person may think of the categories made available by the UNSNA, they can neither be wished away nor simply refused; they are part of the way the world is. Second, the reexive nature of human beings means that social categories and the forms of reasoning built into symbolic technologies such as the UNSNA are ever likely to be taken up and deployed by the very subjects whom they allegedly are about. In this way, symbolic technologies such as the UNSNA may participate in the constitution of the characteristics of the choosing organism (Simon, 1985: 294) itself albeit an organism understood as a social being endowed with social powers and capacities rather than as a rational individual endowed with beliefs. For example, symbolic technologies secrete particular forms of rationality, understood as characteristic modes of reasoning that make sense of and within the context of specic socially constructed realities. The social powers and capacities with which symbolic technologies potentially endow subjects thus include the capacity to reason in particular ways; rationality is a social characteristic, not an individual one (Hindess, 1991: 221). This process of constitution extends to the production of interests as well. To the extent that it can be shown that interests presuppose a particular identity (Wendt, 1992; Weldes, 1996), it then follows that ideas such as the UNSNA are potentially constitutive of interests not only insofar as they enable the apprehension, constitution and production of worlds but also to the extent that they enable particular forms of identity. Once we begin to think through the multiple ways in which a symbolic technology such as the UNSNA is implicated in the constitution and production of the world it purports objectively to measure, an exclusive 220

Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in International Relations focus on substantive denitions of rationality becomes suspect. In this case at least, it appears that the technology in question actually participates in the production of the conditions of substantive rationality. The UNSNA ostensibly a mere accounting device is in fact highly consequential for the production of the objective reality to which it allegedly responds. Moreover, as the example of the UNSNA makes apparent, the modes of reasoning secreted by symbolic technologies to the extent that they enter into the production of the worlds which people must endeavor to negotiate have those actors rather than vice versa (e.g. Pocock, 1985; cf. Ashley, 1986: 294). This process of constitution, and in particular the role of ideas within it, is explicitly ignored in a model of substantive rationality. Focusing on rationality dened only substantively that is, as behavior that can be adjudged objectively to be optimally adapted to the situation then obscures a crucial fact that social analysis presumably ought to uncover, namely, the implication of the ideational in the production of the very conditions taken for granted by substantive conceptions of rationality.

Conclusion
In abstract terms, this argument has addressed itself to a critical analysis of two possible models for thinking through the impact of ideas and related phenomena on foreign policy and state action. Specically, we have highlighted a set of issues that are predominantly theoretical and conceptual in nature ambiguities in the use of theoretical language (should it be ideas and beliefs or ideas as beliefs?), the suitability of certain notions of causality to specic kinds of phenomena (neo-positivist causation or constitutive relations?) and in particular the implications of alternative metaphors for analysis (ideas as commodities or ideas as capital?). As we have demonstrated, conceptions of what ideas are, the explanatory models within which they are situated and the empirical investigation of ideas (in particular, assumptions about where they are located) are all powerfully shaped by the metaphors that structure our analyses. By way of conclusion, we briey discuss the implications of our argument for the politics of model design and selection. The categories that make knowledge of the social world possible are the stakes, par excellence, of political struggle, the inextricably theoretical and practical struggle for power to preserve or transform the social world by preserving or transforming the categories by which it is perceived (Bourdieu, 1985: 729). It is a partial recognition of this fact, we would argue, that drives the ideas literature. However, rationalists have failed to pay sufcient attention either to the ideas that structure their own work or, more signicantly, to the implications of those ideas (see, Goldstein and 221

Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes Keohane, 1993: 12, n. 21 and 30). Models of social phenomena may participate in the constitution and production of the very worlds they seek to address in a variety of ways. For example, if a model proceeds from the prevailing discursive practices that embody the authority and responsibility relationships dominant in the collectivity under investigation, so that model will tend to reproduce and to reinforce those relationships (Shapiro, 1981: 197). A case in point is the emphasis on elites in the ideas literature. Implied by the model is a view of the world that sees foreign policy as the business of elites. Among other things, this tends to absolve non-elites of responsibility for foreign policy. To the extent that the model is persuasive and comes to be a more-or-less taken-for-granted element in the commonsense of some population always a possibility when dealing with reexive creatures like human beings so the model enters directly into the reproduction of existing relations of authority. Foreign policy then just is elite business. A notable feature of the two models we have been discussing ideas as beliefs versus ideas as symbolic technologies is their dependence upon different structuring metaphors. The rationalist model of ideas achieves its plausibility in part precisely by drawing on a set of commonsense assumptions about what ideas are like. Those assumptions, expressed most clearly in the ideas as commodities and conduit metaphors, provide the deep structure of rationalist analyses. In order to begin to make those assumptions and their effects visible, we presented a different set of metaphors and analogies, drawing on Marxian accounts of the commodity. As we have sought to demonstrate, while those metaphors and analogies (ideas as relations?) run directly counter to the received commonsense that structures the ideas literature, they enabled us to address directly all three of the criticisms we had raised with respect to rationalist models. In addition, they also directed our attention to a range of empirical phenomena more or less invisible in the ideas literature. In these respects, we sought to demonstrate the relative utility for analyzing state action of a redenition of ideas as symbolic technologies. The signicance of these duelling metaphors runs deeper than this, however. It is possible further to demonstrate the usefulness of rethinking ideas as symbolic technologies by seeing the rationalist literature as itself made possible by a specic set of technologies. Seen from this point of view, the ideological effects of conceiving ideas as individual possessions (whether beliefs or commodities) become apparent. The conception of the individual and his relationship to his ideas built into the ideas literature mimics fairly directly the possessive individual so beloved of apologists for capitalist social relations (Macpherson, 1962). He has personal property in his ideas which he can both alienate with relative ease he is 222

Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in International Relations a very exible subject in this respect and also generate he is capable of primitive production and accumulation as well. At a time when the project of globalizing capitalist social relations, their associated political forms (liberal democracy) and modes of subjectivity (bourgeois individualism) continues apace, the ideas literature participates, if unintentionally and indirectly, in that project. Notes
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Annual Meetings of the International Studies Association, San Diego, 1620 April 1996, and the International Studies Association, Midwest, Chicago, 2930 October 1993, and to the International Relations Colloquium, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota. Thanks to Sanjoy Banerjee, Tarak Barkawi, Michael Barnett, Walter Carlsnaes, Nicholas Onuf, Michael Shapiro, David Sylvan, Alexander Wendt, the anonymous reviewers of the European Journal of International Relations, and especially Diana Saco for comments on these papers. 1. The qualication is necessary inasmuch as the recent return of ideas like earlier rediscoveries of the state, domestic politics, and the like was only necessary because the eld of International Relations had endeavored systematically to read out these concepts. Earlier work in the eld, particularly that of the classical realists, was attentive to all of these issues. For a sophisticated early example, see Carr (1964 [1946]). For an interesting reading of Carr and the English School as constructivists, see Dunne (1995). 2. Much of this literature focuses on the role of ideas in the making of foreign economic policy. Examples from which we draw include Goldstein (1988, 1989, 1993), Goldstein and Keohane (1993), P. Hall (1989), Odell (1982), Sikkink (1991) and Woods (1995). Exceptions to the usual focus on economic policy are Checkels (1993) analysis of the role of ideas in the Gorbachev foreign policy revolution and Shafers (1988) analysis of the importance of ideas to the explanation of the failure of US counterinsurgency policy. 3. The terms rationalist and reectivist are Keohanes (1988). We prefer the term constructivist (e.g. Onuf, 1989; Wendt, 1992) rather than reectivist because we think it is both more accurate and less pejorative. 4. Neither of these charges is sustainable, of course. Such a criticism might perhaps be accurate if one began with a very narrow understanding of constructivism and levied the charge only against such metatheoretical accounts of (one version of) constructivism as are offered by Onuf (1989) or Wendt (1987, 1992). But such a denition of constructivism is overly narrow; many diverse traditions of analysis including marxisms, feminisms, post-structuralisms, postmodernisms and realisms (Dunne, 1995) are in different ways constructivist and each provides a signicant body of empirical analysis. For a detailed response to such attacks on constructivism understood in this broader sense, see Walker (1989). 5. This notion of rationality is also called instrumental rationality or, in Weberian terms, Zweckrationalit t (Weber, 1947: 115). For Weber, Zweckrationalit t a a

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instrumentally rational actions dened in relation to a system of discrete individual ends and the rational estimation of means available for their attainment was opposed not to procedural or bounded rationality (as in Simon, 1985: 294) but to Wertrationalit t, dened as social action involving a a conscious belief in an absolute value and its implementation independent of the prospects for its successful realization (Hindess, 1991: 217). For a critique of the view that rationality assumptions can ignore an empirical examination of the forms of reasoning actually employed by social actors, see Hindess (1988, 1991). In this respect, the recent ideas literature adopts the same theoretical strategy as those scholars who employ the concept of bounded rationality (see Simon, 1986). For both kinds of theory, substantive rationality remains the norm or modal form of individual reasoning against which deviations are identied, as well as the regulative ideal of reasoning. In neither approach is reasoning as a social institution problematized. See Hindesss (1991) discussion and critique of the model underlying Simons position. While there is a tendency in rationalist analyses to adopt some variant of either ontological or methodological individualism, these commitments are contingent rather than necessary corollaries of a rationalist approach. See Wendt (1996, Chapters 1 and 4); and Ruggie (1983). The explanatory model which underpins much of this literature, and Goldstein and Keohanes version in particular, is that of regression models in statistical analysis. (See also Goldstein, 1993: 251.) Material interests generate the null hypothesis against which ideas are tested as an additional variable with which to explain otherwise inexplicable variance from interest-generated predictions. For explicit statements to this effect, see Garrett and Weingast (1993: 203). For a critique of such models, see Yee (1996: 716). A similar confusion runs through Checkels (1993) analysis. He seems to equate ideas with expert knowledge, the concepts and intellectual frameworks of Soviet academic specialists (272), new ideologies (273), sets of beliefs and attitudes (276), intellectual outlooks (277), mindsets (278), policy, worldviews (281) and images (295), and never denes these concepts or species the relations among them. However, Checkel does seem to want, in tried-andtrue Cold War fashion, to oppose all of these, which are somehow thought to reect serious, scholarly research, to Marxist-Leninist dogma (284) and to ofcial Soviet dogma (285). See Little and Smith (1988) on belief systems. An exception was Leitess (1951, 1953) analyses of the shared operational code of the Bolsheviks. Jacobsen offers a similar, but more streamlined, two-tier typology consensual shared beliefs provide the ends to be pursued while economic ideas specify the means (1995: 287). Why elites is unclear and left unexplained. After all, some inuential ideas, such as old wives tales, seem to derive their authority from their status as common sense rather than from their association with elites. How one might distinguish between expert ideas and other ideas, whether such a distinction is meaningful

6.

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11. 12.

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and what the politics of such a distinction are, are questions never addressed in this literature. We are inclined to agree with Jacobsens charge that, it is time to abandon the conceit that a tree has not really fallen in the forest unless a member of the Council on Foreign Relations hears it or it falls on her (1995: 310). An exception to the almost exclusive focus in this literature on elites is Jackson (1993). This was the terminology used in an earlier version of Goldstein and Keohanes chapter (1990: 7). While they have dropped the term neo-positivist in the published version, the argument remains much the same the primary concern remains causality (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 11) in the positivist, Humean sense. For a critique of this view of causality, see Sayer (1992: Chapter 3) and the discussion in Yee (1996: 7685). An exception is Shafer who uses ideas to explain continuity despite changes in the international distribution of power, presidential administrations, bureaucratic coalitions and capabilities, the locale of conict and the nature of the insurgencies, and the governments they threaten (1988: 34, emphasis added). This critique is lodged by Jacobsen as well (1995: 309). It is fascinating to note that none of this literature seems to recognize that the practice of positing interest-based explanations as the null hypothesis is itself based on an idea, and a modern idea at that namely, that interests can and should be referred to in explanations of human behavior. (See Hirschman (1977) on the development of the idea of interests; for a related argument, see also Hindess on the idea of the person as rational actor (1991: 216).) That the centrality of interests is itself an idea that is culturally variable can be gleaned from Katzensteins (1993) analysis of anti-terrorism policy in Germany and Japan. He argues that while German policy-makers operate with a view of the international system as a community (281) governed by international norms (294), their Japanese counterparts view the international system as held together by interests (294). The centrality of interests is thus revealed to be a culturally specic idea. Goldstein and Keohane make a similar, but much weaker claim, arguing that [I]deas may even lead even if not immediately to a signicant change in the constitution of interests (1993: 16). Ikenberry also argues that policy ideas can inuence governments conceptions of their interests (1993: 58), but he does not investigate this claim. Instead, he treats the two as distinct, although potentially complementary, explanations and argues that policy ideas matter because they provide opportunities for elites to pursue their [given?] interests in more effective ways (84). Although the term t seems to be the most popular (e.g. Sikkink, 1991: 21; Goldstein, 1989: 32, 69), various other formulations appear as well, including the articulation of different ideas with existing ideologies and the resonating of beliefs with existing ideas (Sikkink, 1991: 267; Ikenberry, 1993: 71) or with the larger political environment (Ikenberry, 1992: 292). P. Hall provides some discussion of the t of new Keynesian ideas with existing ideas, arguing that the nature of prevailing political discourse can work to the

14.

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16.

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advantage or disadvantage of new policy proposals. In terms of prevailing discourse, some new proposals will be immediately plausible, and others will be barely comprehensible (1989: 383). While this is a useful insight, he neglects the fact that the t between various ideas and the plausibility, or not, of new ideas are actively constructed rather than simply there in the ideas themselves, which seems to be the assumption in much of this literature. The need for ideas actively to be created is recognized by Garrett and Weingast, who argue that shared belief systems do not always emerge without conscious efforts on the part of interested actors. Rather, they must often be constructed (1993: 176). We differ with these authors in that we maintain that ideas, and their t with existing ideas, must always be constructed, whether consciously or not. See also Halpern (1993: 90). Goldstein makes a similar, peculiar claim that beliefs are simply strategies that can be abandoned if they fail to deliver the goals sought by political leaders (1993: 251). This claim runs counter to a central nding of cognitive research, including the belief systems literature in the study of foreign policy, which has argued persuasively that beliefs are in fact quite robust and that contradictory information is ltered out to avoid cognitive dissonance (e.g. Jervis, 1976). In contrast to most of this literature, Woods differentiates ideas from beliefs on the grounds that the former are subject to thinking, verication, and logic whereas the latter are ideas no longer thought about (1995: 162). However, the fact that any belief currently having the form of a prejudice (Woodss implicit model) can potentially be made the subject of thinking, verication, and logic implies that her model does not distinguish between ideas and beliefs but only between statements of the form I do (or do not) currently believe X. Although the wielders of this metaphor do not comment on it explicitly, they sometimes seem to be at least partially or tacitly aware of it. The various terms of the metaphor are sometimes placed in quotation marks, for example, perhaps to indicate their metaphorical status (e.g. Goldstein, 1989: 33). However, the choice of metaphor is never explained, nor do these authors seem aware of the effects which this metaphor has on the substance of their analyses. This metaphor is more striking and elaborate in the work of Goldstein (1988, 1989, 1993). Other authors tend to use the metaphor more sparingly, invoking, for instance, the circulation of ideas (Odell, 1982) or the role of political entrepreneurs (Sikkink, 1991). This conception of ideas as commodities is also to be found in the literature on epistemic communities. (See the examples and discussion in Laffey and Muppidi, 1992.) In addition to the metaphor of political entrepreneurs, Sikkink uses the notions of sponsors and of intellectual entrepreneurs as well (1991: 2, 18, 244, 253). Checkel uses the similar phrase policy entrepreneur to refer to purveyors of new ideas (1993: 298). This is another example of the semantic peculiarities that emerge when one attempts to substitute shared beliefs for ideas. While it may make intuitive

20.

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22.

23.

24.

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common sense to claim that ideas are carried and then inserted into politics, what does it mean to say that beliefs are carried and inserted? A related issue concerns the question of whether or not reasons can be causes. As the literature on interpretive social theory demonstrates, although beliefs can function as reasons for actions, it is at least debateable as to whether or not they enter explanations of social action in a manner directly analogous to the causes of the natural sciences. It is for this reason that Fay (1975), for example, refers to beliefs and reasons as quasi-causal; but cf. Patomki (1996). With the a exception of Sikkink (1991) and Ferejohn (1993), the literature on ideas basically ignores the distinction between positivist and interpretive social theory. We could go further than this and suggest that the very plausibility of the ideas as commodities metaphor derives from a particular image of and the practices that characterize capitalist societies. Presumably such metaphors would have considerably less plausibility in social formations not dominated by the commodity form. The conduit metaphor also seems to underpin a possible objection to our argument. Specically, it might be charged that, while rationalist analysts are somewhat confused about what ideas are, they are correct to see the signicance of ideas as lying with their propositional content rather than their form. We are sceptical of this argument insofar as it seems to imply that ideas are either separable from or prior to language. For counter-arguments, see Lakoff (1995) and Bowles and Gintis (1987: 156ff). For example, if ideas can be put into words, and words are in books, then the ideas can be in books and the books can be in libraries, where people then go to extract the ideas and put them into their heads (Lakoff, 1995: 11718). Obscured here is the necessity of interpretive human labor which is required in order to take a set of symbols and then to manipulate them in order for those symbols to have meaning. We adopt, and signicantly rework, Greenblatts (1991) language of symbolic technologies. By collective or shared, we mean phenomena which can be decomposed without loss of content into aggregations of more fundamental units of analysis. On this view, ideas or beliefs are collective in the sense that a large number of individuals have the same ideas or beliefs in their heads. Social phenomena, on the other hand, are those which are intersubjective (Taylor, 1987; Neufeld, 1993) or, in a certain sense, holistic (Hollis and Smith, 1990). They are therefore not decomposable into individual beliefs and are not individual-level phenomena. For critiques of the rationalist program along these lines, see, among others, Kratochwil (1988); Alker (1990); Walker (1993: especially Chapters 4 and 5); and Neufeld (1993). In this sense, symbolic technologies are in certain respects analogous to discourses. We prefer the metaphor of symbolic technologies because it highlights what is of most interest to us here, namely the making of meaning itself, the mechanisms whereby meaning is made, and the implication of these in

25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

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processes of constitution. Moreover, unlike discourse which tends (mistakenly) to occlude questions of agency, the language of technologies implies more directly the necessity for people to engage in practices of production and reproduction. Finally, Greenblatt links symbolic technologies directly to a set of phenomena associated with print capitalism (Anderson, 1991). As we indicate below, our interests overlap with his in this respect. For useful discussions of discourse, see O Tuathail and Agnew (1992), Fiske (1987) and Purvis and Hunt (1993). There is no necessary connection between scale, degree of integration and the identication of a set of representational practices as a symbolic technology. The delineation of any particular set of practices and their identication as a symbolic technology is an empirical and theoretical question, shaped by the interests of the analyst. Compare, for example, Edward Saids (1977) analysis of Orientalism with Thomas (1994) and Ahmad (1994 [1992]). Ideas, then, are less like objects and more like a language. Indeed, a move away from seeing ideas as individual possessions towards accounts which stress the shared conventions within which certain kinds of moves are possible has been increasingly the trend, for example, in the study of intellectual history (e.g. Pocock (1985: especially Chapter 1) and Tully (1988a, b)). The language of technologies should not be understood to imply that the relationship between people and these implements is either strictly instrumental or external. Engagement with technologies symbolic or otherwise is always potentially transformative of both the subject and the object of engagement. It is in part on the basis of such engagement that the natural reality of [human beings] as materially situated biological beings is transformed into the social reality of people in society (Onuf, 1989: 40). In the Middle Ages, for example, people took on the names of their occupations (e.g. weaver, carter, mason, miller and so on). Less prosaic is the effect of technology on the human body think of Michelangelos stonemason models, with their huge hands, the ruined eye-sight of watch-makers, or the madness of hatters. Taken together, the cumulative effect of engaging in such practices is the production of particular subjectivities. Other examples of such ideological effects include unication, rationalization, universalization, separation, naturalization, reication, eroticization, insubstantialization, afrmation, negation, classication, aestheticization and appropriation. This list, by no means exhaustive, is derived from Eagleton (1991: Chapter 2) and Spurr (1993). See in particular Chapter 1 (The Commodity) and Appendix (I. Commodities as the Product of Capital) in Marx (1977 [1867]). Of course, Marxism is not a singular category at all; as a category Marxism is, in fact, no better than a gnomic vulgarity (Castree, 1995: 1163). Our reading of Marx draws on the Gramscian-inspired writings of S. Hall (1985, 1988), Rupert (1995) and Cox (1986), among others; see also Ollman (1976). The following, extremely abbreviated, summary leans heavily on Rupert (1995: Chapter 2).

32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

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39. As Greenblatt puts it, any given representation is not only the reection or product of social relations but . . . is itself a social relation, linked to the group understandings, status hierarchies, resistances, and conicts that exist in other spheres of the culture in which it circulates (1991: 6). Seeing representations as social relations also implies that they are themselves forms of power, through the capacity to produce representations. That is, representations are not only products but producers, capable of decisively altering the very forces that brought them into being (Greenblatt, 1991). This is in direct contrast to the ideas as commodities metaphor which sees ideas (beliefs) as deriving most if not all of their power from outside themselves, specically from the political and intellectual entrepreneurs and sponsors who purvey them. 40. Typically, the body of evidential material drawn on is more restricted than this. For such an argument, applied to the security literature on South Asia, see Abraham (1995). 41. The complexity of the relationship between performances such as these, the inference to particular mental states and the production of individual, let alone social, action is barely referenced in the ideas literature. For a (very small) range of works that give some indication of how complex that relationship is and the difculty of examining it, see for example, Austin (1963), Crespi (1992), Grice (1989), Kratochwil (1988, 1989), Sayer (1992), Searle (1969), Somers and Gibson (1994) and Taylor (1964). 42. The recent exchange between Coulter and Bilmes in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (1992) is a good introduction to the literature and the issues involved. For useful introductions to the current state of psychology, see Harr e et al. (1985) and Greenwood (1991), both of which stress the social character of mind. 43. For explicit discussion of this alternative analytic move in relation to theories of state action, see Weldes and Saco (1996), Milliken (1995) and O Tuathail and Agnew (1992). For a sophisticated discussion of rules in relation to social theory, see Onuf (1989). 44. Yee (1996) also recommends greater attention to the internal structure of ideational forms but does not make explicit the distinction between representations and beliefs nor the necessary implication of representations in practices that we have sought to highlight here. Indeed, Yees otherwise impressive analysis is undermined by his continued commitment to a Cartesian model of the subject. Compare Coulter (1989, 1991). 45. Barnetts account is corroborated in this respect by Mark Laffeys experiences while working as an assistant advisory ofcer in the New Zealand Department of Trade and Industry in 1987. 46. It should be noted at the outset that the UNSNA is a highly formalized symbolic technology. We have chosen to discuss the UNSNA both because it is absent from the discourse of International Relations as a eld, and because it illustrates our larger argument particularly well. For discussion and analysis of more informal examples, see Carmichael (1993) on the Cold War, Drinnon (1990

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[1980]) on indian-hating and empire-building, Escobar (1995) on development, Herman and OSullivan (1989) on terrorism, Schram (1995) on poverty, Spurr (1993) on the rhetoric of empire, or Weldes and Saco (1996) on the Cuban problem. 47. Greenblatt makes a similar point. Recalling the capital metaphor we discussed above, he says that the images that matter, that merit the term capital, are those that achieve reproductive power, maintaining and multiplying themselves as they are deployed and become integrated into everyday life (1991: 6).

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MARK LAFFEY is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. He is completing a dissertation examining the internationalization of the state and the redenition of social purpose in a world economy. JUTTA WELDES is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kent State University. Her work has previously appeared in the European Journal of International Relations, Millennium, and Theory and Society.