practices. Given the ever more complex and interdependent nature of politicaland social action, phenomenology might thus indeed help us steer clear ofthe reductionisms and schematizations still prominent in much IR theorizing.By this it can indeed bring us—in Husserl’s words—‘‘back to things them-selves’’ and allow us to encounter them in all their various and multifacetedappearances.

References

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (1979) Truth and Method, translated by William Glen-Doepel. London: Sheedand Ward.

Heidegger, Martin. (1982) The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, translated by Albert Hofstadter.Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Heidegger, Martin. (2008) Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, translated by John Van Buren.Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mercer, Jonathan. (2010) Emotional Beliefs. International Organization 64 (1): 1–31.Seeburger, Francis. (1975) Heidegger and the Phenomenological Reduction. Philosophy and Phenom-

enological Research 36 (2): 212–221.Sokolowski, Robert. (2000) Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Taylor, Charles. (2006) Engaged Agency and Background in Heidegger. In The Cambridge Compan-

ion to Heidegger, edited by Charles Guignon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Warnke, Georgia. (1987) Gadamer. Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-

sity Press.Wight, Colin. (1999) They Shoot Dead Horses Don’t They? Locating Agency in the Agent-Structure

Problematique. European Journal of International Relations 5 (1): 109–142.

On the ‘‘Construction’’ of Knowledge andthe Knowledge of ‘‘Construction’’

Daniel Jacobi

Goethe University Frankfurt

Since its arrival in IR about 20 years ago, the idea of ‘‘the social construction ofreality’’ has firmly established itself in the discipline. While acknowledging thatnot everything was socially constructed ‘‘including, say, the taste of honey andthe planet Mars’’ (Hacking 1999:25), the scholarly notion that ‘‘the social’’ is atthe core of the (re-)production of order took center stage. With it, numerousinnovative concepts like norms, ideas, and identities officially entered into ourvocabulary along with the promise to enable a better study of ‘‘the political.’’Yet, unfortunately, rather than embarking on new theoretical or empirical ave-nues, many scholars merely ‘‘poured the newly emerging patterns of thoughtinto the old framework’’ (Wight 2002:40) and stalled any processual dimensioninherent in the new vocabulary.

The concept of knowledge has been repeatedly at the receiving end of thisdilemma. Quite frequently borrowed from phenomenologically primed sociolo-gists and usual suspects for the legitimization of the constructivist turn,Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, the concept of knowledge featuresprominently as one access point to the study of the social dimension of

94 On the ‘‘Construction’’ of Knowledge and the Knowledge of ‘‘Construction’’

international politics. To be sure, the upside of the turn with regards to thisconcept was the definite end to any rationalist illusions about ‘‘true knowl-edge.’’ Instead, today, knowledge can be understood in an undogmatic fashion‘‘as the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific char-acteristics’’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966:1). In fact, such a minimalist vantagepoint makes way for the rather fundamental question of ‘‘Who believes whichknowledge to be true?’’ Knowledge thus becomes contingent on truth claims.Our attention is shifted to the social character and hence the social determi-nation of knowledge. We can then understand knowledge as socially relevant,objectified, and distributed meaning. In other words, what is real is defined inthe communities constituting (world) society and the form of this definition iswhat is considered valid knowledge (ibid.:17). Consequently, assuming that thestruggles over the recognition of the definitions of reality lie at the heart of‘‘the political,’’ we in fact need to understand how knowledge and socialaction go together in the formation and distribution of knowledge as a phe-nomenon which bonds individual and community in the (re-)production ofpolitical order.

Quite a few approaches in recent IR theory have focused on the conceptualiza-tion of this relationship. With their distinctions of private ⁄ shared or implicit ⁄explicit knowledge as well as their focus on interaction, practices and discoursesthey, without a doubt, offer an inventive vocabulary for the description of ‘‘thesocial’’ (e.g., Adler 2005; Pouliot 2010). However, looking at these approacheswith a phenomenological gaze—and its particular interest in the relation of theforms of reasoning to its content (e.g., Husserl 1975)—one has to concede thatmany of these attempts fail to account for the actual sociality of knowledge.While their vocabulary undeniably follows the semantics of process, their con-crete conceptualizations tend to exclude the latter. This is because of the factthat many of them fall for the mind ⁄ world or subject ⁄ object dualism alreadydescribed by Kessler and Michel above. The conceptualizations of knowledge inmany IR approaches are either of an individualistic or a collectivistic nature asknowledge is exclusively located in either individual minds or discourses andpractices. Even where the aforesaid ‘‘processual vocabulary’’ suggests some kindof dynamics between the types of knowledge, we can usually find an implicitly orexplicitly ontologized hierarchy between them by which they are eventually rei-fied. Knowledge is assumed to exist either inside or outside the actors and takeson the object-like qualities of a substantive entity. It subsists beyond any socialrelation.

Subsequently, the analytical strength of these concepts is profoundly cur-tailed as they are furnished with a pre-socialized layer which, in turn, inevita-bly makes any knowledge or action just another instant of the analyzedpractice or discourse (Knoblauch 2005:344). Worse yet, it conceals any ele-ments of contention in the analysis of ‘‘the political,’’ the aforesaid space ofthe ‘‘social construction’’ of political order. These approaches simply cannotgrasp the ‘‘force field’’ of individual and community because, conceptually,they have no ‘‘placeholder’’ for the diverging ideas injected into the processof the ‘‘construction’’ of meaning and thus knowledge. Consequently, the‘‘social construction’’ must not be understood as the accomplishment of eitheran individual or collective (sub-)consciousness. It is never an intentional goal,but rather the result of continuous social action. Any other conception invitesa predicament described by Clifford Geertz, ‘‘The sociology of knowledge… isnot a matter of matching varieties of consciousness to types of social organiza-tion and then running causal arrows from somewhere in the recesses of thesecond in the general direction of the first—rationalists wearing square hatssitting in square rooms thinking square thoughts, they should try sombreros’’(Geertz 1983:153).

95Daniel Jacobi

What kind of sombrero should we wear then? Well, I think it is the onelabeled ‘‘communicative action.’’ Yet, it must not be conflated with Habermasianconcepts or their rather functionalist operationalizations in IR. The concept, asit is understood here, rests on the simple belief that neither of the above-isolatedperspectives on speech, practice, or thought can by themselves account for a the-ory of the sociality of knowledge and thus the idea of the ‘‘social construction.’’Far from it, they need to be understood as coequal aspects of communicationand can only be separated for heuristic purposes. Knowledge and action are thusassumed to go together in communicative action.

Indeed, ‘‘communication’’ is no stranger to IR, yet ‘‘the concept of ‘communi-cation’ notoriously marks a blank space in most contemporary theories of inter-national relations’’ (Albert, Kessler, and Stetter 2008:43). Instead, it is quitefrequently and interchangeably used with terms like language, intersubjectivity,or dialogue. An initial primer from a phenomenologically oriented sociology ofknowledge can thus help us to better understand the communicative structuresof the life-world in which knowledge is (re-)produced.

First, communication is always relational: When we try to model its basic struc-ture (Buhl 2002:267–270), we must avoid falling back on an outdated sender–receiver model which depicts communication as the simple transmission of amessage. Even if we overcome its inherent monological intentionalism for amore non-representational understanding of intentionality—by including feed-back effects or conceding that the transmission is always threatened by interfer-ence from ‘‘white noise’’—the message will nevertheless always remainontologically prior to the receiver. Its content is thus taken at face value becauseany reflexivity is conceptually excluded. Consequently, if we understand knowl-edge as emerging in communicative action, the basic communicative constella-tion needs to be thought of in a contextually oriented vocabulary and fill thesocial vacuum left behind by the above model.

Second, communication is always multilayered: The knowledge emerging incommunication is a result of various layers of meaning which can either comple-ment or contradict each other (Rombach 1977:27ff). Communication, hence,does not pass through a single channel a la the sender–receiver model but actu-ally exists only because of its multilayered nature. Knowledge can only come intoview in contrast or reference to other knowledge. Hence, there can also be no‘‘meta-level of communication’’ because if the various levels equally rely on eachother, they cannot be hierarchized or conflated into each other. It is actuallybecause of this ambiguity and multilayered character of communication that dif-ferent actors can always find points of entry into communication: ‘‘The ambigu-ity of communication is thus not an absence but a surplus of truth’’ (Buhl2002:281–282, my translation). Consequently, it is not the message that is beingcommunicated but the context (ibid.:272).

Third, communication is always contextual: The above makes communica-tion a common effort par excellence. It can no longer be understood as themere exchange of two isolated individuals. Even face-to-face communication isalways shot through with sociality: ‘‘There is no unsituated understanding, noaction without meaning, no being without values…. Any attempt to conceptu-alize knowledge and action in an ahistorical fashion is bound to fail since thebasic condition of these phenomena is [the dynamics of their] contextuality’’(Rombach 1977:41–42; my translation). For one, no communicative relationcan exist without orientation toward some additional contextual object of ref-erence—a theme, a topic, etc.; a fact that is already implicit in our system ofpronouns. There simply are no purely private points of reference in communi-cation as they never exist without being influenced by the orientation of oth-ers. In reflexively relating to and commonly defining contextual objects ofreference, time and space enter into communication, further localizing and

96 On the ‘‘Construction’’ of Knowledge and the Knowledge of ‘‘Construction’’

situating it. However, we must not only include referent objects as context butalso the context of the objects themselves. Any object of reference onlydefined by two actors would let the concept slip right back to the level of thesender–receiver model. If referent objects do not exist without the influenceof ‘‘the other,’’ we need to remind ourselves that ‘‘the other’’ always only rep-resents multiple others. It is via this asymmetric relation to contextually situ-ated objects of reference that the world inevitably becomes part of anycommunicative constellation; again, a fact already implicit in the Latin rootsof communicare, ‘‘to share’’ or ‘‘to make common.’’ Communication is thennot the simple exchange of pre-fixed signs and symbols, but the signs andsymbols we use have an appresentational character (Schutz and Luckmann1989:131–147). They are always already embedded in a horizon of meaning,making communication a continuous process of (re-)contextualization ratherthan a loose sequence of ad hoc interactions.

Fourth, communication is more than language: Maybe it is because of itspragmatic correlation with the immediate experience and thus authenticity offace-to-face interactions that language indeed seems to be the medium for the(re-)production and distribution of knowledge. Yet, particularly communicationthat is socially relevant in international politics needs to transcend this immediatecontext and find other knowledge media. While spoken language in face-to-faceinteractions is already, at least, accompanied by bodily expressions, it needs to becomplemented or even replaced by other systems of signification once knowledgegoes beyond such immediate interactions for more intermediate and thus (world)societal—but also even more transcendent—contexts. Here, among others, morevisually oriented systems of signification gain relevance (e.g., emblems, flags, ritu-als) and hence also need to be social theoretically accounted for.

In conclusion, knowledge must not be conceptualized as some kind of mysteri-ous relational ‘‘connector’’ between individuals and community but as somethingwhich is co-original with them and their communicative interactions—a processof ‘‘social construction’’ of order and identities in which they are perpetually tri-angulated and differentiated. A phenomenologically primed ‘‘social construc-tion’’ must therefore be understood as the ‘‘communicative construction ofreality’’ (Luckmann 2002:201-210). If we want to observe the formation and distri-bution of knowledge as well as its relationship to social structures, we must turnto communication. It is only there that knowledge does empirically reveal itself.

References

Adler, Emanuel. (2005) Communitarian International Relations. London: Routledge.Albert, Mathias, Oliver Kessler, and Stephan Stetter. (2008) On Order and Conflict: Interna-

tional Relations and the ‘Communicative Turn’. Review of International Studies 34 (S1): 43–67.Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. (1966) The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor

Books.Buhl, Walter. (2002) Phanomenologische Soziologie. Konstanz: UVK.Geertz, Clifford. (1983) Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books.Hacking, Ian. (1999) The Social Construction of What? London: Harvard University Press.Husserl, Edmund. (1975) Experience and Judgment. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Knoblauch, Hubert. (2005) Wissenssoziologie. Konstanz: UVK.Luckmann, Thomas. (2002) Wissen und Gesellschaft. Konstanz: UVK.Pouliot, Vincent. (2010) International Security in Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Rombach, Heinrich. (1977) Die Grundstruktur der menschlichen Kommunikation. In Phanomenolog-

ische Forschungen 4, edited by Wolfgang Orth. Freiburg: Alber.Schutz, Alfred, and Thomas Luckmann. (1989) Structures of the Life-World, Vol. II. Evanston, IL:

Northwestern University Press.Wight, Colin. (2002) Philosophy of Social Science and International Relations. In Handbook of Inter-

national Relations, edited by Walter Carlsnaes et al. London: Sage.

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