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Radical Diplomacy.

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 The Committee for Radical Diplomacy

radical diplomacy

'A negotiator must have stamina - physical and mental stamina.

He has got to be physically prepared, since he cannot always
control the time of negotiations, because other people are in-
volved. He must not tire easily.'
Zartman, W.I.; Burman, M.R., The Practical Negotiatior, 1982.

'All men should have a drop or two of treason in their veins,

if the nations are not to go soft likeso many sleepy pears.'
West, R., The Meaning Of Treason, 1949·

Within the current cultural and political conjuncture, concepts of

the 'relational', the 'authentic', the 'social' and the 'participatory'
become buzzwords within the fields of art, marketing, urban re-
generation and, increasingly, corporate education. This is the
context within which many of us as cultural workers, mediators
and pedagogues find ourselves increasingly mired in a set of deep
and enduring ambivalences.

It is also in this context that we experience the unreality of col-

lapsing distinctions between life and work, between home and
elsewhere, between leisure and production, between debt and
employment, less as the enactments of the emancipated worker or
the generative relationality of Duchamp's anartist, but rather as

99
 planes of individualised demands for authorship and hyper-pro-
ductivity. Where such collapses hold the potential to build new
possibilities, this potential is more often re-routed, reiterating and
consolidating relations. of property and value.

Traditional critiques of the leftist artist posit a polarisation be-

tween what is described as Institution and that which is outside or
autonomous, a situation where one can choose sides for or against
the institution. We, as critically and politically engaged conveners,
as those who often act as bridges between constituencies and ac-
tivities, no longer occupy discrete fields once described as 'Art',
'Politics', 'Culture'; or the positions once referred to as 'Insider',
'Outsider', 'Artist' of 'Activist'. Rather, we increasingly occupy
the murky sites of their encounter. We argue that, within the ex-
perience and staging of so many collapses, the struggle for the
cultural worker today must be understood from their inhabitation
of what Art and Language once described as the 'historical condi-
tions we are really in' rather than those conditions 'we want,
need, believe or feel intimidated into supporting ... '.

For many of us, such conditions do not permit a choice between

spaces that are co-opted, recuperated or instrumentalised, and
those which are outside. Indeed such choices are misplaced and
belie our occupations of complex processes of organisation and
re-organisation: of power, capital, affect, social and value repro-
duction. To point to this complexity is not to become an apologist
for the 'institution' understood as dominant power, nor is it to
resign oneself to a programme of small change and reform. In this
context, it is rather more generative to attend to these planes of
inhabitation, the dynamics of organisation in which the macropo-
litical, 'facts and lifestyles in their formal, sociological exteriority'
(insides and outsides) and the micropolitical, 'the forces that
shake reality, dissolving its forms' meet. 1 For these are the planes
and sites where power, desire and subjectivity meet and become
entangled. Rather than evoke the endless repetition of a rally cry
('cooptation', 'instrumentalisation'), we attempt to understand
those moments of uncertainty, of oscillation and ambivalence, as
the beginning of an analysis of the 'historical conditions we are re-

IOO
ally in' and what an equally deep and enduring resistant practice
might entail.

Rather than the narratives of inside and outside, we read the situa-
tions in which we find ourselves on a continuum between what
Ivan Illich describes as practices of manipulation and practices of
conviviality. To attend to what is manipulating and what is con-
vivial is to attend to the site of the relationships in which we are
involved - be they personal or professional. For it is no strange
coincidence that it is in these relationships that we often experi-
ence the greatest intensities of our practices, the ambivalences and
both the euphoria of possibility and the strain of the limit.

By shifting our gaze to the site of the relationship and its [Link]
continuum of manipulation and conviviality, what we often experi-
ence is not a choice between becoming, or aligning ourselves with
those, situated within what we might have called
'Institution' or 'community', or with those 'outside'. The experi-
ence is rather one of rapid oscillations between affective wonder,
desire and collaborative sensibility, conviviality and their con-
straints: the budgets, fixed temporalities, and manipulation, the
very capturing mechanisms of capitalist value production. .

To resist these capturing mechanisms is rather, then, to search (in

Guattari's words) for 'the devices that oppose the micropolitics of
cooptation'. 2 It is into this emphasis on the microphysics ofrela-
tions that we insert a notion of diplomacy.

Diplomacy
Superficially, we might evoke some obvious similarities between
socially engaged culture workers and the diplomatic stereotype:
endless traveling, problem solving from the outside (the missions
of the envoy), attention to the mechanisms ofrelationship build-
ing, co_nstant negoti~tion, the production of novel communicative
formalities.

To employ diplomacy in the current context is not, however, to

IOI
 draw to mind men with Gigars, stamping passports and drinking
brandy behind closed doors. Nor is it to make a commentary on
the globalisation of the arts, or the role that official 'culture'
continues to play in the field of international relations. It is rath-
er to evoke the intelligences of diplomats: their attention to the
composition of the event, their 'soft skills in the negotiation of
difference', (the 'art of handling hearts'3), their attention to the
gestures, manners and 'the dissipation of uneasiness' (Swift), to
'listening to what is not said' (Rusk), their 'humility' (Lord
Chesterfield), 'sincerity and good faith' (Plantey)4, friendship,
flattery, and hospitality. Diplomacy, said early theorist Wicque-
fort, is akin to perpetuallly 'staging an opera'5. To invoke the
diplomat, therefore, is to question in every moment how such
intelligences are being deployed. It is to plot the orientation of
these intelligences away from the pleasant play of relations of
force (official diplomacy) and to locate our agitation on this very
continuum of manipulation and conviviality.

Within each of our actiol).s, the diplomatic is that which hovers

between the qualities that we value - collaboration, communica-
tion, micro-political gestures of alliance, actions with conse-
quence, festivity, conviviality - and the relations of force whose
water we navigate.

We might read our own diplomatic terrain in relation to that of

early modern diplomats, who narrated the moment in which
their skills in sociability became the very site of a set of strategic
deployments central to the tripartite apparatus of security. 6 In
this moment, diplomats struggled with the instrumentalisation
of their role, which had, until then, been predicated on the plays
of character of an agent for hire: their creativity and dedication
to the task at hand, the depth and duration of their relation-
ships, their loyalty to this or that prince, and their ability to cho-
reograph formal processes. Diplomats at that time struggled
between the task of upholding at once the integrity of these rela-
tionships and the increasing demand to utilise them in the stra-
tegic dissipation of tensions, as the friendly face that could
achieve equilibrium between states bound in unequal relations.

102
These tensions were manifested in a debate in the early texts of
diplomatic conduct. Wicquefort and Callieres argued about the
degree to which diplomats should locate their work in the 'subtle
art of entree en graces (entering in the other party's graces)', or
how their work might be better understood as the pursuit of an
'honourable spy'.7 It his here that the strange hybridities now as-
sociated with diplomacy began to emerge: those 'virtues of disloy-
alty', that operate for example across Graham Greene's oeuvre of
diplomatic fiction.

To attend to our current condition entails that we understand ful-

ly the diplomatic demand that is often made of us in the field of
engaged art (and indeed post-Fordist production): that which
asks us to be endlessly flexible, virtuosic, to reformulate ourselves
in relation to this or that mandate (always ready to depart on a
new mission), this or that opportunity, this or that need, while at
the same time facilitating relationships that enable, rather than
I
problematise, the smooth running of turgid social divisions, hier-
archies and modes of producing wealth and value. By attending ·
to our current condition as a kind of diplomatic terrain, a terrain
full of ambivalence and potential for treachery and disloyalty of
the right kind, we might get closer to plotting another kind of re-
sistance through the staging and choreographing of other rela-
tional possibilities.

The terrain of relationships we often occupy in cultural work are

littered with unsaid hierarchies, unspoken power relations, unde-
clared demands for performances of particular subjectivities and
positions. These .demands, power relations and hierarchies can
force us to solely occupy the affective realm of the opportunistic,
the strategic, or the vigilant, and the defensive. Suely Rolnik has
written much about how post-Fordism has initiated a particular
social and psychic anesthesia of our vulnerability to the other -
'an anesthesia all the more devastating when the other is repre-
sented by the ruling cartography as hierarchically inferior, because
of his or her economic, social or racial condition ... ' 8 In operating
on this terrain of relationships under these conditions, what is at
stake in the diplomatic operations we attempt is not only the sub-

ro3
tle subversion, occupation and re-staging of manipulations and
conVivialities across and beyond the terrains·of our operation, but
also the micropolitical work that might also allow us to re-con-
struct what Suely Rolnik calls 'the territories of our existence -
the changing contours of our subjectivity, as mutations of the
sensible fabric ofbecoming'.9

Put another way, in terms lent to us by the anthropologist David

Graeber, this entails a movement from relations of avoidance:
those that emerge in situations of extreme hierarchy, in which
there is much that one cannot say (as in an averted gaze in front
of the queen or a question about money asked in the context of
an art gallery), or the joking relation, to a kind of jostling or rav-
enous relation that enables the body to engage [Link] of becom-
ing that are 'continuous with the world'. 10

Radical Diplomacy?
Where diplomacy values the solution, the avoidance of a conflict,
the covering over of structural and historical inequity through
strategies and formalities of relations, a radical diplomacy is one
which resolves not to solve. It provokes frictions and other modes
of becoming: contra- hierarchy, manipulation and avoidance.

The radical diplomat might ask: if we are inhabitants of a field in

which we are regularly implicated, subsumed and entangled in all
t11at we had thought to oppose, if indeed we often find ourselves -
in the words of the early modern negotiator~, 'living in another's
land', 'wearing two hats' or enacting the 'virtues of disloyalty' -
how might we imagine a radical diplomacy that enables us to ma-
nipulate the conducts of the diplomatic to challenge our current
circumstances?

Foucault has argued that conduct is both the 'activity of conduct-

ing, of conduction', but also how one conducts oneself, allows
oneself to be conducted, is conducted.. .in which one behaves as
an effect of a form of conduct, as the act of conducting'. I I Con-
ducts are acts of subjectivation, performatives, or could be seen as
 persons-as-subjectivating acts. They are the many ways in which
we become routinised, assigned roles and designated spheres;
and, perhaps more insidiously, conducts are the ways in which we
become embodied facilitators of these roles.

In a cultural field in which the social and relational practices of

artists are increasingly entangled in the solving of social problems,
the easing of gentrification schemes and the softening of impacts
of a declining welfare state, these questions of conduct are very
familiar. Such conducts might be said to uphold a set of behav-
iours that are central to political institution. In Foucault's reading
however, 'counter-conduct' as a form of dissidence might take
place at the edges of political institution. His examples include
such formations as military desertion in 17th [Link] r8th centuries,
resistance to medical treatment by religious groups,. or in secret
societies (what we might now describe as instituent practices).
[Link], he argues, 'are never autonomous but rather
contingent'. They are the types of revolts that emerge from spe-
cific 'webs of resistance' in relation to forms. of power 'that do not
exercise sovereignty and do not exploit, but "conduct". ' 12

Counter-conducts might function in a way that is not unlike the

character played by Peter Sellers' in The Party, the subaltern guest
who, mistakenly invited and known to no one, hovers around the
gathering's edges uncomfortably, knocking a glass, falling in the
pool, making impossible the formal relations of its guests by
mounting a series of seemingly unintentional acts. We might also
think of such an invited but unknown figure in contemporary dip-
lomatic terms as the Track III diplomat.

Track III diplomacy is a strangely unarticulated and undefined

mode of collective, diplomatic action written into the current con-
ducts of diplomacy. Track III diplomats are, according to more re-
cent diplomatic manuals, composed of activists, unofficial agents
and those who are not sanctioned to conduct diplomatic business.
They work towards the 'elimination of [Link],
engage in social justice and build capacities at the grassroots level'. r3
Running exactly contrary to the aims for which diplomacy is em-

ro5
ployed, Track III diplomats then occupy a strange loophole in
official definitions, an invisible and yet imagined cadre of the un-
defined in the field of the diplomatic. It is in this official gap re-
served for the unofficial that we might attempt to activate the
mode of diplomacy longed for by Walter Benjamin in his Critique
of Violence, a diplomacy that moves beyond 'mere forms', activat-
ing the potential of 'relational webs' of counter-conduct. 1 4 Such a
Track III or radical diplomacy might then make use of diploma-
cy's intelligence and attention to the complex relationship be-
tween micropolitical affect and macropolitical effect, to the art of
negotiating complexity, and multi-faceted interests, to the institu-
tions and conventions offered, while simultaneously articulating
modes of ethical action while 'living in another's land'.

Emerging from such a complex sites of inhabitation, how do we

then navigate the competing interests in whose service current
modes of practice operate? If not in the service of :flexible econo-
mies, inclusion agendas, what modes of responsibility and 'hon-
ourable spying' might we imagine for this new terrain? If we
understand the diplomatic as a condition of convening and inhab-
iting relationships and affects, what inventory of counter-con-
ducts, secret societies, or forms of desertion might we plot for
ourselves?

The radical diplomat is a figure that emerges within the shadows

of our current conditions. She is a figure, a gestural contour of a
passing moment, a gymnast, an acrobat, a synchronised swimm_er
in motion. She is a figure in which a condition becomes recogniz-
able, that which 'makes visible the impossible, (while) it also in-
vites the imagination to transform the impossible into an
experience'. rs

you may also want to go to:

~ 60 intervention
~ 90 non-specialisation
ro6 -7 n7 self
 l Rolnik, S. (2006) 'The involves corporation to corpo-
Geopolitics of Pimping', in ration diplomacy, each of
Transversal, online journal, \ which mobilising relational,
[Link] creative and gestural conducts,
transversal/ I 106/rolnik/en. perpetuating globalised opera-
2 Guattari, F. & Rolnik, S. tions of security. The language
(2007). iviolecular Revolution in around multi-track diplomacy
Brazil. Cambridge, MA: Se- is emergent and thus relatively
miotexte, p. 218. inconsistent. This definition
3 De Callieres, F. (1716) emerges from articles by the
The Art of Negotiating with United Nation, specifically,
Sovereign Princes. London: David Bloomfield and Norbert
Geo. Strahan, p. 34. Roper5 (2005) Dialogue and
4 Freeman, C.W. (2005) Social Integration: Experienr;e
The Diplomat's Dictionary. from Ethno-political Conflict
Washington: United States Work. Background paper for
Institute of Peace Press. the Expert Group Meeting on
5 Wicquefort, A. (1682). Dialogue in the Social Integra-
L'Ambassadeur et ses fonctions, tion Process: Building Peaceful
La Haye: Veneur, p. 127. Social Relations by, for and with
6 Foucault, M. (2007). Secz1- People. New York, ?-I-23 No-
rity, Territory, Population. Lon- vember 2005. Other articles on
don: Palgrave Macmillan Press, the topic include Louise Dia-
p.103. mond and John McDonald
7 Pekar Lempereur, A. (1993) Multilayered Diplomacy,
(2003). A Rhetorical Foundation London: Macmillan (1996)
of International Negotiations. and Multitrack Diplomacy,
Versailles: Group ESSEC Cen- West Hartford, CT: Kumarian
tre de Recherche, p. 15. Press; Andrew F. Cooper
8 Suely, R. (2006). 'The (1997), Niche Diplomacy, New
Geopolitics of Pimping', in York: St. Martin's Press; Mi-
Transform, online journal. chael S. Lund (1996) Prevent-
[Link] ing Violent Conflicts: A Strategy
transversal/I 106/rolnik/en for Preventive Diplomacy,
9 Ibid. Washington DC: U.S. Institute
IO Graeber, D. (2007). of Peace Press.
Manners, Deference and Pri- 14 Benjamin, Walter. (1927),
vate Property, or Elements for 'Critique of Violence'. Trans.
a General Theory of Hierar- E. Jephcott, ill Selected Writ-
chy, in Possibilities. AK Press. ings. Vol. 1: 1913-1926,
I I Foucault, M. (2007). Belknap/Harvard Press 1996.
Op. cit., p.202. 15 Spivak, Gayatri. (1988).
12 /bid. 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', in
13 Track III diplomacy sits Spivak, Nelson & Grossberg,
against a series of other 'tracks' Marxism and the Interpretation
in the growing field of multi- of Culture. Urbana: University
track negotiation, including of Illinois Press.
Track I, the terrain of official
diplomats; Track II, those
engaged in public or what Kofi
Anan described as 'people-to-
people diplomacy', those 'on
the ground negotiators' in the
service of the aims of official
diplomacy; Track N, which

107

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