Chapter 1: Poststructuralism in IR

Introduction

This chapter deals with the basic assumptions of the poststructuralist approaches by focusing on their conceptualisation of the main themes in International Relations such as state, sovereignty and identity, and the ontological and epistemological bases of poststructuralism that are grounded on “discourse.” Focusing on the works of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, it shows the importance of constructive aspect of discourse and interrelations between power and knowledge in this approach. Another aim of this chapter is to describe the analysis methods such as deconstruction, double reading, archaeology and genealogy.

Poststructuralism and the Field of International Relations

Poststructuralism on International Relations is affected in early 1980s through the works of Richard Ashley, Robert Walker, Der Derrian and Michael Shapiro. These works focus on exposing the imaginative boundaries and limitations drawn by traditionalist approaches to understand the domain of world politics through certain concepts (state, sovereignty, etc.) although poststructuralist criticism is not limited to these. For instance, poststructuralism criticises the worldview that events in the world cannot be explained without grand theories. Instead, they prefer to analyse how people were influenced in specific historical periods with a specific way of thinking, which was shaped with the relations of knowledge and power at any given time.

Poststructuralism is regarded as a critical attitude or approach that emphasizes the importance of representation, the role of discourse in the meaning of international relations and the relationship between knowledge and power.

Poststructuralist thought begins its assumption by questioning the traditional assertions that there is an outer place from which the world can be observed objectively and theories can be neutral. However, to observe the world from the outside, scholars must have a Godlike detachment, which is not possible. As a result, neither theorists nor theories can be politically neutral.

Poststructuralism has a lot in common with postempiricism, and assumptions of Frankfurt School in critical theory. All of these approaches share similar ideas about following:

• the central role of language to the construction of social life
• the historicity of knowledge (knowledge is related with power and is historically produced within socio-cultural structures)
• rejection of the idea of universal (timeless and spaceless) knowledge

They reject the possibility of value-free social analysis. In other words, theoretical knowledge is not independent from the values, thoughts and ideological beliefs of the theorist. Their criticism is mainly against structuralist analysis which separates the issue from the historical context by ignoring the development processes of language, culture and identity with a positivist approach.

With respect to state, the traditional approach views state as natural and necessary. Poststructuralists oppose this idea strictly and focus on the creation process of state because sovereign state does not exist a priori according to poststructuralist thinking. According to Weber, the sovereign state is an ‘ontological effect of practices which are performatively enacted.’ Sovereign states are continuously rebuilt through historical and political practices. The state’s existence/identity is an effect of performativity that is constructed with discursive practise about foreign and domestic policies, security and defence strategies, or being a member of any international organization. Therefore, poststructuralist thought focuses on discursive practices that produce the state-centric perspective.

Poststructuralist critics focus on the construction of modern state in a historical context. Sovereignty is considered as the least and most significant common ground for discursive construction of the modern state. It separates “inside” -place under control- from “outside” uncontrollable anarchic international system- when it is understood as having authorization over a specific territory. In addition, the necessity of having boundaries drives states to violence in order to defend their territory. Thus, sovereignty is not an innocent concept as it seems. Poststructuralist approach highlights how the sovereign states, even the liberal ones, construct themselves through violence and exclusion.

Another important field of interest of poststructuralism is identities. Poststructuralists and constructivists base their analyses on different perspectives. Poststructuralists do not adopt an attitude that accepts identity’s causal effects on foreign policy even though identity is considered as one of potential causal influences on foreign policy in social constructivist approaches. The most important feature that distinguishes poststructuralist approaches from other social theories (e.g. constructivism) is that language/discourse is the basis of its ontology. According to poststructuralism, states actually construct “self ” that is marginalized to others and need to protect from otherness through identity. To illustrate, USA’s identifying herself as the “civilized” and Soviet Union as the “barbaric other” through discourse is an example of her attempt to legitimate both parties, for ensuring its integrity and taking precaution against the Soviet Union.

Language and Discourse

The role of language and discourse is one of the fundamental issues emphasized by poststructuralism. In Plato and Wittgenstein’s earlier works, it was indicated that the only function of language has been to describe the world around, and the limits of language have been accepted as boundaries of the world. Scientific knowledge is constituted independent of discourse and objectives because discourse is subjective, and it may disrupt the objectivity of knowledge and damage scientific truth.

However, in Wittgenstein’s later work the idea that the task of language is more than just to describe the world became dominant. John Austin added that discourse can create its own reality, and he showed that it is possible not only to describe what is happening in the world, but also to perform something by saying something, hence the speech act theory.

According to Foucauldian discourse analysis, the focus is on its relation to the individual actor. While Austin emphasizes the rules and contexts of performative speech, Foucauldian discursive analysis further underlines the constitutive role of discourse in the creation of subject identities.

With respect to discourse Jacques Derrida indicates that writing is also important besides speech. To poststructuralists, discourses are not only constative but are also performative because you do/constitute something while you say something, and discourse not only describes the world but also constructs it.

Poststructuralist Scholars

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was mainly influenced by philosophers Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Derrida transformed philosophical school’s understanding of speech and writing, reading, texts and publications.

Many thinkers have claimed that speech represents the mind, and they have emphasized speech as the only successful example of meaning transmission. However, according to Derrida, speech has limited access in space and time compared to the writing. Writing can pass over this boundary and open much larger areas in the same space and time. If the production of writing is like a machine, in following years in the absence of the creator, the machine will go on production. In the absence of not only the recipient (address) but also the sender, writing could still be functional. That is, writing should be readable outside written contexts such as time and space. If everything about the author is forgotten, writing is still being read and it will perform its duties.

Another strength of writing over speech is that some words can be homonymic, that is to say, they might have different spellings and quite diverse meanings, but their pronunciation may be the same. Derrida says that this difference becomes clear and visible only when the words are written down.

Deconstruction

The concept deconstruction was first outlined by Jacques Derrida, who describes deconstruction as some rules for reading, interpretation and writing. He claims that deconstruction signifies how the whole is structured and also restructured. Therefore, it does not have a negative meaning.

Derrida desires to dislodge Western metaphysics or logocentric thinking that produces dichotomies, such as man/woman, sovereignty/ anarchy, good/evil, memory/forgetting, truth/lies. Deconstruction can be seen a way to unsettle the logocentric perspectives that have unstable and untenable foundations. Thus, poststructuralist thought seeks to uncover how dichotomical distinctions (such as inside/outside) and thus exclusion occur and continue.

Through deconstruction, Derrida draws attention to the fact that dichotomies are not neutral and involve hierarchy. He states that the first term of binary oppositions is privileged over the second, it is associated with power, favour, presence, purity, propriety, fullness in contrast with the second which usually is excluded and is marginalized. However, he also adds that the overrated term cannot be taken apart from its shadow (second term). For instance, “bright” has meaning if we have in mind the concept “dark.” Therefore, deconstruction tries to show that dichotomies are dangerous and also have destructive effect. As a result, deconstruction as a re-reading and counter-reading strategy, attempts to expose anomalies or inconsistencies in a given text and to give voice to which has been systematically excluded and silenced.

According to Derrida, meaning cannot be fixed, once the text is released from the author’s hands. The reader cannot read the text without adding his thread and also weaving it. Therefore, a text cannot have a single meaning.

Double Reading

Derrida introduced the double reading method as a deconstruction style. The first reading tells in accordance with original by using its own assumptions of the dominant discourse. The main point here, however, is the second reading which tries to expose the inner contradictions and how they are unsuccessfully closed and displaced by exerting pressure on the discourse or weaknesses of the institution.

Michel Foucault

The book The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences in which Foucault focused on analysis of what knowledge meant and how this meaning changed in Western thought from the Renaissance to the present made him famous. His transdisciplinary works can generally be characterized as philosophically oriented historical research, and all of his work was part of a single project investigating how truth is produced.

Foucault was seriously influenced by Nietzsche and Heidegger. He focused on the relationship between knowledge and power, the constructive aspect of discourse and the transition from subject to subjectivity in his works.

Foucauldian discourse analysis is used by many IR scholars in their works. For example, Richard Ashley in his book seeks to expose that anarchy and sovereignty were constructed through discourse.

The Problem of Power and Knowledge

In traditional approaches, power is considered to be something that can be possessed, i.e. individuals or states have power, but some have more than others. However, Michel Foucault approached the issue of power with different perspectives from the traditional theories. He conceptualized the traditional power as ‘juridicodiscursive’ where power comes from above, from a sovereign. According to Foucault, power should not be seen as something that pre-existing entities possess but as something generated in relationships. Therefore, according to Foucault, there is no power, but there are power relations, whether it is in a family or in institutions. This means that power is no longer centralised and possessed, and may have different forms.

Another key aspect in Foucault’s thinking is that power and knowledge are two sides of the same coin. In addition, knowledge is not only power, but those who hold power at the same time define and control knowledge, and thus succeed in subordinating others to their own rule. As a result, knowledge cannot be objective or neutral.

Modern power struggles to individualize everyone through knowledge by restricting them through dichotomies, such as good/evil, man/woman, normal/abnormal, and this individualizing leads to pacification. In other words, Foucault believes that modern political power has taken individuals under its sovereignty by registering them as data to keep them under surveillance.

Thus, discourse becomes a mechanism of control and discipline within the reality it creates. A person who does not obey these rules is declared guilty or mad. However, in a different historical period, the same act may not be a crime or madness. Therefore, Foucault believes that discourse cannot be separated from the historical period in which it occurs. There is no universal reality, and meaning, truth and morality are created through discourse. That is, there is no universal and absolute understanding of truth, and truth can be limited to a certain period of time.

Foucault was also interested in the analysis of discourse that relied on power and knowledge. Discourse is an instrument of constituting knowledge together with the social practice and power relations. He asserts that meaning, truth and morality are created through discourse.

From Archaeology to Genealogy

Foucault studied the history of knowledge and power relations by means of the methodologies archaeology and genealogy.

Foucault’s notion of archaeology opposes the modernist idea that language is a source of thought on its own, not only an instrument for expressing the thoughts of those who use it. Foucault believes that there are constraints on how people are able to think at any given period. With archaeology, Foucault refers to a study of the historical conditions, underlying different methods, concepts and theories of an idea and thought that dominates a particular period.

He suggests that the researchers should consider changing historical conditions and view events/cases in their own contexts and the conditions of their own time instead of time-independent and unchanging a priori ideas. Each period has a unique epistemic structure which limits what is not to be said/thought and what can be said/thought.

Even though archaeology was a crucial method for Foucault, it could not explain the causes of discontinuities, i.e. objects or phenomena were not perceived, classified, or depicted in the same way in the transition from one historical period to another. Therefore, he worked on the new methodology ‘genealogy’ with the purpose of completing archaeology.

Genealogy deals with the imposition of present on the past. It focuses on the relationship between discourse and power, and tries to show that history is shaped within the framework of these relations and does not have continuity. To illustrate, today’s concept of democracy has undergone a lot of changes and has gained a different meaning since the democracy concept in Athens in ancient times.

According to Foucault, history is a story of domination and subjection, not a story of continuity and progression. It is a story of excluded ones with discussions and power struggles caused by the background of seemingly system, so he aims to historicize the ones excluded in history expressions.

Foucault tries to demonstrate that words, language, or discourse (utterances/statements and texts) are not as innocent as those attempted to show, and are shaped within the framework of current power/ knowledge and power relations. By deconstructing social relations, it aims to show that there are multiple perspectives by freeing them from the general narratives by creating a counter memory.

Foucault owes very much to Nietzsche for his genealogical strategy. Instead of the modern thought that idealizes a single, universal, objective and neutral perspective, Nietzsche believes that there is always more than one perspective in thought and also each perspective consists of a particular set of values. Each perspective that creates its own reality, provides a different interpretation of the same real world. Therefore, events acquire the status of ‘real’ not because they occurred but because they are remembered and because they assume a place in a narrative.

Poststructuralist thought defends that there will always be alternative perspectives and arguments during the reflection of a political event such as September 9/11. Like other poststructuralists, after a genealogical study Zehfuss remarks that if we want to understand what makes September 11 a distinctive event, we need to leave the dominant discourses, the significant powers aside. As Foucault says, “ You may continue to explain history as you have always done. But be careful: if you look very closely, if you peel away the banalities, you will notice that there is more to explain than you thought; there are crooked contours that you haven’t spotted .”

Conclusion

The most important figures in poststructuralism have been Foucault and Derrida. Foucault mainly focused on the following:

• the transition from subject to subjectivity
• the relationship between knowledge and power
• the constructive aspect of discourse

To analyse power relations and politics, he developed the methodologies archaeology and genealogy Derrida claimed the following:

• no text reflects the reality
• every structure and text (discourse and writing) contains a certain power relationship through dual oppositions
• when dual oppositions are deconstructed, the power relations and the marginalized/excluded ones can be revealed.

Derrida designed deconstruction as a method of analysis based on the following assumptions:

• Nothing in the text is random.
• Each text contains power relations.
• Deconstruction focuses on power relations, contradictions, inconsistencies in a given text.
• Meaning cannot be fixed and controlled.
• He withdraws the concession that is given to first term of binary opposition such as good/evil. Reversing the hierarchy, he gives an opportunity to re-read the text over the second term.

In brief, poststructuralism encourages to view events/cases from different perspectives by tearing down the belief and by questioning everything, i.e. deconstructing the idea.