Chapter 11

Poststructuralism

• Every understanding of international politics depends upon abstraction, representation and interpretation. That is because ‘the world’ does not present itself to us in the form of ready-made categories, theories, observations or statements.

• Political leaders, social activists, scholars and students are all involved in abstraction, representation and interpretation of ‘the world’ whether they are conscious of this or not, and whether they are engaged in theory, practice or the study of international relations.

• This does not mean, however, that anyone can simply make things up and have the products of their imagination count as legitimate knowledge. Those interpretations which dominate are one among many different possibilities: how they come to dominate is a question that leads us to interrogate the relationship between knowledge and power.

• Only critical perspectives on IR demand that we understand the importance of interpretation, inquire about the relationship between power and knowledge, and reflect on the politics of identity in the production and understanding of global affairs.

• Poststructuralism is a critical attitude rather than a ‘paradigm’ which has clear views of actors, causes and outcomes. Poststructuralism poses a series of questions about metatheory – the theory of theory – in order to understand what counts as knowledge, how particular ways of knowing come to define the field, and who can know (which includes other theories and theorists).

• Poststructuralism’s entry into IR came in the 1980s through the work of Richard Ashley, James Der Derian, Michael Shapiro and R.B.J.Walker. Much of this early writing took on the dominance of realism. For realism, the state marked the border between inside/outside, sovereignty/anarchy, us/them, duty/indifference. Poststructuralism questioned how it came to be seen as natural and inevitable to privilege state-centric accounts of world politics (particularly ones which overlook deep questions about the state, such as its political formation, economic constitution, and social exclusions). Later work has engaged more directly with political events and representations of those events.

• Resistance to poststructuralism by mainstream IR has been intense: this suggests an anxiety on the part of mainstream theories, an anxiety grounded in misconceptions about poststructuralism's supposed flight from moral responsibility, and their alleged rejection of the Enlightenment question for knowledge and progress.

• Many of the basic assumptions of empiricist epistemology are challenged by poststructuralism. All knowledge – in both the human sciences and the natural sciences – has to be concerned with the social constitution of meaning, the linguistic construction of reality and the historicity of knowledge. This reaffirms the indispensability of interpretation, and suggests that all knowledge involves a relationship with power in its mapping of the world.

• The critical attitude of poststructuralism can be found in the writing of numerous thinkers – the work of Michel Foucault is an exemplar. In Foucault’s words, ‘A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.’

• Foucault challenges all foundational accounts of the human subject. There is no universal person as is often assumed by liberal thinkers. Foucault asks how the category of the human subject has been produced historically. How have the identities of women/men, Western/Eastern, North/South, civilized/uncivilized, developed/underdeveloped, domestic/foreign, rational/irrational, and so on, been constituted over time and in different places? Poststructuralism studies the cultural practices through which the inclusions and exclusions that give meaning to the binary pairs are established.

• For example, in Discipline and Punish (1979) Foucault demonstrates how what the prison confines is as much the identity of society outside the walls as it is the prisoners on the inside. The good, civilized society constituted by the bad, barbaric prisoners it confines.

• Meaning is created by discourse. Discourse refers to a specific series of representations and practices through which meanings are produced, identities constituted, social relations established, and political and ethical outcomes made more or less possible. For example, states are made possible by a wide range of discursive practices that include immigration policies, military strategies, cultural debates about normal social behaviour, political speeches and economic investments.

• Case Study: Images of Humanitarian Crises. Visual imagery is of particular importance for international politics because it is one of the principal ways in which news from distant places is brought home. Historically, it was the photographs taken by explorers that contributed to the development of an imagined geography of east and west, civilized and barbarian etc. Much of today’s international news, through the medium of moving images, features stories about disease, famine, war and death.

• Case Study continued. Humanitarian emergencies are matters of life and death. They are constructed as an event largely through media coverage. These media materializations create a range of identities – us/them, victim/saviour – and are necessary for a response to be organised. Pictures draw attention to questions of representation. While many readers taken them as representing snapshots of reality, they are constructions which create a particular sense of placed populated by a particular kind of people.

• Case Study continued. Famine images are a good example of the creation of particular kinds of subject. Understood as a natural disaster, famine is seen as a symptom of the lack of progress that results in the death of the innocent (as Edkins argues). It is for this reason that famine images are more often than not of women and children who are barely clothed and stare passively into the lens. Similarly, outsiders are represented as dispensers of charity to victims of a natural disaster who are too weak to help themselves. Such representations of famine are so familiar they can be reproduced without any context or understanding of the local circumstances.

• Case Study continued. This discursive formation has effects on ‘us’ at the same time as it gives meaning to ‘them’. Indeed, it establishes a series of identity relations that confirm historical notions of self and other. Given that most contemporary famine imagery comes from one continent, it reproduces the imagined geography of ‘Africa’, so that a continent of 900 million people in 57 countries is homogenized into a single entity represented by a starving child (see, for example, figure 11.6). In doing this, the famine image is not creating something from nothing; rather, it is drawing on modes of representation established during the colonial period.

• In assessing poststructuralism, it is important to be clear about the purpose of the body of thought. Poststructuralism is different from most other approaches to international politics because it does not see itself as a theory, school or paradigm which produces a single account. Instead, poststructuralism is an approach, attitude or ethos that pursues critique in particular ways. It makes assessing other theories of international relations one of its objects of analysis, and approaches those paradigms with meta-theoretical questions designed to expose how they are structured. The result of a poststructuralist analysis is itself an interpretation of international politics, and as such can (and should) be subject to the same ethos of critique that gave rise to it.

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Oxford University Press, Online Resource Centre, Chapter 11.

Chapter 11

Poststructuralism