Introduction
Don't touch!
There are […] people who, instead of solving a problem, tie it in knots and make it harder for others to solve. He who does not know how to hit the nail on the head ought to be asked not to hit it at all.
Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human Footnote 1
Scylla, Charybdis, and International Relations theory
During the past two decades, the field of International Relations has experienced a growing incursion from post-structuralist and post-modernist schools of thought. To this end, we must all in some sense be grateful to those who have so steadily and patiently brought such influences to bear on what generally remains one of the more intellectually conservative fields among the social sciences. Indeed, as Roger D. Spegele has rightly suggested with regard to one of the more prominent representatives of this new wave of scholarship, we should certainly ‘appreciate [such] efforts to wake the discipline from its dogmatic slumbers’Footnote 2 – and it is precisely on this account, too, that one must acknowledge the great contributions of certain circles and tendencies of thought currently absorbed within the constructivist school, which has so richly added to the field as well.Footnote 3
Nonetheless, the footing of this new enterprise remains relatively uncertain at present: if the realist school of International Relations has sustained the most enduring series of assaults in this highly critical polemic, one can hardly avoid being struck by the extraordinary amount of time and energy expended in attacking a core theory of the discipline without ever fully establishing and demonstrating precisely how a post-structuralist or post-modernist alternative might eventually bear significant and positive fruit beyond the seemingly arcane sphere of academic debates among International Relations theorists. A theory, after all, must be able to explain more than the flaws or origins of another competing theory; it must develop some viable means of grasping its object of enquiry as a complex whole in its own right, eventually elaborating some succinct statement of method in the process. In this sense, any theoretical advance must be capable of clearly and distinctly establishing the precise contours of its methodological tenets as well as the extent to which such an approach might provide a veritable, if also reasonably delimited, breakthrough in the field. In the case of International Relations, any thoroughgoing post-structuralist or post-modernist challenge to the theoretical hegemony of realism (including either neo-realism or structural realism) would therefore be required to demonstrate some new means of grasping the range of form-engendering principles ‘transversing’Footnote 4 what realists have typically preferred to conceive as a system of relatively discrete state-entities; in so doing, such a theory would have to focus, above all, on the arrangement of various forces emerging within, through, and across individual states – all the while, of course, recognising the fact that such forces may well ‘develop more easily and to a greater extent in certain countries.’Footnote 5 The object of any such undertaking would thus hardly lie in the manner in which the theory of the international system of states is maintained and legitimated within the scholarly literature of International Relations; instead, it would focus on something far more salient, namely, the very processes through which the underlying coordinates of the international system of states are generated, regenerated, and occasionally even transformed.
It furthermore stands to reason that any theory seeking to establish itself as an alternative to traditional approaches should make absolutely certain to develop an adequate understanding of its own precursors and intellectual foundations, especially if it is to engage in making expressly heroic and often exorbitant claims. For better or worse, I shall ultimately argue on this account that the group of International Relations theorists associated with such important names as Richard K. Ashley, R. B. J. Walker, Jim George, and James Der Derian – among many others who will doubtless be familiar to readers – has largely missed the mark, consequently setting a dubious course for those genuinely interested in pursuing a more robust, illuminating, and concrete form of post-structural or post-modern analysis. In turn, one can only hope that it is not too late to right the ship, and that a more constructive future for post-structural and post-modern analyses might yet be possible, despite such a seemingly inauspicious and hugely misleading beginning in the world of International Relations literature.
Given the above, we would obviously be entirely remiss to overlook the invaluable endeavours of Darryl S. L. Jarvis, along with certain of his cohorts, in attempting to grasp the actual significance of this incursion. While the writings of such orthodox critics are much to be commended, first of all, for simply having taken the post-structuralist and post-modernist projects seriously enough to have read, often with great care and attention to detail, not only their contemporary proponents in the world of International Relations theory but also many of their most important intellectual precursors,Footnote 6 it is their broader criticisms and concerns that interest us more directly here. Objections are, of course, legion in Jarvis's account, and a great many are, in fact, well worth considering. The most disconcerting, however, clearly consists in the stubborn claim that must be acknowledged, by now almost with a certain degree of inevitability (and doubtless even by those who remain, or once were, relatively sympathetic to this curious and challenging breed of new scholarship), namely, that the post-structuralist and post-modernist projects have thus far failed to establish any authentic theoretical innovations capable of providing us with a viable framework for furthering our understanding of International Relations.Footnote 7
In a rather damning passage from International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism, Jarvis offers a criticism of George's treatment of political realism as an ideological justification of American interests that might well prove emblematic as one of the most notable shortcomings to be found in this new breed of scholarship as a whole:
The startling banality of this observation […] is that George has rediscovered realism and how nationalism and self-interest are at work not only in international politics but also in the articulation of theory in International Relations. However, this is not old-fashioned Yankee imperialism cast in terms of a spatial neocolonial dimension as with the ‘new-left’ of the 1960s and 1970s, but for George an imperialism of discourse and thinking practices, where certain images, modes of conceptualization, and textual practices and readings are obscured by an ethnocentric intelligentsia who define thinking space in such a way as to make invisible gender, women, patriarchy, people of color, issues of race, sexual politics, and other ‘marginal’ discourses.Footnote 8
The implications of such a criticism are nearly as devastating as the language in which it is expressed; and yet, by the same token, it is difficult to avoid the admission that this very misgiving will be quickly and easily recognised by almost anyone who has read this literature as closely as Jarvis and his followers have. If such a claim is both fair and accurate, which I believe it is, then one would have no choice but to conclude that the post-structuralist and post-modernist projects ultimately offer us little more than an extended probing of the types of insights already long available in the writings of Thucydides,Footnote 9 Niccolò Machiavelli,Footnote 10 and Karl MarxFootnote 11 – the formula for which is by now highly familiar to us all: particular interests seek to justify themselves as universal interests, in the process employing broad rhetorical gestures and ideological appeals in order to legitimate and mask what would otherwise be revealed as their own naked self-interest. Perhaps more dubiously still, it seems in Jarvis' account, specifically, that these projects are informed far more by a distinctly academic style of ‘political resistance’Footnote 12 than any thoroughgoing scholarly focus on the real issues, whether practical or theoretical, of the field,Footnote 13 thus proving in the end more a distraction than a breakthrough. To this end, too, Spegele has probably voiced the most devastating criticism of all – in this instance directing his comments towards a figure who is unquestionably one of this new wave of scholarship's most prominent representatives – when he writes of Ashley's reading of Derrida and Foucault that ‘it is far from obvious that his interpretations of these thinkers are sound.’Footnote 14
Nor, either, should we imagine that Jarvis and his followers are in any way alone in reaching such conclusions, for others have expressed similar reservations as well – albeit from rather different quarters and aimed in very different directions. The late Fred Halliday, for example, evinced a series of similarly devastating criticisms of post-modernism and multiculturalism in his discussions of Orientalism and the endemic overuse, if not outright abuse, of cultural explanations in the contemporary social sciences.Footnote 15 On this account, Halliday was even more emphatic than Terry O'Callaghan, for instance, who has argued that ‘[p]ostmodern approaches look as impoverished as realist perspectives’Footnote 16 when it comes ‘to confront[ing] some of the dilemmas that policymakers do on a daily basis’.Footnote 17 For Halliday, it was not simply a matter of practical expedience alone; rather, the danger of parting ways with the intellectual foundations of the Enlightenment represents, in his view, not merely a perilous prospect for finding realistic solutions to real problems, but, in its misuse of theory and science at the empirical level, it furthermore opens the door to all manner of ethical delusions, particularly when it comes to such crucial issues as establishing universal foundations for human rights – and, as those familiar with Halliday's work will know, one of his central claims was that a stable international order is best predicated upon a just international order.Footnote 18 Halliday struck at the heart of the matter more convincingly still when he identified the unrecognised threat within such intellectual movements: in their obvious failure to appreciate history, they have given rise to the rather embarrassing tendency to reify and essentialise the plastic nature of culture itself – a matter of deep concern for those who take the dual problem of human rights and democracy seriously,Footnote 19 not to mention for those who remain committed to the fundamental tenets of social science.
The discipline of International Relations therefore finds itself momentarily trying to negotiate safe passage between a Scylla and Charybdis of vast theoretical and empirical proportions: on the one hand, it is confronted by young and vibrant schools of thought, very much in vogue and willing to make bold forays into uncharted areas of research; on the other, it faces an equally stunning array of criticisms and concerns from sceptics and detractors, some of whom happen to be counted among the most pre-eminent names in the field.Footnote 20 We could develop the criticisms and concerns set forth by the latter almost ad infinitum, of course, but most scholars in the field will be all too aware of those voiced by their preferred camp; consequently, it should suffice here simply to state that, despite an immense amount of print and discussion over the past two decades, the jury is still deep in deliberation with regard to appraising the lasting significance of post-structuralism and post-modernism for the study of International Relations. Unfortunately, then, I must further prevail upon the reader's indulgence, for the purpose of this article, and indeed several others soon to follow, consists only secondarily in directly restating or contesting what has already been developed and explicated so passionately and extensively by the main protagonists of these new waves of thought; the purpose here, rather, consists primarily in offering something that has been conspicuously absent from their discussions, namely, a succinct statement of method – devoid of ‘[e]thereality’,Footnote 21 as Jarvis might say – that might, with some degree of modesty, more clearly and distinctly establish the precise contours of such modes of enquiry. In so doing, I propose to return to several of the founding figures of post-structuralist and post-modernist thought so as better to formulate exactly what might be derived from them if we are more firmly to ground a series of related investigations in the field of International Relations. My focus in these pages shall therefore rest broadly on several sets of issues emanating from the writings of Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze – each with a strong Nietzschean wind at his back and an equally strong predilection against both teleological thinking and the tendency towards reification so common among many contemporary theorists of this persuasion. Since the anti-foundationalist line of reasoning that lies at the core of the post-structuralist and post-modernist projects is often misconstrued as a lack of coherent methodology, it shall be my aim in this initial discussion to develop the ontological premises and implications of this body of thought specifically with regard to the organisation of forces at work in the construction of International Relations, for it is precisely these modes of organisation which are now most badly in need of fuller explanation and which also stand to gain the most from a clear and distinct discussion of these thinkers in particular.
As the reader, doubtless, has already adduced, it is my opinion that the cause of developing a theory of International Relations appropriate to the post-structuralist and post-modernist schools of thought has been haphazardly posed from the very onset and can only be corrected at this point in time by wiping the slate clean,Footnote 22 and indeed, potentially, by taking on board number of key developments occurring within certain constructivists circles.Footnote 23 Since the group of theorists associated with the self-proclaimed ‘dissident’Footnote 24 school of International Relations has consistently failed to conceptualise the ‘power-knowledge relationship’Footnote 25 adequately, the dynamics between the political reality of the state and the discursive reality of thought have remained perpetually, if not terminally, obscured in their writings. To this end, little is to be gained from ceaseless attempts to dismiss realism as a theoretical instruments of power's vested interests – such grand theories and structural narratives were always too global in effect to engage the research efforts of the better post-structuralists and post-modernists; instead, as Foucault once wrote, one must look towards ‘subjugated knowledges’,Footnote 26 the ‘historical contents’Footnote 27 of which ‘have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systematization’Footnote 28 and ‘which involve […] a particular, local, regional knowledge.’Footnote 29
This point is absolutely crucial and hence requires some brief attention, for, contrary to much that has been written on the subject in the International Relations literature, Foucault is no way interested in global theoretical explanations of human behaviour (whether realistFootnote 30 or neo-realist,Footnote 31 philosophical history à la Hegel,Footnote 32 historical materialism à la Marx,Footnote 33 or modernisation theory à la Rostow);Footnote 34 rather, he is interested in ‘blocks of historical knowledge which were present but disguised within the body of functionalist and systematizing theory.’Footnote 35 The titles and subtitles of several of Foucault's most famous texts give us some inkling of his central preoccupations: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason; The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison – ‘a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath required level of cognition or scientificity.’Footnote 36 Here, it cannot be emphasised strongly enough that these knowledges have tended to proliferate in the modern age, that they have no readily identifiable centre, and that they are hardly attributable in a directly causal or ‘univocal’Footnote 37 manner to the designs, for example, of either bourgeois class domination or the national interest. What appears to be ‘global’,Footnote 38 however, is ‘the functioning of […] a society of normalization’,Footnote 39 and it is for this reason that we shall endeavour at a later juncture in this article to indicate a very specific set of related discourses concerning the ‘art of government’,Footnote 40 as it is precisely this region of knowledge, along with its accompanying methods and practices, that would at last provide the post-structuralists and post-modernists with a positive object of study – and perhaps even one of some use in understanding a number of the actual problems facing International Relations.
Furthermore, if the power-knowledge relationship has remained profoundly underdeveloped in the post-structuralist and post-modernist literature of International Relations theory, then it must be acknowledged that the actual history of these subjugated knowledges hardly appears at all in the work of these theorists. Quite amazingly, in fact, the dual problem of ‘temporality [Zeitlichkeit]’ and ‘historicity [Geschichtlichkeit]’Footnote 41 is almost altogether absent in these writings, in turn raising grave concerns with regard to one of the most cherished of all ontological concepts for these theorists, namely, that of becoming as opposed to being. Drawing from the lengthy passage from Jarvis cited earlier, we are consequently tempted to infer that these theorists have fought so long with the realist monster that they have themselves come very much to resemble the realist monsterFootnote 42 – and, once again, we find ourselves with little choice but to accept Spegele's suggestion that this new wave of scholars has radically misunderstood the corpus of work upon which they have supposedly built their broader critique of International Relations theory. This would mean in turn that, while Jarvis and his cohorts are most probably correct in their assessment of the dissidents of International Relations theory, something might yet be salvaged by attempting to establish some preliminary outlines of post-structuralist and post-modernist theory anew.
Before embarking on any such effort, it will thus prove necessary to offer a brief sketch of the basic intellectual traditions involved in the debate and their relation to one another. As the concepts of post-structuralism and post-modernism have themselves been so poorly defined, some clear and distinct explanation of these basic terms is required, particularly for those in the field who are somewhat unfamiliar with the terrain – and it is to this task that we must briefly direct our attention before proceeding to make some recommendations as to their actual significance for contemporary International Relations theory.
Post-structuralism, post-modernism, and power-knowledge
Structures are necessarily unconscious, by virtue of the elements, relations and points that compose them. Every structure is an infrastructure, a micro-structure. In a certain way, they are not actual. What is actual is that in which the structure is incarnated or rather what the structure constitutes when it is incarnated.
Deleuze, How Do We Recognize Structuralism? Footnote 43
The project of modernity came into focus during the eighteenth century. That project amounted to an extraordinary intellectual effort on the part of the Enlightenment thinkers ‘to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic.’ The idea was to use the accumulation of knowledge generated by many individuals working freely and creatively for the pursuit of human emancipation and the enrichment of daily life. The scientific domination of nature promised freedom from scarcity, want, and the arbitrariness of natural calamity. The development of rational forms of social organization and rational modes of thought promised liberation from the irrationalities of myth, religion, superstition, release from the arbitrary use of power as well as from the dark side of our own human natures. Only through such a project could the universal, eternal, and the immutable qualities of all humanity be revealed.
Enlightenment thought […] embraced the idea of progress, and actively sought that break with history which modernity espouses. It was, above all, a secular movement that sought the demystification and desacralization of knowledge and social organization in order to liberate human beings from their chains.
Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity Footnote 44
It should come as no surprise – especially during an age of mass-consumption, in which ideas have become almost as much commodities as actual things – to find the terms of popular cultural trends coming so quickly into play that they lose almost any meaning they might have initially had in rough proportion to the rapidity and extent of their public dissemination. This situation has proven even more aggravating for a term such as post-modernism, perhaps above all, since its appearance on the historical stage coincided so closely with the advent of the World Wide Web, the end of the Cold War, an increasing awareness of globalisation, and a confluence of other related cultural factors which, as a whole, almost immediately dissolved any trace of its initial meaning and value as a concept. The case, of course, is not so difficult with post-structuralism, which was always more of a specialised academic term; notwithstanding its loose association with post-modernism, its fate in the social sciences was less to have been popularly confused and contorted than simply to have receded into the distance on the intellectual horizon. It therefore behooves us, indeed from the very onset, to clarify the meaning of these two terms and subsequently to underscore one of the most important conceptual innovations to appear in the course of their development, namely, that of power-knowledge relations – the latter being of pivotal significance in this instance, specifically insofar as the poorly conceived meaning of this term has produced a good deal of mischief in the literature of International Relations.
Not surprisingly, post-structuralism emerged directly in relation to structuralism,Footnote 45 its intellectual predecessor. While there can be no question here of developing a lengthy and detailed discussion of the current established by structuralism's two greatest proponents, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)Footnote 46 and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009),Footnote 47 one might nevertheless state that their research was ultimately directed towards grasping the underlying deep structure (base or substructure) that determines the subsequent structures (superstructures) of social and cultural life. In the case of Saussure, it would be the structure of language, an impersonal and independent system of signs, which defines the system of signification (semiology) in advance of individual human agency; in the case of Lévi-Strauss, it would be the fundamental structures of the mind, universal laws which are roughly similar throughout all societies and cultures, as evidenced in the principles governing kinship and primitive mythology (anthropology). Casting a tremendously rich and fecund shadow over French intellectual life in particular during the 1950s and 1960s, structuralism sought ‘to find the underlying system of relationships, the structure, within which any individual event could come to have a meaning.’Footnote 48
While such figures as Roland Barthes (the French literary critic and semiologist),Footnote 49 Jacques Lacan (the French neo-Freudian psychoanalyst),Footnote 50 and Foucault himself would all draw heavily on the various breakthroughs of structuralist thought and eventually, if each in his own unique manner, move decisively in the direction of post-structuralism, the example of Louis Althusser (the French Marxist) is in many senses emblematic of the structuralist enterprise in twentieth-century social science – and, most likely, in a manner that is easily recognisable to those in the field of International Relations. As he wrote in his seminal work, For Marx: ‘On the one hand, the structure (the economic base: the forces of production and the relations of production); on the other, the superstructure (the State and all the legal, political and ideological forms).’Footnote 51 What we therefore encounter as a pervasive and consistent element throughout each of these various tendencies of the structuralist project is a persistent attempt to identify and elucidate immutable and transhistorical foundations for understanding human activities in their widest possible variety. It is for this reason that the comments of Richard T. and Fernande M. DeGeorge are no less instructive today than they were when they first appeared over thirty years ago:
What Marx, Freud, and Saussure have in common, and what they share with present-day structuralists, is a conviction that surface events and phenomena are to be explained by structures, data, and phenomena below the surface. The explicit and obvious is to be explained by and is determined – in some sense of the term – by what is implicit and not obvious. The attempt to uncover deep structures, unconscious motivations, and underlying causes which account for human actions at a more basic and profound level than do individual conscious decisions, and which shape, influence, and structure these decisions, is an enterprise which unites, Marx, Freud, Saussure, and modern structuralists.Footnote 52
It was precisely against the centrality of these supposed deep structures, and the purportedly all-encompassing rules accompanying them, that post-structuralism would increasingly rebel during the course of the 1960s, in the process emphasising difference instead of similarity, and hence the attendant problem of novelty as opposed to the monotonous repetition of universal patterns.Footnote 53 Whereas structuralism had focused heavily on timeless or transhistorical systems of signification and other practical activity, post-structuralism would introduce the dual problem of temporality and historicity with a vengeance. While we can do little more here than to provide a thumbnail sketch of the movement, two important examples will doubtless prove illustrative for present purposes; we shall thus focus our attention on Foucault's treatment of cultural codes and Deleuze's concept of the event.
It was during roughly the period of The Order of Things (1966) – more appropriately titled Les mots et les choses in the original French – that we find clear evidence in Foucault's writings of a distinct movement away from the tendencies of structuralism and towards those of post-structuralism. While Foucault was clearly interested in indicating, though not without careful and well-considered qualification,Footnote 54 underlying cultural codes, he was also familiar enough with some of Nietzsche and Heidegger's most important insightsFootnote 55 to insist upon the ‘profound historicity’Footnote 56 of such codes, that is, to emphasise the necessity of grasping such structures in terms of their ‘emergence’Footnote 57 within a specific temporal horizonFootnote 58 (‘the horizon of Being’Footnote 59). In this sense, rather than viewing temporality as a continuous incarnation of elementary structures (structuralism), Foucault would view it as the site of a continual process of displacement, indeed as a discontinuous plane on which different and novel structures emerge as others in turn fall by the waysideFootnote 60 (post-structuralism).Footnote 61 To this end, it was perhaps Deleuze who most aptly characterised the post-structuralist shift in Foucault's earlier writings when he wrote that they present us with ‘events of pure thought, radical or transcendental events that determine a space of knowledge for any one era.’Footnote 62
But it was also Deleuze, of course, who would more fully radicalise the concept of the event than anyone else. Following Nietzsche's suggestion that ‘the greatest thoughts are the greatest events’Footnote 63 and that the world revolves ‘not around the inventors of new noise, but around the inventors of new values’,Footnote 64 he would develop an entire theory around microscopic, almost indiscernible processes of becoming, moments in which fundamental transformations occur – moments in which, for better or worse, a world is reconstituted anew.Footnote 65 While Deleuze's treatment of events was distinctly revolutionary in character,Footnote 66 it would in turn prove highly suggestive for much of Foucault's work, and maybe even his later work most specifically, particularly since its ideational emphasis compellingly opened the path, once again, to posing the problem of novelty in a serious fashion and, subsequently, to attempting to elucidate those crucial moments in which processes of transformation reach critical massFootnote 67 in what Foucault himself would later characterise as ‘eventalization’.Footnote 68
We shall return to the prospect of a more empirically-oriented discussion of such becomings in due course, but we would do well simply to maintain a sharp awareness of the strong sense of novelty at work in post-structural analysis as we proceed to our discussion of post-modernism.
As is well-known, the concept of modernity has long been associated with Western civilisation's potential mastery over, or at least the diminution of, what Freud once famously identified as the three principal sources of human suffering: ‘the superior power of nature, the feebleness of our own bodies, and the inadequacy of the regulations which adjust the mutual relationships of human beings in the family, the state and society.’Footnote 69 Yet it was in the writings of Freud and also Weber, perhaps two of modernity's greatest and most important proponents, that certain misgivings with regard to the Enlightenment project of emancipation were already becoming apparent. As each of them so powerfully noted, modern civilisation represents a complex and many-sided phenomenon, for the very ‘intellectualization’,Footnote 70 ‘rationalization’,Footnote 71 and ‘discipline’Footnote 72 upon which it is based inevitably require an accompanying and hardly inconsiderable degree of ‘disenchantment’Footnote 73 and ‘repression’Footnote 74 in relation to man's ‘psycho-physical apparatus’Footnote 75 – to be sure, as part and parcel of the selfsame process of scientific and cultural progress. Moreover, if the horrors of World War One and World War Two would each in their own way reveal the more subterranean forces at work in civilisation's growing mastery over what Foucault once described as ‘a sort of complex composed of men and things’,Footnote 76 it must likewise be emphasised that a certain sense of unease had pervaded Western philosophy since around the time of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was published during the late-eighteenth century, as the problem of truth had here been posed in the most astonishing manner. Indeed, as Schopenhauer, one of Kant's greatest admirers and critics once aptly put it: ‘Kant's teaching produces a fundamental change in every mind that has grasped it.’Footnote 77
According to Kant, human reason was capable of extraordinary things: in addition to providing us with firm and productive foundations for theoretical (scientific)Footnote 78 and practical (moral)Footnote 79 activity, it also affords us compelling prospects for historical progress and the justification of evil.Footnote 80 Nonetheless, for Kant, human reason was also inherently limited: while capable of providing rational legislation in the scientific and moral domains, it was entirely incapable of explaining the ultimate nature and meaning of the universe (the noumenal world of the thing-in-itself),Footnote 81 which, in Kant's estimation, was essentially unknowable.Footnote 82 It might thus be argued that Kantian philosophy deserves the curious distinction of being, in one and the same instant, both the crowning achievement of Enlightenment modernity as well as the speculative gateway to the post-modern experiment eventually to follow in its wake: on the hand, it had demonstrated that the changing, novel, and not infrequently shocking contours of the ‘age of Enlightenment’Footnote 83 were themselves legislated by reason; on the other, it had opened the door to the possibility that reason was perhaps itself merely of ‘human, all too human’Footnote 84 origin.
For the sake of brevity, we shall presume that the modernist tradition will be familiar enough to International Relations scholars – if not necessarily though the writings of Hegel and the early-Marx, then surely through Rostow or maybe even Fukuyama's very interesting, if also horribly misguided, post-Cold War text, The End of History and the Last Man; the post-modernist tradition, however, has been presented much less authoritatively in the International Relations literature and therefore requires some long-overdue clarification if it is to avoid lapsing into the dead-end of overly simplistic and utterly embarrassing caricature.
In a very important and well-considered text from the mid-1980s, Gianni Vattimo followed the path initiated by Nietzsche and Heidegger in developing a considerably more modest and sober definition of post-modernism than those to which we have typically become accustomed today. In so doing, he emphasised ‘the “weakening” of Being’,Footnote 85 stating that we can in no way understand the meaning of post-modernity ‘as long as man and Being are conceived of – metaphysically, Platonically, etc. – in terms of stable structures’.Footnote 86 To this end, Vattimo links post-modernity with ‘post-history’Footnote 87 and the ‘post-metaphysical era’Footnote 88 as a whole, ultimately suggesting that it is no longer possible to think in terms of teleological laws of historical development nor in terms of metaphysical essences through which one might gain access to the underlying natures of man, state, or society. Radicalising the Kantian distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds, Vattimo would further develop the insights of Nietzsche and Heidegger so as to show that philosophy simply has no right to make such claims to immutable laws or essences.
Much like post-structuralism, then, the key to an alert and intelligent post-modernism lies not in making exorbitant or heroic claims with regard to the impossibility or non-existence of truth, but rather in relativisingFootnote 89 the all too easily presumed finality and inevitability of modernity,Footnote 90 in grasping its novelty and innovations as well as its limitations and paradoxes, and, above all, in insisting on careful attention to its own unique cultural preconditions as opposed to its historical or metaphysical necessity. Indeed, as Nietzsche himself once suggested, such an intellectual gambit should be conceived more as an extension and radicalisation of the Enlightenment project than a return to pre-Enlightenment myth, theology, superstition, or barbarism of any variety.Footnote 91 In this sense, one might even propose that there is a profoundly novel form of empiricism, even positivism, at work in certain of the best post-modern projects,Footnote 92 for, insofar as we endeavour to understand the world, it behooves us not to lean too heavily upon teleological preconceptions or any other metaphysical generalities for intellectual sustenance – and it is a tremendous pity that the methodological precept to avoid such forms of reification and functionalism has been almost entirely lost on a superabundant number of theorists currently claiming the mantle of post-modernism, not least in the rarefied world of International Relations theory.
Given the characterisations presented above, we should now be prepared to summarise the broader theoretical argument set forth in the confluence of post-structuralism and post-modernism, subsequently establishing their corresponding conception of power-knowledge relations, for it is perhaps this concept in particular that has produced the most mischief and confusion in the International Relations literature.
Since, according to these perspectives, neither man nor history have predetermined essences or iron laws of development, their ultimate natures must be grasped as largely indeterminate. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to presume that either man, the state, or society determine themselves entirely autonomously; to a considerable extent, rather, they are determined in advance by certain structures that antedate their own temporal existence, though not that of history itself. These structures may hardly, therefore, be deemed timeless or static; instead, they must be grasped as the product of transformative events occurring along the plane of history itself. Foucault, of course, has captured this matter quite neatly in a famous remark from The Order of Things: ‘The fundamental codes of a culture – those governing its language, its schema of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices – establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home.’Footnote 93 Consequently, these writings point less towards a timeless vision of ‘the episteme of Western culture’Footnote 94 than to a specific series of constitutive ruptures and discontinuities within the course of its historical development.Footnote 95
We shall have more to say of these ruptures and discontinuities in due course, but the final task of our discussion in this section must consist in clarifying the constitutive, if ultimately decentralised,Footnote 96 aspect of modern power-knowledge relations and, once conceived more rigorously, their potential implications for International Relations theory.
If post-structuralism and post-modernism respectively reject anything along the lines of either ‘formal structures with universal values’Footnote 97 (the repetition of transhistorical structures) or an absolute foundation for the ‘Being of beings’Footnote 98 (the teleological or metaphysical necessity of modernity), then it is plain to see that they must both view power-knowledge as a type of ongoing construction in which, as Nietzsche once put it, ‘[o]ur values are interpreted into things’:Footnote 99
Man projects his drive to truth, his ‘goal’ in a certain sense, outside himself as a world that has being, as a metaphysical world, as a ‘thing-in-itself’, as a world already in existence. His needs as a creator invent the world upon which he works, anticipate it; this anticipation (this ‘belief’ in truth) is his support.Footnote 100
It is for this reason that Heidegger, in the midst of developing Nietzsche's theory of knowledge in relation to the will to power, was prone to speaking of it in terms of the ‘poetizing essence of reason’ – not in the sense that philosophy and science are naive fantasies, but in the sense that they always refer to some ‘higher origin’Footnote 101 beyond the objects that are perceived immediately through the senses. As Heidegger explains in a famous, if quite quotidian, example, we tend to posit sameness or identity as a means of dissolving the stubborn and inevitable reality of difference and change; and yet, in the same breath, we must recognise that this very positing is itself a creative act, based upon the projection of the selfsame – a positing that is consequently replete with effects, even if the very projection that is posited does not, in actual fact, in any way exist either in-itself or in perpetuum.
Assuming that we frequently come across a lone tree outside on a meadow slope, a particular birch, the manifold of colors, shades, light, atmosphere has a different character according to the time of day and year, and also according to the changing perspective of our perception, our distance, and our mood; and yet it always this ‘identical’ tree. It is ‘identical’, not subsequent to our ascertaining the matter through comparisons (as though it proved to be, after all, the ‘identical’ tree), but the other way around; our way of approaching the tree always already looks for the ‘identical’. Not as though the changing aspects escaped us; on the contrary, only if in advance we posit something beyond the variability of what gives itself, something that is not at hand in the self-giving given, an ‘identity’, that is, a selfsame, can we experience the magic of the change of aspects.
Such positing of the tree as the same is in a way a positing of something that does not exist, namely, in the sense of something to be found at hand. Such positing of something ‘identical’ is thus a creation and an invention. In order to determine and think the tree in its actually given appearance, its sameness must have been created beforehand. This irrepressible presupposing of a selfsame, that is, of a sameness, this creative character, is the essence of reason and thinking. For this reason, creation must always occur before there can be thinking in the usual sense.Footnote 102
The play of identity and non-identity is impossible to dismiss in this passage, especially if we are, first of all, in any way attentive to some of the Nietzschean overtones that are, unfortunately, somewhat eclipsed in Heidegger's rather distinctive treatment of the matter, and, secondly, if we reflect back on Heidegger's remarks subsequent to our reading of Foucault: on the one hand, we ‘impose upon becoming the character of being,”Footnote 103 thus imposing “upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require’;Footnote 104 on the other, this imposition is also, at the same time, potentially a means of obscuring the process of becoming on both the subjective and objective sides of knowledge itself, for it always runs the risk of remaining fixed at the initial moment of its creation and hence of never moving beyond this moment into the ever-fluctuating realm of ‘real’Footnote 105 things.Footnote 106
Such a proposition would therefore mean that not only does becoming occur just as readily in the subject that knows as well as the object that is known, but also, as Deleuze once wrote, in ‘the movement of the surface’,Footnote 107 or the discourse that serves to ‘enframe’Footnote 108 both subject and object as such.Footnote 109
At this juncture, it is not difficult to discern precisely where the post-structuralist and post-modernist schools of International Relations theory have run aground. As we have already easily inferred from Jarvis, they remain entirely unable to move in any way beyond the level of mere ‘ideology critique’Footnote 110 because, despite all their claims to the contrary, they have never been able to conceive of power-knowledge relations as effectively constitutive or as emanating from a broadarray of different ‘relays’;Footnote 111 rather they have continually viewed power-knowledge as essentially legitimating and ideological in nature, as the product of centralised forces. Consequently, they have tended to cast the relationship between knowledge and national interests far too neatly, thus blocking the way toward a more provocative treatment of the Western episteme in which knowledge would be seen as a formative and inventive capacity that is itself closely related to the development of very specific modes of governance. Moreover, it is for this reason as well that they have hitherto been unable to present any thoroughgoing methodological contribution to the field, instead relying negatively on a series of supposed ‘unmaskings’Footnote 112 of the contradictions and vested interests within mainstream theoretical currents.
To this extent, Der Derian's famous remark regarding ‘the big American car of International Relations theory’Footnote 113 is particularly telling; not only does he far too easily conflate a body of state-centric principles and theories that have been evolving since roughly the time of the Peloponnesian War, the Renaissance, and the Treaty of Westphalia with an ideological justification of post-war American foreign policy interests, but, perhaps more disconcertingly still, he completely fails to see what was ultimately at stake in the writings of several of his most favoured French thinkers, namely, the collective, or even ‘pre-individual’,Footnote 114 organisation of the Western episteme. Indeed, in suggesting that theory merely provides ideological justification for the pursuit of political interests (a mere ideational supplement to material and strategic objectives), Der Derian overlooks, somewhat astonishingly, one of the greatest and most fundamental insights of the initial wave of post-structuralist and post-modernist thought – to cite Foucault in an important interview from 1978:
We live in a social universe in which the formation, circulation, and utilization of knowledge present a fundamental question. If the accumulation of capital has been an essential feature of our society, the accumulation of knowledge has not been any less so. Now, the exercise, production, and accumulation of knowledge cannot be dissociated from the mechanisms of power; complex relations exist which must be analyzed. From the sixteenth century on it has always been considered that the development of the forms and contents of knowledge was one of the greatest guarantees of the liberation of humanity. It is a postulate of our Western civilization that has acquired a universal character, accepted more or less by everyone. It is a fact, however – I was not the first to ascertain this – that the formation of the great systems of knowledge has also had effects and functions of subjection and rule. This leads us to reexamine more or less entirely the postulate according to which the development of knowledge is undoubtedly the guarantee of liberation […] I tried to show how a certain type of power that was exercised on individuals through their upbringing, through the formation of their personalities, was connected in the West to the birth not only of an ideology but also a regime of the liberal kind. In other political and social systems – the absolutist monarchy, feudalism, etc. – an analogous exercise of power on individuals would not have been possible. I always analyze quite precise and localized phenomena: for example, the formation of disciplinary systems in eighteenth-century Europe. I don't do this to say that Western civilization is a ‘disciplinary civilization’ in all its aspects. The systems of discipline are applied by one group upon another. There is a difference between governing and being governed. And I emphasize that. Then, I take pains to explain adequately why these systems arose in a determinate period, in which country, in response to which needs; consequently, I don't speak of societies that wouldn't be specified in time and geographical location. I don't really see how anyone can complain that I don't establish differences, for example, between regimes that are totalitarian or not. In the eighteenth century, totalitarian states, in the modern sense, didn't exist.Footnote 115
That the exercise, production, and accumulation of knowledge should be linked to the mechanisms of power is hardly a revelation – Francis Bacon had already anticipated as much in the seventeenth century;Footnote 116 what is far more striking in Foucault's remark is the emphasis on the collective formation, circulation, and utilisation of knowledge; the emphasis on regimes; the emphasis on historical and geographical specificity; and the emphasis on localised phenomena. Foucault is undoubtedly alluding to something very different from timeless, transhistorical structures or, indeed, any essentialising form of identity politics; rather, he is tracing the outlines of a completely distinctive methodological shift in which researchers would attune themselves to the relationship between the various features of the Western episteme and their corresponding practices, or what he once jointly termed ‘practical systems’,Footnote 117 along with the means through which this relationship affects the everyday governance of the body politic, omnes et singulatim:Footnote 118 the ‘micro-physics’Footnote 119 of power entailed in shaping and constituting subjects as such, or what he frequently termed, in different ways throughout many of his later writings, the process ‘subjectification’Footnote 120 – be it of states, corporations, societies, markets, or individuals.
It is precisely on this account that we can at last begin to see the path forward to a new and more productive horizon for those interested in developing a post-structuralist or post-modernist school of International Relations. If realism has perpetually sought to focus on what occurs between states, whether it be conflict or cooperation, a new agenda for International Relations theory, and one very much in keeping with the above, would consist, first of all, in breaking the field's age-old taboo of not looking inside the state, as it is within states and their various means of governing the complex composed of men and things that we find another realm of real ideational, material, and institutional activity of tremendous import to International Relations; secondly, any thoroughgoing post-structuralist or post-modernist theory of International Relations would also need to take careful account of movements across states rather then merely focusing on what occurs between them. Stretching both backwards and forwards along the path that leads both to and from conflict and cooperation, one would thus quickly discover the historicity of the state, its ‘Proteus nature’,Footnote 121 and the fact that the state is not merely an abstraction existing in relation to other abstractions, but, rather, a part of an active process that must constantly renew itself if it is to survive in the relation to other active processes.Footnote 122
Towards a new post-structuralist and post-modernist agenda: from modern science to modern political power
[…] man in the technological age is, in a particularly striking way, challenged forth into revealing. Such revealing concerns nature, above all, as the chief storehouse of the standing energy reserve. Accordingly, man's ordering attitude and behavior display themselves first in the rise of modern physics as an exact science. Modern science's way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces. Modern physics is not experimental because it applies apparatus to the questioning of nature. The reverse is true. Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up this way.
Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology Footnote 123
Maybe what is really important for our modernity – that is, for our present – is not so much the étatisation of society, as the ‘governmentalization’ of the state.
We live in an era of ‘governmentality’ first discovered in the eighteenth century. This governmentalization of the state is a singularly paradoxical phenomenon, since if in fact the problems of governmentality and the techniques of government have become the only political issue, the only real place for political struggle and contestation, this is because the governmentalization of the state is at the same time what has permitted the state to survive, and it is possible to suppose that if the state is what it is today, this is so precisely thanks to this governmentality, which is at once central and external to the state, since it is the tactics of the government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on; thus the state can only be understood in its survival and limits on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality.
Foucault, Governmentality Footnote 124
Phenomena, things, organisms, societies, consciousness and spirits are signs, or rather symptoms, and themselves reflect states of forces […] The mode of existence is the state of forces insofar as it forms a type which can be expressed in signs or symptoms.
Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy Footnote 125
For perhaps too long now, International Relations theory has treated the state in an analogous fashion to Aristotle's ‘unmoved mover’,Footnote 126 that is to say, as a metaphysical reality, as ‘eternal, substance, and actuality’,Footnote 127 as an ideal and timeless unity – as causa sui. To this end, the post-structuralist and post-modernist causes would be far better served by focusing systematically on an ‘historico-critical’Footnote 128 reappropriation of this reality than on continually seeking to unmask the manner in which it perpetually goes about disguising its true interests, for it is the field's central unit of analysis, after all, that remains most badly in need of further study and evaluation. Insofar as International Relations theorists have tended to follow a certain strain – in fact, merely the concluding strain – of Hobbesian thought in conceiving the state as a ‘Mortall [sic] God’,Footnote 129 those wishing to challenge such traditional theories should begin by demonstrating to what degree the state is not merely cause but also effect. Beyond all the various forms of inter-state competition and cooperation, the post-structuralists and post-modernists would subsequently have something of profound value to offer the field. By concentrating on what occurs within, through, and across states instead of between them, real theoretical innovations would be made possible through the consideration of events that are considerably less obvious in significance than, for example, either wars or treaties. Indeed, such a shift in focus would allow theorists to concern themselves with events ensuing from the very forces that seize hold of states – forces often having much to do, in turn, with their very survival and demise, particularly when it comes to innovations in what Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose have followed Foucault in conceiving as the ‘discursive character of governmentality’Footnote 130 and its corresponding ‘technologies of government’.Footnote 131
There can be no question here of entering into a lengthy and elaborate discussion of the empirical foundations of this theory, as this matter will soon be properly detailed in a subsequent paper; in the space remaining, however, we shall simply endeavour to suggest the provisional contours of its most basic concepts.
Historians as diverse as Karl Marx,Footnote 132 Jacob Burckhardt,Footnote 133 Lewis Mumford,Footnote 134 Antonio Negri,Footnote 135 Gerhard Oestreich,Footnote 136 R. Po-Chia Hsia,Footnote 137 Martin van CreveldFootnote 138have each brilliantly demonstrated the extent to which the state, or indeed any other form of political life, can only be conceived in relation to the ideational, material, and technological forces transversing it. These studies therefore afford us a series of profound insights into the manner in which political formations are organised not only in relation to commerce, industrialisation, imperialism, and capital in general, but also, for example, in relation to Renaissance Humanism, the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, Neo-stoicism, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Mass-Mobilization. And yet the salience of these studies is only increased by placing them within the context of several key insights first set forth by Heidegger and subsequently developed, albeit along a rather different trajectory, by Foucault as well.
In his ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics’ and ‘The Question Concerning Technology’,Footnote 139 Heidegger embarked on a path of analysis designed specifically to establish the mode of knowing and ordering distinct to the modern (Western) world, especially as characterised by modern philosophy and science. In so doing, he was particularly concerned to develop the means by which nature has been constructed as an object of study, in turn effectively grounding it as a type of subject.Footnote 140 As we read in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’:
The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of setting-upon, in the sense of challenging-forth. Such challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is in turn distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing […] Regulating and securing even become the chief characteristics of the revealing that challenges.Footnote 141
Heidegger's uncanny insight in these writings consisted in demonstrating the degree to which certain modes of revealing were capable of constituting objects in such a manner, so to speak, as to make calculably productive subjects of them. As he wrote in an extremely instructive section of ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics’, modern science had clearly departed from the Aristotelian notion of the Middle Ages that ‘how a body moves […] has its basis in the body itself’:Footnote 142 ‘Motions themselves are not determined according to different natures, capacities, and forces, or the elements of the body, but, in reverse, the essence of force is determined by the fundamental law of motion: every body, left to itself, moves uniformly in a straight line.’Footnote 143
Not surprisingly, Heidegger likewise sought, conversely, to suggest that this mode of revealing had immense implications for the human subject in turn; as he writes in ‘The Letter on Humanism’, just before outlining the various meanings of the term in relation to historical periods and traditions:
Every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one. Every determination of the essence of man that already presupposes an interpretation of beings without asking about the truth of Being, whether knowingly or not, is metaphysical. The result is that what is peculiar to all metaphysics, specifically with respect to the way the essence of man is determined, is that it is
‘Humanistic’. Accordingly, every humanism remains metaphysical.Footnote 144
Heidegger would thus insist that although ‘[m]etaphysics does indeed represent beings in their Being’Footnote 145 (ironically, even when it is claiming to be anti-metaphysical), it has traditionally failed to understand its own historical contingency; in fact, by virtue of its own inherent productivity, it has tended continually to confuse its own theoretical projections with the nature of things-in-themselves.Footnote 146 One of Heidegger's greatest insights therefore consisted in grasping the degree to which metaphysical systems play constitutive roles in reciprocally defining the world of subjects and objects, of man and nature in general – and if, as we have already seen, the epistemic codification of this complex composed of men and things had similarly preoccupied the early Foucault, we must now direct our attention to the manner in which he would eventually develop the political ramifications of power-knowledge and subjectification in many of his subsequent and later writings.
In Discipline and Punish, ‘The Juridical Apparatus’, several sections of The History of Sexuality volumes, and his various writings and lectures on ‘governmentality’,Footnote 147 Foucault takes up the Heideggerean problématique with a distinct reorientation towards political life; fluctuating between well-considered reflections on the nature of modern political formations, the power-knowledge relationship, a range of ethical issues, and criticisms of the naive assumptions of state theory (particularly in relation to Hobbes, on the one hand, and the early Marx, on the other), it might easily be argued that this diverse body of work serves better than any other to afford us a clear and distinct idea as to the unexplored possibilities of post-structuralist and post-modernist International Relations theory. Completing an arc of thought spanning from the later-Marx to Nietzsche and Heidegger, Foucault was especially interested in avoiding any overly simplistic renditions of Enlightenment emancipation; instead, he would aim, above all, to trace the development of a specific trajectory at work in the shaping of modern political life:
We should admit […] that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, not any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. These ‘power-knowledge relations’ are to be analysed, therefore, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free in relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject who knows, the object to be known and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformations. In short, it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determine s the forms and possible domains of knowledge.Footnote 148
In many senses, Discipline and Punish picks up where Marx left off – at the same time, however, filling a gap in the Marxian canon that could never be explained simply in terms of superstructural coordination of an economically explosive substructure.Footnote 149 To be sure, as Foucault himself acknowledged, Marx had made huge strides in explaining ‘the economic take-off of the West’,Footnote 150 which had begun ‘with the techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital’;Footnote 151 nonetheless, what Marx and most of his followers had never fully grasped was the reciprocal emergence of ‘a political take-off’ of the West:Footnote 152 ‘the methods for administering the accumulation of men made possible a take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection.’
The curious paradox that animates much of Foucault's thought on this subject is that even where early-modern sovereign power was absolute, it could never have penetrated socio-economic life or the individual's psycho-physical apparatus to nearly the same degree as the decentralised, impersonal, and diffuse techniques of modern disciplinary power:Footnote 153 for ‘[t]he “Enlightenment”, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.’Footnote 154 Doubtless, Marx and Engels had identified a fundamental determinant of International Relations in their discussion of the division of labour in The German Ideology; emphasising the internal organisation of societies as the chief determinant of their external relations, they had written:
The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the separation of town and country and to the conflict of their interests. Its further development leads from to the separation of commercial from industrial labour. At the same time, through the division of labour inside these various branches there develop various divisions among the individuals cooperating in definite kinds of labour. The relative position of these individual groups is determined by the methods employed in agriculture, industry, and commerce (patriarchalism, slavery, estates, classes). These same conditions are to be seen (given more developed intercourse) in the relations of different nations to one another.Footnote 155
Yet, as is well-known, the Marxian theory of the state remains incomplete to this very day, for it could never fully account for the tempering of an explosive society and individual economic interests merely by virtue of class-domination, coercion, the rule of law, and ideological conformity; alas, like Adam SmithFootnote 156 and David RicardoFootnote 157 before him, Marx himself had perhaps, on occasion, too easily accepted the assertion of a spontaneous, automatic, or natural adjustment of forces,Footnote 158 even in politico-economic life. What Foucault had realised, instead, was the necessity of governmentality, in both its discursive (epistemic or theoretical) and technological (operational or practical) domains, as a means of shaping national societies and subjects. In this sense, liberty could only be maintained through a special form of concurring discipline:
One should not forget that, generally speaking, the Roman model, at the Enlightenment, played a dual role: in its republican aspect, it was the very embodiment of liberty; in its military aspect, it was the ideal schema of discipline. The Rome of the eighteenth century and of the Revolution was the Rome of the Senate, but it was also that of the legion; it was the Rome of the Forum, but it was also that of the camps.Footnote 159
And in an even more emblematic passage, which we shall quote at length, he takes up the great Clausewitzean thread of modern political life in the following manner:
It may be that war as strategy is a continuation of politics. But it must not be forgotten that ‘politics’ has been conceived as a continuation, if not exactly and directly of war, at least of the military model as a fundamental means of preventing civil disorder. Politics, as a technique of internal peace and order, sought to implement the mechanism of the perfect army, of the disciplined mass, of the docile, useful troop, of the regiment in camp and in the field, on manoeuvres and on exercises. In the great eighteenth-century states, the army guaranteed civil peace no doubt because it was a real force, an ever-threatening sword, but also because it was a technique and a body of knowledge that could project its schema over the social body. If there is a politics-war series that passes through strategy, there is an army-politics series that passes through tactics. It is strategy that makes it possible to understand warfare as a way of conducting politics between states; it is tactics that makes it possible to understand the army as a principle for maintaining the absence of warfare in civil society. The classical age saw the birth of the great political and military strategy by which nations confronted each other's economic and demographic forces; but it also saw the birth of meticulous military and political tactics by which the control of bodies and individual forces was exercised within states. The ‘militaire’ – the military institution, military science, the militaire himself, so different from what was formerly characterized by the term ‘homme de guerre’ – was specified, during this period, at the point of junction between war and the noise of battle on the one hand, and order and silence, subservient to peace, on the other. Historians of ideas usually attribute the dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth century; but there was also a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract, but to the permanent coercions, not to fundamental rights, but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility.
[…]While jurists or philosophers were seeking in the pact a primal model for the construction or reconstruction of the social body, the soldiers and with them the technicians of discipline were elaborating procedures for the individual and collective coercions of bodies.Footnote 160
Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to presume that Foucault viewed the advent of disciplinary society as a culminating moment in Western history; rather, he conceived it simply as one formation of many others. Indeed, throughout all of his political writings, he continually underscored the manner in which the state was too often treated as a timeless abstraction; instead, he proposed to conceive it in terms of specific, historico-critically defined modalities of power – such as the ‘sovereign power’Footnote 161 that lasted throughout the eighteenth century in most of Europe; the ‘disciplinary power’Footnote 162 and increasingly full-blown ‘bio-power’Footnote 163 of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and then, more recently still, what Deleuze characterised, à la Foucault, as ‘control societies’Footnote 164 in the late-twentieth century and beyond. What constantly interested Foucault – who, in this sense at least, always remained very much both a FreudianFootnote 165 and a NietzscheanFootnote 166 – was not nearly so much what states do as actors but the manner in which states, societies, and individuals are ‘invested’Footnote 167 by certain historico-critical forces, or what he cast in the modern era as the ‘infra-law’Footnote 168 of ‘[extra-legal] procedures of normalization’Footnote 169 that ‘come to be ever more constantly engaged in the colonization of those of the law’.Footnote 170
What, then, might these observations potentially mean for a new post-structuralist and post-modernist agenda?
First of all, proponents of these new schools of thought should dispense with the critique of state-centric analysis, especially if the effect is simply again to reintroduce the realist theory of the state through the backdoor (a curious tendency found in certain strains of constructivism as well); whether such analyses focus on centralised power or the rule of law, they are, in one in the same instance, both too broad and too narrow to be of any prospective interest to a revitalised post-structuralist and post-modernist agenda. In addition, the critique of either realist or liberal theories of International Relations offers those interested in doing something new in the field little more than a negative opportunity to attack perceived weaknesses in existing academic approaches to the discipline, when what is actually needed, in fact, is some clear and distinct object of study other than the way International Relations scholars traditionally discuss their research, especially since, as we have seen, the latter is inherently global in nature and in no way geared to address the broader set of problems posed by post-structuralist or post-modernist analysis.
Indeed, if the production of knowledge and discourse is to play a vital role in discussions of power and subjectification, then scholars interested in pursuing such undertakings must begin to look much more historically at the discursive character of governmentality and its corresponding technologies of government, along with all their current innovations and continuing means of proliferation. On the one hand, there is doubtless a long series of histories to be written with regard to the organisation of military, civic, and economic life; on the other, the contemporary world offers a myriad of opportunities for scholars, especially if they are willing to unearth and analyse the growing archive of material concerning the daily governance of the global system. Nonetheless, it is nothing short of striking that post-structuralists and post-modernists have not made greater inroads into the stunning and highly promising body of work that has appeared over the past several years from various constructivist quarters. For evidence of such empirical and historical research is already emerging in a very formidable fashion, particularly in the writings of such scholars as Rawi Abdelal,Footnote 171 Mark Blyth,Footnote 172 Jeffrey Chwieroth,Footnote 173 Frank Dobbin,Footnote 174 Rachel Epstein,Footnote 175 Alexandra Gheciu,Footnote 176 Juliet Johnson,Footnote 177 Timothy Mitchell,Footnote 178 Craig Parsons,Footnote 179 and Hendrik Spruyt,Footnote 180 among others. To this end, however, one must remember that it is all too easy to presume, particularly in modern societies, that the means of organising and arranging these forces originate from the state apparatus itself or function merely to serve its interests in an instrumental fashion; as Denis Meuret has argued, rather, one would be far better served to analyse the manner in which the dispersion and organisation of such forces have actually played a fundamental role in the ‘domestication of the state’,Footnote 181 to say nothing of the taming of factions,Footnote 182 individuals,Footnote 183 and nature itself.Footnote 184 In any event, post-structuralists and post-modernists badly need a clear and distinct object of study beyond the grand theories of other academicians, and the focus on the theory and practice of governance, particularly as represented in the work of those scholars cited above, would certainly provide them with such.
In a closely related fashion, we might also draw a second conclusion from the preceding observations, in this case concerning the theorisation of knowledge itself. Here, it is somewhat alarming that so many of the post-structuralists and post-modernists of International Relations theory seem to have adopted the view that knowledge is controlled by the state with such relative ease, particularly when someone like Foucault, for instance, was very much opposed to making such facile assertions.Footnote 185 As if it were not enough to reify the state, they have, therefore, managed as well to overlook the fact that the production of knowledge, in the modern era particularly, is not necessarily conducted quite so consonantly with supposed state interests as one might be tempted to believe. It would consequently be much more prudent to view the state as having a somewhat more ambivalent relation to the production of knowledge – as either stabilising or destabilising, restraining or enabling,Footnote 186 depending upon specific times and circumstances.
Again, this weakness in the current state of post-structuralist and post-modernist studies could easily be corrected by a concerted effort to observe something much more concrete, such as, for example, not only political economy,Footnote 187 the disciplining of the people,Footnote 188 and the governance of the system of natural liberties in general,Footnote 189 but also the training programmes of military personnel,Footnote 190 civil servants,Footnote 191 and the international econocrats of the corporate and financial worlds;Footnote 192 the theory and practice of issues pertaining to the governance of global telecommunications networks,Footnote 193 insurance and risk management,Footnote 194 the major accountancy firms,Footnote 195 cartels and private protectionism,Footnote 196 and even organised crime;Footnote 197 discourses concerning human rights and their means of implementation at the UN;Footnote 198 international health and education programmes;Footnote 199 the role of nongovernmental actors, particularly religious and civic organisations, in shaping transnational values and opinions;Footnote 200 and certainly, too, the broader significance and implications of technics in relation to civilisation as a wholeFootnote 201 – all with a clear and distinct focus on the manner in which modes of subjectification are conceived and implemented in the process. The dissidents have, of course, voiced many complaints with regard to their realist colleagues, but their own endeavours would benefit much more greatly from pursuing the seemingly mundane, if potentially quite fascinating and rewarding, types of research that some of their most favoured thinkers have undertaken in the past – and it is to be hoped that such opportunities might allow them to overcome their growing pains, while simultaneously giving them some empirical foil against which to amend and develop the ongoing project of refining their respective theoretical frameworks.
Conclusion
Univocity, process philosophy, and becoming
‘Timeless’ to be rejected […] ‘Change’ is part of the essence, and therefore so is temporality – which, however, just amounts to one more conceptual positing of the necessity of change.
Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks Footnote 202
All our belief in objects, all our operations on the system that science isolates, rest in fact on the idea that time does not bite into them.
Bergson, Creative Evolution Footnote 203
[…] the very essence of real actuality – that is, of the completely real – is process. Thus each actual thing is only to be understood in terms of its becoming and perishing. There is no halt in which the actuality is just its static self, accidentally played upon by qualifications derived from the shift of circumstances. The converse is the truth.
Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas Footnote 204
If mainstream International Relations theory – in either of its many realist, neo-realist, structural realist, or pluralist guises – has long taken for granted the existence of the state as the central unit of analysis, it would seem that post-structuralists and post-modernists would better serve the field by advancing its knowledge of precisely how this unit has emerged and been transformed in time than endlessly criticising those who have, for better or worse, simply taken it for granted. To this end, one must wonder why these new schools of thought have offered so little in the way of explaining the basic contours of their predecessors to others in the field so that their insights might be appropriated both more creatively and more systematically. As I have tried broadly to suggest in the latter sections of this article, one must cease to grasp the state as a mere abstraction and begin to focus on the arrangement of forces that ensue and flow from within, through, and across states as well as the forms of competition and cooperation occurring between states and to which states are deemed to contribute. What is therefore necessary is a theory of the state that would conceive it not merely as cause but also as effect, so as to focus on the nearly silent and indiscernible series of innovations and transformations at work in shaping not only the underlying forces of international conflict and cooperation, but also the globalisation of normalising forces throughout international society during the various stages of its modern development.
To this end, post-structuralists and post-modernists might profit greatly from some consideration of the teachings of the Deleuzian doctrine of univocityFootnote 205 and current developments in process philosophy:Footnote 206 the former teaches us that our material reality is inseparable from the broader historico-critical forces that have invested it and shaped it, albeit not in a haphazard fashion but according to certain received rules – even if these rules remain continually open to various forms of amendment; the latter teaches us that it is not fixed things that are real but the processes that inform them – and thus that movement must prove our real object of study, not the supposed stability of timeless entities. Together these teachings potentially point the way forward to new and fertile grounds for International Relations scholars and, indeed, to a renewed interest in the governmentalisation of the state. If we were to take such teachings to heart, as a type of baseline, it might even be possible to find a fresh beginning for those of us still interested in giving wing to these new schools of thought – a project which, as yet, remains very much to be accomplished in the world of International Relations theory.
