Postmodernism

26 March 2018 (class held on 23 March)

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 The Idea of the Postmodern
• Attitude of incredulity towards ‘meta’/‘grand’ narratives,
systematicity, coherence, or synthesis in interpretation —J-F
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1979)
Lyotard
• “Theory proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty
fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production, and it
was manifestly hoped as a result that all the domains of
human activity could be seen, and lived, as a unity” — EW Said,
The World, the Text, and the Critic (1982), p.3
Said
• Emphasis on crisis of representation in late capitalism,
valuation of utility and capital universalization, globalization,
and end of history. — F Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism
Jameson
• Postmodernity as a “fully developed modernity …
emancipated from false consciousness”, leading to suspicion
about totalizing social programs and solutions motivated by
an overriding ideology or agenda. — Z Bauman, ‘A Sociological Theory
of Postmodernity’ (1991) Baumann
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 The Idea of the Postmodern (cont.)
Marx
• “From Marx to Nietzsche”?
– 1956: Khrushchev’s secret speech to 20th Party
Conference in Moscow & USSR’s suppression of
Hungarian revolts. 1968: (Failed) student revolution in
France, which together ended illusions about Sartre,
communism, history, philosophy, “humanism”
– Power as repressive and transcendible versus power as
generative/productive (as well as repressive)
Sartre
• Postmodern/poststructuralist critique
– Chiefly a neo-Nietzschean variant of the practice of
contesting the authority of forms of knowledge derived
from Enlightenment philosophy
– Goal to delegitimize institutional orders of knowledge by
exposing the contingent nature of their authority and Nietzsche
oppressive power relations inscribed within them.
Subjects have no existence outside of history 3
• Irresolvable philosophical/theoretical puzzle or paradox. Indeterminable or
ungroundable dimension to practice, irreducible to agency or structure, or
voluntarism and determinism. No “dialectical synthesis” of oppositions
possible
• Living with aporia:“What emerges instead is a respect for this paradox as an
opposition in which it is never possible to choose one proposition over the other. It
is an undecidable opposition that destabilizes all pretense to secure grounds at the
end of history, as poststructuralism well knows, but it is also an opposition that must
be respected as an inescapable feature of the ways in which one may think about
history. To respect it...is to insist on taking historicity seriously as a condition of life
that theory cannot escape. It is to insist that historicity must be taken to the very
center of the practice of doing theory” —RK Ashley, ‘Living on Border Lines: Man,
Poststructuralism, and War’ (1989)

• Implications for positivist-rationalist logic of causation, which is based on

assumption of ultimate determinacy. Notion of “nonoriginary origin”, where
determination of origin “shifting elements in an endless system of relay and
sites”. However, this doesn’t mean an ultimate nondeterminacy (nihilism or
sophistry) or the rejection of causality: “We can’t throw away thinking causally”
--GC Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic (1990)
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• Condition where imitations or reproductions of reality acquire legitimacy,
value, and power over the original
• The distinction between a representation/reproduction (sign, trace) and its Nene Anegasaki??

original referent (signified, essence) no longer exists. The postmodern

condition has erased all signs from their associated referents
• Reality (or hyperreality) is therefore constructed out of models and
simulations (or simulacra) which have no reference to the real, but exist within
a series of replications that have no historical meaning.
• The “reality” produced within the hyperreal appears more real than reality
itself. “Absolute unreality is offered as real presence. The aim … is to supply a
‘sign’ that will then be forgotten as such: The sign aims to be the thing, to Eco
abolish the distinction of the reference, the mechanism of replacement” — U
Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (1986), p.7
• Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1992): war as media spectacle,
rehearsed as war-game or simulation, enacted for viewing public as a
simulation: as a news event, with embedded journalists and missile's-eye-view
video cameras, a videogame. The real violence was thoroughly overwritten by
electronic narrative and simulation.
Baudrillard
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 (J Kristeva, R Barthes)
• Text: traditionally viewed as an autonomous, self-contained artifact
that exists independent of author (agent) and cultural forces
(structure), that transcends (or is external to) history and author’s
subjectivity (i.e. agency). Alternatively, written text is loosened
from author and authority is relocated within culture (ideology,
civilization, int’l anarchy; i.e., structure)
• Rejection of idea that the essence (or signified) behind the
appearance (or sign), whether author (e.g., Barthes’ “death of the
Kristeva
author”) or culture, is decipherable, essentializable and hence can
be privileged. Textual authority is therefore on the reader as the
vehicle of all acts of (inter)textuality
• Focus on traces/signs and their interrelationships
• Intertextual readings cross disciplinary boundaries, challenge
perceived sanctity of genre by demonstrating all texts and ideas
draw on similar ideological resources
Barthes

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• Classical conception: subject as bounded, rational agent, the intended source of
knowledge and meaning (Descartes, Kant). Contested by Marx (material forces,
class struggle) and Freud (the human unconscious). Postmodernism: subject as an
entity constructed by, and not simply reflected in a culture’s social discourses,
linguistic structures, and signifying practices: “[The] subject is itself a site of power
political contest, and ceaselessly so. The subject itself exists as an identifiable subject only in
the precarious balancing and dispersal of plural interpretive elements resulting from the
continuing strategic interplay of multiple alien forms”. --RK Ashley, ‘The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space’
(1987), p. 410 Foucault
• Genealogy (Foucault): provides a counter-history exposing exclusionary
(“dividing”) social processes and cultural practices that make possible idea of
history as grand, single, unified story with clear beginning, middle and end.
Detecting continuities in apparent ruptures in history, and ruptures in apparent
continuities. Knowledge has no clear point of origin and no stable configuration,
i.e., no Archimedean point of truth. There’s only competing perspectives and
“regimes of truth”
• Genealogy in IR: Goal isn’t “true” representations of world affairs, but a critical
account of how particular representations circulate and take hold in order to
produce practical political effects. Analytical emphasis on “how” not “why”:
[W]hat goes for production and disciplining of social spaces goes also for the production and
Ashley
disciplining of subjects. From a genealogical standpoint, there are no subjects, no fully
formed identical egos, having an existence prior to practice and then implicated in power
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political struggles. Like fields of practice, subjects emerge in history” --Ashley, ibid
• Describes how Western rationality is grounded in bipolarities, dualisms, or binary
oppositions – hierarchical mostly – to help define reality: good/evil, day/night,
being/nothingness, self/other, inside/outside, presence/absence, mind/matter,
man/woman, First World/Third World, West/East, etc
• Naturalization of binaries over time :reality cannot be conceived apart from them.
Default privileging of one term over the other.
• Deconstruction (Derrida): Unsettling of settled/naturalized oppositions and expose Derrida
parasitical nature of their hierarchical relationship. Binaries never neutral as
privileged term relies on relegated one, which is already within it.
• Différance: (1) Difference: Identity possible only through process differentiation,
exclusion, boundary-making: “Foreign policy” as the process of making ‘foreign’ or
exotic, and thus different from the self, someone or thing. Differentiation almost
invariably amounts to the constitution of that Other as a less than equal subject
than the Self (MJ Shapiro) (2) Deferral: promised or ideal endpoint is deferred. (3)
Erasure: construction and concealment
• Double exclusion: (1) Represent (a) identities, e.g. individuals, states, as sovereign
presences; (b) the domain beyond sovereignty as dangerous and anarchical. (2)
Represent sovereignty and anarchy as mutually exclusive and exhaustive only
possible by converting differences within sovereign presences/identities/states into
differences between them. In short, presence is always and already divided:
constructed subjects never cohere to form a complete or non-contradictory
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Comment on différence:

[W]ords are determined only by their being referred to other words,

which in turn must be referred to yet other marks, usages, contexts,
and the like. This process is intrinsically endless, and yet in order for it
to function at all we must arrest it. The fact that we do this (most of
the time without a second thought) and that our lives are generally
organized precisely in order to defend against such arresting second
thoughts does not change the basic operation: namely, that even in
the most prosaic use of language, we must in a certain sense split our
minds in order to think at all, in order to articulate. We must refer both
the defining terms to other marks that can never be fully defined for
us and at the same time ... we must “forget” this irreducibly
undefinable vestige, this set of exclusions that is neither entirely
indeterminate or fully determinable. –Samuel Weber, Institution and
Interpretation (1987), p. 45

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 Questions
1. What’s postmodernism? What makes someone
a postmodern or postmodernist? What’s the
difference between post-modernity and
modernity?
2. Are postmodernism and post-structuralism one
and the same?
3. “Issues of war and peace are too important for
the field [IR] to be diverted into a prolix and self-
indulgent discourse that is divorced from the
real world” (Stephen Walt, 1991). Discuss.

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