Poststructuralism Flashcards
What is the most important ontological question for a poststructuralist that studies the world?
The most important ontological question concerns the state.
- Is the state the only actor that really matters, or are non-state actors as - or more - important?
- Does the state today act in essentially the same terms as states in the past, or are historical changes so important that we need specific theories for other times and places?
- Are states able to change their views of others from hostility and fear to collaboration?
Describe how poststructuralism brings epistemology to the fore?
Poststructuralists embrace a post-positivist epistemology. They argue that the social world is so far removed from the hard sciences where causal epistemologies originate that we cannot understand world politics through causal cause-effect relationships.
Explain the concept of discourse in poststructuralism.
Language is essential to how we make sense of the world. Politically, language is significant because politicians - and other actors relevant to world politics - must legitimate their foreign policies to audiences at home and abroad. The words we use to describe something are not neutral, and the choice of one term over another has political implications.
Language produces meaning. Postconstructivists hold that even brute facts (gravity, stone, water) are socially constructed. There is no given essence to a ‘thing’ or ‘an event’. What possible meanings that can be assigned to an event thus depends on the discourses that are available. We can attribute a heart attack to lifestyle, genes, or divine punishment.
Poststructuralists stress that discourses are not same as ideas, and that materiality or ‘the real world’ is not abandoned.
Explain Deconstruction.
To see language as a set of codes means that words make sense only in relation to to other words: ‘horse’ -‘animal’. We know what something is only by comparing it to something it is not: ‘horse’, not ‘human’
Sign (word) structures is unstable because connections among words are never given once and for all. It tells us that the ways we describe events, places, peoples, and states are neither neutral nor given by the things themselves.
Deconstruction shows how dichotomies make something look like an objective description, for instance how developed a country is, although it is in fact a structured set of values.
The goal is to problematize dichotomies, show how they work, and thereby open up alternative ways to understand world politics.
Explain Genealogy
Defined as a “history of the present.” It asks two questions when examining an issue at hand, ex climate change. What political practices have formed the present and which alternative discourses have been marginalized?
By looking into the past, we see alternative ways to conceptualize humans’ relationship with ‘the climate’ and gain an understanding of the discursive and material structures that underpin the present.
What is the concept of power?
Power, to Foucault, is ‘productive’: it comes about when discourses constitute particular subject positions as the ‘natural’ ones. ‘Actors’ therefore do not exist outside discourse; they are produced through discourse and need to be recognize by others. Ex, during the Arab Spring, who would represent the people?
Knowledge is not opposed to power, but rather an integral part of it. More broadly, to speak from a position of knowledge is to exercise authority over a given issue.
One of the key issues in the discussion over poststructuralism as an approach in IR is whether it provides a good account of the way that materiality and power impact world politics.
What is biopower? Biopolitics?
Biopower works at two levels? 1) at the individual we are told to discipline and control our bodies, and at 2) the collective level we find that governments and other institutions seek to manage whole populations.
example of biopolitics - population control - states promotes ‘body-disciplining’ practices as abstinence before marriage.
Explain intertextuality.
intertextuality argues that we can understand the social world as comprised of texts. This is because texts form an ‘intertext’ - that is, they are connected to texts that came before them. For example, to say that ‘the Balkans’ is filled with ‘ancient hatred’ is to draw on a body of texts that constitutes ‘the BAlkans as premordern and barbaric. Working with intertextuality, we should therefore ask ourselves what a given text does not mention, either because it is taken for granted or because it is too dangerous to say.
Post.Con. also studies popular fiction in this way. Because states care about popular culture, how wars, like vietnam, are depicted in movies and such.
How does postconstructuralists view the nation-state?
It is not ‘a unit’ that has the same essence across time and space. The state is a particular way to organize political community.
Political community is of utmost importance to national as well as international politics because it tells us why the forms of governance that are in place are legitimate. Who “we” are.
What does Walker mean by the inside-outside distinction in regard to nation states?
State sovereignty implies a division of the world into an ‘inside’ the state (where there is order, trust, loyalty, and progress) and an ‘outside’ (where there is conflict, suspicion, self-help, and anarchy).
Walker then uses the principle of deconstruction to show that the national-international distinction is not simply an objective account of how the ‘real world’ works. The dichotomy reinforce each other: we know the international only by what is not (national), and vv.
this kind of dichotomies are inherently unstable. Negotiations between EU and Greece, then the sovereignty is challenged by the conditions Greece has to accept.
Why are poststructuralists skeptical against liberals or idealists who advocate universal principles.
The deconstruction of the state sovereignty makes it look less like an objective fact, yet, it cannot be replaced by ‘a global community’.
To engage a dichotomy is not simply to reserve the hierarchy between its terms (that is, replace ‘the sate with the ‘global’), but rather to rethink all the complex dichotomies around which it revolves.
Poststructuralists hold that claims to ‘global’, ‘universal’ solutions always imply that something else is different and particular. That which is different is always subject to change towards the norm.
How does Poststructuralistys view foreign policy?
Foreign policies rely on and produce particular understandings of the state. They are not protecting a given and fixed identity, but rather are discourses through which identities are produced. Does Turkey belong to the EU? This discourse produce the identity of states.
What is a performative identity?
Identities have no objective existence, but rather depend on discursive practices. They are socially ‘real’ but are produced.
Because identities haev no existence independently of the foreign policies that produce and reproduce them, we cannot say that identities cause foreign policy.
What is subject positions?
they are identities as constituted in discourse. Identity is not something that someone has, but rather that it is a position that one is constructed as having.
Individuals and institutions navigate among different subject positions and might identify with the positions they are given by other to a greater or lesser extent.
Example, what it means to be a Muslim in Europe.
