POSTMODERNISM

Elimination of both Object and Subject!

Definition:
 According to Terry Eagleton, Postmodernism is “the contemporary movement of thought,
which rejects the possibility of objective knowledge and is therefore ‘skeptical of truth,
unity and progress’”. {After Theory- 2003}
 Postmodernism is a movement particularly in architecture that reacted against the
modern school of thought by re-introducing classical (of relating to or characteristic of
Greek and Roman antiquity) and traditional elements of style.
 Postmodernism is a late-20th century movement in the arts, architecture, and criticism
that was a departure from modernism.
 Postmodernism includes skeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy,
history, economics, architecture, fiction and literary criticism.
 It is often associated with deconstruction and post-structuralism because its usage as a
term gained significant popularity at the same time as 20 th century post-structuralist
thought.
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 The term postmodernism has been applied to a host of movements mainly in art,
music and literature, that reacted against tendencies in modernism and are
typically marked by revival of historical elements and techniques.
History: Different usages of the term.
 1870’s : First- John Watkins Chapman – A postmodern style of painting – Departure
from French impressionism.
 1914 : J. M. Thompson – Change in religious beliefs and attitudes.
 1921 & 1925 : Postmodernism had been used to describe new forms of art and
music.
 1942 : H. R. Hays – New Literary form.
 However, as a general theory for a historical movement, it was first used in 1939
by Arnold J. Toynbee – “Our own postmodern age has been inaugurated by the
general war of 1914-1918”.
 1949 : Used to describe a dis-satisfaction with modern architectural movement
known as international style.
 1971 : Mel Buchner – Used the term in a lecture delivered at the Institute of Art,
London.
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 More recently, Walter Truett Anderson described postmodernism as belonging to one
of the four typological world views, which he identifies as either:
 1. Postmodern-Ironist: which sees truth as socially constructed.
 2. Scientific-Rational: in which truth is found through methodical-disciplined enquiry.
 3. Social-Traditional: in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western
civilization, and
 4. Neo-Romantic: in which truth is found through attaining harmony with nature
and/or spiritual exploration of inner self.
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 Postmodernist ideas in philosophy and the analysis of culture and society
expanded the importance of critical theory and has been the point of departure
for works of literature, architecture and design, as well as being visible in
marketing/business and the interpretation of history, law and culture, starting
in the 20th century.
 Postmodernism has also been used interchangeably with the term post-
structuralism, out of which postmodernism grew.
 A proper understanding of postmodernism or doing justice to the postmodernist
thought demands an understanding of the post-structuralist movement and the
ideas of its advocates.
Lyotard’s Three Senses of the Term
Postmodernism:
 In the writing of Lyotard, one of the foremost thinkers associated with
postmodernism, we can identify at-least three analytically distinguishable senses of
the term, even if they shade into each other at the edges.
 First Sense: Postmodernism as an Aesthetic Event! In many cases ‘postmodernism’
refers to a trend or movement in literature, cinema, art and architecture.
 This sense of postmodernism is often premised on a rupture between modern and
postmodern styles where the later represents a questioning of modern conceptions of
Teleological Time and Euclidian Space, a predilection (an established preference for
something) for diversity and difference over unity, for irony, self-reflection and self-
refrentiality and a loss of faith in avant-grade (New and experimental ideas in art ,
music and literature)
 Generalizing to the extreme, we might say that postmodernism highlights and plays
with the rules and limits of structuralism, formalism and orthodoxies of any kind.
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 Second Sense: Postmodernism as a Social Condition! Perhaps the most common
sense in which the term ‘postmodernism’ is used to signify the emergence of a
new period or distinctive social condition.
 Postmodernity in this sense represents a break with the past, the arrival of ‘new
times’, imputing a qualitative transformation to society or a shift in cultural
sensibility which is characterized by the rise of information technologies.
 Knowledge changes in status as it becomes just another commodity in the circuity
of post-industrial, postmodern capitalism.
 There emerges in postmodernity a ‘mercantilization of knowledge, which no
longer asks, ‘Is it true?’ but ‘what use is it?’, ‘Is it saleable?’ and ‘Is it efficient?’
 Knowledge is judged in terms of its utility and technical applicability.
 Knowledge in the postmodern era comes to be understood as an ‘informational
commodity’ in the global network of power and wealth.
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 Lyotard goes so far as to say that “It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day
fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control of access to
and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.
 Third Sense: Postmodernism as Crisis of Narratives! Apart from using the term
‘postmodernism’ to denote an ‘aesthetic event’ or the transformation in the ‘use
value of knowledge’, Lyotard also uses it to denote the ‘general cultural context of
nihilism’, in which this transformation takes place.
 Postmodernism in this sense evokes a ‘crisis of narratives’ or more specifically an
‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’, i.e., disbelief, doubt, skepticism, suspicion
about any grand theory with foundational grounds.
 There is Lyotard perceives, a loss of confidence in the authority of the grand
narratives, which function to legitimate the rules and procedures for making and
judging knowledge claims.
 The grand narrative is thus an external support to which appeal is made, so as, to
ground and legitimate knowledge claims.
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 In more political terms, the importance of narrative is that it bears a
legitimation function for knowledge claims.
 At the epistemological level, grand narratives serve as a ‘means of self-
foundation’, while at the political level, they serve as a ‘means of self-assertion
or self-legislation’.
 Central to each narrative is the subject who pursues self-foundation or self-
legislation.
The Operation of Grand Narratives in IR:
 One can see the operation of grand narratives in IR. The dominant narratives,
realism and neorealism, legitimate their knowledge by reference to the state’s
pursuit of power and security under conditions of anarchy.
 Knowledge claims are thus judged according to their usefulness for states under
such conditions.
 One of the main alternative narratives, liberal internationalism, legitimates its
knowledge by reference to humanity’s gradual achievement of universal freedom
and perpetual peace by challenging the priority accorded to state defined
interests and by overcoming the spurious (false, bogus, fake) moral boundaries
policed by sovereign states.
 Each narrative places the epistemological and the political dimensions in a
mutual embrace.
 Self-assertion grounds self-foundation and vice-versa.
 Finally each narrative marks the limits of what is possible in theory and in
practice.
Expression of Crisis of Narratives:
 One of the most significant expressions of the crisis of narrative is the de-
legitimation of modernity and the West.
 Stories telling of the triumph of modernity and/or the West have increasingly
come under critical scrutiny, not just by those positioned ‘outside’ the
modern West, but by those ‘within’.
 The moral and political implications of such narratives, which legitimate the
domination of a set of predominantly European values at the expense of
alternatives have been amply documented by Arjun Appadurai, Chris Brown,
Roxanne Doty, Rob Walker and Robert Young.
1. Postmodernism as a critical discourse here shades into postcolonialism as a
critique of Euro- and ethnocentrism (Evaluation of other cultures according to
preconceptions originating in the standards and customs of one's own culture).
 This provides an important context in which to interpret Lyotard’s call to
‘wage a war on totality’ and to be sensitive to difference.
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 Postmodernism thus signifies a resistance against totalizing narratives of
morality, culture and politics, that is, narratives which function to justify or
legitimate the imposition of Western or modern norms on others.
 At the risk of oversimplifying, it might be said that postmodernism in this
sense represents a resistance to totalization.
 In the language of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, it is a form of thought
opposed to modes of epistemological and political capture.
 It will be suggested that this sense of postmodernism, which is better called
post-structuralism, echoes the efforts of Nietzsche.
 Nietzsche’s thought is an effort to avoid totalizing views of knowledge and
politics, at the center of which is a critique of the subject.
The deployment of Nietzschean or Post-
structuralist form of Postmodernism in IR:
 After Grand Narratives: Nietzsche, Perspectivism and the Critique of the
Subject:
 Lyotard’s account of the de-legitimation of metanarratives can be read
alongside Nietzsche’s Genealogy of morals insofar as it is concerned with
responding to a condition of nihilism; that is, a condition where the highest
values are devalued.
 According to both Nietzsche and Lyotard, humanity finds itself in a situation
where it can no longer, if ever it could, identify a transcendent ground for
knowledge claims.
 The idea that transcendent values, principles and reference-points might
somehow ground knowledge claims has been rendered null and void under the
aegis of postmodernism.
 There exists no overarching, transhistorical viewpoint from which judgements
regarding epistemology or politics can be made.
Continue: Nietzsche’s Perspectivism
 ‘God is dead’, it is declared, and no other reference-points has replaced Him
which might function as a stable ground for knowledge claims.
 In the absence of a stable, universal frame of reference or grand narrative,
we are left with a plurality of perspectives, or in Lyotard’s words, ‘little
narratives’.
 As Nietzsche puts it: There is only a perspective “seeing”, only a perspective
“knowing”.
 The modern idea or ideal of an objective or “all encompassing perspective”
has been displaced by the Nietzschean recognition that there is always more
than one perspective and that each perspective embodies a particular set of
values.
 Moreover, these perspectives do not simply offer different views of the same
‘real world’.
 The very idea of the ‘real world’ has been ‘abolished’ in Nietzsche’s thought,
leaving only perspectives, only interpretations of interpretations, or in
Derrida’s terms, only ‘textuality’.
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 The warp and weft of the ‘real world’ is woven out of perspectives,
interpretations and little narratives, none of which can claim to correspond to
‘reality in-in-itself’, to be a ‘view from nowhere’, or to be exhaustive.
 To say that there is only a ‘perspective knowing’ does not mean, of course,
that there can be no knowledge at all.
 Nietzsche and post-structuralists have never denied the possibility of
knowledge, only the possibility of overcoming perspective or escaping
textuality.
 Equally, they have never been seduced by relativism as an alternative to
objectivism. Perspectivism does not confer equal authority on all
perspectives, nor does it relinquish the possibility of discriminating between
perspectives.
 It simply confers on all perspectives an equal right to claim authority.
 There is no overarching perspective, no transcendent point from which to
pass judgement.
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 No perspective can thus claim to stand on unshakable foundations.
 Or to repeat an earlier formulation, no perspective can claim to correspond
to ‘reality-in-itself’, to be a ‘view from nowhere’, or to be exhaustive.
 Alternative criteria must thus be employed to judge between different
perspectives, as claim to truth, objectivity or exhaustiveness are no longer
tenable.
 Perspectivism thus acts as an alternative to the ‘unitarian epistemologies’, to
use Paul Patton’s term, that dominate the social sciences and underpin grand
narratives.
 Unitarian epistemologies assume that if a given theory provides some
knowledge of the social or political world than alternative theories can make
knowledge claims only insofar as they are consistent with the grand narrative
which legitimates the extant theory.
 The extant theory acts as a benchmark or reference-point against which other
theories are judged – as if it was somehow unproblematically placed to gain
access to the ‘real world’.
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 But perspectivism challenges Unitarian epistemologies by suggesting that no
knowledge claim stands outside the struggle or contestation which takes place
to impose authoritative interpretations.
 Every grand narrative is thus simply one among many little narratives, each of
which is engaged in an epistemological battle to have its perspective win out.
 It is important to remember that Nietzsche’s perspectivism is internally
related to his critique of subjectivity.
 Unitarian epistemologies are predicated upon an objective, universal knowing
subject.
 Nietzsche however warns us to be on our guard against “the dangerous old
conceptual fiction that posited a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing
subject”’.
 According to Nietzsche, the knowing subject is simply a fiction produced by
grammatical habit.
 The subject-predicate distinction in language creates the ‘rude fetishism, as
Nietzsche calls it in Twilight of the Idols, of the active, unified subject behind
any action.
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 The problem with this ‘rude fetishism’ as Nietzsche sees it, is twofold. Firstly,
it ignores the situatedness of any knowing subject.
 Knowledge is always situated, it always marks and is embedded in a particular
position.
 As Nietzsche so forcefully showed, the subject does not simply denote a
perspective, but is constituted by it. A perspective thus always also posits a
subject. Nietzsche thus suggests that knowledge and subjectivity are
fundamentally entwined: knowledge is always embodied in a particular
subject, simultaneously positing that subject.
 Knowledge, qua perspective, always posits or positions a subject, it is thus
always linked to ways of being-in-the-world, and indeed is a part of the
world, not somehow extraneous or removed.
 Secondly, the habit of grammar that leads us to separate subject and action,
and to confuse the subject for a cause who ‘produces an effect’, fools us into
believing that there is an a priori unified subject behind human knowing and
doing.
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 As Nietzsche explains, however, ‘‘there is no ‘being’ behind doing’’, effecting,
becoming; the ‘doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – ‘the deed is
everything’.
 The subject is not a pre-existent, noumenal entity, but is constituted by the doing.
 Nietzsche’s point here is, that the subject’s being is constituted by doing. Knowing
constitutes the knower.
 Postmodernism qua perspectivism thus marks a suspicion towards, or a decentering
of, epistemological totalization.
 This will force us to take a different perspective of perspective. It is no longer just
a neutral gaze. Instead, it is a part of the world, even as it partakes in the
constitution of the world.
 As Nietzsche already hints, there are important ontological implications that
extends from this theoretical insight. At the heart of these implications is the
knowing and acting subject.
 The contribution of these Nietzschean reflections, is to mistrust the will to totalize
or essentialize, that is, to question the assumption that there is a priori essence to
being or that any perspective can capture the essence or totality of the world.
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 For postmodernism, totalization at the levels of epistemology and ontology is
to be resisted. In fact, for postmodernism, totalization never actually takes
place.
 There are attempts at totalization, and often appearances of totalization, but
totalization is never achieved.
 Lyotard’s slogan ‘wage war on totality’ usefully captures the de-centering
impulse that drives postmodernism in both its epistemological and political
concerns.
IR Theory, Perspectivism and De-centered States:

 We have seen that postmodernism represents a generalized will to resist

totalization in both epistemological and ontological dimensions.
 Perspectivism also has found its expression in IR theory.
 Postmodernism’s revised conception of ontology also has its implications on the
nature of the primary subject of international relations, that is , the sovereign
state.
 A: Perspectivism in IR Theory:
 The will to resist epistemological totalization is evident in postmodernism’s
suspicion towards grand narratives and its affirmation of perspective.
 David Campbell’s analysis of Bosnian war in National Deconstruction affirms this
perspectivism.
 He reminds us that the same events can be represented in markedly different
ways with significantly different effects.
 Indeed, the upshot of his analysis is that the Bosnian war can only be known
through perspective; there is no over-arching perspective.
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 For postmodernism, following Nietzsche, perspectives are integral to the
constitution of the ‘real world’, not just because they are our only access to it, but
because they are basic and essential elements of it.
 Perspectives are thus not to be thought of as simply optical devices for
apprehending the ‘real world’, like a telescope or microscope, but also as the very
fabric of that ‘real world’.
 Perspectives are thus component objects and events that go towards making up the
‘real world’.
 In fact we should say that there is no object or event outside or prior to
perspective or narrative.
 As Campbell explains, after Hayden White, narrative is central, not just to
understanding an event, but in constituting that event. This is what Campbell
means by the ‘narrativization of reality’.
 According to such a conception events acquire the status of ‘real’ not because they
occurred but because they are remembered and because they assume a place in
narrative.
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 Narrative is thus not simply a representation of a prior, but now past, presence, it
is the means by which the status of reality is conferred on any presence.
 However, just as objects or events are constituted through narrative so too are
subjects. Or as Campbell puts it, ‘the narrativizing of reality is integral to the
performative constitution of identity’. To revert to the Nietzschean language used
earlier, perspectives always posit a subject.
 Perspective and subjectivity are thus mutually entwined as we have already noted.
 The various actors in the Bosnian wars are performatively constituted through
narrative.
 Campbell’s narrativism leads to a critique of subjectivity, just as Nietzsche’s
perspectivism led him to a critique of subjectivity via a revised ontology.
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 B: De-centering States.
 Postmodernism also has carried out a reconceptualization, or more specifically, a de-
centering of the state.
 One attempt to bring postmodernism to bear a questions of ontology is undertaken by
Costas Constantinou in his study, ‘On the Way to Diplomacy’.
 The main concern of his diplomatic theory as he calls it, is to expose the originary
connection between theory and diplomacy as two political acts caught in the paradoxes of
sending and receiving representations.
 The structure of diplomacy and theory, he says are integrated in the act of representation
that is peculiar to Western metaphysical thought.
 His work registers a rethinking of both the concept of theory and diplomacy.
 This is a necessary corollary of his claim that both theory and diplomacy are predicated
upon what Jacques Derrida has called ‘a metaphysics of presence’.
 Insofar as they both depend on assumptions of presence, both are expressed through a
variety of sendings, paths, journeys, themes, spectacles, the sight or hour of God/truth
and theorems, theory and diplomacy are thus governed by the same structural features.
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 Moreover, Constantinou suggests that theory and, by necessity, diplomacy
always harbor a particular conception of being.
 He demonstrates how the sender of an ambassador is not simply an adornment
(decoration, ornamentation, beautification) of the state.
 The act of legation (delegation, deputation), that is the sending of diplomatic
representation, is not simply an act undertaken by an already existent state.
 Constantinou here follows Nietzsche: there is no being (state) behind doing
(legation), there is no presence before representation.
 While diplomacy may appear to be nothing more than a signifier of a prior
signified (the state), Constantinou’s analysis leads us to recognize the state’s
being as thoroughly bound up in, and constituted through diplomacy.
 As postmodernism has convincingly shown, every signified is but another
signifier in a whole chain of signifiers. Or as Constantinou himself puts it, ‘the
thing-word, signifier-signified binary opposition does not hold’.
 The implications of this analysis are distinctly Nietzschean. Habits of what we
might call ‘IR grammar’ fool us into believing that the state (as a subject) lies
behind diplomacy (as an action).
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 But Constantinou demonstrates that the concept of the state as a prior, unified
presence is little more than a fiction added to the deed of diplomacy.
 He thus exposes the dependence of the state on diplomacy in a particularly
Nietzschean sense: the various practices of diplomacy are constitutive of states, not
an added extra.
 Diplomacy, according to this logic, what Derrida calls the ‘strange economy of the
supplement’, has a dual, ambivalent (unsure, undecided, uncertain) function:
 On the one hand it appears to add itself as a surplus or addition to the already
present state, but on the other hand, it is integral to the state’s presence and thus
acts as a sign of the lack or incompletion inherent to the state.
 So what appears a secondary aspect of the state (diplomacy) is actually an essential
and necessary aspect.
 Indeed the sending of diplomatic representation functions to give presence to the
state.
 Embassies thus function as ‘delegations of presence’ as Constantinou puts it.
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 A similar argument is to be found in Cynthia Weber’s ‘Simulating Sovereignty’.
 Weber provides an account of how the meaning of state sovereignty is stabilized by
theories and practices of intervention.
 Like any political concept or institution, sovereignty is an essentially contested and
unstable one whose functions change over time.
 Her main concern is to map how changing conceptions of intervention effect a
stabilization of the concept of sovereignty.
 By analyzing the different forms of intervention and modalities of punishment which have
occurred over time, she seeks to trace the changing ways in which sovereignty has been
constituted.
 Theories and practices of intervention are thus, in her account, indispensable indicators of
how the sovereign state has been constituted and its meaning stabilized historically.
 She thus offers a critique of conventional understandings of sovereignty and intervention.
 Conventional accounts are premised on a ‘logic of representation’ as Weber calls it,
following Richard Ashley.
 As Ashley explains, the ‘logic of representation’ is an expression of the ‘metaphysics of
presence’. It disposes thought always to hark back to a prior, foundational presence as the
source of meaning and authority.
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 Conventional accounts tend to analyze intervention as an act of transgression carried out
by one state against another. Both the transgressing and the transgressed state are
conceived as prior and complete presences.
 Implicit in conventional accounts therefore is a supposition that the states referred to
are already fully constituted as sovereign identities.
 But Weber too follows Nietzsche in mistrusting the grammatical habit which supposes the
prior existence of a 'being' behind the 'doing'. The effect of her mistrust is to cast doubt
on the idea of the sovereign state as a foundational referent.
 As Weber points out, to deploy the logic of representation is to suppose that a
foundation or signified exists which can ground and stabilize political concepts and
meanings.
 Her intention is to problematise the notion that state sovereignty can serve this
foundational function. Indeed, as she explains, paradoxically, the concept of sovereignty
depends fundamentally on the thing to which it appears antithetical, namely,
intervention. Employing the theoretical insights of Jean Baudrillard, Weber suggests that
the concept of sovereignty takes' on stable meaning by being placed in opposition to
intervention.' [O]ne way to assert the existence of something (sovereignty) is to insist
upon the existence of its opposite (intervention) '."States are constituted by the very
acts and discourses surrounding their affirmation (sovereignty) and their negation
(intervention).
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 Employing the theoretical insights of Jean Baudrillard, Weber suggests that the
concept of sovereignty takes' on stable meaning by being placed in opposition to
intervention.’
 [O]ne way to assert the existence of something (sovereignty) is to insist upon the
existence of its opposite (intervention) '."States are constituted by the very acts
and discourses surrounding their affirmation (sovereignty) and their negation
(intervention).
 Sovereignty is nothing other than a sign of another sign, one which feigns the
existence of something 'real’.”
 As such the concept of sovereignty cannot perform the stabilizing or grounding
function it is expected to perform.
 We can no longer refer to the 'real itself, only to 'signs of the real'. This of course
does not explain how it is that sovereign states have come to appear as if they
were a 'real' and stable referent.
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 The short explanation as to how states take on the appearance of being stable
and complete entities is through performativity. This notion of performativity
draws directly upon Nietzsche's claim that 'being' is constituted and sustained
through 'doing'.