Conclusions
We do not, as Hegel did, think that the state is an incarnation of reason. But we do conceive of the state as governing through and by forms of rationality. Poststructuralist approaches to the state do not seek to dismiss the desire for order, simply to collapse reason into a dizzying multiplicity of language games.
The world can do that for us. We want only to underline the way in which rationalities are drawn on at the same time as constantly coming up against their limits. These need to be understood in their own right (as dynamic elements of political processes) rather than as expressions of some underlying determining principle.Poststructuralism does not, of itself, legitimate any specific political orientation. It does however, take a certain attitude towards the world and to the ‘the political’ as such; to the wider, paradigmatic contexts within which politics (in a narrow sense) are conducted and which are constituted through forms of power and exclusion too often hidden by an exclusive focus on politics as negotiation, bargaining and dialogue. For poststructuralists, the state is positioned somewhat ambiguously towards the political understood in this sense. For it is a site of politics that nevertheless functions by closing down the parameters of the political.
We have seen this, for instance, in arguments about hegemony as well as in views about spatial representation in geopolitics. The state, it is implied, can only secure its management of the wider environment by delimiting politics and subjecting it to forms of reasoning that determine in advance the nature of the ‘political game’. Thus the state is both a site of politics and also a source of depoliticization. Whether it be through social and economic policies or action within the international environment, states govern by defining the field in which they can be understood to act, thus making their environment governable by holding off alternative ways of defining the situation.
This paradoxical depoliticization, we suggest, is not simply a vice that we put up with in an uncertain world; it is the ineradicable condition of all efforts to impose order on the world and, hence, the very condition of politics itself.Further reading
Burchell, Graham (ed.) (1991) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Edkins, Jenny (1999) Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner).
Finlayson, Alan and Valentine, Jeremy (eds) (2002) Politics and Poststructuralism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
Howarth, David (2000) Discourse (Milton Keynes: Open University Press).
Howarth, David, Norval, Aletta and Stavrakakis, Yannis (2000) Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
Rose, Nikolas (1999) Powers of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Torfing, Jacob (1998) New Theories of Discourse: Laclau, Mouffe and Zizek (Oxford: Blackwell).
Walker, R. J. B. (1992) Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
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- 3. Some conclusions
- Conclusions: beyond the state
- Chapter VI Conclusions
- Conclusions: Myth and Power
- Reasoning by induction
- Some distinctions between the academic study and the practice of law
- The foregoing discussion in Part A of moral scepticism and several of its ramifications will form the backdrop of my consideration of aspects of legal theory.