Locating poststructuralism

There is no single version of poststructuralism. It has been adapted to the circumstances and needs of many disciplines including history (Jenkins 1991; White 1987), literary studies and geography (Doel 1999).

Early on in his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant describes his time - the period of European Enlightenment - as one with a ‘ripened power of judgement’. ‘Ours’, he says, ‘is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit’, including religion, the law and monarchy. These institutions may try to escape criticism but if they do then they ‘cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination’ (A, xi). In other words, public institutions of varying kinds must justify themselves to human rationality; they cannot rely on tradition, dogma or superstition. Kant’s philosophical-political project was to establish and defend the posi­tion of reason, to help ‘institute a court of justice by which reason may secure its rightful claims... not by mere decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws’ (A, xii). For him, Reason is at the centre of philosophy, morality and public political action. It alone can assess claims to authority and knowledge. This was, and is, a marvellous vision with radical implications.

However, poststructuralism questions this enthroning of reason and has thus been accused of irrationality. Critics imagine that in rejecting Kantian Enlightenment, poststructuralism must be hankering for pre-enlightenment superstition. But poststructuralism does not reject Enlightenment: it follows it through. Taking the critical imperative seriously, poststructuralists criticize criticism and use reason against reason, questioning the ‘eternal and unchangeable’ standpoint from which it claims to derive authority. This is not easy. How can one use reason against itself without falling into unreason or ceasing to be able to think? Yet we must ask if reason is always reason­able and if it is as uniform and unchanging as it can be made to appear. Far from claiming that there is no such thing as reason, poststructuralists argue that there are multiple forms of reason and many rationalities.

For Kant the act of reasoning involved identifying a universal principle to follow. By ‘universal’ is meant something that applies across specific cases, independently of them. A universal truth is always true and it is true for everyone. The essential Kantian moral maxim tells us to act in line with principles we could reasonably assume to be principles for everyone else. Kant’s critics challenge just this claim to universality arguing that any claim regarding universal validity will always be historically and politically specific. This criticism has not just been made philosophically. It has also been made, implicitly but forcefully, by actual historical social movements that have, in practice, challenged the limits of conceptions of reason.

When enlightened states first granted rights to ‘the people’ they did not grant them to all. The propertyless, the working class, women, ethnic and religious minorities and the peoples of colonized countries were usually excluded.

For instance, the Marxist critique of nineteenth-century liberalism, scath­ingly expressed in The Communist Manifesto, did not reproach it simply for excluding the poor and dispossessed. Marx attacked liberalism for imagining that its way of living, being and thinking was the universal way. In the twentieth century, feminist critiques of patriarchy did not simply demand that women be included in the masculine world of citizenship but exposed the ways in which the exclusion of women was fundamental to social and political structures. To these criticisms were added charges that our way of thinking necessarily excludes non-European perspectives or that it is based on a very particular and increasingly untenable attitude towards the natural world. For such critics traditional reason was seen not as eman­cipatory but as instrumental and constraining, directed at the attainment of specific goals (see Adorno and Horkehimer 1944[1973]; Held 1980) and as excluding, setting limits to what counts as proper reasoning, regarding other ways of thinking as gibberish to be ignored or suppressed in advance.

However, it is not clear that in Western society such a uniform ration­ality still holds a position of domination. The traditional division of labour between men and women in the West has not disappeared but it has been altered in many ways; our national cultures are often still imagined to be homogenous or uniform but regional identities are increasingly assertive and the difficult realities of multicultural and transnational societies are becoming apparent. The closed worlds of traditional communities of all kinds (from rural Wales to urban Afghanistan) are connected with and exposed to international networks of communication or trade. The media (satellite television and internet) communicate at such a pace and volume that our conceptions of time and space have changed (Giddens 1991; Beck, Lash and Giddens 1994) and we are surrounded by such a surfeit of images that our mental environment is radically different to that of literate cultures just a century ago (see McLuhan 1964). The pervasive power of commodi­fication unsettles traditional moralities and routines of justification replacing them with the individualised rationalities of market choice. We live amidst discontinuity and disjuncture where the traditional, modern and ‘post­modern’ commingle and the singular dominance of any particular way of reasoning appears hard to sustain.

In response some have sought to defend or re-found the Kantian vision of reason, making it fit for a pluralized social world, yet worried that without singular Reason and Truth as the guarantee of our choices there will be chaos and moral collapse (e.g. Habermas 1996; Rawls 1973, 1996). Others seem to rejoice in unreason and reject the ‘Western’ way of being in its entirety, searching for a ‘new age’ believed to be more natural or spiritual or traditional. But there is another possibility: engaging in a kind of criti­cism and analysis that does not reject reason but seeks to show and then exceed its historical limits. Such criticism of rationality proceeds by demon­strating how a particular form of reasoning depends on what it excludes, on the limits it sets for itself, and how, in placing some things beyond that limit, it necessarily construes them as anti-rational and undeserving of participation in the ‘tribunal’ of reason.

Poststructuralism does not try to make reason disappear, but to under­stand it as multiple in form, limited and partial.

This sort of conception is at odds with the positivist mainstream of the discipline of political studies. Rational choice theories, for example, often treat individuals as isolated units with more or less fixed preferences that can form the basis of explanatory models. But our approach inquires into the rationality behind choices, the intellectual, deliberative, cultural and ideological processes that go into them. Poststructuralism, then, has links with variations of hermeneutic or interpretive political science. For these there is a fundamental difference between the objects of natural science and those of social science: human beings are conscious, reflective and reflexive creatures living in a world they experience as meaningful because they fill it with symbols and signs, values and meanings. By studying systems of meaning, the interpretivists hope, we may gain insight into the modes or forms of reason particular groups employ.

Interest in meaning and discourse has become increasingly common in political science (Schmidt and Radaelli 2004), public administration (Fox and Miller 1995) and studies of governance (Bevir and Rhodes 2003; Bevir etal. 2004) because to understand the interactions of people in government bureaucracies, or politicians negotiating over policies, we have also to understand the cultural worlds they come from, the relations between such worlds and the rationalities by which they are engendered.

Poststructuralism shares much with these approaches. It too examines the frameworks against which actors act. But poststructuralism insists that we cannot establish fixed rules of thought or language, tradition and community that underpin all or some political institutions or groups. Political decisions and actions are not merely expressions of tradition because those traditions and their rules are manifestations of past political victories: a kind of ‘sedimented’ power. They are systems of meaning that are the object and the mechanism of social control and contestation. For poststruc­turalists all actions and objects are meaningful but derive their meaning from their relationship to other actions and objects: which is to say from traditions and institutions but also from the ways in which political (or other) actors make use of or activate them. Furthermore, for poststructuralists, the ‘actor’ does not exist independently of these ‘frameworks’ or systems of meaning; the ‘subject’, the being with an identity that acts, is defined by that system and the actions it carries out within or against it (and, as we will see, this may also be the case when the identity in question is that of the state).

For instance, some political scientists wonder why people vote. Voting, it is argued, is an irrational activity since it takes up time and energy dispro­portionate to the influence a single vote can have. But what meaning does voting have? For the newly enfranchised a vote is part of a much larger expression of liberation and casting it creates and expresses the identity of ‘free citizen’. But this does not exhaust the context or possible identities (which may be inexhaustible); there are always other potential meanings for situations, acts and utterances. A vote may be an expression of liberation within one context but, in another, the alienation of power to a distant representative, creating an identity of ‘lawful subject’. A vote may be an acclamation, a celebration, an expression of individuality or a duty to the commonweal. Whichever meaning and identity predominates, will depend on overt or covert, present or past, power struggle: an attempt to organize the systems of meaning within which we act. Poststructuralists see this as a fundamentally political activity that far exceeds the narrow realms of parliamentary debating chambers, legal institutions or military headquar­ters. Individuals do not come together, their aspirations, perceptions and interests already fully formed, but come to have an identity through their position within a broader politicized system of meaning. Thus, many actors and institutions play a role in organizing social systems of meaning that naturalize and legitimate political claims, making the ‘rules of the game’, how we ‘naturally’ and ‘normally’ act seem inevitable and immovable. These are ‘discourses’ or ‘discursive structures’ that draw lines of exclusion and inclusion, of what is and is not a legitimate ‘move in the game’ or an identity that matters, ‘drawing... political frontiers between “insiders” and “outsiders”... excluding certain options and structuring relations’ (Howarth, Norval and Stavrakakis 2000: 4). In order to act in certain domains understood as political one has to be able to participate in a particular ‘language-game’ whose rules may shape the sorts of action that can take place. State bureaucracies, for example, are professional domains built around all sorts of professional codes that legitimate and delegitimate certain persons and actions, affording entry to those who have mastered the code while facilitating the exclusion of those who have not. When political actors form preferences, take decisions, prescribe policies and so on, they draw on some set of discursively produced resources that prescribe and shape the outcomes of thought and action. That is to say, they act on the basis of an implicit yet unexamined social theory. Poststructuralists investigate such political discourse in order to perceive something of its structure, rules of performance and institutionali­zation. But we do not do this in order to uncover an implicit logical struc­ture of propositions which can then be verified or falsified. We do so in order to establish what has been excluded and how, and to try and make something new thinkable. ‘Discourses’ are open-ended systems, always productive of new possibilities. ‘Authorities’ of various kinds may seek to control language, meaning and identity within narrow, stable parameters but meaning always exceeds such control. There is not one discursive struc­ture in society as a whole, or even just within the governmental domain, but multiple forms of ‘language game’ (Wittgenstein 1958) and multiple rationalities that may contradict or clash. The struggle between openness and closure is at the heart of political struggle and it is from this perspective that we may study the phenomenon of the state. We now turn to some different ways in which this has been done.