Post-structuralism, post-modernism, and power-knowledge

It should come as no surprise – especially during an age of mass-consumption, in which ideas have become almost as much commodities as actual things – to find the terms of popular cultural trends coming so quickly into play that they lose almost any meaning they might have initially had in rough proportion to the rapidity and extent of their public dissemination. This situation has proven even more aggravating for a term such as post-modernism, perhaps above all, since its appearance on the historical stage coincided so closely with the advent of the World Wide Web, the end of the Cold War, an increasing awareness of globalisation, and a confluence of other related cultural factors which, as a whole, almost immediately dissolved any trace of its initial meaning and value as a concept. The case, of course, is not so difficult with post-structuralism, which was always more of a specialised academic term; notwithstanding its loose association with post-modernism, its fate in the social sciences was less to have been popularly confused and contorted than simply to have receded into the distance on the intellectual horizon. It therefore behooves us, indeed from the very onset, to clarify the meaning of these two terms and subsequently to underscore one of the most important conceptual innovations to appear in the course of their development, namely, that of power-knowledge relations – the latter being of pivotal significance in this instance, specifically insofar as the poorly conceived meaning of this term has produced a good deal of mischief in the literature of International Relations.

Not surprisingly, post-structuralism emerged directly in relation to structuralism,Footnote ⁴⁵ its intellectual predecessor. While there can be no question here of developing a lengthy and detailed discussion of the current established by structuralism's two greatest proponents, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)Footnote ⁴⁶ and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009),Footnote ⁴⁷ one might nevertheless state that their research was ultimately directed towards grasping the underlying deep structure (base or substructure) that determines the subsequent structures (superstructures) of social and cultural life. In the case of Saussure, it would be the structure of language, an impersonal and independent system of signs, which defines the system of signification (semiology) in advance of individual human agency; in the case of Lévi-Strauss, it would be the fundamental structures of the mind, universal laws which are roughly similar throughout all societies and cultures, as evidenced in the principles governing kinship and primitive mythology (anthropology). Casting a tremendously rich and fecund shadow over French intellectual life in particular during the 1950s and 1960s, structuralism sought ‘to find the underlying system of relationships, the structure, within which any individual event could come to have a meaning.’Footnote ⁴⁸

While such figures as Roland Barthes (the French literary critic and semiologist),Footnote ⁴⁹ Jacques Lacan (the French neo-Freudian psychoanalyst),Footnote ⁵⁰ and Foucault himself would all draw heavily on the various breakthroughs of structuralist thought and eventually, if each in his own unique manner, move decisively in the direction of post-structuralism, the example of Louis Althusser (the French Marxist) is in many senses emblematic of the structuralist enterprise in twentieth-century social science – and, most likely, in a manner that is easily recognisable to those in the field of International Relations. As he wrote in his seminal work, For Marx: ‘On the one hand, the structure (the economic base: the forces of production and the relations of production); on the other, the superstructure (the State and all the legal, political and ideological forms).’Footnote ⁵¹ What we therefore encounter as a pervasive and consistent element throughout each of these various tendencies of the structuralist project is a persistent attempt to identify and elucidate immutable and transhistorical foundations for understanding human activities in their widest possible variety. It is for this reason that the comments of Richard T. and Fernande M. DeGeorge are no less instructive today than they were when they first appeared over thirty years ago:

It was precisely against the centrality of these supposed deep structures, and the purportedly all-encompassing rules accompanying them, that post-structuralism would increasingly rebel during the course of the 1960s, in the process emphasising difference instead of similarity, and hence the attendant problem of novelty as opposed to the monotonous repetition of universal patterns.Footnote ⁵³ Whereas structuralism had focused heavily on timeless or transhistorical systems of signification and other practical activity, post-structuralism would introduce the dual problem of temporality and historicity with a vengeance. While we can do little more here than to provide a thumbnail sketch of the movement, two important examples will doubtless prove illustrative for present purposes; we shall thus focus our attention on Foucault's treatment of cultural codes and Deleuze's concept of the event.

It was during roughly the period of The Order of Things (1966) – more appropriately titled Les mots et les choses in the original French – that we find clear evidence in Foucault's writings of a distinct movement away from the tendencies of structuralism and towards those of post-structuralism. While Foucault was clearly interested in indicating, though not without careful and well-considered qualification,Footnote ⁵⁴ underlying cultural codes, he was also familiar enough with some of Nietzsche and Heidegger's most important insightsFootnote ⁵⁵ to insist upon the ‘profound historicity’Footnote ⁵⁶ of such codes, that is, to emphasise the necessity of grasping such structures in terms of their ‘emergence’Footnote ⁵⁷ within a specific temporal horizonFootnote ⁵⁸ (‘the horizon of Being’Footnote ⁵⁹). In this sense, rather than viewing temporality as a continuous incarnation of elementary structures (structuralism), Foucault would view it as the site of a continual process of displacement, indeed as a discontinuous plane on which different and novel structures emerge as others in turn fall by the waysideFootnote ⁶⁰ (post-structuralism).Footnote ⁶¹ To this end, it was perhaps Deleuze who most aptly characterised the post-structuralist shift in Foucault's earlier writings when he wrote that they present us with ‘events of pure thought, radical or transcendental events that determine a space of knowledge for any one era.’Footnote ⁶²

But it was also Deleuze, of course, who would more fully radicalise the concept of the event than anyone else. Following Nietzsche's suggestion that ‘the greatest thoughts are the greatest events’Footnote ⁶³ and that the world revolves ‘not around the inventors of new noise, but around the inventors of new values’,Footnote ⁶⁴ he would develop an entire theory around microscopic, almost indiscernible processes of becoming, moments in which fundamental transformations occur – moments in which, for better or worse, a world is reconstituted anew.Footnote ⁶⁵ While Deleuze's treatment of events was distinctly revolutionary in character,Footnote ⁶⁶ it would in turn prove highly suggestive for much of Foucault's work, and maybe even his later work most specifically, particularly since its ideational emphasis compellingly opened the path, once again, to posing the problem of novelty in a serious fashion and, subsequently, to attempting to elucidate those crucial moments in which processes of transformation reach critical massFootnote ⁶⁷ in what Foucault himself would later characterise as ‘eventalization’.Footnote ⁶⁸

We shall return to the prospect of a more empirically-oriented discussion of such becomings in due course, but we would do well simply to maintain a sharp awareness of the strong sense of novelty at work in post-structural analysis as we proceed to our discussion of post-modernism.

As is well-known, the concept of modernity has long been associated with Western civilisation's potential mastery over, or at least the diminution of, what Freud once famously identified as the three principal sources of human suffering: ‘the superior power of nature, the feebleness of our own bodies, and the inadequacy of the regulations which adjust the mutual relationships of human beings in the family, the state and society.’Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet it was in the writings of Freud and also Weber, perhaps two of modernity's greatest and most important proponents, that certain misgivings with regard to the Enlightenment project of emancipation were already becoming apparent. As each of them so powerfully noted, modern civilisation represents a complex and many-sided phenomenon, for the very ‘intellectualization’,Footnote ⁷⁰ ‘rationalization’,Footnote ⁷¹ and ‘discipline’Footnote ⁷² upon which it is based inevitably require an accompanying and hardly inconsiderable degree of ‘disenchantment’Footnote ⁷³ and ‘repression’Footnote ⁷⁴ in relation to man's ‘psycho-physical apparatus’Footnote ⁷⁵ – to be sure, as part and parcel of the selfsame process of scientific and cultural progress. Moreover, if the horrors of World War One and World War Two would each in their own way reveal the more subterranean forces at work in civilisation's growing mastery over what Foucault once described as ‘a sort of complex composed of men and things’,Footnote ⁷⁶ it must likewise be emphasised that a certain sense of unease had pervaded Western philosophy since around the time of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was published during the late-eighteenth century, as the problem of truth had here been posed in the most astonishing manner. Indeed, as Schopenhauer, one of Kant's greatest admirers and critics once aptly put it: ‘Kant's teaching produces a fundamental change in every mind that has grasped it.’Footnote ⁷⁷

According to Kant, human reason was capable of extraordinary things: in addition to providing us with firm and productive foundations for theoretical (scientific)Footnote ⁷⁸ and practical (moral)Footnote ⁷⁹ activity, it also affords us compelling prospects for historical progress and the justification of evil.Footnote ⁸⁰ Nonetheless, for Kant, human reason was also inherently limited: while capable of providing rational legislation in the scientific and moral domains, it was entirely incapable of explaining the ultimate nature and meaning of the universe (the noumenal world of the thing-in-itself),Footnote ⁸¹ which, in Kant's estimation, was essentially unknowable.Footnote ⁸² It might thus be argued that Kantian philosophy deserves the curious distinction of being, in one and the same instant, both the crowning achievement of Enlightenment modernity as well as the speculative gateway to the post-modern experiment eventually to follow in its wake: on the hand, it had demonstrated that the changing, novel, and not infrequently shocking contours of the ‘age of Enlightenment’Footnote ⁸³ were themselves legislated by reason; on the other, it had opened the door to the possibility that reason was perhaps itself merely of ‘human, all too human’Footnote ⁸⁴ origin.

For the sake of brevity, we shall presume that the modernist tradition will be familiar enough to International Relations scholars – if not necessarily though the writings of Hegel and the early-Marx, then surely through Rostow or maybe even Fukuyama's very interesting, if also horribly misguided, post-Cold War text, The End of History and the Last Man; the post-modernist tradition, however, has been presented much less authoritatively in the International Relations literature and therefore requires some long-overdue clarification if it is to avoid lapsing into the dead-end of overly simplistic and utterly embarrassing caricature.

In a very important and well-considered text from the mid-1980s, Gianni Vattimo followed the path initiated by Nietzsche and Heidegger in developing a considerably more modest and sober definition of post-modernism than those to which we have typically become accustomed today. In so doing, he emphasised ‘the “weakening” of Being’,Footnote ⁸⁵ stating that we can in no way understand the meaning of post-modernity ‘as long as man and Being are conceived of – metaphysically, Platonically, etc. – in terms of stable structures’.Footnote ⁸⁶ To this end, Vattimo links post-modernity with ‘post-history’Footnote ⁸⁷ and the ‘post-metaphysical era’Footnote ⁸⁸ as a whole, ultimately suggesting that it is no longer possible to think in terms of teleological laws of historical development nor in terms of metaphysical essences through which one might gain access to the underlying natures of man, state, or society. Radicalising the Kantian distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds, Vattimo would further develop the insights of Nietzsche and Heidegger so as to show that philosophy simply has no right to make such claims to immutable laws or essences.

Much like post-structuralism, then, the key to an alert and intelligent post-modernism lies not in making exorbitant or heroic claims with regard to the impossibility or non-existence of truth, but rather in relativisingFootnote ⁸⁹ the all too easily presumed finality and inevitability of modernity,Footnote ⁹⁰ in grasping its novelty and innovations as well as its limitations and paradoxes, and, above all, in insisting on careful attention to its own unique cultural preconditions as opposed to its historical or metaphysical necessity. Indeed, as Nietzsche himself once suggested, such an intellectual gambit should be conceived more as an extension and radicalisation of the Enlightenment project than a return to pre-Enlightenment myth, theology, superstition, or barbarism of any variety.Footnote ⁹¹ In this sense, one might even propose that there is a profoundly novel form of empiricism, even positivism, at work in certain of the best post-modern projects,Footnote ⁹² for, insofar as we endeavour to understand the world, it behooves us not to lean too heavily upon teleological preconceptions or any other metaphysical generalities for intellectual sustenance – and it is a tremendous pity that the methodological precept to avoid such forms of reification and functionalism has been almost entirely lost on a superabundant number of theorists currently claiming the mantle of post-modernism, not least in the rarefied world of International Relations theory.

Given the characterisations presented above, we should now be prepared to summarise the broader theoretical argument set forth in the confluence of post-structuralism and post-modernism, subsequently establishing their corresponding conception of power-knowledge relations, for it is perhaps this concept in particular that has produced the most mischief and confusion in the International Relations literature.

Since, according to these perspectives, neither man nor history have predetermined essences or iron laws of development, their ultimate natures must be grasped as largely indeterminate. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to presume that either man, the state, or society determine themselves entirely autonomously; to a considerable extent, rather, they are determined in advance by certain structures that antedate their own temporal existence, though not that of history itself. These structures may hardly, therefore, be deemed timeless or static; instead, they must be grasped as the product of transformative events occurring along the plane of history itself. Foucault, of course, has captured this matter quite neatly in a famous remark from The Order of Things: ‘The fundamental codes of a culture – those governing its language, its schema of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices – establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home.’Footnote ⁹³ Consequently, these writings point less towards a timeless vision of ‘the episteme of Western culture’Footnote ⁹⁴ than to a specific series of constitutive ruptures and discontinuities within the course of its historical development.Footnote ⁹⁵

We shall have more to say of these ruptures and discontinuities in due course, but the final task of our discussion in this section must consist in clarifying the constitutive, if ultimately decentralised,Footnote ⁹⁶ aspect of modern power-knowledge relations and, once conceived more rigorously, their potential implications for International Relations theory.

If post-structuralism and post-modernism respectively reject anything along the lines of either ‘formal structures with universal values’Footnote ⁹⁷ (the repetition of transhistorical structures) or an absolute foundation for the ‘Being of beings’Footnote ⁹⁸ (the teleological or metaphysical necessity of modernity), then it is plain to see that they must both view power-knowledge as a type of ongoing construction in which, as Nietzsche once put it, ‘[o]ur values are interpreted into things’:Footnote ⁹⁹

It is for this reason that Heidegger, in the midst of developing Nietzsche's theory of knowledge in relation to the will to power, was prone to speaking of it in terms of the ‘poetizing essence of reason’ – not in the sense that philosophy and science are naive fantasies, but in the sense that they always refer to some ‘higher origin’Footnote ¹⁰¹ beyond the objects that are perceived immediately through the senses. As Heidegger explains in a famous, if quite quotidian, example, we tend to posit sameness or identity as a means of dissolving the stubborn and inevitable reality of difference and change; and yet, in the same breath, we must recognise that this very positing is itself a creative act, based upon the projection of the selfsame – a positing that is consequently replete with effects, even if the very projection that is posited does not, in actual fact, in any way exist either in-itself or in perpetuum.

The play of identity and non-identity is impossible to dismiss in this passage, especially if we are, first of all, in any way attentive to some of the Nietzschean overtones that are, unfortunately, somewhat eclipsed in Heidegger's rather distinctive treatment of the matter, and, secondly, if we reflect back on Heidegger's remarks subsequent to our reading of Foucault: on the one hand, we ‘impose upon becoming the character of being,”Footnote ¹⁰³ thus imposing “upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require’;Footnote ¹⁰⁴ on the other, this imposition is also, at the same time, potentially a means of obscuring the process of becoming on both the subjective and objective sides of knowledge itself, for it always runs the risk of remaining fixed at the initial moment of its creation and hence of never moving beyond this moment into the ever-fluctuating realm of ‘real’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ things.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Such a proposition would therefore mean that not only does becoming occur just as readily in the subject that knows as well as the object that is known, but also, as Deleuze once wrote, in ‘the movement of the surface’,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ or the discourse that serves to ‘enframe’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ both subject and object as such.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

At this juncture, it is not difficult to discern precisely where the post-structuralist and post-modernist schools of International Relations theory have run aground. As we have already easily inferred from Jarvis, they remain entirely unable to move in any way beyond the level of mere ‘ideology critique’Footnote ¹¹⁰ because, despite all their claims to the contrary, they have never been able to conceive of power-knowledge relations as effectively constitutive or as emanating from a broadarray of different ‘relays’;Footnote ¹¹¹ rather they have continually viewed power-knowledge as essentially legitimating and ideological in nature, as the product of centralised forces. Consequently, they have tended to cast the relationship between knowledge and national interests far too neatly, thus blocking the way toward a more provocative treatment of the Western episteme in which knowledge would be seen as a formative and inventive capacity that is itself closely related to the development of very specific modes of governance. Moreover, it is for this reason as well that they have hitherto been unable to present any thoroughgoing methodological contribution to the field, instead relying negatively on a series of supposed ‘unmaskings’Footnote ¹¹² of the contradictions and vested interests within mainstream theoretical currents.

To this extent, Der Derian's famous remark regarding ‘the big American car of International Relations theory’Footnote ¹¹³ is particularly telling; not only does he far too easily conflate a body of state-centric principles and theories that have been evolving since roughly the time of the Peloponnesian War, the Renaissance, and the Treaty of Westphalia with an ideological justification of post-war American foreign policy interests, but, perhaps more disconcertingly still, he completely fails to see what was ultimately at stake in the writings of several of his most favoured French thinkers, namely, the collective, or even ‘pre-individual’,Footnote ¹¹⁴ organisation of the Western episteme. Indeed, in suggesting that theory merely provides ideological justification for the pursuit of political interests (a mere ideational supplement to material and strategic objectives), Der Derian overlooks, somewhat astonishingly, one of the greatest and most fundamental insights of the initial wave of post-structuralist and post-modernist thought – to cite Foucault in an important interview from 1978:

That the exercise, production, and accumulation of knowledge should be linked to the mechanisms of power is hardly a revelation – Francis Bacon had already anticipated as much in the seventeenth century;Footnote ¹¹⁶ what is far more striking in Foucault's remark is the emphasis on the collective formation, circulation, and utilisation of knowledge; the emphasis on regimes; the emphasis on historical and geographical specificity; and the emphasis on localised phenomena. Foucault is undoubtedly alluding to something very different from timeless, transhistorical structures or, indeed, any essentialising form of identity politics; rather, he is tracing the outlines of a completely distinctive methodological shift in which researchers would attune themselves to the relationship between the various features of the Western episteme and their corresponding practices, or what he once jointly termed ‘practical systems’,Footnote ¹¹⁷ along with the means through which this relationship affects the everyday governance of the body politic, omnes et singulatim:Footnote ¹¹⁸ the ‘micro-physics’Footnote ¹¹⁹ of power entailed in shaping and constituting subjects as such, or what he frequently termed, in different ways throughout many of his later writings, the process ‘subjectification’Footnote ¹²⁰ – be it of states, corporations, societies, markets, or individuals.

It is precisely on this account that we can at last begin to see the path forward to a new and more productive horizon for those interested in developing a post-structuralist or post-modernist school of International Relations. If realism has perpetually sought to focus on what occurs between states, whether it be conflict or cooperation, a new agenda for International Relations theory, and one very much in keeping with the above, would consist, first of all, in breaking the field's age-old taboo of not looking inside the state, as it is within states and their various means of governing the complex composed of men and things that we find another realm of real ideational, material, and institutional activity of tremendous import to International Relations; secondly, any thoroughgoing post-structuralist or post-modernist theory of International Relations would also need to take careful account of movements across states rather then merely focusing on what occurs between them. Stretching both backwards and forwards along the path that leads both to and from conflict and cooperation, one would thus quickly discover the historicity of the state, its ‘Proteus nature’,Footnote ¹²¹ and the fact that the state is not merely an abstraction existing in relation to other abstractions, but, rather, a part of an active process that must constantly renew itself if it is to survive in the relation to other active processes.Footnote ¹²²

Towards a new post-structuralist and post-modernist agenda: from modern science to modern political power

For perhaps too long now, International Relations theory has treated the state in an analogous fashion to Aristotle's ‘unmoved mover’,Footnote ¹²⁶ that is to say, as a metaphysical reality, as ‘eternal, substance, and actuality’,Footnote ¹²⁷ as an ideal and timeless unity – as causa sui. To this end, the post-structuralist and post-modernist causes would be far better served by focusing systematically on an ‘historico-critical’Footnote ¹²⁸ reappropriation of this reality than on continually seeking to unmask the manner in which it perpetually goes about disguising its true interests, for it is the field's central unit of analysis, after all, that remains most badly in need of further study and evaluation. Insofar as International Relations theorists have tended to follow a certain strain – in fact, merely the concluding strain – of Hobbesian thought in conceiving the state as a ‘Mortall [sic] God’,Footnote ¹²⁹ those wishing to challenge such traditional theories should begin by demonstrating to what degree the state is not merely cause but also effect. Beyond all the various forms of inter-state competition and cooperation, the post-structuralists and post-modernists would subsequently have something of profound value to offer the field. By concentrating on what occurs within, through, and across states instead of between them, real theoretical innovations would be made possible through the consideration of events that are considerably less obvious in significance than, for example, either wars or treaties. Indeed, such a shift in focus would allow theorists to concern themselves with events ensuing from the very forces that seize hold of states – forces often having much to do, in turn, with their very survival and demise, particularly when it comes to innovations in what Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose have followed Foucault in conceiving as the ‘discursive character of governmentality’Footnote ¹³⁰ and its corresponding ‘technologies of government’.Footnote ¹³¹

There can be no question here of entering into a lengthy and elaborate discussion of the empirical foundations of this theory, as this matter will soon be properly detailed in a subsequent paper; in the space remaining, however, we shall simply endeavour to suggest the provisional contours of its most basic concepts.

Historians as diverse as Karl Marx,Footnote ¹³² Jacob Burckhardt,Footnote ¹³³ Lewis Mumford,Footnote ¹³⁴ Antonio Negri,Footnote ¹³⁵ Gerhard Oestreich,Footnote ¹³⁶ R. Po-Chia Hsia,Footnote ¹³⁷ Martin van CreveldFootnote ¹³⁸have each brilliantly demonstrated the extent to which the state, or indeed any other form of political life, can only be conceived in relation to the ideational, material, and technological forces transversing it. These studies therefore afford us a series of profound insights into the manner in which political formations are organised not only in relation to commerce, industrialisation, imperialism, and capital in general, but also, for example, in relation to Renaissance Humanism, the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, Neo-stoicism, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Mass-Mobilization. And yet the salience of these studies is only increased by placing them within the context of several key insights first set forth by Heidegger and subsequently developed, albeit along a rather different trajectory, by Foucault as well.

In his ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics’ and ‘The Question Concerning Technology’,Footnote ¹³⁹ Heidegger embarked on a path of analysis designed specifically to establish the mode of knowing and ordering distinct to the modern (Western) world, especially as characterised by modern philosophy and science. In so doing, he was particularly concerned to develop the means by which nature has been constructed as an object of study, in turn effectively grounding it as a type of subject.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ As we read in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’:

Heidegger's uncanny insight in these writings consisted in demonstrating the degree to which certain modes of revealing were capable of constituting objects in such a manner, so to speak, as to make calculably productive subjects of them. As he wrote in an extremely instructive section of ‘Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics’, modern science had clearly departed from the Aristotelian notion of the Middle Ages that ‘how a body moves […] has its basis in the body itself’:Footnote ¹⁴² ‘Motions themselves are not determined according to different natures, capacities, and forces, or the elements of the body, but, in reverse, the essence of force is determined by the fundamental law of motion: every body, left to itself, moves uniformly in a straight line.’Footnote ¹⁴³

Not surprisingly, Heidegger likewise sought, conversely, to suggest that this mode of revealing had immense implications for the human subject in turn; as he writes in ‘The Letter on Humanism’, just before outlining the various meanings of the term in relation to historical periods and traditions:

Heidegger would thus insist that although ‘[m]etaphysics does indeed represent beings in their Being’Footnote ¹⁴⁵ (ironically, even when it is claiming to be anti-metaphysical), it has traditionally failed to understand its own historical contingency; in fact, by virtue of its own inherent productivity, it has tended continually to confuse its own theoretical projections with the nature of things-in-themselves.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ One of Heidegger's greatest insights therefore consisted in grasping the degree to which metaphysical systems play constitutive roles in reciprocally defining the world of subjects and objects, of man and nature in general – and if, as we have already seen, the epistemic codification of this complex composed of men and things had similarly preoccupied the early Foucault, we must now direct our attention to the manner in which he would eventually develop the political ramifications of power-knowledge and subjectification in many of his subsequent and later writings.

In Discipline and Punish, ‘The Juridical Apparatus’, several sections of The History of Sexuality volumes, and his various writings and lectures on ‘governmentality’,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Foucault takes up the Heideggerean problématique with a distinct reorientation towards political life; fluctuating between well-considered reflections on the nature of modern political formations, the power-knowledge relationship, a range of ethical issues, and criticisms of the naive assumptions of state theory (particularly in relation to Hobbes, on the one hand, and the early Marx, on the other), it might easily be argued that this diverse body of work serves better than any other to afford us a clear and distinct idea as to the unexplored possibilities of post-structuralist and post-modernist International Relations theory. Completing an arc of thought spanning from the later-Marx to Nietzsche and Heidegger, Foucault was especially interested in avoiding any overly simplistic renditions of Enlightenment emancipation; instead, he would aim, above all, to trace the development of a specific trajectory at work in the shaping of modern political life:

In many senses, Discipline and Punish picks up where Marx left off – at the same time, however, filling a gap in the Marxian canon that could never be explained simply in terms of superstructural coordination of an economically explosive substructure.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ To be sure, as Foucault himself acknowledged, Marx had made huge strides in explaining ‘the economic take-off of the West’,Footnote ¹⁵⁰ which had begun ‘with the techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital’;Footnote ¹⁵¹ nonetheless, what Marx and most of his followers had never fully grasped was the reciprocal emergence of ‘a political take-off’ of the West:Footnote ¹⁵² ‘the methods for administering the accumulation of men made possible a take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection.’

The curious paradox that animates much of Foucault's thought on this subject is that even where early-modern sovereign power was absolute, it could never have penetrated socio-economic life or the individual's psycho-physical apparatus to nearly the same degree as the decentralised, impersonal, and diffuse techniques of modern disciplinary power:Footnote ¹⁵³ for ‘[t]he “Enlightenment”, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.’Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Doubtless, Marx and Engels had identified a fundamental determinant of International Relations in their discussion of the division of labour in The German Ideology; emphasising the internal organisation of societies as the chief determinant of their external relations, they had written:

Yet, as is well-known, the Marxian theory of the state remains incomplete to this very day, for it could never fully account for the tempering of an explosive society and individual economic interests merely by virtue of class-domination, coercion, the rule of law, and ideological conformity; alas, like Adam SmithFootnote ¹⁵⁶ and David RicardoFootnote ¹⁵⁷ before him, Marx himself had perhaps, on occasion, too easily accepted the assertion of a spontaneous, automatic, or natural adjustment of forces,Footnote ¹⁵⁸ even in politico-economic life. What Foucault had realised, instead, was the necessity of governmentality, in both its discursive (epistemic or theoretical) and technological (operational or practical) domains, as a means of shaping national societies and subjects. In this sense, liberty could only be maintained through a special form of concurring discipline:

And in an even more emblematic passage, which we shall quote at length, he takes up the great Clausewitzean thread of modern political life in the following manner:

Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to presume that Foucault viewed the advent of disciplinary society as a culminating moment in Western history; rather, he conceived it simply as one formation of many others. Indeed, throughout all of his political writings, he continually underscored the manner in which the state was too often treated as a timeless abstraction; instead, he proposed to conceive it in terms of specific, historico-critically defined modalities of power – such as the ‘sovereign power’Footnote ¹⁶¹ that lasted throughout the eighteenth century in most of Europe; the ‘disciplinary power’Footnote ¹⁶² and increasingly full-blown ‘bio-power’Footnote ¹⁶³ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and then, more recently still, what Deleuze characterised, à la Foucault, as ‘control societies’Footnote ¹⁶⁴ in the late-twentieth century and beyond. What constantly interested Foucault – who, in this sense at least, always remained very much both a FreudianFootnote ¹⁶⁵ and a NietzscheanFootnote ¹⁶⁶ – was not nearly so much what states do as actors but the manner in which states, societies, and individuals are ‘invested’Footnote ¹⁶⁷ by certain historico-critical forces, or what he cast in the modern era as the ‘infra-law’Footnote ¹⁶⁸ of ‘[extra-legal] procedures of normalization’Footnote ¹⁶⁹ that ‘come to be ever more constantly engaged in the colonization of those of the law’.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

What, then, might these observations potentially mean for a new post-structuralist and post-modernist agenda?

First of all, proponents of these new schools of thought should dispense with the critique of state-centric analysis, especially if the effect is simply again to reintroduce the realist theory of the state through the backdoor (a curious tendency found in certain strains of constructivism as well); whether such analyses focus on centralised power or the rule of law, they are, in one in the same instance, both too broad and too narrow to be of any prospective interest to a revitalised post-structuralist and post-modernist agenda. In addition, the critique of either realist or liberal theories of International Relations offers those interested in doing something new in the field little more than a negative opportunity to attack perceived weaknesses in existing academic approaches to the discipline, when what is actually needed, in fact, is some clear and distinct object of study other than the way International Relations scholars traditionally discuss their research, especially since, as we have seen, the latter is inherently global in nature and in no way geared to address the broader set of problems posed by post-structuralist or post-modernist analysis.

Indeed, if the production of knowledge and discourse is to play a vital role in discussions of power and subjectification, then scholars interested in pursuing such undertakings must begin to look much more historically at the discursive character of governmentality and its corresponding technologies of government, along with all their current innovations and continuing means of proliferation. On the one hand, there is doubtless a long series of histories to be written with regard to the organisation of military, civic, and economic life; on the other, the contemporary world offers a myriad of opportunities for scholars, especially if they are willing to unearth and analyse the growing archive of material concerning the daily governance of the global system. Nonetheless, it is nothing short of striking that post-structuralists and post-modernists have not made greater inroads into the stunning and highly promising body of work that has appeared over the past several years from various constructivist quarters. For evidence of such empirical and historical research is already emerging in a very formidable fashion, particularly in the writings of such scholars as Rawi Abdelal,Footnote ¹⁷¹ Mark Blyth,Footnote ¹⁷² Jeffrey Chwieroth,Footnote ¹⁷³ Frank Dobbin,Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Rachel Epstein,Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Alexandra Gheciu,Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Juliet Johnson,Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Timothy Mitchell,Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Craig Parsons,Footnote ¹⁷⁹ and Hendrik Spruyt,Footnote ¹⁸⁰ among others. To this end, however, one must remember that it is all too easy to presume, particularly in modern societies, that the means of organising and arranging these forces originate from the state apparatus itself or function merely to serve its interests in an instrumental fashion; as Denis Meuret has argued, rather, one would be far better served to analyse the manner in which the dispersion and organisation of such forces have actually played a fundamental role in the ‘domestication of the state’,Footnote ¹⁸¹ to say nothing of the taming of factions,Footnote ¹⁸² individuals,Footnote ¹⁸³ and nature itself.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ In any event, post-structuralists and post-modernists badly need a clear and distinct object of study beyond the grand theories of other academicians, and the focus on the theory and practice of governance, particularly as represented in the work of those scholars cited above, would certainly provide them with such.

In a closely related fashion, we might also draw a second conclusion from the preceding observations, in this case concerning the theorisation of knowledge itself. Here, it is somewhat alarming that so many of the post-structuralists and post-modernists of International Relations theory seem to have adopted the view that knowledge is controlled by the state with such relative ease, particularly when someone like Foucault, for instance, was very much opposed to making such facile assertions.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ As if it were not enough to reify the state, they have, therefore, managed as well to overlook the fact that the production of knowledge, in the modern era particularly, is not necessarily conducted quite so consonantly with supposed state interests as one might be tempted to believe. It would consequently be much more prudent to view the state as having a somewhat more ambivalent relation to the production of knowledge – as either stabilising or destabilising, restraining or enabling,Footnote ¹⁸⁶ depending upon specific times and circumstances.

Again, this weakness in the current state of post-structuralist and post-modernist studies could easily be corrected by a concerted effort to observe something much more concrete, such as, for example, not only political economy,Footnote ¹⁸⁷ the disciplining of the people,Footnote ¹⁸⁸ and the governance of the system of natural liberties in general,Footnote ¹⁸⁹ but also the training programmes of military personnel,Footnote ¹⁹⁰ civil servants,Footnote ¹⁹¹ and the international econocrats of the corporate and financial worlds;Footnote ¹⁹² the theory and practice of issues pertaining to the governance of global telecommunications networks,Footnote ¹⁹³ insurance and risk management,Footnote ¹⁹⁴ the major accountancy firms,Footnote ¹⁹⁵ cartels and private protectionism,Footnote ¹⁹⁶ and even organised crime;Footnote ¹⁹⁷ discourses concerning human rights and their means of implementation at the UN;Footnote ¹⁹⁸ international health and education programmes;Footnote ¹⁹⁹ the role of nongovernmental actors, particularly religious and civic organisations, in shaping transnational values and opinions;Footnote ²⁰⁰ and certainly, too, the broader significance and implications of technics in relation to civilisation as a wholeFootnote ²⁰¹ – all with a clear and distinct focus on the manner in which modes of subjectification are conceived and implemented in the process. The dissidents have, of course, voiced many complaints with regard to their realist colleagues, but their own endeavours would benefit much more greatly from pursuing the seemingly mundane, if potentially quite fascinating and rewarding, types of research that some of their most favoured thinkers have undertaken in the past – and it is to be hoped that such opportunities might allow them to overcome their growing pains, while simultaneously giving them some empirical foil against which to amend and develop the ongoing project of refining their respective theoretical frameworks.