Retracing and Redrawing the Boundaries of Events: Postmodern Interferences with International Theory

Retracing and Redrawing the Boundaries of Events: Postmodern Interferences withInternational TheoryAuthor(s): Roland BleikerSource: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1998), pp. 471-497Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644925 .

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Alternatives 23 (1998), 471-497

Retracing and Redrawing the Boundaries of Events:

Postmodern Interferences with International Theory

Roland Bleiker*

Recognition of the extraordinary lengths to which one must go to challenge a given structure of intelligibility, to intervene in resident meanings by bringing what is silent and unglimpsed into focus, is an essential step towards opening up possibilities for a politics and ethics of discourse.

Michael J. Shapiro1

Many old certainties about world politics crumbled with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Entire political systems vanished overnight. Entrenched Cold War routines gave way to less polarized forms of international interactions. Opportunities emerged, and so did countless new problems. The same can be said of the body of literature that is trying to comprehend these phenomena. Interna- tional theory has been thrown into disarray by its inability to antici- pate what will be remembered as one of the defining moments of the late twentieth century. "An empire collapsed," Jean Elshtain says, "and many, if not most, practitioners of international relations were entirely unprepared. It seems that precisely when theories of international politics should have best served us, they failed rather strik- ingly, overtaken, as it were, by politics itself."2 During the 1990s, various scholarly efforts have sought to address this crisis in international theory. Among them is a heterogeneous group of approaches that could be labeled, in the wide sense of the term, postmodern.

This article examines postmodern contributions to international theory by focusing on their understanding of what constitutes an

*Assistant professor, International Studies Program, Pusan National University, Pusan, 609-735, South Korea

471



472 Retracing and Redrawing the Boundaries of Events

event in world politics. I argue that the positive potential of postmodern approaches can be appreciated and realized in practice only once we have moved beyond the current polemic that surrounds the term postmodernism. Defenders of the postmodern present it as a necessary critique of modern thought forms and their objectivication of international relations. Opponents justify the modern project at all costs, for they fear that postmodern alternatives would induce an endless fall into a relativist abyss. The result is an often dogmatic exchange of hostilities - a flexing of muscles that misses out on much of the substance at stake. Rather than articulating the issue in such stark either/or extremes, this article advances suggestions about how to rethink the nature of events, accept their multiple dimensions, and retain, at the same time, possibilities to pronounce normative judgments about the dilemmas that currently haunt world politics.

Mapping the Postmodern Terrain: What Is an Event in World Politics?

Postmodernists have proposed a fresh start to understanding and conducting world politics. They draw upon bodies of literature that are not usually part of international theory, including philosophy, cultural studies, feminist theory, geography, and linguistics.3 Many established scholars find no merit in these new approaches. Instead, they detect dangers of various kinds. They warn of fateful nihilistic tendencies. They fear that a too loosely defined academic discipline of international relations would undermine the search for coherent visions of world politics. And such visions, the argument goes, are badly needed at a time when violent conflicts and economic insecu- rities haunt the post-Cold War system.4 Real problems need theories grounded in reality. It is, of course, fairly easy to dismiss the lack of focus, the obscure writing style, or the alleged relativism of postmodern approaches and advocate a more realistic engagement with world political events. But it is far more difficult, as Paul Patton has pointed out in a different context, "to specify the nature of this theoretical engagement or to define the 'real events' with which theory is summoned to engage."5

Through deeply entrenched practices of speaking and writing we have grown accustomed to familiar representation of events, often to the point that these representations have become the events themselves. Banished from our collective memory is the actual construction and objectification of social reality. By exploring how realities achieve meanings and turn into events, postmodern approaches to world politics increase awareness of the choices we have made or the



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ones that have been made for us. Critics of postmodernism often point out that the language of such inquiries disturbs a reader or seems, at first sight, hopelessly removed from the everyday realities that are supposedly being addressed.6 They may be right. Postmod- ern approaches do, indeed, disturb. But such interferences are not necessarily faddish ravings or unpleasant by-products of postmodern theory. They are the very processes through which abstraction re- veals different facets of factual occurrences, and thus opens up possibilities to rethink and redirect political practice. Abstraction, then, is a means of shedding light on various pathways that lead from concrete political dilemmas to equally concrete manners of understanding and dealing with them. The task of this article is to outline the potential and limits of this process.

Various dilemmas emerge with an attempt to explain how postmodern approaches seek to break through entrenched forms of representing events. If one resorts to an explanation written in postmodern ways, one runs the risk of losing a reader who has not yet gained an appreciation of the linguistic subversion that sustains this approach. If, by contrast, one tries to summarize postmodern ideas in a conventional manner, then one may well annihilate the very substance they contain. In both cases, the objective remains elusive. This is why I am employing two parallel writing strategies in this article. I begin with a conceptual clarification of the postmodern that is advanced, on purpose, in a relatively straightforward way. Its objective is to locate and increase understanding of a body of theory that is more often critiqued than read. The second half of the article moves into writing strategies that themselves reflect and enact some of the stylistic critiques that are being advanced in postmodern approaches to world politics. My presentation takes the shape of aphorisms grouped in clusters. Aphorisms refuse to impose sovereign and final judgments. They are self-contained but advance no claim to totality. They do not achieve meaning in a linear way, but only in a constant cross-fertilization with each other. They may come closest to what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called a rhizome: a multiplicity that has no coherent and bounded whole, no beginning or end, only a middle from where it expands and overspills.7 What purpose such a writing strategy fulfills and how it may help to illuminate world political events can only emerge out of the rhizome itself.

Modernity

To understand postmodern approaches to international theory one must first investigate the modern elements from which they try to




distinguish themselves. No easy task. Certainly not one that I can solve here. Modernity is a highly ambiguous concept, an elusive set of complexities that defy single meanings.

Modernity has no clear beginning and end. While the roots of this period reach back somewhere to the early days of Renaissance humanism, scholars today are engaging in relentless disputes about whether we find ourselves in a late modern age or whether we have already taken the first steps into a beyond - some kind of postmodernity. I tend to side with the former. This has consequences. The recognition that we have not yet transgressed modernity means that we cannot look at it from the outside. A self-critical look at modern ideas and practices can never be detached from the eye of the viewer. It is more like a look in a mirror - an incomplete image of reflections and distortions, a mixture of vanity and self-doubt. But we must nevertheless grapple with the contours of life reflected in the mirror, even if we know that they will always remain distorted images.

Instead of looking at modernity as a historical period or a set of institutions, I follow Michel Foucault's advice and treat it primarily as an attitude, "a way of thinking and feeling," "a mode of relating to contemporary reality."8 Modernity, then, is the broad common theme that runs through a set of diverse discursive practices that, su- perseding and intersecting with each other, have come to constitute our contemporary consciousness.

One could say that the dominant frame of contemporary life is- sued to a considerable extent from the tension between romanticism and the Enlightenment. What has been retained from the romantic ideal is the autonomy of the self, the quest for independence and self-determination, the belief that the subject can shape history. This form of modern idealism was then supplemented with the scientific heritage of the Enlightenment, the desire to systematize, to search for rational foundations and certainty in a world of turmoil and constant flux.

The romantic element of our contemporary consciousness is epitomized in Hegel. What makes modernity different in Hegel's view is its attempt at self-understanding, the desire to establish nor- mativity out of itself rather than by way of borrowing from or reject- ing the ideas of a surpassed epoch. The keystone of this process of self-grounding is the principle of subjectivity, which, at least in Habermas's reading of Hegel, is linked to a perception of freedom that recognizes an individual's autonomy and responsibility in the realms of action and reflection.9 The legacy of the Enlightenment then provides this subjectivity-oriented approach with stable and scientific foundations. Jean Baudelaire, in a much cited passage, draws



Roland Bleiker 475

attention to the recurring quest for certainty in a world of turbu- lence and chaos. While describing modernity as "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent," Baudelaire points toward the constant attempts to discover underlying patterns behind these ephemeral features. He describes the recurring quest for essences as a desire to "extract the eternal out of the transient."10

Within such modern attempts to fuse subjectivity and science there is ample room for discussion and diversity, more than in any preceding period. Indeed, Hegel considers the right to criticism precisely as one of modernity's key characteristics.11 The breathing space necessary for criticism was provided by the emergence of a public sphere in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Pas- sionate debates were waged about all aspects of modern life. Virtually every opinion, every thought, every theory was attacked and refuted, or at least submitted to intense and sustained scrutiny.

While the waging of fierce intellectual debates emerged as a key feature of modernity, the range of these debates was not as bound- less as it appears at first sight. William Connolly emphasizes that modern debates all have a distinctive character. They are all well framed. The contours of the modern framing process have to a large extent been drawn by the recurring unwillingness to deal with what Nietzsche called the death of God, the disappearance, at the end of the medieval period, of a generally accepted worldview that provided a stable ground from which it was possible to assess nature, knowledge, common values, truth, politics - in short, life itself. When the old theocentric world crumbled, when the one and only commonly accepted point of reference vanished, the death of God became the key dilemma around which modern debates were waged. Yet, instead of accepting the absence of stable foundations and dealing with the ensuing responsibilities, many prominent modern approaches em- barked on attempts to find replacements for the fallen God.12 Noth- ing ought to remain unexplained. This quest has taken different shapes in various stages of the modern project. For Renaissance hu- manists it centered around a skeptical and rhetorical belief in human agency and the virtue of "men." During the Enlightenment it was trust in science and universal reason. For romantics it was the belief in an aesthetics and a deified self. For Marxists it consisted of faith in history's teleological dimension.

Modernity is not the only bounded set of discourses. Every discourse has limits, revolves around a set of underlying assumptions, advances propositions that banish others to conceptual exiles. Nei- ther can modernity be reduced to the recurring desire to repress am- biguity. Of course not. But the search for certainty is an important




and widely applied modern theme that continues to remain central to political dynamics in the twentieth century.13

It is in this context that the study of international relations emerged as a coherent academic discipline, in the 1920s in the United Kingdom, to be precise. Ever since then, countless scholars have engaged in relentless disputes about how to comprehend and conduct international politics. Several so-called great debates super- seded each other: an interwar opposition between idealism and realism was followed by a postwar methodological tension between be- haviorálism and traditionalism. More recently, various paradigms have tried to convince each other that they have discovered the key to understanding world politics - among them are pluralism, globalism and neoversions of realism and liberalism.14

These disputes in international theory display strong parallels with the modern debates mentioned above: they have been waged fiercely and often emotionally. Everything has come under attack. Seemingly nothing has been spared criticism. And yet, these debates have all been well framed. They have been framed by the urge to impose order upon a complex and elusive modern world. In a recent and illuminating essay, Steve Smith has drawn attention to this framing process. For him, positivism is the common theme that runs through a diverse set of traditional approaches to international theory. Even the debates about methodological issues, he points out, were carried out within a positivist frame because they failed to even touch upon issues of epistemology.15 Positivism entails not only methodological commitments (propositions about how to study world politics) but also epistemological and ontological frameworks (assumptions about how world politics can be known and how the knowers acquire their knowledge). The latter ones are more often la- tently used than explicitly acknowledged. At its most elementary level, positivism is based on an attempt to separate subject and object. It implies that the social scientist, as detached observer, can pro- duce value-free knowledge, that our comprehension of facts can be separated from our relationship with them.

For a postmodernist, thinking expresses a will to truth, a desire to control and impose order upon random and idiosyncratic events. "To think," Adorno says, "is to identify."16 When we think we identify choices, privilege one interpretation over others, and, often without knowing it, exclude what does not fit into the way we want to see things. There is no escape from this process, no possibility of ex- tracting pure facts from observation. To disrespect these limits to cognition is to endow one particular and necessarily subjective form of knowledge with the power to determine factuality. It is from such



Roland Bleiker 477

a theoretical vantage point that scholars like Jim George or Richard Ashley have tried to show how positivist epistemologies have transformed one specific interpretation of world political realities, the dominant realist one, into reality per se.17 As a result, realist perceptions of the international have gradually become accepted as common sense, to the point that any critique against them has to be evaluated in terms of an already existing and objectivized (realist) worldview. Smith detects powerful mechanisms of control precisely in this ability to determine meaning and rationality, to decide which issues are or are not legitimate concerns for international theorists. "Defining common sense," he argues, "is the ultimate act of political power."18 It separates the possible from the impossible and directs the theory and practice of world politics on a particular path. The ability to define normality interferes with virtually all aspects of the international, but its consequences are particularly evident in the domain of gender relations. World politics has for long been dominated by men. Dominant realist approaches to international theory have, through their positivist epistemologies, not only entrenched this patriarchal form of domination, but also rendered it meaningful and natural. Masculine values and men as a group have been elevated to the status of a norm, with the female constituted as a mere aberration from them.19

By challenging the positivist assumptions of dominant approaches to international theory, postmodernists have tried to open up various possibilities for rethinking not only the relationship between theory and evidence, fact and value, but also the very nature of the dilemmas that have haunted world politics for decades. To understand their efforts, a short look at larger issues in postmodern thought is useful.

Postmodernism

The postmodern has become a stretched, widely used, and highly controversial term. It first achieved prominence in literary criticism and architecture, but eventually spread into virtually all realms, pen- etrating such fields as architecture, art, music, sociology, geography, philosophy, and, with some delay, international theory. What the postmodern actually means is highly disputed. The increasing sense of confusion in the proliferation of the postmodern leads Gianni Vat- timo to note that this term is so omnipresent and faddish that it has become almost obligatory to distance oneself from it.20 But Vattimo, and many others, nevertheless hold on. He, alongside such diverse




authors as Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, David Harvey, and Fredric Jameson, views the postmodern as both a changing attitude and a fundamentally novel historical condition. Such writers focus on cultural transformations that have taken place in the West- ern world and assume, as Andreas Huyssen summarizes, that we are witnessing "a noticeable shift in sensibility, practices and discourse formations which distinguishes a postmodern set of assumptions, experiences and propositions from that of a preceding period."21 Such shifts are recognized in various globalizing tendencies, such as the rapid evolution and spread of mass media, computers, and other communicative features. These processes, it is said, have led to a "transparent society" (Vattimo); an "ecstasy of communication" (Bau- drillard); a fundamental rearrangement of the relationship between time and space (Harvey); a postindustrial phase whose main feature is knowledge production (Lyotard); the advance of new technologies and a consumer democracy that provides capitalism with an inher- ently new cultural logic (Jameson).

I argue for a more limited usage of the term postmodern, one that draws a clear distinction between postmodernity (a new historical époque) and postmodernism (an attitude).22 I adopt elements of the latter position, but reject the former as premature. This is not to deny the existence of the above-mentioned, so-called postmodern phenomenon, such as the increasing centrality of mass media. Yet, I do not see enough evidence to suggest that these features have ush- ered in a fundamentally new historical period, one that has super- seded modernity and deserves the label "post." In this sense I concur with authors like Paul de Man and Michel Foucault, for whom modernity is already such a vague and dubious historical term that postmodernity becomes nothing but a parody of the notion of modernity.23 Even Lyotard, in a departure from earlier terminology, now prefers to "rewrite modernity." The very concept of postmodernity, he points out, represents an effort in historical periodization, an obsession with ordering that is typically modern.24

The term postmodernism is a more useful analytical tool than postmodernity for it does not imply the end of a historical epoch called modernity, but merely draws attention to the need for rethinking the concepts and categories through which this epoch has been constituted. For this purpose I accept the aspects of Lyotard's work that differentiate between the modern and the postmodern by defining the former as any science that grounds and legitimates itself in reference to a grand narrative, while employing the latter term to express an incredulity toward totalizing forms of knowledge.25



Roland Bleiker 479

Postmodernism can thus be considered, at least at this point, as a methodological and epistemological position, which revolves around the issue of what knowledge is, how it is constructed, and how it re- lates to language and power. Epistemology here is not, as it was in pre-Kantean philosophy, a privileged form of insight into the human mind. The postmodern notion of episteme rejects the existence of truth beyond power, a privileged site of knowledge. It draws attention to the constituted and multiple dimensions of social practices. Given the acceptance of epistemological fragmentation, it is almost self-evident that this search is characterized more by diversity than by a single and coherent set of positions and assumptions about life.

If there is a unifying point in postmodernism then, it is precisely the acceptance of difference, the refusal to uphold one position as the correct and desirable one. "The postmodern begins," Wolfgang Welsch says, "where totality ends."26 Its vision is the vision of plurality, a positive attempt to secure and explore multiple dimensions of the processes that legitimize and ground social practices. Once the end of totalizing thought is accepted, it becomes, of course, very difficult to talk about the postmodern without descending into clichés or doing grave injus- tice to individual authors who explore various terrains of difference. Jane Flax recognized this difficulty and admits that by speaking about postmodernism one already runs "the risk of violating some of its central values - heterogeneity, multiplicity, and difference."27

There have been numerous attempts to apply postmodern ideas to the domain of world politics. Authors have exposed the state-cen- trism of realist and liberal approaches to international theory, their narrow perceptions of what the international is, and where its relations take place. They have challenged the masculine and Eurocen- tric values of existing approaches or reexamined such notions as security, identity, agency, sovereignty, diplomacy, geopolitics, and ethics. And they have used a multitude of postpositivist methodolo- gies to do so - genealogies, deconstruction, and hermeneutics, for instance. It is not my intention here to survey these diverse postmodern approaches to world politics; various authors have already done so competently.28 Moreover, surveying a body of literature is not unproblematic. It is, one could say, a modern attempt to bring order and certainty into a world of chaos and flux. It is a desire to squeeze freely floating and thus somewhat worrisome ideas into sur- veyable categories - to cut off and smoothen the various overlapping edges so that each piece neatly fits into its assigned place. The task of this article, then, is not to define what postmodern international theories are, but to gaze at some of the multiplicities through which




they work. Fragmented insight. Insight through fragmentation. Time to shift.

Cluster 1: Interfering Interpretations

Fata Morgana Realities are not. They happen. They come and go.

Reality cannot stand as something in itself, independent from the meaning that it acquires though our perceptions of it and our attempts to comprehend and describe these perceptions. The means of perception and description are webs of signification that are in- separable from language. They exist prior to our attempts to visual- ize and internalize objects and occurrences. Our comprehension of the world has to do with our being, with the nature of existence and its conditioning through language, before the process of knowing even begins.

The Nature of Events

Events are actualizations of reality in language. Events are more than the physical state of affairs that they are.

Events are more than the linguistic representations of the physical state of affairs that they are. Events are moving realities in motion.

Events in world politics are world political realities in motion. They are in motion not only because they may take place over time, but because they are physical attributes or occurrences that achieve meaning by means of language. And languages are splattered plural- ities floating in a constant state of flux.

Events cannot be apprehended as part of a natural order of things, as something that exists out there, waiting to be unveiled through a flash of authentic insight. Events are, at least in part, determined by what is asked about them in the process of imbuing their existence with sociolinguistic meaning.

In rendering meaningful, one is not describing or representing, one is intervening.29

Identifying Identifications When we investigate an event in world politics, we compare what we see, read, or feel about this event with our past experiences. We locate our perceptions within categories that we have acquired in a



Roland Bleiker 481

long and culturally conditioned process of socialization. This locat- ing takes place after the event itself has already been actualized into a specific form of representation that imbued it with meaning and significance.

(Take a mass demonstration, such as the street protests in 1989 that contributed to the downfall of the Berlin Wall and, ultimately, to the dissolution of the Cold War system. These events took place not only, and not even mostly, in the streets where people voiced their protest. The presence of mass media transformed a local act of dissent almost immediately into an event of global significance. Within hours, images of protesting people flickered over television screens worldwide, accompanied by one or two five-second sound bites that were sought to capture the essence of the dilemma in question. The naturalistic appearance of these selected images and sound bites masked their subjective representational character. "The electronic eyes of the media," Gearóid O Tuathail would say, "function [ed] as videocameralistic orders of power."30 Millions of people in various parts of the globe then compared the televised/objectivized street demonstrations with impressions that they had already acquired about repression in East Germany or about what political dissent means and how it shapes social dynamics. The ensuing creation of popular opin- ions and the intertwined reactions of politicians and diplomats shaped the international and domestic situation within which social dynamics in East Germany evolved during the autumn of 1989.

The political impact and in many ways the reality of the actual protest was determined less by what actually happened in the streets of East Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden than by how these events were represented in the world media and absorbed by its viewers. The dy- namic of the mass movement, the influence it exerted on the outside world, and the pressures that the outside world exerted back on the domestic situation in East Germany was shaped by a long and maybe untraceable chain of interfering interpretations.)

The process of identifying the nature of a political event becomes the nature of the event itself.

Speed and World Politics

The production of events in world politics has increased in intensity and significance, and so have the possibilities of masking the traces of this construction. Not that the process of actualizing realities through language has changed as such: what has changed is the speed at which this objectification happens and the potential audi- ence it is able to reach.




Speed is the relationship between space and time. The centrality of space has decreased and time has taken over as the criterion around which many global dynamics revolve. The instantaneous character of communication and mass media has reduced the im- portance of duration and locality. The "now" of the emission is privileged to the detriment of the "here," the space where things take place.31

(Mass media presentations of events that are considered of international significance, such as a street demonstration in East Berlin in 1989, have the potential of reaching a worldwide television audi- ence almost immediately after the event's occurrence. The process of physical occurrence, televised representation, internalization in language, public perception, and political reaction is often squeezed into a few hours. There is less and less time to reflect upon the various interpretative layers and interfering objectifications that make up this process. Actions are called for and decisions are being made based on information and assessments that emerged from an increasingly globalized but decreasingly reflective process of identifying the nature of events and the problems they pose in world politics.)

The Transversal Nature of World Politics

An event today is no longer apprehensible through traditional spatial understandings of world politics. Advances in economic, technologi- cal, and" informational domains have led to what could be called a "deterritorialization" of the world, a situation in which "the local is instantly global."32 This transformation has rendered obsolete the convention of investigating world politics through several distinct levels of analysis.33 David Campbell argues convincingly that globalized life is best seen "as a series of transversal struggles rather than as a complex of inter-national, multi-national or trans-national relations."34 The latter, he points out, are modes of representation that have strong investments in the very borders that are currently being questioned. By contrast, to conceptualize global politics as a site of transversal struggles is to draw attention to the multiple and multi- layered interactions that make up contemporary life. It is to recognize the complex cross-border flow of people, goods, ideas, capital - in short, "the increasing irruptions of accelerated and nonterritorial contingencies upon our horizons."35

(A world political event, such as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, cannot be understood through a spatial mode of representation that relies on a distinction between different levels of analysis. The key dynamics took place in various interstices, in the transversal gray



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zones that loom along the boundaries between local, domestic, and international politics. The processes that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall are thus best characterized as a series of diverse but intercon- nected occurrences that transgressed the spatial and political given- ness of both East German and Cold War international politics.)36

Retracing and Redrawing Identifications To examine events is to locate the interferences that have occurred through their identification and to highlight the consequences that issue from them. To examine events is to scrutinize how one particular interpretation of them has been objectivized and elevated to the level of factuality. Questioning processes of identification and interference not only reorients our thoughts about events, but also our actions. It may reshape the events themselves, even if they are long past, even if they have not yet happened.

Cluster 2: Form as Substance, Substance as Form

We Don't Know

The how is as important as the what. The what cannot be separated from how it is seen, felt, absorbed. Seeing, feeling, absorbing takes place within language. Words took their place long before we were thrown into a- void of whats.

Language assigned a place to each of us. It polished the edges of whats and placed them into square boxes. Only a few raw hows float outside the matrix of delineations.

We don't know all that, of course. We still don't. We never will.

Wearing Out Worn-Out Metaphors "Inventions from the unknown," the poet Arthur Rimbaud says, "de- mand new forms."37 New forms of speaking create preconditions for new forms of acting.

Opening up different ways of identifying events, of seeing and feeling reality, can occur only through language. It is a process satu- rated with obstacles and contradictions, obscurities and frustrations. It is never complete. It may not even happen. It certainly does not happen always.

Language has no outside. Only different insides. There is no easy language. There are only worn-out metaphors.




(How to locate forms of writing and thinking that may turn into new forms of acting and living? The point is to stretch language up to its limits: beyond the encrusted layers of silencing speech habits, but only as far as the roots still touch the ground. Disentangle knots of words, liberate from them laughter, shouts, gazes, variations, sen- sitivities, multiplicities. But do not disregard the manner in which a particular language is embedded in concrete social practices. "Any war against a form of language," Michael Shapiro says, "must come from within.")38

Contracting Contradictions

Live the life of contradictions. The contradictions of life. Think through contradictions, not against them. Write about contradictions, not around them. Don't cut off the edges that bother you. They will never fit into your box, even without edges.

(Instead of continuously trying to fill the void left by the fallen God, postmodern thought no longer searches for alternative Archi- medean foundations. The increasingly transversal events of contemporary world politics require more than ever that one accepts ambiguities and deals with the fragmented nature of life in the late twentieth century. One must try to comprehend international relations by relying on various forms of insight and levels of analysis even if they are incommensurable and contradict each other's internal logic.

An event like the fall of the Berlin Wall has multiple faces. It is too complex to be viewed adequately through one set of lenses. The masses of people that took to the streets in November 1989 were only one of many factors that contributed to the downfall of the existing regime. Other crucial influences include the evolution of the Soviet- led alliance system, the existence of a second German state, economic decay, or the obsolescence of domestic systems of threats and privileges. Each of these political sites offers possibilities for different readings of the event in question, readings that may contradict each other. Each provides a unique fragment of insight into the fall of the Berlin Wall. None of them can have the last word. Only in their incomplete and perhaps contradictory complementariness can these insights provide something that resembles an adequate understanding of what happened.)

Rhizome, or Living with Rupture Live the life of rupture. The ruptures of life. Think in ruptures. Write in ruptures. Don't try to link what floats and dissipates. Don't



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mold what does not melt. Don't write as if there were more than the fragmentations from whence we glimpse the next fragmentations. Don't build bridges where you can jump. Bridges don't move. Every- thing else does.

(Rhizome. Deleuze and Guattari speak of a rhizome. Of the need to think in the form of a rhizome, rather than trees, roots, radicles. The latter three, they say, has dominated much of Western thought. A tree is a hierarchical system in which ones becomes two, in which everything can be traced back to the same origin. Roots and radicles may shatter the linear unity of knowledge, but they hold onto a con- trived system of thought, to an image of the world in which the multiple always goes back to a centered and higher unity. The brain, by contrast, is not rooted, does not strive for a central point. It func- tions like a subterranean rhizome. It grows sideways - has multiple entryways and exits. It has no beginning or end, only a middle, from where it expands and overspills. Any point of the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize, is connected to any other. It is a multiplicity without hierarchies, unities or fixed points to anchor thought. There are only lines, magnitudes, dimensions, plateaus, and they are always in motion.)39

Language and the War Machine: The Politics of Naming

War. Languages of War. War. Their inherent circularities flattened beyond recognition, but still spiraling, behind masking objectifiers, higher and higher up until they are but one indistinguishable point in a dotted imagination, a vortex subsumed by itself. War. Languages of War. War. Everything circles, but the mask. Everything wages, but wars over language.

(War is the locus classicus of international theory. Most of the existing scholarly efforts have been geared toward understanding the causes of war and, perhaps, providing suggestions about how to overcome them. Compelling and urgent as it is, this task is not unproblematic. War, for a postmodern scholar, is in part what has been said and written about war, and that, in turn, is linked to entrenched linguistic and cultural practices. Consider the numerous critiques that have lately been directed toward the state-centric perspective of conventional international theory. These critiques are difficult to sus- tain, for they have to struggle with a language that has already established the state as norm. The spatial arrangement of world politics around the existence of sovereign states is a historically constituted practice - one that represses various alternatives and, as William Con- nolly notes, "implicitly endows state violence with special sanctity."40




To critique such practices and remain plausible, one must first engage with the languages that have rendered this sanctity unproblematic. Two examples:

1. Most political science approaches to war are dominated by pragmatic and strategic orientations. Wars are presented in policy terms; that is, as pragmatic reactions against external threats. Michael Shapiro believes that such approaches are not just explana- tory in nature, but that they also provide the state with a legitimate rationale for violent encounters.41 To disclose this normalization of war, Shapiro engages in what he calls "disruptive writing."42 The object of disruption is the familiar language of security studies, which presents war in relation to national interest, logistics, and enmities. Shapiro attempts to dislocate familiar images of war by constantly juxtaposing them with unusual sites of investigation, such as film, television, art and literature. He switches back and forth between contemporary and ancient practices of warfare and discovers that they display, indeed, rather striking parallels. In tribal societies, such as the Hurons or the Aztecs, warfare was an important, even vital, ac- tivity through which a sense of collective identity could be forged and maintained.43 Many pre-state societies did not hide this aspect of war, but celebrated it proudly and publicly. Shapiro argues that this ontological dimension of warfare is equally important in today's state societies, except that its presence is camouflaged by a language that has rationalized war as if it were a mere response - necessary and pragmatic - to an objective external situation. By reinterpreting Hegel, von Clausewitz, and various contemporary approaches to strategy, Shapiro demonstrates that warfare today is far more than a utilitarian policy - it is integral to the constitution of our identity. Hidden behind a pragmatic understanding of war is an ontological justification of state violence in which the cultural production of an "enemity," an antagonistic Other, is essential for the maintenance of a body politic and a coherent societal whole.44 After problematizing the identity formations that frame the circumstances of warfare, Shapiro advances suggestions for an alternative approach to international politics, which he calls an "ethics-as-nonviolent-encounter." This alternative revolves around a relationship to alterity that dis- plays respect for the Other's different identity performances.45 Whether or not Shapiro's mode of writing has facilitated such re- spectful encounters with difference cannot be revealed by a sum- mary of his arguments. Only the text itself and the multiple readings that it facilitates can answer this question.

2. Deleuze and Guattari critique the state-centric and strategic approach to understanding war from a different perspective. Theirs



Roland Bleiker 487

is an attempt to disentangle the state and war. They present war as a machine, as something that existed prior to the state, a nomadic invention designed to ward off the apparatuses of cities and states that threatened to annihilate the nomad. The war machine, they argue, was then appropriated by and subordinated to the state in the form of a military institution.46 The language with which Deleuze and Guattari present their arguments is as "disruptive" as Shapiro's un- reading and rewriting of security discourses. They employ unusual terminology, grammar, and syntax. They begin their treatise on war not with policy analyses, but with references to Indo-European mythology. They draw their wisdom not from utterances of famous statesmen and warriors, but, for instance, from the music of Pierre Boulez, the poetic ravings of Arthur Rimbaud, Franz Kafka, and Heinrich von Kleist, or the wheelings and dealings of Eskimos, Mon- gols, and gangs of street children in Bogotá. All this takes place within a rhizome that intermingles and overspills thoughts from the middle without putting lids or labels on them. The very politics of naming war epitomizes the manner in which Deleuze and Guattari try to create distance from conventional analyses of violence. They speak not of war but of a war machine, a term that indicates an ex- teriorality of sorts, a move away from sovereignty and agency. War is then not something that someone does, but a complexity that is too random, too unpredictable, to be ascribed solely to agents and their rational actions.

These two examples of disruptive writings on war draw attention to the contentious nature of the relationship between language, war, and international theory. Of course, a short discussion can neither reenact nor represent the disclosures that the respective texts have sought to engender. Only the texts themselves, only an endless process of reading and rereading events, can do so. Only a constant disturbing of language can break through the circularity of war and problematize its ensuing justification of violence.)

Cluster 3: Foundations, Anti-Foundations, Rhizomes

Revealing Judgments If one abandons the notion of Truth, the idea that an event can be apprehended as part of a natural order, pure, scientifically, authen- tically, as something that exists independently of the meaning we have given it - if one abandons this separation of object and subject, then the process of judging the adequacy of a particular approach to




understanding and explaining an event becomes a very muddled af- fair. There is no longer an objective measuring device that can set the standard to evaluate whether or not a particular insight into an event (like the collapse of the Berlin Wall) is true or false. The very nature of a past event becomes indeterminate insofar as its identification is dependent upon ever-changing forms of linguistic expres- sions that imbue the event with meaning.47 This recognition need not, as some international theorists fear, open up the floodgates to a mass of relativistic ravings, according to which "anything goes" and "any narrative is as valid as another."48

Not every perception is equally perceptive. Not every thought is equally insightful. Not every action is equally justifiable. How, then, can one judge?

Determining the value of a particular insight or action is always a process of negotiating knowledge, of deciding where its rotating axes should be placed, and how its outer boundaries should be drawn. The actual act of judging can thus be made in reference to the very process of negotiating knowledge. Among various criteria, the fol- lowing two could, for instance, be employed to assess the adequacy and usefulness of a postmodern contribution to international theory:

1 . The insight of a particular approach can be judged in relation to whether or not a description or redescription of an event is able to open up new perspectives on the event. Expressed in other words, knowledge can be evaluated by its ability to orient and reorient our thoughts about events and the political actions that issue from them. (Feminist contributions to international theory, for instance, could be assessed by their ability to demonstrate that the study of gender issues has revealed different insights into world politics; that is, whether or not particular events appear in a new light once they are being scrutinized by an approach that pays attention to factors that have hitherto been ignored. Actual judgments are not my task here, but one could easily recognize, for instance, that Jean Elshtain has revealed how closely modern practices of warfare have been intertwined with patriarchal divisions of labor,49 or that Cynthia Enloe, Christine Sylvester, and Jan Jindy Pettman have forced us to rethink the actual locations where international relations take place by zooming in, for instance, on migrant workers, assembly lines, rural cooperatives, or the political economy of sex tourism.)50

2. The insight of a particular approach can be judged by the reactions to its attempt at redescribing the identity of events. Any re- orientation of thought and action is a painful process, one that may involve giving up comforting identities or political and social privileges. Ensuing processes of interference and dislocation are bound



Roland Bleiker 489

to be met with strong opposition and hostility. Such reactions can serve as evidence that indicate whether or not interfering interpretations have been successful in uprooting entrenched and objectified perspectives on social reality. (Judging by this standard, postmodern analyses of world politics have been rather successful. Hardly any other approach to international theory has harvested as much opposition and hostility as postmodernism. Many established scholars express not just indifference or critique: they express fear - fear that a pursuit of postmodern lines of inquiry would, in Robert Keohane's representative words, inevitably lead to "an intellectual and moral disaster."51 Postmodernism, then, appears as a rambling conceptual menace that is employed "not to reinforce argument, but to com- pensate for the lack of it."52 Concerns about the dangers of relativism are legitimate and ought to be taken seriously. But this is not the end of the story. To draw attention to the moral necessity of grounding values is one thing. To equate the idea of the postmodern with an automatic and inevitable fall into a nihilistic abyss is an entirely different thing, one that suggests a high level of anxiety about the values that are being scrutinized. No postmodernist would think of implying, yet alone asserting, that "if the text and the discourse is all, then the Earth is flat if you say so."53 And yet, such forms of critique are often advanced to discredit, even vilify, postmodern inquiries into the constitution of social and political practices.)

Circularities of Thought - or Faith No More, Faith Again In the absence of authentic knowledge, the formulation of theoretical positions and practical action requires modesty. Accepting difference and facilitating dialogue becomes more important than search- ing for the elusive Truth.

But dialogue is a process, an ideal, not an end point. Often there is no common discursive ground, no language that can establish a link between the inside and the outside. The link has to be searched first.

But the celebration of difference is a process, an ideal, not an end point. A call for tolerance and inclusion cannot be void of power. Every social order, even the ones that are based on the acceptance of difference, excludes what does not fit into their view of the world. Every form of thinking, some international theorists recognize, expresses a will to power, a will that cannot but "privilege, op- press, and create in some manner."54 There is no all-encompassing gaze. Every process of revealing is at the same time a process of con- cealing. By opening up a particular perspective, no matter how




insightful it is, one conceals everything that is invisible from this vantage point. The enframing that occurs by such processes of revealing, Martin Heidegger argues, runs the risk of making us forget that enframing is a claim, a disciplinary act that "banishes man into that kind of revealing that is an ordering." And where this ordering holds sway, Heidegger continues, "it drives out every other possibility for revealing."55 This is why one must move back and forth between different, sometimes incommensurable forms of insights. Such an approach recognizes that the key to circumventing the ordering mechanisms of revealing is to think in circles - not to rest too long at one point, but to pay at least as much attention to linkages between than to contents of mental resting places.

Inclusiveness does not lie in the search for a Utopian, all-encompassing worldview, but in the acceptance of the will to power - in the recognition that we need to evaluate and judge, but that no form of knowledge can serve as the ultimate arbiter for thought and action. As a critical practice, postmodernism must deal with its own will to power and to subvert that of others. This is not to avoid accountabil- ity, but to take on responsibility in the form of bringing modesty to a majority.

Against the Third Debate

The task of critique is to challenge the dominance of one thought form. Critique is thus always becoming. And "all becoming," Deleuze and Guattari say, "is minoritarian."56 Its task lies in disclosing the dangers that are entailed in elevating a majoritarian position to the level of truth, no matter how insightful, logical, and morally impera- tive this compulsion appears.

Becoming in international theory takes places in the cracks that open up between various academic disciplines. Disciplines are majoritarian. They establish rules that frame the rules that frame the analyses of what is called world politics. To critique is to gaze beyond the rules that frame the rules. (The so-called third debate in international theory, the one that presumably revolves around postpositivist challenges to orthodoxy,57 is not the location of postmodern critique. A debate presupposes the existence of a language that can link up the various voices that shout around the ring. This ideal speech scenario is far off. And even if we were closer to communicative harmony, postmodernism would see no point in trying to win a debate, in discovering the way of interpreting world politics. The postmodern author searches for solutions outside the disciplinary boundaries that have already preset the possible range of debates.)



Roland Bleiker 491

The power and the positive potential of postmodern critique does not lie in engaging orthodox international theory, but in forgetting it.58

Grounding Without Ground: Three Sticks

How to ground thought, critique, action, norms, life itself, if there are no universal values that can enable such a process of grounding. How to understand international relations after having come to terms with the death of God? How to oppose totalitarian thought and escape relativism at the same time?

It cannot be the task of this brief exposé to provide answers to these complex questions. Some of the puzzles they raise may always remain puzzles and have to be dealt with as such, in their frustrating infinity. May it suffice, for now, to draw brief attention to three different attempts at grounding thought in a void:

1. Judith Butler speaks of contingent foundations. For her, the recognition that power pervades all aspects of society, including the position of the critic, does not necessarily lead into a nihilistic abyss. It merely shows that political closure occurs through attempts to establish foundational norms that lie beyond power. Likewise, to re- open this political domain is not to do away with foundations as such, but to acknowledge their contingent character, to illuminate what they authorize, exclude, and foreclose.59 (To scrutinize dominant strategic approaches to war, for instance, is to disclose the possibilities that they exclude. An alternative understanding of war can then be grounded on these disclosures. It is advanced not as a position that demands exclusiveness and is valid for all times and places, but as a form of insight that promotes specific moral and political values in a delineated spatiotemporal context.)

2. Michel de Certeau attempts to avoid totalitarian thought by grounding his position not in a systematic theory but in "operational schemes."60 A theory is a method of delineation. It freezes what should be understood in its fluidity. An understanding of operational schemes, by contrast, recognizes that events should be assessed in their changing dimensions. Rather than trying to determine what an event is, such an approach maps the contours within which events are incessantly constituted and reconstituted. (To scrutinize a phenomenon like war through operational schemes is to understand, for instance, how and with what consequences practices of warfare are imbued with sociolinguistic meaning. This culturally sensitive inquiry provides the ground for a framework of analysis within which various acts of violence can be scrutinized and acted upon.)




3. Deleuze and Guattari go even further. Opting for the rhizome, they reject all forms of foundations, structures, roots, or trees. Un- like a structure, which is made up of points and positions, a rhizome consists only of various types of lines, of which the line of flight de- marcates the rhizome's maximum dimension.61 To travel along these lines is to engage in nomad thought, to travel along axes of difference, rather than identity. Nomad thought, says one of Deleuze's feminist interpreters, "combines coherence with mobility," it is "a creative sort of becoming, a performative metaphor that allows for otherwise unlikely encounters and unsuspected sources of inter- action of experience and of knowledge."62 (The extent to which this form of thinking constitutes a grounding process may be left open to question. Judging from Deleuze's work it is clear, however, that the exploration of difference and multiplicities does not prevent him from taking positions for or against something. What he does forgo, however, is a central authorial voice - to the benefit of a polyphonic array of whispers and shouts.)

Cluster 4: "I Know Nothing About Dostoevsky"

The Text . . .

Postmodernism does not exist. Never has. To speak of its existence is to negate its content: heterogeneity,

fragmentation, tolerance for difference. There is nothing beyond the multiplicity of the texts that make

up the postmodern bubble. Any coherent whole is more a function of our need to categorize than a quality inherent to the texts in question. Indeed, each text embarks on a variety of unpredictable jour- neys. Each becomes a multiplicity itself, a constantly transforming array of voices that lies far beyond the control of the author's initial intentions.

"I know nothing about Dostoevsky," William Faulkner said. "I like The Brothers Karamazov."®*

(To Name to No Longer Name

I have spoken of "it" only with great reluctance, only to be able to speak about something that is recognizable, only to be able to stop speaking about "it." What else to use? "Critical" has been suggested as an alternative concept to capture the meaning of nonfoundationalist



Roland Bleiker 493

approaches.64 It is convincing. It too has its problems. It assumes that everything but itself is uncritical: a semantic self-righteousness that may foreclose the few fruitful links that could develop between in- commensurabilities. What else to use?

Nothing.)

. . . Circles and Circles . . .

Postmodernism does not exist. Always has. It is a mind-set, not an epochal delineation. It is an understand-

ing of the relationship between thought and factuality that had existed long before the first uttering of a postwhatsoever. Spinoza's Ethics zip-zapped around the hyphens of migrating thought; Mon- taigne's Essays fragmented the fragments of life; Nietzsche's Gay Sci- ence celebrated the ends of all beginnings and ends. And on. And before. And and.

... Beyond Circles Beyond . . .

Postmodernism does not exist. Always will. The actual term postmodernism will wax and wane with current in-

tellectual fads. The substantial issues that it brought to the forefront are, however, here to stay. They underline the need to retrace and re- draw the boundaries of events. Carefully. Constantly. Against all odds. They urge us to come to terms with the death of God and to accept, rather than circumvent, the will to power that transcends our thoughts and actions.

The contribution of postmodern thought to international theory can be translated into positive practical actions only once the polemic that surrounds the postmodern is overcome. A flexing of muscles, a brute battle that opposes friends and foes of the postmodern, can never grasp the complexities that are being defended or besieged. It is itself part of a dualistic mind-set that has dominated modern thinking for too long. International theory today needs what Pierre Bourdieu and Richard Bernstein have proposed elsewhere a while ago: an attempt to overcome the misleading dichotomy between objectivism and relativism.65 This dichotomy holds that, either there is an ultimate possibility of grounding knowledge in stable foundation, or there are no foundations at all, nothing but an endless fall into a nihilist void. But there are no either/or extremes, except in our encrusted minds. There are only shades of difference, subtleties that contradict the idea of an exclusionary vantage point.




. . . The Text ... .

Large gray-zones in-between, wrapped in ether and gloom, visions of difference looming in blossom and fruit. That is how I wanted to start. Tales of inverted inventions. Re- drawing not tracing maps in my head. Tabula Rasa. By forgetting blinding delineations.

Notes

I have been fortunate to receive supportive criticism on drafts/presentations of this article from Christine Sylvester, Tarja Vayrynen, and Tony Burke, from au- diences at the University of Lund (Department of Political Science) and the Danish Institute of International Affairs in Copenhagen, and from the students in the graduate seminar I taught at the International School of Social Sciences, University of Tampere. Thanks, in particular, to Osmo Apunen, Helena Ry- tövuori-Apunen, Marjajukola-Aho, Bertel Heurlin, Vivienne Jabri, Anne Koski, Johanna Hakala, Leena Rikkilä, Erika Svedberg, and Leena Wilkman.

1. Michael J. Shapiro, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War (Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

2. Jean Bethke Elshtain, "International Politics and Political Theory," in Ken Booth and Steve Smith, eds., International Relations Theory Today (Uni- versity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), p. 272.

3. For reasons to be explained later, this article is not an exercise in surveying postmodern international theory. Besides the texts that are explicitly cited below, key contributions to this diverse and rapidly growing body of theory include, for instance, Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1992); James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Ge- nealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1987); James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro, eds., International /Inter textual Re- lations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989); Michael J. Shapiro and Hayward R. Alker, eds., Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities (Minneapolis: University of Min- nesota Press, 1996); R. B. J. Walker, Inside /Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

4. Among the authors who express concerns about postmodern scholarship are Fred Halliday, Rethinking International Relations (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1994), p. 39; K.J. Holsti, "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Which Are the Fairest Theories of All?" in International Studies Quarterly 33, no. 3, pp. 255-261; Robert O. Keohane, International Institutions and State Power: Articles in International Relations Theory (Boulder: Westview, 1989).



Roland Bleiker 495

5. Paul Patton, "The World Seen from Within: Deleuze and the Philos- ophy of Events," in Theory and Event 1, no. 1 (1997), http://muse.jhu.edu/ journals/t+ae, § 1.

6. See, for instance, Robert G. Gilpin, "The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism," in Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 303.

7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1996/1980), pp. 3-25, 377.

8. Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?" C. Porter, trans., in P. Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 39.

9. Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), pp. 13-58.

10. Jean Baudelaire, "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne," in Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), p. 1163.

11. Habermas, note 9, p. 27. 12. See William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Ithaca, N.Y.:

Cornell University Press, 1993/1988). 13. For an excellent discussion, see Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Am-

bivalence (Oxford: Polity, 1991). 14. For summaries of these various debates, see E. H. Carr, The Twenty

Years Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (New York: Harper & Row, 1964); Klaus Knorr and James Rosenau, eds., Con- tending Approaches to International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969); R. Maghroori and B. Ramberg, eds., Globalism Versus Realism: In- ternational Relations' Third Debate (Boulder: Westview, 1982); D. A. Baldwin, Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Charles W. Kegley, ed., Controversies in International Relations Theory: Realism and the Neoliberal Challenge (New York: St. Martin's, 1995).

15. Steve Smith, "Positivism and Beyond," in S. Smith, K. Booth, and M. Zalewski, eds., International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1996), pp. 11-44.

16. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992/1966), p. 17.

17. Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re) Introduction to In- ternational Relations (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1994); Richard Ashley, "The Poverty of Neorealism," in International Organization 38, no. 2: 225-286.

18. Smith, note 15, p. 13. 19. See V. S. Peterson, ed., Gendered States: Feminist Revisions of Interna-

tional Relations (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992). 20. Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, D. Webb, trans. (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 1. 21. Andreas Huyssen, "Mapping the Postmodern," in New German Cri-

tique 33 (1984): 8. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, P. Foss, P. Patton, and P. Beitchman, trans. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), and "The Ecstasy of Com- munication," J.Johnston, trans., in Hal Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture (Lon- don: Pluto, 1985); Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," in New Left Review, no. 146 (1984); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmoder nity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989); Jean-François Ly- otard, La Condition Postmoderne (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979).




22. For elaborations of this distinction see Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989); and Barry Smart, Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1993).

23. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 120; Michel Foucault, "Space, Knowledge, and Power," C. Hubert, trans., in P. Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 248-249.

24. Jean-François Lyotard, "Rewriting Modernity," in The Inhuman: Re- flections on Time, G. Bennington and R. Bowlby, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991/1988), pp. 24-35.

25. Lyotard, note 21, pp. 7-9. 26. Wolfgang Welsch, "Postmoderne: Genealogie und Bedeutung eines

umstrittenen Begriffes," in P. Kemper, ed., Postmoderne oder der Kampf um die Zukunft (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1988), pp. 29-30.

27. Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmod- ernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 188.

28. See, for instance, Chris Brown, 'Turtles All the Way Down : Anti- Foundationalism, Critical Theory, and International Relations," Millennium 23, no. 2 (1994): 213-236; Richard Devetak, "Postmodernism," in Scott Burchill et al., Theories of International Relations (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996); Jim George, "Of Incarceration and Closure: Neo-Realism and the New/Old World Order," in Millennium 22, no. 2 (1993): 197-234.

29. Deleuze and Guattari, note 7, p. 86; Patton, note 5, §§ 1-9. 30. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, "At the End of Geopolitics? Reflections on a Plural

Problématique at the Century's End," in Alternatives 22, no. 1 (1997): 47. 31. Paul Virilio, La Vitesse de Libération (Paris: Galilée, 1995), pp. 21-34.

See also The Virilio Reader, I. Der Derian, ed. (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1998). 32. Gearóid O Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global

Space (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 250, 228-229. 33. For critical discussions, see Barry Buzan, "The Level of Analysis

Problem in International Relations Reconsidered," in Booth and Smith, note 2, pp. 198-216; and Martin Hollis and Steve Smith, Explaining and Under- standing International Relations (Oxford: Claredon, 1990), pp. 92-118.

34. David Campbell, Political Prosaics, Transversal Politics, and the An- archical World," in Michael J. and Hayward R. Alker, eds., Challenging Bound- aries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 24. See also Richard K. Ashley, "Living on Border Lines: Man, Poststructuralism, and War," in Der Derian and Shapiro, note 3, pp. 270, 296-299, 314.

35. Campbell, note 34, p. 9. 36. There is no space here for elaborating on the transversal complexities

that made up the collapse of the Berlin Wall. I have scrutinized this case in more detail in a project that seeks to understand practices of disssent that defy national sovereignty and challenge the spatial logic of global politics ( Transver- sal Dissent: Rethinking Human Agency in Global Politics, MS in preparation).

37. Arthur Rimbaud, "Letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871," in Collected Poems, O. Bernard, trans. (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 16.

38. Shapiro, note 1, p. 184. 39. See Deleuze and Guattari, note 7, pp. 3-25. 40. William Connolly, Identity /Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1991), p. 207.



Roland Bleiker 497

41. Shapiro, note 1, and "Strategic Discourse/Discursive Strategy: The Representation of 'Security Policy' in the Video Age," in International Studies Quarterly 34, no. 3 (1990): 327-340. For a similar argument from a feminist viewpoint see Carol Cohn, "Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals," in L. R. Forcey, ed., Peace: Meanings, Politics, Strategies (New York: Praeger, 1989), pp. 39-71.

42. Shapiro, note 1, pp. ix, 38. 43. Ibid., p. 67. 44. Ibid., pp. 41-72. 45. Ibid., pp. 170-209. 46. Deleuze and Guattari, "Treatise on Nomadology - The War Ma-

chine," in A Thousand Plateaus, note 1, pp. 351-423. 47. Patton, note 5, § 6. 48. 0yvind 0sterud, "Antinomies of Postmodernism in International

Studies," in Journal of Peace Research 33, no. 4 (1996): 386. 49. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987). 50. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense Out

of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Chris- tine Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics (London: Routledge, 1996).

51. Robert O. Keohane, "International Relations Theory: Contributions of a Feminist Standpoint," in Millennium 18, no. 2 (1989): 89.

52. Fred Halliday, Rethinking International Relations, p. 39. 53. 0sterud, note 48, pp. 387-388. 54. Paul Saurette, "'I Mistrust All Systematizers and Avoid Them': Niet-

zsche, Arendt and the Crisis of the Will to Order in International Relations Theory," in Millennium 25, no. 1: 24.

55. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," D.F. Krell, trans., in Basic Writings (New York: HarperCollins, 1993/1977), p. 332.

56. Deleuze and Guattari, note 7, p. 106. 57. See Yosef Lapid, "The Third Debate: On the Prospects of Interna-

tional Theory in a Post-Positivist Era," in International Studies Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1989): 235-254.

58. See Roland Bleiker, "Forget IR Theory," in Alternatives 22, no. 11 (1997): 57-85.

59. Judith Butler, "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of 'Postmodernism,'" in J. Butler andJ.W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Po- litical (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3-7.

60. Michel de Certeau, Arts de Faire, vol. 1 of L'Invention du Quotidien (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 51.

61. Deleuze and Guattari, note 7, p. 21. 62. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in

Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 63. Faulkner, cited in Clare Messud, "Bard of the bayou," in the

Guardian, September 20, 1997, p. 18. 64. Brown, note 28, pp. 213-236. 65. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, R. Nice, trans. (Stanford: Stan-

ford University Press, 1990/1980); Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), pp. 1-49.



Retracing and Redrawing the Boundaries of Events: Postmodern Interferences with International Theory

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