Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T13:44:21.721Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

New Materialisms, discourse analysis, and International Relations: a radical intertextual approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2014

TOM LUNDBORG  and
NICK VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article investigates the recent ‘New Materialisms’ turn in social and political thought and asks what the potential theoretical and methodological significance might be for the study of International Relations (IR). To do so we return to debates about the theoretical status of discourse in IR as it is in this context that the question of materiality – particularly as it relates to language – has featured prominently in recent years. While the concept of discourse is increasingly narrow in IR, the ‘New Materialisms’ literature emphasises the political force of materiality beyond language and representation. However, a move to reprioritise the politics of materiality over that of language and representation is equally problematic since it perpetuates rather than challenges the notion of a prior distinction between language and materiality. In response, we draw on earlier poststructural thought in order to displace this dichotomy and articulate an extended understanding of what analysing ‘discourse’ might mean in the study of IR.

Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 3 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, in Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For works framed in these terms see, for example, Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Braun, Bruce and Whatmore, Sarah (eds), Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Coole and Frost, New Materialisms. For an older set of literature also engaged with the question of materiality, but not necessarily framed in terms of ‘New Materialisms’ see, for example, Appadurai, Arjun (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in a Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Barad, Karen, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28:3 (2003), pp. 801–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fraser, Mariam, Kember, Sarah, and Lury, Celia (eds), Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism (London: Sage, 2006)Google Scholar; Law, John and Hassard, John (eds), Actor-Network Theory and After (Oxford: Blackwell)Google Scholar; Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

3 Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore, ‘The Stuff of Politics: An Introduction’, in Braun and Whatmore (eds), Political Matter, p. ix.

4 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. viii.

5 Coole and Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, p. 1.

6 Ibid., p. 1.

7 Ibid., p. 5.

8 Braun and Whatmore, ‘The Stuff of Politics’, p. xvii.

9 Coole, Diana, ‘Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with New Materialisms in the Political Sciences’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 41:3 (2013), pp. 451–69, 452CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For a recent summary of these debates see Banta, Benjamin R., ‘Analysing Discourse as a Causal Mechanism’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:2 (2013), pp. 379–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For recent contributions see also Epstein, Charlotte, The Power of Words in International Relations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Epstein, Charlotte, ‘Who Speaks? Discourse, the Subject and the Study of Identity in International Politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 17:2 (2010), pp. 327–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 For an empirical application of the position developed in this article see Lundborg, Tom and Vaughan-Williams, Nick, ‘Resilience, Critical Infrastructure, and Molecular Security: The Excess of “Life” in Biopolitics’, International Political Sociology, 5:4 (2011), pp. 367–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 We have chosen to focus on particular authors because their work on discourse analysis – perhaps more than any others' over the past two decades – has been hugely influential in inspiring a generation of scholars in IR. Moreover, their work is commonly referred to as landmark texts when critics refer to poststructural scholarship. See, for example, Banta's discussion in ‘Analysing Discourse’.

13 We gratefully acknowledge the comments of an anonymous reviewer on this point.

14 See, for an example of this approach, Mearsheimer, John J., ‘A Realist Reply’, International Security, 20:1 (1995), pp. 82–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 We recognise that the label ‘poststructuralism’ is potentially problematic. It refers to a diverse literature consisting of sometimes incompatible perspectives and often thinkers associated with this term openly reject it. However, we use it as a heuristic device to refer to a body of scholarship that seeks to problematise the language/materiality distinction. For a summary of this scholarship see Edkins, Jenny, Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In (London: Lynne Rienner, 1999)Google Scholar.

16 Coole and Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, p. 3.

17 Wight, Colin, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 135–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (2nd edn, Brooklyn, New York: Verso, 2001), p. 105Google Scholar. This formulation has been picked up and framed as the poststructuralist view on the relationship between idealism and materialism most notably in the work of David Campbell and Lene Hansen, which we discuss in the first section of the article. The extent to which this characterisation has come to frame broader understandings of poststructuralism in IR is reflected in Banta, ‘Analysing Discourse’.

19 Lapid, Yosef, ‘The Third Debate: On the Prospects of International Theory in a Post-positivist Era’, International Studies Quarterly, 33:3 (1989), pp. 235–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Booth, Ken, Smith, Steve, and Zalewski, Marysia (eds), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

21 Keohane, Robert O., ‘International Institutions: Two Approaches’, International Studies Quarterly, 44:1 (1988), pp. 83–105Google Scholar; Mearsheimer, John J., ‘The False Promise of International Institutions’, International Security, 19:3 (1994), pp. 5–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Walt, Stephen M., ‘The Renaissance of Security Studies’, International Studies Quarterly, 35:2 (1991), pp. 211–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Milliken, Jennifer, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Methods’, European Journal of International Relations, 5:2 (1999), pp. 225–54, 227CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Aradau, Claudia and Huysmans, Jef, ‘Critical Methods in International Relations: The Politics of Techniques, Devices, and Acts’, European Journal of International Relations (published online 2013)Google Scholar.

25 Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse’, p. 229.

26 Ibid., p. 233.

27 Ibid., p. 230.

28 Ibid., p. 233.

29 Jackson, Richard, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics, and Counter-Terrorism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 2Google Scholar.

30 Ibid., p. 2.

31 Ibid., p. 9.

32 Ibid., p. 17.

33 Ibid., p. 18.

34 Campbell, David, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (2nd edn, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 6Google Scholar.

35 Campbell, David, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 25Google Scholar.

36 Hansen, Lene, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 55Google Scholar.

37 Aradau and Huysmans, ‘Critical Methods in International Relations’, p. 11.

38 Hansen, Security as Practice, p. 8, emphasis added.

39 Ibid., p. 41.

40 Ibid., p. 18, emphasis added.

41 Campbell, David, ‘Cultural Governance and Pictoral Resistance: Reflections on the Imaging of War’, Review of International Studies, 29:S1 (2003), pp. 57–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Poststructuralism’, in Dunne, Tim, Kurki, Milja, and Smith, Steve (eds), International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity (2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2010), pp. 213–37Google Scholar.

42 Hansen, Lene, ‘The Politics of Securitization and the Muhammed Cartoon Crisis: A Post-structuralist Perspective’, Security Dialogue, 42:4–5 (2011), pp. 357–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Theorizing the Image for Security Studies: Visual Securitization and the Muhammad Cartoon Crisis’, European Journal of International Relations, 17:1 (2011), pp. 51–74.

43 See, for example, the Special Issue entitled ‘Materialism and World Politics’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 41:3 (2013).

44 Braun and Whatmore, ‘The Stuff of Politics’, p. xiv.

45 Coole and Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, p. 2.

46 Braun and Whatmore, ‘The Stuff of Politics’, p. ix.

47 Coole, ‘Agentic Capacities’, p. 452.

48 Ibid., p. 453.

49 Ibid., p. 457.

50 Ibid., p. 458.

51 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. viii.

52 Jane Bennett draws heavily on Deleuze when advancing her version of a vital materialism, not least when referring to an immanent power of materiality – a power that is inherent in materiality to change, transform, and create independently of human actions. She draws moreover on various connections explored by Deleuze and Félix Guattari between materiality's power of variation and the process of deterritorialisation, which frees ‘life’ from an illusory state of being and opens up to an unpredictable movement of singularity and becoming. See Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Massumi, Brian (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 445–58Google Scholar.

53 Bennett, Jane, ‘The Force of Things: Steps Towards an Ecology of Matter’, Political Theory, 32:3 (2004), pp. 347–72, 351CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 25.

55 Bennett, ‘The Force of Things’, p. 354.

56 Ibid., p. 357.

57 Ibid., p. 357.

58 Ibid., p. 349.

59 Ibid., p. 358.

60 Ibid., p. 351.

61 Coole, ‘Agentic Capacities’, p. 460.

62 Ibid., p. 461.

63 Coward, Martin, Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 89Google Scholar.

64 Coward, Martin, ‘Between Us in the City: Materiality, Subjectivity, and Community in the Era of Global Urbanization’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30:3 (2012), pp. 468–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 Ibid., p. 468.

66 Ibid., p. 473.

67 Voelkner, Nadine, ‘Managing Pathogenic Circulation: Human Security and the Migrant Health Assemblage in Thailand’, Security Dialogue, 42:3 (2011), pp. 239–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Ibid., p. 240.

69 Ibid., p. 244.

70 Aradau, Claudia, ‘Security That Matters: Critical Infrastructure and Objects of Protection’, Security Dialogue, 41:5 (2010), pp. 491–514, 493CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 Ibid., p. 493.

72 Ibid., p. 494.

73 Ibid., p. 501.

74 Ibid., p. 509.

75 Coole, ‘Agentic Capacities’, p. 455.

76 Coward, ‘Between Us in the City’, p. 476.

77 Aradau, ‘Security That Matters’, p. 494.

78 Coole and Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, p. 3.

79 Ibid., p. 6.

80 Coole, ‘Agentic Capacities’, p. 451.

81 Ibid., p. 454.

82 Banta, ‘Analysing Discourse’, p. 2.

83 Shapiro, Michael J., ‘Textualizing Global Politics’, in Der Derian, James and Shapiro, Michael J. (eds), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Massachusetts and Toronto: Lexington, 1989), pp. 11–24, 13Google Scholar.

84 Ibid., p. 17.

85 Ibid.

86 Connolly, William E., The Terms of Political Discourse (3rd edn, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), p. 231Google Scholar.

87 Ibid.

88 Foucault, Michel, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. Sheridan Smith, A. M. (London: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar. See especially Chapter Three, ‘The Formation of Objects’.

89 According to Edkins, Foucault ‘goes out of his way to stress’ the materiality of discourse. Edkins, Poststructuralism and International Relations, p. 48.

90 Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Howard, Richard (London: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar.

91 Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge, p. 49.

92 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 109Google Scholar.

93 Ibid., p. 143.

94 Deleuze, Gilles, Foucault, trans. Hand, Seán (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 32Google Scholar, emphasis added.

95 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 30.

96 Ibid., pp. 32–3. For a further elaboration on the materiality of the body and its relation to mechanisms of power, see Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, trans. Hurley, Robert (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 152Google Scholar.

97 Coole, ‘Agentic capacities’, pp. 465–6.

98 Coole and Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, p. 36.

99 This ethical-political dimension of genealogy is especially evident in Foucault, Michel, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Bouchard, Donald F., trans. Bouchard, Donald F. and Simon, Sherry (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 139–64Google Scholar.

100 Berman, Russell, ‘Troping to Pretoria: The Rise and Fall of Deconstruction’, Telos, 85 (1990), pp. 4–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

101 Protevi, John, Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Body Politic (New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, 2001)Google Scholar. See also Coole's comments on the limits of ‘undertaking linguistic or textual deconstruction of texts’ in Coole, ‘Agentic Capacities’, p. 454.

102 Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 158Google Scholar.

103 Derrida, Jacques, ‘Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms’, trans. Tomiche, Anne, in Carroll, David (ed.), The States of ‘Theory’: History, Art, and Critical Discourse (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 79Google Scholar.

104 Pheng Cheah has argued that: ‘It would not be inappropriate to speak of deconstruction as a materialism of the other, or more precisely, as the thought of the materiality of the reference or relation to the other.’ Pheng Cheah, ‘Non-Dialectical Materialism’, in Coole and Frost (eds), New Materialisms, p. 75.

105 Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Kamuf, Peggy (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 168–9Google Scholar (quoted in Cheah, ‘Non-Dialectical Materialism’, p. 72).

106 Cheah, ‘Non-Dialectical Materialism’, p. 72.

107 Ibid., p. 74.

108 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 148.

109 Derrida, ‘Some Statements’, p. 79.

110 Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 148.

111 Derrida, ‘Some Statements’, p. 65.

112 Cheah, ‘Non-dialectical Materialism’, p. 81.

113 Derrida, Jacques, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 228–98Google Scholar. See also Derrida, Jacques, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London and New York: Routledge, 2001)Google Scholar, and Borradori, Giovanna, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

114 Coole, ‘Agentic Capacities’, p. 454.

115 For more on the zoopolitical in Derrida's thought see Calarco, Matthew, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. For a critique of the Derridean position, see Shukin, Nicole, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)Google Scholar.