Antinomies of Postmodernism in International Studies

By Way of Appearances The new wave of anti-positivism reached international relations remarkably late. Dressed in Parisian post-structuralist vocabulary it spread from peripheral North American universities by the mid-1980s (Ashley, 1984; Walker, 1987). Scattered 'voices from exile' made a wave of 'dissident thought', challenging the academic establishment with heated critical fervour. The itinerary from the American outback is not hard to account for. Modish currents tend to rise with the frenzied search for visibility in an overpopulated and strongly competitive discipline. Today, the exile is closing in on centre stage, and dissidents are often hard to tell apart from figures of power. The march through the professional institutions university departments, conferences and journals has proceeded with remarkable speed. The postmodernist movements may be at the ebb in cultural life generally, but in international studies the latecomer is still up-beat. What is at stake here? The postmodernist spirit is questioning Established Knowledge in general and Realism in particular. At the surface, it is disclosing itself in trendy terminology, with politics as discourse, the world as text, verbal depiction as narrative, narrative as construction of meaning and meaning as construction of reality, and for sure any foe or antagonist image as simply the Other. In part, the terminology is seeping in by osmosis everywhere. Beyond terminology, the spirit is hard to pin-point, as theory, as method, or as strategy of research. It is even hard to label, appearing as it does as postmodernism, post-structuralism, Critical Theory, intertextuality, reconstructivism (late-modern or postmodern), deconstructivism, or simply constructivism. In some cases, the terms are used synonymously with no great precision; in other cases, crucial distinctions are made between them. Every insider will certainly demand distinction in protest against a collective portrait. An outside observation will hazardously have to blur distinctions in favour of family resemblances. Since the various postmodernist or constructivist brands cluster in opposition to the academic Other ('conservative science', 'conventional scholarship') we may challenge the validity of the general position, even if it is more negatively than positively conceived. Individual figures, therefore, will suffer from superficial treatment here. There may be a point in the multitude of ideas and labels, as noted by a sympathetic and very lenient observer. Dissident thought aims at defamiliarization: 'Clarification and familiarization annuls the basic feature of post-structuralism' (Brown, 1994). Employing, we may take it, estrangement as literary technique, the exposition should be elusive and strange. This is the tolerant view of what could pass as scientific discourse. The open mind is certainly worried: 'Now is not the time for shotgun attacks' on dissident thought (Brown, 1994, p. 236).