The document discusses key concepts from post-structuralist philosophy, including constitutive theories, anti-foundational theories, discourse, genealogy, deconstruction, double reading, and intertextuality. It explains that post-structuralist thinkers see language and concepts as constructing reality rather than just describing an objective world, and seek to uncover the power dynamics and assumptions behind dominant ways of thinking. Theorists discussed include Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, and Lyotard, along with some of their main ideas around how power shapes knowledge, the instability of language, and texts being interrelated.

1. Theme “Major International Relations Theories”
February 19th, 2015
Anna A. Dekalchuk,
Lecturer at the Department of Applied Politics,
Higher School of Economics – St. Petersburg
DG 5.
Post-positivist era:
Poststructuralism and more

2. DG outline
1. How to study social world?
1. What is poststr. philosophy about?

3. 1. How to study social world?
EXPLANATORY
THEORIES
VS.
CONSTITUTIVE
THEORIES

4. 1. How to study social world?
EXPLANATORY THEORIES:
•
see the world as something external to the theories of
it;
•
aim at uncovering regularities in human behaviour and
thereby explaining the social world in much the same
way as a natural scientist might explain the physical
world (unity of science argument);
•
strive to find the causal relations that ‘rule’ world
politics (dependent and independent variables).

5. 1. How to study social world?
CONSTITUTIVE THEORIES:

think that theories actually help construct the world
(theories about the world shape how we act, and
thereby make those theories become self-confirming);

see our language and concepts as helping create the
reality (the very concept we use to think about the
world help to make that world what it is);

see theory as not external to the things it is trying to
explain (and as constructing how we think about the
world) => theories define what we see as the external
world;

casual epistemology of the hard sciences is
inappropriate to study the social world ('vaiables' are
mutually consituting each other).

6. 1. How to study social world?
FOUNDATIONAL
THEORIES
VS.
ANTI-
FOUNDATIONAL
THEORIES
WHAT IS EPISTEMOLOGY?

7. 1. How to study social world?
FOUNDATIONAL THEORIES:
•
hold that all truth claims can be judged true or false
(against empirical ‘facts’);
ANTI-FOUNDATIONAL THEORIES:
•
think that truth claims cannot be judged since there are
never neutral grounds for doing so (these grounds are
simply a reflection of an adherence to a particular view
of epistemology).
What were the reasons for the constitutive anti-
foundational theories to become popular in the 90s?

8. 1. How to study social world?
Historical sociology
Positivism Post-positivism*
What are 4 main assumptions of positivist epistemology?
intra-paradigm
debates
inter-paradigm
debate
EXPLANATORY &
FOUNDATIONAL
THEORIES
CONSTITUTIVE &
ANTI-FOUNDATIONAL
THEORIES

9. 1. How to study social world?
4 main assumptions of positivist epistemology:
•
Belief in the unity of science (same methodologies for
scientific and non-scientific world);
•
Distinction between facts and values with facts being
neutral between theories;
•
Social world like the natural one, has regularities that
can be discovered by our theories;
•
The way to determine the truth of statements is by
appeal to the neutral fact (empirical epistemology).

10. 2. What is poststr. philosophy?
Jacques Derrida
(1930-2004)
Concepts of
deconstruction and
double reading
Michel Foucault
(1926-1984)
Concepts of
discourse,
genealogy and
power (power-
knowledge
relationship)
Julia Kristeva
(born 1941)
Concept of
intertextuality
Jean-François
Lyotard
(1924-1998)
“Post-modern is
incredulity towards
metanarratives”

11. 2. What is poststr. philosophy?
Michel Foucault
(1926-1984)
ON DISCOURSE:
1. Language is essential to how we make
sense of the world;
2. Language is social because we cannot
make our thoughts understandable to
others without a set of shared codes;
3. Discourse is a linguistic system that
orders statements and concepts;
4. The words we use to describe
something are not neutral (choice of
them has implications);
5. Language is not a neutral transmitter
but language produces meanings
(things do not have an objective
meaning independently of how we
constitute them in language);
6. Thus, the assigned meanings depend on
discourse.

12. 2. What is poststr. philosophy?
ON GENEALOGY:
1. Genealogy is a history of the present (it
turns what we accept as natural into a
question);
2. Two questions are in need while using
genealogy: (1) what political practices
have formed the present and (2) which
alternative understandings have been
marginalized and often forgotten;
3. The central message of genealogy is
that various regimes of truth merely
reflect the ways in which, through
history, both power and truth develop
together in a mutually sustainable
relationship;
4. Thus, we need to gain an understanding
of the discursive and material structures
that underpin the present.
Michel Foucault
(1926-1984)

13. 2. What is poststr. philosophy?
ON POWER-KNOWLEDGE RELATIONS:
1. Power is ‘productive’: it comes about
when discourses constitute particular
subject positions as the ‘natural’ ones
=> ‘actors’ do not exist outside
discourse; they are produced through
discourse;
2. To establish oneself as having the
knowledge to govern a particular issue
is an instance of power;
3. Knowledge is integral to power itself (to
speak from a position of knowledge is to
exercise authority over a given issue);
4. Knowledge is not immune from the
workings of power (all power requires
knowledge and all knowledge relies on &
reinforces existing power relations);
5. The concept of biopolitics.
Michel Foucault
(1926-1984)

14. 2. What is poststr. philosophy?
ON DECONSTRUCTION:
1. To see language as a set of codes
means that words (or signs) make
sense only in relations to other words;
2. We know something only by comparing
it to something it is not;
3. Language as connected signs works for
the structural side of post-structuralism;
4. But these sign structures (textual
interplay) are unstable because
connections between words are never
given once and for all;
5. Language is made up by dichotomies,
which are not ‘neutral’ as one term is
superior to another;
6. Deconstruction shows how such
dichotomies make something seemingly
natural (but in fact are a structured set
of values that is artificially constructed).
Jacques Derrida
(1930-2004)

15. 2. What is poststr. philosophy?
Jacques Derrida
(1930-2004)
ON DOUBLE READING:
1. As deconstruction is a way of showing
how all theories and discourses rely on
artificial stabilities produced by the use of
seemingly objective and natural
oppositions, double reading is a way of
showing how these stabilizations operate
by subjecting the text to two readings;
2. The first reading is a repetition of a
dominant reading to show how it achieves
coherence;
3. The second reading is to point out the
internal tensions within a text that result
from the use of seemingly natural
stabilizations;
4. The aim is not to come to a ‘correct; or
even ‘one’ reading of a text, but intsead
to show how there is always more than
one reading.

16. 2. What is poststr. philosophy?
Julia Kristeva
(born 1941)
ON INTERTEXTUALITY:
1. Understand the social world as comprised of
texts;
2. Texts form an intertext; that is they are
connected to texts that came before them;
3. Intertextuality implies that certain things are
taken for granted because previous texts
have made the point so many times that
there is no need to state it again;
4. Working with intertextuality, we should ask
ourselves what a given text does not
mention either because it is taken for
granted or because it is too dangerous to
say;
5. As intertextuality points to the way in which
texts always ‘quote’ past texts, it also holds
that individual texts are unique (no text is a
complete reproduction of an earlier one).
Why study popular culture?