post-structuralism

Starting assumption

there is no point outside the world from which the world can be observed. So all observations are part of the world they seek to describe and have an effect in that world  no politically neutral theories.

Post-structuralism vs other theories

traditional, modernist approaches assume a world that comprises distinct entities (such as individuals, material objects, processes, events and structures) that can be said to possess some form of essence or nature and that exist unproblematically in time. The job of political and social theory then becomes to describe and account for the relations and interactions that take place between objects and/or structures, and the job of normative theory to consider how we might decide what form those relations and interactions should take. Poststructuralist ways of thinking, in contrast, do not start from this point. Rather, they are interested in the processes and practices that produce entities as distinct in the first place. For example, rather than starting from the individual human being and asking how these individuals come together to form social groups, they ask how it is that we come to think in terms of people as separate and distinct individuals in the first place.

Subjectivity

The subject is not born into a world. The subject produces the world of which it is a part at the same time as it is itself produced (co-constitutive)

Language and discourse, de Saussure

Words mean what they do not because of any link in sound with the object they represent but because of the difference between one word and the next. What is said is meaningful because of the associations with what is not said.

Foucault, powerrelations

Power is not held centrally but produced in a dispersed way, through a series of power relations that take place on a micro-level during social interactions. Where there is power, there is also resistance (so power is a dynamic process and can be emancipatory)

Power is capillary

not just stored centrally and dispersed on powerless subjects. Something is powerful if everyone adheres to it

Biopower

is expressed in disciplinary practices, such as are found in the
prison, the barracks, the school or the hospital, and in forms of governmentality. The state increasingly operates through these practices, which are addressed to entire populations,
rather than through the direct expression of sovereign power in relation to the individual subject.

Genealogy

History is always composed from the perspective of the time in which it is written and the purpose of history is in the present. You can’t trace an idea through ages, as ideas change with each distinct way of thinking. What is accepted as rationality and what is necessary for something to be considered ‘true’ is dependent on the prevailing regime of truth. So history doesn’t have a clear beginning and end, where you start your story isn’t neutral.

Deconstruction

a critique of the very possibility of definition and an analysis of the outcomes of attempts to delineate concepts and specify methods and programs. A deconstructive approach can examine what is set to one side in a piece of writing in order for the analysis to continue. What has to be excluded is instructive, and bringing this ‘back in’ can reveal the contingent nature of the analytical frame that has been set up.

Logo-centrism

criticized by post-structuralists. It’s a way of reasoning that is fundamental to contemporary thought, specifically that derived from the European world, operates through the production of dichotomies such as inside/outside, man/woman, memory/forgetting and presence/absence. Every dichotomy of this sort is more than just an opposition between two terms. Each sets up a hierarchy in which the first term of the pair is seen as primary and is valued more highly than the second.

Derrida, how discourses work

via logocentrism, language produces binaries like good and bad. These binaries reflect a hierarchy between two terms. However, this binary isn’t stable and will collapse eventually. For example the discourse of colonization as civilizing has collapsed

Critique of the humanist subject

a critique of human brings being able to think critically. This goes back to not being born in an empty world, the context is very important to how you think and what you believe.

Post-structuralism vs structuralism

structuralism still presumed objectivity and then stable meanings can be discovered by analyzing structures. Post-structuralism questions this as structures are not stable and objective  meaning is never fixed. An example is the meaning of NATO going from a counterweight to Soviet union, to a peace-oriented security alliance, to being against Russia again.

Against state-centrism

states are often presented as unitary and rational actors, but there are many intra-national conflicts that take place. And what does rationality even mean? Who gets to define it? We often see that the political-economic life is separated into domestic and foreign. But these can’t be separated in reality as the state both contains economy and society. Importantly, geopolitical events doesn’t just happen between states, as there is a lived reality for people experiencing it.