To what extent does language play a role in contemporary international relations?
The essay has a linear argument tracing language as a body of knowledge onto the power/knowledge relationship; this is brought into play and made important via language’s relationship to reality. The argument of language’s relationship to reality merits a discussion of ideology, hegemony and struggle, which are closely interlinked. This is all for the effect of showing the role language plays in international relations. Language is the very framework for our understanding and in this essay it is understood in its most basic components as a semiotic system, or a system of signification with an ever present emphasis on social practise. Contemporary international relations is assumed to be the outcome of an amalgamation of individual actors, their beliefs and values, institutions, regimes and differing social structures. Additionally, international relations can only be understood, interpreted and represented through language, in this way, language plays a chief role in international relations and the elucidation of its mechanisms is key.
When considering language as knowledge we understand this to be the shared ideas or norms of an actor, therefore knowledge relates to the broader linguistic structure within which it is embedded. Constructivism assumes actors are social, that ‘identities and interests… are constructed by these shared ideas’ (Wendt 1999:1). Thus, Wendt assumes language as the bedrock of identity. Importantly it can ‘frame international situations’ (Wendt 1999:141), acting as a perspective and is ‘any belief an actor takes to be true’ (Wendt 1999:140). In international relations, every actor’s identity is constituted within a linguistic structure shaped on the knowledge that they take to be true. What cannot be emphasised enough is that the knowledge of actors, their values and beliefs are assumed to be real, and so they act on them with conviction. This can explain the willingness of International Monetary Fund (IMF) economists to make policy prescriptions through their ‘“one size fits all” approach’, because they believed in their methods (Stiglitz 2002:34-35).
For Foucault there is an issue with this neutral status of knowledge, ‘power and knowledge directly imply one another’ (Foucault 1979:27), concerning actors, ‘it is transmitted by them and through them; it exerts pressure upon them’ (Foucault 1979:27).
Mcnay (1994:99) clarifies this articulation of biopower, the power/knowledge relationship as it is channelled through bodies ‘is fundamentally normalizing and regulatory’. For instance, the United Kingdom is both a subject and advocate of human rights regimes, for one of many examples of this see the European Human Rights convention (European Court of Human Rights 2010). Another example resides in the insight of Stiglitz (2002:34) and the discourses mobilizing the IMF’s ‘lack of detailed knowledge’ in making policy, mentioned in the previous paragraph. The relevance of believing these discursive regimes was recognised by Foucault, saying, ‘even the word of the law could no longer be authorised…except by a discourse of truth’ (trans. of Foucault 1979, by R. Young 1981:55 cited in Mcnay 1994:86). The belief in a discourse and its normality is an important dimension to knowledge, both legitimating and maintaining the power in knowledge mobilization and the social regulation of subjects in the wider context of international relations. This would suggest no ‘distribution of knowledge’ or ‘identity’ is neutral but is the product and the producer of ideational power relations. The importance of this power/knowledge relationship in conjunction with its normalizing and regulatory function becomes apparent when we consider the restriction of ontology on epistemology.
When actors talk, they wish their language reflects actual material reality (The Real). This seems an almost commonsensical notion, we want to describe what we see and what we feel, etcetera. We can only do this, however, through systems of signification and are ultimately torn from the Real by our inability to experience it before signification. There is a drive, Lacanian Desire, in that systems of signification are repeated ‘attempts to colonize and domesticate the real with reality, to represent the real in discourse’ (Glynos & Stavrakakis 2004:205). If the real is an objective state that we attempt to conceive of subjectively, through language, then all reality construction involves reifying categories for the purpose of truth, to somehow make it fit. However, truth and language are entangled by ontology and it is the structure of the discursive system that limits what we communicate, think and know. As Glynos puts it, there is an ‘epistemological barrier’ but ‘this barrier is ontologically constitutive’ (Glynos & Stavrakakis 2004:204). As an example of this we could understand the conflict between the West and Islamic fundamentalists as a conflict of ontology/reality. After all, freedom is closely associated, if not synonymous, with democracy and markets (for a view that propounds this explicitly, see,
Hegemony, for this essay, is the state of fixed meaning in its totality, an ontological consensus, or ‘an exhaustive representation’ (Glynos & Stavrakakis 2004:204) but as has been discussed, we cannot know the Real, only attempt to make sense of it through signification. It is because ‘discourse is in a constant state of tension’ (Glnos & Stavrakakis 2004:204) by virtue of its impossibility ‘to reach an exhaustive representation of the world’ (Glynos & Stavrakakis 2004:204) that the concept of hegemony is more a theoretical potential, or ontological mistake, there is not and never will be total consensus. If this is true, ideology should be the analytical level where the centrifugal state of hegemony is played out. Ideology is a system of ideas with some semblance of semiotic closure, thus we can attribute the concept of knowledge an ideological flavour. It has the effect of ‘fixing the… process of signification’ (Eagleton 1991:196), but still, with recourse to the ‘unbridgeable’ Real (Glynos & Stavrakakis 2004:205), ‘ideology is always a field of struggle’ (Zizek 2009:37). Examples of this have already been given: IMF policy, European human rights and democratic freedom; these are all ideological constructions, none have total consensus. Our drive to ‘colonize and domesticate the real with reality’ (Glynos & Stavrakakis 2004:205), becomes the practice of ‘hegemonization’: an attempt to ‘fix the meaning of social relations’ (Critchely 2004:113) through language. The drive towards semiotic ‘closure’ (Eagleton 1991:196), is therefore inscribed into the logics of language. An interesting parallel exists with Marcuse’s operationalization: ‘to make the concept synonymous with the…operations’ (1964:86) for the effect that ‘thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself’ (1964:14). Thus ideology as a state of fixed meaning has the effect of abridging other meanings and ways of thinking. (One should self-consciously refer back to the divergence of ontology between Qutb and
In conclusion and tracing the argument, the system of language aptly accounts for our cultural proclivities, providing a foundation for our knowledge, which in turn provides an identity that is acted upon. Belief in this knowledge is an important dimension, and through the power/knowledge relationship we see how language has a regulative function on the body, but also, that identity and knowledge are not neutral. This point is reinforced when we consider how language cannot reflect the Real, but must constitute itself a reality through which it perceives the Real. This brings us to the relevance of ontology on our knowledge claims, and we see, due to the separation of the Real from reality, ontology defines the extent and validity of what we can know. With these points in mind, language and representation in international relations must construct itself with some closure to be communicative; the effect is that reality construction is ideological and so necessarily regulative, exclusionary and thought-abridging.
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