Tracing the Discourses of Terrorism

Identity, Genealogy and State

O. Ditrych

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137394958
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137394965
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This unique, historical study explores how states have articulated statements about terrorism since the 1930s and what effect these discourses have had on global politics. Ditrych's analysis challenges established understandings of terrorism, providing a new conceptualization of how terrorism discourse emerged historically.

1

Concerning Method

This chapter introduces the methodological framework and the research design for the genealogical analysis that follows. Its ambition is to lay down a method that draws substantially on Foucault’s ‘toolbox’.¹ As Foucault had a rather notorious aversion to universals (cf. Foucault 1991), the design aims to be true, not to his methodical prescriptions, but rather to the ontological, epistemological and theoretical assumptions of his historical analyses and their normative underpinnings. The reader who is interested more in the empirical or theoretical arguments and less in the mechanics of how these arguments have been arrived at may safely skip this chapter. For those interested in the conduct of poststructuralist inquiry, it may perchance serve as a source of inspiration.

Needless to say, this book is not the first genealogy conceived in the field of international relations. A very selective list of previous genealogical studies includes James Der Derian’s genealogies of diplomacy (Der Derian 1987) and terror and the national security culture (Der Derian 1992)²; David Campbell’s genealogy of America’s foreign policy (Campbell 1998); Jens Bartelson’s genealogy of sovereignty (Bartelson 1995); Richard Price’s genealogy of the chemical weapons taboo (Price 1997); Patrick T. Jackson’s genealogy of the civilizational discourses of Germany after WWII (Jackson 2006); Richard Jackson’s genealogy of the war on terrorism (Jackson 2006)³;Lene Hansen’s genealogy of the Western discourses of the Balkans (Hansen 2006); and field genealogies such as Steve Smith’s genealogy of International Relations (Smith 1995) and Oliver Richmond’s genealogy of peace and conflict theory (Richmond 2010).⁴ All these genealogies are products of the broader reflectivist movement, some strands of which have been inspired by poststructuralism. As a consequence, they refuse to conform to Keohane’s condition for the recognition of reflectivists within the discipline, namely that they articulate and test causal hypotheses about a positively observable reality (Keohane 1988).⁵ The fundamental question asked by scholars inspired by poststructuralism is, how does order (logos)emerge from disorder (chaos) – in other words, how are geographical, conceptual and epistemological boundaries established, and identities constituted in the play of identity and difference. Their aim is to reverse a ‘theoretical enclosure’ imposed on the international political imagination (cf. Der Derian 1992: 7). The philosophical foundation for these inquiries is the importance of the word (discourse).

Following in the tradition of the linguistic turn in philosophy that attributed to language supreme importance in making sense of the world,⁶ poststructuralism was initially articulated in resistance to linguistic structuralism, which conceived of language (langue) as a system of signs whose meaning is established through differences and which enables speakers to issue mutually understandable utterances (paroles). Language, in this understanding, is the law of speech that organizes the world which we inhabit and in which things have no meaning based on their essence, but only in relation to signs existing at the level of langue. Such a language is not a product of the acting individual will; it is a structure (Saussure 1983). Poststructuralists like Foucault or Derrida (1978) draw on these assumptions, but they see language not as a closed but rather as an open and constantly moving structure of signs which continues to generate meaning through patterns of (privileged) identity and (devalued) difference, and focus on the power relationships underpinning these patterns. Gone is the inevitable and stable representational relationship between the significant and the signified. The word ceases to represent objects in the real world; instead, it constitutes them. Discourse is ontologically significant, (violently) endowing subjects, objects and material structures with meaning. It does not create things, but it does ‘turn them to shapes and gives to airy nothing/a local habitation and a name’.⁷ There rests the constitutive power of discourse, and it is why it makes sense to study it.

Methodology, or the frame

The world according to Foucault: Discourse, power, genealogy

Discourse

Discourse, according to Foucault, is neither a conversation, nor a discussion of something (for example, the method). It is a formidable structure of meaning, a regular but unstable series of statements. A statement, the ‘atom of discourse’, must be distinguished from a (logical) proposition, a (grammatical) sentence or an (Austinian) speech act, as Foucault argues in the Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault 1997: 90). This is not to say that a statement cannot include sentences, that it cannot make sense, and that speech acts are not in fact series of properly arranged statements.⁸ It is to say that propositions, sentences and speech acts are categories at different levels of analysis. A statement must also be distinguished from a sign. The sign only exists ‘in the oblique form of [a] description that would take [it] as its object’ (ibid., 95). If there were no statements (‘descriptions’), there could be no language. Yet the sign is not simply contained in the statement. It is imposed on it and controls it, since a sign is a part of the system for the construction of possible statements which is called language (langue). So Foucault’s statement, although it is always composed of an identifiable set of signs, exists at a very peculiar level: a level which is neither the level of the sign itself (that is, the abstract level of langue) nor the level of its material manifestation (such as a letter that is randomly typed on a typewriter and printed on a page).

Having made the distinction between statements and the other categories existing at separate levels of existence (propositions, sentences, speech acts and signs), Foucault finally arrives at the definition of a statement. A statement, according to Foucault, is ‘a function of existence that properly belongs to signs and on the basis of which one may then decide, through analysis or intuition, whether or not they make sense, according to what rule they follow one another or are juxtaposed … ’ (Foucault 1997: 97). In other words, it is a modality of existence proper to signs and their series which allows them to be more than a mere sequence of marks, endows them with a ‘repeatable materiality’, and makes it possible for them to relate to the domains of objects (120). This is the statement’s (enouncement) enunciative function, and it accounts for its character as an event.

The statement can assume variable forms. It can be a statistical formula, a siren sound, a modern artwork or a lighthouse sequence. Insofar as it does not have a structural unity of its own, it is always ‘invested’ in other unities (like sentences). But despite the elusiveness of its form, it circulates, changes, serves or resists particular interests, or participates in challenges.

As noted above, the statement is the base unit of discourse. Hence, Foucault refers to discourse as (1) a general domain of all statements, or (2) a specific group of statements for which certain conditions of existence can be defined (Foucault 1997: 131). Discourse is therefore a collection of statements (as langue is a collection of signs). However, it is also a system of their formation and ordering. As such, it is not externally imposed on the statement as it is being formulated, but rather is constituted through the statements’ articulation and their interactions.

Discourse is boundless. To be sure, any particular discourse, including the discourse of terrorism, is but ‘a fragment of history … posing the problem of its own limits, its divisions, its transformations, the specific modes of its temporality … ’ (Foucault 1997: 131). Not only does a discourse have its rules (order) determining who can speak about what and how, but it also has boundaries that delimit the marginalized and excluded. But there is nothing beneath or beyond discourse that is understood generally. The methodological consequence is that one cannot step out of discourse and observe it from a vantage point, and expose the true meaning of things, or establish a causal relationship (at least in the traditional sense) between the discourse and the social practices that form the social reality.

To say that discourse is boundless does not mean that it creates objects which have no separate existence, as it were, an sich. Neither is it, however, a mere medium of experience. By enabling statements about objects the discourse constitutes them. This is the foundation of pouvoir d’affirmation, the constitutive power of discourse – ‘le pouvoir de constituer des domaines d’objets, á propos desquels on pourra affirmer ou nier des propositions vraies ou fausses’. Because of its productive possibility, the discourse is ‘le pouvoir dont on cherche á s’emparer’ (Foucault 1970: 12), the power to be seized. The methodological implication is that a Foucauldian discourse analysis should not treat discourse as a set of linguistic facts linked together by certain syntactical rules, but rather as a battlefield, or a strategic and polemic game (cf. Foucault 2000a).

Power

Because of its constitutive power, the discourse is a site for transmission, transformation, exposure and inversion of the relations of force. Power, conceived as the multiplicity of such relations of force that are immanent to the domain in which they operate (Foucault 1976: 121–122), was the central problem around which Foucault’s historical inquiries were organized. He understood power neither as an (institutional) entity nor as an (individual) capacity; neither as communication (though ‘power relations are exercised, to an exceedingly important extent, through the production and exchange of signs’) nor as a commodity (Foucault 2000c: 338; 2004: 14). Drawing on Kelly’s synthesis of Foucault’s propositions of power (Kelly 2000: 37nn.), its key characteristics may be considered as follows. Power is impersonal and subjectless; it is relational; it is decentered and multidirectional; it is strategic; it is productive (that is, not repressive); and it is immanent in social relations (economic, sexual) among individuals. The exercise of power

is a set of actions on possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; it releases or contrives, makes more probable or less; in the extreme, it constrains or forbids absolutely, but it is always a way of acting upon one or more acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action.

(Foucault 2000c: 341)

The subjectlessness of power means that it is not governed by the will of individual subjects. That does not belie its strategic character, however. For despite the subjects’ basic intentionality and tactical polyvalence of power there is assumed to exist an overall (spatiotemporally contingent) strategic cohesion through the power’s ‘machine’ rationality. In Foucault’s historical studies, power is analyzed through different models: of war (the ‘Nietzschean hypothesis’), but also of game (with both models mirroring his concept of discourse discussed above) and government (where governmentality comes to stand for the mentality of the government, or conducting the conduct of individuals). In those studies, the sovereign power, associated with a law which coerces, prohibits and punishes, becomes gradually complemented – though never entirely substituted – by disciplinary power (microsocial, constitutive and bearing on individual bodies through prescription), liberal security (regulating circulation within the life environment) and biopolitics (macrosocial, constitutive and bearing on populations).⁹

Closely associated with Foucault’s notion of power is the concept of dispositif. It can be interpreted in a threefold way. First, it can be interpreted as a ‘heterogeneous ensemble’ of discourse(s), institutions, regulatory decisions, laws, architectural structures, administrative measures, scientific statements and philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions; second, as a particular configuration in time which arranges those components and thereby strategically orients the multiplicity of forces in a given domain; and third, as an instrument which makes it possible to make truth claims about the field of power in specific historical periods (Foucault 1976; 1980 [1977]; cf. Bussolini 2010; Deleuze 1992; Agamben 2009).¹⁰ Following Foucault’s understanding of the dispositif as a complex edifice (Foucault 2007: 8) and taking into account the historical evolution of the modalities of power, from sovereignty to discipline, security and biopolitics, the methodological conclusion is that inquiring into current dispositifs, including the dispositif of terrorism, requires one to pay attention to what characterizes all of them: from law to the practices of the contemporary panopticon to statistical profiling and normalization through the distribution of optimal future and risk analysis.

The inclusion in the dispositif of scientific statements or philosophical propositions points to another important aspect of Foucault’s notion of power – its relationship to knowledge. ‘There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge … ’, Foucault writes (1979: 27). This relationship is mutually constitutive. ‘The exercise of power constantly produces knowledge,’ but at the same time ‘knowledge constantly induces effects of power’ (an interview, quoted in Foucault 2000c: xvi) which rely on the production of authoritative truth claims about how things were (historical facts), how things are now (present facts) and how things always are (historical laws; cf. Hansen 2006: 66). Power and knowledge are not identical. However, neither are they ever separable.

Genealogy

In the conventional sense, genealogy is a means of answering the question of origin. Historically, this question was never asked out of pure interest. The answer could, and indeed did, determine what rights and duties a person had. Moreover, since a unity of the person’s descent and their moral character was often assumed, genealogy could answer the question of one’s character too. Examples of such uses of genealogy are found in the Iliad, in Hesiod’s Theogony (which discusses a cosmogony in which all is genealogically derived from three initial entities), and in the concept of the Apostolic Succession (where certain exceptional powers are passed down from the Christ to successive generations of men). In all such cases, the present social status or moral character of a person (or a god) is determined and legitimized by means of his or her genealogy.¹¹

Nietzsche broke radically with this conventional understanding. His genealogy is (a method of) wirkliche Historie, the real and effective history, which is neither monumental nor antiquarian, but critical. Here, genealogy is counterposed against the ‘total history’, with its strictly defined boundaries of the inside and the outside. Nietzsche’s genealogy inquires into the conditions under which humans discovered the values of good and evil. Yet it does so without resorting to any transcendental criteria that are located outside history or at least discovered only at its dusk (cf. Hegel 1991: 23). In fact, it concludes that the present unity of the norm and its historical stability is nothing but an accidental construct produced by power. Nietzsche refutes the concept of Ursprung (origin), which is associated with an unchangeable and eternal essence of things – divine, perfect, absolutely true and real at the moment of their birth and remaining so in potentia. His genealogy looks at the beginning of things – complex, heterogeneous and temporal – in order to destabilize that which is commonly considered stable. By historicizing his object of analysis (Christianity), Nietzsche challenges the subjecting of the pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Concerning Method
• 2. Overture: One World, Many Terrorisms
• 3. Emergence/y (1930s)
• 4. Division (1970s)
• 5. Enclosure (2000s)
• 6. Power and Knowledge
• Conclusion: The Global Terrorism Dispositif and Its Critique
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index