Postmodernism Sartika Tandirerung/071012045 Postmodernism is the most controversial theory in social science and humanities, which emerged in the

early 1980s. Some thinkers who are pioneered this theory, such as Foucalt, Derrida, Richard Ashley and Robert Walker. Generally, thinkers of postmodernism . . . have certain values and may subscribe to a particular ethical or moral code. However, postmodernists are different from, say, liberals or Critical Theorists, because they are more willing to admit that ultimately there might not be any solids grounds, or ultimate source of appeal, on which to establish the rightness or wrongness of particular value system, beliefs, or world views (Jill and Pettiford 2005: 133). Before explaining about postmodernism so far, it is needed to distinguish postmodernism and poststructuralism that sometimes mystify. According to the articles of Jill and Pettiford, postmodernism is centrally concerned with the nature and consequences of modernity and develops a thoroughgoing critique of the Enlightment project. . . Poststructuralism is more concerned with the nature, role and function of language - how social meaning is constructed through language (2005: 130). Postmodernists observe that we have shared meaning; these must be understood as intertextualities, rather than truths arrived at by a shared understanding of events, processes and practices out there in the real world. . . . Foucault presented a view of the human subject as a body, an empty vessel, a product of the power relations to which we are all subjected throughout our lives in sexual relationships, in the family, in the school, by exposure to media and communications, by conscription into the armed forces perhaps, by the regulations and supervision carried out by the police force and law courts, by the discipline we are subjected to in the workplace and so forth. In this case, the truth about the human condition and speculate about the ends of human life, philosophy is rejected on the grounds that there can be no single truth and no one conception of the good life. Then Derrida centered on one authoritative voice (phonocentrict) committed to a belief in some presence, or reality. Derrida argued that this occurred because of the human desire for certainty, the need to posit a central presence something or someone there at the beginning of time and whose idea or will is being played out throughout history (Jill and Pettiford 2005:140- 141).

In interpreted histories, Foucault used a method called genealogy to trace the discontinuities and rupture in history, in order to emphasize the singularity of events, rather than seeking to identify historical trends: in effect, to show that history had become accounts of the powerful . . . for postmodernists our encounters and dialogues always contain power relations (Jill and Pettiford 2005: 141). As Roland Bleiker (2000: 25) explains, genealogies focus on the process by which we have constructed origins and given meaning to particular representations of the past, representations that continuously guide our daily lives and set clear limits to political and social options. In a sense genealogy is concerned with writing counter-histories which expose the processes of exclusion and covering which make possible the teleological idea of history as a unified story unfolding with a clear beginning, middle and end (Devetak 2005: 163). Devetak also taking argument from Foucault (1987: 236) that claims as one of genealogys express purposes the systematic dissociation of identity. There are two dimensions to this purpose. First, it has a purpose at the ontological level: to avoid substituting causes for effects (metalepsis).Secondly, it has an ethico-political purpose in problematizing prevailing identity formations, which appear normal or natural (2005: 166). Beside power, according to Devetak it is also related to the knowledge in international relations. Power and knowledge are mutually supportive; they directly imply one another (Foucault 1977: 27 on Devetak 2005: 162). On the one hand, knowledge is thought to depend on the sovereignty of the heroic figure of reasoning man who knows that the order of the world is not God-given, that man is the origin of all knowledge, that responsibility for supplying meaning to history resides with man himself, and that, through reason, man may achieve total

knowledge, total autonomy, and total power (1989a: 2645). On the other hand, modern political life finds in sovereignty its constitutive principle. The state is conceived by analogy with sovereign man as a pre-given, bounded entity, which enters into relations with other sovereign presences (Devetak 2005 162-163). State-centric approaches neglect to ask how sovereignty centralized authority has been produced and what the consequences are of carving up political space in this way (Jill and Pettiford 2005: 144). Der Derian (1989: 6) on Devetak (2005: 167) contends that postmodernism is concerned with exposing the textual interplay behind power politics. Textual interplay refers to the supplementary and mutually constitutive relationship between different interpretations in the

representation and constitution of the world. In order to tease out the textual interplay, postmodernism deploys the strategies of deconstructions and double reading (2005: 168). Deconstruction is concerned with both the constitution and deconstitution of any totality, whether a text, theory, discourse, structure, edifice, assemblage, or institution. While as expressed by Derrida (1981: 6), double reading is essentially a duplicitous strategy which is simultaneously faithful and violent. The first reading is a commentary or repetition of the dominant interpretation that is, a reading that demonstrates how a text, discourse or

institution achieves the stability-effect. The second, counter-memorializing reading unsettles it by applying pressure to those points of instability within a text, discourse, or institution (Devetak 2005: 169). Beside that, Ashley also has double reading to analyze the anarchy problematique. The first reading assembles the constitutive features or hard core of the anarchy problematique, while the second reading disassembles the constitutive elements of the anarchy problematique, showing how it rests on a series of questionable theoretical suppositions or exclusions (Devetak 2005: 170). Generally, most postmodernists focus on state, sovereignty and violence problematizing. As what postmodernists using to explain about the interpretation to the stories, in this case they still using genealogy and deconstruction for revises three problematizing above. According to the Devetak in his article, there are four main elements to explain the postmodernisms quasiphenomenology of the state. First, a genealogical analysis of the modern states origins in violence. Violence is fundamental to the ontological structuring of states, and is not merely something to which fully formed states resort for powerpolitical reasons. Violence is, according to postmodernism, inaugural as well as augmentative. Second, an account of boundary inscription. Boundaries function in the modern world to divide an interior, sovereign space from an exterior, pluralistic, anarchical space. Third, a deconstruction of identity as it is defined in security and foreign policy discourses. Identity, it can be surmised, is an effect forged, on

the one hand, by disciplinary practices which attempt to normalize a population, giving it a sense of unity and, on the other, by exclusionary practices, which attempt to secure the domestic identity through processes of spatial differentiation, and various diplomatic, military and defense practices. Fourth, a revised interpretation of statecraft, where the revised notion of statecraft advanced by postmodernism stresses the ongoing political practices which found and maintain the state, having the effect of keeping the state in perpetual motion. The overall result

is to rethink the ontological structure of the sovereign state in order to respond properly to the question of how the sovereign state is (re)constituted as the normal mode of subjectivity in international relations (2005: 172-180). In breaking with the ethics of sovereign exclusion, postmodernism offers an understanding of ethics which is detached from territorial limitations. The diplomatic ethos is a deterritorialized ethics, which unfolds by transgressing sovereign limits (2005: 186). According to the explanations above about postmodernism, As Devetak (2005: 187) concludes that by the genealogical method, postmodernism related political sovereignty with knowledge in international relations. Then, by the textual strategy of deconstruction, it seeks to problematize all claims to epistemological and political roralization. Beside that postmodernism, also rethink the concept of the political without invoking assumptions of sovereignty and reterritorialization. Postmodernism seeks to broaden the political imagination and the range of of political possibilities for transforming international relations. In my point of view, postmodernism is too skeptics to dealing interpretation, where we are using as universal interpretation. Postmodernism does not give the solution to conclude the international phenomenon, they only protest to the universal interpretation that actually mostly human kind use it. . They do not have conviction and their theory is float and still mystify.

References 1. Devetak Richard (2005) Postmodernism, in Burchill, Scott and Andrew Linklater, eds., Theory of International Relations, Palgrave Macmilan (Basingstoke) 2. Steans, Jill & Pettiford, Llyod (2005) Introduction to International Relations: Perspective and Themes, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall