Critique often comes with the idea that things need to change. By producing a critical discourse, it is assumed that talking about the problems or denouncing them help to transform the situation. In my book Western dominance in International Relations I show that things are not that simple as discourses can implicitly reproduce what it explicitly denounce (in this case anti-Eurocentric discourses happen to be Eurocentric).
This project aims to investigate this paradox of the critique, focusing more specifically on the academic critique and the authors partaking in ‘critical theories’. For critical theories, the efficacy of power lies in its invisibility. These theories emphasise the role of discourses in the structuration of the social and political order. A key concept used in the literature is the concept of performativity: the capacity for discourses to manifest into being the reality they describe. From John Austin to Pierre Bourdieu, the study of performativity extends from identifying speech acts—for example, a couple being married as a result of a priest saying ‘you are married’—to investigating the social conditions in which any discourse can become performative. Based on the idea of performativity, scholars have put forward how social agents can unconsciously perform the power relationships and discriminations they have been socialised into.
The concept of performativity raises a challenge for the scholars who aim at challenging the social and political order. This particularly applies to criticism formulated in negative terms. Indeed, if discourses participate in structuring the world they refer to, how can IR discourses focusing only on domination and constraints contribute to social change and the improvement of the social conditions they study?
Critical theories emphasise the key role played by discourses in making power invisible but have not investigated the conditions in which critical discourses were actually capable of performing a world different from the one they study and denounce. In the absence of systematic and collective questioning regarding the potential performative effects of critique, critical scholarship runs the risk of implicitly reproducing rather than resisting the social and political order it explicitly aims to challenge.
This research project aims at addressing this theoretical and methodological paradox by drawing on historical examples of scholars who have used Love as an academic praxis.
In May 2017, I organised a workshop titled “Performing Utopia: Discourses of Love, Compassion and More in International Relations” to explore further this topic.
This project aims to investigate this paradox of the critique, focusing more specifically on the academic critique and the authors partaking in ‘critical theories’. For critical theories, the efficacy of power lies in its invisibility. These theories emphasise the role of discourses in the structuration of the social and political order. A key concept used in the literature is the concept of performativity: the capacity for discourses to manifest into being the reality they describe. From John Austin to Pierre Bourdieu, the study of performativity extends from identifying speech acts—for example, a couple being married as a result of a priest saying ‘you are married’—to investigating the social conditions in which any discourse can become performative. Based on the idea of performativity, scholars have put forward how social agents can unconsciously perform the power relationships and discriminations they have been socialised into.
The concept of performativity raises a challenge for the scholars who aim at challenging the social and political order. This particularly applies to criticism formulated in negative terms. Indeed, if discourses participate in structuring the world they refer to, how can IR discourses focusing only on domination and constraints contribute to social change and the improvement of the social conditions they study?
Critical theories emphasise the key role played by discourses in making power invisible but have not investigated the conditions in which critical discourses were actually capable of performing a world different from the one they study and denounce. In the absence of systematic and collective questioning regarding the potential performative effects of critique, critical scholarship runs the risk of implicitly reproducing rather than resisting the social and political order it explicitly aims to challenge.
This research project aims at addressing this theoretical and methodological paradox by drawing on historical examples of scholars who have used Love as an academic praxis.
In May 2017, I organised a workshop titled “Performing Utopia: Discourses of Love, Compassion and More in International Relations” to explore further this topic.