File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/bhaskar.9710, message 114


To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
From: cow-AT-aber.ac.uk (Colin Wight)
Subject: BHA: Re: Help
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 1997 10:58:35 +0100


I don't know if list members mind me using the list for this question, and if anyone objects, please just let me know (I think Howard has already raised the issue of how we use the list, so I am sensitive about this).

Anyway, I am working on a reply to a postmodern theorist who has attempted to address the agent-structure problem in international relations theory. Since I did my thesis on this subject, the article is begging for me to reply to it. Now there are loads of inconsistencies about RB in the article, as well as quotes that are attributed to certain RB texts but which don't exist in those texts. 

However, my problem is the following sentence, and I was just wondering if the collective wisdom of the list could enlighten me. The author writes:

"Specifically, I interrogate the following - (1) the issues of practice, discourse and contexts of meaning that are implicit in existing solutions, offering a radical, decentered understanding of practices in place of the restricted/conservative understanding found in the agent-structure literature..."

Now, there are all sorts of problems with this claim, not least the claim to be offering a _radical_ understanding, where as the poor simple minded fools who have gone before are all dreadfully conservative. However, this is not my problem, such moralising claiming of the high ground is endemic to pomo in my discipline (they call themselves dissidents, invoking, of course, images of the Gulags etc.). My real problem is I can make no sense at all of what a _decentered understanding_ might be. What can this mean, or is decentred simply a pomo catchword that is being thrown about here at random? What is a centred understanding for that matter. Help! Am I missing something here?

Thanks,




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Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Tel: (01970) 621769

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