7 - Post-modern perspectives on orthodox positivism  pp. 182-210

Post-modern perspectives on orthodox positivism

By Ingo Venzke

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Introduction

This contribution explains the travails of international legal positivism (ILP) from post-modern perspectives. It identifies conventional precepts of orthodox ILP and shows how variants of post-modern thinking unravel them. It thereby provides part of the background against which current ILP needs to argue. The focus rests on three main such precepts and their critique: first, orthodox ILP works against the backdrop of a given language that stands stable and unsoiled from the operation of the law. Second, it embraces a political philosophy that gives the legal subject – traditionally the sovereign state – a foundational role. Third, orthodox ILP sees but a small space for politics in international law that is confined to law's creation through legal sources. These three basic precepts relate to linguistics (the location and generation of meaning), to subjectivity (the place of state consent) and to politics (here understood as the struggle for power and its exercise).

I will present key concepts of post-modern thinking to question each of these precepts. The vivacious concept of performativity embodies lessons of the linguistic turn. It lets go of the idea that language operates as a scheme that exists independent of its operation and instead appreciates how social practices create the language they use. Performativity internalises the generation of meaning into communicative practice and reveals that legal interpretation is a creative activity that contributes to the making of what it purports to find. Deconstruction suggests unveiling conflicting diversity underneath harmony and unity not only within legal and social order, but also within any subject. It disassembles state consent as a foundational anchor and further lays bare how consent can be an expression of power structures. Governmentality, finally, exposes the many faces of power that not only work through hard law and variants of visible coercion, but also in much more penetrating ways. Law and politics are much more entangled than ILP would traditionally have it.

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