Their rejection of academic theory is lazy. We must reject the binary of theoretical vs.

practical.
Paul Bowman, Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Bath Spa University College, England, 2002,
online: http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/bowman.htm, accessed
February 21, 2005
The supposed difficulty of the language of such political theory, and of the language of cultural theory in
general, and the supposed apparent clarity of many more popular modes, actually suggests the
many difficulties of confronting the object of analysis called the political or the socio-political in
anything other than a turgid masculinist mode when one hopes this work will register in
the field one is concerned with, a field whose construction has always been dominated by
one or another manifestation of masculinist discourse. The whole field is polarised between appeals to
common sense and appeals to apodictic logic. Laclau and Mouffe have clearly, in some measure, inherited, comfortably and happily, an
unambivalent sense of what political debate should be; its just that it doesnt conform to more popular notions of what it should be. Discoursing
otherwise is apparently not really taken seriously by either camp (Derrida, 1996: 30). But this difficulty and the fact that it is a difficulty not
often perceived illustrates the stranglehold that reasonable language, of whatever inflection, has on discourse of the properly political. You
would be right to state that I am clearly not going out of my way to try to construct an alternative. But my justification for deferring the
attempt devolves on the inevitable subordination of performance to its obligatory explanation or interpretation. I raise the matter here, albeit
somewhat turgidly, because acknowledging this gendered contingency of rationality and logicality may sow the seeds of their deconstruction and,

when people accuse Theory of being

useless, unrelated or unconnected, distracted, self-absorbed abstraction, then that
accusation is tropologically aligned with the standard slippage into a charge of masturbation
as in, theory just plays with itself. That which is ostensibly disconnected or not putatively immediately
related to real and pressing issues is readily said to be castrated, lacking direct purchase, direct utility,
and any ability to intervene directly into real and pressing issues. When Rorty, no mean theorist himself,
perhaps, transformation. So, that being said, what have I said? One point is that

accuses Laclau, Critchley, and Derrida of just playing with themselves, this is not least because deconstruction, for Rorty, is a kind of
masturbation, primarily because it does not connect. Rortys charge is exemplary of the general tenor of criticisms levelled against Theory: that

What is especially telling about this facile and dominant binary between
worthwhile work versus worthless wank is that it can also be mapped onto the dominant
binary structuring debate about university education in general that has dominated discourse about knowledge for at least two
hundred years: namely, the debate about whether knowledge should have any use (see Young, 1992: 97-126).
Usefulness, today, is invariably coordinated with connection, penetration, control, prediction
and production: in short, with technical, scientific, or financial utility and mastery. The Thatcherite assault on the arts and humanities
it just plays with itself.

exemplified this hegemonisation of cultural values with the ascendancy of the equation value equals usefulness equals profit. But, given
capitals attempted hegemonisation of all values, it becomes not imponderable to suspect that cultural studies own obsession with themes
supposedly contrary to this ethos, like ethics, politics, policy, intervention, and so on, is itself a symptom of the techno-capitalist hegemonic
injunction to be intelligibly productive, in some way, as the determination of worth and value increasingly obliges all to render reason for
everything in terms intelligible to discourses tropologically and analytically dominated by the discourse or ideology of capital. So, how should

I have implicitly painted a picture of a scene

polarised by two improprieties: hyper-academic versus hypo-academic. The difference
between the former, a cultural studies fixated on supposedly unintelligible or too difficult (or too
theoretical, too self-obsessed, too masturbatory) exploration of the ethico-political, on the one hand, and the
latter on the other hand, a cultural studies that only takes seriously empirical, fact-based discourse
(practical, real), is crucially that the theoretically inflected approach deliberately (and, I would
say, dogmatically3) leaves itself space in its remit to question how, why, to what ends, in whose
interests, and supporting what ethico-political values and agenda, any discourse imposes
itself as the as-is (i.e., the true, correct, common sense, etc.); while empirically inflected
approaches subordinate or tend to factor out such reflection from the outset. Both positions
can readily deem the other a waste of time, misguided digression, distraction, or, as Shakespeare put it, the expense of
cultural studies elaborate itself? According to what protocols of discussion?

spirit in a waste of shame. (Perhaps Shakespeare was speaking as a theorist here, as he was critiquing proper procreational activity.) Theory
easily deems empiricism to be subject to an inadequately thought-through agenda often implying its culpability in and as the reproduction and
strengthening of capitalist and especially panoptical power. Empiricism

deems theory to be distracted, unrelated,

playing with itself. But this binary itself operates and is intelligible only thanks to a tacit

universal that remains to be questioned or acknowledged, by both parties: worthwhile and worthless, valuable
work and useless wank are accusations all too easily levelled by all against all. If this is a war of all against all, then what is common to all is the

as long as the
determination of worth is tropologically dominated by the fantasy of simple, direct, unmediated,
face to face, missionary position heterosexual penetrative intervention leading to proper production, then
our thinking remains beholden to the rules of a closed economic system imposed on
thought. For the theorists here, this means that we are thereby still unconsciously trafficking the preference for insemination, no matter how
consciously we subscribe to dissemination. For those who think theory is a load of old wank, my argument
means that all supposedly normal, sensible, concern for real issues remains a simulation whose
parameters are imposed by limits placed to police and regulate the acceptable
interpretation of what normal and sensible are. If these limits are accepted, this sentences
us to remaining incapable of even thinking about why we think the way we do. If thinking
is thought of as less important than doing, you still have to think about why one might
think that, and whose interests it is in. Supplementary acts of mental masturbation are more fundamental than supposedly
proper intercourse. The imperative that we must have productive intercourse with the real world
skews thought, sentences us to guilt (as such immediate connection is an impossibility), and always consigns
arts and humanities to the prejudgement of being less worthwhile than science and
business. But our obligation is not to mime their success, to impose their remit and their kind of success as our own. Our own obligation
belittling of masturbation as the dominant trope of discourse on knowledge and especially on academic orientation. But

as academics is, first, to be academic. And wherever and whenever the potentially limitless reserves of playful, apparently pointless conjecture
and reflection on any point ever meets a limitation which says stop!, then it is still our duty to ask why we should stop there, who gives the

the onus to justify ones activity is actually not on the theorist,

but actually it is on the non-theorist, who should justify why they
think thinking should be low-level, pedestrian, less than and other than it could be, in short, wanting, lacking, or
failing to carry itself further than is acceptable in whatever status quo. Perhaps we should try not to
order, and whose interests it is in. Put simply:
who thinks and thinks and thinks,

come too quickly to the conclusion. The incessant mind-wank of theorists needs no justification, if you think about it. If you wont think about it,

if you wont engage with

certain forms of academic thought, if you cant be bothered to understand, find out, learn,
if you think that theories are disconnected, unrelated, irrelevant to the real world, then you
must also stop to ask yourself precisely how and in what way and if at all your own
sensible, reasonable academic activity connects with anything more real than other
unrelated academic activity. Because it doesnt. Neither more nor less. We are all wankers
here.
then you are the intellectual imposture. But, moreover, and this is I think my most important point:

Epistemology comes first- The question of action must take a backseat to questions of
policy formation and assumptions surrounding problem-solving techniques.
Owen 02, Reader in Political Theory at the University of Southampton (David, Reorienting International Relations: On Pragmatism,
Pluralism and Practical Reasoning, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, http://mil.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/31/3/653)
The first dimension concerns the relationship between positivist IR theory and postmodernist IR theory (and the examples illustrate the claims
concerning pluralism and factionalism made in the introduction to this section). It is exhibited when we read Walt warning of the danger of
postmodernism as a kind of theoretical decadence since issues of peace and war are too important for the field [of IR] to be diverted into a prolix
and self-indulgent discourse that is divorced from the real world,12 or find Keohane asserting sniffily that Neither neorealist nor neoliberal
institutionalists are content with interpreting texts: both sets of theorists believe that there is an international political reality that can be partly

We should be wary of such denunciations

precisely because the issue at stake for the practitioners of this prolix and self-indulgent
discourse is the picturing of international politics and the implications of this picturing for
the epistemic and ethical framing of the discipline, namely, the constitution of what phenomena are appropriate
objects of theoretical or other forms of enquiry. The kind of accounts provided by practitioners of this type
are not competing theories (hence Keohanes complaint) but conceptual reproblematisations of the
background that informs theory construction, namely, the distinctions, concepts,
assumptions, inferences and assertability warrants that are taken for granted in the course of the
debate between, for example, neorealists and neoliberal institutionalists (hence the point-missing character of Keohanes complaint). Thus,
for example, Michael Shapiro writes: The global system of sovereign states has been familiar both structurally
and symbolically in the daily acts of imagination through which space and human identity
are construed. The persistence of this international imaginary has helped to support the
political privilege of sovereignty affiliations and territorialities. In recent years, however, a variety of
disciplines have offered conceptualizations that challenge the familiar, bordered world of
the discourse of international relations.14 The point of these remarks is to call critically into
question the background picture (or, to use another term of art, the horizon) against which the disciplinary
discourse and practices of IR are conducted in order to make this background itself an object of reflection and
evaluation. In a similar vein, Rob Walker argues: Under the present circumstances the question What is to be
done? invites a degree of arrogance that is all too visible in the behaviour of the dominant
political forces of our time. . . . The most pressing questions of the age call not only for
concrete policy options to be offered to existing elites and institutions, but also, and more
crucially, for a serious rethinking of the ways in which it is possible for human beings to
live together.15 The aim of these comments is to draw to our attention the easily forgotten fact that our existing ways of
picturing international politics emerge from, and in relation to, the very practices of
international politics with which they are engaged and it is entirely plausible (on standard Humean
grounds) that, under changing conditions of political activity, these ways of guiding reflection
and action may lose their epistemic and/or ethical value such that a deeper interrogation of
the terms of international politics is required. Whether or not one agrees with Walker that this is currently required, it
understood, even if it will always remain to some extent veiled.13

is a perfectly reasonable issue to raise. After all, as Quentin Skinner has recently reminded us, it is remarkably difficult to avoid falling under the

As we analyse and reflect on our normative concepts, it is easy to

become bewitched into believing that the ways of thinking about them bequeathed to us by
the mainstream of our intellectual traditions must be the ways of thinking about them. 16 In
spell of our own intellectual heritage. . . .

this respect, one effect of the kind of challenge posed by postmodernists like Michael Shapiro and Rob Walker is to prevent us from becoming too
readily bewitched.

Policy making is a continuous cycle of reproblematization. Why role-play such a ridiculous

farce?
Dillon and Reid 1998 (Michael Dillon, professor of Politics at Lancaster University, and Julian
Reid, Doctor of Philosophy in Politics, Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex
Emergency, http://www.cross-x.com/vb/showthread.php?t=979961&highlight=dillon+reid)
Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted

"problems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions
that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological
assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations
exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they
are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What

Yet serial policy failure--the fate and the fuel of all

policy--compels them into a continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them
from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.[ 35] Serial policy
failure is no simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately
overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions
that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a
process of emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing
ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the
they do not have is precisely the control that they want.

very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a
linear problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better information and knowledge to
bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically

inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very
detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it. In consequence, thinking and acting politically
is displaced by the institutional and epistemic rivalries that infuse its power/ knowledge networks, and by the local
conditions of application that govern the introduction of their policies. These now threaten to exhaust what
"politics," locally as well as globally, is about.[ 36] It is here that the "emergence" characteristic of governance begins to make its

The
"subjects" of policy increasingly also become a matter of definition as well, since the
concept population does not have a stable referent either and has itself also evolved in
biophilosophical and biomolecular as well as Foucauldian "biopower" ways.
appearance. For it is increasingly recognized that there are no definitive policy solutions to objective, neat, discrete policy problems.

State-centricity makes critical understanding of the world impossible.

Shampa Biswas, Professor of Politics at Whitman College, December 2007, Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading Edward
Said as an International Relations Theorist, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, p. 125-126

In making a case for the exilic orientation, it is the powerful hold of the nation-state upon
intellectual thinking that Said most bemoans. 31 The nation-state of course has a particular pride of place in the
study of global politics. The state-centricity of International Relations has not just circumscribed
the ability of scholars to understand a vast ensemble of globally oriented movements,
exchanges and practices not reducible to the state, but also inhibited a critical intellectual
orientation to the world outside the national borders within which scholarship is produced.
Said acknowledges the fact that all intellectual work occurs in a (national) context which
imposes upon ones intellect certain linguistic boundaries, particular (nationally framed)
issues and, most invidiously, certain domestic political constraints and pressures, but he
cautions against the dangers of such restrictions upon the intellectual imagination. 32
Comparing the development of IR in two different national contexts the French and the German ones Gerard Holden has argued that different
intellectual influences, different historical resonances of different issues, different domestic exigencies shape the discipline in different contexts.
33 While this is to be expected to an extent, there is good reason to be cautious about how scholarly sympathies are expressed and circumscribed
when the reach of ones work (issues covered, people affected) so obviously extends beyond the national context. For scholars of the global, the
(often unconscious) hold of the nation-state can be especially pernicious in the ways that it limits the scope and range of the intellectual
imagination. Said argues that the hold of the nation is such that even intellectuals progressive on domestic issues become collaborators of empire
when it comes to state actions abroad. 34 Specifically, he critiques nationalistically based systems of education and the tendency in much of
political commentary to frame analysis in terms of we, us and our - particularly evident in coverage of the war on terrorism - which
automatically sets up a series of (often hostile) oppositions to others.

He points in this context to the rather common

intellectual tendency to be alert to the abuses of others while remaining blind to those of
ones own.
Predictability and Limits standards Bad b/c they are the inscription of technique onto this
discussion. [Insert Tech Cards]

There is no unique reason to restrict roleplaying to the traditional role of the policymaker.
Bleiker, 00 Ph.D. visiting research and teaching affiliations at Harvard, Cambridge, Humboldt,
Tampere, Yonsei and Pusan National University as well as the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague,(Roland, Popular Dissent, Human
Agency and Global Politics, Cambridge University Press)
Once one conceptualises global politics as a series of overlapping transversal struggles, various
new forms of dissent come into view. Human agency is then no longer limited to the
deliberations of statesmen or the strategic victories of military commanders, but takes place in a
variety of other, often mundane and unrecognised domains. Dissent, likewise, is no longer solely
associated with mass uprisings and other heroic acts of defiance. It is also operative in powerful
but largely inaudible processes that take place against the backdrop of great events. Indeed, more
than anywhere else, transversal dissent is located in countless non-heroic practices that make up
the realm of the everyday and its multiple connections with contemporary global life.
Discourse frames thought; systems of domination become dominant by gradually acquiring
greater acceptance in the minds of people such that these ways of thinking become normal.
Thus systems of discourse decide upon what can and cannot be said socially. Thus, we
must talk about this, not whatever meaningless topic or resolution, so that these ideas can
be disseminated.
Bleiker, Roland. Co-Director of the University of Queenslands Rotary Centre for International Studies in Peace and Conflict Resolution.
Contemporary Political Theory, Volume 2, Number 1, March 2003, pp. 25-47
'It is within discourse,' one of Foucault's much rehearsed passages (1976, 133) notes, 'that power and knowledge
articulate each other.' The work of the French historian and philosopher epitomizes what is at stake in questions of discourse and
agency. For Foucault, discourses are subtle mechanisms that frame our thinking process. They determine
the limits of what can be thought, talked and written in a normal and rational way. In every
society the production of discourses is controlled, selected, organized and diffused by certain
procedures. This process creates systems of exclusion in which one group of discourses is
elevated to a hegemonic status, while others are condemned to exile. Discourses give rise to
social rules that decide which statements most people recognize as valid, as debatable or as
undoubtedly false. They guide the selection process that ascertains which propositions from
previous periods or foreign cultures are retained, imported, valued, and which are forgotten or
neglected (see Foucault, 1969,1971,1991, 59-60). Not everything is discourse, but everything is in discourse.
Things exist independently of discourses, but we can only assess them through the lenses of
discourse, through the practices of knowing, perceiving and sensing, which we have acquired
over time. Discourses render social practices intelligible and rational -- and by doing so mask the ways in
which they have been constituted and framed. Systems of domination gradually become accepted as normal and
silently penetrate every aspect of society. They cling to the most remote corners of our mind, for, as
Nietzsche (1983, 17) once expressed it, 'all things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their emergence out of unreason
thereby becomes improbable.' While providing compelling evidence of subtle forms of domination, a preoccupation with discourses may run the
risk of leaving us with an image of the world in which the capacity for human agency is all but erased, annihilated by forces that are not only

Foucault portrays the emergence

of things (as the concept of goodness) as taking place in a void between the energy of the strong
and the reaction of the weak. Since adversaries do not meet directly in this interstice, so we read,
no one is responsible for its outcome. 'Only a single drama is ever staged in this "non-place," the
endlessly repeated play of dominations' (Foucault, 1984, 85). If power and domination are so omnipresent, so invincible, how
impenetrable, but also elude human comprehension. In his reading of Nietzsche, for instance,

could anything every change? If, as Foucault implicitly suggests, there is no conversation, no common language, not even a visible discursive
meeting between the inside and the outside, the centre and the margin, how could one explain all those challenges from below, the moments when
people take to the street and shake, successfully or not, the foundations of the established order? These questions prompted many critics to

dismiss approaches that revolve around discursive explanations of social dynamics.

There is functionally no difference between kritiks and policy arguments- events are both a
physical occurrence and a discursive construction.
Bleiker, 98 asst. prof. of International Studies at Pusan National University (Roland, Retracing and redrawing the boundaries of events:
Postmodern interferences with international theory, Alternatives, Oct-Dec 1998, Vol. 23, Issue 4)

Events

are actualizations of reality in language.

Events are more than the physical state of affairs that they are. Events are more than the linguistic
representations of the physical state of affairs that they are. Events are moving realities in motion.
Events in world politics are world political realities in motion. They are in motion not only
because they may take place over time, but because they are physical attributes or occurrences
that achieve meaning by means of language. And languages are splattered pluralities floating in a constant state of flux.
Events cannot be apprehended as part of a natural order of things, as something that exists out
there, waiting to be unveiled through a flash of authentic insight. Events are, at least in part,
determined by what is asked about them in the process of imbuing their existence with
sociolinguistic meaning.