Discourse Ks – Gonzaga Debate Institute 14

A2: Shapes Reality

Discourse does not shape reality – translation proves that it’s the other way around.

Tuathail, Professor of Government and International Affairs, 1996

[Gearóid, 6/7, “The patterned mess of history and the writing of critical geopolitics: a reply to Dalby, Political Geography” 15: p 661-5, retrieved 7/5/14, WZ]

While theoretical debates at academic conferences are important to academics, the discourse and concerns of foreign-policy decision makers are quite different, so different that they constitute a distinctive problemsolving, theory-averse, policy-making subculture. There is a danger that academics assume that the discourses they engage are more significant in the practice of foreign policy and the exercise of power than they really are. This is not, however, to minimize the obvious importance of academia as a general institutional structure among many that sustain certain epistemic communities in particular states. In general, I do not disagree with Dalby’s fourth point about politics and discourse except to note that his statement-‘Precisely because reality could be represented in particular ways political decisions could be taken, troops and material moved and war fought’-evades the important question of agency that I noted in my review essay. The assumption that it is representations that make action possible is inadequate by itself. Political,military and economic structures, institutions, discursive networks and leadership are all crucial in explaining social action and should be theorized together with representational practices. Both here and earlier, Dalby’s reasoning inclines towards a form of idealism. In response to Dalby’s fifth point (with its three subpoints), it is worth noting, first, that his book is about the CPD, not the Reagan administration. He analyzes certain CPD discourses, root the geographical reasoning practices of the Reagan administration nor its public-policy reasoning on national security. Dalby’s book is narrowly textual; the general contextuality of the Reagan administration is not dealt with. Second, let me simply note that I find that the distinction between critical theorists and poststructuralists is a little too rigidly and heroically drawn by Dalby and others. Third, Dalby’s interpretation of the reconceptualization of national security in Moscow as heavily influenced by dissident peace researchers in Europe is highly idealist, an interpretation that ignores the structural and ideological crises facing the Soviet elite at that time. Gorbachev’s reforms and his new security discourse were also strongly selfinterested, an ultimately futile attempt to save the Communist Party and a discredited regime of power from disintegration. The issues raised by Simon Dalby in his comment are important ones for all those interested in the practice of critical geopolitics. While I agree with Dalby that questions of discourse are extremely important ones for political geographers to engage, there is a danger of fetishizing this concern with discourse so that we neglect the institutional and the sociological, the materialist and the cultural, the political and the geographical contexts within which particular discursive strategies become significant. Critical geopolitics, in other words, should not be a prisoner of the sweeping ahistorical cant that sometimes accompanies ‘poststructuralism nor convenient reading strategies like the identity politics narrative; it needs to always be open to the patterned mess that is human history.

Discourse doesn’t shape reality

Jarvis, Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of British Columbia, 2000

[Darryl, 7/11 International relations and the challenge of postmodernism, p. 190, retrieved 7/5/14, WZ]

The simple and myopic assumption that social change can be engineered through linguistic policing of politically incorrect words, concepts and opinions, is surely one of the more politically lame (idealist) suggestions to come from armchair theorists in the last fifty years. By the same token, the suggestion that we engage in revisionism of the sort that would "undo" modernist knowledge so that we might start again free of silences, oppressions, and inequalities also smacks of an intelligentsia so idealist as to be unconnected to the world in which they live. The critical skills of subversive postmodernists, constrained perhaps by the success of the West, of Western capitalism, if not liberal democracy, as the legitimate form of representation, and having tried unsuccessfully through revolution and political uprising to dethrone it previously, have turned to the citadel of our communal identities and attacked not parliaments, nor forms of social-political-economic organization, but language, communication, and the basis of Enlightenment knowledge that otherwise enables us to live, work, and communicate as social beings. Clever though this is, it is not in the end compatible with the project of theory knowledge and takes us further away from an understanding of our world. Its greatest contribution is to celebrate the loss of certainty, where, argues John O'Neill, "men (sic) are no longer sure of their ruling knowledge and are unable to mobilize sufficient legitimation for the master-narratives of truth and justice." To suppose, however, that we should rejoice collectively at the prospects of a specious relativism and a multifarious perspectivism, and that absent any further constructive endeavor, the great questions and problems of our time will be answered or solved by this speaks of an intellectual poverty now famed perversely as the search for "thinking space."

Policy making comes before discourse

Policy action must come before language discourse—makes worse inequalities invisible

Taft-Kaufman, CMU Department of speech communication, 95

(Jill, and dramatic arts professor, “Other Ways: Postmodernism and performance praxis,” Southern Communications Journal, Vol. 60, Iss. 3, Pg. 222, CLF)

The postmodern passwords of "polyvocality," "Otherness," and "difference," unsupported by substantial analysis of the concrete contexts of subjects, creates a solipsistic quagmire. The political sympathies of the new cultural critics, with their ostensible concern for the lack of power experienced by marginalized people, aligns them with the political left. Yet, despite their adversarial posture and talk of opposition, their discourses on intertextuality and inter-referentiality isolate them from and ignore the conditions that have produced leftist politics--conflict, racism, poverty, and injustice. In short, as Clarke (1991) asserts, postmodern emphasis on new subjects conceals the old subjects, those who have limited access to good jobs, food, housing, health care, and transportation, as well as to the media that depict them. Merod (1987) decries this situation as one which leaves no vision, will, or commitment to activism. He notes that academic lip service to the oppositional is underscored by the absence of focused collective or politically active intellectual communities. Provoked by the academic manifestations of this problem Di Leonardo (1990) echoes Merod and laments: Has there ever been a historical era characterized by as little radical analysis or activism and as much radical-chic writing as ours? Maundering on about Otherness: phallocentrism or Eurocentric tropes has become a lazy academic substitute for actual engagement with the detailed histories and contemporary realities of Western racial minorities, white women, or any Third World population. (p. 530) Clarke's assessment of the postmodern elevation of language to the "sine qua non" of critical discussion is an even stronger indictment against the trend. Clarke examines Lyotard's (1984) The Postmodern Condition in which Lyotard maintains that virtually all social relations are linguistic, and, therefore, it is through the coercion that threatens speech that we enter the "realm of terror" and society falls apart. To this assertion, Clarke replies: I can think of few more striking indicators of the political and intellectual impoverishment of a view of society that can only recognize the discursive. If the worst terror we can envisage is the threat not to be allowed to speak, we are appallingly ignorant of terror in its elaborate contemporary forms. It may be the intellectual's conception of terror (what else do we do but speak?), but its projection onto the rest of the world would be calamitous....(pp. 2-27) The realm of the discursive is derived from the requisites for human life, which are in the physical world, rather than in a world of ideas or symbols.(4) Nutrition, shelter, and protection are basic human needs that require collective activity for their fulfillment. Postmodern emphasis on the discursive without an accompanying analysis of how the discursive emerges from material circumstances hides the complex task of envisioning and working towards concrete social goals (Merod, 1987). Although the material conditions that create the situation of marginality escape the purview of the postmodernist, the situation and its consequences are not overlooked by scholars from marginalized groups. Robinson (1990) for example, argues that "the justice that working people deserve is economic, not just textual" (p. 571). Lopez (1992) states that "the starting point for organizing the program content of education or political action must be the present existential, concrete situation" (p. 299). West (1988) asserts that borrowing French post-structuralist discourses about "Otherness" blinds us to realities of American difference going on in front of us (p. 170). Unlike postmodern "textual radicals" who Rabinow (1986) acknowledges are "fuzzy about power and the realities of socioeconomic constraints" (p. 255), most writers from marginalized groups are clear about how discourse interweaves with the concrete circumstances that create lived experience. People whose lives form the material for postmodern counter-hegemonic discourse do not share the optimism over the new recognition of their discursive subjectivities, because such an acknowledgment does not address sufficiently their collective historical and current struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, and economic injustice. They do not appreciate being told they are living in a world in which there are no more real subjects. Ideas have consequences. Emphasizing the discursive self when a person is hungry and homeless represents both a cultural and humane failure. The need to look beyond texts to the perception and attainment of concrete social goals keeps writers from marginalized groups ever-mindful of the specifics of how power works through political agendas, institutions, agencies, and the budgets that fuel them.