Framework
Framework
Shell
Prioritize foundational framing as precursor to policy solutions, first comes
epistemological considerations
The doorkeepers of IR are those who, knowingly or unknowingly, make sure that the discipline’s discursive
boundaries remain intact. Discourses, in a Foucaultian sense, are subtle mechanisms that frame our thinking
process. They determine the limits of what can be thought, talked, and written of in a normal and
rational way. In every society the production of discourses is controlled, selected, organized, and
diffused by certain procedures. They create systems of exclusion that elevate one group of discourses
to a hegemonic status while condemning others to exile. Although the boundaries of discourses change, at times
gradually, at times abruptly, they maintain a certain unity across time, a unity that dominates and transgresses individual authors, texts, or
social practices. They
explain, to return to Nietzsche, why “all things that live long are gradually so saturated with
reason that their origin in unreason thereby becomes improbable.”28 Academic disciplines are
powerful mechanisms to direct and control the production and diffusion of discourses. They establish
the rules of intellectual exchange and define the methods, techniques, and instruments that are
considered proper for the pursuit of knowledge. Within these margins, each discipline recognizes true
and false propositions based on the standards of evaluation it established to assess them.29 <63-64>
Critique solves - Dissent at the epistemological and ontological level runs through the
discursive cracks of hegemony to the heart of social change.
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)
This chapter has mapped out some of the discursive terrains in which transversal dissent takes place. Discourses
are not invincible
monolithic forces that subsume everything in reach. Despite their power to frame social practices, a
discursively entrenched hegemonic order can be fragmented and thin at times. To excavate the
possibilities for dissent that linger in these cracks, a shift of foci from epistemological to ontological
issues is necessary. Scrutinising the level of Being reveals how individuals can escape aspects of hegemony. Dasein, the existential
awareness of Being, always already contains the potential to become something else than what it is. By shifting back and forth etween
hyphenated identities, an individual can travel across various discursive fields of power and gain the critical insight necessary to escape at least
some aspect of the prevailing order. Transversal
practices of dissent that issue from such mobile subjectivities
operate at the level of dailiness. Through a range of seemingly mundane acts of resistance, people can
gradually transform societal values and thus promote powerful processes of social change. Theses
transformations are not limited to existing boundaries of sovereignty. The power of discursive
practices is not circumscribed by some ultimate spatial delineation, and neither are the practices of
dissent that interfere with them. At a time when the flow of capital and information is increasingly
trans-territorial, the sphere of everyday life has become an integral aspect of global politics — one that
deserves the attention of scholars who devote themselves to the analysis of international relations.
The remaining chapters seek to sustain this claim and, in doing so, articulate a viable and non-essentialist concept of human agency.
Discourse First – Policy Making
Policymaking cannot escape the nature of actions as preconstituted in language- the
creation of a single acceptable description of actions is vital to preventing engagement
or discussion of these acts, meaning that in a vacuum there is no way to evaluate
policy without kritik.
Patton 97, professor of philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (Paul, “The
World Seen From Within: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Events”, Theory and Event 1:1, 1997)
There is a parallel here with the views of Anscombe and others in the philosophy of action, according to which actions (a special class of
events) are always events under a description. This is because actions involve intentions and intentions
presuppose some description of what it is that the agent intends to do . On this view, the bare occurrence
(or numerical identity) of actions might be specifiable in purely physical terms, but their identity as actions of
a particular kind involves reference to appropriate descriptions . 4 There is thus a necessary connection
between the identity of the action and the manner in which it would be described by the agent .
Moreover, to the degree that events involving non-human agencies such as corporate bodies, political
movements and nation states are understood in terms of the model of rational action, this connection
applies in the case of a broad range of social and political events . Thus, while it may be true that by installing
offensive missiles the Soviet authorities reinforced the defensive capabilities of Cuba, this might not be an appropriate description of their
action. 5 The same action may have multiple (true) descriptions, but it is not always possible to substitute one description of an action for
another in contexts that involve reference to the beliefs or intentions of agents. This thesis about the dependence of actions upon
descriptions implies that the nature of such events is not exhausted by any particular description or set of
descriptions. Ian Hacking explores some surprising consequences of this thesis. One is the phenomena to which Nietzsche and Foucault
drew attention, namely that new forms of description of human behavior make possible new kinds of action.
Only after the discursive characterization of behavior in terms of juvenile delinquency or split
personality was established did it become possible for individuals to conceive of themselves and
therefore to act as delinquents or splits. Not all discursive constructions of subjectivity open up new
possibilities for action: some may serve to invalidate or remove possibilities for action . Hacking cites the case
of a bill brought before the British Parliament which sought to pardon retrospectively several hundred soldiers who were shot for desertion
during the First World War, on the grounds that they would now be regarded as suffering from post-traumatic stress. 6 Such a redescription
would pathologize the action of the deserters, retrospectively transforming their actions into symptoms. In other cases, the aim of retroactive
redescription is to render reprehensible behavior that was formerly acceptable, as for example, when the European 'settlement' of Aboriginal
land in the Australian colonies is redescribed as invasion. The second surprising conclusion which Hacking draws from this account of the
nature of actions is that there
is no simple fact of the matter which enables us to say whether such
redescriptions are correct or incorrect. It follows that the nature of past actions is essentially
indeterminate: one and the same event may be expressed in an open-ended series of statements . In
other words, generalizing the Anscombe thesis about actions points in the same direction as Deleuze's Stoic thesis about the relationship
between events and the forms of their linguistic expression: while
the event proper or pure event is not reducible to
the manner in which it appears or is incarnated in particular states of affairs, the nature of the
incarnate or impure event is closely bound up with the forms of its expression . Moreover, since the
manner in which a given occurrence is described or 'represented' within a given social context
determines it as a particular kind of event, there is good reason for political actors to contest accepted
descriptions.