Practice versus Theory

What kind of practice is theory? What is the theory of practice? Several key debates, one between Ernesto Laclau, Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida (1996), a second between Laclau and Slavoj Zizek (1989; 2000), and another between Laclau, Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek (2000; see also Laclau 2004; 2005), stand as important illuminating and representative encounters that each tellingly illustrate the consequences for scholarship of different answers to the question of university responsibility, or the practice of intellectual work. These encounters can be taken to represent wider tendencies: they stand as clashes between influential examples of key paradigms of cultural/ political study. As we will see, they each have paradigms that are overlapping yet distinct; and that come into disagreement because of apparently slight but nevertheless significant differences in theoretical and practical approaches. These differences derive from the orienting function of different tacit assumptions operative within each paradigm about theory and practice (Derrida 1996: 78). Their effects radiate from the ‘merely academic’ to the decidedly ethico-political.

These debates are particularly salient because the different theoretical assumptions that they entail can be viewed as exemplary cases of very widely used paradigms.