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1 -Their hope for the debate space represents a relationship of cruel optimism to the ballot—a hopeful attachment to the logic of a problematic system of economic exchange that stultifies the potential for politics through—the ballot, the source of subjectification and violence, is invested with optimism rather than productive distance.
2 -Berlant 2006 (Lauren, Professor of Literature at the University of Chicago, “Cruel Optimism” in differences 17.3)
3 -When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talk- ing about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us. This cluster of promises could be embed- ded in a person, a thing, an institution, a text, a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea—whatever. To phrase “the object of desire” as a cluster of promises is to allow us to encounter what is incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality, but as an explanation for our sense of our endurance in the object, insofar as prox- imity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that the object promises, some of which may be clear to us while others not so much. In other words, all attachments are optimistic. That does not mean that they all feel optimistic: one might dread, for example, returning to a scene of hunger or longing or the slapstick reiteration of a lover or parent’s typi- cal misrecognition. But the surrender to the return to the scene where the object hovers in its potentialities is the operation of optimism as an affective form (see Ghent). “Cruel optimism” names a relation of attachment to compro- mised conditions of possibility. What is cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world. This phrase points to a condition different than that of melancholia, which is enacted in the subject’s desire to temporize an experience of the loss of an object/scene with which she has identified her ego continuity. Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss.¶ One might point out that all objects/scenes of desire are prob- lematic, in that investments in them and projections onto them are less about them than about the cluster of desires and affects we manage to keep magnetized to them. I have indeed wondered whether all optimism is cruel, because the experience of loss of the conditions of its reproduction can be so breathtakingly bad. But some scenes of optimism are crueler than others: where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalizing or ani- mating potency of an object/scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first place. This might point to something as banal as a scouring love, but it also opens out to obsessive appetites, patriotism, a career, all kinds of things. One makes affective bargains about the costliness of one’s attachments, usually unconscious ones, most of which keep one in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition.¶ To understand cruel optimism as an aesthetic of attachment requires embarking on an analysis of the modes of rhetorical indirection that manage the strange activity of projection into an enabling object that is also disabling. I learned how to do this from reading Barbara Johnson’s work on apostrophe and free indirect discourse. In her poetics of indi- rection, each of these rhetorical modes is shaped by the ways a writing subjectivity conjures other ones so that, in a performance of phantasmatic intersubjectivity, the writer gains superhuman observational authority, enabling a performance of being made possible by the proximity of the object. Because the dynamics of this scene are something like what I am describing in the optimism of attachment, I will describe the shape of my transference with her thought.
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5 -Treating difference as a thing to be liberated only works by first establishing a criteria for what counts as difference—this criteria is established internal to the existing system of signification—it is an abstraction defined only per its economic utility.
6 -Grace 2000 (Victoria, Professor of Sociology at Canterbury University, Baudrillard’s Challenge p. 12-14)
7 -Following on from his earliest work on objects and social dynamics of consumption (SO and CS), Baudrillard develops this critique of the ideology of needs in his book For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. He claims that to ‘speak in terms of need is magical thinking’ (PES: 70) precisely because of its status as a kind of origin myth. Here he argues that the positing of subject and object as autonomous and separate entities creates the necessity to devise a myth to establish their relation. This, he says, is accomplished in the concept of need and its allied concepts of mana, instinct, motivation, choice, preference, utility. The syntax of subject needs object is a tautological means of resolving the relationship between the subject and the object, whereby the one is defined in terms of the other: ‘positing the autonomy of the subject and its specular reflection in the autonomy of the object’ (PES: 71). The logic of equivalence (axiomatic to economics) is an abstraction, a code, a rule. For objects to be abstractly and generally exchangeable, they must be thought and rationalised in terms of utility (PES: 131). The code equates the object to its useful end; its function becomes its ontological finality. According to Baudrillard’s analysis, this is where the economic is born (PES: 132). In the same movement, the social relation of use value requires the existence of the abstract individual who becomes not only the person with needs, but also the one with desires, with motivations, with a ‘self’ (and an unconscious) in the privacy of ‘his’ or ‘her’ psychological finitude. 6 I have placed the gendered pronoun in inverted commas here to signal what, I want to argue, is the provisional nature of the gendering of this individual. In the same way as the ‘subject’ is an abstraction necessitated by this dichotomous splitting of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, the notion that gender constitutes an identity of the individual is equally an abstraction. The abstract (gendered) individual with a ‘self’ has to have a relation to ‘him’ or ‘her’ self, a relation which Baudrillard argues is itself structured by the utilitarian imperative: In the process of satisfaction, he sic valorises and makes fruitful his own potentialities for pleasure; he ‘realises’ and manages, to the best of his ability, his own ‘faculty’ of pleasure, treated literally like a productive force. Isn’t this what all of humanist ethics is based on – the ‘proper use’ of oneself?. (PES: 136) In his critique of the naturalised assumption of utility and human needs, and its role in providing an anchoring point for the system of economic exchange value, Baudrillard also analyses the relationship between the two forms of value as two terms of a binary opposition. He points out, as many have before and since, that the structural logic of binary oppositions always privileges one term, which becomes the dominant term. In this context, the logic of equivalence, articulated within a dichotomous structure of ‘same as’ or ‘different from’, is necessary for the construction of ‘identity’: identity is the dominant term (‘same as’). Here we see the powerful significance of the parallel structure of identity/difference; same as/different from; equivalent to/not equivalent to; positive/negative; present not present. This rationalisation which permits the identity of objects to be rendered in their functionality also permits the object to enter the field of political economy as a positive (+) value (PES: 134). Baudrillard characterises the parallel structural form of economic value and signification in the terms of two equivalent dichotomies: EV/UV = Sr/Sd. The ideological form of economic exchange value (EV) is to assume that EV obtains its value from use value (UV), whereas in fact, Baudrillard has argued, UV is an artefact of the social institution of a codified system of EV. 7 In the same way, rather than assuming that the meaning of the Sr obtains in the Sd, Baudrillard argues that the Sd is an artefact of the social institution of a codified system of representation. UV and Sds are only effects of EV and Sr respectively, and neither UV nor the Sd is an autonomous reality that either EV or the Sr ‘would express or translate in their code’ (PES: 137). Here Baudrillard argues that UV and the Sd are only simulation models, produced by the play of EV and Srs, providing the latter with the ‘guarantee of the real, the lived, the concrete’ (PES: 137). As political economy needed UV to institute the order of EV (in the same movement establishing equivalence as an abstract equation of all values), so the Sd was needed to institute an order of meanings making possible the naturalisation of the relationship Sr– Sd. This naturalisation could then produce the appearance that concepts (Sds) exist and precede the Srs that name them. 8 In Baudrillard’s words: The system of use value involves the resorption without trace of the entire ideological and historical labour process that leads the subject in the first place to think of himself sic as an individual, defined by his needs and satisfaction, and thus ideally to integrate himself into the structure of the commodity. (PES: 138) The inalienable point of origin instantiated by the myth of utility is not only parallel to, but inextricably coexistent with, the assumption of the unsurpassable ‘nature’ of meaning. As I mentioned above, whether the Sd conjured by a Sr is assumed to be fixed in Saussure’s terms, in the semantic conventions of a particular language, or whether the Sd is conceptualised as plural in its possibilities, inevitably deferred in poststructuralist, Derridian terms, the dichotomous structure of Sr/Sd remains, the bar that separates them is re-marked, and the assumption of a codified system of meaning continues to underwrite the mode of representation. I hope that the significance of this critique becomes clearer as we consider Baudrillard’s notion of symbolic exchange and seduction.
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9 -This turns the case and takes out solvency—your frame produces the revolutionary hope that debate and society might change but ultimately reinstitutes the same in a way that solidifies and naturalizes the brutal logic of the economy centered on the exchange value.
10 -Berlant 2006 (Lauren, Professor of Literature at the University of Chicago, “Cruel Optimism” in differences 17.3)
11 -It is striking that these moments of optimism, which mark a possibility that the habits of a history might not be reproduced, release an overwhelmingly negative force: one predicts such effects in traumatic scenes, but it is not usual to think about an optimistic event as having the same potential consequences. The conventional fantasy that a revolu- tionary lifting of being might happen in proximity to a new object/scene would predict otherwise than that a person or a group might prefer, after all, to surf from episode to episode while leaning toward a cluster of vaguely phrased prospects. And yet: at a certain degree of abstraction both from trauma and optimism, the experience of self-dissolution, radi- cally reshaped consciousness, new sensoria, and narrative rupture can look similar; the emotional flooding in proximity to a new object can also produce a similar grasping toward stabilizing form, a reanchoring in the symptom’s predictability.¶ I have suggested that the particular ways in which identity and desire are articulated and lived sensually within capitalist culture produce such counterintuitive overlaps. But it would be reductive to read the preceding as a claim that anyone’s subjective transaction with the optimistic structure of value in capital produces the knotty entailments of cruel optimism as such. This essay focuses on artworks that explicitly remediate singularities into cases of nonuniversal but general abstraction, providing narrative scenarios of how people learn to identify, manage, and maintain the hazy luminosity of their attachment to being x and having x, given that their attachments were promises and not possessions after all. Geoff Ryman’s historical novel Was provides a different kind of limit case of cruel optimism. Linking agrarian labor, the culture industries, and therapy culture through four encounters with The Wizard of Oz, its pursuit of the affective continuity of trauma and optimism in self-unfold- ing excitement is neither comic, tragic, nor melodramatic, but metaformal: it absorbs all of these into a literary mode that validates fantasy (from absorption in pretty things to crazy delusion) as a life-affirming defense against the attritions of ordinary history.¶ Was constructs a post-traumatic drama that is held together by the governing consciousness of Bill Davison, a mental health worker, a white heterosexual Midwesterner whose only intimate personal brush with trauma has been ambivalence toward his fiancée but whose profes- sional capacity to enter into the impasse with his patients, and to let their impasses into him, makes him the novel’s optimistic remainder, a rich witness. The first traumatic story told is about the real Dorothy Gale, spelled Gael, partly, I imagine, to link up the girl who’s transported to Oz on a strong breeze to someone in prison, and also to link her to the Gaelic part of Scotland, home of the historical novel, the genre whose affective and political conventions shape explicitly Ryman’s quasi-documentary inclusion of experiences and memories whose traces are in archives, land- scapes, and bodies scattered throughout Kansas, Canada, and the United States. Like Cooter, this Dorothy Gael uses whatever fantasy she can scrap together to survive her scene of hopeless historical embeddedness. But her process is not to drift vaguely, but intensely, by way of multigeneric inven- tion: dreams, fantasies, private plays, psychotic projection, aggressive quiet, lying, being a loud bully and a frank truth teller. Dorothy’s creativity makes a wall of post-traumatic noise, as she has been abandoned by her parents, raped and shamed by her Uncle Henry Gulch, and shunned by other children for being big, fat, and ineloquent.¶ Part 2 of Was tells the story of Judy Garland as the child Frances Gumm. On the Wizard of Oz set she plays Dorothy Gale as desexualized sweetheart, her breasts tightly bound so that she can remain a child and therefore have her childhood stolen from her. It is not stolen through rape, but by parents bound up in their own fantasies of living through children in terms of money and fame (Gumm’s mother) or sex (Gumm’s father, whose object choice was young boys). The third story in Was is about a fictional gay man, a minor Hollywood actor named Jonathan, whose fame comes from being the monster in serial killer movies titled The Child Minder and who, as the book begins, is offered a part in a touring Wizard of Oz company while he is entering aids dementia. All of these stories are about the cruelty of optimism for people without control over the material condi- tions of their lives and whose relation to fantasy is all that protects them from being destroyed by other people and the nation. I cannot do justice here to the singularities of what optimism makes possible and impossible in this entire book but want to focus on a scene that makes the whole book possible. In this scene, Dorothy Gael encounters a substitute teacher, Frank Baum, in her rural Kansas elementary school.¶ “The children,” writes Ryman, “knew the Substitute was not a real teacher because he was so soft” (168). “Substitute” derives from the word “succeed,” and the sense of possibility around the changeover is deeply embedded in the word. A substitute brings optimism if he hasn’t yet been defeated—by life or by the students. He enters their lives as a new site for attachment, a dedramatized possibility. He is by definition a placeholder, a space of abeyance, an aleatory event. His coming is not personal—he is not there for anyone in particular. The amount of affect released around him says something about the intensity of the children’s available drive to be less dead, numb, neutralized, or crazy with habit; but it says nothing about what it would feel like to be in transit between the stale life and all its others, or whether that feeling would lead to something good.¶ Of course, often students are cruel to substitutes, out of excite- ment at the unpredictable and out of not having fear or transference to make them docile or even desiring of a recognition that has no time to be built. But this substitute is special to Dorothy: he is an actor, like her parents; he teaches them Turkish, and tells them about alternative histo- ries lived right now and in the past (171). Dorothy fantasizes about Frank Baum not in a narrative way, but with a mixture of sheer pleasure and defense: “Frank, Frank, as her uncle put his hands on her” (169); then she berates herself for her “own unworthiness” (169) because she knows “how beautiful you are and I know how ugly I am and how you could never have anything to do with me” (174). She says his name, Frank, over and over: it “seemed to sum up everything that was missing from her life” (169). Yet, face to face she cannot bear the feeling of relief from her life that the substitute’s being near provides for her. She alternately bristles and melts at his deference, his undemanding kindness. She mocks him and disrupts class to drown out her tenderness, but obeys him when he asks her to leave the room to just write something, anything.¶ What she comes back with is a lie, a wish. Her dog, Toto, had been murdered by her aunt and uncle, who hated him and who had no food to spare for him. But the story she hands in to the substitute is a substitute: it is about how happy she and Toto are. It includes sentences about how they play together and how exuberant he is, running around yelping “like he is saying hello to everything” (174). Imaginary Toto sits on her lap, licks her hand, has a cold nose, sleeps on her lap, and eats food that Auntie Em gives her to give him. The essay suggests a successful life, a life where love circulates and extends its sympathies, rather than the life she actually lives, where “it was as if they had all stood back-to-back, shouting ‘love’ at the tops of their lungs, but in the wrong direction, away from each other” (221). It carries traces of all of the good experience Dorothy has ever had. The essay closes this way: “I did not call him Toto. That is the name my mother gave him when she was alive. It is the same as mine” (175).¶ Toto, Dodo, Dorothy: the teacher sees that the child has opened up something in herself, let down a defense, and he is moved by the brav- ery of her admission of identification and attachment. But he makes the mistake of being mimetic in response, acting soft toward her in a way he might imagine that she seeks to be: “I’m very glad,” he murmured, “that you have something to love as much as that little animal.” Dorothy goes ballistic at this response and insults Baum, but goes on to blurt out all of the truths of her life, in public, in front of the other students. She talks nonstop about being raped and hungry all the time, about the murder of her dog, and about her ineloquence: “I can’t say anything,” she closes (176). That phrase means she can’t do anything to change anything. From here she regresses to yelping and tries to dig a hole in the ground, to become the size she feels, and also to become, in a sense, an embodiment of the last thing she loved. After that, Dorothy goes crazy, lives in a fantasy world of her own, wandering homeless and free, especially, of the capacity to reflect on loss in the modalities of realism, tragedy, or melodrama. To protect her last iota of optimism, she goes crazy.¶ In Was, Baum goes on to write The Wizard of Oz as a gift of alternativity to the person who can’t say or do anything to change her life materially and who has taken in so much that one moment of relief from herself produces a permanent crack in the available genres of her survival. In “What Is a Minor Literature?” Deleuze and Guattari exhort people to become minor in exactly that way, to deterritorialize from the normal by digging a hole in sense, like a dog or a mole. Creating an impasse, a space of internal displacement, in this view, shatters the normal hierar- chies, clarities, tyrannies, and confusions of compliance with autonomous individuality. This strategy looks promising in the Ashbery poem. But in “Exchange Value,” a moment of relief produces a psychotic defense against the risk of loss in optimism. For Dorothy Gael, in Was, the optimism of attachment to another living being is itself the cruelest slap of all.¶ From this cluster we can understand a bit more of the magnetic attraction to cruel optimism, with its suppression of the risks of attach- ment. A change of heart, a sensorial shift, intersubjectivity, or transference with a promising object cannot generate on its own the better good life: nor can the collaboration of a couple, brothers, or pedagogy. The vague futurities of normative optimism produce small self-interruptions as the utopias of structural inequality. The texts we have looked at here stage moments when it could become otherwise, but shifts in affective atmo- sphere are not equal to changing the world. They are, here, only pieces of an argument about the centrality of optimistic fantasy to reproducing and surviving in zones of compromised ordinariness. And that is one way to take the measure of the impasse of living in the overwhelmingly present moment.
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13 -The reduction of all existence to the economy of signification is the elimination of the value to life and extermination
14 -Michael Dillon, professor of politics and international relations at the University of Lancaster, April 1999, Political Theory, Vol. 27, No. 2, “Another Justice,” p. 164-5
15 -Quite the reverse. The subject was never a firm foundation for justice, much less a hospitable vehicle for the reception of the call of another Justice. It was never in possession of that self-possession which was supposed to secure the certainty of itself, of a self-possession that would enable it ultimately to adjudicate everything. The very indexicality required of sovereign subjectivity gave rise rather to a commensurability much more amenable to the expendability required of the political and material economies of mass societies than it did to the singular, invaluable, and uncanny uniqueness of the self. The value of the subject became the standard unit of currency for the political arithmetic of States and the political economies of capitalism. They trade in it still to devastating global effect. The technologisation of the political has become manifest and global. Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability. Thus no valuation without mensuration and no mensuration without indexation. Once rendered calculable, however, units of account are necessarily submissible not only to valuation but also, of course, to devaluation. Devaluation, logically, can extend to the point of counting as nothing. Hence, no mensuration without demensuration either. There is nothing abstract about this: the declension of economies of value leads to the zero point of holocaust. However liberating and emancipating systems of value-rights-may claim to be, for example, they run the risk of counting out the invaluable. Counted out, the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life. Herewith, then, the necessity of championing the invaluable itself. For we must never forget that, “we are dealing always with whatever exceeds measure.” But how does that necessity present itself? Another Justice answers: as the surplus of the duty to answer to the claim of Justice over rights. That duty, as with the advent of another Justice, is integral to the lack constitutive of the human way of being
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17 -Our alternative is to reread the circumstance of the debate as an expression of the logic of exchange value—this lens produces our perspective of symbolic exchange which solves their arguments better by providing the only locus of meaningful political critique—opening this lens allows us to read the ballot against itself.
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19 -Conceiving of symbolic exchange rather than exchange on the basis of use value solves by blurring the subject/object relation through mechanisms that create indistinction—asking to commodify political projects shuts down symbolic exchange because those projects can only exist as commodities
20 -Grace 2000 (Victoria, Professor of Sociology at Canterbury University, Baudrillard’s Challenge p. 18-19)
21 -Symbolic exchange is the radical other from the economic. According to Baudrillard, the economic, in its classical and neo-classical form, 11 is born when what the object ‘is’ is assumed to reside within it, it has an essence; when the object attains its value in accordance with an abstract code that enables its relation to other objects to be ascertained through a logic of equivalence which in turn obtains its rationale from the ideology of utility and use value; and when the individual emerges as a ‘subject’ whose relation to the world of objects is articulated primarily through the ideology of need (and, with psychoanalysis, desire). From this critical viewpoint, the notion of the ‘individual’ as it emerged from the Enlightenment period with needs, ‘liberated’ from the ties and constraints of a previous era, is an abstraction. And the discourse of liberation can be understood as a process of interiorising subjectivity resulting from the dichotomous separation of subject and object. This ‘subject’ of industrialising modernity has an essence, ‘an abstract essence over which the identity of the subject comes to fix itself’ (MOP: 95). By contrast, symbolic exchange is a form of exchange, a form of construction of objects and their meaning, that is antithetical to the economic. The poles of the exchange are not automatised; there is neither essence nor absolute separation of subject from object. Both are continually transformed through the exchange. There is no identity. 12 The ontology of objects is inexorably ambivalent. Goods are not produced, nor do they exist as commodities or products. Most importantly, goods are destined to circulate in a social process of exchange that augments the social in terms of the creation and destruction, the giving and returning or passing on, of the ‘gift’. This process negates the possibility of power through accumulation. The individual is not an ‘individual’ with an interior psychology, a subjectivity, an identity, with needs and desires. Within this construct of the symbolic exchange, language is symbolic, similarly ambivalent, and must be exchanged. Words evoke, point, seduce, act rather than connote and denote. And they circulate. Stockpiles of words that do not circulate and are not exchanged are, as Baudrillard writes, more deadly than the accumulation of waste from industrialisation (SEandD: 203). The logic of the symbolic and symbolic exchange is one of ambivalence and transformation through circulation; the positive and the negative, presence and absence (if one can talk in these terms), are always activated.
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23 -Voting negative to open the ballot up to a lens of symbolic exchange divests the ballot of the ability to represent truth and meaning—we instead play with the signifier of the ballot by READING IT AGAINST ITSELF which allows us deoperationalize it’s power.
24 -Robinson 12 Robinson, Andrew. "An A to Z of Theory | Jean Baudrillard: Symbolic Exchange." Ceasefire Magazine RSS. N.p., 17 Feb. 2012. Web. 19 Feb. 2014.
25 -Symbolic exchange – the aspect of life which is missing today according to Baudrillard – is central to his entire theory. If simulation is the exchange of signs with signs, symbolic exchange is the exchange of signs with the real. Baudrillard treats the symbolic as an “outside” to representation, the code, value, production, the law, master-signification, and the unconscious – hence as radically other to most of the familiar institutions and roles of capitalist/statist systems. Baudrillard’s idea of symbolic exchange is loosely based on Marcel Mauss’s analysis of gifts in indigenous social life, though he takes it in a different direction from Mauss, using it to analyse what is missing in today’s capitalist societies.¶ There were, according to Baudrillard, societies without the social. They existed without the kind of representational systems which create the appearance of social life in modernity. Instead, they were based on networks of symbolic ties.¶ They were outside production because their social forms were instead based on excess, expenditure and the symbolic. Excess exists instead of surplus or accumulation. Nothing is taken from nature without being returned. They were neither societies of scarcity, nor did they limit their “production” to avoid a “surplus”. They were simply outside the logic of production.¶ Symbolic exchange is fundamental to the nature of ‘society’ in such groups. People in indigenous groups are not simply born, biologically. They become part of society through initiation. This is a process marked by exchanges and rituals. Forms of marking, such as tattoos, turn people and the world into material for symbolic exchange. They then enter into an uninterrupted, ongoing process of exchange. According to Baudrillard, initiation is a second birth, into a symbolic order. It breaks the Oedipal nexus of natural birth. The whole body can be used in exchange. Initiation, torture, tattooing, as well as sexuality were used to perform symbolic exchange.¶ The idea of seduction (more on this later) is closely linked to symbolic exchange. Seduction is a type of initiation. Those who ‘seduce’ someone become the second, initiatory parents. Initiation is a pure ‘event without precedent’ which is the beginning of a destiny. Destiny is taken to escape history, causality, determination and genesis, at least on the level of experience. It is something which ‘happens without your having anything to do with it’ – in other words, it is experienced as extra-subjective.¶ Symbolic exchange allows people and objects to enter a realm of destiny, where things aren’t arbitrary. Destiny is distinct from chance, probability and the aleatory – which are central aspects of modernity. The chance happening, such as birth, does not create an event. A true event only occurs via a second birth or death. Only through true events do we attain intensity. Crucially, symbolic exchange establishes a relationship between signs and reality. It allows signs to “mean”.¶ Reality is here conceived as subjective, experiential, and expressive. In one passage in The Consumer Society, Baudrillard identifies the symbolic with a childlike emotional response to a new object or gadget. Such a response is intense, ignorant of fashion, and disregarding of others’ demands for particular meanings. It is the opposite of how consumer society works. The introduction of combinations of elements, rules of the game and so on is seen as eliminating such libidinal investment of objects. Passion is replaced by indifferent fascination or curiosity. He also suggests there was initially an absence of reproducibility in indigenous society, to the point where the existence of two identical books is bewildering.¶ Symbolic exchange also gives us a singularity or uniqueness. Symbolic exchange gives objects an individuality which rips them out of sign-, use- and exchange-value. Each object becomes unique, ambivalent and reciprocal or reversible with other objects. Initiation is based on the possibility for any system or category to overflow into others – to escape its path-dependency and jump tracks. It also removes the separation, and therefore the meaning, of things. This removal of separation causes an intense enjoyment. Indeed, Baudrillard sees this reversibility or ambivalence as the sole source of enjoyment. (Enjoyment should here be seen, as in Lacanian theory, as distinct from ‘pleasure’). Humour is a remnant of this kind of reversible enjoyment.¶ There is also no bar between subject and object in symbolic exchange. The subject does not attempt to master the object, but rather, accepts being analysed by it in turn – a relation of reversibility. Similarly, humans and animals are part of an interchangeable cycle. Genders are reversible (it is modernity which strictly establishes gender binaries). According to Baudrillard, we should respect the inhuman. Cultures dismissed as fatalist actually find their law from the inhuman. Symbolic exchange also destroys the other cherished separations of modernity. Sexuality, for instance, does not exist outside modernity. Sex is simply part of a cycle of exchanges.¶ Initiation is fundamentally a group, rather than a privatised or massified, phenomenon. It is a passage through the cycle of life and death, through a symbolic event in which one is reborn as a social being and hence enters the field of symbolic exchange. It summons away the splitting of life and death, and therefore fatality towards life. In the symbolic order, life is to be exchanged and returned, eventually returned to death. As a group event, it also separates a particular group from the whole of humanity. The specificity of a symbolic society also depends on a boundary against other groups, a “them and us”. This process is also not individualised, as in Oedipal psychology, but occurs through a collective movement of exchanges.¶ Symbolic exchange is based on the pact, challenge or alliance, which are consciously artificial and initiatory. It is based on ritual defiance and obligation, rather than liberty; metamorphosis, rather than the accumulation of energy.¶ Although it grounds an experience of things as meaningful, symbolic exchange is not heavy with meaning and truth. For Baudrillard, the most intense human experiences don’t come from bodies or from the natural. They come from artificial systems. Rituals produce ecstatic connections based on esoteric rules. They have no meaning. They instead introduce people into initiatory cycles or appearance and disappearance. Baudrillard argues that symbolic ritual is esoteric, whereas Christian ideas of love are exoteric. Symbolic exchange occurs as a light, superficial play of signs without meaning. This contrasts with later systems of emotional investment heavy with meaning. Rules are necessary to symbolic exchange, but are something people simply invent, with ‘the intensity and simplicity of child’s play’.
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1 +Interp: The affirmative/negative must defend the resolution or a hypothetical implimentation of a plan by the United States Federal Government
2 +
3 +“Resolved” proves the framework for the resolution is to enact a policy.
4 +Words and Phrases 64 Permanent Edition
5 +Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”.
6 +“United States Federal Government should” means the debate is solely about the outcome of a policy established by governmental means
7 +Ericson, 03 (Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
8 +The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ~-~~-~-“The United States” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.
9 +Violation: insert violation
10 +B. Reasons to Prefer:
11 +
12 +1 – Predictable ground
13 +A. Predictability: There is no predictable framework provided by a critical 1AC – they’re not tied to a stable advocacy so when we try to stick them to one they shift – they can take infinite unpredictable, non-falsifiable, totalizing, and personal claims
14 +B. Stable Link Ground: The aff can claim their “discourse” outweighs disads, counterplans, and case arguments by clarifying their advocacies throughout the round, skewing the 1NC and killing clash—in their version of debate, you’ll only hear core generics.
15 +C. Limits are key – infinite political theories exist, artificial limits are key
16 +Lutz 2k (Donald S. Professor of Polisci at Houston, Political Theory and Partisan Politics p. 39-40)JFS
17 +Aristotle notes in the Politics that political theory simultaneously proceeds at three levels—discourse about the ideal, about the best possible in the real world, and about existing political systems.4 Put another way, comprehensive political theory must ask several different kinds of questions that are linked, yet distinguishable. In order to understand the interlocking set of questions that political theory can ask, imagine a continuum stretching from left to right. At the end, to the right, is an ideal form of government, a perfectly wrought construct produced by the imagination. At the other end is the perfect dystopia, the most perfectly wretched system that the human imagination can produce. Stretching between these two extremes is an infinite set of possibilities, merging into one another, that describe the logical possibilities created by the characteristics defining the end points. For example, a political system defined primarily by equality would have a perfectly inegalitarian system described at the other end, and the possible states of being between them would vary primarily in the extent to which they embodied equality. An ideal defined primarily by liberty would create a different set of possibilities between the extremes. Of course, visions of the ideal often are inevitably more complex than these single-value examples indicate, but it is also true that in order to imagine an ideal state of affairs a kind of simplification is almost always required since normal states of affairs invariably present themselves to human consciousness as complicated, opaque, and to a significant extent indeterminate. A non-ironic reading of Plato's Republic leads one to conclude that the creation of these visions of the ideal characterizes political philosophy. This is not the case. Any person can generate a vision of the ideal. One job of political philosophy is to ask the question "Is this ideal worth pursuing?" Before the question can be pursued, however, the ideal state of affairs must be clarified, especially with respect to conceptual precision and the logical relationship between the propositions that describe the ideal. This pre-theoretical analysis raises the vision of the ideal from the mundane to a level where true philosophical analysis, and the careful comparison with existing systems can proceed fruitfully. The process of pre-theoretical analysis, probably because it works on clarifying ideas that most capture the human imagination, too often looks to some like the entire enterprise of political philosophy.5 However, the value of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of the General Will, for example, lies not in its formal logical implications, nor in its compelling hold on the imagination, but on the power and clarity it lends to an analysis and comparison of actual political systems.
18 +D. Impacts: Ground is key to fairness – it keeps the playing field level - without ground, there’s no room for teams to compete, judges are forced to vote on discussion rather than debate.
19 +E. Predictable ground is the strongest internal link to clash, and a lack of clash leads to exclusion and alienation.
20 +Tonn ’05 (Mari Boor, Professor of Communication – University of Maryland, “Taking Conversation, Dialogue, and Therapy Public”, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Vol. 8, Issue 3, Fall)
21 +
22 +Perhaps the most conspicuous effort at replacing public debate with therapeutic dialogue was President Clinton's Conversation on Race, launched in mid-1997. Controversial from its inception for its ideological bent, the initiative met further widespread criticism for its encounter-group approaches to racial stratification and strife, critiques echoing previously articulated concerns- my own among them6-that certain dangers lurk in employing private or social communication modes for public problem-solving.7 Since then, others have joined in contesting the treating of public problems with narrative and psychological approaches, which-in the name of promoting civility, cooperation, personal empowerment, and socially constructed or idiosyncratic truths-actually work to contain dissent, locate systemic social problems solely within individual neurosis, and otherwise fortify hegemony.8 Particularly noteworthy is Michael Schudson's challenge to the utopian equating of "conversation" with the "soul of democracy." Schudson points to pivotal differences in the goals and architecture of conversational and democratic deliberative processes. To him, political (or democratic) conversation is a contradiction in terms. Political deliberation entails a clear instrumental purpose, ideally remaining ever mindful of its implications beyond an individual case. Marked by disagreement-even pain-democratic deliberation contains transparent prescribed procedures governing participation and decision making so as to protect the timid or otherwise weak. In such processes, written records chronicle the interactional journey toward resolution, and in the case of writing law especially, provide accessible justification for decisions rendered. In sharp contrast, conversation is often "small talk" exchanged among family, friends, or candidates for intimacy, unbridled by set agendas, and prone to egocentric rather than altruistic goals. Subject only to unstated "rules" such as turn-taking and politeness, conversation tends to advantage the gregarious or articulate over the shy or slight of tongue.9 The events of 9/11, the onset of war with Afghanistan and Iraq, and the subsequent failure to locate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have resuscitated some faith in debate, argument, warrant, and facts as crucial to the public sphere. Still, the romance with public conversation persists. As examples among communication scholars, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's 2001 Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture treated what she termed "the rhetoric of conversation" as a means to "manage controversy" and empower non-dominant voices10; multiple essays in a 2002 special issue of Rhetoric and Public Affairs on deliberative democracy couch a deliberative democratic ideal in dialogic terms11; and the 2005 Southern States Communication Convention featured family therapist Sallyann Roth, founding member and trainer of the Public Conversations Project, as keynote speaker.12 Representative of the dialogic turn in deliberative democracy scholarship is Gerard A. Hauser and Chantal Benoit-Barne's critique of the traditional procedural, reasoning model of public problem solving: "A deliberative model of democracy . . . construes democracy in terms of participation in the ongoing conversation about how we shall act and interact-our political relations" and "Civil society redirects our attention to the language of social dialogue on which our understanding of political interests and possibility rests."13 And on the political front, British Prime Minister Tony Blair-facing declining poll numbers and mounting criticism of his indifference to public opinion on issues ranging from the Iraq war to steep tuition hike proposals-launched The Big Conversation on November 28, 2003. Trumpeted as "as way of enriching the Labour Party's policy making process by listening to the British public about their priorities," the initiative includes an interactive government website and community meetings ostensibly designed to solicit citizens' voices on public issues.14 In their own way, each treatment of public conversation positions it as a democratic good, a mode that heals divisions and carves out spaces wherein ordinary voices can be heard. In certain ways, Schudson's initial reluctance to dismiss public conversation echoes my own early reservations, given the ideals of egalitarianism, empowerment, and mutual respect conversational advocates champion. Still, in the spirit of the dialectic ostensibly underlying dialogic premises, this essay argues that various negative consequences can result from transporting conversational and therapeutic paradigms into public problem solving. In what follows, I extend Schudson's critique of a conversational model for democracy in two ways: First, whereas Schudson primarily offers a theoretical analysis, I interrogate public conversation as a praxis in a variety of venues, illustrating how public "conversation" and "dialogue" have been coopted to silence rather than empower marginalized or dissenting voices. In practice, public conversation easily can emulate what feminist political scientist Jo Freeman termed "the tyranny of structurelessness" in her classic 1970 critique of consciousness- raising groups in the women's liberation movement,15 as well as the key traits Irving L. Janis ascribes to "groupthink."16 Thus, contrary to its promotion as a means to neutralize hierarchy and exclusion in the public sphere, public conversation can and has accomplished the reverse. When such moves are rendered transparent, public conversation and dialogue, I contend, risk increasing rather than diminishing political cynicism and alienation. Continues… This widespread recognition that access to public deliberative processes and the ballot is a baseline of any genuine democracy points to the most curious irony of the conversation movement: portions of its constituency. Numbering among the most fervid dialogic loyalists have been some feminists and multiculturalists who represent groups historically denied both the right to speak in public and the ballot. Oddly, some feminists who championed the slogan "The Personal Is Political" to emphasize ways relational power can oppress tend to ignore similar dangers lurking in the appropriation of conversation and dialogue in public deliberation. Yet the conversational model's emphasis on empowerment through intimacy can duplicate the power networks that traditionally excluded females and nonwhites and gave rise to numerous, sometimes necessarily uncivil, demands for democratic inclusion. Formalized participation structures in deliberative processes obviously cannot ensure the elimination of relational power blocs, but, as Freeman pointed out, the absence of formal rules leaves relational power unchecked and potentially capricious. Moreover, the privileging of the self, personal experiences, and individual perspectives of reality intrinsic in the conversational paradigm mirrors justifications once used by dominant groups who used their own lives, beliefs, and interests as templates for hegemonic social premises to oppress women, the lower class, and people of color. Paradigms infused with the therapeutic language of emotional healing and coping likewise flirt with the type of psychological diagnoses once ascribed to disaffected women. But as Betty Friedan's landmark 1963 The Feminist Mystique argued, the cure for female alienation was neither tranquilizers nor attitude adjustments fostered through psychotherapy but, rather, unrestricted opportunities.102
23 +
24 +
25 +2- Methodology
26 +A. The structure of the debate forum is a prior question that must be resolved first – it is a pre-condition for debate to occur
27 +Shively, 2k (Assistant Prof Political Science at Texas AandM, Ruth Lessl, Partisan Politics and Political Theory, p. 181-2)JFS
28 +The requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The ambiguists must say "no" to-they must reject and limit-some ideas and actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say "yes" to some things. In particular, they must say "yes" to the idea of rational persuasion. This means, first, that they must recognize the role of agreement in political contest, or the basic accord that is necessary to discord. The mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The mistake is in thinking that agreement marks the end of contest-that consensus kills debate. But this is true only if the agreement is perfect-if there is nothing at all left to question or contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are highly imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities but not on specifics, on principles but not on their applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting condition of contest and debate. As John Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them. It seems to have been one of the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the reverse is true. There can be no argument except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement. (Murray 1960, 10) In other words, we cannot argue about something if we are not communicating: if we cannot agree on the topic and terms of argument or if we have utterly different ideas about what counts as evidence or good argument. At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being debated before we can debate it. For instance, one cannot have an argument about euthanasia with someone who thinks euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if one's target audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing the sitting have no complaints. Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy. In other words, contest is meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and debaters must have some shared ideas about the subject and/or the terms of their disagreements. The participants and the target of a sit-in must share an understanding of the complaint at hand. And a demonstrator's audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the contesting of an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about intelligibly contesting it. In other words, contestation rests on some basic agreement or harmony.
29 +B. Turns the case- A lack of structure prevents their message from being heard in the long term - only the majority can be heard if there are no rules. That’s Tonn ’05. The discussion of the K in this debate is outweighed by the elimination of that discussion from any meaningful spheres
30 +C. Switch-side debate - You should evaluate this debate in the framework of switch-side policy analysis—following the rules and debating policy is critical to effective space efforts and empathy.
31 +HUNTLEY et al 2010 (Wade L. Huntley, US Naval Postgraduate School; Joseph G. Bock, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies; Miranda Weingartner, Weingartner Consulting; “Planning the unplannable: Scenarios on the future of space,” Space Policy 26)
32 +As anticipated, one important merit of the process was that it generated constructive dialogue around complex issues. Common themes emerged even though participants came from diverse professional backgrounds. Thus there was a strong desire to continue the dialogue generated by the workshop, both to adjust for ongoing events and to examine some of the findings in more depth. Areas of potentially deeper analysis include specific turning points (such as those where conflict emerged), the implications of increasing the commercialization of space, and a breakdown of the involvement and interests of the various actors (states, institutions, non-state actors). The goal would be to project common elements likely to be in a family of international instruments cutting across public, private and communal sectors, or to identify codes of conduct. Workshop participants did note that most were from North America, and that different sets of assumptions and conclusions may have emerged if the process was held with Chinese, Indian or European participants. This observation reinforced the conveners’ pre-existing judgment: because successful scenario building depends upon the ‘‘friction’’ of diverse knowledge and outlooks, international participation would be vital to the success of more extensive exercises. Moreover, scenario analysis can also be an ideal vehicle for broaching sensitive topics in an international dialogue. Because the process is designed to identify shared critical uncertainties and focus on longer-term challenges, it is ideally suited to provide a forum wherein participants divided by contentious near-term issues can find a common basis for engagement. Thus, scenario-building exercises can yield community-building benefits independent of their substantive results. In this vein, the process can also help generate ‘‘buy-in’’ among divided parties with very different interests to the minimal objective of identifying a shared set of long-term future concerns (as the Mont Fleur experience shows). It is not necessary for participants to possess, at the outset, common core values. It is sufficient that there be agreement on common process values within the exercise, the most important being commitment to the goals of the exercise and a willingness to think about matters imaginatively. Participants do not need to leave their opinions at the door e indeed, the ‘‘friction’’ of that diverse input is vital to the success of the process. They need only be ready and able also to view things from others’ points of view.
33 +D. The 1AC movement away from conventional politics dooms their movement and recreates the worst forms of oppression
34 +McClean in 1
35 +David E. McClean, 2001, “The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope,” Am. Phil. Conf., www.american-philosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion20papers/david_mcclean.htm
36 +
37 +Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long overdue, leftist critics continue to cite and refer to the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this group, those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic jargon. These elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled questions about what shape democracy should take in various contexts, or whether private property should be protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature (described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been 'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . . These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action." Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than some of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain. Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they bury some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects and help forge public and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed, achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference to the American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of social and ethical nihilism. We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to move past high theory to other important questions that are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?"The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the guts of our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it means making honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the actual world before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us from being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they proceed, and who have not yet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."
38 +E. We control external impacts – abandoning politics causes war, slavery, and authoritarianism
39 +Boggs 2k (CAROL BOGGS, PF POLITICAL SCIENCE – SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 00, THE END OF POLITICS, 250-1)
40 +But it is a very deceptive and misleading minimalism. While Oakeshott debunks political mechanisms and rational planning, as either useless or dangerous, the actually existing power structure-replete with its own centralized state apparatus, institutional hierarchies, conscious designs, and indeed, rational plans-remains fully intact, insulated from the minimalist critique. In other words, ideologies and plans are perfectly acceptable for elites who preside over established governing systems, but not for ordinary citizens or groups anxious to challenge the status quo. Such one-sided minimalism gives carte blanche to elites who naturally desire as much space to maneuver as possible. The flight from “abstract principles” rules out ethical attacks on injustices that may pervade the status quo (slavery or imperialist wars, for example) insofar as those injustices might be seen as too deeply embedded in the social and institutional matrix of the time to be the target of oppositional political action. If politics is reduced to nothing other than a process of everyday muddling-through, then people are condemned to accept the harsh realities of an exploitative and authoritarian system, with no choice but to yield to the dictates of “conventional wisdom”. Systematic attempts to ameliorate oppressive conditions would, in Oakeshott’s view, turn into a political nightmare. A belief that totalitarianism might results from extreme attempts to put society in order is one thing; to argue that all politicized efforts to change the world are necessary doomed either to impotence or totalitarianism requires a completely different (and indefensible) set of premises. Oakeshott’s minimalism poses yet another, but still related, range of problems: the shrinkage of politics hardly suggests that corporate colonization, social hierarchies, or centralized state and military institutions will magically disappear from people’s lives. Far from it: the public space vacated by ordinary citizens, well informed and ready to fight for their interests, simply gives elites more room to consolidate their own power and privilege. Beyond that, the fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian civil society, not too far removed from the excessive individualism, social Darwinism and urban violence of the American landscape could open the door to a modern Leviathan intent on restoring order and unity in the face of social disintegration. Viewed in this light, the contemporary drift towards antipolitics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more authoritarian and reactionary guise-or it could simply end up reinforcing the dominant state-corporate system. In either case, the state would probably become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society.16 And either outcome would run counter to the facile antirationalism of Oakeshott’s Burkean muddling-through theories.
41 +Framework is a voter for the reasons above: fairness, limits, and education
42 +Topicality before advocacy – vote negative to say that you think they are not topical, not that you don’t believe in their project
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1 +Erika Schneider
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1 +23
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1 +Appleton East Moorhead Neg
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1 +0- Performance Theory
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1 +CFL Quals
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1 +21
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1 +2017-01-24 15:43:56.0
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1 +Golda Meir KP
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1 +CFL Quals

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