Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[14]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[12]

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Caselist.RoundClass[14]

EntryDate

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1		-2016-09-17 15:24:40.912
	1	+2016-09-17 15:24:40.0

Caselist.CitesClass[12]

Cites

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	1	+Focus on rhizomes overlooks that we are all prefigured by global capitalism, which wants us to think we can become anything so that the poor keep slaving away to the rich. Mann 95
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	3	+Mann 95 (Paul Mann Department of English Pomona College, Stupid Undergrounds, Postmodern Culture v.5 n.3 (May, 1995) DA: 7/27/12, CP)
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	5	+Intellectual economics guarantees that even the most powerful and challenging work cannot protect itself from the order of fashion. Becoming-fashion, becoming-commodity, becoming-ruin. Such instant, indeed retroactive ruins, are the virtual landscape of the stupid underground. The exits and lines of flight pursued by Deleuze and Guattari are being shut down and rerouted by the very people who would take them most seriously. By now, any given work from the stupid underground's critical apparatus is liable to be tricked out with smooth spaces, war-machines, n - is, planes of consistency, plateaus and deterritorializations, strewn about like tattoos on the stupid body without organs. The nomad is already succumbing to the rousseauism and orientalism that were always invested in his figure; whatever Deleuze and Guattari intended for him, he is reduced to being a romantic outlaw, to a position opposite the State, in the sort of dialectical operation Deleuze most despised. And the rhizome is becoming just another stupid subterranean figure. It is perhaps true that Deleuze and Guattari did not adequately protect their thought from this dialectical reconfiguration (one is reminded of Breton's indictment against Rimbaud for not having prevented, in advance, Claudel's recuperation of him as a proper Catholic), but no vigilance would have sufficed in any case. The work of Deleuze and Guattari is evidence that, in real time, virtual models and maps close off the very exits they indicate. The problem is in part that rhizomes, lines of flight, smooth spaces, BwOs, etc., are at one and the same time theoretical-political devices of the highest critical order and merely fantasmatic, delirious, narcissistic models for writing, and thus perhaps an instance of the all-too-proper blurring of the distinction between criticism and fantasy. In Deleuze-speak, the stupid underground would be mapped not as a margin surrounding a fixed point, not as a fixed site determined strictly by its relation or opposition to some more or less hegemonic formation, but as an intensive, n-dimensional intersection of rhizomatic plateaus. Nomadology and rhizomatics conceive such a "space" (if one only had the proverbial nickel for every time that word is used as a critical metaphor, without the slightest reflection on what might be involved in rendering the conceptual in spatial terms) as a liquid, colloidal suspension, often retrievable by one or another techno-metaphorical zoning (e.g., "cyberspace"). What is at stake, however, is not only the topological verisimilitude of the model but the *fantastic* possibility of nonlinear passage, of multiple simultaneous accesses and exits, of infinite fractal lines occupying finite social space. In the strictest sense, stupid philosophy. Nomad thought is prosthetic, the experience of virtual exhilaration in modalities already mapped and dominated by nomad, rhizomatic capital (the political philosophy of the stupid underground: capital is more radical than any of its critiques, but one can always pretend otherwise). It is this very fantasy, this very narcissistic wish to see oneself projected past the frontier into new spaces, that abandons one to this economy, that seals these spaces within an order of critical fantasy that has long since been overdeveloped, entirely reterritorialized in advance. To pursue nomadology or rhizomatics as such is already to have lost the game. Nothing is more crucial to philosophy than escaping the dialectic and no project is more hopeless; the stupid-critical underground is the curved space in which this opposition turns back on itself. It is not yet time to abandon work that so deeply challenges our intellectual habits as does that of Deleuze and Guattari, and yet, before it has even been comprehended, in the very process of its comprehension, its fate seems secure. One pursues it and knows that the pursuit will prove futile; that every application of these new topologies will only serve to render them more pointless. The stupid optimism
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	7	+Postmodern subjectivity is a shell game – it can exist only by strengthening the hold of capitalism. Snyder 2K
	8	+Laura Bartlett Snyder, Doctoral Fellow in the English Department at Louisville, “Boundary Dissolution in film, photography and advertising,” 2000, http://athena.louisville.edu/a-s/english/babo/snyder/bountexts.html
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	10	+The argument I am making about the postmodern theories of subjectivity and global capitalism are similar to arguments made about multiculturalism and global capitalism by David Rieff and Slavoj Zizek. Rieff suggests that multiculturalism is a “byproduct or corollary of a specific material integument” (62). Rieff’s position is that although multiculturalists often regard their work as politically leftist: resulting in the breakdown of patriarchal, European hegemony and the ascendancy of the previously marginalized, they actually function as the “silent partner” of global capitalism. Additionally, Rieff points out how closely the buzz words of multiculturalism~-~-“‘cultural diversity,’ ‘difference,’ the need to do away with boundaries’—resemble the stock phrases of the modern corporation: ‘product diversification,’ ‘the global marketplace,’ and ‘the boundary-less company’” (Rieff). Similarly, Zizek contends that postmodern identity politics—while ostensibly seeking to subvert capitalism—are made possible only in the field of global capitalism. He writes that “’cultural studies’, is performing the ultimate service for the unrestrained development of capitalism” and that “the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism” (218; 216).My argument is that postmodern theories and global capitalism dialectically influence one another. Postmodern theory is generated by the material conditions of labor and production in late capitalism, which needs consumers who will disregard national boundaries. By the logic that all products of the system are necessary to the system, we assume that anything the system produces, it needs. Ideological state apparatuses, like the university, do the work necessary to interpellating the ideal subject of global capitalism. My thought is that global capitalism needs postmodern theories of subjectivity because they produce subjects who are seamlessly articulated with the structures of global capitalism. While postmodern subjectivity may seem wildly radical at first—breaking down boundaries between genders, between machines and humans—the similarities between its subjectivities and the structures of global capitalism are eerily similar. Fluidity, flexibility, and boundary dissolution equally describe both. The celebration of the loss of the unified, coherent subject of modernity and the new fluid, flexible, fragmented subject of postmodernity is the stuff of “Millenial Dreams,” Paul Smith’s term for the rhetoric of globalization and the array of ideological forms which interpellate the desired subject of global capitalism. Smith writes that “the annunciation of globalization itself is part of the ideological battery used to interpellate subjects in the current conjuncture . . . and attempt to regulate the moral and cultural practices of subjects” (46). I agree with Tereas Ebert that post-al theories are complicit with patriarchal capitalism. Rather than seeking the liberation of the exploited workers of late capitalism—primarily third-world, minority, poverty-stricken women—postmodern theorists celebrate a liberatory freedom experienced by a small percentage of the first world at the expense of the rest of the world.
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	12	+Floating subjectivity and rebellion against modernity reinforces patterns of domination. Cryderman 2K
	13	+Kevin Cryderman, “Jane and Louisa: The Tapestry Of Critical Paradigms: Hutcheon, Lyotard, Said, Dirlik, And Brodber,” 2000, http://65.107.211.206/post/caribbean/brodber/kcry1.html
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	15	+In "Borderlands Radicalism," Dirlik is critical of the trends of postmodernism and postcolonialism in regard to borders, subjectivity, and history. Dirlik claims that postmodernism and postcolonialism tend to simply reinforce the reign of late capitalism: Post-modernism, articulating the condition of the globe in the age of flexible production, has done great theoretical service by challenging the tyrannical unilinearity of inherited conceptions of history and society. The political price paid for this achievement, however, has been to abolish the subject in history, which destroys the possibility of political action, or to attach action to one of another diffuse subject positions, which ends up in narcissistic preoccupations with self of one kind of another. (89) Dirlik claims that the 'happy pluralism' of postcolonialism ~-~- such as its emphasis on flux, borderlands and liminal space ~-~- does not so much oppose elite unified narratives of nations and cultures as it does reinforce them. Dirlik also links this trend of "fluid subject positions" (98) in postmodernism to postcolonialism and Global Capitalism: "in the age of flexible production, we all live in the borderlands. Capital, deterritorialized and decentered, establishes borderlands where it can move freely, away from the control of states and societies but in collusion with states against societies" (Dirlik 87). Moreover, the problem "presented by postcolonial discourse" is "a problem of liberating discourse that divorces itself from the material conditions of life, in this case Global Capitalism as the foundational principle of contemporary society globally" (99). Dirlik also links the intellectual class as a product of global capitalism which, according to Dirlik, "has jumbled up notions of space and time" (100). Indeed, both postmodernist and post-colonialist literature involve the fragmentation and rebellion against modernist ideologies that impose essentializing identity, linear time schemes, and totalizing narratives.
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	18	+Unified action is crucial - individual politics in flux are easily crushed by capitalism. Ahmad 97
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	20	+Ahmad, Professorial Fellow at the Centre of Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi and is visiting Professor of Political Science at York University, 1997 (Aijaz, Culture, Nationalism, And the Role of Intellectuals in In defense of history). NS from file
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	22	+But then you have asked me also about future prospects for radical intellectuals in the United States, and you have said some provocative things about interest and identity groups, giving the example of blacks and gays and in a way feminism. Let me remark on the examples first. That everyone should have equal rights of course goes without saying. But there are also a number of ambiguities in relation to the political field. The gay rights movement, for example, cuts across the distinction between civil society and the state, the so-called private and the public. There are certain rectifi¬cations that only the state can undertake, and there is nothing structural about the U.S. state that prevents those rectifications. I don’t at all wish to minimize the extent of prejudice against homosexuality when I say that in the political field, properly so called, there is really nothing that prevents the U.S. state from absorbing the pressures of the gay rights movements within its authorized ideologies of pragmatism and pluralism. In that sense, the situation of women and blacks is quite different. Of course there are enormous prejudices against women and blacks, and of course these social prejudices are fully reflected in the behavior of the state. But I have something else in mind. The majority of blacks constitute a distinct underclass in the U.S. economy that has been reproduced over and over again since the time of slaveiy. The majority of women do the lowest paid work, in the United States and elsewhere; feminization of manual work in the core capitalist countries is part of the strategic offensive of capital against labor as such; and women’s unpaid housework is a fundamental component in minimizing the aggregate wage bill, hence for ensuring a certain rate of profit. Despite all the celebrated successes of feminism in certain areas of academic and cultural life in the United States, there have been no gains in the incomes of poor women, not to speak of black youth. The issue of justice to that vast majority of women and blacks goes to the very heart of the totality of U.S. life and cannot be fully resolved without revolutionaiy transformations. Some white, upper-class feminisms may cultivate the detachment you mentioned, but most women can’t afford that. That every group has the right to fight for members of that group also goes without saying. But I want to raise a much more difficult question about democracy. A great problem for socialist theory and practice today is that of the relationship between difference and universality, group rights and indivisible universal rights, the right as woman and the right as citizen, and the right as worker, whether citizen or immigrant. The postmodernist answer is simple: universality is a chimera; identities are local, contingent, freely chosen; rights of identity are absolute, and self-representation is the only authentic form of representation. This absolutization of identity, this quick abrogation of universality, strikes me as politically very dangerous. For a start: if in the constitution of your identity, I have no rights of cognition, participation, criticism, then on what basis may you ask for my solidarity with you except on the basis of some piety, some voluntaristic good will that I may withdraw at any moment? I can’t explicate this problem here, so let me reduce the scope of what I’m saying. You see, at this historical juncture, when the issue of people’s equal access to material goods has been posed by what I still call socialism, the capitalist state probably prefers to deal with a people that confronts it not in its unity but in its dispersal among communities and interest groups. Communities and interest groups typically raise the issue of social prejudice and distribution of the social surplus; the issue of the ownership of property as such can only be raised within the discourse of universal rights. Once we get distributed into distinct groups, our public rhetorics can then go on stressing how much we believe in everyone’s equal rights, but in the actual dealings with the state each community and each interest group can become a distinct supplicant competing with all others for its own share of the social surplus. One way of putting this may be that the capitalist state can perhaps live more easily with multiple and competing claimants on the social surplus that it governs, making sure that they cancel out each other, than with a radicalized politics of universal rights where each is to be the equal of all others, not just juridically but in every conceivable dimension, most cru¬cially the dimension of economic goods. What I am trying to say, I suppose, is that group egoism of discrete communities is perhaps not much of an improvement on the historical egoism of the bourgeois male individual, and that we need forms of politics that constitute human subjects both in their heterogeneity and their universality. (62-3)
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	24	+The most primary ethical obligation is to reject capitalism in every instance – it causes massive global violence and inequality. Zizek and Daly 04
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	26	+(Slavoj and Glyn, Conversations with Zizek page 14-16)
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	28	+For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today’s global capitalism and its obscene naturalization / anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture – with all its pieties concerning ‘multiculturalist’ etiquette – Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called ‘radically incorrect’ in the sense that it break with these types of positions 7 and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of today’s social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety. For far too long, Marxism has been bedeviled by an almost istic economism that has tended towards political morbidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffee, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite . That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of implicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian-Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibition conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizek’s point is rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marx’s central insight that in order to create a universal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose ‘universalism’ fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world’s populations. In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a neutral market place. Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded life chances cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the ‘developing world’). And Zizek’s point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalism’s profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle. Against this Zizek argues for a new universalism whose primary ethical directive is to confront the fact that our forms of social existence are founded on exclusion on a global scale. While it is perfectly true that universalism can never become Universal (it will always require a hegemonic-particular embodiment in order to have any meaning), what is novel about Zizek’s universalism is that it would not attempt to conceal this fact or reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a glitch in an otherwise sound matrix.
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	31	+The alt is to engage in a class based withdrawal from capitalism. We need to destroy capitalism by refusing to perpetuate it, forming resistance from within. Herod 04
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	33	+Herod, 04 (James, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/4thEd/4-index.htm, Getting Free, 4th EditionA sketch of an association of democratic, autonomous neighborhoods and how to create it, Fourth Edition, January 2004
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	35	+It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This strategy, at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization. The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth, power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells.¶ This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it with something better, something we want.¶ Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalis relations t and force them out of existence.¶ This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs. But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly.¶

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-09-17 15:24:42.688

Judge

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	1	+Panel

Opponent

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	1	+Montegomery WP

ParentRound

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	1	+14

Round

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	1	+7

Team

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	1	+Harvard Westlake Engel Neg

Title

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	1	+1 - K - Postmodernism

Tournament

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	1	+Greenhill Round Robin