Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[15]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[15]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[15]

EntryDate

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1		-2016-12-03 15:10:53.411
	1	+2016-12-03 15:10:53.0

Caselist.CitesClass[15]

Cites

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	1	+T – Policy
	2	+
	3	+Interpretation - The AFF must defend hypothetical implementation of government action and legislative policy.
	4	+
	5	+This does not require the use of any particular style, type of evidence, or assumption about the role of the judge. Solves their method good offense – they can read __ as a framework argument to justify a government plan, there’s no reason voting off it is key.
	6	+
	7	+Parcher 01 defines resolved
	8	+
	9	+Parcher 1 (Jeff, Fmr. Debate Coach at Georgetown University, February, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200102/0790.html)
	10	+
	11	+(1) Pardon me if I turn to a source besides Bill. American Heritage Dictionary: Resolve: 1. To make a firm decision about. 2. To decide or express by formal vote. 3. To separate something into constituent parts See Syns at *analyze* (emphasis in original) 4. Find a solution to. See Syns at *Solve* (emphasis in original) 5. To dispel: resolve a doubt. - n 1. Frimness of purpose; resolution. 2. A determination or decision. (2) The very nature of the word "resolution" makes it a question. American Heritage: A course of action determined or decided on. A formal statemnt of a deciion, as by a legislature. (3) The resolution is obviously a question. Any other conclusion is utterly inconcievable. Why? Context. The debate community empowers a topic committee to write a topic for ALTERNATE side debating. The committee is not a random group of people coming together to "reserve" themselves about some issue. There is context - they are empowered by a community to do something. In their deliberations, the topic community attempts to craft a resolution which can be ANSWERED in either direction. They focus on issues like ground and fairness because they know the resolution will serve as the basis for debate which will be resolved by determining the policy desireablility of that resolution. That's not only what they do, but it's what we REQUIRE them to do. We don't just send the topic committee somewhere to adopt their own group resolution. It's not the end point of a resolution adopted by a body - it's the prelimanary wording of a resolution sent to others to be answered or decided upon. (4) Further context: the word resolved is used to emphasis the fact that it's policy debate. Resolved comes from the adoption of resolutions by legislative bodies. A resolution is either adopted or it is not. It's a question before a legislative body. Should this statement be adopted or not. (5) The very terms 'affirmative' and 'negative' support my view. One affirms a resolution. Affirmative and negative are the equivalents of 'yes' or 'no' - which, of course, are answers to a question.
	12	+
	13	+B. Violation:
	14	+
	15	+The AFF is clearly not a government policy - individual criticism or rejection is not sufficient – they say __.
	16	+
	17	+C. Standards:
	18	+
	19	+1. Legal change:
	20	+
	21	+A. Understanding the intricacies of politics and the state is a prerequisite to addressing oppression – their ideological critique falsely assumes that social relations rather than material structures create systemic oppression. Bryant 12
	22	+
	23	+Bryant 12 – (9/15, Levi, professor of Philosophy at Collin College and Chair of the Critical Philosophy program at the New Centre for Research and Practice, “War Machines and Military Logistics: Some Cards on the Table,” https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/war-machines-and-military-logistics-some-cards-on-the-table/). NS
	24	+
	25	+We need answers to these questions to intervene effectively. We can call them questions of “military logistics”. We are, after all, constructing war machines to combat these intolerable conditions. Military logistics asks two questions: first, it asks what things the opposing force, the opposing war machine captured by the state apparatus, relies on in order to deploy its war machine: supply lines, communications networks, people willing to fight, propaganda or ideology, people believing in the cause, etc. Military logistics maps all of these things. Second, military logistics asks how to best deploy its own resources in fighting that state war machine. In what way should we deploy our war machine to defeat war machines like racism, sexism, capitalism, neoliberalism, etc? What are the things upon which these state based war machines are based, what are the privileged nodes within these state based war machines that allows them to function? These nodes are the things upon which we want our nomadic war machines to intervene. If we are to be effective in producing change we better know what the supply lines are so that we might make them our target. What I’ve heard in these discussions is a complete indifference to military logistics. It’s as if people like to wave their hands and say “this is horrible and unjust!” and believe that hand waving is a politically efficacious act. Yeah, you’re right, it is horrible but saying so doesn’t go very far and changing it. It’s also as if people are horrified when anyone discusses anything besides how horribly unjust everything is. Confronted with an analysis why the social functions in the horrible way, the next response is to say “you’re justifying that system and saying it’s a-okay!” This misses the point that the entire point is to map the “supply lines” of the opposing war machine so you can strategically intervene in them to destroy them and create alternative forms of life. You see, we already took for granted your analysis of how horrible things are. You’re preaching to the choir. We wanted to get to work determining how to change that and believed for that we needed good maps of the opposing state based war machine so we can decide how to intervene. We then look at your actual practices and see that your sole strategy seems to be ideological critique or debunking. Your idea seems to be that if you just prove that other people’s beliefs are incoherent, they’ll change and things will be different. But we’ve noticed a couple things about your strategy: 1) there have been a number of bang-on critiques of state based war machines, without things changing too much, and 2) we’ve noticed that we might even persuade others that labor under these ideologies that their position is incoherent, yet they still adhere to it as if the grounds of their ideology didn’t matter much. This leads us to suspect that there are other causal factors that undergird these social assemblages and cause them to endure is they do. We thought to ourselves, there are two reasons that an ideological critique can be successful and still fail to produce change: a) the problem can be one of “distribution”. The critique is right but fails to reach the people who need to hear it and even if they did receive the message they couldn’t receive it because it’s expressed in the foreign language of “academese” which they’ve never been substantially exposed to (academics seem to enjoy only speaking to other academics even as they say their aim is to change the world). Or b) there are other causal factors involved in why social worlds take the form they do that are not of the discursive, propositional, or semiotic order. My view is that it is a combination of both. I don’t deny that ideology is one component of why societies take the form they do and why people tolerate intolerable conditions. I merely deny that this is the only causal factor. I don’t reject your political aims, but merely wonder how to get there. Meanwhile, you guys behave like a war machine that believes it’s sufficient to drop pamphlets out of an airplane debunking the ideological reasons that persuade the opposing force’s soldiers to fight this war on behalf of the state apparatus, forgetting supply lines, that there are other soldiers behind them with guns to their back, that they have obligations to their fellows, that they have families to feed or debt to pay off, etc. When I point out these other things it’s not to reject your political aims, but to say that perhaps these are also good things to intervene in if we wish to change the world. In other words, I’m objecting to your tendency to use a hammer to solve all problems and to see all things as a nail (discursive problems), ignoring the role that material nonhuman entities play in the form that social assemblages take. This is the basic idea behind what I’ve called “terraism”. Terraism has three components: 1) “Cartography” or the mapping of assemblages to understand why they take the form they take and why they endure. This includes the mapping of both semiotic and material components of social assemblages. 2) “Deconstruction” Deconstruction is a practice. It includes both traditional modes of discursive deconstruction (Derridean deconstruction, post-structuralist feminist critique, Foucaultian genealogy, Cultural Marxist critique, etc), but also far more literal deconstruction in the sense of intervening in material or thingly orders upon which social assemblages are reliant. It is not simply beliefs, signs, and ideologies that cause oppressive social orders to endure or persist, but also material arrangements upon which people depend to live as they do. Part of changing a social order thus necessarily involves intervening in those material networks to undermine their ability to maintain their relations or feedback mechanisms that allow them to perpetuate certain dependencies for people. Finally, 3) there is “Terraformation”. Terraformation is the hardest thing of all, as it requires the activist to be something more than a critic, something more than someone who simply denounces how bad things are, someone more than someone who simply sneers, producing instead other material and semiotic arrangements rendering new forms of life and social relation possible. Terraformation consists in building alternative forms of life. None of this, however, is possible without good mapping of the terrain so as to know what to deconstruct and what resources are available for building new worlds. Sure, I care about ontology for political reasons because I believe this world sucks and is profoundly unjust. But rather than waving my hands and cursing because of how unjust and horrible it is so as to feel superior to all those about me who don’t agree, rather than playing the part of the beautiful soul who refuses to get his hands dirty, I think we need good maps so we can blow up the right bridges, power lines, and communications networks, and so we can engage in effective terraformation.
	26	+
	27	+B. Anti politics creates material authoritarian oppression which outweighs since it affects people’s real lives instead of being ivory tower theorizing. Boggs 97
	28	+
	29	+Boggs 97 — Carl Boggs, 1997 (“The great retreat: Decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America,” Theory and Society, Volume 26, Issue 6, December, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via SpingerLink, p. 773-775)
	30	+
	31	+The decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America poses a series of great dilemmas and challenges. Many ideological currents scrutinized here — localism, metaphysics, spontaneism, post- modernism, Deep Ecology — intersect with and reinforce each other. While these currents have deep origins in popular movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they remain very much alive in the 1990s. Despite their different outlooks and trajectories, they all share one thing in common: a depoliticized expression of struggles to combat and overcome alienation. end page 773. The false sense of empowerment that comes with such mesmerizing impulses is accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of citizenship and a depleted capacity of individuals in large groups to work for social change. As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems that are destroying the fabric of American society will go unsolved — perhaps even unrecognized — only to fester more ominously into the future. And such problems (ecological crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of infectious diseases, technological displacement of workers) cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context of internationalized markets, finance, and communications. Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often inspired by localist sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that ignore or side-step these global realities will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence. In his commentary on the state of citizenship today, Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of people turn away from public concerns toward private ones. By diluting the life of common involvements, we negate the very idea of politics as a source of public ideals and visions.74 In the meantime, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The unyielding truth is that, even as the ethos of anti-politics becomes more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political power that will continue to decide the fate of human societies.¶ This last point demands further elaboration. The shrinkage of politics hardly means that corporate colonization will be less of a reality, that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that gigantic state and military structures will lose their hold over people's lives. Far from it: the space abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate at many levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites — an already familiar dynamic in many lesser- developed countries. The fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that have been so much a part of the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face of disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent guise — or it might help further rationalize the existing power structure. In either case, the state would likely become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society.75 end page 774¶ The historic goal of recovering politics in the Aristotelian sense, therefore, suggests nothing less than a revitalized citizenry prepared to occupy that immense expanse of public space. Extension of democratic control into every area of social life requires insurgency against the charade of normal politics, since the persistence of normal politics is just another manifestation of anti-politics. If authentic citizenship is to be forged, then information, skills, and attitudes vital to political efficacy need to flourish and be widely distributed throughout the population, without this, “consciousness transformation” is impossible, or at least politically meaningless. A debilitating problem with the culture of anti-politics, however, is that it precisely devalues those very types of information, skills, and attitudes.
	32	+
	33	+C. The state is inevitable - their resistance fails without a concrete plan of action. Day 09
	34	+
	35	+Day 09 – (Christopher, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project, http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/historical_failure_of_aanarchism_chris_day_kasama.pdf). NS
	36	+
	37	+The strength of anarchism is its moral insistence on the primacy of human freedom over political expediency. But human freedom exists in a political context. It is not sufficient, however, to simply take the most uncompromising position in defense of freedom. It is neccesary to actually win freedom. Anti-capitalism doesn’t do the victims of capitalism any good if you don’t actually destroy capitalism. Anti-statism doesn’t do the victims of the state any good if you don’t actually smash the state. Anarchism has been very good at putting forth visions of a free society and that is for the good. But it is worthless if we don’t develop an actual strategy for realizing those visions. It is not enough to be right, we must also win. Continues… Finally revolutionaries have a responsibility to have a plausible plan for making revolution. Obviously there are not enough revolutionaries to make a revolution at this moment. We can reasonably anticipate that the future will bring upsurges in popular opposition to the existing system. Without being any more specific about where those upsurges might occur it seems clear that it is from the ranks of such upsurges that the numbers of the revolutionary movement will be increased, eventually leading to a revolutionary situation (which is distinguished from the normal crises of the current order only by the existence of a revolutionary movement ready to push things further). People who are fed up with the existing system and who are willing to commit themselves to its overthrow will look around for likeminded people who have an idea of what to do. If we don’t have a plausible plan for making revolution we can be sure that there will be somebody else there who will. There is no guarantee that revolutionary-minded people will be spontaneously drawn to anti-authoritarian politics. The plan doesn’t have to be an exact blueprint. It shouldn’t be treated as something sacred. It should be subject to constant revision in light of experience and debate. But at the very least it needs to be able to answer questions that have been posed concretely in the past. We know that we will never confront the exact same circumstances as previous revolutions. But we should also know that certain problems are persistent ones and that if we can’t say what we would have done in the past we should not expect people to think much of our ability to face the future.
	38	+
	39	+We solve their offense:
	40	+
	41	+A. Using the government strategically doesn’t legitimate it – hate crime laws that stopped KKK members from lynching black people didn’t change the entire system, but they were a step in the right direction as a demand from black communities.
	42	+
	43	+B. Defending a plan doesn’t require assimilation into the government. Harris 13
	44	+
	45	+Scott Harris, Director of Debate, Kansas University, 2013, This Ballot, http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php?topic=4762.0 CC
	46	+
	47	+While this ballot has meandered off on a tangent I’ll take this opportunity to comment on an unrelated argument in the debate. Emporia argued that oppressed people should not be forced to role play being the oppressor. This idea that debate is about role playing being a part of the government puzzles me greatly. While I have been in debate for 40 years now never once have I role played being part of the government. When I debated and when I have judged debates I have never pretended to be anyone but Scott Harris. Pretending to be Scott Harris is burden enough for me. Scott Harris has formed many opinions about what the government and other institutions should or should not do without ever role playing being part of those institutions. I would form opinions about things the government does if I had never debated. I cannot imagine a world in which people don’t form opinions about the things their government does. I don’t know where this vision of debate comes from. I have no idea at all why it would be oppressive for someone to form an opinion about whether or not they think the government should or should not do something. I do not role play being the owner of the Chiefs when I argue with my friends about who they should take with the first pick in this year’s NFL draft. I do not role play coaching the basketball team or being a player if I argue with friends about coaching decisions or player decisions made during the NCAA tournament. If I argue with someone about whether or not the government should use torture or drone strikes I can do that and form opinions without ever role playing that I am part of the government. Sometimes the things that debaters argue is happening in debates puzzle me because they seem to be based on a vision of debate that is foreign to what I think happens in a debate round.
	48	+
	49	+C. The state is inevitably a unit of analysis given that it exists now even if we want to move beyond it. Frost 96
	50	+
	51	+Mervyn Frost, U of Kent, 1996, Ethics in Int’l Relations, p. 90-1. NS
	52	+
	53	+A first objection which seems inherent in Donelan’s approach is that utilizing the modern state domain of discourse in effect sanctifies the state: it assumes that people will always live in states and that it is not possible within such a language to consider alternatives to the system. This objection is not well founded, by having recourse to the ordinary language of international relations I am not thereby committed to argue that the state system as it exists is the best mode of human political organization or that people ought always to live in states as we know them. As I have said, my argument is that whatever proposals for piecemeal or large-scale reform of the state system are made, they must of necessity be made in the language of the modern state. Whatever proposals are made, whether in justification or in criticism of the state system, will have to make use of concepts which are at present part and parcel of the theory of states. Thus,for example. any proposal for a new global institutional arrangement superseding the state system will itself have to be justified, and that justification will have to include within it reference to a new and good form of individual citizenship, reference to a new legislative machinery equipped with satisfactory checks and balances, reference to satisfactory law enforcement procedures, reference to a satisfactory arrangement for distributing the goods produced in the world, and so on. All of these notions are notions which have been developed and finely honed within the theory of the modern state. It is not possible to imagine a justification of a new world order succeeding which used, for example, feudal, or traditional/tribal, discourse. More generally there is no worldwide language of political morality which is not completely shot through with state-related notions such as citizenship, rights under law, representative government and so on.
	54	+
	55	+2. Procedural fairness:
	56	+
	57	+A. Predictability - Non state advocacies mean they can defend incredibly vague advocacies making it unclear what DAs the 1NC can read – also allows massive 1AR shifts to clarify their advocacy and delink from all NEG offense. Defending a policy means there are clear legislative steps we can contest.
	58	+
	59	+B. Ground - The majority of NEG arguments come from policy enforcement, like ___. Generic Ks of their method will always lose to the specificity of the plan and a case specific prep advantage
	60	+
	61	+This is an independent voting issue which outweighs:
	62	+
	63	+A. Evaluation – even if their arguments seem true, that’s only because they already had an advantage – fairness is a meta constraint on your ability to determine who best meets their ROB.
	64	+B. Fairness is key to effective dialogue. Galloway 07
	65	+
	66	+Ryan, “DINNER AND CONVERSATION AT THE ARGUMENTATIVE TABLE: RECONCEPTUALIZING DEBATE AS AN ARGUMENTATIVE DIALOGUE”, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007)
	67	+
	68	+Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure. Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table. When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced. Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Hugh Duncan furthers this line of reasoning: Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each other because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound decisions. Opposition is necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument, discussion, and talk, among free an informed people who subordinate decisions of any kind, because it is only through such discussion that we reach agreement which binds us to a common cause…If we are to be equal…relationships among equals must find expression in many formal and informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197). Debate compensates for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that maintains equality for the sake of the conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). For example, an affirmative case on the 2007-2008 college topic might defend neither state nor international action in the Middle East, and yet claim to be germane to the topic in some way. The case essentially denies the arguments that state action is oppressive or that actions in the international arena are philosophically or pragmatically suspect. Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange of the affirmative case and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful role to the negative team, preventing them from offering effective “counter-word” and undermining the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts. Germaneness and other substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy.
	69	+
	70	+
	71	+Voter: Drop the debater on T – our state good offense justifies a counter ROB which outweighs and turns theirs. Also, the round is already skewed from the beginning because their advocacy excluded by ability to generate NC offense– letting them sever doesn’t solve any of the abuse
	72	+
	73	+Vote on substantive engagement: otherwise we’re speaking without debating and there’s nothing to separate us from dueling oratory. It also creates the most valuable long-term skills since we need to learn how to defend our beliefs in any context, like politics.
	74	+Drop the debater on T:
	75	+
	76	+A. Hold them accountable for their interp – a topical advocacy frames the debate - drop the arg lets them jump ship to a new layer killing NEG ground.
	77	+B. Drop the arg on T is the same thing as drop the debater since T indicts their advocacy
	78	+
	79	+Competing interps since reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention based on preference rather than argumentation and encourages a race to the bottom in which debaters exploit a judge’s tolerance for questionable argumentation.
	80	+
	81	+No RVIs
	82	+A. Topicality is a prima facie burden for the AFF. You wouldn’t vote for them just because they didn’t speak over their time limits and you shouldn’t vote for them for following the most basic rule of debate.
	83	+B. They incentivize debaters to go all in in theory and bait it with abusive practices, killing substantive clash on other flows.
	84	+Case
	85	+
	86	+Agamben’s kritik fails, another state formation will always rise instead we should use the state in strategic instances for responsibility of human needs.
	87	+
	88	+Passavant, 2007 (Paul A, Political Theory 2007; 35; 147, “The Contradictory State of Giorgi Agamben,” http://ptx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/35/2/147, Pg25-26)
	89	+Finally, Agamben indicates, through the example of the apostle Paul and the remnant of those who faithfully adhere to messianic law, the possibility of active political subjects adequate to the challenge of state sovereignty. This argument, however, contradicts his earlier positions embracing potentiality over the acts emblematic of sovereign decisions, and an experience of being beyond any idea of law. It also, by relying on a determinate situation to create the conditions of possibility for a successful speech act, occludes the forms of power needed to maintain this situation against other ontological possibilities much as his first theory of passage beyond the state of integrated spectacle did. This argument also begs the question of how this messianic community might relate to that which remains other to its situation. That is, Agamben must address the very questions that his ontological approach to state sovereignty intended to avoid— questions of power and otherness. In sum, Agamben remains haunted by the very problems that motivated not only his critique of the state but also his attempt to remove this inquiry from political philosophy to “first” philosophy. 43 At the end of Agamben’s theory of the state, politics remains. There are four implications of this critique for political theory and the state. First, the modern state is poorly understood as transcendent, unitary, and sovereign. The “state” encompasses a variety of institutions, many of which predate modernity.44 The Foucauldian understanding of government, I suggested, is the practice by which articulations between these institutions are forged—and non-state institutions are joined to this chain—and they are mobilized toward various purposes. The plural nature of this ensemble is precisely what gives extension to the modern state.45 Second, if we treat the state as an ensemble of institutions, then the concept of a state of emergency is poorly suited to understanding our political present. Agamben rightly criticizes the USA PATRIOT Act in State of Exception. This law, like most laws that are passed in an ongoing legal system, amends a variety of other laws and sits on a foundation created by these other laws, such as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. The Antiterrorism Act created the possibility of attributing guilt by association since it criminalized the provision of material support for organizations that the administration deems “terrorist”—provisions that the USA PATRIOT Act builds upon.46 From this perspective, current policies are less “exceptional,” unfortunately, and more a continuing development of a national security state apparatus that has been built through legislation like the National Security Act of 1947, through discourse, and through the creation of stakeholders (the military-industrial complex).47 In other words, another state formation is struggling to emerge through the ruin of liberal democracy in the United States, and this emergence (and ruin) is hastened by those who seek to enhance surveillance and presidential powers, while diminishing the power of courts and legislative oversight as a response to September 11, 2001.48 Third, any social formation is constituted by elements of both contingency and determination. By emphasizing pure potentiality, Agamben misses this and either cherishes the excessive quality of pure potentiality to the neglect of the exigent needs of the present, or neglects how the active political subjects he does defend are embedded within finite commitments that necessarily persevere through the foreclosure of other possibilities. Some contemporary political theorists concerned with injustice and the lack of democracy also emphasize contingency, excess, and potentiality over determination, finitude, and acts.49 These theorists correctly seek to disrupt oppressive patterns. Since politics—hence political change—would not be possible under conditions of absolute determination, emphasizing contingency or excess makes sense. Yet reflection upon the retraction of certain state services from places like the Bronx during the late 1970s permits us to see how neither justice nor democracy is served by excessive economic duress or violence. Not only are these contingencies unjust, but also their incapacitating effects prevent democratic practices of government where the latter necessarily presupposes some collective capacity to direct and achieve collective purposes. State actions that mitigate chaos, economic inequality, and violence, then, potentially contribute to the improved justice of outcomes and democracy. Political theorists must temper celebrating contingency with a simultaneous consideration of the complicated relation that determination has to democratic purposes.5 Fourth, the state’s institutions are among the few with the capacity to respond to the exigency of human needs identified by political theorists. These actions will necessarily be finite and less than wholly adequate, but responsibility may lie on the side of acknowledging these limitations and seeking to redress what is lacking in state action rather than calling for pure potentiality and an end to the state. We may conclude that claims to justice or democracy based on the wish to rid ourselves of the state once and for all are like George W. Bush claiming to be an environmentalist because he has proposed converting all of our cars so that they will run on hydrogen.51 Meanwhile, in the here and now, there are urgent claims that demand finite acts that by definition will be both divisive and less than what a situation demands.52 In the end, the state remains. Let us defend this state of due process and equal protection against its ruinous other.
	90	+
	91	+
	92	+. Liberal democratic protections prevent the slide to totalitarianism. Heins 05
	93	+
	94	+Heins, 05 (Volker, visiting professor of political science at Concordia University and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, 6 German Law Journal No. 5, May,
	95	+http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=598)
	96	+
	97	+According to this basic Principle of Distinction, modern humanitarian action is directed towards those who are caught up in violent conflicts without possessing any strategic value for the respective warring parties. Does this imply that classic humanitarianism and its legal expressions reduce the lives of noncombatants to the "bare life" of nameless individuals beyond the protection of any legal order? I would rather argue that humanitarianism is itself an order-making activity. Its goal is not the preservation of life reduced to a bare natural fact, but conversely the protection of civilians and thereby the protection of elementary standards of civilization which prevent the exclusion of individuals from any legal and moral order. The same holds true for human rights, of course. Agamben fails to appreciate the fact that human rights laws are not about some cadaveric "bare life", but about the protection of moral agency. His sweeping critique also lacks any sense for essential distinctions. It may be legitimate to see "bare life" as a juridical fiction nurtured by the modern state, which claims the right to derogate from otherwise binding norms in times of war and emergency, and to kill individuals, if necessary, outside the law in a mode of "effective factuality." Agamben asserts that sovereignty understood in this manner continues to function in the same way since the seventeenth century and regardless of the democratic or dictatorial structure of the state in question. This claim remains unilluminated by the wealth of evidence that shows how the humanitarian motive not only shapes the mandate of a host state and nonstate agencies, but also serves to restrict the operational freedom of military commanders in democracies, who cannot act with impunity and who do not wage war in a lawless state of nature. Furthermore, Agamben ignores the crisis of humanitarianism that emerged as a result of the totalitarian degeneration of modern states in the twentieth century. States cannot always be assumed to follow a rational self-interest which informs them that there is no point in killing others indiscriminately. The Nazi episode in European history has shown that sometimes leaders do not spare the weak and the sick, but take extra care not to let them escape, even if they are handicapped, very old or very young. Classic humanitarianism depends on the existence of an international society whose members feel bound by a basic set of rules regarding the use of violence—rules which the ICRC itself helped to institutionalize. Conversely, classic humanitarianism becomes dysfunctional when states place no value at all on their international reputation and see harming the lives of defenseless individuals not as useless and cruel, but as part of their very missionThe founders of the ICRC defined war as an anthropological constant that produced a continuous stream of new victims with the predictable regularity and unavoidability of floods or volcanic eruptions. Newer organizations, by contrast, have framed conditions of massive social suffering as a consequence of largely avoidable political mistakes. The humanitarian movement becomes political, to paraphrase Carl Schmitt, in so far as it orients itself to humanitarian states of emergency, the causes of which are located no longer in nature, but in society and politics. Consequently, the founding generation of the new humanitarian organizations have freed themselves from the ideals of apolitical philanthropy and chosen as their new models historical figures like the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews during the Second World War. In a different fashion than Agamben imagines, the primary concern in the field of humanitarian intervention and human rights politics today is not the protection of bare life, but rather the rehabilitation of the lived life of citizens who suffer, for instance, from conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder. At the same time, there is a field of activity emerging beneath the threshold of the bare life. In the United States, in particular, pathologists working in conjunction with human rights organizations have discovered the importance of corpses and corporal remains now that it is possible to identify reliable evidence for war crimes from exhumed bodies.
	98	+
	99	+1. We need to learn about the complex state, even if it’s bad, to create effective solutions. Zanotti 14
	100	+
	101	+Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research and teaching include critical political theory as well as international organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and the role of NGOs in post-conflict governance.“Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World” – Alternatives: Global, Local, Political – vol 38(4):p. 288-304,. A little unclear if this is late 2013 or early 2014 – The Stated “Version of Record” is Feb 20, 2014, but was originally published online on December 30th, 2013. Obtained via Sage Database. NS from file
	102	+
	103	+By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to ‘‘rejection,’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or ‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of governmental rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them. This approach questions oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems. International power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than overarching demonizations of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations on ‘‘what ought to be.’’ Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine ‘‘freedom’’ to be regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences of political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.’’84
	104	+
	105	+No biopolitical violence impact
	106	+Jonathan Short 5, Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought, York University, “Life and Law: Agamben and Foucault on Governmentality and Sovereignty,” Journal for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, Vol. 3, No. 1
	107	+Adding to the dangerousness of this logic of control, however, is that while there is a crisis of undecidability in the domain of life, it corresponds to a similar crisis at the level of law and the national state. It should be noted here that despite the new forms of biopolitical control in operation today, Rose believes that bio-politics has become generally less dangerous in recent times than even in the early part of the last century. At that time, bio- politics was linked to the project of the expanding national state in his opinion. In disciplinary-pastoral society, bio-politics involved a process of social selection of those characteristics thought useful to the nationalist project. Hence, according to Rose, "once each life has a value which may be calculated, and some lives have less value than others, such a politics has the obligation to exercise this judgement in the name of the race or the nation" (2001: 3). Disciplinary-pastoral bio- politics sets itself the task of eliminating "differences coded as defects", and in pursuit of this goal the most horrible programs of eugenics, forced sterilization, and outright extermination, were enacted (ibid.: 3). If Rose is more optimistic about bio-politics in 'advanced liberal' societies, it is because this notion of 'national fitness', in terms of bio- political competition among nation-states, has suffered a precipitous decline thanks in large part to a crisis of the perceived unity of the national state as a viable political project (ibid.: 5). To quote Rose once again, "the idea of 'society' as a single, if heterogeneous, domain with a national culture, a national population, a national destiny, co-extensive with a national territory and the powers of a national political government" no longer serves as premises of state policy (ibid.: 5). Drawing on a sequential reading of Foucault's theory of the governmentalization of the state here, Rose claims that the territorial state, the primary institution of enclosure, has become subject to fragmentation along a number of lines. National culture has given way to cultural pluralism; national identity has been overshadowed by a diverse cluster of identifications, many of them transcending the national territory on which they take place, while the same pluralization has affected the once singular conception of community (ibid.: 5). Under these conditions, Rose argues, the bio-political programmes of the molar enclosure known as the nation-state have fallen into disrepute and have been all but abandoned.
	108	+
	109	+Turn - Biopower operates to sustain life-not kill it—and rejecting it risks creating more attrocities
	110	+Ojakangas, 2005 (Mike, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Finland
	111	+ “Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power Agamben and Foucault,” Foucault Studies, May, http://www.foucault-studies.com/no2/ojakangas1.pdf)
	112	+
	113	+In fact, the history of modern Western societies would be quite incomprehensible without taking into account that there exists a form of power which refrains from killing but which nevertheless is capable of directing people’s lives. The effectiveness of bio‐power can be seen lying precisely in that it refrains and withdraws before every demand of killing, even though these demands would derive from the demand of justice. In bio‐ political societies, according to Foucault, capital punishment could not be maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal: “One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others.”112 However, given that the “right to kill” is precisely a sovereign right, it can be argued that the bio‐political societies analyzed by Foucault were not entirely bio‐political. Perhaps, there neither has been nor can be a society that is entirely bio‐political. Nevertheless, the fact is that present‐day European societies have abolished capital punishment. In them, there are no longer exceptions. It is the very “right to kill” that has been called into question. However, it is not called into question because of enlightened moral sentiments, but rather because of the deployment of bio‐political thinking and practice. For all these reasons, Agamben’s thesis, according to which the concentration camp is the fundamental bio‐political paradigm of the West, has to be corrected.113 The bio‐political paradigm of the West is not the concentration camp, but, rather, the present‐day welfare society and, instead of homo sacer, the paradigmatic figure of the bio‐political society can be seen, for example, in the middle‐class Swedish social‐democrat. Although this figure is an object – and a product – of the huge bio‐political machinery, it does not mean that he is permitted to kill without committing homicide. Actually, the fact that he eventually dies, seems to be his greatest “crime” against the machinery. (In bio‐political societies, death is not only “something to be hidden away,” but, also, as Foucault stresses, the most “shameful thing of all”.114) Therefore, he is not exposed to an unconditional threat of death, but rather to an unconditional retreat of all dying. In fact, the bio‐political machinery does not want to threaten him, but to encourage him, with all its material and spiritual capacities, to live healthily, to live long and to live happily – even when, in biological terms, he “should have been dead long ago”.115 This is because bio‐power is not bloody power over bare life for its own sake but pure power over all life for the sake of the living. It is not power but the living, the condition of all life – individual as well as collective – that is the measure of the success of bio‐power. Another important question is whether these bio‐political societies that started to take shape in the seventeenth century (but did not crystallize until the 1980s) are ideologically, especially at the level of practical politics, collapsing – to say nothing about the value of the would‐be collapse. One thing is clear, however. At the global level, there has not been, and likely will not be, a completely bio‐political society. And to the extent that globalization takes place without bio‐political considerations of health and happiness of individuals and populations, as it has done until now, it is possible that our entire existence will someday be reduced to bare life, as has already occurred, for instance, in Chechnya and Iraq. On that day, perhaps, when bio‐political care has ceased to exist, and we all live within the sovereign ban of Empire without significance, we can only save ourselves, as Agamben suggests, “in perpetual flight or a foreign land”116 – although there will hardly be either places to which to flee, or foreign lands.
	114	+
	115	+The k has ZERO explanatory power – the plan tactical deployment is effective and alters the essence of the law – no risk of escalating violence
	116	+Ross, 12 “Agamben’s Political Paradigm of the Camp: Its Features and Reasons” Alison Ross is Lecturer in Critical Theory in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, Australia, Constellations Volume 19, No 3, 2012, p. Blackwell Publications
	117	+The difficulty here is that Agamben, given the ahistoricity of his theory, is unable to provide an account of why the state of exception has become a problem at this particular point in time. Similarly, he claims that the law is more likely to bring violence into play now, in the present historical juncture, than ever before, a claim that pertains to questions of fact. Agamben, however, cannot draw a link between the thesis concerning law’s “constitutive violence” and current circumstances because he pays no attention to issues such as historical relationships between political institutions and policing mechanisms, which disciplines like political sociology deal with. Agamben’s ontological theses regarding the “essence” of the law do not help in attending to the historical problem his theory needs to be able to address: namely, to show the process by which “the state of exception has become the norm.” More generally, it is difficult to see how his commitment to such theses sheds any light on the workings of the law. Agamben sees the purported “legitimacy of law” as a ruse of the liberal state, which in the social contract narrative claims legitimacy for law on account of its protection of otherwise vulnerable life. This position may usefully be compared with Foucault’s comments on the same topic. Foucault addresses the topic of law’s legitimacy from two different angles. First, he sees in political philosophy’s interest in the question of the features that qualifysovereign power as legitimate a tendency to avoid the crucial question of how “legitimate” power actually operates. In this sense, the account he provides in his work on prisons of how law’s violence manifests in penal institutions is a critique of the adequacy of the theory of sovereignty to form an accurate picture of the complex forces and instruments involved in social organization.32 Second, in his 1978–9 lectures on biopolitics, Foucault argues that liberalism is a government of life rather than the exercise of sovereignty over life and death. His analysis of the policy direction of post-war German intellectuals is premised on the assumption that their activities were strategically meaningful. Their social integration and state building initiatives were based on the goal of economic success. Even their “power politics” were staked on rapid economic growth.33 Foucault’s analysis of liberalism follows an injunction comparable to his focus on reformist manuals and prison plans in Discipline and Punish. Institutional practices do not function independently of what people think about them. They are intelligible precisely because they embody strategically considered ends (even if these ends are not realized or contained by those strategies).34 C _ 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 428 Constellations, Volume 19, Issue 3, 2012 The premise of Agamben’s analysis, in contrast, renders power senseless. What possible intelligible motives might Agamben’s sovereign have for wanting perpetual and unlimited disposition over the physical existence of its subjects in the manner of a Nazi camp warden? This question cannot be raised in Agamben’s scheme. Moreover, it is precisely because the law is not – as Agamben’s analysis assumes – an objective mechanism that could function independently of what people think about it that he obscures how the different ways in which the law is experienced as legitimate (e.g., in its strategic deployment to realize specific ends) can affect its “essential nature.” This renders Agamben’s thesis of the “constitutive violence” of the law, if not unintelligible, at least inscrutable. Is it the way political institutions are shaped or the way human individuals are conceptualized in legal doctrine that produces this state of affairs? The deficiencies of this perspective can partly be found in the ontological nature of his framework, which thus has very little to do with an inquiry into institutional features and practices. It aims to pose questions regarding legal institutions and practices at the “fundamental” level of the forces or elements that drive history. His fascination with the terminology of the “exception” as the incisive political vocabulary for our times is a case in point. His use of this terminology marks out extreme situations not as anomalous, but as if they had general significance. This mode of argumentation necessarily looks past the task of analyzing institutional functioning because it imports the grammar of such functioning from the “exceptional” situation. iii. Agamben treats those subject to law as totally passive “bodies.” His focus on the camp situation is telling because this is the only situation where his doctrine seems to work: in the extermination camp, action does not meet other actions, but bodies. Foucault insisted that this type of situation was not a relation of power, but one of submission to force.35 Similarly, sociological models of social interaction differentiate the study of social organization defined as actions influencing other actions from situations of crude force. Since he is so often contemptuous of the assumptions of liberalism, it is worth comparing Agamben’s position on this question of force with that of liberalism. Classical liberal theory acknowledges the ultimate dependence of order on relations of force; it holds the unification of the aggregate force of society under a single coercive law to be the virtue of the state. The purpose of such force is the protection of the members of its aggregate body. However, there are limits on the capacity of force to decide conflicts internal to this aggregate body. These limits are a central topic in liberal political philosophy, which sees reliance on force to manage social conflicts as a sign of the system’s weakness: such reliance places inflationary pressure on force, thus devaluing it. “Force” as it is understood and used in liberal political theory is a differential quantity that has to present itself and be received as a “quality,” as authority, on the pain of dissipation. In The State and the Rule of Law, Blandine Kriegel reads the history of theories of the state in these terms, emphasizing the perils of naked reliance on force pointed out in such theories. She notes, for instance, that theorists of the state since Bodin have found the state that restrains itself in its use of force and its extension of powers more powerful than one with unlimited powers.36 The question of force can also be approached from the perspective of other mechanisms that are important for social organization and that presuppose the existence of distinct currencies that pertain to the different media of the social system. Liberal theory acknowledges the findings of political sociology that describes how social order is constituted through, for instance, symbolic integration and economic instruments. Social integration and organization take place in multiple dimensions or media: symbolic (cultural, ideological, etc.), C _ 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Agamben’s Political Paradigm of the Camp: Alison Ross 429 economic, and political (participation in collective decisions at various levels).37 Talcott Parsons attempted to define the problem of social interaction in terms of “systems of action” that use different “symbolically generalized media of communication” where action influences action. As part of this approach, he maintained the importance of patterns of interaction in establishing and reinforcing expectations for the functioning of such media. When a cultural system changes, this marks the introduction of a new pattern whose meaning is intelligible to and expected by social actors.38 In particular, Parsons was interested to account for the interaction between social, cultural, and personality systems. These relationships are all bidirectional according to him; that is, these symbolic systems are intelligible to agents whose action is susceptible to the “actions” of social and cultural systems of meaning.39 This approach is important not just because of the elements it deploys to explain social organization, but because of the image it produces of such organization. I will return to this point in my concluding remarks to this paper. The economic system is based on interactions in which actors select actions that will optimize their ends. They want to act “in the most profitable way to achieve the highest benefits when costs are substantial.” In this system, the symbolic medium of money is ordered according to a specific set of norms for its use and acquisition. Within the system, money is not replaceable by force. For instance, as a legitimate means for acquiring property, the use of money as a symbolic mechanism of exchange forbids as illegitimate “the use of force” for property acquisition.40 Similarly, in the political system, force is understood as an abortive way of managing conflicting goals since it is susceptible to counter-action by the force of others. It thus fails to make decisions that could bind everyone in a social system. The political system uses forms of collective decision-making to maximize the realization of actors’ specific goals. Legitimate political power is a general medium that can make collectively binding and effective decisions in a way that force cannot.41 Insofar as such mechanisms are effective, they are real; and they need to be understood and analyzed in terms of their actual mechanics and dynamics, not dismissed as masks.42 With these comments I do not intend to mount a defence of liberal political philosophy. Rather, I want to ask whether Agamben’s style of analysis allows things to be seen more clearly than they are in sociologically influenced liberal theory. Agamben’s criticisms of law are directed to the potential he sees realized in the camps to hold life in a relation of exposure to pure force. Of course, the critical stand he takes on law is explicable in terms of the ontological perspective he adopts, but we need to ask whether adopting this stance helps us illuminate current political circumstances. Why, for instance, does he choose to explain what happens in the camp as a potential of liberal law, rather than as a degradation of liberal protections?43 Additionally, how useful are categories crafted in the field of jurisprudence, which have their proper register of application within this field, for the purpose of describing what occurs in extreme situations like the camp? What makes the camp analogy especially unsuitable as a paradigm for understanding the organization of a society is that the “camp population,” unlike society, is not meant to have a future (and here one needs think of all those things that are required for a society to have a future: from material production to symbolic identity, etc.). The murderous contempt shown the camp inmate is simply not a viable option for a state.

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-12-03 15:10:56.216

Judge

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	1	+Liz Letak

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	1	+Sunset AB

ParentRound

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	1	+15

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	1	+5

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	1	+Harvard Westlake Gross Neg

Title

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	1	+Alta R5 NC

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	1	+Alta