Summary

• Objects (0 modified, 0 added, 1 removed)
  • Caselist.CitesClass[70]

Details

Caselist.CitesClass[70]

Cites

...	...	@@ -1,14 +1,0 @@
1		-The affirmative is an example of a radical, critical alternative in which one’s political being is not as a political subject but tied up in one’s ethics and one’s identity
2		-Chandler 7 David, Researcher @ Centre for the Study of Democracy, “The Possibilities of Post-Territorial Political Community,” Area, Vol. 39, No. 1, p. 116-119. SW
3		-The immanence of a post-territorial political community is often posed as a radical or critical alternative to the dominant ways of being political today (for example, Massey, 1994; Ó Tuathail, 1996; Soja, 1989; Appadurai, 1996; Kuehls, 1996; Shapiro and Alker, 1996). Territorial state-based politics is held to institutionalise the structuring of grand narratives of ‘the nation’ and to universalise particularist and narrow interests on the basis of the division of those ‘inside’ and those ‘outside’ the territorial boundaries (for example, Walker, 1993; Ashley, 1988; Campbell, 1998; Connolly, 1991; Falk, 1995; Linklater, 1998). Instead of politics being mediated through the divisive institutions of territorial communities, it is argued that the individual can engage directly in the ‘politics of the human’, in ‘global civil society’, or in the struggle against ‘power’ or ‘Empire’ (for example, Hardt and Negri, 2001; Kaldor, 2003; Keane, 2003; Walker, 1994; Baker, 2002; Deudney, 1993; Shaw, 2000). It would seem that politics freed from territorial constraints has, of necessity, to take the form of an unmediated relationship between the individual and humanity or ‘global society’. This unmediated relationship between the individual the global then legitimises the individual’s claim in an unmediated way, under the sign of ethics/morality/identity, and also makes the reception of the claim, or the impact or consequences of the claim, an unmediated one: as a claim on global society not a specific political collectivity or state. It is the lack of mediation between the individual and global society that makes the alternative global politics of ethics immediately the politics of the undifferentiated ‘human’, and thereby signifies a community of humanity rather than that of differentiated political subjects, a global community, by definition one that does not operate on the basis of hierarchy, power, domination, or exclusion/inclusion.
4		-This denies politics its instrumentality—a political act becomes a means of “raising awareness” or “making one’s voice heard” rather than one with specified ends
5		-Chandler 7 David, Researcher @ Centre for the Study of Democracy, “The Possibilities of Post-Territorial Political Community,” Area, Vol. 39, No. 1, p. 116-119.
6		-The politics of the human would eschew the traditional ontological focus on state power or the desire to subordinate political demands to collectivities beyond the individual. As an individual act, even if made in conjunction with others, the instrumentality would be a limited one. In a sense the effectiveness of the campaign/demand/claim would be secondary to the immediate desire to ‘raise awareness’ or to make a ‘voice’ heard, whether in advocacy on behalf of an Other or the identity/values/beliefs of the claim-making subject themselves. Operating in an unmediated global space, the relationship between the individual making a claim and the outcome would, of necessity, have to be highly contingent. An awareness of this contingency makes any action or declaration immediately important as part of the broader struggle for universal ethics/justice/awareness. The morality of an action is what is most important, providing its own justification, rather than its specified instrumental or intentional ends. We can see this in academia in the field of International Relations – ask students which theory they prefer out of Realism and Constructivism or Critical theory and very few will go for Realism even though they (paradoxically?) believe that states pursue the self-interests of power. That is because students will tend to see their beliefs in a non-instrumental way; it is what their theories say about them that counts, not how they would use them to engage with the outside world. This privileging of the self above engagement with the outside world means that political/ethical positions are more about moral badges than any practical engagement with society. Politics is increasingly becoming based on personal identities rather than instrumental engagement. Let me take one example, the Guardian newspaper’s 1 April 2006 spoof that Coldplay’s Chris Martin has come out in support for new Conservative leader David Cameron. This was taken seriously by Labour’s media office because it rang so true – Martin’s alleged switch was not based on practical policies but life style and identity. ‘David really cares about the things I care about’ says Martin. The reasons Martin allegedly switched from Blair to Cameron were entirely personal – Cameron travels by bicycle, dresses in casual clothes with Converse trainers, has a wind generator on his roof, his wife Samantha even allegedly asked Martin’s wife where she could source some Fairtrade essential oils (at their yoga class) – ‘Dave’s given me the absolute assurance that he’s committed to saving the planet’ Martin is alleged to have said (Priol, 2006).
7		-Reducing politics to a decentering of power relations in academia and other bureaucratic structures flies in the face of historic successes of collective social action, while depriving the oppressed of even a vocabulary of protest—turns case.
8		-Collins, 97 (Dr. Patricia Hill, professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland; “Fighting Words”; p. 136-7)
9		-In this sense, postmodern views of power that overemphasize hegemony and local politics provide a seductive mix of appearing to challenge oppression while secretly believing that such efforts are doomed. Hegemonic power appears as ever expanding and invading. It may even attempt to “annex” the counterdiscourses that have developed, oppositional discourses such as afrocentrism, postmodernism, feminism, and Black feminist thought. This is a very important insight. However, there is a difference between being aware of the power of one’s enemy and arguing that such power is so pervasive that resistance will, at best, provide a brief respite and, at worst, prove ultimately futile. This emphasis on power as being hegemonic and seemingly absolute, coupled with a belief in local resistance as the best that people can do, flies in the face of actual, historical successes. African-Americans, women, poor people, and others have achieved results through social movements, revolts, revolutions, and other collective social action against government, corporate, and academic structures. As James Scott queries, “What remains to be explained…is why theories of hegemony…have…retained an enormous intellectual appeal to social scientists and historians” (1990, 86). Perhaps for colonizers who refuse, individualized, local resistance is the best they can envision. Overemphasizing hegemony and stressing nihilism not only does not resist injustice but participates in its manufacture. Views of power grounded exclusively in notions of hegemony and nihilism are not only pessimistic, they can be dangerous for members of historically marginalized groups. Moreover, the emphasis on local versus structural institutions makes it difficult to examine major structures such as racism, sexism, and other structural forms of oppression.
10		-Social theories that reduce hierarchical power relations to the level of representation, performance, or constructed phenomena not only emphasize the likelihood that resistance will fail in the face of a pervasive hegemonic presence, they also reinforce perceptions that local, individualized micropolitics constitutes the most effective terrain of struggle. This emphasis on the local dovetails nicely with increasing emphasis on the “personal” as a source of power and with parallel attention to subjectivity. If politics becomes reduced to the “personal,” decentering relations of ruling in academia and other bureaucratic structures seems increasingly unlikely. As Rey Chow opines, “What these intellectuals are doing is robbing the terms of oppression of their critical and oppositional import, and thus depriving the oppressed of even the vocabulary of protest and rightful demand” (1993, 13). Viewing decentering as a strategy situated within a larger process of resistance to oppression is dramatically different from perceiving decentering as an academic theory of how scholars should view all truth. When weapons of resistance are theorized away in this fashion, one might ask, who really benefits?
11		-Our alternative is institutional politics—it’s the only way to prevent criticism from being an end in itself.
12		-Frank 12 Thomas, brilliant badass, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? and editor of The Baffler "To the Precinct Station: How theory met practice …and drove it absolutely crazy" http://www.thebaffler.com/past/to_the_precinct_station
13		-
14		-Occupy itself is pretty much gone. It was evicted from Zuccotti Park about two months after it began—an utterly predictable outcome for which the group seems to have made inadequate preparation. OWS couldn’t bring itself to come up with a real set of demands until after it got busted, when it finally agreed on a single item. With the exception of some residual groups here and there populated by the usual activist types, OWS has today pretty much fizzled out. The media storm that once surrounded it has blown off to other quarters. Pause for a moment and compare this record of accomplishment to that of Occupy’s evil twin, the Tea Party movement, and the larger right-wing revival of which it is a part. Well, under the urging of this trumped-up protest movement, the Republican Party proceeded to win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives; in the state legislatures of the nation it took some six hundred seats from the Democrats; as of this writing it is still purging Republican senators and congressmen deemed insufficiently conservative and has even succeeded in having one of its own named as the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate. * * * The question that the books under consideration here seek to answer is: What is the magic formula that made OWS so successful? But it’s exactly the wrong question. What we need to be asking about Occupy Wall Street is: Why did this effort fail? How did OWS blow all the promise of its early days? Why do even the most popular efforts of the Left come to be mired in a gluey swamp of academic talk and pointless antihierarchical posturing? The action certainly started with a bang. When the occupation of Zuccotti Park began, in September 2011, the OWS cause was overwhelmingly popular; indeed, as Todd Gitlin points out, hating Wall Street may well have been the most popular left-wing cause since the thirties. Inequality had reached obscene levels, and it was no longer the act of a radical to say so. The bank bailouts of the preceding years had made it obvious that government was captured by organized money. Just about everyone resented Wall Street in those days; just about everyone was happy to see someone finally put our fury in those crooks’ overpaid faces. People flocked to the OWS standard. Cash donations poured in; so did food and books. Celebrities made appearances in Zuccotti, and the media began covering the proceedings with an attentiveness it rarely gives to leftist actions. But these accounts, with a few exceptions here and there, misread that overwhelming approval of Occupy’s cause as an approval of the movement’s mechanics: the camping out in the park, the way food was procured for an army of protesters, the endless search for consensus, the showdowns with the cops, the twinkles. These things, almost every writer separately assumes, are what the Occupy phenomenon was really about. These are the details the public hungers to know. The building of a “community” in Zuccotti Park, for example, is a point of special emphasis. Noam Chomsky’s thoughts epitomize the genre when he tells us that “one of the main achievements” of the movement “has been to create communities, real functioning communities of mutual support, democratic interchange,” et cetera. The reason this is important, he continues, is because Americans “tend to be very isolated and neighborhoods are broken down, community structures have broken down, people are kind of alone.” How building such “communities” helps us to tackle the power of high finance is left unexplained, as is Chomsky’s implication that a city of eight million people, engaged in all the complexities of modern life, should learn how humans are supposed to live together by studying an encampment of college students. The actual sins of Wall Street, by contrast, are much less visible. For example, when you read Occupying Wall Street, the work of a team of writers who participated in the protests, you first hear about the subject of predatory lending when a sympathetic policeman mentions it in the course of a bust. The authors themselves never bring it up. And if you want to know how the people in Zuccotti intended to block the banks’ agenda—how they intended to stop predatory lending, for example—you have truly come to the wrong place. Not because it’s hard to figure out how to stop predatory lending, but because the way the Occupy campaign is depicted in these books, it seems to have had no intention of doing anything except building “communities” in public spaces and inspiring mankind with its noble refusal to have leaders. Unfortunately, though, that’s not enough. Building a democratic movement culture is essential for movements on the left, but it’s also just a starting point. Occupy never evolved beyond it. It did not call for a subtreasury system, like the Populists did. It didn’t lead a strike (a real one, that is), or a sit-in, or a blockade of a recruitment center, or a takeover of the dean’s office. The IWW free-speech fights of a century ago look positively Prussian by comparison. With Occupy, the horizontal culture was everything. “The process is the message,” as the protesters used to say and as most of the books considered here largely concur. The aforementioned camping, the cooking, the general-assembling, the filling of public places: that’s what Occupy was all about. Beyond that there seems to have been virtually no strategy to speak of, no agenda to transmit to the world. * * * Whether or not to have demands, you might recall, was something that Occupy protesters debated hotly among themselves in the days when Occupy actually occupied something. Reading these books a year later, however, that debate seems to have been consensed out of existence. Virtually none of the authors reviewed here will say forthrightly that the failure to generate demands was a tactical mistake. On the contrary: the quasi-official account of the episode (Occupying Wall Street) laughs off demands as a fetish object of literal-minded media types who stupidly crave hierarchy and chains of command. Chris Hedges tells us that demands were something required only by “the elites, and their mouthpieces in the media.” Enlightened people, meanwhile, are supposed to know better; demands imply the legitimacy of the adversary, meaning the U.S. government and its friends, the banks. Launching a protest with no formal demands is thought to be a great accomplishment, a gesture of surpassing democratic virtue. And here we come to the basic contradiction of the campaign. To protest Wall Street in 2011 was to protest, obviously, the outrageous financial misbehavior that gave us the Great Recession; it was to protest the political power of money, which gave us the bailouts; it was to protest the runaway compensation practices that have turned our society’s productive labor into bonuses for the 1 percent. All three of these catastrophes, however, were brought on by deregulation and tax-cutting—by a philosophy of liberation as anarchic in its rhetoric as Occupy was in reality. Check your premises, Rand-fans: it was the bankers’ own uprising against the hated state that wrecked the American way of life. Nor does it require poststructuralism-leading-through-anarchism to understand how to reverse these developments. You do it by rebuilding a powerful and competent regulatory state. You do it by rebuilding the labor movement. You do it with bureaucracy. Occupiers often seemed aware of this. Recall what you heard so frequently from protesters’ lips back in the days of September 2011: Restore the old Glass-Steagall divide between investment and commercial banks, they insisted. Bring back big government! Bring back safety! Bring back boredom! But that’s no way to fire the imagination of the world. So, how do you maintain the carnival while secretly lusting for the CPAs? By indefinitely suspending the obvious next step. By having no demands. Demands would have signaled that humorless, doctrinaire adults were back in charge and that the fun was over. This was an inspired way to play the situation in the beginning, and for a time it was a great success. But it also put a clear expiration date on the protests. As long as demands and the rest of the logocentric requirements were postponed, Occupy could never graduate to the next level. It would remain captive to what Christopher Lasch criticized—way back in 1973—as the “cult of participation,” in which the experience of protesting is what protesting is all about.

EntryDate

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-2017-01-28 13:45:33.0

Judge

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-Jaden Lessnick

Opponent

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-Hawken HG

ParentRound

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-32

Round

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-3

Team

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-La Canada Zhao Neg

Title

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-1 Chandler K

Tournament

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-Emory