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Caselist.CitesClass[15]
Cites
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1 -Policies of restraint towards competing powers is zero sum.
2 -Machiavelli, Renaissance man (historian, politician, diplomat, philosopher, humanist, and writer), 1532
3 -Niccolò, The Prince, Chapter III: Concerning Mixed Principalities, GW ***We do not endorsed gendered language***
4 -Again, the prince who holds a country differing in the above respects ought to make himself the head and defender of his powerful neighbours, and to weaken the more powerful amongst them, taking care that no foreigner as powerful as himself shall, by any accident, get a footing there; for it will always happen that such a one will be introduced by those who are discontented, either through excess of ambition or through fear, as one has seen already. The Romans were brought into Greece by the Aetolians; and in every other country where they obtained a footing they were brought in by the inhabitants. And the usual course of affairs is that, as soon as a powerful foreigner enters a country, all the subject states are drawn to him, moved by the hatred which they feel against the ruling power. So that in respect to these subject states he has not to take any trouble to gain them over to himself, for the whole of them quickly rally to the state which he has acquired there. He has only to take care that they do not get hold of too much power and too much authority, and then with his own forces, and with their goodwill, he can easily keep down the more powerful of them, so as to remain entirely master in the country. And he who does not properly manage this business will soon lose what he has acquired, and whilst he does hold it he will have endless difficulties and troubles. The Romans, in the countries which they annexed, observed closely these measures; they sent colonies and maintained friendly relations with the minor powers, without increasing their strength; they kept down the greater, and did not allow any strong foreign powers to gain authority. Greece appears to me sufficient for an example. The Achaeans and Aetolians were kept friendly by them, the kingdom of Macedonia was humbled, Antiochus was driven out; yet the merits of the Achaeans and Aetolians never secured for them permission to increase their power, nor did the persuasions of Philip ever induce the Romans to be his friends without first humbling him, nor did the influence of Antiochus make them agree that he should retain any lordship over the country. Because the Romans did in these instances what all prudent princes ought to do, who have to regard not only present troubles, but also future ones, for which they must prepare with every energy, because, when foreseen, it is easy to remedy them; but if you wait until they approach, the medicine is no longer in time because the malady has become incurable; for it happens in this, as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to cure. Thus it happens in affairs of state, for when the evils that arise have been foreseen (which it is only given to a wise man to see), they can be quickly redressed, but when, through not having been foreseen, they have been permitted to grow in a way that every one can see them. there is no longer a remedy. Therefore, the Romans, foreseeing troubles, dealt with them at once, and, even to avoid a war, would not let them come to a head, for they knew that war is not to be avoided, but is only put off to the advantage of others; moreover they wished to fight with Philip and Antiochus in Greece so as not to have to do it in Italy; they could have avoided both, but this they did not wish; nor did that ever please them which is for ever in the mouths of the wise ones of our time:— Let us enjoy the benefits of the time — but rather the benefits of their own valour and prudence, for time drives everything before it, and is able to bring with it good as well as evil, and evil as well as good.
5 -
6 -cp:The United States federal government should develop and deploy Prompt Global Strike systems
7 -
8 -The PGS system’s speed increases rapid deployment capabilities and trades off with nukes. It’s going to be fantastic for heg and fighting terror
9 -Grossman 6 (Elaine, reporter with Global Security Newswire, July 1, http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20090701_5635.php AD: 6/28/10)JM
10 -Under the conventional
11 -postures to work."
12 -
13 -US leadership prevents great power war and existential governance crises
14 -Brooks et al 13 (Brooks, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth ’13) (Stephen, Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, William C. Wohlforth is the Daniel Webster Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College “Don’t Come Home America: The Case Against Retrenchment,” International Security, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Winter 2012/13), pp. 7–51)
15 -
16 -A core premise of deep engagement is that it prevents the emergence of a far more dangerous global security environment. For one thing, as noted above, the United States’ overseas presence gives it the leverage to restrain partners from taking provocative action. Perhaps more important, its core alliance commitments also deter states with aspirations to regional hegemony from contemplating expansion and make its partners more secure, reducing their incentive to adopt solutions to their security problems that threaten others and thus stoke security dilemmas. The contention that engaged U.S. power dampens the baleful effects of anarchy is consistent with influential variants of realist theory. Indeed, arguably the scariest portrayal of the war-prone world that would emerge absent the “American Pacifier” is provided in the works of John Mearsheimer, who forecasts dangerous multipolar regions replete with security competition, arms races, nuclear proliferation and associated preventive war temptations, regional rivalries, and even runs at regional hegemony and full-scale great power war. 72 How do retrenchment advocates, the bulk of whom are realists, discount this benefit? Their arguments are complicated, but two capture most of the variation: (1) U.S. security guarantees are not necessary to prevent dangerous rivalries and conflict in Eurasia; or (2) prevention of rivalry and conflict in Eurasia is not a U.S. interest. Each response is connected to a different theory or set of theories, which makes sense given that the whole debate hinges on a complex future counterfactual (what would happen to Eurasia’s security setting if the United States truly disengaged?). Although a certain answer is impossible, each of these responses is nonetheless a weaker argument for retrenchment than advocates acknowledge. The first response flows from defensive realism as well as other international relations theories that discount the conflict-generating potential of anarchy under contemporary conditions. 73 Defensive realists maintain that the high expected costs of territorial conquest, defense dominance, and an array of policies and practices that can be used credibly to signal benign intent, mean that Eurasia’s major states could manage regional multipolarity peacefully without the American pacifier. Retrenchment would be a bet on this scholarship, particularly in regions where the kinds of stabilizers that nonrealist theories point to—such as democratic governance or dense institutional linkages—are either absent or weakly present. There are three other major bodies of scholarship, however, that might give decisionmakers pause before making this bet. First is regional expertise. Needless to say, there is no consensus on the net security effects of U.S. withdrawal. Regarding each region, there are optimists and pessimists. Few experts expect a return of intense great power competition in a post-American Europe, but many doubt European governments will pay the political costs of increased EU defense cooperation and the budgetary costs of increasing military outlays. 74 The result might be a Europe that is incapable of securing itself from various threats that could be destabilizing within the region and beyond (e.g., a regional conflict akin to the 1990s Balkan wars), lacks capacity for global security missions in which U.S. leaders might want European participation, and is vulnerable to the influence of outside rising powers. What about the other parts of Eurasia where the United States has a substantial military presence? Regarding the Middle East, the balance begins to swing toward pessimists concerned that states currently backed by Washington— notably Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—might take actions upon U.S. retrenchment that would intensify security dilemmas. And concerning East Asia, pessimism regarding the region’s prospects without the American pacifier is pronounced. Arguably the principal concern expressed by area experts is that Japan and South Korea are likely to obtain a nuclear capacity and increase their military commitments, which could stoke a destabilizing reaction from China. It is notable that during the Cold War, both South Korea and Taiwan moved to obtain a nuclear weapons capacity and were only constrained from doing so by a still-engaged United States. 75 The second body of scholarship casting doubt on the bet on defensive realism’s sanguine portrayal is all of the research that undermines its conception of state preferences. Defensive realism’s optimism about what would happen if the United States retrenched is very much dependent on its particular—and highly restrictive—assumption about state preferences; once we relax this assumption, then much of its basis for optimism vanishes. Specifically, the prediction of post-American tranquility throughout Eurasia rests on the assumption that security is the only relevant state preference, with security defined narrowly in terms of protection from violent external attacks on the homeland. Under that assumption, the security problem is largely solved as soon as offense and defense are clearly distinguishable, and offense is extremely expensive relative to defense. Burgeoning research across the social and other sciences, however, undermines that core assumption: states have preferences not only for security but also for prestige, status, and other aims, and they engage in trade-offs among the various objectives. 76 In addition, they define security not just in terms of territorial protection but in view of many and varied milieu goals. It follows that even states that are relatively secure may nevertheless engage in highly competitive behavior. Empirical studies show that this is indeed sometimes the case. 77 In sum, a bet on a benign postretrenchment Eurasia is a bet that leaders of major countries will never allow these nonsecurity preferences to influence their strategic choices. To the degree that these bodies of scholarly knowledge have predictive leverage, U.S. retrenchment would result in a significant deterioration in the security environment in at least some of the world’s key regions. We have already mentioned the third, even more alarming body of scholarship. Offensive realism predicts that the withdrawal of the American pacifier will yield either a competitive regional multipolarity complete with associated insecurity, arms racing, crisis instability, nuclear proliferation, and the like, or bids for regional hegemony, which may be beyond the capacity of local great powers to contain (and which in any case would generate intensely competitive behavior, possibly including regional great power war). Hence it is unsurprising that retrenchment advocates are prone to focus on the second argument noted above: that avoiding wars and security dilemmas in the world’s core regions is not a U.S. national interest. Few doubt that the United States could survive the return of insecurity and conflict among Eurasian powers, but at what cost? Much of the work in this area has focused on the economic externalities of a renewed threat of insecurity and war, which we discuss below. Focusing on the pure security ramifications, there are two main reasons why decisionmakers may be rationally reluctant to run the retrenchment experiment. First, overall higher levels of conflict make the world a more dangerous place. Were Eurasia to return to higher levels of interstate military competition, one would see overall higher levels of military spending and innovation and a higher likelihood of competitive regional proxy wars and arming of client states—all of which would be concerning, in part because it would promote a faster diffusion of military power away from the United States. Greater regional insecurity could well feed proliferation cascades, as states such as Egypt, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia all might choose to create nuclear forces. 78 It is unlikely that proliferation decisions by any of these actors would be the end of the game: they would likely generate pressure locally for more proliferation. Following Kenneth Waltz, many retrenchment advocates are proliferation optimists, assuming that nuclear deterrence solves the security problem. 79 Usually carried out in dyadic terms, the debate over the stability of proliferation changes as the numbers go up. Proliferation optimism rests on assumptions of rationality and narrow security preferences. In social science, however, such assumptions are inevitably probabilistic. Optimists assume that most states are led by rational leaders, most will overcome organizational problems and resist the temptation to preempt before feared neighbors nuclearize, and most pursue only security and are risk averse. Confidence in such probabilistic assumptions declines if the world were to move from nine to twenty, thirty, or forty nuclear states. In addition, many of the other dangers noted by analysts who are concerned about the destabilizing effects of nuclear proliferation—including the risk of accidents and the prospects that some new nuclear powers will not have truly survivable forces—seem prone to go up as the number of nuclear powers grows. 80 Moreover, the risk of “unforeseen crisis dynamics” that could spin out of control is also higher as the number of nuclear powers increases. Finally, add to these concerns the enhanced danger of nuclear leakage, and a world with overall higher levels of security competition becomes yet more worrisome. The argument that maintaining Eurasian peace is not a U.S. interest faces a second problem. On widely accepted realist assumptions, acknowledging that U.S. engagement preserves peace dramatically narrows the difference between retrenchment and deep engagement. For many supporters of retrenchment, the optimal strategy for a power such as the United States, which has attained regional hegemony and is separated from other great powers by oceans, is offshore balancing: stay over the horizon and “pass the buck” to local powers to do the dangerous work of counterbalancing any local rising power. The United States should commit to onshore balancing only when local balancing is likely to fail and a great power appears to be a credible contender for regional hegemony, as in the cases of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the midtwentieth century. The problem is that China’s rise puts the possibility of its attaining regional hegemony on the table, at least in the medium to long term. As Mearsheimer notes, “The United States will have to play a key role in countering China, because its Asian neighbors are not strong enough to do it by themselves.” 81 Therefore, unless China’s rise stalls, “the United States is likely to act toward China similar to the way it behaved toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War.” 82 It follows that the United States should take no action that would compromise its capacity to move to onshore balancing in the future. It will need to maintain key alliance relationships in Asia as well as the formidably expensive military capacity to intervene there. The implication is to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, reduce the presence in Europe, and pivot to Asia— just what the United States is doing. 83 In sum, the argument that U.S. security commitments are unnecessary for peace is countered by a lot of scholarship, including highly influential realist scholarship. In addition, the argument that Eurasian peace is unnecessary for U.S. security is weakened by the potential for a large number of nasty security consequences as well as the need to retain a latent onshore balancing capacity that dramatically reduces the savings retrenchment might bring. Moreover, switching between offshore and onshore balancing could well be difficult. Bringing together the thrust of many of the arguments discussed so far underlines the degree to which the case for retrenchment misses the underlying logic of the deep engagement strategy. By supplying reassurance, deterrence, and active management, the United States lowers security competition in the world’s key regions, thereby preventing the emergence of a hothouse atmosphere for growing new military capabilities. Alliance ties dissuade partners from ramping up and also provide leverage to prevent military transfers to potential rivals. On top of all this, the United States’ formidable military machine may deter entry by potential rivals. Current great power military expenditures as a percentage of GDP are at historical lows, and thus far other major powers have shied away from seeking to match top-end U.S. military capabilities. In addition, they have so far been careful to avoid attracting the “focused enmity” of the United States. 84 All of the world’s most modern militaries are U.S. allies (America’s alliance system of more than sixty countries now accounts for some 80 percent of global military spending), and the gap between the U.S. military capability and that of potential rivals is by many measures growing rather than shrinking. 85
17 -Heg solves terrorism
18 -Walt, international affairs professor at Harvard, 2002
19 -(Stephen, “American primacy: its prospects and pitfalls - prominence of United States in economic, international affairs”, Naval War College Review, Spring, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JIW/is_2_55/ai_88174226/pg_2/, ldg)
20 -
21 -Perhaps the most obvious reason why states seek primacy~-~-and why the United States benefits from its current position~-~-is that international politics is a dangerous business. Being wealthier and stronger than other states does not guarantee that a state will survive, of course, and it cannot insulate a state from all outside pressures. But the strongest state is more likely to escape serious harm than weaker ones are, and it will be better equipped to resist the pressures that arise. Because the United States is so powerful, and because its society is so wealthy, it has ample resources to devote to whatever problems it may face in the future. At the beginning of the Cold War, for example, its power enabled the United States to help rebuild Europe and Japan, to assist them in developing stable democratic orders, and to subsidize the emergence of an open international economic order. (7) The United States was also able to deploy powerful armed forces in Europe and Asia as effective deterrents to Soviet expansion. When the strategic importance of the Persian Gulf increased in the late 1970s, the United States created its Rapid Deployment Force in order to deter threats to the West's oil supplies; in 1990-91 it used these capabilities to liberate Kuwait. Also, when the United States was attacked by the Al-Qaeda terrorist network in September 2001, it had the wherewithal to oust the network's Taliban hosts and to compel broad international support for its campaign to eradicate Al-Qaeda itself. It would have been much harder to do any of these things if the United States had been weaker. Today, U.S. primacy helps deter potential challenges to American interests in virtually every part of the world. Few countries or nonstate groups want to invite the "focused enmity" of the United States (to use William Wohlforth's apt phrase), and countries and groups that have done so (such as Libya, Iraq, Serbia, or the Taliban) have paid a considerable price. As discussed below, U.S. dominance does provoke opposition in a number of places, but anti-American elements are forced to rely on covert or indirect strategies (such as terrorist bombings) that do not seriously threaten America's dominant position. Were American power to decline significantly, however, groups opposed to U.S. interests would probably be emboldened and overt challenges would be more likely.
22 -
23 -
24 -Hegemony decline causes prolif.
25 -Rosen, professor of National Security and Military Affairs at Harvard University, 2003
26 -(Stephen, “An Empire, If you Can Keep It”, National Interest, Spring, lexis, ldg)
27 -
28 -Rather than wrestle with such difficult and unpleasant problems, the United States could give up the imperial mission, or pretensions to it, now. This would essentially mean the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the Middle East, Europe and mainland Asia. It may be that all other peoples, without significant exception, will then turn to their own affairs and leave the United States alone. But those who are hostile to us might remain hostile, and be much less afraid of the United States after such a withdrawal. Current friends would feel less secure and, in the most probable post-imperial world, would revert to the logic of self-help in which all states do what they must to protect themselves. This would imply the relatively rapid acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Iran, Iraq and perhaps Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Indonesia and others. Constraints on the acquisition of biological weapons would be even weaker than they are today. Major regional arms races would also be very likely throughout Asia and the Middle East. This would not be a pleasant world for Americans, or anyone else. It is difficult to guess what the costs of such a world would be to the United States. They would probably not put the end of the United States in prospect, but they would not be small. If the logic of American empire is unappealing, it is not at all clear that the alternatives are that much more attractive.
29 -
30 -Proliferation guarantees massive nuclear escalation and war
31 -Utgoff, Institute for Defense Analyses deputy director, 02
32 -Victor A., former National Security Council staff, “Proliferation, Missile Defence and American Ambitions,” Survival, vol. 44, p85-102
33 -
34 -Once a conflict reaches the point where nuclear weapons are employed, the stresses felt by the leaderships would rise enormously. These stresses can be expected to further degrade their decision-making. The pressure to force the enemy to stop fighting or to surrender could argue for more forceful and decisive military action, which might be the right thing to do in the circumstances, but maybe not. And the horrors of the carnage already suffered may be seen as justification for visiting the most devastating punishment possible on the enemy.7 Again, history demonstrates how intense conflict can lead the combatants to escalate violence to the maximum possible levels. In the Second World War, early promises not to bomb cities soon gave way to essentially indiscriminate bombing of civilians. The war between Iran and Iraq during the 1980s led to the use of chemical weapons on both sides and exchanges of missiles against each other's cities. And more recently, violence in the Middle East escalated in a few months from rocks and small arms to heavy weapons on one side, and from police actions to air strikes and armoured attacks on the other.
35 -Escalation of violence is also basic human nature. Once the violence starts, retaliatory exchanges of violent acts can escalate to levels unimagined by the participants beforehand.8 Intense and blinding anger is a common response to fear or humiliation or abuse. And such anger can lead us to impose on our opponents whatever levels of violence are readily accessible. In sum, widespread proliferation is likely to lead to an occasional shoot-out with nuclear weapons, and that such shoot-outs will have a substantial probability of escalating to the maximum destruction possible with the weapons at hand. Unless nuclear proliferation is stopped, we are headed toward a world that will mirror the American Wild West of the late 1800s. With most, if not all, nations wearing nuclear 'six-shooters' on their hips, the world may even be a more polite place than it is today, but every once in a while we will all gather on a hill to bury the bodies of dead cities or even whole nations.
EntryDate
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1 -2017-01-16 08:29:06.0
Judge
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1 -Daniel Park
Opponent
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1 -Harker AM
ParentRound
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1 -11
Round
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1 -6
Team
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1 -Polytechnic Liu Neg
Title
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1 -Machiavellian IR
Tournament
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1 -Harvard Westlake
Caselist.CitesClass[16]
Cites
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1 -The world is a dark and hopeless place - the affirmative’s politics of optimism and affirmation cause us to ignore our own complicity in violence—negation resolves the aff better
2 -
3 -Pozo 9 (ANTONIO GUTIÉRREZ, Filozofická fakulta, Sevilská univerzita, Sevilla, Španielsko POZO, A. G.: Utopia in Black: The Negative Aesthetics of Adorno and the Contemporary Black Art, FILOZOFIA 64, 2009, No 5, p. 481-6)~-~-mm ***We don’t endorse holocaust rhetoric.
4 -The Materialistic Aesthetics of Black Art. Colours talk, mean; they are texts1. Als the black one. Adorno considers that the black colour tells the truth. This thesis can agglutinate the aesthetic theory of Adorno, that it has in the black colour, already risen to the category of maximum aesthetic/philosophical relevance, its ‘ideal’. Black is the colour of the negative aesthetics of Adorno. The paragraph that he dedicates to black colour in his Ästhetische Theorie (AT 65-7)2 summarizes the spirit of this work and in general the spirit of that the truest contemporary art says, a black art (schwarze Kunst). Adorno is a black thinker, a black writer, as the thinkers, writers and artists who exerted bigger and deeper attraction and influence on him were: Sade, Poe, Baudelaire, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kafka, Beckett or Ionesco (DA 139).3 An aesthetics can not be built with the help of pure intellect, and to the margin of the real experience of art. The negative aesthetics concretely tells what black art of its time says, an art that Adorno calls “radical art (radikale Kunst)” (AT 65), that is to say, an art that thinks, an art that tells the truth. Art thinks, it is a “complexion of the truth” (AT 152, 391). For Adorno, to affirm that art thinks or that tells the truth, means to affirm that it consists on “unconscious writing of the history (bewuβtlose Geschichtsschreibung)” (AT 286, 387). The contemporary radical is so by force of thinking the truth of his (our) times, and it is a black, ugly art, because the reality that thinks of is black, ugly, horrible. Black colour is the true of our time. Today, Adorno concludes, a radical art is equal to a dark, gloomy art, “an art whose fundamental colour is black colour” (AT 65). The thesis of Adorno about the work of art as writing of the history supposes a nonidealist understanding of art. Black colour tells the truth. But on what the eloquence of black colour is based?. The works of art are, in principle, appearances, manifestations, and in this sense Adorno compares them with fireworks and circus. As the former, theworks of art “are showed in the shine of an instant in their expressive manifestation”, they are “writing that shines during an instant and goes out (aufblitzende und vergehende Schrift)” (AT 125-6). It is certain that every work of art tries to plot with the circus, but it annuls its primary artistic stratum if it does not imitate circus, if it does not include the moment of the appearance, that it is as the frame of a picture that notices us that right there the real world is interrupted and that another one begins, a imaginary, new and hopeful universe. The same role plays the curtain of the theatre: “The instant in that the curtain rises is the expectation of the appearance” (AT 126). Even Beckett, an author that represents the maximum expression of the contemporary radical art for Adorno4, he is faithful to the circus when using the stage and when “raising the curtain full with promises”, and it is in spite that his intention is “to exorcize the multicoloured thing of the circus” (AT 127). The authors that suppress “the charm of the backstages”, the moment of hope of the appearance, are signing the surrender of art. The proposal of Adorno suggests that negative art can not abdicate of its artistic level if it intends to be negative, black. Only being art it will be able to be anti-art. But the works of art are not simple manifestations. For Adorno they are more than that: “The works of art become such when producing that more (Mehr), when creating its own transcendency” (AT 122). The works exceed the manifestation (Erscheinung) itself on which they consist; they are manifestations that are transcended by themselves (AT 123). Art is not only manifestation; it is also spirit. Basically it is a spiritual phenomenon: “The spirit (Geist) of the works of art is what converts them, as regards manifestations, in more than they really are” (AT 134). The spirituality is what makes them talk, say; it is what is in the base of the eloquence of colour. The works of art are language, and this – their linguistic character (Sprachcharakter)- is what it allows them to transcend their character of thing (AT 122, 249). The spirit is what transforms them into language. However, Adorno underlines, “the spirit is nothing in the works of art outside of their words” (AT 135). The spirit of the works of art is nothing spiritual: “In their fullness works of art are not anything spiritual” (AT 122). They are, rather, something historical-social. The spirit transforms the works of art into language, in writing of history, because the spirit itself is spiritualised history. The aesthetic spirit is not an in itself, but the deposited history that speaks in the works of art. The ‘more’ that is the spirit of the work of art is said by the context – by the history and by the society. In contrast to the radical spiritualization of the aesthetics, Adorno points out that “the spiritual moment of the art is not what idealism calls spirit, but rather the proscribed mimetic impulse (mimetische Impuls)” (AT 139). The aesthetic spirit is the mimesis that allows the work of art to be the language of the historical reality. Adorno affirm that “the linguistic moment (sprachliche Moment) of art is its mimetic moment (Mimetisches)” (AT 305). Everything that talks in the work of art is said by the historical-social context. The negative aesthetics of Adorno is then a materia- listic aesthetics: “Art is cell of materialism”, says (KKA 186). In contrast to the idealistic interpretation, Adorno sustains that neither the colours, nor the sounds, intervene in art as if they themselves already express something (AT 140). Adorno defends that colours and sounds and forms do not speak per se. What they tell, “its eloquence only comes from the context in which they appear” (AT 140). The colour is certainly a text, writing, but not in idealistic key: it is the historical-social reality the one who writes. What black colour says it does not say for itself, but because it tells about a blackened reality. Ideological Art and Critical Art. The radical contemporary art is black art because is writing of a blackened historical reality. Black colour’s truth is not in itself but in the historical reality whose writing is so. The totalitarian logic of dominion, and with it horror, injustice and desperation, seem to have been taken possession of the historical life. The situation is ugly, black. The disenchantment (Entzauberung) and/or the blackening of the historical world are very patent. The enlightened critical reason, far from liberating, has become dominance instrument, condemning the humanity, that supposedly would liberate, to black darkness. This is the “dialectics of enlightenment”: the process of necessary metamorphosis (Verwandlung) of the pure idea (freedom, justice …) in dominion (DA 239-40, 254-55). The dominion is practiced by means of the identification (annulment and forgetfulness) of the differences in the whole of the social system. The idealistic philosophy of Hegel, centred in the “thought of the identity (Identitätsdenken)” (JE 506), represents for Adorno the highest philosophical expression of the dominion. Auschwitz will be then the supreme realization of this metaphysics of the identity: the genocide is the most horrible form of the individual’s homogeneity (ND 355). The homogeneity of the individuals in the society of the total dominion, the administered world (verwaltete Welt), that is to say, the identity a priori imposed between reality and reason, it is what Adorno calls the “system of the horror (System des Grauens)” (MM 126), the world in which the individuals are annulled, des-individualized. In fact, the pain, the individual thing, is the negative thing, the different thing, what can not be said or integrated by the system, the inexpressible thing, the incomprehensible thing. “The whole, Adorno writes down, is the no-real thing (Das Ganze ist das Umwahre)” (MM 55). The concrete, suffering and bloody of the historical reality escapes to the concept; it is black, opaque. The concept can not say that because it tends to sense, to identify it to itself, while the reality is black, illogical. Idealism ‘has told’ pain, but “the suffering (Leiden), Adorno has writen down, when becomes concept, remains silent and sterile” (AT 35). To say it or to understand it in idealistic terms is equal to identify it, to project a sense to it, and that is to deny it, to forget it, to conceal it. The pain is silenced, it fades; it is translated (masked) in sense. For Adorno, to translate it into concept, to rationalize it, that it is precisely what the Hegelian positive dialectics and the current social system intend, is in fact an injustice: “The sensibility is not less able to see a talkativeness in every statement of the positive of the existence, an injustice (Unrecht) towards the victims, and it has to rebel against the extraction of a sense, as abstract as it can be, of that tragic destiny” (ND 354). The price of the sense is the forgetfulness of the innocents’ pain. But the wounds continue open, and pain persists in silence: “Each philosophical term is the toughened scar of an unsolved problem” (PhT II, 10-1). When translating pain into concept, an injustice is not only committed with the victims, but also we reconcile with reality. This is the ideological function of the search for sense, of the translation of pain to concept. To extract sense of what seems negative, illogical, to understand the horror of the real thing, it is to legitimate it, to glorify the world just as it is. But Auschwitz, an open wound specially bleeding and suffering, radically goes further from the concept evidencing the philosophy and the society of the identity. In opinion of Adorno the essential danger resides in that the social system identifies everything with itself, homogenizes everything and integrates it in itself, repressing all that denies it, keeping the pain silent. To dominate is to silence, to remove the word to the negative thing. To the integration through the silence. The system of horror does not want to be recognized as such and it wants to hide the proofs. The critic’s key element is art, because art, Adorno writes down, is “the world for second time” (AT 208). Art is then a place of transgressions, is another thing regarding the bourgeois modern world. Therefore, “there is nothing in art, even being the most sublime one, that does not come from the world; not even anything that has not been transfigured” (AT 208). This ‘second world’ of art presents a negative –critical- tendency against the first one. The definitive feature of the aesthetics according to Adorno is criticism, the resistance and the protest against what it is. “The works of art are negative a priori” (AT 201). To understand art it is necessary to see it in negative relationship with the reality.5 The authentic work of art is a revolution (Revolte) in itself, so that “a conservative work of art is a contradiction in terms in itself” (AT 13, 264, 303, 339). The polemic character a priori of art is due do its own artistic nature. Its (critic) social function resides then in maintaining its aesthetic autonomy, its immanent difference with the real6: “The comforting of the big works of art is less in what they say (aussprechen) that in the fact that they were able to be pulled up of the existence” (MM 253). But not the whole current art is critic, resistance. Only the radical art is so. Adorno points out that there is also an art that “in a infantile way is happy with the colours” (Matisse?), a colourist and happy art (heitere Kunst) (AT 65-6), an art that adopts the attitude of comfort and narcotic before the blackened empiric reality by means of the false beautification of the world. Following the precept that ‘mundus vult decipi’ (AT 34, 350), it intends to improve the appearance of the horrible real world from its colourist world, but only a naïve person, Adorno adds, can believe possible that the discoloured and disenchanted world recovers its colours from art (AT 66). There is also an art that – like the idealistic concept-serves to the dominion, a art entkünstet, that has lost its artistic character, its critical capacity (AT 32-4), and that serves to the same end: to silence and to sterilize the pain. The ideological character of this art reaches its maximum expression with the cultural industry (Kulturindustrie) that is not but the reproduction to great scale of that colourist art, transforming it in a gigantic dominion machinery: while we console ourselves of the black historical reality with the false colourist beauty of this art, we conceal the reality of the existent thing, we legitimate it and we leave it just as it is. The conversion of art in consumption object by the cultural industry coincides with its reduction to pure diversion, what supposes the suspension of its critical and utopian power (DA 152). It promises ‘di-version’, that is, escape, evasion, but this promise is the mask of its ideological character as instrument of the dominion. Really, Adorno writes down, “escape art, escape movies are abhorrent not because they turn their back to a discoloured existence but because they do not do that with enough energy”, so that, “the escape is all a message. The message seems just the opposite, what wants to escape to escape from the flight (Flucht)” (MM 228). Diversion (Vergnügen) is flight, but not of the negative reality but of the “last resistance thought” that becomes agitated against that situation (DA 167). The diversion, far from escaping from this disenchanted world, it affirms it; it is what is most committed with the exploitation and the dominion. The message that the flight carries with itself really means ‘to be in agreement’: diversion is to collaborate, to forget the suffering, to abandon criticism (DA 167, 181). As Pascal7, Adorno conceives diversion like a mask, like turning one’s back before reality not to face the real problems face to face, in sum, as a closing in false of the wounds, what impedes to man the possibility to solve them in a more appropriate way: utopia. The diversion is the opposite side to the suffering conscience, the conscience that is nurtured of blood that flows from a wounded reality; the message of diversion is the suppression of the conscience of pain, the only way to salvation. This is the aesthetic hedonism that Adorno condemns. This cheerful and charming art that forgets and conceals horrors, is an injustice against “the deads and the accumulated pain and without word (akkumulierten und sprachlosen Schmerz)” (AT 66). Adorno assumes those verses of Brecht in which it is prohibited for our time an art that does not want to realize of horror: “What kind of times are they, where / a talk about trees is almost a crime / because it implies silence about so many horrors!” (AT 66). The poetry that has become impossible after Auschwitz, for being barbarian (KG 30), is the colourist poetry. For this reason Adorno has written that “maybe it has been false to say that after Auschwitz it can no longer be possible to write poems” (ND 355). They can be written, whenever they are black poems!. In this sombre time, an art that has lost all evidence (Selbstverständlichkeit) and legitimacy (AT 9-10), is art as embellishment, the ideological art that conceals and justifies the current reality. The Expressive Mimesis as Instrument of Criticism. The other art, the contemporary radical art, the black and critical art of Kafka and Beckett, as long as it gives word to pain, is the only hope. In contrast to art understood as false embellishment or reconcilable enchantment, an art able to transform deceptively the negative into positive, the irreconcilable in reconciliation, the chaotic in order, Adorno affirms that “today the mission of art is to introduce chaos in the order (Ordnung)” (MM 251). That mission is carried out by black art giving the word to pain. What Adorno tries with black art is to return to art its right to exist after Auschwitz, in a discoloured world. In opinion of Adorno, amid the more extreme (Äuβersten) and gloomy or dark (Finstersten) of reality, that is, amid the terrifying current reality, art can only subsist by becoming equal (sich gleichmachen) to that (black) reality (AT 65). Only the spiritual principle of the mimesis is guarantee of aestheticity. Only black art is art. And it is so because black art, in spite of becoming equal to the empiric reality, is not simple reflection, but essentially criticism, negation, utopia and hope. How is it possible that an art is critical being equal to the reality that denounces? In the current state of things, Adorno writes that art “is only able to be opposition by means of the identification with that against it rebels” (AT 201). Only being black – only becoming equal to the empiric reality- it can be critical and utopian. In a blackened world, black is the colour of criticism, of resistance, of negation and of utopia. This is the paradox of the contemporary radical art. If dominion is silence and integration, concealment of what suffers, criticism and utopia can only be scream, failure of (identifier) tendency that silences and conceals. The scream represents the statement of the difference faced with the horror of des-individualization. If the dominion system heals the wounds in false, resistance and hope depend onthat the wounds bleed again. Black art represents for Adorno the maximum exit to pain, the absurdity and the ugliness of the current reality (AT 171). Then black colour expresses the experience of the no-identical, what does not allow itself to be dissolved in the concept; it is the highest expression in the aesthetic phenomenon, understood as opening of the conscience to the other thing, what is not reducible to sense. This transcendency toward the other thing, on which radical black art consists, also constitutes the essence of the artistic mimesis. The mimetic logos of art consists then on alienation, in becoming equal to pain, in giving the word to that silences the society of dominion. This mimesis, last refuge of criticism, should be understood in a deeper sense than the usual: not as ‘representation’ but as ‘expression’ (Ausdruck). There is not aesthetic mimesis without expression (AT 171-5). Black art has become equal to the absurd, black and ugly reality, becoming absurd, black and ugly; becoming “social wound (gesellschaftliche Wundmal)” (AT 353). In this sense black art is for Adorno “language of suffering (Sprache des Leidens)” (AT 35). Beckett’s and Kafka’s art embodies the oppressed by the totalitarian society, what does not allow itself to be led, nor to be identified, nor to be integrated: the other thing. It tears the conciliatory facade that recovers the “lack of moderation of pain (Unmaβ des Leidens)” (AT 348; KG 262). Black art does not speak ‘of’ but rather ‘is’. Becoming equal, it is made ‘thing itself’. Instead of imposing to the object, art becomes its instrument, in the language of the thing itself, expression of its total negativity: to express the pain, to be the wound itself. The “central criterion” of the works of art, of its aesthetic and critical character, is the “force of its expression, thanks to which tension the works of art become eloquent with an gesture without words” (AT 353). The opposition to the society that art represents is not said, because to say is to understand, to rationalize, to find sense and to legitimate; it can not be made in the content but in the form, ‘becoming itself’ just that against what protests. The commitment of the works of art is not manifested by means of harangue, thesis or doctrines; it is rather executed in the form. More than to say it, it is expressed. The works tell by means of the form, not by means of the content. But what the work says is always a historical-social truth. And this is what Adorno finds fulfilled in an exemplary way in Picasso’s Guernica, that “achieves in its inhuman construction that expression that transforms it into a sharp social protest beyond any contemplative misunderstanding” (AT 353). In this way art tells, that is how it gives the world to pain and becomes language of the suffering. In the Kafkian style, and not so much in what it says, it is where Adorno finds Kafka’s criticism to the dehumanised society (AT 342). The aesthetic identification with that that it denies is expressive, that is to say, it has to load on itself all the blackness and the pain of that denied reality, and to express it, to show it, not to represent it or to say it. The black radical art is identified to the world by giving it the word, making the world be expressed through the works.
EntryDate
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1 -2017-01-16 08:29:07.0
Judge
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1 -Daniel Park
Opponent
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1 -Harker AM
ParentRound
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1 -11
Round
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1 -6
Team
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1 -Polytechnic Liu Neg
Title
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1 -K-Pozo
Tournament
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1 -Harvard Westlake
Caselist.CitesClass[17]
Cites
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1 -The affirmative joins a growing liberal consensus that the state must be reformed to resist violence, but their mono-political approach recreates the conditions of ontological enframing
2 -
3 -Joronen ‘13 (Mikko, Department of Geography and Geology, Geography Section, University of Turku, Finland, “Conceptualising New Modes of State Governmentality: Power, Violence and the Ontological Mono-politics of Neoliberalism” Geopolitics, 00:1–15, pp. 10-11)
4 -As I have suggested,52 ontological monopolisations constitute violence through two reciprocally conditioning mechanisms. First, through the oblivion of the mechanism of ‘appropriation’ (Ereignis), which works by intrinsically concealing the openness of being and its reservoir of ungrounded possibilities; and second, through the violence intrinsic in particular historical modes of revealing, for instance, the ontological ordering of entities in neoliberal enframing. The first mechanism of violence apparently refers to the fundamental (im)possibility for the different forms of life to emerge. It is a question concerning particular appropriations of being, which take place by monopolising their own mode of revealing, thus refusing their intrinsic condition of possibility, the abyssal richness of open being. The second mechanism of violence, in turn, is related to the designated positions, such as the neoliberal enframing, which violently enframe human existence and the revealing of the real to particular modalities of ontology. At the level of the first mechanism, neoliberal fabrication of particular mode of existence takes advantage of what I have discussed, by following Heidegger, the ontological ambiguity of being, its happening as a concealing-revealing.53 Accordingly, while disclosing a peculiar mode of existence, the appropriation of being always conceals the open possibility for the other modes of revealing to come about. Such concealment is an intrinsic necessity for all revealing to take place: all modes of revealing conceal their originary source, the inexhaustible plenitude of open being. Neoliberal governmentality, however, follows the logic of violent mono-politics and complete grounding of the revealing of things to the point of abandoning the possibility for ontological change. It remains solely withdrawn to the optimised arrangement of ontic realities: it concentrates on the calculative ordering of things (beings), and as a result, hides the ontological question concerning its own mode of revealing (being). Neoliberalisation thus covers not only the ontological mechanism of concealing-revealing, but its own ontological finitude. By monopolising its own modality of revealing, neoliberal enframing veils its own finitude, its nature as a finite ‘Event of appropriation’ (das Ereignis), thus passing the originary openness of being into oblivion. The latter mechanism of ontological violence, in turn, refers to the inner logic of neoliberal enframing. Neoliberalisation operates, first, by reducing political capabilities of individuals to the internalised rule of the maximum economy, but also by moulding all things into reserves of profits. First of all, neoliberalisation violently enframes human existence into bare reserves of human capital, which are increasingly used by states in their tactics to succeed in global competition. The neoliberal state, governing its population by the means of encouraging economically calculating subjectivity, is not established out of the violent act of territorial inclusion and order, but above all, out of the violent fact of reducing human existence into usable capital. Second, as a drive to reveal things as profitable reserves, neoliberalisation violently divests natural entities from their abrupt happening and phenomenological richness of revealing. Altogether, such reductions constitute the post-political situation of neoliberal governmentality: they create a world of technical solutions and politics-free zones abrogating the politics of ontological revealing. The depoliticising conduct of the neoliberal state is an ultimate political act, which paradoxically establishes an anti-political abrogation of all political acts through the concealment of the politics of ontological possibility. Such ‘ontological mono-politics’ thus intertwines with the first mechanism of ontological violence: by fabricating the real, including human existence, for the use of economic calculations and profits, neoliberal governmentality monopolises a particular mode of revealing, and thus, fades the ontological openness of being and its finite Event (Ereignis) to the background.
EntryDate
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1 -2017-01-16 08:29:08.0
Judge
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1 -Daniel Park
Opponent
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1 -Harker AM
ParentRound
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1 -11
Round
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1 -6
Team
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1 -Polytechnic Liu Neg
Title
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1 -K-Joronen
Tournament
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1 -Harvard Westlake
Caselist.CitesClass[18]
Cites
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1 -their affirmation may be all well and good, but tying it to a desire for recognition by an external social authority such as the judge produces a form of dependence on authority that turns the case
2 -
3 -McGowan 13 (Todd, Prof @ U of Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, p. 87-90)//LA
4 -When subjects enter into society, the social order confronts them with a demand. This demand for the sacrifice of enjoyment offers them social recognition in return. Recognition grounds the subjects' identities and allows them to experience themselves as valuable. The socially recognized subject has a worth that derives solely from recognition itself. Popular kids may believe that their sense of worth is tied to an activity-playing football, obtaining good grades, being a cheerleader -but in fact it depends on the recognition that an anonymous social authority accords those who engage in these activities. Though we might imagine the football player fully enjoying himself and his popular status, the recognition that comes with this status renders enjoyment impossible insofar as popularity adheres to the social authority's demand rather than its unarticulated desire.17 The demand that confronts the subject entering the social order is directly articulated at the level of the signifier. Social authority says to the subject, "Act in this way, and you will receive approval (or recognition)." But the demand conceals an unconscious desire that is not articulated on the level of the signifier. What the authority really wants from the subject is not equivalent to what it explicitly demands in signifiers. This desire of social authority or the Other engenders the subject's own desire: the subject's desire is a desire to figure out what the Other wants from it-to solve the enigma of the Other's desire and locate itself within that desire. The subject becomes a desiring subject by paying attention not to what the social authority says (the demand) but to what remains unsaid between the lines (the desire). The path of desire offers the subject the possibility of breaking from its dependence on social authority through the realization that its secret, the enigma of the Other's desire, does not exist - that the authority doesn't know what it wants. Such a realization is not easy to achieve, but adopting the attitude of desire at least makes it possible. For the subject who clings to the social authority's demand, dependence on this authority becomes irremediable and unrealizable. This is the limitation of pseudo-Hegelian political projects oriented around garnering recognition. They necessarily remain within the confines of the order that they challenge, and even success will never provide the satisfaction that the project promises. Full recognition would bring with it not the sense of finally penetrating into the secret enclave of the social authority but instead the disappointment of seeing that this secret does not exist. The widespread acceptance of gay marriage in the United States, for instance, ·would not provide a heretofore missing satisfaction, because the social authority that would provide the recognition is not a substantial entity fully consistent with itself. Even though institutional authority can grant a marriage certificate to gay couples and the majority of the population can recognize the validity of the marriage, there is no agency that can authorize such a marriage that is itself authorized. Social authority, in other words, is always unauthorized or groundless, and this is the ultimate reason why the pursuit of recognition leads to frustration. Those who seek social recognition structure their lives around the social authority's demand, and recognition is the reward that one receives for doing one's social duty. For instance, in order to gain popularity, one must adhere to the social rules that lead to popularity. This involves wearing the proper clothes, hanging out with the right people, playing the approved sports, and talking in the correct fashion. Too much deviation from the standard dissolves one's popularity. Even those who disdain popularity most often align themselves with some other source of recognition and thereby invest themselves in another form of it. The outsider who completely rejects the trappings of the popular crowd but slavishly obeys the demands of fellow outsiders remains within the orbit of social recognition. This devotion to social recognition is more apparent, though not more true, among the young; the adult universe employs strictures with a similar severity.18 Following the path of desire - going beyond the explicit demand of the social authority- has a cost in terms of social status. Those who restrict themselves to the authority's demand do not necessarily evince more obedience to actual laws than others do. In fact, the social authority’s demand often conflicts with laws because it demands love, not just obedience. Criminals who flaunt the law for the sake of accumulating vast amounts of money are among those most invested in this demand. There is no inherent radicality in criminal behavior, and most criminals tend to be politically conservative." The object of the demand is the subject's complete sacrifice for the sake of the social authority, not simply adherence to a set of laws. By imposing a demand that requires subjects to violate the law, the authority creates a bond of guilt among those who follow this demand. For instance, contemporary capitalist society demands the unrestricted accumulation of capital, even if this requires bypassing ethical or legal considerations at some point. Those who adhere to this demand to such an extent that they break the law or act against their own conscience find themselves all the more subjected to the social authority than if the demand didn't include the dimension of transgression. The guilt that the demand engenders in them seals their allegiance. This is the logic of the hazing ritual, which always necessitates a violation of the law or common morality. The demand aims to redirect subjects away from their own enjoyment and toward social productivity. This turn is unimaginable without guilt, which is the fundamental social emotion. Subjects who sacrifice enjoyment for the sake of recognition do so with the expectation that this sacrifice will pay off on the other side, that the rewards of recognition will surpass the enjoyment that they have given up. This wager seems to have all the empirical evidence on its side: every day, images of the most recognized subjects enjoying themselves bombard us. We see them driving in the nicest cars, eating in the finest restaurants, wearing the most fashionable clothes, and having sex with the most attractive people, among other things. On the other side, we rarely see the enjoyment of those who remain indifferent to the appeal of recognition. By definition, they enjoy in the shadows. What’s more the apparent misery of those who do not receive recognition is readily visible among the social outcasts we silently pass every day. To all appearances, the sacrifice of enjoyment for the sake of recognition is a bargain, as long as one ends up among the most recognized. The problem with this judgment sterns from its emphasis on visibility; it mistakes the display of enjoyment for the real thing. Someone who was authentically enjoying would not need to parade this enjoyment. The authentically enjoying subject does not perform its enjoyment for the Other but remains indifferent to the Other. As Joan Copjec notes, "Jouissance flourishes only there where it is not validated by the Other."20 Enjoyment consumes the subject and directs all of the subject's attention away from the Other's judgment, which is why one cannot perform it andwhy being a social outcast doesn't bother the enjoying subject. One immerses oneself completely in enjoyment, and the enjoyment suffices for the subject. In contrast, recognition, though it offers its own form of satisfaction, ultimately leaves the subject eager for something else. No matter what level of recognition subjects receive, they always find it insufficient and seek more. Unlike enjoyment, recognition is an infinite struggle. But no one can make a direct choice of enjoyment instead of recognition. The initial loss of enjoyment, the initial sacrifice, is inevitable. As I have insisted in earlier chapters, this enjoyment only exists insofar as it is lost: there is no way for the subject to avoid altogether the loss of enjoyment for the sake of recognition. But what the subject might avoid is the perpetuation of this abandonment of enjoyment through the embrace of recognition. One can't initially reject recognition, but one can subsequently revisit the original acceptance of the social demand and refuse it by becoming indifferent to recognition's appeal.
EntryDate
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1 -2017-01-16 08:29:08.0
Judge
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1 -Daniel Park
Opponent
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1 -Harker AM
ParentRound
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -11
Round
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1 -6
Team
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1 -Polytechnic Liu Neg
Title
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1 -K-McGowan
Tournament
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1 -Harvard Westlake
Caselist.CitesClass[19]
Cites
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1 -The 1AC isn’t tied to the affirmative team—all art is autonomous of its creators—vote neg on presumption
2 -
3 -Bryant 12 - Professor of Philosophy at Collin College (Levi R., Author of a number of articles on Deleuze, Badiou, Zizek, Lacan, and political theory, July 24th, 2012, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/radical-ethnography-or-situated-knowledge-a-response-to-a-friend/)
4 -Your tone here sounds a bit irritated. I hope I didn’t provoke that as it wasn’t my intention. I don’t think I understood your point, but genuinely disagree with you. While I readily acknowledge that the cave painters were the cause of the paintings, I strongly disagree that the painters are a part of the being of the painting. Just as ones parents are the cause of one’s being while nonetheless the child is an autonomous being, the painting is an autonomous beings that have its own power that exceed any particular cultural or historical context. I don’t disagree that the question of what the paintings were for the cave painters is an interesting and important one, but in raising that question we’ve entered into a new machinic relation and are no longer talking about the paintings for themselves as autonomous entities that circulate throughout the world beyond their origins. What they were for a particular group is an important issue. My only point is that no work can ever be reduced– nor any entity, for that matter –can be reduced to what it is for another entity.
EntryDate
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1 -2017-01-16 08:29:09.0
Judge
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1 -Daniel Park
Opponent
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Harker AM
ParentRound
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1 -11
Round
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1 -6
Team
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -Polytechnic Liu Neg
Title
... ... @@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1 -K-Bryant
Tournament
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1 -Harvard Westlake
Caselist.CitesClass[20]
Cites
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1 -There’s no meaningful relationship between debate about the character of the law and social change—get out of the argument room
2 -Schlag ‘3 (Pierre, Distinguished Prof. @ U. of Colorado and Byron R. White Professor @ Colorado Law School, 57 U. Miami L. Rev. 1029)
3 -The presumption is that the words of the judge (if they are well crafted) will effectively produce a social reality that corresponds roughly with the words uttered. But what reason is there to believe this? False Empowerment (No. 2) The endlessly repeated question in first year, "What should the court do?" leads law students to believe that courts respond to the force of the better argument. This would be tolerable if one added two provisos:1. The better argument often means little more than the one the courts are predisposed to believe; and 2. In the phrase "force of better argument" it's important to attend not just to the "better" part, but to the other term as well. False Empowerment (No. 3) Law students first learn of many complex social and economic realities through the medium of case law. What they learn is thus the law's vision of these economic and social realities. Not surprisingly, there is an almost magical correspondence between legal categories and social or economic practices. This magical fit leads law students (later to become law professors) to have an extremely confident view of the efficacy of law. Many law students are cured of this belief-structure by a stay in the legal clinic or by law practice. n4 There is one group of people, however, who are generally not cured of this belief-structure at all, but whose faith is actually intensified. These are the people who hold prestigious judicial clerkships where an emotional proximity to and identification with their judge ("my judge") leads to an even greater confidence in the efficacy of law. These people are frequently chosen to teach in law schools. False empowerment can be disempowering. It can also lead to pessimism and despair. Many people react to a loss of faith in law or legal studies with despair or pessimism. But this is the despair and pessimism that comes from giving up a naieve or a romantic vision of law and/or legal studies. The onslaught of this despair and pessimism is a good thing. It is like the thirty-something who realizes that he is mortal and that life is brief. Generally, this is not welcome news. At the same time, it may help prevent a life spent in Heideggerian dread, tanning salons, or the interstices of footnote 357.When the academic loses faith in law or legal studies, typically that person is most troubled because she has lost the framework that makes her academic project possible. But so what? Isn't the demand that law conform to an academic project arguably a selfish one? The Con, The Joke, and The Ironic Truth The Con: In the courtroom, the appellate judge is typically seated behind an elevated bench. On the classroom blackboard the appellate judge is chalked in above the plaintiff and the defendant. This is both a reflection and a reinforcement of the belief that the appellate judge is an intellectually and politically privileged legal actor. The Joke: In actuality, the appellate judge is a person who operates in conditions of severe information deficits and whose outlook is thoroughly manipulated by professional rhetoricians. Very often he has little or no understanding of the configurations of the social field to which his rulings will apply. What's more, this is a person who is prohibited from talking about the social field, except with a highly restricted number of people. The Ironic Truth: On the other hand, because we believe the appellate judge is a particularly privileged intellectual and political actor, we contribute to making him so. Legal intellectuals like to believe that law is an intelligent enterprise. They like to believe that the law offers an interesting vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric through which to think about the world and law itself. This is naive. The political demand that law be efficacious means that law must track, must indeed incorporate popular beliefs about social and economic identities, causation, linguistic meaning, and so forth. (Those beliefs are often intellectually bereft.)The Argument Room The argument room is a place where academic advocates go to argue passionately about law and politics. (Apologies to Monty Python.) Within the room, arguments are won and lost; triumphs and defeats are had. But generally, no one outside the room pays much attention to what goes on inside the room. Sometimes there is seepage and fragments of the conversations are heard outside the room. Participants most often spend their time arguing about what should happen outside the room. This they call “knowledge” or "understanding" or "jurisprudence" or “scholarship” or “politics.” The one thing that generally cannot be talked about inside the room is the construction of the room itself. Politics (No. 1) For progressive legal thinkers, politics is a "theoretical unmentionable": The concept "politics" does a great deal of theoretical work and yet its identity remains generally immune from scrutiny. The categories (right, left) and the fundamental grammar of politics (progress, reaction, and so forth) generally go unquestioned. Oddly, while everything else seems to be contingent, conditional, contextual, and so on, the categories of politics seem to be oddly stable, nearly transcendent. Strangely, this occurs at a time when the categories, left and right (and even politics itself), seem increasingly fragile and non-referential.Still, this is an intensely political time - political not in the sense of significant social contestation (not much of that) nor in the sense of ideological struggle (not happening much either). Rather, political in the sense of very significant reorganizations and reallocations of power, wealth, and so on. Capital (for lack of a better term) is in a period of rapid self-reorganization in which it increasingly regiments precincts of life previously offering some resistance to its grammar - to wit: time, family, media, public space, wilderness, and so forth. The point is not that these precincts were immune to capital before, but rather that capital is advancing at such an intense rate to bring about a significant disruption and a qualitative change in these precincts. This change is manifest not only in the colonization of new precincts, but in the self-organization of capital *1034 (new financial vehicles) and, of course, in new literary and intellectual forms (postmodernism as both symptom and diagnosis). Meanwhile, the old categories, the old grammar, the old answers, seem to have lost some of their hold. The right is intellectually stagnant. And the left is, as a social presence, ontologically challenged. Indeed, in the United States, we seem at present to have several right wings and no left wing. This does not mean that "politics" as a social category is necessarily dead. It might mean simply that we (and others) have not understood, have not grasped, have not articulated its new configurations.What would be required on the intellectual level is a re-evaluation not only of the conventionally articulated categories, but of the social and economic ontology. At its best, postmodernism (and there has been a lot of bad reactionary and nostalgic postmodernism) is an attempt to trigger such a re-evaluation. Progressives, understandably, strive to protect their categories, grammar, and self-image from these challenges. But this is not without cost. To argue in favor of political positions is sometimes political. But it is not always political. Sometimes taking up a political argument is political and sometimes it has no consequences whatsoever. One cannot know beforehand. But it is a serious mistake to suppose that arguing in favor of a political position is in and of itself political. Very often in the legal academy, to argue for a political (or normative) position is not political at all. It simply triggers a scholastic, highly stereotyped meta-discourse about whether the arguments advanced are sound, accurate, should be adopted, or the like. Traditionally, the left has defended the victims of capitalism, imperialism, and racism. Indeed, this is an important part of what it means to be "on the left." Meanwhile, in the university, scholarly attention depends upon the production of new exciting ideas and research agendas. This poses a problem for the left: the victims of capitalism, imperialism, and racism remain the same. The political-intellectual defenses advanced on behalf of victims remain the same. This leads to a certain sense of weariness and deja vu - stereotyped arguments, standard rhetorical moves. A tendency to fight the same old fights. Machines. This is a problem. A Problem for Progressive Legal Thinkers As the author of Laying Down the Law, it just isn't clear to me that law is the sort of thing that is endlessly perfectible. At times it seems to me that law is a lot like military strategy. You can try making military strategy the best it can be (maybe you should). But when you get done it's still going to be military strategy. In that context it would be a good thing to have a few people (I volunteer) to be less than completely enthralled by military strategy. The same would go for law. It could be that law is objectionable in important respects because, well ... it's law. From this standpoint it seems odd that someone should feel authorized to say: "You should do X." Legal Thought as Arrogance The belief is that the future of the free world, the maintenance of the rule of law, the welfare of the republic, the liberation of oppressed peoples, the direction of the Court, the legitimacy of the Florida election, hangs on a law professor's next article. This is the esprit serieux gone nuts. The most significant effect of this belief is to arrest thought and end the play of ideas necessary for creativity.Yes, legal interpretation sometimes takes place in a field of pain and death. n9 But that hardly means that legal studies takes place in a field of pain and death. It is a residual objectivism that enables legal academics to believe that when they write about law - what it is or what it should be - they are somehow engaged in the same enterprise as judges. They're not. It is not that legal scholarship is without consequence. It's just that the institutional and rhetorical contexts are sufficiently different that the consequences are different as well.There is an important, indeed foundational, category mistake that sustains American legal thought - it is the supposition that because academics and judges deploy the same vocabulary and the same grammar, they are involved in largely the same enterprise. I just don't think that's true. My own view is that legal academics are but one social group (among many) competing for the articulation of what law is. Judges are another. Social movements, corporations, public interest groups, administrative officials, criminals, etc., are some of the others. For most of the history of the American law school, academics have anointed judges as privileged speakers of law. In turn, legal academics have adopted the habits, forms of thought, and rhetoric of judges - thereby accruing to themselves the authority to say what the law is.Legal academics legitimate their claim to say what the law is by fashioning law as an academic discipline requiring expertise. Legal academics then hold themselves out as possessing this expertise. Among those critical theorists who seek to contest this expertise, one can distinguish two approaches. One approach is to try to reveal the emptiness of the claims to expertise among the legal intelligentsia and to reveal how these claims nonetheless gain power. Another approach is to try to relocate the authority to say what the law is among those who have been excluded.I do not see these approaches as antithetical, but rather as complementary. Furthermore, both approaches will in fact reinscribe, will performatively reinforce, precisely the sort of rhetorics and hierarchies they contest. No way around that.I think critical thinkers all do this - though in different ways. And it's certainly worthwhile pointing out how it is being done. At the same time, no one is safe or immune from this sort of criticism.To learn to laugh at what is taken seriously, but is not serious, is a serious thing to do. To take seriously what is not, is a drag. A Problem for Progressives
4 - Progressives wish to pursue a politics that is efficacious. This means keeping track both of the social context in which progressivism articulates itself (on the side of the subject), and the social context in *1038 which progressivism seeks to register its results (on the side of the object). But this work of reconnaissance - a work that is necessary - may bring unwelcome news: namely that progressivism unmodified is no longer a terribly cogent project. Choices will have to be made: to defend progressive thought against this unwelcome news or to put the identity of progressive projects at risk by encountering this unwelcome news. Formalism is virtually an inexorable condition of legal scholarship in the following sense: a legal academic generally writes scholarship outside the social pressures of what a lawyer would call real stakes, real clients, or real consequences. The failure of an argument in the pages of the Stanford Law Review is generally very different from the failure of an argument in a brief or an opinion. The difference in context changes the character and consequences of the acts - even if the authors use exactly the same words.Binary and Not (Insider/Outsider, Immanent/Transcendent, Mind/Body etc. etc. etc.)It's one thing to deploy oppositional binarism to describe the broad structures of a text. It's quite another to adopt binarism as an intellectual lifestyle choice. Oppositional binarism has a special hold/appeal in American law precisely because: 1) law is often identified with what appellate courts say it is; and 2) by the time a case gets to an appellate court, the reductionism of litigation and the binary structure of the adversarial orientation has reduced the dispute to an either/or (e.g., liberty vs. equality or formal equality vs. substantive equality, and so on).But ... .Oppositional binarism flounders because law does not have fixed, uncontroversial grids. Hence, for instance, the notion that a person is an insider or an outsider just doesn't track with much of anything (except perhaps the author's own formalism).If one thinks about it, a person is an insider in this respect (he's white) but an outsider in that respect (he's working class) and then an insider with respect to his pedigree (he went to Columbia) but really an outsider within his insider Columbia status because he was profoundly *1039 alienated from the Columbia social scene and blah blah blah. After a while (very soon, actually) the insider/outsider distinction loses its hold. The point is, unless you happen to have a well-formed, non-overlapping fixed grid (and this would be a very strange thing for a critical theorist to have!), oppositional binarism (like everything else) ultimately collapses.Interestingly, there was a moment of slippage in the history of critical legal studies (or perhaps the fem-crits) when binary oppositionalism slid from a heuristic into (of all things) a metaphysic!The Machines In Keith Aoki's comic strip, the agents of R.E.A.S.O.N. and P.I.E.R.R.E. fight each other in a comically cliched fashion. It is Nick Fury jurisprudence. And there is something strikingly right about that (however humbling it may be for me and others).One of the things that happens in the Nick Fury comic strips (as in Keith Aoki's contribution) is that the antagonists deploy machines against each other. In legal thought, we have a lot of machines in operation. n13 By this I mean that a great deal of so-called legal thought is not really thought at all - but the deployment of a series of rhetorical operations over and over again to perform actions (usually destructive in character) on other peoples' texts or persons. Every argument tends to become a machine. Over time, legal academics tend to become their own arguments. Then, of course, they become their own machines. At that point, it's time to move on.
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1 -2017-01-16 08:29:09.0
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1 -Daniel Park
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1 -Harker AM
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1 -Polytechnic Liu Neg
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1 -K-Schlag
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1 -Harvard Westlake
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1 -The aff will be ruined by its own success—to have one’s status as exception legally sanctioned by the law is the equivalent of smelting one’s self new chains
2 -
3 -Dolar 6 (Mladen, Jan Van Eyck Academie, A Voice and Nothing More, p. 177-180)//HarvardBS
4 -But in her role as artist she is also the capricious prima donna; there is the whole comedy of her claims for her rights. She wants to be exempt from work, she requires special privileges, work allegedly harms her voice, she wants due honor to be paid to her services, she wants to be granted a place apart. She "does not want mere admiration, she wants to be admired exactly in the way she prescribes" (p. 362). But the people, despite their general esteem for her, do not want to hear about any of this, they are cold in their judgment- they respect her, but want her to remain one of them. So there is the whole charade of the artist who is not appreciated as she deserves, she does not get the laurels that she thinks belong to her, she puts up a preposterous act of genius not understood by her contemporaries. Out of protest she announces that she will cut down on her coloratura—this will teach them a lesson—and maybe she does, only nobody notices. She keeps coming up with all sorts of whims, she lets herself be begged, and only reluctantly gives in. There is the comedy of hurt narcissism, megalomania, an inflated ego, the high mission of the artist's overblown vocation. So one day she indeed stops singing, firmly believing that there will be some huge scandal, but nobody gives a damn, everybody goes about their business as usual, without noticing a lack—that is, without noticing the lack of a lack, the absence of the gap. Curious, how mistaken she is in her calculations, the clever creature, so mistaken that one might fancy she has made no calculations at all but is only being driven on by her destiny, which in our world cannot be anything but a sad one. Of her own accord she abandons her singing, of her own accord she destroys the power she has gained over people's hearts. How could she ever have gained that power, since she knows so little about these hearts of ours? ... Josephine's road must go downhill. The time will soon come when her last notes sound and die into silence. She is a small episode in the eternal history of our people, and the people will get over the loss of her.... Perhaps we shall not miss so very much after all, while Josephine . . . will happily lose herself in the numberless throngs of the heroes of our people, and soon, since we are no historians, will rise to the heights of redemption and be forgotten like all her brothers. (p. 376) Despite her vanity and megalomania, people can easily do without her, she will be forgotten, no traces of her art will be left—this is not a people of archivists, and besides, there is no way one could store, collect, archivize her art, which consists purely in the gap. So this is the second strategy: the strategy of art, of art as the non-exceptional exception, which can arise anywhere, at any moment, and is made of anything—of ready-made objects—as long as it can provide them with a gap, make them make a break. It is the art of the minimal difference. Yet the moment it makes its appearance, this difference is bungled by the very gesture which brought it about, the moment this gesture and this difference become instituted, the moment art turns into an institution to which a certain place is allotted and certain limits are drawn. Its power is at the same time its powerlessness, the very status of art veils what is at stake. Hence the whole farce of the egocentric megalomania and misunderstood genius which occupies the major part of the story. Josephine wants the impossible: she wants a place beyond the law, beyond equality- and equality is the essential feature of the mouse-folk, equality in tininess, in their miniature size (hence her claims to greatness are all the more comical). But at the same time she wants her status as exception to be legally sanctioned, symbolically recognized, properly glorified. She wants to be, like the sovereign, both inside and outside the law. She wants her uniqueness to be recognized as a special social role, and the moment art does this, it is done for. The very break it has introduced is reduced to just another social function; the break becomes the institution of the break, its place is circumscribed, and as an exception it can fit very well into the rule—that is, into the rule of law. As an artist who wants veneration and recognition she will be forgotten, relegated to the gallery of memory, that is, of oblivion. Her voice, which opens a crack in the seamless continuity of the law, is betrayed and destroyed by the very status of art, which reinserts it and closes the gap. At best it can be a tiny recess: “Piping is our people’s daily speech, only many a one pipes his whole life long and does not know it, where here piping is set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while" (p. 370). Just for a little while, but by setting us free, it only helps us to bear the rest all the better. The miniature size of the mouse is enough to open the gap, but once it is instituted and recognized, its importance shrinks to the size of the mouse, despite its delusions of grandeur. It is the voice tied to the mast, and the oarsmen, although they may hear it in the flash of a brief recess, will continue to be deaf Thus we do not end up with Kafka's version of Ulysses but are stuck with Ulysses tout court—or, rather, with the Adorno and Horkheimer version. Josephine's sublime voice will finally be den Miiusen gepfiffen, as the German expression has it (and this German phrase may well be at the origin of the whole story), that is, piped to the mice, piped in vain to someone who cannot understand or appreciate it—not because of some mass obtuseness, but because of the nature of art itself We could say: the art is her mousetrap. So the second strategy fails, it is ruined by its own success, and the transcendence that art promised turned out to be of such a nature that it could easily fit in as one part of the division of labor; the disruptive power of the gap turned out to accommodate the continuity all too well.
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1 -2017-01-16 08:29:10.0
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1 -Daniel Park
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1 -Harker AM
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1 -Polytechnic Liu Neg
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1 -K-Dolar
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1 -Harvard Westlake
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1 -The claim that free speech leads to democratic debate and social progress is a neoliberal myth – the AFF’s faith in the free exchange of ideas displaces a focus on direct action and re-entrenches multiple forms of oppression.
2 -Tillett-Saks 13 Andrew Tillett-Saks (Labor organizer and critical activist author for Truth-Out and Counterpunch), Neoliberal Myths, Counterpunch, 11/7/13, http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/07/neoliberal-myths/ //LADI
3 -In the wake of the Brown University shout-down of Ray Kelly, champion of the NYPD’s racist stop-and-frisk policy and racial profiling in general, the debate has resurfaced. Rather than talking past the anti-protestors’ arguments, they need to be addressed directly. The prototypical argument in denouncing the protestors is not a defense of Ray Kelly’s racism. It is twofold: First, that a free-flowing discourse on the matter will allow all viewpoints to be weighed and justice to inevitably emerge victorious on its merits. Second, that stopping a bigot from speaking in the name of freedom is self-defeating as it devolves our democratic society into tyranny. The twofold argument against the protestors stems from two central myths of neoliberalism. The argument for free discourse as the enlightened path to justice ignores that direct action protest is primarily responsible for most of the achievements we would consider ‘progress’ historically (think civil rights, workers’ rights, suffrage, etc.), not the free exchange of ideas. The claim that silencing speech in the name of freedom is self-defeating indulges in the myth of the pre-existence of a free society in which freedom of speech must be preciously safeguarded, while ignoring the woeful shortcomings of freedom of speech in our society which must be addressed before there is anything worth protecting. Critics of the protest repeatedly denounced direct action in favor of ideological debate as the path to social justice. “It would have been more effective to take part in a discussion rather than flat out refuse to have him speak,” declared one horrified student to the Brown Daily Herald. Similarly, Brown University President Christina Paxson labeled the protest a detrimental “affront to democratic civil society,” and instead advocated “intellectual rigor, careful analysis, and…respectful dialogue and discussion.” Yet the implication that masterful debate is the engine of social progress could not be more historically unfounded. Only in the fairy tale histories of those interested in discouraging social resistance does ‘respectful dialogue’ play a decisive role in struggles against injustice. The eight-hour workday is not a product of an incisive question-and-answer session with American robber barons. Rather, hundreds of thousands of workers conducted general strikes during the nineteenth century, marched in the face of military gunfire at Haymarket Square in 1886, and occupied scores of factories in the 1930’s before the eight-hour work day became American law. Jim Crow was not defeated with the moral suasion of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches. Rather, hundreds of thousands marched on Washington, suffered through imprisonment by racist Southern law enforcement, and repeatedly staged disruptive protests to win basic civil rights. On a more international scale, Colonialism, that somehow-oft-forgotten tyranny that plagued most of the globe for centuries, did not cease thanks to open academic dialogue. Bloody resistance, from Algeria to Vietnam to Panama to Cuba to Egypt to the Philippines to Cameroon and to many other countries, was the necessary tool that unlocked colonial shackles. Different specific tactics have worked in different contexts, but one aspect remains constant: The free flow of ideas and dialogue, by itself, has rarely been enough to generate social progress. It is not that ideas entirely lack social power, but they have never been sufficient in winning concessions from those in power to the oppressed. Herein lies neoliberal myth number one—that a liberal free-market society will inexorably and inherently march towards greater freedom. To the contrary, direct action has always proved necessary.
4 -The AFF’s assumption of a property right to free speech assumes an overly idealistic notion of society that ignores economic barriers and is a product of the neoliberal myth that individuality should be protected at all costs.
5 -Tillett-Saks 13 Andrew Tillett-Saks (Labor organizer and critical activist author for Truth-Out and Counterpunch), Neoliberal Myths, Counterpunch, 11/7/13, http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/07/neoliberal-myths/ //LADI
6 -Yet there are many critics of the protestors who do not claim Ray Kelly’s policies can be defeated with sharp debate. Instead, they argue that any protest in the name of freedom which blocks the speech of another is self-defeating, causing more damage to a free society by ‘silencing’ another than any potential positive effect of the protest. The protestors, the argument goes, tack society back to totalitarian days of censorship rather than forward to greater freedom. The protestors, however well intentioned, have pedantically thwarted our cherished liberal democracy by imposing their will on others. The premise of this argument is neoliberal myth number two—that we live in a society with ‘freedom of speech’ so great it must be protected at all costs. This premise stems from an extremely limited conception of ‘freedom of speech’. Free speech should not be considered the mere ability to speak freely and inconsequentially in a vacuum, but rather the ability to have one’s voice heard equally. Due to the nature of private media and campaign finance in American society, this ability is woefully lopsided as political and economic barriers abound. Those with money easily have their voices heard through media and politics, those without have no such freedom. There is a certain irony (and garish privilege) of upper-class Ivy Leaguers proclaiming the sanctity of a freedom of speech so contingent upon wealth and political power. There is an even greater irony that the fight for true freedom of speech, if history is any indicator, must entail more direct action against defenders of the status quo such as Ray Kelly. To denounce such action out of indulgence in the neoliberal myth of a sacrosanct, already existing, freedom of speech is to condemn the millions in this country with no meaningful voice to eternal silence. Every few years, an advocate of oppression is shouted down. Every few years, the protestors are denounced. They are asked to trust open, ‘civil’ dialogue to stop oppression, despite a historical record of struggle and progress that speaks overwhelmingly to the contrary. They are asked to restrain their protest for freedom so to protect American freedom of speech, despite the undeniable fact that our private media and post-Citizens United political system hear only dollars, not the voices of the masses. Some will claim that both sides have the same goal, freedom, but merely differ on tactics. Yet the historical record is too clear and the growing dysfunctions in our democracy too gross to take any such claims as sincere. In a few years, when protestors shout down another oppressive conservative, we will be forced to lucidly choose which side we are on: The oppressors or the protestors. The status quo or progress.
7 -The AFF’s notion of the marketplace of ideas is neoliberal rhetoric designed to strengthen corporate power.
8 -Whatler 13 Stuart Whatley, Speak for Yourself: A Meditation on the Marketplace of Ideas, Los Angeles Review of Books, 10/4/13, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/speak-for-yourself-a-meditation-on-the-marketplace-of-ideas/#! //LADI
9 -The very notion of a “marketplace of ideas” tracks exactly with neoliberalism’s rising star. This can be seen through Nexis searches of the term, as well as through Google’s n-gram book search between 1800 and 2008. Since first breaking into common usage with a couple dozen mentions in the 1970s, its appearances have increased exponentially decade by decade in books, newspapers, journals, and similar forms of media to the point that it is now published hundreds of times every year. Though use of the phrase actually declined very slightly in books between 2000 and 2008 (not to any degree of significance), it increased in news media year by year over the same course of time — especially between 2008 and 2012. While public policy can be altered and reversed from one administration or congress to another, the fideistic embrace of market vocabulary across political divides indicates that it has become more deeply embedded — instead of being the subject of political debate, it designates the coordinates of what is debatable as politics. It did not take until the 1970s for the “marketplace of ideas” to develop, but it did take that long for it to really become prevalent. Before then it had mainly been the subject of legal opinions, notably in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1919 Abrams v. United States dissent. The law scholar Ronald Collins points out that Holmes used the metaphor, if not the exact phrase, when he wrote, “The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” For his part, Holmes was influenced by John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which in turn drew from John Milton’s Areopagitica, which asked, “Who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” With Holmes as the more direct line of inspiration, the actual words would come to form decades later in other free speech and free press court opinions, including United States v. Rumely (1953) and Lamont v. Postmaster General (1965). In the latter, Justice William Brennan opined that, “The dissemination of ideas can accomplish nothing if otherwise willing addressees are not free to receive and consider them. It would be a barren marketplace of ideas that had only sellers and no buyers.” Back to the early 1970s: big business was a beleaguered beast, feeling the need to counter the popular social movements of the previous decade, and found it prudent to press-gang the “marketplace of ideas” into its service. After a series of crises in capitalism — stagflation, the collapse of Bretton Woods, the 1973 Oil Shock — the solution eventually proffered was even more capitalism. Which is to say, the failure of postwar Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies to turn the economy around led in time to a loss of faith in their effectiveness and to the ouster of leftward-leaning leaders Jimmy Carter and James Callahan. When the recessionary waves did eventually subside, the timing allowed for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to dance on their predecessors’ political graves, accredit their own success to market fundamentalism, and move forward full bore with its implementation through tax cuts and financial deregulation. As Reagan later declared on the New York Stock Exchange floor, “We’re going to turn the bull loose.” And so, the “marketplace of ideas” began to appear for the first time in the mainstream press — most notably in reports quoting corporate public relations professionals in defense of their respective industries. To take one early example, in a July 1975 U.S. News and World Report interview titled “Why Business Has a Black Eye,” Alexander B. Trowbridge, president of a corporate advocacy organization called the Conference Board, addressed questions about the lugubrious public favorability of big business: We businessmen have to get out individually into this marketplace of ideas. We have to be far more involved in our communities. We have to be in closer touch with the groups of people with whom we have close contact — our employees, out stockholders, the community leaders in places where we have our plants and offices, and our customers and suppliers. We need to do a better job not only in supporting them with better products, but in explaining the workings of our business system and what makes it all tick. A March 1976 Newsweek article by Michael Ruby and Gretchen Browne titled “Oil: The Mobil Manner” followed, reporting on a full-page advertisement taken out by Mobil in response to a critical NBC News documentary about gasoline prices. According to Mobil’s vice president of public affairs, Herbert Schmertz, “The ad was an effort to participate in the market-place of ideas” (Schmertz’s line would be quoted again two years later in a Harvard Business Review story by Louis Banks, titled “Taking on the Hostile Media”). Such participation, the reporters note, had become a trend of late. And it would only continue, to the point where even Jimmy Carter invoked the metaphor in an unwittingly ironic 1977 statement, declaring Voice of America independent from State Department propagandizing: The agency must not operate in a covert, manipulative or propagandistic way … Under this administration, Voice of America will be solely responsible for the content of its news broadcasts — for there is no more valued coin than candor in the international marketplace of ideas. While it’s unclear how much of this was a consciously cooperative effort on the part of business and pro-market advocates, it was, regardless, in keeping with the corporate PR strategy of the time — what sociologists David Miller and William Dinan have labeled the “third wave of corporate political activism.” That wave rode from the late 1960s through the 1970s, and saw vast and rapid expansion in corporate lobbying, the founding of numerous business-funded think tanks (including the Heritage Foundation, an early influence on the Reagan presidential platform), and increased media involvement on the part of businesses across the board. According to Miller and Dinan, a collective corporate strategy was effectively launched in a private August 1971 memo from corporate lawyer (and later Supreme Court justice) Lewis F. Powell Jr. to US Chamber of Commerce Education Committee chairman Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., in which Powell wrote: “It is time for American business — which has demonstrated the greatest capacity in all history to produce and to influence consumer decisions — to apply its great talents vigorously to the preservation of the system itself.”
10 -Impact is extinction – neoliberalism destabilizes neurological functioning, dissolves ethical models and creates an endless cycle of environmental crisis creation
11 -Bone 12 (John, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland, the Deregulation Ethic and the Conscience of Capitalism: How the Neoliberal ‘Free Market’ Model Undermines Rationality and Moral Conduct, Globalizations, October 2012, Vol. 9, No. 5, pp. 651–665)//mm
12 -
13 -First, as Durkheim observed, the ability to act with relative impunity is both individually as well as socially corrosive (Durkheim, 1925, 1960, 1965). Compounding this situation, the mutual social estrangement that occurs with increasing social polarisation diminishes the extent to which actors on both sides of the divide identify with each other as, raising the potential for stereotyping, distrust, prejudice and stigma (Aronson, 1995; Bone, 2010; Goffman, 1963). This process can evidently produce a situation where an exclusive elite begin to view the masses as ‘other’ which, in turn, leads to demonization and reduced empathy, legitimating a hardening of attitudes to the plight of those negatively affected by the actions of the powerful, a situation that has arguably been much at play during the neoliberal era. Once more, as has been identified throughout our history, psycho-social estrangement and the concomitant negative stereotyping and prejudice that it cultivates, further enhances the capacity for un-empathic and amoral conduct, with potentially fateful outcomes, particularly where this can occur with few constraints. It may even be the case, as has been argued, that social arrangements and values such as those prevalent in contemporary capitalism not only disinhibit anti-social behaviours but actually undermine an otherwise natural predisposition towards pro-social and empathic conduct (Olson, 2005). Conclusion As above, the much promulgated notion that deregulated economies promote freedom, wealth and the greater good can be regarded as a touchstone of late twentieth and early twenty-first century capitalist societies, as was the case a century before. Thus, the notion of competitive, rational and deregulated markets, operating by the rational laws and governed by the ‘invisible hand’, are once more presented as being the best vehicle providing economic efficiency and the wider public good, with any restraint merely operating to the detriment of the latter. From this standpoint, the brief intervening period of managed capitalism, or ‘embedded liberalism’, appears as a minor detour, as opposed to the sea change that it was once assumed to represent within major developed Western societies (Harvey, 2005; Ruggie, 1982). It has been extensively argued, however, that the return to the economics of the past has revived capitalism’s worst irrationalities and instabilities, culminating in the credit crisis, as well as its capacity to generate profound inequities (Krugman, 2009). This paper asserts that, in their contribution to the above, the deregulatory features of neoliberal capitalism imply more than mere structural adjustments to economic organisation, but might also be understood as impacting upon the aspects of individual neurological functioning that are correlated with inhibiting anti-social self gratifying behaviour. Thus, without a deeply neurologically ‘engrained’ set of formal and informal rules, together with a concomitant commitment to their adherence, the habituated emotional ‘stop’ signs that routinely inhibit socially and economically destructive conduct dissolve, as firm injunctions become pliable obstacles to be ‘negotiated’ or simply ignored. Overall, by undermining or even eradicating the regulatory walls that guide individual conscience—and, in turn, socially and economically rational and responsible conduct—licentiousness, self interest and short term expediency flourish, raising the potential for further ‘irrational’ destabilization of society and economy and the generation of continuing crises. In this way deregulation, of itself, compounds the deleterious effects of the value system that drives it. From this perspective, the ‘spirit’ of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and its organisational ‘form’ appears as almost the inverse of the rational, measured and moral credo that Weber once imagined (1930).
14 -Thus the alternative is an ethic of social flesh. That foregrounds embodied interdependence, substituting an ecological view of relationships for the aff’s commodity thinking – only the alternative can produce ethical institutional decisionmaking
15 -Beasley and Bacchi 7
16 -(Chris, Prof. of Politics @ University of Adelaide, Carol, Prof. Emeritus @ University of Adelaide, “Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity ~-~- towards an ethic of `social flesh'”, Feminist Theory, 2007 8: 279)
17 -
18 -The political vocabulary of social flesh has significant implications for democratic visions. Because it conceptualizes citizens as socially embodied – as interconnected mutually reliant flesh – in a more thoroughgoing sense than the languages of trust, care, responsibility and generosity, it resists accounts of political change as making transactions between the ‘less fortunate’ and ‘more privileged’, more trusting, more caring, more responsible or more generous. Social flesh is political metaphor in which fleshly sociality is profoundly levelling. As a result, it challenges meliorist reforms that aim to protect the ‘vulnerable’ from the worst effects of social inequality, including the current distribution of wealth. A political ethic of embodied intersubjectivity requires us to consider fleshly interconnection as the basis of a democratic sociality, demanding a rather more far-reaching reassessment of national and international institutional arrangements than political vocabularies that rest upon extending altruism. Relatedly, it provides a new basis for thinking about the sorts of institutional arrangements necessary to acknowledge social fleshly existence, opening up ‘the scope of what counts as relevant’ (Shildrick, 2001: 238). For example, it allows a challenge to current conceptualizations that construct attention to the ‘private sphere’ as compensatory rather than as necessary (Beasley and Bacchi, 2000: 350). We intend to pursue the relationship between social flesh and democratic governance in future papers. Conclusion In this paper we focus on various vocabularies of social interconnection intended to offer a challenge to the ethos of atomistic individualism associated with neo-liberalism and develop a new ethical ideal called ‘social flesh’. Despite significant differences in the several vocabularies canvassed in this paper, we note that most of the trust and care writers conceive the social reform of atomistic individualism they claim to address in terms of a presumed moral or ethical deficiency within the disposition of individuals. Hence, they reinstate the conception of the independent active self in certain ways. Moreover, there is a disturbing commonality within all these accounts: an ongoing conception of asymmetrical power relations between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, ‘carers’ and ‘cared for’, ‘altruistic’ and ‘needy’. While widely used terms like trust and care clearly remain vocabularies around which social debate may be mobilized, and hence are not to be dismissed (see Pocock, 2006), we suggest that there are important reasons for questioning their limits and their claims to offer progressive alternative understandings of social life. In this setting, we offer the concept of social flesh as a way forward in rethinking the complex nature of the interaction between subjectivity, embodiment, intimacy, social institutions and social interconnection. Social flesh generalizes the insight that trusting/caring/ altruistic practices already take place on an ongoing basis to insist that the broad, complex sustenance of life that characterizes embodied subjectivity and intersubjective existence be acknowledged. As an ethico-political starting point, ‘social flesh’ highlights human embodied interdependence. By drawing attention to shared embodied reliance, mutual reliance, of people across the globe on social space, infrastructure and resources, it offers a decided challenge to neo-liberal conceptions of the autonomous self and removes the social distance and always already given distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’. There is no sense here of ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’; rather we are all recognized as receivers of socially generated goods and services. Social flesh also marks our diversity, challenging the privileging of normative over ‘other’ bodies. Finally, because social flesh necessarily inhabits a specific geographical space, environmentalist efforts to preserve that space take on increased salience (Macken, 2004: 25). By these means, the grounds are created for defending a politics beyond assisting the ‘less fortunate’. Social flesh, therefore, refuses the residues of ‘noblesse oblige’ that still appear to linger in emphasis upon vulnerability and altruism within the apparently reformist ethical ideals of trust/respect, care, responsibility and even generosity. In so doing it puts into question the social privilege that produces inequitable vulnerability and the associated need for ‘altruism’. Vital debates about appropriate distribution of social goods, environmental politics, professional and institutional power and democratic processes are reopened.
19 -
20 -Neolib-Framework
21 -Role of the ballot is to foreground a particular political vocabulary – how society is framed and understand gives debaters’ skill development a particular trajectory and meaning – the alternative is crucial to inserting the pedagogical energy of the debate into a broader circuit of anti-neoliberal public spaces and commons
22 -Giroux 13
23 -(Henry Giroux, currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University, “Hope in the Age of Looming Authoritarianism,” 02 December 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20307-hope-in-the-age-of-looming-authoritarianism#_edn2)
24 -
25 -We live at a time in which the crisis of politics is inextricably connected to the crisis of ideas, education and agency. What must be remembered is that any viable politics or political culture can emerge only out of a determined effort to provide the economic conditions, public spaces, pedagogical practices and social relations in which individuals have the time, motivation and knowledge to engage in acts of translation that reject the privatization of the public sphere, the lure of ethno-racial or religious purity, the emptying of democratic traditions, the crumbling of the language of commonality, and the decoupling of critical education from the unfinished demands of a global democracy.¶ Young people, artists, intellectuals, educators and workers in the United States and globally are increasingly addressing what it means politically and pedagogically to confront the impoverishment of public discourse, the collapse of democratic values and commitments, the erosion of its public spheres and the widely promoted modes of citizenship that have more to do with forgetting than with critical learning. Collectively, they provide varied suggestions for rescuing modes of critical agency and social grievances that have been abandoned or orphaned to the dictates of global neoliberalism, a punishing state and a systemic militarization of public life. In opposition to the attacks on democratic institutions, values and modes of governance, activists all over the globe are offering an incisive language of analysis, a renewed sense of political commitment, different democratic visions and a politics of possibility.¶ Political exhaustion and impoverished intellectual visions are fed by the widely popular assumption that there are no alternatives to the present state of affairs. Within the increasing corporatization of everyday life, market values trump ethical considerations enabling the economically privileged and financial elite to retreat into the safe, privatized enclaves of family, religion and consumption. Those without the luxury of such choices pay a terrible price in the form of material suffering and the emotional hardship and political disempowerment that are its constant companions. Even those who live in the relative comfort of the middle classes must struggle with a poverty of time in an era in which the majority must work more than they ever have to make ends meet. Moreover, in the face of the 2008 economic crisis caused by gangster financial service institutions such as J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Barclay and Merrill Lynch, among others, the middle class is dissolving into the jaws of a death-machine that has robbed them of their homes, health care, jobs and dignity.¶ The ruling elites have taken flight from any sense of social and ethical responsibility and their willing and active repression of conscience has opened the door to new forms of authoritarianism in which the arrogance of corporate power finds its underside in a hatred of all others that threaten its power. Some contemporary theorists suggest that politics as a site of contestation, critical exchange and engagement is in a state of terminal arrest or has simply come to an end. However, too little attention is paid to what it means to think through how the struggle over democracy is inextricably linked to creating and sustaining public spheres where individuals can be engaged as political agents equipped with the skills, capacities and knowledge they need not only as autonomous political agents but also to believe that such struggles are worth taking up. The growth of cynicism in American society may say less about the reputed apathy of the populace than about the bankruptcy of the old political languages and the need for a new language and vision for clarifying intellectual, ethical, economic and political projects, especially as they work to reframe questions of agency, ethics and meaning for a substantive democracy.¶ In opposition to the attacks on critical thought, engaged citizenship, the discourse of hope and the erosion of "the public character of spaces, relations, and institutions,"xx young people, workers, intellectuals, artists and environmentalists are once again taking seriously Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's insistence "to hang on to intellectual and real freedom" and to ensure that thinking does not become "immune to the suggestion of the status quo,"xxi thus losing its "secure hold on possibility."xxii Increasingly, young people and others concerned about a substantive democracy are taking political stands; they are becoming more willing to cross boundaries, join questions of understanding and power, and bring into being with passion and conscience new ways of engaging with the world. In doing so, this diverse group of activists, intellectuals and concerned global citizens is intervening in the world on several registers.¶ Such groups, while in their infancy, are determined to unmask society's most pernicious myths, restage power in productive ways, rescue the promise of social agency from those places where it has been denied, and further the ethical and political imperative to provide an accurate historical account of the racial state and racial power. More and more, youths and others marginalized by race and class are refusing the dominant scripts of official authority and the limitations they impose upon individual and social agency. Progressives and oppositional groups are rethinking what it would mean to engage spaces of neglect and human suffering such as schools, shelters, food banks, union halls and other sites of potential resistance as starting points from which to build unfamiliar, potential worlds of hope, learning and struggle. In the process of thinking seriously about structures of power, state formation, race, sexuality, technology, class and pedagogy, these new modes of resistance never substitute moral indignation for the hard work of contributing to critical education and enabling people to expand the horizons of their own sense of agency and collectively challenge structures of power.¶ From Québec and Athens to Paris and New York City, these emerging collective movements bristle with a deeply rooted refusal to serve up well-worn and obvious truths, reinforce existing relations of power or bid retreat to an official rendering of common sense that promotes "a corrosive and demoralizing silence."xxiii What emerges in these distinct but politically allied voices is a pedagogy of disruption, critique, recovery and possibility, one that recognizes that viable politics cannot exist without will and awareness, and that critical education motivates and provides a crucial foundation for understanding and intervening in the world. Freedom in this discourse means learning how to think critically and act courageously - refusing to substitute empowering forms of education for mind-deadening training and numbing methods of memorizing data and test taking.¶ Collectively these emerging movements of resistance are developing an understanding of politics that demands not only a new language but also necessitates a broader vision, sense of organization and robust strategies that are critical and visionary. This commitment translates into a pedagogy and politics capable of illuminating the anti-democratic forces and sites that threaten human life; at the same time, its visionary nature cracks open the present to reveal new horizons, different futures and the promise of a global democracy. And yet, under the reign of casino capitalism, racist xenophobic nationalisms and other anti-democratic forces, notions of citizenship are increasingly privatized, commodified or subject to various religious and ideological fundamentalisms that feed a sense of powerlessness and disengagement from democratic struggles, if not politics itself. The culture of cruelty is alive and well as casino capitalism presents misfortune as a weakness and the logic of the market instructs individuals to rely on their own wits if they fall on hard times, especially because the state has washed its hands of any responsibility for the fate of its citizens. Hope is in the air, but it is crucial to recognize that the creeping authoritarianism descending upon the United States will not give up power easily, if at all. Consequently, an impatient patience proceeds slowly and persistently offers the formative culture necessary for feeding a radical imagination waiting to manifest itself concretely in a new vision, social movement and fierce urgency of struggle.
26 -this question of the ballot is an incalculable ethical directive - Every argument they make is dependent on this flawed symbolic order that precludes effective analysis because capitalism subsumes truth claims.
27 -Zizek and Daly ‘4
28 -(Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher, Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, and Glyn Daly, Lecturer and Instructor, Political Theory and Thought, Northampton University, 2004, Conversations With Zizek, p. 14-19)
29 -
30 -This is not to endorse any 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 population. 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 judgement in a neutral marketplace. 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 of 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 is 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 to reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a 'glitch' in an otherwise sound matrix. Risking the impossible / The response of the left to global capitalism cannot be one of retreat into the nation-state or into organicist forms of ‘community’ and popular identities that currently abound in Europe and elsewhere. For Zizek it is, rather, a question of working with the very excesses that, in a Lacanian sense, are in capitalism more than capitalism. It is a question, therefore, of transcending the provincial ‘universalism’ of capitalism. To illustrate the point, Zizek draws attention to the category of ‘intellectual property’ and the increasingly absurd attempts to establish restrictive dominion over technological advances – genetic codes, DNA structures, digital communications, pharmaceutical breakthroughs, computer programs and so on – that either affect us all and/or to which there is a sense of common human entitlement. Indeed, the modern conjuncture of capitalism is more and more characterized by a prohibitive culture: the widespread repression of those forms of research and development that have real emancipatory potential beyond exclusive profiteering; the restriction of information that has direct consequences for the future of humanity; the fundamental denial that social equality could be sustained by the abundance generated by capitalism. Capitalism typically endeavors to constrain the very dimensions of the universal that are enabled by it and simultaneously to resist all those developments that disclose its specificity-artificiality as merely one possible mode of being. / The left, therefore, must seek to subvert these ungovernable excesses in the direction of a political (and politicizing) universalism; or what Balibar would call egaliberte. This means that the left should demand more globalization not less. Where neo-liberals speak the language of freedom – either in terms of individual liberty or the free movement of goods and capital – the left should use this language to combat today’s racist obsessions with ‘economic refugees’, ‘immigrants’ and so on, and insist that freedoms are meaningless without the social resources to participate in those freedoms. Where there is talk of universal rights, the left must affirm a responsibility to the universal; one that emphasizes real human solidarity and does not lose sight of the abject within differential discourses. Reversing the well-known environmentalists’ slogan, we might say that the left has to involve itself in thinking locally and acting globally. That is to say, it should attend to the specificity of today’s political identities within the context of their global (capitalist) conditions of possibilities precisely in order to challenge those conditions. / Yet here I would venture that, despite clearly stated differences (Butler et al., 2000), the political perspective of Zizek is not necessarily opposed to that of Laclau and Mouffe and that a combined approach is fully possible. While Zizek is right to stress the susceptibility of today’s ‘alternative’ forms of hegemonic engagement to deradicalization within a postmodern-p.c. imaginary – a kind of hegemonization of the very terrain (the politico-cultural conditions of possibility) that produces and predisposes the contemporary logics of hegemony – it is equally true to say that the type of political challenge that Zizek has in mind is one that can only advance through the type of hegemonic subversion that Laclau and Mouffe have consistently stressed in their work. The very possibility of a political universalism is one that depends on a certain hegemonic breaking out of the existing conventions/grammar of hegemonic engagement. / It is along these lines that Zizek affirms the need for a more radical intervention in the political imagination. The modern (Machiavellian) view of politics is usually presented in terms of a basic tension between (potentially) unlimited demands/appetites and limited resources; a view which is implicit in the predominant ‘risk society’ perspective where the central (almost Habermasian) concern is with more and better scientific information. The political truth of today’s world, however, is rather the opposite of this view. That is to say, the demands of the official left (especially the various incarnations of the Third Way left) tend to articulate extremely modest demands in the face of a virtually unlimited capitalism that is more than capable of providing every person on this planet with a civilized standard of living. For Zizek, a confrontation with the obscenities of abundance capitalism also requires a transformation of the ethico-political imagination. It is no longer a question of developing ethical guidelines within the existing political framework (the various institutional and corporate ‘ethical committees’) but of developing a politicization of ethics; an ethics of the Real. The starting point here is an insistence on the unconditional autonomy of the subject; of accepting that as human beings we are ultimately responsible for our actions and being-in-the-world up to and including the construction of the capitalist system itself. Far from simple norm-making or refining/reinforcing existing social protocol, an ethics of the Real tends to emerge through norm-breaking and in finding new directions that, by definition, involve traumatic changes: i.e. the Real in genuine ethical challenge. An ethics of the Real does not simply defer to the impossible (or infinite Otherness) as an unsurpassable horizon that already marks every act as a failure, incomplete and so on. Rather, such an ethics is one that fully accepts contingency but which is nonetheless prepared to risk the impossible in the sense of breaking out of standardized positions. We might say that it is an ethics which is not only politically motivated but which also draws its strength from the political itself. / For Zizek an ethics of the Real (or Real ethics) means that we cannot rely on any form of symbolic Other that would endorse our (in)decisions and (in)actions: for example, the ‘neutral’ financial data of the stockmarkets; the expert knowledge of Beck’s ‘new modernity’ scientists; the economic and military councils of the New World Order; the various (formal and informal) tribunals of political correctness; or any of the mysterious laws of God, nature or the market. What Zizek affirms is a radical culture of ethical identification for the left in which the alternative forms of militancy must first of all be militant with themselves. That is to say, they must be militant in the fundamental ethical sense of not relying on any external/higher authority and in the development of a political imagination that, like Zizek’s own thought, exhorts us to risk the impossible.
EntryDate
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1 -2017-01-16 08:29:36.0
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1 -Karen Qi
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1 -Lynbrook NA
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1 -12
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1 -1
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1 -Polytechnic Liu Neg
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1 -K-Neolib
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1 -college prep
Caselist.CitesClass[23]
Cites
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1 -====The proliferation of meaning and consciousness raising rely on a fantasy of communication which implodes under its own weight. More knowledge does not change reality.====
2 -**Baudrillard '0**
3 -(Jean, Simulacra and Simulations, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations-viii-the-implosion-of-meaning-in-the-media/)
4 -We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less
5 -AND
6 -imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.
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1 -2017-02-05 22:02:42.0
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1 -Sean Fee
Opponent
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1 -Loyola NT
ParentRound
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1 -13
Round
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1 -5
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1 -Polytechnic Liu Neg
Title
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1 -K - Baudrillard
Tournament
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1 -Golden Desert
Caselist.CitesClass[24]
Cites
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1 -=====The affirmative relegates the question of the actor to a place of fiction – their understanding of debate results in ressentiment. =====
2 -**Antonio 95** (Robert, July 1995, "Nietzsche's antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of Historycorr
3 -", American Journal of Sociology, Volume 101, No. 1)
4 -Treating words as mirrors of reality provides a comforting illusion
5 -AND
6 - untrammeled ressentiment paves the way for a new type of tyrant
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1 -2017-02-05 22:02:43.0
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1 -Sean Fee
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1 -Loyola NT
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1 -13
Round
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1 -5
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1 -Polytechnic Liu Neg
Title
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1 -K - Antonio
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1 -Golden Desert
Caselist.CitesClass[25]
Cites
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1 -====The Aff has become caught in a circular chain of unfulfilled desire. say "NO" to the affirmative. Only this intervention breaks apart fantasy and opens the aff to a mode of political subjectivity capable of inaugurating change. ====
2 -**Lundberg 12** (Christian, Assoc. Prof. of Rhetoric @ UNC, Chapel Hill, "On Being Bound to Equivalential Chains", Cultural Studies 26.2-3)
3 -Laclau's On Populist Reason provides an elegant account of demand as the fundamental unit of
4 -AND
5 -a hegemonic order, and therefore a particularly fraught form of political subjectivization.
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1 -2017-02-05 22:02:43.0
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1 -Sean Fee
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1 -Loyola NT
ParentRound
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1 -13
Round
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1 -5
Team
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1 -Polytechnic Liu Neg
Title
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1 -K - Lundberg
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1 -Golden Desert
Caselist.CitesClass[26]
Cites
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1 -Interp: Any
2 -A. Interpretation: aff’s must defend not restricting all constitutionally protected speech
3 -B. The term “any” is the res is the weak form of “any” - “not any” statements refer to “all”. Cambridge Dictionary no date
4 -Cambridge Dictionary, Any, http://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/quantifiers/any. NS
5 -
6 -We use any before nouns to refer to indefinite or unknown quantities or an unlimited entity: Did you bring any bread? Mr Jacobson refused to answer any questions. If I were able to travel back to any place and time in history, I would go to ancient China. Any as a determiner has two forms: a strong form and a weak form. The forms have different meanings. Weak form any: indefinite quantities We use any for indefinite quantities in questions and negative sentences. We use some in affirmative sentences: Have you got any eggs? I haven’t got any eggs. I’ve got some eggs. Not: I’ve got any eggs. We use weak form any only with uncountable nouns or with plural nouns: talking about fuel for the car Do I need to get any petrol? (+ uncountable noun) There aren’t any clean knives. They’re all in the dishwasher. (+ plural noun) Warning: We don’t use any with this meaning with singular countable nouns: Have you got any Italian cookery books? (or … an Italian cookery book?) Not: Have you got any Italian cookery book? Strong form any meaning ‘it does not matter which’ We use any to mean ‘it does not matter which or what’, to describe something which is not limited. We use this meaning of any with all types of nouns and usually in affirmative sentences. In speaking we often stress any:. (+ uncountable noun) When you make a late booking, you don’t know where you’re going to go, do you? It could be any destination. (+ singular countable noun) talking about a contract for new employees Do we have any form of agreement with new staff when they start? (+ singular countable noun) a parent talking to a child about a picture he has painted A: I don’t think I’ve ever seen you paint such a beautiful picture before. Gosh! Did you choose the colours? B: We could choose any colours we wanted. (+ plural countable noun) See also: Determiners and types of noun Some and any Any as a pronoun Any can be used as a pronoun (without a noun following) when the noun is understood. A: Have you got some £1 coins on you? B: Sorry, I don’t think I have any. (understood: I don’t think I have any £1 coins.) parents talking about their children’s school homework A: Do you find that Elizabeth gets lots of homework? Marie gets a lot. B: No not really. She gets hardly any. (understood: She gets hardly any homework.) A: What did you think of the cake? It was delicious, wasn’t it? B: I don’t know. I didn’t get any. (understood: I didn’t get any of the cake.) See also: Determiners used as pronouns Any of We use any with of before articles (a/an, the), demonstratives (this, these), pronouns (you, us) or possessives (his, their): Shall I keep any of these spices? I think they’re all out of date. Not: … any these spices? We use any of to refer to a part of a whole: Are any of you going to the meeting? I couldn’t answer any of these questions. I listen to Abba but I’ve never bought any of their music. Any doesn’t have a negative meaning on its own. It must be used with a negative word to mean the same as no. Compare Not Any: there aren’t any biscuits left. They’ve eaten them all. No: There are no biscuits left. They’ve eaten them all.
7 -Prefer the interpretation for Legal precision – multiple court rulings agree with our interp. Elder 91
8 -Elder ‘91
9 -(David S. Elder, October 1991, "Any and All": To Use Or Not To Use?” "Plain Language' is a regular feature of the Michigan Bar Journal, edited by Joseph Kimble for the State Bar Plain English Committee. Assistant editor is George H. Hathaway. Through this column the Committee hopes to promote the use of plain English in the law. Want to contribute a plain English article? Contact Prof. Kimble at Thomas Cooley Law School, P.O. Box 13038, Lansing, MI 48901, http://www.michbar.org/file/generalinfo/plainenglish/pdfs/91_oct.pdf | SP)
10 -The Michigan Supreme Court seemed to approve our dictionary definitions of "any" in Harrington v Interstate Business Men's Accident Ass'n, 210 Mich 327, 330; 178 NW 19 (1920), when it quoted Hopkins v Sanders, 172 Mich 227; 137 NW 709 (1912). The Court defined "any" like this: "In broad language, it covers 'arl'v final decree' in 'any suit at law or in chancery' in 'any circuit court.' Any' means ,every,' 'each one of all."' In a later case, the Michigan Supreme Court again held that the use of "any" in an agency contract meant "all." In Gibson v Agricultural Life Ins Co, 282 Mich 282, 284; 276 NW 450 (1937), the clause in controversy read: "14. The Company shall have, and is hereby given a first lien upon any commissions or renewals as security for any claim due or to become due to the Company from said Agent." (Emphasis added.) The Gibson court was not persuaded by the plaintiff's insistence that the word "any" meant less than "all": "Giving the wording of paragraph 14 oJ the agency contract its plain and unequivocable meaning, upon arriving at the conclusion that the sensible connotation of the word any' implies 'all' and not 'some,' the legal conclusion follows that the defendant is entitled to retain the earned renewal commissions arising from its agency contract with Gibson and cannot be held legally liable for same in this action," Gibson at 287 (quoting the trial court opinion). The Michigan Court of Appeals has similarly interpreted the word "any" as used in a Michigan statute. In McGrath v Clark, 89 Mich App 194; 280 NW2d 480 (1979), the plaintiff accepted defendant's offer of judgment. The offer said nothing about prejudgment interest. The statute the Court examined was MCL 600.6013; MSA 27A.6013: "Interest shall be allowed on any money judgment recovered in a civil action...." The Court held that "the word 'any' is to be considered all-inclusive," so the defendants were entitled to interest. McGrath at 197 Recently, the Court has again held that "alny means 'every,' 'each one of all,' and is unlimited in its scope." Parker v Nationwide Mutual Ins Co, 188 Mich App 354, 356; 470 NW2d 416 (1991) (quoting Harrington v InterState Men's Accident Ass'n, supra)
11 -Standard is Limits
12 -There are thousands of possible affs under their interpretation
13 -Lukianoff (Greg Lukianoff, "Campus Speech Codes: Absurd, Tenacious, and Everywhere", May 23, 2008 , https://www.nas.org/articles/Campus_Speech_Codes_Absurd_Tenacious_and_Everywhere)
14 -For our 2007 report, FIRE surveyed publicly available policies at the 100 “Best National Universities” and at the 50 “Best Liberal Arts Colleges,” as rated in the August 28, 2006 “America’s Best Colleges” issue of U.S. News and World Report. FIRE surveyed an additional 196 major public universities. (because public universities are legally bound by the First Amendment, FIRE is continually adding data on public universities to our database, at a rate consistent with our available resources). Several FIRE staff members spent a substantial portion of their year researching literally thousands of policies and rules in student handbooks, other official campus materials, and on schools’ websites. The policies were then evaluated by FIRE’s specialized lawyers and assigned a red (worst), yellow or green light (best) rating to the university based on the extent to which their written policies restricted constitutionally protected speech. We publicly post all of the relevant materials, our ratings, and excerpts containing the language most dangerous to basic liberties on our Spotlight website (www.thefire.org/spotlight). It is, to our knowledge, the most extensive evaluation of campus codes ever attempted. A school is given a “red light” if it has at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech. A “clear” restriction involves a threat to free speech which is obvious on the face of the policy, whereas a “substantial” restriction is one that is broadly applicable to important categories of campus expression. A “yellow light” institution is one that has policies which could be interpreted to suppress protected speech, or policies that, while restrictive of freedom of speech, restrict only narrow categories of speech. For example, a policy banning “verbal abuse” would have broad applicability and would pose a substantial threat to free speech, but it would not be a clear violation because “abuse” might refer to unprotected speech, such as threats of violence or genuine harassment. “Yellow light” policies may still be unconstitutional,28 but they do not clearly and substantially restrict speech in the same manner as “red light” policies. If FIRE finds no policies that seriously imperil protected speech, a college or university receives a “green light.” This does not necessarily mean that a school actively supports free expression. It simply means that the school does not have any publicly available written policies which violate students’ free speech rights. Of the 346 schools reviewed by FIRE, 259 received a red-light rating (75), 73 received a yellow-light rating (21), and only 8 received a green-light rating (2). Six schools did not receive any rating from FIRE. Surprisingly, public schools, which are unambiguously legally bound by the First Amendment, actually had a somewhat higher percentage of “red light” ratings; a full 79 of public schools were “red light,” 19 “yellow light”, and 2 green.
15 -
16 -Second is Competitive equity. There’s no way for the neg to prepare against specifics of thousands of cases which means that the aff will always win the case debate.
17 -Third is Absolutism. The aff explodes research burdens meaning that the neg will be forced to resort to either extreme K’s or disads that don’t really link which is terrible for our education because we never learn about the topic. Also creates a substantive side bias because the aff will have an easier time beating generic arguments and k’s. External impact to absolutism is that the affirmative model of debate results in dogmatism as the negative can’t make objections to the case itself which results in a lack of truth testing. That impact turns the aff because we can’t have the discourse the aff defends.
18 -Fourth is semantics. Prefer semantics
19 -A. It’s the only stasis point we know before the round so it controls the internal link to engagement, and there’s no way to use ground if that ground isn’t predictable
20 -
21 -B. Grammar is the most objective since it doesn’t rely on arbitrary determinants of what constitutes the best type of debate – it’s the only impact you can evaluate.
22 -
23 -C. The AFF isn’t topical regardless of fairness or education since it doesn’t affirm the text - we wouldn’t debate rehab again just because it was a good topic. Also means you can probably vote negative on presumption since the aff doesn’t affirm the resolution as it is.
24 -
25 -Prefer competing interpretations over reasonability. Reasonability leads to a race to the bottom, justifies judge intervention, and produces hella arbitrary brightlines.
26 -Default to potential abuse, it’s not a question of what the aff does, but rather what the aff’s model of debate justifies.
27 -No rvis:
28 -They make no sense. Just because the aff proves they aren’t a cheater doesn’t mean that I inversely am a cheater or they should automatically win the round.
EntryDate
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1 -2017-03-04 17:52:03.0
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1 -Panel
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1 -La Canada Alex Zhao
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1 -14
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1 -Triples
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1 -Polytechnic Liu Neg
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1 -T-Any
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1 -berkeley
Caselist.CitesClass[27]
Cites
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1 -The affirmative relegates the question of the actor to a place of fiction – their understanding of debate is reflective of a Socratic notion of de-subjectification that makes life-affirmation impossible and results in endless resenttiment
2 -Antonio 95 (Robert, July 1995, “Nietzsche’s antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of History”, American Journal of Sociology, Volume 101, No. 1)
3 -Treating words as mirrors of reality provides a comforting illusion of "certainty." This tendency obscures the social bases of language, reifies social conventions, and weakens capacities to imagine and create alternative conditions. Linguistic "abbreviations" cement obligatory social ties where "mutual agreement" about "feelings" is absent and the tendency to "let go" must be stemmed. Nietzsche held that language serves social selection of the herd, keeping experiences, desires, impulses, and actions of weak persons within boundaries, inscribing strong individuals as collective enemies, and redirecting ressentiment into regimentation. Accordingly, cultural rationalization makes this process of liquidating particularity more effective and universal (Nietzsche 1966, pp. 100—102, 216—17; 19686, pp. 357-58, 380). Since Nietzsche was himself a master writer, his polemics about words per se are hyperbolic.11 The real target is Socratic culture's exceptionally abstract languages, rampant conceptual reifications, and impoverished aesthetic sensibilities. Nietzsche believed that the obsession with rational representation makes the body an inert target of disciplinary control. Adoration of concepts, theory, and reason makes the abstract signifier the ultimate object of knowledge. Purely formal concepts are treated as the "highest," "real," and "true" things, while sense experience is relegated to the degraded status of "appearance." Platonic ideas, Chris- tian soul, Kantian things-in-themselves, and Newtonian atoms and time are all foundational reifications that "dehistoricize" the corporeal world and erect illusions of firm "grounds" for those who cannot face life without God and tradition or bear the weight of its connective choices and its "great dice game" (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 287-90; 19686, p. 549; 19686, pp. 35-37). Destroying Socratic culture's "objective" foundations (i.e., God and Truth), the latest phase of cultural rationalization greatly amplifies feel- ings of uncertainty. The consequent desperate searching and clinging produces frenetic reification; fanatical new prejudices, religions, and politics appear alongside the most sterile intellectual formalisms. Mass culture's hastily formulated languages blur all difference and ambiguity (e.g., parties "transform their principles into great at fresco stupidities"). The proliferation of abstract signifiers, arising from diverse locations and detached from any sense of stable referents, contribute to increasingly mechanical, diffuse, and mindless regimentation. In this fashion, Nietzsche severed the links that modern theorists saw between rationalization and enhanced communication, social integration, and legitimate authority (Nietzsche 1983, p. 215; 1986, pp. 161-62; 1966, pp. 216-17; 19686, pp. 357-58, 380-81). According to Nietzsche, the "subject" is Socratic culture's most central, durable foundation. This prototypic expression of ressentiment, master reification, and ultimate justification for slave morality and mass discipline "separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum . . . free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no 'being' behind the doing, effecting, becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed" (Nietzsche 1969b, pp. 45-46). Leveling of Socratic culture's "objective" foundations makes its "subjective" features all the more important. For example, the subject is a central focus of the new human sciences, appearing prominently in its emphases on neutral standpoints, motives as causes, and selves as entities, objects of inquiry, problems, and targets of care(Nietzsche 1966, pp. 19-21; 1968a, pp. 47-54). Arguing that subjectified culture weakens the personality, Nietzsche spoke of a "remarkable antithesis between an interior which fails to correspond to any exterior and an exterior which fails to correspond to any interior" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 78-79, 83). The "problem of the actor," Nietzsche said, "troubled me for the longest time."'12 He considered "roles" as "external," "surface," or "foreground" phenomena and viewed close personal identification with them as symptomatic of estrangement. While modern theorists saw differentiated roles and professions as a matrix of autonomy and reflexivity, Nietzsche held that persons (especially male professionals) in specialized occupations over identify with their positions and engage in gross fabrications to obtain advancement. They look hesitantly to the opinion of others, asking themselves, "How ought I feel about this?" They are so thoroughly absorbed in simulating effective role players that they have trouble being anything but actors-"The role has actually become the character." This highly subjectified social self or simulator suffers devastating inauthenticity. The powerful authority given the social greatly amplifies Socratic culture's already self-indulgent "inwardness." Integrity, decisiveness, spontaneity, and pleasure are undone by paralyzing over concern about possible causes, meanings, and consequences of acts and unending internal dialogue about what others might think, expect, say, or do (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 83-86; 1986, pp. 39-40; 1974, pp. 302-4, 316-17). Nervous rotation of socially appropriate "masks" reduces persons to hypostatized "shadows," "abstracts," or simulacra. One adopts "many roles," playing them "badly and superficially" in the fashion of a stiff "puppet play." Nietzsche asked, "Are you genuine? Or only an actor?  A representative or that which is represented? . . . Or no more than an imitation of an actor?" Simulation is so pervasive that it is hard to tell the copy from the genuine article; social selves "prefer the copies to the originals" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 84-86; 1986, p. 136; 1974, pp. 232- 33, 259; 1969b, pp. 268, 300, 302; 1968a, pp. 26-27). Their inwardness and aleatory scripts foreclose genuine attachment to others. This type of actor cannot plan for the long term or participate in enduring networks of interdependence; such a person is neither willing nor able to be a "stone" in the societal "edifice" (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 302-4; 1986a, pp. 93-94). Superficiality rules in the arid subjectivized landscape. Nietzsche (1974, p. 259) stated, "One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always 'might miss out on something. ''Rather do anything than nothing': this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture. . . . Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating others." Pervasive leveling, improvising, and faking foster an inflated sense of ability and an oblivious attitude about the fortuitous circumstances that contribute to role attainment (e.g., class or ethnicity). The most mediocre people believe they can fill any position, even cultural leadership. Nietzsche respected the self-mastery of genuine ascetic priests, like Socrates, and praised their ability to redirect ressentiment creatively and to render the "sick" harmless. But he deeply feared the new simulated versions. Lacking the "born physician's" capacities, these impostors amplify the worst inclinations of the herd; they are "violent, envious, exploitative, scheming, fawning, cringing, arrogant, all according to circumstances. " Social selves are fodder for the "great man of the masses." Nietzsche held that "the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely- a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. The deadly combination of desperate conforming and overreaching and untrammeled ressentiment paves the way for a new type of tyrant
4 -Their anti-capitalism is the Iraq war, an intervention based upon a supposedly complete understanding of reality as defined by capitalism. This surety as to the structure of reality turns its own aim—instead, embrace lack—this solves the aff without calcifying resistance
5 -Agent Z 12 (Anonymous Blogger @ In Bed with the Resistance, Why I am not an anti-capitalist and why it shouldn’t matter, 9/1/12, http://withtheresistance.com/why-i-am-not-an-anti-capitalist-and-why-it-shouldnt-matter/) ***We don’t endorse ableist or gendered language.
6 -The point is not that I like capitalism. I am neither pro or anti capitalism because I am not sure of the concept of ‘capitalism’ itself, so I would not want to define myself by it. I would be willing to say I am against something I feel I can point to more easily, say, unnecessary human cruelty. But that pits me against Roman gladiatorial displays and its descendant X-factor, as well as against our current economic systems. I am happy to be against feeding people to lions and X-factor, but that can hardly define my whole political position, nor would I want it to. But I do not think that a more complex and complete political position can be outlined by defining myself against a more complex concept. It does not really add the level of nuance and complexity I think is needed if we want to try to create systemic changes. The bad things (and let’s define that as unnecessary cruelty and cruel situations, for the sake of argument) happening in the world today strike me as on the one hand very basic, and not greatly different from processes that happened under the deeply non-capitalist Genghiz Khan, and on the other hand very complex, shot through with everything from historical currents, through cultural oddities, to bodily functions. I do not feel I am in a position to say – and I do not think anyone is in a position to say – that one current of activity (whether you call it capitalisation, commodification or something else), or one conceptualisation of that activity, has a defining, let alone a totalising, role in the systems we see. This brings me onto my problem with Marxian thought, and why I have never been a Marxist. It isn’t just that I disagree with parts of it (the poor historical method, the psuedo-scientific differing definitions of ‘value’, for instance – much of it creates an air of scientific authority around what is essentially a narrative – dialectical? – and inaccurate description of history), or that I think his failure to analyse power outside of the concept of ‘class relations’ did leave the door open to authoritarian uses of his work. It is that Marxism is the wrong type of theory for me. It is an enlightenment theory that attempts to give a ‘true’ picture of the world. Once we grasp this truth the world becomes an understandable place, and we know the right action to take. This contrasts with my position, which is not that ‘there is no truth’ or some straw man position of absolute relativism, but that we can only catch glimpses of what we might semi-seriously call the ‘real world’. We can come closer to understanding the world than before, but it will not be through grand models or revelations of the ‘truth’ but through incremental changes in our understanding and through constructing multiple models from multiple viewpoints. There are various ways of explaining why I hold to this model of discovery rather than the enlightenment model, but as a short-hand let’s say that we communicate our ideas about the world in language, and language does not map to the real world. All our attempts to describe the world are therefore heavily compromised from the outset, particularly when addressing social problems. Less social problems like the trajectories of sub-atomic particles can be dealt with through tight definition (albeit ultimately unfounded) but social problems cannot use this method because they must either use the fuzzily defined language of everyday life or re-define, and so separate their language from everyday life, diminishing their power to reflect everyday discourse and life. You can, for instance, define the idea of a ‘working class’ with objectively aligned interests within a model, but I think it a big mistake to believe this idea is something that actually exists in the world. I am suspicious too of the desire to create a coherent and defining view of the world because I do not believe the world is coherent; I certainly don’t believe it is black and white. Despite Marx’s attempt to remove moral disapproval from his modelling, to many people ‘capital’ is the devil. For myself, I do not believe in the devil. I know that many people would say he’s just pulled a good trick on me, but I think there is a certain religiously-tinged paranoia, not to say egotism, in believing that ‘capital’, as a coherent set of social relations, exists. I may feel like a target sometimes, but not of anything so coherent as ‘capital’. In as far as we have a ‘system’ on this planet, I see no reason to believe it has coherence in the way many people attribute to it. The ‘system’ contains within it, I think, many things that we have so far failed to define, some of which we will never define, mixed in with various things we try to define, some of which can be picked on as a source of evil (the commodity form, say) within a certain worldview. I think we should discuss and talk about those ideas. But we should not pretend to have an understanding we don’t have. Some systemic features that exist today were present in feudalism, or the Roman Empire, and had other names then. Some aspects we see today will exist in the future, when no-one at all can cling on to the idea that capitalism exists. While I think we can improve our knowledge, I suspect our global systems are too complex to be defined by particular features at any given moment in time. This doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to understand where I find myself or the details of the system in which I live. I just don’t think I’ll ever know it well enough to attach a name – capitalism – to a set of defined things and say “That’s what I’m against.” To call yourself ‘anti-capitalist’ you presumably have to have decided that the economic worldview Marx outlined (or some correction offered by one of his followers) is essentially correct, and that deliberately opposing this is the way forward. To me a confidence that you know the right things to be against within a system you do not fully understand is a danger sign. You begin to look something like the US Military in Iraq, convinced they knew what they are doing, walking with certainty into disaster. What’s more, while I might learn things from a Marxian perspective, I do not think I should constantly overlay my subjective experience with some supposedly objective framework Note: some people have said to me in response to this that Marx isn't seeking to reveal truth, he's being dialectical man, meaning I think that his claims are attempts to change the world, which is fine but (a) I wish most Marxists understood he was not preaching the gospel and (b) that only shifts the truth claim to the claim that you've found the right weapon - and I don't think dialectics or Marx's models are all that. That is why I talked about the notion of being against cruelty. It is an emotional reaction to the world (one of many a person might have) and I am more likely to give weight to this reaction than to any ideological construction, even if I find that construction useful. I dislike X-factor not because it is attempting to draw me into a mass consumer experience for the sake of advertising revenue, although that is one way of viewing it. I prefer to hate it for being a cruelty-fest of the type that rears its head constantly throughout history. If any ideology failed to eliminate cruelty in its mindset, I would discard the ideology long before my dislike of cruelty. I have had people get annoyed with me when I described their Marxian ideas as ‘an interesting point of view’. But that’s exactly how I see those ideas and how I know I will always see them, no matter how much Marx or marxian thought I read, and no matter if I see the M-C-M circulatory form, or some other marxian concept, as useful sometimes. The notion of ‘capitalism’ itself is to me a particular viewpoint, so I am unlikely to use the concept in anything more than a casual sense. It is not a ‘true’ description of the world against which I would be willing to define myself. The question people often ask now is, in the absence of a shared ideological framework, how do we create collective action? But this is an odd question. I think most collective action happens in the absence of a shared ideological framework. People unite around particular things for wildly differing reasons, even when they are claiming to be ideologically united. I suspect that leftist organising would often be more effective if it gave up on the notion of ideological unity and instead united around campaigns to improve the conditions of people’s lives. We might regard all aspects of political organising as encounters in which we all learned about the world, rather than a chance to express our beliefs. Now it’s true that your viewpoint on the world affects the actions you may wish to take – this was visible in the division between ‘liberals’ and ‘radicals’ in Occupy camps – but in the end I suspect that ‘radical’ action will only ever come out of desperation for change. The arguments we have amongst those of us who do not have that desperation are probably more important as social interactions than as deciders of the future. Moments of change will happen despite the ideologies and despite the arguments over how change should be brought about. Our ideas can influence those moments a little but will probably be relegated to the position of a mouse pushing against the tiller of a great ship. To put it another way, even when people rallied under the banner of Marxian thought, I think it was more the wish to improve their lives that brought them together, not the ideology itself. The use of ideological rhetoric as a social glue to hold these campaigns together has a mixed record, to say the least. I do not think that polishing up the ideology a bit – making it anti-hierarchical, say – will make ideology a better uniting force. For myself, and I suspect for a lot of people inclined towards leftist ideas but not active in politics, it would be preferable to find some other way of creating the social cohesion necessary to help us act together. Finally, the discussions about how the world works and how we should react to it are important, but if what is radical is what brings change, then we should admit we do not know what is radical yet. It may turn out that being ‘anti-capitalist’ is not the position that will force a big change in economic and social relations but something else entirely, some position or campaign we do not yet know and have not yet imagined. ENDNOTE on editing post 03/11/2013: I wrote this a while ago and now feel I missed at trick in not noting that, while it is easier to unite people against something than for something, it is not necessarily the most politically productive way to proceed. I think I avoided the point because so many people have asked of anti-capitalists “But what are you FOR?” and they have always reserved the right to define themselves by what they are against, or to answer the question with ‘revolution’, or some similarly ill-defined term. I used to have a tolerance for this because it is important to begin to resist and difficult to work out where to go next, but I am less tolerant of it now because I think it ignores something really obvious in using the term ‘anti-capitalist’. To people who get their food and homes and holidays under what we might call ‘capitalism’, to be against it is to be against their quality of life – unless, that is, you offer a viable alternative. How can you hope to build a popular movement if you promise to take away people’s livelihoods without explaining how you will replace them? It takes a certain type of fervour to want to do that and I’m glad most people don’t have it. It is not the big leaders to whom we need to offer concrete demands and plans, it is the people around us – our friends and parents and colleagues. This is who we have to organise with and it’s very difficult to engage with most of them on the basis of saying ‘this is all crap and here’s why’, dismissing those who don’t believe our framework as being not radical. It leaves so little room for discussing what alternatives WE see as feasible, for dealing with the moment we are in, so little room for developing the future with the people standing in front of us. As for theory, it’s not that we don’t need it, but I feel that we should frame the world through communication with those around us, with a bit of help from theory, rather than framing the world primarily through theory. For me the right balance is to relegate theory to a place where it does not define my position and that is why I cannot be an anti-capitalist.
7 -The alternative is not a new mode of politics but a “NO” to the affirmative. Only this intervention breaks apart debate’s agential fantasy and opens the aff to a mode of political subjectivity capable of inaugurating change
8 -Lundberg 12 (Christian, Assoc. Prof. of Rhetoric @ UNC, Chapel Hill, “On Being Bound to Equivalential Chains”, Cultural Studies 26.2-3)
9 -Laclau's On Populist Reason provides an elegant account of demand as the fundamental unit of the political, and by extension of politics as a field of antagonism. Laclau's basic goal is to define the specificity of populist reason, or, to give an account of populism as ‘special emphasis on a political logic which, is a necessary ingredient of politics tout court’, of ‘Populism, quite simply, as a way of constructing the political’ (Laclau 2005, p. 18). Here, a focus on demands replaces a now prevalent approach focused on various taxonomies of populism (which Laclau diagnoses as hopelessly unsystematic) with a more formal account of the political based on the logic of demands, which in turn provides a way of thinking about the political as the space of demand and politics as a practice of working through specific demands. Demands serve a number of functions that derive from the split between the universal and the particular that Laclau relies upon. Demands articulate a specific political claim at the level of the particular, and also imply a more generalized relationship to hegemony in the register of the universal. On this logic, demands represent the hegemonic order, creating an implicit picture of how it functions and might change. Simultaneously, demands create possible lines of equivalential affinity between others also making demands on the hegemonic order. Thus, the demand is more fundamental than the group, in that the operation of the split demand inaugurates all ‘the various forms of articulation between a logic of difference and a logic of equivalence’ that animate the social affinities that give groups their coherence (Laclau 2005, p. 20). The logic of the demand is in turn the logic of equivalence, and equivalence is as important for how it animates a group identity, as it is in positing claims on a hegemonic order. Although Laclau owes a significant debt to Freud and Lacan, it is not clear that his theory of demand is explicitly crafted from psychoanalytic categories. For example, how central is enjoyment to Laclau's relatively formal account of the demand? As Glynos and Stavrakakis have argued, there is a ‘complete and conspicuous absence in Laclau's work of Lacanian categories such as fantasy, and, perhaps more importantly, jouissance’ (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2006, p. 202). Glynos and Stavrakakis claim that there is ‘to their knowledge no reference in Laclau's work to the concept of jouissance’ (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2006, p. 209). On Populist Reason contains a brief discussion of the concept of jouissance as worked out by Copjec, which Laclau summarizes by saying: there is no achievable jouissance except through radical investment in an objet petit a. But the same discovery (not merely an analogous one) is made if we start from the angle of political theory. No social fullness except through hegemony; and hegemony is nothing more than the investment in a partial object, of a fullness which will always evade us. The logic of the objet petit a and the hegemonic logic are not just similar, they are simply identical. (Laclau 2005, p. 109) There is an elegance to Laclau's point about enjoyment, provided that enjoyment is reducible to a set of logical forms. This presupposition makes the lack of talk about jouissance in Laclau's work understandable. If jouissance and hegemony are identical, one does not need Lacan to say something that might be said more elegantly with Gramsci. Jouissance is simply hegemonic investment, an elevation of an object or identity to the level of a thing or a universal. Despite occasional caveats to the contrary, the greatest virtues of Laclau's version of the political stem from his relentlessly persistent application of a formal, almost structural account of the political. And, as is the case with many well executed structuralist accounts, Laclau's system can elegantly incorporate caveats, objections to and oversights in the original system by incorporating them into the functioning of the structure – jouissance can easily be read as nothing more than hegemony in this account without changing the original coordinates of the system too drastically. Yet, enjoyment provides one particularly difficult stumbling block for a dedicated formal account. To start with, enjoyment is never quite as ‘achievable’ as the preceding quotation might suggest. Far from being the consummation of a logic of structure and investment, enjoyment is a supplement to a failing in a structure: for example, Lacan frames jouissance as a useless enjoyment of one's own subjectivity that supplements the fundamental failings of a subject in either finding a grounding or consummating an authoritative account of its coherence. This ‘uselessness’ defines the operation of jouissance. Thus, for example, when Lacan suggests that ‘language is not the speaking subject’ in the Seminar on Feminine Sexuality, lodging a critique of structural linguistics as a law governing speech, jouissance is understood as something excessive that is born of the failure of structures of signification (Lacan 1977). Language is not the speaking subject precisely because what is passed through the grist mill of the speech is the result of a misfiring of structure as much as it is prefigured by logics of structure, meaning and utility. Therefore the interpretive difficulty for a structuralist account of enjoyment: the moment that the fact of enjoyment is recoded in the language of structure, the moment that it is made useful in a logic of subjectivization is precisely the moment where it stops being jouissance. Following Glynos and Stavrakakis's suggestion, one might press the question of the relationship between the demand and jouissance as a way of highlighting the differences that a purely Lacanian reading of demand might make for Laclau's understanding of politics. Framing enjoyment as equivalent with hegemony, Laclau identifies the fundamental ‘split’ in psychoanalytic theory between the universal and the particular demands of a group. Framing the split in this way, and as the privileged site of the political, Laclau occludes attention to another split: namely, the split within a subject, between the one who enters an equivalential relationship and the identitarian claim that sutures this subject into a set of linkages. This too is a site of enjoyment, where a subject identifies with an external image of itself for the sake of providing its practices of subjectivity with a kind of enjoyable retroactive coherence. The demand is relevant here, but not simply because it represents and anticipates a change in the social order or because it identifies a point of commonality. Here the demand is also a demand to be recognized as a subject among other subjects, and given the sanction and love of the symbolic order. The implication of this argument about the nature of enjoyment is that the perverse dialectic of misfirings, failure and surpluses in identity reveals something politically dangerous in not moving beyond demand. Put another way: not all equivalences are equally equivalent. Some equivalences become fetishes, becoming points of identification that eclipse the ostensible political goal of the demand. To extend the line of questioning to its logical conclusion, can we be bound to our equivalential chains? Freud, Lacan and the demand Demand plays a central role in Freud's tripartite scheme for the human psyche specifically in the formation of the ego. Although this scheme does not exercise the same hold over psychoanalytic thinking that it once did, the question of the ego still functions as an important point of departure for psychoanalytic thinking as a representative case of the production of the subject and identity. Even for critics of ‘ego psychology’, the idea of the ego as a representation of the ‘I’ of the human subject is still significant – the main question is what kind of analytical dispositions one takes towards the ego, the contingencies of its emergence and its continuing function. Despite the tendency of some commentators to naturalize Freud's tripartite schema of the human psyche, Freud's account of the ego does not characterize the ego as pre-existent or automatically given. Although present in virtually every human subject, the ego is not inevitably present: the ego is a compensatory formation that arises in the usual course of human development as a subject negotiates the articulation and refusal of its needs as filtered through demand. Hypothetically a ‘subject’ whose every need is fulfilled by another is never quite a subject: this entity would never find occasion to differentiate itself from the other who fulfils its every need. As a mode of individuation and subjectification, egos are economies of frustration and compensation. This economy relies on a split in the Freudian demand, which is both a demand to satiate a specific need and a demand for addressee to provide automatic fulfilment of need generally. The generative power of the demand relies on this split and on fact that some demands will be refused. This economy of need and frustration works because refusal of a specific need articulated as a demand on another is also a refusal of the idea that the addressee of the demand can fulfil all the subject's needs, requiring a set of individuation compensatory economic functions to negotiate the refusal of specific demands. ‘Ego’ is nothing more than the name for the contingent economy of compensatory subjectification driven by the repetition and refusal of demands – the nascent subject presents wants and needs in the form of the demand, but the role of the demand is not the simple fulfilment of these wants and needs. The demand and its refusal are the fulcrum on which the identity and insularity of the subject are produced: an unformed amalgam of needs and articulated demands is transformed into a subject that negotiates the vicissitudes of life with others. Put in the metaphor of developmental psychology, an infant lodges the instinctual demands of the id on others but these demands cannot be, and for the sake of development, must not be fulfilled. Thus the logic of the pop-psychology observation that the incessant demands of children for impermissible objects (‘may I have a fourth helping of dessert’) or meanings that culminate in ungroundable authoritative pronouncements (the game of asking a never-ending ‘whys’) are less about satisfaction of a request than the identity producing effects of the distanciating parental ‘no’. In ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, Freud argues: If … demands meet with no satisfaction, intolerable conditions arise … At that point … the ego begins to function. If all the driving force that sets the vehicle in motion is derived from the id, the ego … undertakes the steering, without which no goal can be reached. The instincts in the id press for immediate satisfaction at all costs, and in that way they achieve nothing or even bring about appreciable damage. It is the task of the ego to guard against such mishaps, to mediate between the claims of the id and the objections of the external world. (Freud 1986, p. 22) Later works move this theory from the narrow bounds of the parent/child relationship to a broader social relationship which was continually constituting and shaping the function of the ego – this is a theme of works such as Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, as well as Civilization and its Discontents. The latter repeats the same general dynamics of ego formation as ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, but moves the question beyond individual development towards the entirety of social relations. For Freud, the inevitability of conflicts between an individual and the social whole is simply one of the facts of life among other people. Life with others inevitably produces blockages in the individual's attempts to fulfil certain desires – some demands for the fulfilment of desires must be frustrated. This blockage produces feelings of guilt, which in turn are sublimated as a general social morality. Here frustration of demand is both productive in that it authorizes social moral codes, and civilization as mode of functioning, though it does so at the cost of imposing a constitutively contested relationship with social mores (Freud 1989). Though there are many places to begin thinking the Freudian demand in Lacan, one of the best places to start is an almost accidental Lacanian rumination on demands. Confronted by student calls to join the movement of 1968 Lacan famously quipped: ‘as hysterics you demand a new master: you will get it!’ Framing the meaning of his response requires a treatment of Lacan's theory of the demand and its relationship to hysteria as an enabling and constraining political subject position. Lacan's theory of the demand picks up at Freud's movement outward from the paradigmatic relationships between the parent/child and individual/civilization towards a more general account of the subjects, sociality and signification. The infrastructure supporting this theoretical movement transposes Freud's comparatively natural and genetic account of development to a set of metaphors for dealing with the subject's entry into signification. Lacan's goal is to rearticulate Freudian development processes as metaphors for a theory of the subject's production within signification. In Lacanian terms, what is at stake in this transposition is a less naturalized account of the subject by privileging supplementary practices of enjoyment that give a subject coherence as an agent, not in the sense of an ultimate ontological grounding, but rather as a mode of enjoying the repetition of retroactive totalities that name and produce subjects. This process is most famously worked out in Lacan's famous ‘Mirror Stage’ which details the trauma of the subject's insertion into the symbolic order, and the way that this constitutive dislocation generates the jouissance that sustains the production of subjectivity (Lacan 1982a). Looking in the mirror, Lacan's hypothetical infant does not yet have a concept of a unified self, puzzled by the fact that when it moves the image of the child in the mirror also moves. From the child in the mirror, Lacan infers the existence of two ‘I's underwriting processes of subjectivization: an ‘ideal I’, a statuesque projection of what it means to be an ‘I’ (in this case the image of the child) and a phenomenological experience of ‘I-ness’. Lacan treats the dialectic of misidentification in the mirror as a constant and constitutive performance of subjectivity as opposed to a specific developmental stage (Wilden 1982). In this interpretation, the child in the mirror stage is a metaphor for the constant production of the subject as a performance of the self in relation to a constitutive gap between the Symbolic and the subject, and the articulation of subjectivity as a category serves to repress the trauma produced in the margin between a nascent subject, its alienation from a projected external identity, and within the structure of signification. The paradoxical effect of this mode of subject formation is that not only does the child ‘discover’ that she is the child in the mirror, it also experiences a disorienting distance between itself and its image. Despite this fact, the child requires the an external image such as the one in the mirror to impose a kind of unity on its experience – the image of the other child provides an imaginary framing, a retroactive totality or a kind of narrative about what it means to be a self. The paradox of subjectivity lies in the simultaneity of identifying with an image of one's self that is given by a specific location within the symbolic order and the simultaneous alienation produced by the image's externality. Thus, the assumption of a frame for identity cannot ever completely effective, or, a subject is never completely comfortable inhabiting subjectivity – there is always an impossible gap between an experience of alienated subjectivity, a prefigured given image of one's subjectivity and the experience of being produced by the Symbolic. There is a famous Lacanian aphorism that holds that ‘the signifier represents a subject for another signifier’ (Lacan 1977, p. 142). This formulation of the subject's relation to language inverts the conventional wisdom that ontologically pre-given subjects use language as an instrument to communicate their subjective intentions. Signifiers are constituted by their difference, and subjects come into being in negotiating their entry into this realm of difference. Instead of articulating subjective states through language, subjects are articulated through language, within the differential space of signification. The paradoxical implication of this reversal is that the subject is simultaneously produced and disfigured by its unavoidable insertion into the space of the Symbolic. The mirror stage marks the excess of the demand as a mode of subject formation. Subjects assume the identity as subjects as a way of accommodating to the demand placed on them by the symbolic, and as a node for producing demands on the symbolic, or, of being recognized as a subject (Lacan 1982a, p. 4). Here jouissance is nothing more than the useless enjoyment of one's own subjectivity, surplus produced in negotiating a difficult gap between the phenomenological and ideal ‘I's, produced by a failure in relation between Lacan's phenomenological I and the Symbolic. Both the site of subject production and the site where this subject fills out an identity by investing in equivalential linkages and common demands are sites of enjoyment. In this sense, perhaps there is an excess of jouissance that remains even after the reduction of jouissance to hegemony. This remainder may even be logically prior to hegemony, in that it is a useless but ritually repeated retroactive act of naming the self that produces the conditions of possibility for investment, the defining point for Laclau's reduction of jouissance to hegemony. This specific site of excess, where the subject negotiates the terms on a non-relationship with the symbolic is the primary site splitting need, demand and desire. Need approximates the position of the Freudian id, in that it is a precursor to demand. Demand is the filtering of the need through signification, but as Sheridan notes ‘there is no adequation between need and demand’ (Sheridan 1982). The same type of split that inheres in the Freudian demand inheres in the Lacanian demand, though in this case the split does not derive from the empirical impossibility of fulfilling demands as much as it stems from the impossibility of ever fully articulating needs to or receiving a satisfactory response from the Other. Since there is no adequation, the specificity of the demand becomes less relevant than the structural fact that demand presupposes the ability of the addressee to fulfil the demand. This impossibility points to the paradoxical nature of demand: namely that the demand is less a way of addressing need than a call for love and recognition by this other. ‘In this way’, writes Lacan, ‘demand annuls (aufheht) the particularity of everything that can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love, and the very satisfactions that it obtains for need are reduced (sich erniedrigt) to the level of being no more than the crushing of the demand for love’ (Lacan 1982b, p. 286). The difficulty is that the Other cannot, by definition, ever give this gift: the starting presupposition of the mirror stage is the constitutive impossibility of comfortably inhabiting the symbolic – the mirror stage marks the constitutive split between the subject and the Symbolic. This paradoxical split, namely the structural impossibility of fulfilling demands, resonates with the logic of the Freudian demand in that the frustration of demand produces the articulation of desire. Thus, Lacan argues that ‘desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second’ (Lacan 1982b, p. 287). How might this subtraction occur? The answer to this question requires an account of the Other as seemingly omnipotent, and as simultaneously unable to fulfil demands. This sentiment animates the crucial Lacanian claim for the impossibility of the other giving a gift which it does not have, namely the gift of love: It will seem odd, no doubt, that in opening up the immeasurable space that all demand implies, namely, that of being a request for love …. Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need: this margin being that which is opened up by demand, the appeal of which can be unconditional only in regards to the Other … having no universal satisfaction … It is this whim that introduces the phantom of omnipotence, not of the subject, but of the other in which his demand is installed. (Lacan 1982c, p. 311) Transposed to the realm of political demands, this framing of demand reverses the classically liberal presupposition regarding demand and agency. In the classical iteration and contemporary critical theories that inherit its spirit, there is a presupposition that a demand is a way of exerting agency, and that the more firmly that the demand is lodged, the greater the production of an agential effect. The Lacanian framing of the demand sees the relationship as exactly the opposite: the more firmly one lodges a demand the more desperately one clings to the legitimate ability of an institution to fulfil it. Thus, demands ought to reach a kind of breaking point where the inability of an institution or order to proffer a response should produce a re-evaluation of the economy of demand and desire. In analytic terms, this is the moment of subtraction, where the manifest content of the demand is stripped away and the desire that underwrites it is laid bare. The result of this ‘subtraction’ is that the subject is in a position to relate to its desire, not as a set of deferrals, avoidances or transposition, but rather as an owned political disposition. As Lacan frames it, this is a dialectical process, where at each moment the subject is either learning to reassert the centrality of its demands, or where it is coming to terms with the impotence of the other as a satisfier of demands: But it is in the dialectic of the demand for love and the test of desire that development is ordered …. Clinical experience has shown us that this test of the desire of the Other is decisive not in the sense that the subject learns by it whether or not he has a real phallus, but in the sense that he learns that the mother does not have it. (Lacan 1982b, p. 311) Thus, desire both has general status and a specific status for each subject. In other words, it is not just the mirror that produces the subject and its investments, but the desire and sets of proxy objects that cover over this original gap. As Easthope puts it: Lacan is sure that everyone's desire is somehow different and their own – lack is nevertheless my lack. How can this be if each of us is just lost in language … passing through demand into desire, something from the real, from the individual's being before language, is retained as a trace enough to determine that I desire here and there, not anywhere and everywhere. Lacan terms this objet petit a … petit a is different for everyone; and it can never be in substitutes for it in which I try to refind it. (Easthope 2000, pp. 94–95) The point of this disposition is to bring the subject to a point where they might ‘recognize and name’ their own desire, and as a result to become a political subject in the sense of being able to truly argue for something without being dependent on the other as a support for or organizing principle for political identity. This naming is not about discovering a latently held but hidden interiority, rather it is about naming a practice of political subjectivization that is not solely oriented towards or determined by the locus of the demand, determined by the contingent sets of coping strategies that orient a subject towards others and a political order. As Lacan argues, this is the point where a subject becomes a kind of new presence, or in the register of this essay, a new political possibility: ‘That the subject should come to recognize and to name his desire; that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it isn't a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given …. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world’ (Lacan 1988, pp. 228–229). Alternatively, subjects can stay fixated on the demand, but in doing so they forfeit the possibility of desire, or as Fink argues: ‘later, however, Lacan comes to see that an analysis … that … does not go far enough in constituting the subject as desire leaves him or her stranded at the level of demand … unable to truly desire’ (Fink 1996, p. 90). What does this have to do with hysteria? A politics defined by and exhausted in demands is definitionally a hysterical politics. The hysteric is defined by incessant demands on the other at the expense of ever articulating a desire which is theirs. In the Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, for example, Lacan argues that the hysteric's demand that the Other produce an object is the support of an aversion towards one's desire: ‘the behavior of the hysteric, for example, has as its aim to recreate a state centred on the object, in so far as this object, das Ding, is, as Freud wrote somewhere, the support of an aversion’ (Lacan 1997, p. 53). This economy of aversion explains the ambivalent relationship between hysterics and their demands. On one hand, the hysteric asserts their agency, even authority over the Other. Yet, what appears as unfettered agency from the perspective of a discourse of authority is also simultaneously a surrender of desire by enjoying the act of figuring the other as the one with the exclusive capability to satisfy the demand. Thus the logic of ‘as hysterics you demand a new master: you will get it!’ At the register of manifest content, demands are claims for action and seemingly powerful, but at the level of the rhetorical form of the demand or in the register of enjoyment, demand is a kind of surrender. As a relation of address hysterical demand is more a demand for recognition and love from an ostensibly repressive order than a claim for change. The limitation of the students’ call on Lacan does not lie in the end they sought, but in the fact that the hysterical address never quite breaks free from its framing of the master. Here the fundamental problem of democracy is not in articulating resistance over and against hegemony, but rather the practices of enjoyment that sustain an addiction to mastery and a deferral of desire. The difficulty in thinking hysteria is that it is both a politically effective subject position in some ways, but that it is politically constraining from the perspective of organized political dissent. If not a unidirectional practice of resistance, hysteria is at least a politics of interruption: imagine a world where the state was the perfect and complete embodiment of a hegemonic order, without interruption or remainder, and the discursive system was hermetically closed. Politics would be an impossibility, with no site for contest or reappropriation and everything simply the working out of a structure. Hysteria is a site of interruption, in that hysteria represents a challenge to our hypothetical system, refusing straightforward incorporation by its symbolic logic. But, stepping outside this hypothetical non-polity, hysteria is net politically constraining because the form of the demand, as a way of organizing the field of political enjoyment requires that the system continue to act in certain ways to sustain its logic. Thus, though on the surface it is an act of symbolic dissent, hysteria represents an affective affirmation of a hegemonic order, and therefore a particularly fraught form of political subjectivization.
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1 -Polytechnic Liu Neg
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1 -Pyschoanalysis
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1 -2017-01-16 08:29:04.0
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1 -Daniel Park
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1 -Harvard Westlake
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1 -2017-01-16 08:29:33.0
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1 -2017-02-05 22:02:41.0
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1 -Sean Fee
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1 -Loyola NT
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1 +In 1939 the power of nuclear energy was discovered – the military industrial complex prioritized its own interests and forced the scientific community to focus its research on Uranium – in doing so it marginalized research into thorium energy.
2 +Puplava, 11 President, Chief Investment Strategist at PFS Group,” Kirk Sorensen States Thorium a Million Times More Energy Dense than Fossil Fuels“ http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/james-j-puplava/kirk-sorensen-thorium-a-million-times-more-energy-dense-than-fossil-fuels
3 +
4 +Thus the counterplan: Countries should invest in generation 4 liquid fluoride thorium reactors.
5 +Warming causes Extinction
6 +Brandenberg 99 (John and Monica Paxson, Visiting Prof. Researcher @ Florida Space Institute, Physicist Ph.D., Science Writer, Dead Mars Dying Earth, Pg 232-233)
7 +
8 +
9 +Geologic history goes negative.
10 +Bushnell 10 - Chief scientist at the NASA Langley Research Center Dennis Bushnell (MS in mechanical engineering. He won the Lawrence A. Sperry Award, AIAA Fluid and Plasma Dynamics Award, the AIAA Dryden Lectureship, and is the recipient of many NASA Medals for outstanding Scientific Achievement and Leadership.) “Conquering Climate Change,” The Futurist, May-June, 2010
11 +
12 +Thorium reactors are sustainable
13 +Barton, ‘9 Charles, retired counselor, writes for Energy From Thorium, “The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Paradigm,” http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4971/
14 +
15 +And, simply eliminating nuclear power doesn’t solve – only thorium reactors eliminate current toxic waste storages.
16 +Rhodes, 12 February, Professor Chris Rhodes is a writer and researcher. He studied chemistry at Sussex University, earning both a B.Sc and a Doctoral degree (D.Phil.); rising to become the youngest professor of physical chemistry in the U.K. at the age of 34. A prolific author, Chris has published more than 400 research and popular science articles (some in national newspapers: The Independent and The Daily Telegraph) He has recently published his first novel, "University Shambles" was published in April 2009 (Melrose Books), “Hopes Build for Thorium Nuclear Energy”, http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Hopes-Build-for-Thorium-Nuclear-Energy.html
17 +Reprocessing would solve for 100 percent of the waste.
18 +Bastin 8 (Clinton, Former Chemical Engineer at the Atomic Energy Commission, 21st Century Science and Technology, “We Need to Reprocess Spent Nuclear Fuel, And Can Do It Safely, At Reasonable Cost”, 2008, http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles202008/ Summer_2008/Reprocessing.pdf,)
19 +
20 +Thorium fuel reactors can be expanded and easily mass produced.
21 +Hargraves, 12 July, Robert, Robert Hargraves has written articles and made presentations about the liquid fluoride thorium reactor and energy cheaper than from coal – the only realistic way to dissuade nations from burning fossil fuels. His presentation “Aim High” about the technology and social benefits of the liquid fluoride thorium reactor has been presented to audiences at Dartmouth ILEAD, Thayer School of Engineering, Brown University, Columbia Earth Institute, Williams College, Royal Institution, the Thorium Energy Alliance, the International Thorium Energy Association, Google, the American Nuclear Society, and the Presidents Blue Ribbon Commission of America’s Nuclear Future. With coauthor Ralph Moir he has written articles for the American Physical Society Forum on Physics and Society: Liquid Fuel Nuclear Reactors (Jan 2011) and American Scientist: Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (July 2010). Robert Hargraves is a study leader for energy policy at Dartmouth ILEAD. He was chief information officer at Boston Scientific Corporation and previously a senior consultant with Arthur D. Little. He founded a computer software firm, DTSS Incorporated while at Dartmouth College where he was assistant professor of mathematics and associate director of the computation center. He graduated from Brown University (PhD Physics 1967) and Dartmouth College (AB Mathematics and Physics 1961). THORIUM: energy cheaper than coal, ISBN: 1478161299, purchased online at Amazon.com
22 +
23 +
24 +Renewables are not a viable option, investors are not interested.
25 +Jacobius, Staff Writer, 2012
26 +Arleen, “Clean-tech investing littered with mines”, Pensions and Investments,
27 +http://www.pionline.com/article/20120917/PRINTSUB/309179992/clean-tech-investing-littered-with-mines
28 +Generation 4 liquid based thorium reactors offer significant advantages over all alternative options.
29 +Cohen 12 (Armond, Co-founder and Executive Director of the Clean Air Task Force, Actively involved in CATF projects focusing on Arctic stabilization, low carbon technology innovation and coal transition, Armond led the Conservation Law Foundation's Energy Project starting in 1983, Graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School, Served as judicial clerk for the late Harlington Wood, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit 1982-1983, Published numerous articles on climate, energy, and air pollution, and speaks and testifies frequently on these topics, Member of the Keystone Energy Board and US EPA's Clean Air Act Advisory Committee, Decarbonization: The Nuclear Option, February 13th, http://energy.nationaljournal.com/2012/02/is-america-poised-for-nuclear.php)
30 +
31 +
32 +It’s try or die, SMRs are the only solution that addresses the cataclysmic impacts of warming before it’s too late.
33 +Palley 11 (Reese Palley, The London School of Economics, 2011, The Answer: Why Only Inherently Safe, Mini Nuclear Power Plans Can Save Our World, p. 186-90)
34 +
35 +
36 +Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Nuclear is the best choice among imperfect options.
37 +Lynas 11 (Mark, Visiting Research Associate at Oxford University’s School of Geography and the Environment, Appointed advisor on climate change to the President of the Maldives, Longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Award for Non-Fiction, and short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, Author of The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, Why nuclear power is still a good choice, http://articles.latimes.com/print/2011/apr/10/opinion/la-oe-lynas-nukes-20110410)
38 +
39 +Fossil Fuel usage is one of the largest proximate causes of daily death in the world, nuclear is the safest option.
40 +Mike Conley, 4/17/2015 Writer and Physicist, head of the energy reality project, The Energy Reality Project, http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear-energy-vs-wind-and-solar/
41 +Nuclear energy is the cheapest method to power the country. Renewables can’t scale up
42 +Mike Conley, 4/17/2015 Writer and Physicist, head of the energy reality project, The Energy Reality Project, http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear-energy-vs-wind-and-solar/
43 +
44 +
45 +A shift to renewables is fundamentally impossible – they will always produce intermittent power while what we need is baseload power.
46 +Mike Conley, 4/17/2015 Writer and Physicist, head of the energy reality project, The Energy Reality Project, http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear-energy-vs-wind-and-solar/
47 +
48 +
49 +
50 +Generation 4 small modular reactors are better and safer.
51 +Mike Conley, 4/17/2015 Writer and Physicist, head of the energy reality project, The Energy Reality Project, http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear-energy-vs-wind-and-solar/
52 +
53 +
54 +Nuclear power k2 stable desalinization, only solution for water shortages
55 +IAEA 15 ~-~- widely known as the world's "Atoms for Peace" organization within the United Nations family. Set up in 1957 as the world's centre for cooperation in the nuclear field, the Agency works with its Member States and multiple partners worldwide to promote the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear technologies, “New Technologies for Seawater Desalination Using Nuclear Energy,” IEAE TecDoc Series, 2015
56 +Warming is real, anthropogenic
57 +Nuccitelli 11 (Dana Nuccitelli is an environmental scientist at a private environmental consulting firm in the Sacramento, California area. He has a Bachelor's Degree in astrophysics from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Master's Degree in physics from the University of California at Davis. He has been researching climate science, economics, and solutions as a hobby since 2006, and has contributed to Skeptical Science since September, 2010., Updated 2011, Originally Posted 9/24/2010, “The Big Picture”, http://www.skepticalscience.com/big-picture.html)
58 +
59 +
60 +Reducing CO2 is key before we pass the tipping point.
61 +Hansen et al 10 – Director of NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies Dr. James Hansen, Dr. Makiko Sato (Physicist @ NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies), Dr. Pushker Kharecha (Researcher of earch sciences and astrobiology @ NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies), Dr. David Beerling (Professor of Animal and Plant Sciences @ University of Sheffield), Dr. Robert Berner (Professor Geology and Geophysics @ Yale University), Valerie Masson-Delmotte (Lab. Des Sciences du Climat et l’Environnement/Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, CEA-CNRS-Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin en Yvelines), Dr. Mark Pagani (Professor of paleoceanography and paleoclimatology @ Yale University), Dr. Maureen Raymo (Paleoclimatologist/marine geologist @ Boston University), Dr. Dana L. Royer (Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences @ Wesleyan University) and Dr. James C. Zachos ( Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences @ University of California – Santa Cruzo) “Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?” Open Atmos. Sci. J. (2008), vol. 2, pp. 217-231
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1 +2016-09-10 18:48:10.0
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1 +Felix Tan
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1 +Peninsula IG
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1 +2
Round
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1 +1
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1 +Polytechnic Liu Neg
Title
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1 +thorium cp
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1 +loyola
Caselist.CitesClass[1]
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1 +T
2 +Interpretation:
3 +The aff must defend more than one country prohibits the production of nuclear power Google n.d. “country” accessed 8/10/16
4 +google.com/search?num=40andsafe=offandespv=2andq=countries+definitionandoq=countries+definiti on plural noun: countries 1. a nation with its own government, occupying a particular territory.
5 +Violation – aff defends one country
6 +Standard: limits,
7 +Grammar – only my interp is grammatical since it respects the plural form of the word country. Most predictable on common usage too – no one would look at your plan and think it proves countries ought to prohibit. Grammar is a constraint, it tells us what the res actually says.
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1 +2016-09-11 00:56:45.0
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1 +Michael Harris
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1 +Immaculate Heart
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1 +3
Round
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1 +Polytechnic Liu Neg
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1 +t-countries plural
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1 +loyolla
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1 +Interpretation:  Countries
2 +Websters, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/countries
3 +a political state or nation or its territory
4 +
5 +Violation
6 +the aff doesn't defend the entirety of the resolution
7 +
8 +
9 +The Affirmative interpretation is bad for debate
10 +T and Extra-T voters because they're necessary for good, well-prepared debating
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1 +2016-09-11 00:56:45.0
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1 +Michael Harris
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1 +Immaculate Heart
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1 +3
Round
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1 +4
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1 +Polytechnic Liu Neg
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1 +t-countries
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1 +loyolla
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1 +Intrerpretation: Prohibit
2 +Dictionary.com, 8-5-2013, "the definition of prohibit," Dictionary, http://www.dictionary.com/browse/prohibit
3 +to forbid (an action, activity, etc.) by authority or law:
4 +
5 +Violation: decommissioning is distinct from prohibition.
6 +Dictionary.com, 5-15-2009, "the definition of decommission," http://www.dictionary.com/browse/decommission
7 +to remove or retire (a ship, airplane, etc.) from active service.
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1 +2016-09-11 15:53:21.0
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1 +arjun tambe
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1 +lynbrook
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1 +4
Round
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1 +6
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1 +Polytechnic Liu Neg
Title
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1 +t-decomission
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1 +loyolla
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1 +Banning nuclear power causes a shift to coal, empirics prove
2 +Korosec 11
3 +KIRSTEN KOROSEC, Fortune journalism, “Germany's Nuclear Ban: The Global Effect” Money Watch, May 31, 2011, 4:28 PMhttp://www.cbsnews.com/news/germanys-nuclear-ban-the-global-effect/ 
4 +
5 +
6 +Coal Kills 4,000 times more people than nuclear power
7 +Roos 11 Jerome; The Breakthrough Institute (researcher); 4/11/11; "Coal Kills 4,000 Times More People Per Unit of Energy than Nuclear"; http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/coal_kills_4000_times_more_peo; JLB (9/11/16)
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1 +2016-10-08 21:25:26.0
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1 +paras kumar
Opponent
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1 +quarry lane
ParentRound
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1 +5
Round
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1 +2
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1 +Polytechnic Liu Neg
Title
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1 +Coal DA
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1 +voices
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1 +Nuclear power is the only way to generate sufficient energy for large-scale desalination
2 +IAEA 15 ~-~- widely known as the world's "Atoms for Peace" organization within the United Nations family. Set up in 1957 as the world's centre for cooperation in the nuclear field, the Agency works with its Member States and multiple partners worldwide to promote the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear technologies, “New Technologies for Seawater Desalination Using Nuclear Energy,” IEAE TecDoc Series, 2015
3 +
4 +Water crises cause escalating global conflict.
5 +Rasmussen 11 (Erik, CEO, Monday Morning; Founder, Green Growth Leaders) “Prepare for the Next Conflict: Water Wars” HuffPo 4/12
6 +
7 +That goes nuclear
8 +Zahoor 12 (Musharaf, Researcher at Department of Nuclear Politics – National Defense University, Water Crisis can Trigger Nuclear War in South Asia, http://www.siasat.pk)
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1 +2016-10-08 21:25:27.0
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1 +paras kumar
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1 +quarry lane
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Round
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1 +Polytechnic Liu Neg
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1 +Desal DA
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1 +voices
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Cites
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1 +Prohibiting nuclear power means warming can’t be solved – impracticality of renewables combined with a switch to coal only makes warming worse. Harvey ‘12
2 +Fiona Harvey - award-winning environment journalist for the Guardian, used to work for financial times. “Nuclear power is only solution to climate change, says Jeffrey Sachs.” The Guardian. May 3, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/may/03/nuclear-power-solution-climate-change JJN *bracketing in original
3 +
4 +Climate change disproportionately affects people of color. Pellow 12
5 +David Naguib Pellow 12, Ph.D. Professor, Don Martindale Endowed Chair – University of Minnesota, “Climate Disruption in the Global South and in African American Communities: Key Issues, Frameworks, and Possibilities for Climate Justice,” February 2012, http://www.jointcenter.org/sites/default/files/upload/research/files/White_Paper_Climate_Disruption_final.pdf
EntryDate
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1 +2016-10-08 21:25:28.0
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1 +paras kumar
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1 +quarry lane
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1 +5
Round
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1 +2
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1 +Polytechnic Liu Neg
Title
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1 +warming DA
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1 +voices
Caselist.CitesClass[9]
Cites
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1 +The claim that free speech leads to democratic debate and social progress is a neoliberal myth – the AFF’s faith in the free exchange of ideas displaces a focus on direct action and re-entrenches multiple forms of oppression.
2 +Tillett-Saks 13 Andrew Tillett-Saks (Labor organizer and critical activist author for Truth-Out and Counterpunch), Neoliberal Myths, Counterpunch, 11/7/13, http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/07/neoliberal-myths/ //LADI
3 +In the wake of the Brown University shout-down of Ray Kelly, champion of the NYPD’s racist stop-and-frisk policy and racial profiling in general, the debate has resurfaced. Rather than talking past the anti-protestors’ arguments, they need to be addressed directly. The prototypical argument in denouncing the protestors is not a defense of Ray Kelly’s racism. It is twofold: First, that a free-flowing discourse on the matter will allow all viewpoints to be weighed and justice to inevitably emerge victorious on its merits. Second, that stopping a bigot from speaking in the name of freedom is self-defeating as it devolves our democratic society into tyranny. The twofold argument against the protestors stems from two central myths of neoliberalism. The argument for free discourse as the enlightened path to justice ignores that direct action protest is primarily responsible for most of the achievements we would consider ‘progress’ historically (think civil rights, workers’ rights, suffrage, etc.), not the free exchange of ideas. The claim that silencing speech in the name of freedom is self-defeating indulges in the myth of the pre-existence of a free society in which freedom of speech must be preciously safeguarded, while ignoring the woeful shortcomings of freedom of speech in our society which must be addressed before there is anything worth protecting. Critics of the protest repeatedly denounced direct action in favor of ideological debate as the path to social justice. “It would have been more effective to take part in a discussion rather than flat out refuse to have him speak,” declared one horrified student to the Brown Daily Herald. Similarly, Brown University President Christina Paxson labeled the protest a detrimental “affront to democratic civil society,” and instead advocated “intellectual rigor, careful analysis, and…respectful dialogue and discussion.” Yet the implication that masterful debate is the engine of social progress could not be more historically unfounded. Only in the fairy tale histories of those interested in discouraging social resistance does ‘respectful dialogue’ play a decisive role in struggles against injustice. The eight-hour workday is not a product of an incisive question-and-answer session with American robber barons. Rather, hundreds of thousands of workers conducted general strikes during the nineteenth century, marched in the face of military gunfire at Haymarket Square in 1886, and occupied scores of factories in the 1930’s before the eight-hour work day became American law. Jim Crow was not defeated with the moral suasion of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches. Rather, hundreds of thousands marched on Washington, suffered through imprisonment by racist Southern law enforcement, and repeatedly staged disruptive protests to win basic civil rights. On a more international scale, Colonialism, that somehow-oft-forgotten tyranny that plagued most of the globe for centuries, did not cease thanks to open academic dialogue. Bloody resistance, from Algeria to Vietnam to Panama to Cuba to Egypt to the Philippines to Cameroon and to many other countries, was the necessary tool that unlocked colonial shackles. Different specific tactics have worked in different contexts, but one aspect remains constant: The free flow of ideas and dialogue, by itself, has rarely been enough to generate social progress. It is not that ideas entirely lack social power, but they have never been sufficient in winning concessions from those in power to the oppressed. Herein lies neoliberal myth number one—that a liberal free-market society will inexorably and inherently march towards greater freedom. To the contrary, direct action has always proved necessary.
4 +The AFF’s assumption of a property right to free speech assumes an overly idealistic notion of society that ignores economic barriers and is a product of the neoliberal myth that individuality should be protected at all costs.
5 +Tillett-Saks 13 Andrew Tillett-Saks (Labor organizer and critical activist author for Truth-Out and Counterpunch), Neoliberal Myths, Counterpunch, 11/7/13, http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/07/neoliberal-myths/ //LADI
6 +Yet there are many critics of the protestors who do not claim Ray Kelly’s policies can be defeated with sharp debate. Instead, they argue that any protest in the name of freedom which blocks the speech of another is self-defeating, causing more damage to a free society by ‘silencing’ another than any potential positive effect of the protest. The protestors, the argument goes, tack society back to totalitarian days of censorship rather than forward to greater freedom. The protestors, however well intentioned, have pedantically thwarted our cherished liberal democracy by imposing their will on others. The premise of this argument is neoliberal myth number two—that we live in a society with ‘freedom of speech’ so great it must be protected at all costs. This premise stems from an extremely limited conception of ‘freedom of speech’. Free speech should not be considered the mere ability to speak freely and inconsequentially in a vacuum, but rather the ability to have one’s voice heard equally. Due to the nature of private media and campaign finance in American society, this ability is woefully lopsided as political and economic barriers abound. Those with money easily have their voices heard through media and politics, those without have no such freedom. There is a certain irony (and garish privilege) of upper-class Ivy Leaguers proclaiming the sanctity of a freedom of speech so contingent upon wealth and political power. There is an even greater irony that the fight for true freedom of speech, if history is any indicator, must entail more direct action against defenders of the status quo such as Ray Kelly. To denounce such action out of indulgence in the neoliberal myth of a sacrosanct, already existing, freedom of speech is to condemn the millions in this country with no meaningful voice to eternal silence. Every few years, an advocate of oppression is shouted down. Every few years, the protestors are denounced. They are asked to trust open, ‘civil’ dialogue to stop oppression, despite a historical record of struggle and progress that speaks overwhelmingly to the contrary. They are asked to restrain their protest for freedom so to protect American freedom of speech, despite the undeniable fact that our private media and post-Citizens United political system hear only dollars, not the voices of the masses. Some will claim that both sides have the same goal, freedom, but merely differ on tactics. Yet the historical record is too clear and the growing dysfunctions in our democracy too gross to take any such claims as sincere. In a few years, when protestors shout down another oppressive conservative, we will be forced to lucidly choose which side we are on: The oppressors or the protestors. The status quo or progress.
7 +The AFF’s notion of the marketplace of ideas is neoliberal rhetoric designed to strengthen corporate power.
8 +Whatler 13 Stuart Whatley, Speak for Yourself: A Meditation on the Marketplace of Ideas, Los Angeles Review of Books, 10/4/13, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/speak-for-yourself-a-meditation-on-the-marketplace-of-ideas/#! //LADI
9 +The very notion of a “marketplace of ideas” tracks exactly with neoliberalism’s rising star. This can be seen through Nexis searches of the term, as well as through Google’s n-gram book search between 1800 and 2008. Since first breaking into common usage with a couple dozen mentions in the 1970s, its appearances have increased exponentially decade by decade in books, newspapers, journals, and similar forms of media to the point that it is now published hundreds of times every year. Though use of the phrase actually declined very slightly in books between 2000 and 2008 (not to any degree of significance), it increased in news media year by year over the same course of time — especially between 2008 and 2012. While public policy can be altered and reversed from one administration or congress to another, the fideistic embrace of market vocabulary across political divides indicates that it has become more deeply embedded — instead of being the subject of political debate, it designates the coordinates of what is debatable as politics. It did not take until the 1970s for the “marketplace of ideas” to develop, but it did take that long for it to really become prevalent. Before then it had mainly been the subject of legal opinions, notably in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1919 Abrams v. United States dissent. The law scholar Ronald Collins points out that Holmes used the metaphor, if not the exact phrase, when he wrote, “The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” For his part, Holmes was influenced by John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which in turn drew from John Milton’s Areopagitica, which asked, “Who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” With Holmes as the more direct line of inspiration, the actual words would come to form decades later in other free speech and free press court opinions, including United States v. Rumely (1953) and Lamont v. Postmaster General (1965). In the latter, Justice William Brennan opined that, “The dissemination of ideas can accomplish nothing if otherwise willing addressees are not free to receive and consider them. It would be a barren marketplace of ideas that had only sellers and no buyers.” Back to the early 1970s: big business was a beleaguered beast, feeling the need to counter the popular social movements of the previous decade, and found it prudent to press-gang the “marketplace of ideas” into its service. After a series of crises in capitalism — stagflation, the collapse of Bretton Woods, the 1973 Oil Shock — the solution eventually proffered was even more capitalism. Which is to say, the failure of postwar Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies to turn the economy around led in time to a loss of faith in their effectiveness and to the ouster of leftward-leaning leaders Jimmy Carter and James Callahan. When the recessionary waves did eventually subside, the timing allowed for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to dance on their predecessors’ political graves, accredit their own success to market fundamentalism, and move forward full bore with its implementation through tax cuts and financial deregulation. As Reagan later declared on the New York Stock Exchange floor, “We’re going to turn the bull loose.” And so, the “marketplace of ideas” began to appear for the first time in the mainstream press — most notably in reports quoting corporate public relations professionals in defense of their respective industries. To take one early example, in a July 1975 U.S. News and World Report interview titled “Why Business Has a Black Eye,” Alexander B. Trowbridge, president of a corporate advocacy organization called the Conference Board, addressed questions about the lugubrious public favorability of big business: We businessmen have to get out individually into this marketplace of ideas. We have to be far more involved in our communities. We have to be in closer touch with the groups of people with whom we have close contact — our employees, out stockholders, the community leaders in places where we have our plants and offices, and our customers and suppliers. We need to do a better job not only in supporting them with better products, but in explaining the workings of our business system and what makes it all tick. A March 1976 Newsweek article by Michael Ruby and Gretchen Browne titled “Oil: The Mobil Manner” followed, reporting on a full-page advertisement taken out by Mobil in response to a critical NBC News documentary about gasoline prices. According to Mobil’s vice president of public affairs, Herbert Schmertz, “The ad was an effort to participate in the market-place of ideas” (Schmertz’s line would be quoted again two years later in a Harvard Business Review story by Louis Banks, titled “Taking on the Hostile Media”). Such participation, the reporters note, had become a trend of late. And it would only continue, to the point where even Jimmy Carter invoked the metaphor in an unwittingly ironic 1977 statement, declaring Voice of America independent from State Department propagandizing: The agency must not operate in a covert, manipulative or propagandistic way … Under this administration, Voice of America will be solely responsible for the content of its news broadcasts — for there is no more valued coin than candor in the international marketplace of ideas. While it’s unclear how much of this was a consciously cooperative effort on the part of business and pro-market advocates, it was, regardless, in keeping with the corporate PR strategy of the time — what sociologists David Miller and William Dinan have labeled the “third wave of corporate political activism.” That wave rode from the late 1960s through the 1970s, and saw vast and rapid expansion in corporate lobbying, the founding of numerous business-funded think tanks (including the Heritage Foundation, an early influence on the Reagan presidential platform), and increased media involvement on the part of businesses across the board. According to Miller and Dinan, a collective corporate strategy was effectively launched in a private August 1971 memo from corporate lawyer (and later Supreme Court justice) Lewis F. Powell Jr. to US Chamber of Commerce Education Committee chairman Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., in which Powell wrote: “It is time for American business — which has demonstrated the greatest capacity in all history to produce and to influence consumer decisions — to apply its great talents vigorously to the preservation of the system itself.”
10 +Impact is extinction – neoliberalism destabilizes neurological functioning, dissolves ethical models and creates an endless cycle of environmental crisis creation
11 +Bone 12 (John, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland, the Deregulation Ethic and the Conscience of Capitalism: How the Neoliberal ‘Free Market’ Model Undermines Rationality and Moral Conduct, Globalizations, October 2012, Vol. 9, No. 5, pp. 651–665)//mm
12 +
13 +First, as Durkheim observed, the ability to act with relative impunity is both individually as well as socially corrosive (Durkheim, 1925, 1960, 1965). Compounding this situation, the mutual social estrangement that occurs with increasing social polarisation diminishes the extent to which actors on both sides of the divide identify with each other as, raising the potential for stereotyping, distrust, prejudice and stigma (Aronson, 1995; Bone, 2010; Goffman, 1963). This process can evidently produce a situation where an exclusive elite begin to view the masses as ‘other’ which, in turn, leads to demonization and reduced empathy, legitimating a hardening of attitudes to the plight of those negatively affected by the actions of the powerful, a situation that has arguably been much at play during the neoliberal era. Once more, as has been identified throughout our history, psycho-social estrangement and the concomitant negative stereotyping and prejudice that it cultivates, further enhances the capacity for un-empathic and amoral conduct, with potentially fateful outcomes, particularly where this can occur with few constraints. It may even be the case, as has been argued, that social arrangements and values such as those prevalent in contemporary capitalism not only disinhibit anti-social behaviours but actually undermine an otherwise natural predisposition towards pro-social and empathic conduct (Olson, 2005). Conclusion As above, the much promulgated notion that deregulated economies promote freedom, wealth and the greater good can be regarded as a touchstone of late twentieth and early twenty-first century capitalist societies, as was the case a century before. Thus, the notion of competitive, rational and deregulated markets, operating by the rational laws and governed by the ‘invisible hand’, are once more presented as being the best vehicle providing economic efficiency and the wider public good, with any restraint merely operating to the detriment of the latter. From this standpoint, the brief intervening period of managed capitalism, or ‘embedded liberalism’, appears as a minor detour, as opposed to the sea change that it was once assumed to represent within major developed Western societies (Harvey, 2005; Ruggie, 1982). It has been extensively argued, however, that the return to the economics of the past has revived capitalism’s worst irrationalities and instabilities, culminating in the credit crisis, as well as its capacity to generate profound inequities (Krugman, 2009). This paper asserts that, in their contribution to the above, the deregulatory features of neoliberal capitalism imply more than mere structural adjustments to economic organisation, but might also be understood as impacting upon the aspects of individual neurological functioning that are correlated with inhibiting anti-social self gratifying behaviour. Thus, without a deeply neurologically ‘engrained’ set of formal and informal rules, together with a concomitant commitment to their adherence, the habituated emotional ‘stop’ signs that routinely inhibit socially and economically destructive conduct dissolve, as firm injunctions become pliable obstacles to be ‘negotiated’ or simply ignored. Overall, by undermining or even eradicating the regulatory walls that guide individual conscience—and, in turn, socially and economically rational and responsible conduct—licentiousness, self interest and short term expediency flourish, raising the potential for further ‘irrational’ destabilization of society and economy and the generation of continuing crises. In this way deregulation, of itself, compounds the deleterious effects of the value system that drives it. From this perspective, the ‘spirit’ of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and its organisational ‘form’ appears as almost the inverse of the rational, measured and moral credo that Weber once imagined (1930).
14 +Thus the alternative is an ethic of social flesh. That foregrounds embodied interdependence, substituting an ecological view of relationships for the aff’s commodity thinking – only the alternative can produce ethical institutional decisionmaking
15 +Beasley and Bacchi 7
16 +(Chris, Prof. of Politics @ University of Adelaide, Carol, Prof. Emeritus @ University of Adelaide, “Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity ~-~- towards an ethic of `social flesh'”, Feminist Theory, 2007 8: 279)
17 +
18 +The political vocabulary of social flesh has significant implications for democratic visions. Because it conceptualizes citizens as socially embodied – as interconnected mutually reliant flesh – in a more thoroughgoing sense than the languages of trust, care, responsibility and generosity, it resists accounts of political change as making transactions between the ‘less fortunate’ and ‘more privileged’, more trusting, more caring, more responsible or more generous. Social flesh is political metaphor in which fleshly sociality is profoundly levelling. As a result, it challenges meliorist reforms that aim to protect the ‘vulnerable’ from the worst effects of social inequality, including the current distribution of wealth. A political ethic of embodied intersubjectivity requires us to consider fleshly interconnection as the basis of a democratic sociality, demanding a rather more far-reaching reassessment of national and international institutional arrangements than political vocabularies that rest upon extending altruism. Relatedly, it provides a new basis for thinking about the sorts of institutional arrangements necessary to acknowledge social fleshly existence, opening up ‘the scope of what counts as relevant’ (Shildrick, 2001: 238). For example, it allows a challenge to current conceptualizations that construct attention to the ‘private sphere’ as compensatory rather than as necessary (Beasley and Bacchi, 2000: 350). We intend to pursue the relationship between social flesh and democratic governance in future papers. Conclusion In this paper we focus on various vocabularies of social interconnection intended to offer a challenge to the ethos of atomistic individualism associated with neo-liberalism and develop a new ethical ideal called ‘social flesh’. Despite significant differences in the several vocabularies canvassed in this paper, we note that most of the trust and care writers conceive the social reform of atomistic individualism they claim to address in terms of a presumed moral or ethical deficiency within the disposition of individuals. Hence, they reinstate the conception of the independent active self in certain ways. Moreover, there is a disturbing commonality within all these accounts: an ongoing conception of asymmetrical power relations between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, ‘carers’ and ‘cared for’, ‘altruistic’ and ‘needy’. While widely used terms like trust and care clearly remain vocabularies around which social debate may be mobilized, and hence are not to be dismissed (see Pocock, 2006), we suggest that there are important reasons for questioning their limits and their claims to offer progressive alternative understandings of social life. In this setting, we offer the concept of social flesh as a way forward in rethinking the complex nature of the interaction between subjectivity, embodiment, intimacy, social institutions and social interconnection. Social flesh generalizes the insight that trusting/caring/ altruistic practices already take place on an ongoing basis to insist that the broad, complex sustenance of life that characterizes embodied subjectivity and intersubjective existence be acknowledged. As an ethico-political starting point, ‘social flesh’ highlights human embodied interdependence. By drawing attention to shared embodied reliance, mutual reliance, of people across the globe on social space, infrastructure and resources, it offers a decided challenge to neo-liberal conceptions of the autonomous self and removes the social distance and always already given distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’. There is no sense here of ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’; rather we are all recognized as receivers of socially generated goods and services. Social flesh also marks our diversity, challenging the privileging of normative over ‘other’ bodies. Finally, because social flesh necessarily inhabits a specific geographical space, environmentalist efforts to preserve that space take on increased salience (Macken, 2004: 25). By these means, the grounds are created for defending a politics beyond assisting the ‘less fortunate’. Social flesh, therefore, refuses the residues of ‘noblesse oblige’ that still appear to linger in emphasis upon vulnerability and altruism within the apparently reformist ethical ideals of trust/respect, care, responsibility and even generosity. In so doing it puts into question the social privilege that produces inequitable vulnerability and the associated need for ‘altruism’. Vital debates about appropriate distribution of social goods, environmental politics, professional and institutional power and democratic processes are reopened.
19 +
20 +Neolib-Framework
21 +Role of the ballot is to foreground a particular political vocabulary – how society is framed and understand gives debaters’ skill development a particular trajectory and meaning – the alternative is crucial to inserting the pedagogical energy of the debate into a broader circuit of anti-neoliberal public spaces and commons
22 +Giroux 13
23 +(Henry Giroux, currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University, “Hope in the Age of Looming Authoritarianism,” 02 December 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20307-hope-in-the-age-of-looming-authoritarianism#_edn2)
24 +
25 +We live at a time in which the crisis of politics is inextricably connected to the crisis of ideas, education and agency. What must be remembered is that any viable politics or political culture can emerge only out of a determined effort to provide the economic conditions, public spaces, pedagogical practices and social relations in which individuals have the time, motivation and knowledge to engage in acts of translation that reject the privatization of the public sphere, the lure of ethno-racial or religious purity, the emptying of democratic traditions, the crumbling of the language of commonality, and the decoupling of critical education from the unfinished demands of a global democracy.¶ Young people, artists, intellectuals, educators and workers in the United States and globally are increasingly addressing what it means politically and pedagogically to confront the impoverishment of public discourse, the collapse of democratic values and commitments, the erosion of its public spheres and the widely promoted modes of citizenship that have more to do with forgetting than with critical learning. Collectively, they provide varied suggestions for rescuing modes of critical agency and social grievances that have been abandoned or orphaned to the dictates of global neoliberalism, a punishing state and a systemic militarization of public life. In opposition to the attacks on democratic institutions, values and modes of governance, activists all over the globe are offering an incisive language of analysis, a renewed sense of political commitment, different democratic visions and a politics of possibility.¶ Political exhaustion and impoverished intellectual visions are fed by the widely popular assumption that there are no alternatives to the present state of affairs. Within the increasing corporatization of everyday life, market values trump ethical considerations enabling the economically privileged and financial elite to retreat into the safe, privatized enclaves of family, religion and consumption. Those without the luxury of such choices pay a terrible price in the form of material suffering and the emotional hardship and political disempowerment that are its constant companions. Even those who live in the relative comfort of the middle classes must struggle with a poverty of time in an era in which the majority must work more than they ever have to make ends meet. Moreover, in the face of the 2008 economic crisis caused by gangster financial service institutions such as J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Barclay and Merrill Lynch, among others, the middle class is dissolving into the jaws of a death-machine that has robbed them of their homes, health care, jobs and dignity.¶ The ruling elites have taken flight from any sense of social and ethical responsibility and their willing and active repression of conscience has opened the door to new forms of authoritarianism in which the arrogance of corporate power finds its underside in a hatred of all others that threaten its power. Some contemporary theorists suggest that politics as a site of contestation, critical exchange and engagement is in a state of terminal arrest or has simply come to an end. However, too little attention is paid to what it means to think through how the struggle over democracy is inextricably linked to creating and sustaining public spheres where individuals can be engaged as political agents equipped with the skills, capacities and knowledge they need not only as autonomous political agents but also to believe that such struggles are worth taking up. The growth of cynicism in American society may say less about the reputed apathy of the populace than about the bankruptcy of the old political languages and the need for a new language and vision for clarifying intellectual, ethical, economic and political projects, especially as they work to reframe questions of agency, ethics and meaning for a substantive democracy.¶ In opposition to the attacks on critical thought, engaged citizenship, the discourse of hope and the erosion of "the public character of spaces, relations, and institutions,"xx young people, workers, intellectuals, artists and environmentalists are once again taking seriously Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's insistence "to hang on to intellectual and real freedom" and to ensure that thinking does not become "immune to the suggestion of the status quo,"xxi thus losing its "secure hold on possibility."xxii Increasingly, young people and others concerned about a substantive democracy are taking political stands; they are becoming more willing to cross boundaries, join questions of understanding and power, and bring into being with passion and conscience new ways of engaging with the world. In doing so, this diverse group of activists, intellectuals and concerned global citizens is intervening in the world on several registers.¶ Such groups, while in their infancy, are determined to unmask society's most pernicious myths, restage power in productive ways, rescue the promise of social agency from those places where it has been denied, and further the ethical and political imperative to provide an accurate historical account of the racial state and racial power. More and more, youths and others marginalized by race and class are refusing the dominant scripts of official authority and the limitations they impose upon individual and social agency. Progressives and oppositional groups are rethinking what it would mean to engage spaces of neglect and human suffering such as schools, shelters, food banks, union halls and other sites of potential resistance as starting points from which to build unfamiliar, potential worlds of hope, learning and struggle. In the process of thinking seriously about structures of power, state formation, race, sexuality, technology, class and pedagogy, these new modes of resistance never substitute moral indignation for the hard work of contributing to critical education and enabling people to expand the horizons of their own sense of agency and collectively challenge structures of power.¶ From Québec and Athens to Paris and New York City, these emerging collective movements bristle with a deeply rooted refusal to serve up well-worn and obvious truths, reinforce existing relations of power or bid retreat to an official rendering of common sense that promotes "a corrosive and demoralizing silence."xxiii What emerges in these distinct but politically allied voices is a pedagogy of disruption, critique, recovery and possibility, one that recognizes that viable politics cannot exist without will and awareness, and that critical education motivates and provides a crucial foundation for understanding and intervening in the world. Freedom in this discourse means learning how to think critically and act courageously - refusing to substitute empowering forms of education for mind-deadening training and numbing methods of memorizing data and test taking.¶ Collectively these emerging movements of resistance are developing an understanding of politics that demands not only a new language but also necessitates a broader vision, sense of organization and robust strategies that are critical and visionary. This commitment translates into a pedagogy and politics capable of illuminating the anti-democratic forces and sites that threaten human life; at the same time, its visionary nature cracks open the present to reveal new horizons, different futures and the promise of a global democracy. And yet, under the reign of casino capitalism, racist xenophobic nationalisms and other anti-democratic forces, notions of citizenship are increasingly privatized, commodified or subject to various religious and ideological fundamentalisms that feed a sense of powerlessness and disengagement from democratic struggles, if not politics itself. The culture of cruelty is alive and well as casino capitalism presents misfortune as a weakness and the logic of the market instructs individuals to rely on their own wits if they fall on hard times, especially because the state has washed its hands of any responsibility for the fate of its citizens. Hope is in the air, but it is crucial to recognize that the creeping authoritarianism descending upon the United States will not give up power easily, if at all. Consequently, an impatient patience proceeds slowly and persistently offers the formative culture necessary for feeding a radical imagination waiting to manifest itself concretely in a new vision, social movement and fierce urgency of struggle.
26 +this question of the ballot is an incalculable ethical directive - Every argument they make is dependent on this flawed symbolic order that precludes effective analysis because capitalism subsumes truth claims.
27 +Zizek and Daly ‘4
28 +(Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher, Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, and Glyn Daly, Lecturer and Instructor, Political Theory and Thought, Northampton University, 2004, Conversations With Zizek, p. 14-19)
29 +
30 +This is not to endorse any 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 population. 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 judgement in a neutral marketplace. 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 of 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 is 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 to reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a 'glitch' in an otherwise sound matrix. Risking the impossible / The response of the left to global capitalism cannot be one of retreat into the nation-state or into organicist forms of ‘community’ and popular identities that currently abound in Europe and elsewhere. For Zizek it is, rather, a question of working with the very excesses that, in a Lacanian sense, are in capitalism more than capitalism. It is a question, therefore, of transcending the provincial ‘universalism’ of capitalism. To illustrate the point, Zizek draws attention to the category of ‘intellectual property’ and the increasingly absurd attempts to establish restrictive dominion over technological advances – genetic codes, DNA structures, digital communications, pharmaceutical breakthroughs, computer programs and so on – that either affect us all and/or to which there is a sense of common human entitlement. Indeed, the modern conjuncture of capitalism is more and more characterized by a prohibitive culture: the widespread repression of those forms of research and development that have real emancipatory potential beyond exclusive profiteering; the restriction of information that has direct consequences for the future of humanity; the fundamental denial that social equality could be sustained by the abundance generated by capitalism. Capitalism typically endeavors to constrain the very dimensions of the universal that are enabled by it and simultaneously to resist all those developments that disclose its specificity-artificiality as merely one possible mode of being. / The left, therefore, must seek to subvert these ungovernable excesses in the direction of a political (and politicizing) universalism; or what Balibar would call egaliberte. This means that the left should demand more globalization not less. Where neo-liberals speak the language of freedom – either in terms of individual liberty or the free movement of goods and capital – the left should use this language to combat today’s racist obsessions with ‘economic refugees’, ‘immigrants’ and so on, and insist that freedoms are meaningless without the social resources to participate in those freedoms. Where there is talk of universal rights, the left must affirm a responsibility to the universal; one that emphasizes real human solidarity and does not lose sight of the abject within differential discourses. Reversing the well-known environmentalists’ slogan, we might say that the left has to involve itself in thinking locally and acting globally. That is to say, it should attend to the specificity of today’s political identities within the context of their global (capitalist) conditions of possibilities precisely in order to challenge those conditions. / Yet here I would venture that, despite clearly stated differences (Butler et al., 2000), the political perspective of Zizek is not necessarily opposed to that of Laclau and Mouffe and that a combined approach is fully possible. While Zizek is right to stress the susceptibility of today’s ‘alternative’ forms of hegemonic engagement to deradicalization within a postmodern-p.c. imaginary – a kind of hegemonization of the very terrain (the politico-cultural conditions of possibility) that produces and predisposes the contemporary logics of hegemony – it is equally true to say that the type of political challenge that Zizek has in mind is one that can only advance through the type of hegemonic subversion that Laclau and Mouffe have consistently stressed in their work. The very possibility of a political universalism is one that depends on a certain hegemonic breaking out of the existing conventions/grammar of hegemonic engagement. / It is along these lines that Zizek affirms the need for a more radical intervention in the political imagination. The modern (Machiavellian) view of politics is usually presented in terms of a basic tension between (potentially) unlimited demands/appetites and limited resources; a view which is implicit in the predominant ‘risk society’ perspective where the central (almost Habermasian) concern is with more and better scientific information. The political truth of today’s world, however, is rather the opposite of this view. That is to say, the demands of the official left (especially the various incarnations of the Third Way left) tend to articulate extremely modest demands in the face of a virtually unlimited capitalism that is more than capable of providing every person on this planet with a civilized standard of living. For Zizek, a confrontation with the obscenities of abundance capitalism also requires a transformation of the ethico-political imagination. It is no longer a question of developing ethical guidelines within the existing political framework (the various institutional and corporate ‘ethical committees’) but of developing a politicization of ethics; an ethics of the Real. The starting point here is an insistence on the unconditional autonomy of the subject; of accepting that as human beings we are ultimately responsible for our actions and being-in-the-world up to and including the construction of the capitalist system itself. Far from simple norm-making or refining/reinforcing existing social protocol, an ethics of the Real tends to emerge through norm-breaking and in finding new directions that, by definition, involve traumatic changes: i.e. the Real in genuine ethical challenge. An ethics of the Real does not simply defer to the impossible (or infinite Otherness) as an unsurpassable horizon that already marks every act as a failure, incomplete and so on. Rather, such an ethics is one that fully accepts contingency but which is nonetheless prepared to risk the impossible in the sense of breaking out of standardized positions. We might say that it is an ethics which is not only politically motivated but which also draws its strength from the political itself. / For Zizek an ethics of the Real (or Real ethics) means that we cannot rely on any form of symbolic Other that would endorse our (in)decisions and (in)actions: for example, the ‘neutral’ financial data of the stockmarkets; the expert knowledge of Beck’s ‘new modernity’ scientists; the economic and military councils of the New World Order; the various (formal and informal) tribunals of political correctness; or any of the mysterious laws of God, nature or the market. What Zizek affirms is a radical culture of ethical identification for the left in which the alternative forms of militancy must first of all be militant with themselves. That is to say, they must be militant in the fundamental ethical sense of not relying on any external/higher authority and in the development of a political imagination that, like Zizek’s own thought, exhorts us to risk the impossible.
EntryDate
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1 +2016-12-17 18:48:44.0
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1 +Karen Qi
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1 +Lynbrook NA
ParentRound
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1 +8
Round
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1 +1
Team
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1 +Polytechnic Liu Neg
Title
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1 +Jan-Feb neolib
Tournament
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1 +college prep
Caselist.RoundClass[8]
Cites
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1 +9
EntryDate
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1 +2016-12-17 18:48:37.0
Judge
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1 +Karen Qi
Opponent
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1 +Lynbrook NA
Round
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1 +1
RoundReport
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1 +1ac-neolib
2 +1nc-neolib k
Tournament
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1 +college prep

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