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1		-Pt. 1 Framing
2		-The state is inevitable but that doesn’t mean we should invest faith in it or even care about it. This is the time for the anarchy of becoming – a ideological separation of state and person.
3		-Liberalism tries to seize control of the state and direct the flow of history; this fails and maintains ongoing violence against the oppressed by maintaining state control. It builds a reliance of the self on the state. Against this, affirm an anarchy of becoming – a micropolitical severance of the state from the ontological self.
4		-Call ‘2: (Lewis Call, Associate Professor of History at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, 2002, Postmodern Anarchism. Lexington: Lexington Books, pp. 47-56); AB
5		-But the usual suspects have another, much more serious problem. Even if postmodern liberals can reject Nietzsche’s assaults on capitalism and the liberal state – and it is easy enough to locate passages in Nietzsche’s books where he seems to contradict these assaults – those who would use Nietzsche to shore up the eroding foundations of liberal democracy must contend with the even more powerful and radical forms of anarchy which are to be found in Nietzsche’s thought. They must contend, for example, with Nietzsche’s well-known anarchy of the subject. A number of commentators have pointed out that one of Nietzsche’s main contributions to political thought is his destruction of the conventional concepts of human subjectivity which lie at the basis of most modern political theories. Keith Ansell-Pearson suggests, for example, that the Genealogy aims “to show that one of the central ideas of moral and political theory, that of a human subject in possession of conscience and a free will, is not a natural given. William Connolly points out that after Nietzsche “the subject is not simply or unambiguously the self which establishes its unity, freedom, independence and self-transparency. And the assault on conventional (i.e., post-Enlightenment) ideas of subjectivity is not simply a metaphysical or epistemological issue. It is also a deeply political issue which has profound implications for the consruction of political theories and institutions. Those implications do not bode well for liberalism. Mark Warren summarizes the problem nicely: “Because liberals put a metaphysical placeholder in the space of the individual, they failed to theorize this space. As a result, they justified liberal forms of the state in terms of a historically conditioned effect mistaken for a universal essence. This is why Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism in Western culture as the collapse of the individual agent also implicates the individualistic metaphysics of liberalism. Nietzsche’s assault on modern subjectivity, then, undermines the philosophical foundations of the liberal state. After Nietzsche, liberals find themselves thrown into a confusing postmodern world of multiple subject positions and decentered identities. They are forces to develop a new kind of liberal politics, one which will not rely upon epistemologically suspect categories of individuality. This is, as we have seen, a difficult task, and one which liberals rarely complete in a satisfying way. Let us now look in more detail at Nietzsche’s anarchy of the subject. Nietzsche famously regarded the free will which is central to most conventional notions of subjectivity as an egregious error. For example, he notes in Human, All Too Human that “we do not accuse nature of immorality when it sends thunderstorms and makes us wet: why do we call the harmful man immoral?” Because in the latter case we assume a voluntary commanding free will, in the former necessity. But this distinction is an error. Here Nietzsche seems to be advocating a kind of radical determinism: he views individual actions not as the product of some chimerical free will, but rather as the indirect product of the social and cultural forces which have constituted the individual who performs those actions. Of course, this has radical implications for political theory. If we understand individual actions as the product of the society and culture which produced the individual, then society is quite literally to blame for what its members do. This naturally renders conventional ideas of punishment radically incoherent. “How is it that every execution offends us more than a murder?” Nietzsche demands. “It is the coldness of the judges, the scrupulous preparation, the insight that here a human being used as a means of deterring others. For it is not guilt that is being punished, even when it exists: this lies in educators, parents, environment, in us, not in the murderer – I mean the circumstances that cause him to become one.” This is a key point for the postmodern anarchist. If we accept that humans possess no metaphysical, pre-social essence, if we accept that they are little more than nodal points where various social, economic, and cultural forces converge to produce the illusion of subjectivity, then the punishments schemes of the liberal state make no sense. Indeed, on this reading it would make more sense to execute the system itself, since it is the system that is guilty of manufacturing criminals. Revolutionaries who follow this kind of interpretation would also, perhaps, be less likely to allow their uprisings to descend into the kind of mindless terror, which was, unfortunately, to be found in abundance in France during the 1790s, in Russia during the 1920s and 1930s, or in China during the 1950s. I say this because the radical denial of free will applies to the rulers as well as the ruled. This point was made, remarkably enough, by Bakunin, who observed in 1869 that “the kings, the oppressors, exploiters of all kinds, are as guilty as the criminals who have emerged from the masses; like them, they are the evildoers who are not guilty, since they, too, are involuntary products of the present social order.” Let the guillotine be deployed, then, not against aristocratic or bourgeois tyrants but against the philosophy of subjectivity which gives such tyrants their power in the first place. Nietzsche continues his assault on traditional forms of subjectivity and consciousness in Beyond Good and Evil, questioning whether “there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘ego,’ and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking – that I know what thinking is.” An obvious assault on the old Cartesian concept of subjectivity (“I think, therefore I am”), Nietzsche’s critique of consciousness also has dramatic political meaning. These “thinking egos” – the rational, autonomous dramatic political meaning. These “thinking egos” – the rational, autonomous subjects who have dominated political discourse since the Enlightenment – are supposedly the beings who vote in liberal elections, who serve on the liberal juries which decide the fate of the supposedly autonomous criminals who stand before them, who use the media to inform themselves about issues so that they may form rational opinions, and so on. In short, a whole host of liberal theories and institutions depend upon a certain idea of subjectivity which is, after Nietzsche, extremely difficult to sustain. This anarchy of the subject makes possible another, possibly even more radical form of anarchy, an anarchy of becoming. If Nietzsche is right about the status of the subject in the late modern period – and an entire tradition of twentieth-century Continental philosophy suggests that his analysis is at least presciently persuasive with regards to the postmodern period – then we must radically rethink what it means to be human. Previous concepts of subjectivity (and thus previous political theories) focused on being: I am this autonomous person, I am this rational citizen of a liberal democracy. Nietzsche shifts our attention to becoming. If, as he argues, the subject has no firm metaphysical ground and no center, if indeed our subjectivity is in a constant state of flux, then the meaning of our lives must be constantly changing. It is, of course, somewhat alarming to think that we might have no fixed being, that our essence (if we have one) must reside in a constant stream of transformations. However, the thought of becoming can also be a very liberating thought. All radical thinking demands change, and Nietzsche’s demands more than most. To the conventional radical’s demands for social and political change, Nietzsche adds the demand for a change in our very consciousness, in the way we view our relationship to time and history. In this sense, Nietzsche’s thought stands as one of the most radical ever conceived, for it asserts nothing less than this: change is the very heart of who and what we are. And this is true, says Nietzsche, not only of ourselves but of our world. “If the world had a goal, it must have been reaches. If it were in any way capable of pausing and becoming fixed, of ‘being,’ if in the whole course of its becoming it possessed even for a moment of this capability of ‘being,’ then all becoming would long since have come to an end, along with all thinking, all ‘spirit.’ The fact of ‘spirit’ as a form of becoming proves that the world has no goal, no final state, and is incapable of being.” For Nietzsche, the world has no teleology, no destination. The forces of history do not direct us toward a Zeitgeist named Hegel. Indeed, if Hegel was the preeminent philosopher of the state, Nietzsche’s philosophy of perpetual becoming can only herald the state’s demise.
6		-HE CONTINUES… So: Nietzsche’s thought, which explodes all manifestations of the conventional political subject – its rationality, its language, its thoughts, its theories, its states, its economics – stand at the origin of the subversive counteridea which I call postmodern anarchism. Such an anarchism represents a tactical use of Nietzsche’s thinking, not (as the usual suspects propose) to shore up the rapidly eroding theoretical foundations of liberal democracy but rather to finish off that withered remnant of subject-centered post-Enlightenment politics, in order to open up a space for something more interesting. Postmodern anarchism asserts that the problems which face us today are not the result of flaws in our political structures which can be alleviated through reform of through the seizure of state power. Rather, the problem lies in the structures themselves, and in the epistemologies which sustain those structures. Nietzsche’s anarchy of the subject makes it quite clear that our culture is to blame for the sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves. Following this guilty verdict, modern political culture in general and liberal political culture in particular may expect to receive a death sentence. The liberals warn that this way lies madness. We say: we cannot know what may lie further down this river of becoming. But at least we know that it will be radically different from the disastrous political situation in which we find ourselves presently. Perhaps the greatest appeal of postmodern Nietzschean anarchism lies in the fact that it runs little risk of falling into theoretical and political traps faced by all merely modern revolutions. Marxims and nineteenth-century anarchism criticized capital, bourgeois values, and the liberal state – but they did so using the language, the terms, and the theoretical tools of the very bourgeois order they sought to undermine. Lenin and Mao sought to reshape the state into something which could sanction genuine political and economic freedom, but they retained so many of the old forms that they ended up reproducing the old varieties of repression and exploitation. “The problem for revolutionaries today,” as Deleuze argues, is to unite within the purpose of a particular struggle without falling into the despotic and bureaucratic organization of the party or state apparatus, a nomadic unit related to the outside that will not revive an internal despotic unity. Perhaps this is what is most profound in Nietzsche’s thought and marks the extent of his break with philosophy, at least so far as it is manifested in the aphorism: he made thought into a machine of war – a battering ram – into a nomadic force. As always, it is the performative effect of Nietzsche’s thought, rather than its explicit content, which concerns us. And one crucial effect of his thinking is that it removes philosophy from the horizons of the state. And it is an event whose ramifications will continue to be felt for some time. Just as news of the death of God takes a long time reach us, so too does news of the death of the state. But the word of these deaths draws inexorably nearer. For no God and no state can hope to survive a full engagement with that thinking which detonates all fixed human identities and reveals as mere phantasms of consciousness all fixed politics, economics, and culture.
7		-Politics that does not begin with the creation of the self is doomed to reactivity and ressentiment. This inscribes hatred into the place of power and reaffirms existing structures of domination.
8		-Newman 2k: (Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory at the University of London at Goldsmiths, 2000, “Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment,” Theory and Event, 4:3); AB
9		-Ressentiment is diagnosed by Nietzsche as our modern condition. In order to understand ressentiment, however, it is nec-essary to understand the relationship between master morality and slave morality in which ressentiment is generated. Nietzsche’s work On the Genealogy of Morality is a study of the origins of morality. For Nietzsche, the way we interpret and impose values on the world has a history — its origins are often brutal and far removed from the values they produce. The value of ‘good’, for instance, was invented by the noble and high-placed to apply to themselves, in contrast to common, low-placed and plebeian.3 It was the value of the master — ‘good’ — as opposed to that of the slave — ‘bad’. Thus, according to Nietzsche, it was in this pathos of distance, between the high-born and the low-born, this absolute sense of superiority, that values were created.4 However, this equation of good and aristocratic began to be undermined by a slave revolt in values. This slave revolt, according to Nietzsche, began with the Jews who instigated a revaluation of values: It was the Jews who, rejecting the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed) ventured with awe-inspiring consistency, to bring about a reversal and held it in the teeth of their unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless), saying, ‘Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble, the powerful, you are eternally wicked, cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will also be eternally wretched, cursed and damned!’…5 In this way the slave revolt in morality inverted the noble system of values and began to equate good with the lowly, the powerless — the slave. This inversion introduced the pernicious spirit of revenge and hatred into the creation of values. There- will to power. It would be, in other words, an anarchism without ressentiment. The question of community is central to radical politics, including anarchism. One cannot talk about collective action without at least posing the question of community. For Nietzsche, most modern radical aspirations towards community were a manifestation of the ‘herd’ mentality. However it may be possible to construct a ressentiment-free notion of community from Nietzsche’s own concept of power. For Nietzsche, active power is the individual’s instinctive discharge of his forces and capacities which produces in him an enhanced sensation of power, while reactive power, as we have seen, needs an external object to act on and define itself in opposition to.66 Perhaps one could imagine a form of community based on active power. For Nietzsche this enhanced feeling of power may be derived from assistance and benevolence towards others, from enhancing the feeling of power of others.67 Like the ethics of mutual aid, a community based on will to power may be composed of a series of inter-subjective relations that involve helping and caring for people without dominating them and denying difference. This openness to difference and self-transformation, and the ethic of care, may be the defining characteristics of the post-anarchist democratic community. This would be a community of active power — a community of ‘masters’ rather than ‘slaves’.68 It would be a community that sought to overcome itself — continually transforming itself and revelling in the knowledge of its power to do so. Post-anarchism may be seen, then, as a series of politicoethical strategies against domination, without essentialist guarantees and Manichean structures that condition and restrict classical anarchism. It would affirm the contingency of values and identities, including its own, and affirm, rather than deny, fore morality, as we understand it, had its roots in this vengeful will to power of the powerless over the powerful — the revolt of the slave against the master. It was from this imperceptible, subterranean hatred that grew the values subsequently associated with the good — pity, altruism, meekness, etc. Political values also grew from this poisonous root. For Nietzsche, values of equality and democracy, which form the cornerstone of radical political theory, arose out of the slave revolt in morality. They are generated by the same spirit of revenge and hatred of the powerful. Nietzsche therefore condemns political movements like liberal democracy, socialism, and indeed anarchism. He sees the democratic movement as an expression of the herd-animal morality derived from the Judeo-Christian revaluation of values.6 Anarchism is for Nietzsche the most extreme heir to democratic values — the most rabid expression of the herd instinct. It seeks to level the differences between individuals, to abolish class distinctions, to raze hierarchies to the ground, and to equalize the powerful and the powerless, the rich and the poor, the master and the slave. To Nietzsche this is bringing everything down to level of the lowest common denominator — to erase the pathos of distance between the master and slave, the sense of difference and superiority through which great values are created. Nietzsche sees this as the worst excess of European nihilism — the death of values and creativity. Slave morality is characterized by the attitude of ressentiment — the resentment and hatred of the powerless for the powerful. Nietzsche sees ressentiment as an entirely negative sentiment — the attitude of denying what is life-affirming, saying ‘no’ to what is different, what is ‘outside’ or ‘other’. Ressentiment is characterized by an orientation to the outside, rather than the focus of noble morality, which is on the self.7 While the master says ‘I am good’ and adds as an afterthought, ‘therefore he is bad’; the slave says the opposite — ‘He (the master) is bad, therefore I am good’. Thus the invention of values comes from a comparison or opposition to that which is outside, other, different. Nietzsche says: “… in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, psychologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act all, — its action is basically a reaction.”8 This reactive stance, this inability to define anything except in opposition to something else, is the attitude of ressentiment. It is the reactive stance of the weak who define themselves in opposition to the strong.
10		-Reject ressentiment because it’s a revengeful hatred of the squo that deprecates existence – outweighs all other impacts. Bracketed for gendered language.
11		-Deleuze ‘83: Gilles, 1983, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pg. 34-36 BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE
12		-Is this difference only psychological? A difference of mood or tone? Nietzsche's philosophy depends, in general, on the principle that ressentiment, bad conscience etc. are not psychological determinations. Nietzsche calls the enterprise of denying life and depreciating existence nihilism. He analyses the principal forms of nihilism, ressentiment, bad conscience, ascetic ideal; the whole of nihilism and its forms he calls the spirit of revenge. But, the different forms of nihilism are not at all reducible to psychological determinations, historical events or ideological currents, not even to metaphysical structures. 3 0 The spirit of revenge is undoubtedly expressed biologically, psychologically, historically and metaphysically; the spirit of revenge is a type, it is not separable from a typology, the key stone of Nietzschean philosophy. But the problem is: what is the nature of this typology? Far from being a psychological trait the spirit of revenge is the principle on which our whole psychology depends. Ressentiment is not part of psychology but the whole of our psychology, without knowing it, is a part of ressentiment. In the same way, when Nietzsche shows that Christianity is full of ressentiment and bad conscience he does not make nihilism a historical event, it is rather the element of history as such, the motor of universal history, the famous "historical meaning" or "meaning of history" which at one time found its most adequate manifestation in Christianity. And when Nietzsche undertakes the critique of nihilism he makes nihilism the presupposition of all metaphysics rather than the expression of particular metaphysics: there is no metaphysics which does not judge and depreciate life in the name of a supra-sensible world. We cannot even say that nihilism and its forms are categories of thought, for the categories of thought, of reasonable thought - identity, causality, finality - themselves presuppose an interpretation of force which is that of ressentiment. For all these reasons Nietzsche can say: "The instinct of revenge has gained such a hold on humanity over the centuries that the whole of metaphysics, psychology, history and above all morality bear its imprint. As soon as man began thinking he The Tragic 35 introduced the bacillus of revenge into things" (VP III 458). We must understand this as meaning that the instinct of revenge is the force which constitutes the essence of what we call psychology, history, metaphysics and morality. The spirit of revenge is the genealogical element of our thought, the transcendental principle of our way of thinking. Nietzsche's struggle against nihilism and the spirit of revenge will therefore mean the reversal of metaphysics, the end of history as history of man and the transformation of the sciences. And we do not really know what a man person denuded of ressentiment would be like. A man who would not accuse or depreciate existence - would he still be a man, would he think like a man? Would he not already be something other than a man, almost the Overman? To have ressentiment or not to have ressentiment - there is no greater difference, beyond psychology, beyond history, beyond metaphysics. It is the true difference or transcendental typology - the genealogical and hierarchical difference. Nietzsche presents the aim of his philosophy as the freeing of thought from nihilism and its various forms. Now, this implies a new way of thinking, an overthrow of the principle on which thought depends, a straightening out of the genealogical principle itself, a "transmutation". For a long time we have only been able to think in terms oi ressentiment and bad conscience. We have had no other ideal but the ascetic ideal. We have opposed knowledge to life in order to judge life, in order to make it something blameworthy, responsible or erroneous. We turned will into something bad, something stricken by a basic contradiction: we have said that it must be rectified, restrained, limited and even denied and suppressed. It was only any good at this price. There is no philosopher who, discovering the essence of will, has not groaned at his own discovery and, like the timid fortuneteller, has not immediately seen bad omens for the future and the source of all evils of the past. Schopenhauer pushed this old conception to its extreme limit; the penitentiary of the will, he said, and the wheel of Ixion. Nietzsche is the only one who does not groan at the discovery of the will, who does not try to exorcise it, or limit its effect. The phrase "a new way of thinking" means an affirmative thought, a thought which affirms life and the will to life, a thought which finally expels the whole of the negative; to believe in the innocence of the future and the past, to believe in the eternal return. What Nietzsche calls his glad tidings is that existence is no longer treated as blameworthy nor does the will feel guilty for existing. "Will, this is what the liberator and the messenger of joy is called" (Z II "Of Redemption"). 3 1 The glad tidings are tragic thought, for tragedy is not found in the recriminations of ressentiment, the conflicts of bad conscience or the contradictions of a will which feels guilty and responsible. The tragic does not even fight against ressentiment, bad conscience or nihilism. According to Nietzsche it has never been understood that the tragic = the joyful. This is another way of putting the great equation: to will = to create. We have not understood that the tragic is pure and multiple positivity, dynamic gaeity.
13		-Imbuing the state with power allows it to suspend itself in a state of exception that creates zones of indistinction, where people become invisible and commodified for violence. Bracketed for gendered language.
14		-Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
15		-More than this inclusion by exclusion, sovereign power in the West is constituted by its ability to suspend itself in a state of exception, or ban: "The originary relation of law to life is not application but abandonment."15 The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign is at the same time inside and outside the sovereign order: the sovereign can suspend the law. What defines the rule of law is the state of exception when law is suspended. The very space in which juridical order can have validity is created and defined through the sovereign exception. However, the exception that defines the structure of sovereignty is more complex than the inclusion of what is outside by means of an interdiction.16 It is not just a question of creating a distinction between inside and outside: it is the tracing of a threshold between the two, a location where inside and outside enter into a zone of indistinction. It is this state of exception, or the zone of indistinction between inside and outside, that makes the modern juridical order of the West possible. The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provisional state of danger as a means of establishing the Nazi state it- self. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its boundaries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the normal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitutive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded exclusion from human law (killing him these people does not count as homicide) and he is excluded exclusion from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the exclusion of both the sacred and the profane.
16		-Legal education and state-heuristic debate produce chronic mediocrity through the “YEAH THE STATE SUCKS, BUT LET’S USE IT THO” mentality – guarantees extremely violent decision-making.
17		-Schlag ‘9: Pierre, Byron R. White Professor of Law and Former Associate Dean for Research, University of Colorado Law School, “ESSAY AND RESPONSE: Spam Jurisprudence, Air Law, and the Rank Anxiety of Nothing Happening (A Report on the State of the Art),” March, 2009, Georgetown Law Journal, 97 Geo. L.J. 803
18		-In terms of social organization then, there may be something to be said for creating a professional corps (lawyers) whose modes of communication are widely shared and relatively standardized. Notice that if this is the objective, then the only place where that sort of standardized communication can be widely shared is somewhere close to the middle of the bell curve. Both intellectual sloth and intellectual excellence are, by definition, aberrant and thus detract from our efforts at standardization. Thus, training for mediocrity does serve a social function (within limits, of course). Mediocrity is not the only aim here. One would like this mediocrity to be the best it can be. We would like legal professionals to share a language and a mode of thought and, at the same time, for that language and mode of thought to be as perspicuous and intelligent as possible. Given the omnipresence of the bell curve, these desiderata are obviously in tension. The economists would likely talk about achieving "the optimal degree" of intelligence and mediocrity at the margin, but my sense is this will only get us so far. For law professors, the tension is bound to be somewhat frustrating. What many law professors would like~-~-because many of them are intellectually inclined~-~-is to bring intelligence to bear within legal discourse. This is bound to be a somewhat frustrating venture. Legal discourse is not designed to produce intelligence and, frankly, the materials and the discourse can only bear so much. Good judgment, groundedness, reasonableness~-~-any of these virtues is often enough to snuff out real thinking. Indeed, whatever appeal good judgment, groundedness, and reasonableness may have for a judge or a lawyer (and I am prepared to say the appeal is considerable), such virtues are not particularly helpful to intellectual achievement. On the contrary, intellectual achievement requires the abandonment of received understandings. In fact, I would go so far as to say that intellectual vitality (at least in the context of a discipline like law) *829 requires some degree of defamiliarization, some reach for the exotic. The thing is, those sorts of efforts are not going to get very far if they constantly have to answer to good judgment, groundedness, reasonableness, and the like. And at this point, I would like to flip the argument made earlier in the paper. Here, I would like us to think of appeals to good judgment, groundedness, and reasonableness in legal thought as appeals to mediocrity. Making people see things involves things far different from good judgment, groundedness, or reasonableness. It involves a kind of artistry~-~-a reorientation of the gaze, a disruption of complacency, a sabotage of habitual forms of thought, a derailing of cognitive defaults. This is part of what a really good education is about. Constant obeisance to good judgment or groundedness or reasonableness, by contrast, will systematically frustrate such efforts. n57 This is all rather vexing. Legal academics~-~-with aspirations to intellectual excellence~-~-are thus destined to play out the myth of Sisyphus. The main difference, of course, is that Sisyphus had a real rock to push up a real hill. The law professors' rock and hill, by contrast are symbolic~-~-imaginative constructions of their own making. Arguably, pushing a symbolic rock up a symbolic hill is substantially easier than doing it for real. At the very least, it is easier to fake it and to claim success. At the same time, though, the symbolic nature of the exercise perhaps makes it more transparently pointless. As between these two points, there is a certain dissonance. On the one hand, we are dealing with pushing rocks up hills~-~-and that is surely hard work. On the other hand, the rocks and hills are of our own imagination~-~-so it should be easy. This is very confusing. n58 My best guess (and I offer this only as a preliminary hypothesis) is that the dissonance here might yield a certain degree of neurosis. n59 Still the question pops up again: "So what?" So what~-~-so you have maybe seven thousand-something law professors in the nation and you know, maybe ninety-six percent are engaged in a kind of vaguely neurotic scholarship. So what? Maybe it's borderline tragic. Maybe, these people could have done so much better. None of this, by the way, is clearly established. But let's just assume, it's true. Who cares? Seven thousand people~-~-that's not a lot of people. Plus, it's hard to feel for them. I know that nearly all of them would be us (but still). It's an extraordinarily privileged life. So why care about this? Here's why. The thing about legal scholarship is that it plays~-~-through the mediation of the professorial mind~-~-an important role in shaping the ways, the *830 forms, in which law students think with and about law. n60 If they are taught to think in essentially mediocre ways, they will reproduce those ways of thinking as they practice law and politics. If they are incurious, if they are lacking in political and legal imagination, if they are simply repeating the standard moves (even if with impressive virtuosity) they will, as a group, be wielding power in essentially mediocre ways. And the thing is: when mediocrity is endowed with power, it yields violence. And when mediocrity is endowed with great power, it yields massive violence. n61 All of which is to say that in making the negotiation between the imprinting of standard forms of legal thought and the imparting of an imaginative intelligence, we err too much on the side of the former. (Purely my subjective call here~-~-but so is everybody else's.) Another way to put it is that while there is something to be said for the standardization point made earlier, generally, standardization is overdone. n62
19		-And state heuristic debates are cruelly optimistic – means you vote aff on presumption. Liberalism is familiarity, not revolutionary. We’ve given the state too many chances – don’t give it another.
20		-Berlant ‘11: Lauren, George M. Pullman Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago, Cruel Optimism, Routledge: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 33-6
21		-When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us. This cluster of promises could be embedded in a person, a thing, an institution, a text, a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea - whatever. To phrase 'the object of desire' as a cluster of promises is to allow us to encounter what's incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality but as an explanation for our sense of our endurance in the object, insofar as proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that the object promises, some of which may be clear to us while others not so much. In other words, all attachments are optimistic. That does not mean that they all feel optimistic: one might dread, for example, returning to a scene of hunger or longing or the slapstick reiteration of a lover or parent's typical misrecognition. But the surrender to the return to the scene where the object hovers in its potentialities is the operation of optimism as an affective form. In optimism, the subject leans toward promises contained within the present moment of the encounter with their object.' 'Cruel optimism' names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realisation is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic. What's cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject's sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world. This phrase points to a condition different than that of melancholia, which is enacted in the subject's desire to temporise an experience of the loss of an object/scene with which she has identified her ego continuity. Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object. One more thing: the cruelty of an optimistic attachment is, I think, usually something an analyst observes about someone's or some group's attachment to x, since usually that attachment exists without being an event, or even better, seems to lighten the load for someone/some group.^ But if the cruelty of an attachment is experienced by someone/some group, even in disavowed fashion, the fear is that the loss of the object/scene of promising itself will defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything. Often this fear of loss of a scene of optimism as such is unstated and only experienced in a sudden incapacity to manage startling situations, as we will see below. One might point out that all objects/scenes of desire are problematic, in that investments in them and projections onto them are less about them than about what cluster of desires and affects we can manage to keep magnetised to them. I have indeed wondered whether all optimism is cruel, because the experience of loss of the conditions of its reproduction can be so breathtakingly bad, just as the threat of the loss of x in the scope of one's attachment drives can feel like a threat to living on itself. But some scenes of optimism are clearly crueller than others: where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalising or animating potency of an object/ scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first place. This might point to something as banal as a scouring love, but it also opens out to obsessive appetites, working for a living, patriotism, all kinds of things. One makes affective bargains about the costliness of one's attachments, usually unconscious ones, most of which keep one in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition. This means that a poetics of attachment always involves some splitting off of the story I can tell about wanting to be near x (as though x has autonomous qualities) from the activity of the emotional habitus I have constructed by having x in my life in order to be able to project out my endurance as proximity to the complex of what x seems to offer and proffer. To understand cruel optimism, therefore, one must embark on an analysis of rhetorical indirection, as a way of thinking about the strange temporalities of projection into an enabling object that is also disabling. I learned how to do this from reading Barbara Johnson's work on apostrophe and free indirect discourse. In her poetics of indirection, each of these rhetorical modes is shaped by the ways a writing subjectivity conjures other ones so that, in a performance of fantasmatic intersubjectivity, the writer gains superhuman observational authority, enabling a performance of being made possible by the proximity of the object. Because this object is something like what I am describing in the optimism of attachment, I'll describe a bit the shape of my transference with her thought. In 'Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,' which will be my key referent bere, Johnson tracks the political consequences of apostrophe for what has become foetal personhood: a silent, affectively present but physically displaced interlocutor (a lover, a foetus) is animated in speech as distant enough for a conversation but close enough to be imaginable by the speaker in whose head the entire scene is happening.' But the condition of projected possibility, of a hearing that cannot take place in the terms of its enunciation ('you' are not here, 'you' are eternally belated to the conversation with you that I am imagining) creates a fake present moment of intersubjectivity in which, nonetheless, a performance of address can take place. The present moment is made possible by the fantasy of you, laden with the x qualities I can project onto you, given your convenient absence. Apostrophe therefore appears to be a reaching out to a you, a direct movement from place x to y, but it is actually a turning back, an animating of a receiver on behalf of the desire to make something happen now that realises something in the speaker, makes the speaker more or differently possible, because she has admitted, in a sense, the importance of speaking for, as, and to, two: but only under the condition, and illusion, that the two is really (in) one. Apostrophe is thus an indirect, unstable, physically impossible but phenomenologically vitalising movement of rhetorical animation that permits subjects to suspend themselves in the optimism of a potential occupation of the same psychic space of others, the objects of desire who make you possible (by having some promising qualities, but also by not being there).'' Later work, such as on 'Muteness Envy,' elaborates Johnson's description of the gendered rhetorical politics of this projection of voluble intersubjectivity.'^ The paradox remains that the conditions of the lush submerging of one consciousness into another require a double negation: of the speaker's boundaries, so s/he can grow bigger in rhetorical proximity to the object of desire; and of the spoken of, who is more or less a powerful mute placeholder providing an opportunity for the speaker's imagination of her/his/their flourishing. Of course psychoanalytically speaking all intersubjectivity is impossible. It is a wish, a desire, and a demand for an enduring sense of being with and in x, and is related to that big knot that marks the indeterminate relation between a feeling of recognition and misrecognition - recognition is the misrecognition you can bear, a transaction that affirms you without, again, necessarily feeling good or accurate (it might idealise, it might affirm your monstrosity, it might mirror your desire to be nothing enough to live under the radar, it might feel just right, and so on).'' Johnson's work on projection shows that scenes of impossible identity, rhetorically rendered, open up meaning and knowledge by mining the negative - projective, boundary dissolving - spaces of attachment to the object of address who must be absent in order for the desiring subject of intersubjectivity to get some traction, to stabilise her proximity to the object/scene of promise. In free indirect discourse, a cognate kind of suspension, the circulation of this kind of merged and submerged observational subjectivity, has less pernicious outcomes, at least when Johnson reads Zora Neale Hurston's practice of it.' In a narrator's part-merging with a character's consciousness, say, free indirect discourse performs the impossibility of locating an observational intelligence in one or any body, and therefore forces the reader to transact a different, more open relation of unfolding to what she is reading, judging, being, and thinking she understands. In Jobnson's work such a transformative transaction through reading/speaking 'unfolds' the subject in a good way, despite whatever desires they may have not to become significantly different." In short, Johnson's work on projection is about the optimism of attachment, and is often itself optimistic about the negations and extensions of personhood that forms of suspended intersubjectivity demand from the reader. What follows is not so buoyant: this is an essay politicising Freud's observation that 'people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them'.^ It comes from a longer project about the politics, aesthetics, and projections of political depression. Political depression persists in affective judgments of the world's intractability - evidenced in affectlessness, apathy, coolness, cynicism, and so on - modes of what might be called detachment that are really not detached at all but constitute ongoing relations of sociality.'" The politically depressed position is manifested in the problem of the difficulty of detaching from life-building modalities that can no longer be said to be doing their work, and which indeed make obstacles to the desires that animate them; my archive tracks practices of self-interruption, self-suspension, and self-abeyance that indicate people's struggles to change, but not traumatically, the terms of value in which their life-making activity has been cast." Cruel optimism is, then, like all phases, a deictic, a phrase that points to a proximate location: as an analytic lever it is an incitement to inhabit and to track the affective attachment to what we call 'the good life,' which is for so many a bad life that wears out the subjects who nonetheless, and at the same time, find their conditions of possibility within it. My assumption is that the conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world even of relative wealth, as in the US, are conditions of the attrition or the wearing out of the subject, and that the irony - that the labour of reproducing life in the contemporary world is also the activity of being worn out by it - has specific implications for thinking about the ordinariness of suffering, the violence of normativity, and the 'technologies of patience' or lag that enable a concept of the later to suspend questions of the cruelty of the now.'^ Cruel optimism is in this sense a concept pointing toward a mode of lived imminence, one that grows from a perception about the reasons people are not Bartlehy, do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to, to syncopate with it, or to be held in a relation of reciprocity, reconciliation, or resignation that does not mean defeat by it. Or perhaps they move to normative form to get numb with the consensual promise, and to misrecognise that promise as an achievement. This essay traverses three episodes of suspension - from John Ashhery, Charles Johnson, and Ceoff Ryman - of the reproduction of habituated or normative life. These suspensions open up revelations about the promises that had clustered as people's objects of desire, stage moments of exuberance in the impasse near the normal, and provide tools for suggesting why these exuberant attachments keep ticking not like the time bomb they might be but like a white noise machine that provides assurance that what seems like static really is, after all, a rhythm people can enter into while they're dithering, tottering, bargaining, testing, or otherwise being worn out by the promises that they have attached to in this world.
22		-Pt. 2 Linguistics
23		-Speech codes let the state arbitrarily define linguistic constraints – it empowers hate speech when it wants to. The state shields itself from self-incrimination by punishing individuals whose speech is evidentiary of the state’s failure. This leaves the individual vulnerable and the state all-powerful.
24		-Butler ‘97: Judith Butler writes in “Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.” Judith Butler is Chancellor's Professor in the departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also the author of Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, co-author of Feminist Contentions, and co-editor! with Joan W. Scotti of Feminists Theorize the Political All are available from Routledge; AB
25		-I consider the logic of this policy in the next chapter, and I propose to return to that figure of efficacious and offensive utterance toward the end of this one. In the interim, however, I aim to consider the construal of hate speech as offensive conduct, the effort to construe pornography as hate speech, and the concomitant effort to seek re- SOVEREIGN PERFORMATIVES course to the state to remedy the injuries allegedly caused by hate speech. What happens when we seek recourse to the state to regulate such speech? In particular, how is ~he regulatory power of the state enhanced through such an appeal? This is, perhaps, a familiar argument that I hope to make in a less than familiar way. My concern is not only with the protection of civil liberties against the incursion of the state, but with the peculiar discursive power given over to the state through the process of legal redress. I would like to suggest a formulation for the problem that might seem paradoxical, but which I think, even in its hyperbolic mode, might shed some light on the problem that regulating hate, speech poses. That formulation is this: the state produces hate speech, and by this I do not mean that the state is accountable for the various slurs, epithets, and forms of invective that currently circulate throughout the population. I mean only that the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of publically acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain that consequential line of demarcation. The inflated and efficacious utterance attributed to hate speech in some of the politicized contexts discussed above is itself modeled on the speech of a sovereign state, understood as a sovereign speech act, a speech act with the power to do what it says. This sovereign power is attributed to hate speech when it is said to "deprive" us of rights and liberties. The power attributed to hate speech is a power of absolute and efficacious agency, performativity and transitivity at once (it does what it says and it does what it says it will do to the one addressed by the speech). Precisely this power of legal language is that to which we refer when we call upon the state to effect the regulation of offensive speech. The problem, then, is not that the force of the sovereign performative is wrong, but when used by citizens it is wrong, and when intervened upon by the state, it is, in these contexts, right. The same kind of force, however, is attributed to the performative in both instances, and that version of performative power is never brought into question by those who pursue heightened regulation. What is this power? And how are we to account for its sustained production within hate speech discourse, as well as its continuing allure? Before venturing an answer to these questions, it seems worth noting that this invocation of the sovereign performative takes place against the background of a political situation in which power is no longer constrained within the sovereign form of the state. Diffused throughout disparate and competing domains of the state apparatus, and through civil society in diffuse forms as well, power cannot be easily or definitively traced to a single subject who is its "speaker:' to a sovereign representative of the state. To the extent that Foucault is right to describe contemporary relations of power as emanating from a number of possible sites, power is no longer constrained by the parameters of sovereignty. The difficulty of describing power as a sovereign formation, however, in no way precludes fantasizing or figuring power in precisely that way; to the contrary, the historical loss of the sovereign 78 1 organization of power appears to occasion the fantasy of its return-a return, I want to argue, . that takes place in language, in the figure of the performative. The emphasis on the performative phantasmatically resurrects the performative in language, establishing language as a displaced site of politics and specifying that displacement as driven by a wish to return to a simpler and more reassuring map of power, one in which the assumption of sovereignty remains secure.
26		-Voting aff rejects the politics of aesthetics – we must recognize the role of speech as simply a form of communication. The failure of power structures is responsible for the rise of hate speech – the aff’s anarchy of becoming controls the internal link to defining your own place in the world.
27		-Gilmore ‘9: Paul Gilmore (Paul Gilmore, Associate Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach – scholar critical work in dealing with the history, transatlantic dimensions, and political promises of American Romantic literature - Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism, Published 01/01/2009)
28		-From this reading, Shelley’s idea of the poet as an unacknowledged legislator wielding a sword of lightning takes on a new light, revealing the limitations as well as the power of poetry as a political force. Eschewing the utopianism of the late Enlightenment, Shelley electrifies the human imagination, rendering it both the medium where the mental and the physical meet and the source of intellectual and physical freedom. As such, the materiality of electric poetry lies not just in its physicality—in language being registered by the senses—but in its genesis within and action upon the social world. Poetry is material because it is literally words, which are material themselves, but it is also material in a sociohistorical sense, the product of material conditions of political and economic structures. In “Defence,” for example, Shelley indicates that it is poetry’s embeddeness in what we might now call social discourse that gives it its “electric life,” as that life is “less the poets’ spirit than the spirit of the age” (7:140). Similarly, in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, in further developing the figure of lightning thought, Percy elaorates this relationship between mind and the world, gesturing to its political implications: “The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition, or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or is about to be restored” (2:173). Echoing Schlegel’s prediction about the lightning charge of poetry, Percy at once envisions political revolution and at the same time insists that the changes to come are unpredictable, are “unimagined.” Thus, in concluding his preface to Prometheus Unbound, Percy acknowledges his “‘passion for reforming the world,’” but insists that his poetry does not contain “a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence” (2:174). As Kaufman, from an Adornian-Marxist position, Paul Hamilton, from a Habermasian-Public Sphere approach, and Redfield, from a de Manian–deconstructive angle, have all differently argued, it is this refusal of political commitment that allows Shelley to provide an alternative understanding of aesthetic politics.27 Through acknowledging the material opacity of language itself and by gesturing to the radical indeterminacy of meaning, in drawing on materialist understandings of the mind and the basis of the self in the senses, and in recognizing the sociohistorical conditions and material means by which poetry is disseminated, Percy Shelley emerges as a theorist and practitioner of a kind of aesthetics imagined to engender critical thinking about one’s self and the world, a process of constantly questioning received ideas that opens the self to new experiences and new perspectives that might provide the ground for sociopolitical change but that refuses to offer a political programme.
29		-Pigeonholing speech into categories obscures state violence and bars alterity.
30		-Davis ‘99: Davis, Diane. “‘Addicted to Love’; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity.” Vol. 19 No. 4. 1999
31		-Our fix of finitude, however, reminds us that this so-called home is haunted. In fact, etymologically speaking, "what haunts is also a haunt something that doubles. . .for a familiar place. Haunting belongs to the family of Heim" (Ronell, Dictations xviii). Heim, then, is never not unheimlich; a home is never not haunted. What goes for the subject's home-base, ethos, is spooked, relentlessly, by itsown fractal interiorities, its own unditchable and unsharable alterity?its finitude, which is precisely what it shares with others.15 There never was any "internal peace" in "self-identification," as Lyotard has warned, that was not purchased at the price of what itmust exorcise: "The Volk shuts itself up in theHeim, and it identifies itself through the narratives attached to names" (Differend 151)?that is, through the identification associated with Geschlecht? exorcising its spooks so as to preserve its illusion of stasis, of sobriety. When "communication" signifies only "reasonable exchange" among subjects, you can bet that alterity already will have been barred from the conversation. This is why Nancy charges that "the conventional chatter that attempts to promote reasonable exchange" as synonymous with communication "serves only to obscure violence, betrayal, and lies" ("Exscription" 319)? serves, that is, only to cover over the finitude itought to be exposing. It may be that any theory of communication that places a speaking subject in charge of building community effaces the sharing it attempts to promote. The "subject representing," after all, is not the same as the "being-communicating" (Nancy, Inoperative 24). Communication. . .happens? it is beyond our control; it is, in fact, who we are: communication is "the predicament of being" for any ekstatic existent (24). In as much as this existent functions as "threshold," it is continuously exposed to an in-common outside and so is always already communicating finite being to finite being by virtue of that exposure, by virtue of an involuntary. . .touch. There is no escaping community or this irrepressible communication, which neither expresses a bondage nor approximates a Vulcan mind-meld but simply operates as an exposition of the finitude.. .that.. .we.. .share?an exposition, as George Bataille has put it, that "tears us together" (22). A subject's representations can aim to crank up this rustle of finitude or to tune it out, but communication will have been happening, either way. Maybe this needs to be made explicit: this originary "communication," this sharing, does not signify "under/standing." That is,what "communication" gives us to understand, Nancy explains, is only "that there is no common understanding of or in community, that sharing does not constitute an understanding (or a concept, or an intuition, or a schema), that it does not constitute a knowledge, and that it gives no one, including community itself, mastery over being-in-common" ("Myth Interrupted" 69). Communication is no more or less than the exposition of the overflowing, inappropriable, unsharable finitude that we share. And neither speaking nor writing is a means of this communication; rather, each is "communication itself, an exposure" (Nancy, Inoperative 31). Communication as understanding, Nancy observes, "is always disappointing," it's always "the communication of a disappointment, a nonpossibility, awithdrawal of communication" ("Speaking" 314-15). One can never be sure that a communique will arrive at itsdestination, and one can be fairly certain that ifitdoes, itwon't arrive aswhat itwas when itwas sent. And yet, in all the missed connections, in all the another communication is exposed: a communication that communicates the withdrawal or understanding and/but also the opening of another kind of sharing (315).16 This is not to say that what gets said is insignificant. But it is to say that a certain irrepressible communication is not about exchanging information, arguing a point, or expressing a bond: it's only about exposing understanding's withdrawal and so exposing finitude. . .as what we share. The ethical question par excellence for the third sophistic rhetorician is not how to move an audience toward a predetermined action or attitude but rather how to crank up the "noise," the excess, the interference that must be silenced for the sake of "reasonable erits," for the sake of cutting unifying figures. The question, in other words, that finitude prompts is not how to use language to build community; it is, rather, how to amplify the communications of community that are drowned out by the processes of identification.
32		-The aff is key to creating a space beyond the law – we must ignore the state’s speech codes to critically re-interrogate our practices, developing our own identities in the process by allowing us to define what speech we want to express.
33		-Noterman and Pusey ‘12: (Elsa Noterman is Program Associate at the Community Strategies Group of the Aspen Insitute, Andre Pusey is a PhD candidate in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK, “Inside, Outside, and on the Edge of the Academy: Experiments in Radical Pedagogies” in Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Action, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, pp. 192-194); AB
34		-So, how do we build this new kind of open and ephemeral institution? We think it is important to open up spaces in which we can both experiment with, and critically reflect upon, radical pedagogical practices. The crisis of the university is a crisis that throws up new openings and possibilities for what a university could be. These spaces can work toward pushing the boundaries of the academy by concretely asking, “what can a university do?” in praxis We need to engage in a discussion about how we can go forward as critical-radical researchers inside, outside and on the periphery of the academy. Is there any place for us within the institution as it is? Or as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2004) suggest, is the “only possible with the relationship to the university today . . . a criminal one”? This opens up the question/possibility of what Virno terms “exodus,” but which might also be described as “desertion.” This is not a territorial exodus, or a fleeing from, but rather a desertion of one’s assigned role, in this case of the “critical” yet docile body (Foucault, 2004) of the academic. As Harney and Moten (2004) put it, “to be in but not of is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.” In part, the Really Open University is an experiment in just this. The creation of spaces in which we can begin to interrogate the role of the university and of the academic, not just as theoretical exercise, but within an implicitly antagonistic, yet not wholly reactive, space of political engagement. This is a messy space that avoids any pure politics, or identitarian overcoding, neither overtly anarchist, nor Marxist, nor simply an “anticuts” group, yet neither a purely utopian reimagining. This is necessarily a “cramped space,” of (im)possibility, as Deleuze (2005) states, “creation takes place in bottlenecks.” Many elements of the edu-struggle will ultimately want to close down the categories again, in order to give more weight to their ideological underpinnings, trying to make the moment fit their politics, rather than seizing the moment in all its wealth of potentiality. The ROU views ‘crisis as possibility’ arguing that it is “up to us to decide the universities future.”17 But through what concrete actions might we actually develop a “really open university”? One way to begin may be through the occupation of the spaces where we work, play and consume, and the reappropriation of this time and space for our own (common) ends. This may help to promote new lines of questioning and open up new connectivities. One way to discuss this occupation and reappropriation, might be the literal forced reclamation of space, though direct action. This has, of course, been a tried and tested method across history, and we have seen the tactic of occupation has begun to some extent become popular again, with the recent occupations at universities across the UK, but to a much larger extent across Europe and the United States. We think there is an interesting dynamic, however, between defensive and offensive uses of occupation. We do not wish to set up a binary, but rather are interested in the qualitative shifts and activities that can occur within the occupied space itself, rather than simply the obstructive element of occupation. This problematic has been explored in the U.S. occupations movement through the often heated debate about the utility of political demands, versus occupation without demands. For example, “Occupation mandates the inversion of the standard dimensions of space. Space in an occupation is not merely the container of our bodies, it is a plane of potentiality that has been frozen by the logic of the commodity” (Inoperative Committee, 2009). Another way to discuss the occupation and reappropriation of time and space might be through the creation of new spaces that prefigure the new forms we may wish a reimagined university to take. A concrete example of this is the model of the autonomous social center, or “infoshop,” found within anarchist and autonomous activist practices (Atton, 1999). Social centers are place-based, self-managed spaces. They can be squatted, rented or cooperatively owned (Pusey, 2010). A particularly rich history of social centers can be found in Italy, but they exist all across Europe. In the United States the closest approximation to the autonomous social centers seems to be the network of radical bookstores and “infoshops” such as Red Emma’s in Baltimore and Bluestockings in New York City (Kanuga, 2010). Some academics at the University of Lincoln are attempting to develop a cooperatively run “social science center” that utilizes a social center type autonomous space, where they can practice radical pedagogical methods (Winn, 2010). The idea is that students will be able to enroll for free and staff will still be paid. We can imagine, based on our experiences and research within social centers in the UK, that this would be controversial within anarchist circles, both for its relationship with the institution of the university, and also because of its payment of academic staff. Payment for some roles performed within some spaces has been a source of much debate and contention within social centers within the UK (Chatterton, 2008). These spaces generally rely on the good will and free time of volunteers. However, many spaces cite burnout and lack of participation as major issues within social centers (UK Social Centres Network, 2008). The “dole autonomy” (Aufheben, 1999), which helped facilitate earlier cycles of struggle, has been very much weakened with successive government attacks on the welfare state, and students increasingly forced to take employment while studying means that there are far fewer people around with the “free time” to help enable projects such as these. It is, perhaps, through the establishment of self-organized alternative educational practices, and open and ephemeral institutions that we can start to value ideas for their own merit, rather than capitalist value—to create spaces and places where we can discard the price tags of commodified knowledge and instrumental learning, and instead appreciate the value of ideas and concepts themselves, while rediscovering the subversiveness of teaching.
35		-Denying the state the legitimacy and faith it craves causes it to implode from within – turns political engagement and material scenario-planning – DISENGAGEMENT solves.
36		-Baudrillard ‘83: Jean, IN THE SHADOW OF THE SILENT MAJORITIES OR THE END OF THE SOCIAL. 1983
37		-From Resistance to Hyperconformity The emergence of silent majorities must be located within the entire cycle of historical resistance to the social. Resistance to work of course, but also resistance to medicine, resistance to schooling, resistance to security, resistance to information. Official history only records the uninterrupted progress of the social, relegating to the obscurity reserved for former cultures, as barbarous relics, everything not coinciding with this glorious advent. In fact, contrary to what one might believe (that the social has definitely won, that its movement is irreversible, that consensus upon the social is total), resistance to the social in all its forms has progressed even more rapidly than the social. It has merely taken other forms than the primitive and violent ones which were subsequently absorbed (the social is alive and well, thank you, only idiots run away from writing and vaccination and the benefits of security). Those frontal resistances still corresponded to an equally frontal and violent period of socialisation, and carne from traditional groups seeking to preserve their own culture, their original cultures. It was not the mass in them which resisted, but, on the contrary, differentiated structures, in opposition to the homogeneous and abstract model of the social. This type of resistance can still be discovered in the "two-step flow of communication" which American sociology has analysed: the mass does not at all constitute a passive receiving structure for media messages, whether they be political, cultural or advertising. Microgroups and individuals, far from taking their cue from a uniform and imposed decoding, decode messages in their own way. They intercept them (through leaders) and transpose them (second level), contrasting the dominant code with their own particular sub-codes, finally recycling everything passing into their own cycle, exactly like primitive natives recycle western money in their symbolic circulation (the Siane of New Guinea) or like the Corsicans recycle universal suffrage and elections in their clan rivalry strategies. This ruse is universal: it is a way of redirecting, of absorbing, of victoriously salvaging the material diffused by the dominant culture. It is this which also governs the "magic" usage of the doctor and medicine among the "underdeveloped" masses. Commonly reduced to an antiquated and irrational mentality, we should read in this, on the contrary, an offensive practice, a rediversion by excess, an unanalysed but conscious rejection "without knowing it" of the profound devastation wreaked by rational medicine. But this is still the feat of groups traditionally structured by identity and significance. Quite different is the refusal of socialisation which comes from the mass; from an innumerable, unnamable and anonymous group, whose strength comes from its very destructuration and inertia. Thus, in the case of the media, traditional resistance consists of reinterpreting messages according to the group's own code and for its own ends. The masses, on the contrary, accept everything and redirect everything en bloc into the spectacular, without requiring any other code, without requiring any meaning, ultimately without resistance, but making everything slide into an indeterminate sphere which is not even that of non-sense, but that of overall manipulation/ fascination. It has always been thought - this is the very ideology of the mass media - that it is the media which envelop the masses. The secret of manipulation has been sought in a frantic semiology of the mass media. But it has been overlooked, in this naive logic of communication, that the masses are a stronger medium than all the media, that it is the former who envelop and absorb the latter - or at least there is no priority of one over the other. The mass and the media are one single process. Mass(age) is the message. So it is with movies, whose inventors initially dreamed of a rational, documentary, social medium, but which very quickly and permanently swung towards the imaginary. So it is with technology, science, and knowledge. Condemned to a "magical" practice and to a "spectacular" consumption.· So it is with consumption itself. To their amazement, economists have never been able to rationalise consumption, the seriousness of their "theory of need" and the general consensus upon the discourse of utility being taken for granted. But this is because the practice of the masses very quickly had nothing (or perhaps never had anything) to do with needs. They have turned consumption into a dimension of status and prestige, of useless keeping up with the Joneses or simulation, of potlatch which surpassed use value in every way. A desperate attempt has been made from all sides (official propaganda, consumer societies, ecologues and sociologues) to instil into them sensible spending and functional calculation in matters of consumption, but it is hopeless. For it is by sign/ value and the frantic stake in sign/value (which economists, even when they try to integrate it as a variable, have always seen as upsetting economic reason), that the masses block the economy, resist the" objective" imperative of needs and the rational balancing of behaviors and ends. Sign/ value against use value, this is already a distortion of political economy. And let it not be said that all this ultimately profits exchange value, that is to say the system. For if the system does well out of this game, and even encourages it (the masses "alienated" in gadgets, etc.), this isn't the main thing, and what this slipping, this skidding initiates in the long term - already initiates - is the end of the economic, cut off from all its rational definitions by the excessive, magic, spectacular, fraudulent and nearly parodic use the masses put it to. An asocial use, resistant to all pedagogies, to all socialist education - an aberrant use whereby the masses (us, you, everybody) have already crossed over to the other side of political economy. They haven't waited for future revolutions nor theories which claim to "liberate" them by a "dialectical" movement. They know that there is no liberation, and that a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization. "You want us to consume - O.K., let's consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose." So it is with medicine: frontal resistance (which hasn't disappeared everywhere) has been replaced by a more subtle form of subversion; an excessive, uncontrollable consumption of medicine, a panicked conformity to health injunctions. A fantastic escalation in medical consumption which completely corrupts the social objectives and finalities of medicine. What better way to abolish it? At present, doctors, manipulated much more than they manipulate, no longer know what they are doing, what they are. "Give us more treatment, doctors, medication, security, health - more, ever further, keep it coming ... !" The masses alienated in medicine? Not at all: they are in the process of ruining its institution, of making Social Security explode, of putting the social itself in danger by craving always more of it, as with commodities.
38		-I defend the whole resolution as a thought experiment. The resolution is negative state action, so a pre-fiat framing is justified, which means switch-side debate DOESN’T solve.
39		-The role of the ballot is to reject traditional forms of scholarship in favor of voting for the debater with the best kritikal methodology. This means rejecting roleplaying, state-good, policy-making scholarship, and other postmodern constructs which plague modern academia. Kritikal methodology refers to pre-fiat discursive literature and scholarship. It’s a means-based role of the judge. The 1AC comes before theory/T.
40		-Blind adherence to fiat has drained debate of meaning. There is no connection between what we do here and the political, rejecting fiat brings us closer more meaning – LINK TURNS your T/theory standards.
41		-Baudrillard ‘81: Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation.” Published 1984, in English in 1994; AB
42		-I am a nihilist. I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history, criticism, etc.) that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century. The true revolution of the nineteenth century, of modernity, is the radical destruction of appearances, the disenchantment of the world and its abandonment to the violence of interpretation and of history. I observe, I accept, I assume, I analyze the second revolution, that of the twentieth century, that of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. Those who strikes with meaning are killed by meaning. The dialectic stage, the critical stage is empty. There is no more stage. There is no therapy of meaning or therapy through meaning: therapy itself is part of the generalized process of indifferentiation. The stage of analysis itself has become uncertain, aleatory: theories float (in fact, nihilism is impossible, because it is still a desperate but determined theory, an imaginary of the end, a weltanschauung of catastrophe).*1 Analysis is itself perhaps the decisive element of the immense process of the freezing over of meaning. The surplus of meaning that theories bring, their competition at the level of meaning is completely secondary in relation to their coalition in the glacial and four-tiered operation of dissection and transparency. One must be conscious that, no matter how the analysis proceeds, it proceeds toward the freezing over of meaning, it assists in the precession of simulacra and of indifferent forms. The desert grows. Implosion of meaning in the media. Implosion of the social in the masses. Infinite growth of the masses as a function of the acceleration of the system. Energetic impasse. Point of inertia. A destiny of inertia for a saturated world. The phenomena of inertia are accelerating (if one can say that). The arrested forms proliferate, and growth is immobilized in excrescence. Such is also the secret of the hypertelie, of what goes further than its own end. It would be our own mode of destroying finalities: going further, too far in the same direction - destruction of meaning through simulation, hypersimulation, hypertelie. Denying its own end through hyperfinality (the crustacean, the statues of Easter Island) - is this not also the obscene secret of cancer? Revenge of excrescence on growth, revenge of speed on inertia. The masses themselves are caught up in a gigantic process of inertia through acceleration. They are this excrescent, devouring, process that annihilates all growth and all surplus meaning. They are this circuit short-circuited by a monstrous finality. It is this point of inertia and what happens outside this point of inertia that today is fascinating, enthralling (gone, therefore, the discreet charm of the dialectic). If it is nihilistic to privilege this point of inertia and the analysis of this irreversibility of systems up to the point of no return, then I am a nihilist. If it is nihilistic to be obsessed by the mode of disappearance, and no longer by the mode of production, then I am a nihilist. Disappearance, aphanisis, implosion, Fury of Verschwindens. Transpolitics is the elective sphere of the mode of disappearance (of the real, of meaning, of the stage, of history, of the social, of the individual). To tell the truth, it is no longer so much a question of nihilism: in disappearance, in the desertlike, aleatory, and indifferent form, there is no longer even pathos, the pathetic of nihilism - that mythical energy that is still the force of nihilism, of radicality, mythic denial, dramatic anticipation. It is no longer even disenchantment, with the seductive and nostalgic, itself enchanted, tonality of disenchantment. It is simply disappearance. The trace of this radicality of the mode of disappearance is already found in Adorno and Benjamin, parallel to a nostalgic exercise of the dialectic. Because there is a nostalgia of the dialectic, and without a doubt the most subtle dialectic is nostalgic to begin with. But more deeply, there is in Benjamin and Adorno another tonality, that of a melancholy attached to the system itself, one that is incurable and beyond any dialectic. It is this melancholia of systems that today takes the upper hand through the ironically transparent forms that surround us. It is this melancholia that is becoming our fundamental passion. It is no longer the spleen or the vague yearnings of the fin-de-siecle soul. It is no longer nihilism either, which in some sense aims at normalizing everything through destruction, the passion of resentment (ressentiment).*2 No, melancholia is the fundamental tonality of functional systems, of current systems of simulation, of programming and information. Melancholia is the inherent quality of the mode of the disappearance of meaning, of the mode of the volatilization of meaning in operational systems. And we are all melancholic. Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished. Everywhere, always, the system is too strong: hegemonic. Against this hegemony of the system, one can exalt the ruses of desire, practice revolutionary micrology of the quotidian, exalt the molecular drift or even defend cooking. This does not resolve the imperious necessity of checking the system in broad daylight. This, only terrorism can do. It is the trait of reversion that effaces the remainder, just as a single ironic smile effaces a whole discourse, just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and pleasure of the master. The more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of its reversals. The challenge, even infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure. Only this reversibility without a counterpart is an event today, on the nihilistic and disaffected stage of the political. Only it mobilizes the imaginary.If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us. But such a sentiment is Utopian. Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist, if there were still a radicality - as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death, including that of the terrorist, still had meaning. But it is at this point that things become insoluble. Because to this active nihilism of radicality, the system opposes its own, the nihilism of neutralization. The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference. In this system, death itself shines by virtue of its absence. (The Bologna train station, the Oktoberfest in Munich: the dead are annulled by indifference, that is where terrorism is the involuntary accomplice of the whole system, not politically, but in the accelerated form of indifference that it contributes to imposing.) Death no longer has a stage, neither phantasmatic nor political, on which to represent itself, to play itself out, either a ceremonial or a violent one. And this is the victory of the other nihilism, of the other terrorism, that of the system. There is no longer a stage, not even the minimal illusion that makes events capable of adopting the force of reality-no more stage either of mental or political solidarity: what do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences). There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself. This is where seduction begins.
43		-Underview
44		-The next shell is pre-emptive.
45		-Counter-Interp: The affirmative may defend pre-fiat if
46		-1) The advocacy is defending whole resolution as a thought experiment, which means I’m topical.
47		-2) Has the substantive Part 1 and Part 2 full-text disclosed on the NDCA LD Wiki.
48		-3) Has the underview counter-interp, standards, voter, and RVI cards disclosed on the NDCA LD Wiki.
49		-I meet
50		-STANDARDS:
51		-1) Redundancy: ANALYTICS OMITTED
52		-2) Substantive Clash: ANALYTICS OMITTED
53		-The voter’s education. Fairness only matters if debate’s educational first. If fiat needs to be rejected for education, THEN REJECT FIAT.
54		-Strait and Wallace ‘7: Strait and Wallace L. Paul Strait (George Mason University) and Brett Wallace (George Washington University). “The Scope of Negative ±iat and the Logic of Decision Making.” W±U Debater’s Research Guide. 2007.http://groups.wFu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/2007/The20Scope 20oF20Negative20²iat20and20the20Logic20oF20Decision 20Making.pdf
55		-First. we must note that the terminal impact to all questions of competitive equity is ultimately participation in itself, which is good because debate is fun and, obviously, educational. Therefore, if it is the case that the single most valuable benefit one can gain from participating in debate is that it improves decision-making skills, then the educational benefit of rejecting an illogical fiat scheme would outweigh competitive equity concerns that are not absolute.
56		-Fairness is situational and arbitrary – debaters who haven’t prepped read fairness.
57		-Sigel ‘85: Doug Sigel, Northwestern University. Punishment: Does It Fit the Crime? 1985; http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Sigel985Water.htm,
58		-First, fairness is almost entirely situational. The fairness argument in debate is always made when a team can't think of anything better to say. A new case is going to place an unfair burden on any negative team. If the affirmative can talk faster than the negative an unfair situation exists. If the negative has four really good counterplans against a case an unfair situation exists. In debate there is no objective way to tell what is and isn't fair because the activity by nature favors those participants who stay one step ahead of anyone else. ... There is no reason to punish the team for trying to maximize their own advantages.
59		-Reject competing interps… use reasonability. ANALYTICS OMITTED
60		-RVI ANALYTICS OMITTED
61		-RVIs make sure theory is used for legit abuse checks – not for frivolous strategic purposes.
62		-Sigel ‘84: Doug Sigel. The Punishment Theory: Illegitimate Styles and Theories as Voting Issues. Northwestern University. 1984.
63		-It is this author’s belief that the criticisms that have been lodged against punishment ignore the built-in check provided by the reverse-voting issue. For example, one common attack is that punishment "chills" new theory~-~-teams will be afraid to innovate for fear of being punished. Actually, punishment only "chills" bad theory. New theory~-~-if it truly is an educational advance~-~-would be defensible and could alone be a reason to vote for the team introducing it through the reverse voting issue concept. In fact, since there would be a need to rigorously support any new theory against punishment arguments, new theory would be more carefully articulated and defended.
64		-RVI ANALYTICS OMITTED

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1		-Sunset bhat Aff

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1		-JF - 1AC - Anarchy of Becoming V4

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1		-Early Disclosure - NDCA and TOC