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... ... @@ -1,47 +1,0 @@ 1 -Part 1 is Power to the People 2 -The specter haunting politics is power – we must transcend the current power structures of the state through anarchism. 3 -Newman ‘10: (Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory at the University of London at Goldsmiths, 2010, “The Politics of Postanarchism,” pub. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 104-107); AB 4 -We observe a similar silence about anarchism in more recent radical political thought, that which comes in the wake of poststructuralism. Indeed, in much contemporary continental theory we fi nd a series of themes, preoccupations and debates which bear a strong resemblance to those of anarchism. Amid the ruins of Marxism – or at least of a certain institutionalised and statist form of it – there is a desire among many thinkers today to develop new categories and directions for radical politics. There is the attempt, fi st, to find new forms of radical political subjectivity no longer based on the Marxist notion of the proletariat. There is a recognition that such a category is too narrow to express the different forms of oppression, modes of politicisation and ways of relating to one’s own work and existence that make up the contemporary world. However, there is also the recognition of the inadequacy of the ultimately liberal notion of ‘identity politics’ that characterised much new social movement theory. What is called for is new way of thinking about how, and by what processes, a subject becomes politicised – how does the subject become an egalitarian and collective subject? Secondly, there is, among many thinkers today, a rejection of authoritarian modes of political organisation – for instance, the centrally organised Marxist–Leninist vanguard party which would lead the proletariat to revolution, or the Communist and socialist parties in capitalist countries which sought to play the parliamentary game, thus abandoning any hope of emancipation from the state. There is a need, then, as Badiou would put it, for a politics without a party3 – new forms of political organisation that are no longer structured around the model of the party, as the party always has as its aim the reproduction of state power. Related to this, therefore, is the question of the state itself: the immovability of state power, despite the revolutionary programmes which promised its ‘withering away’, and, moreover, the increasingly authoritarian character of the so- called liberal democratic state, show us that the state remains perhaps the central problem in radical politics. Radical thought, therefore, sees politics increasingly as being situated beyond the state – there is a desire to find a space for politics outside the framework of state power, a space from which the hegemony of the state would be challenged. It seems to me that these themes and questions – political subjectivity beyond class, political organisation beyond the party and political action beyond the state – relate directly to anarchism. If these are the new directions that radical politics is moving in, then this would seem to suggest an increasingly anarchistic orientation. Indeed, this is a tendency that is being borne out in many radical movements and forms of resistance today. The emergence of the global anti- capitalist movement in recent times suggests a new form of politics, one that is much closer to anarchism in its aspirations and tactics, and in its decentralised, democratic modes of organisation. Also, the insurrections in Greece in December 2008 – which had an explicitly anarchist identification – are indicative of this libertarian moment in radical politics. It would seem that the prevailing form taken by radical politics today is anti- statist, anti- authoritarian and decentralised, and emphasises direct action rather than representative party politics and lobbying. Furthermore, is it not evident that there is a massive disengagement of ordinary people from normal political processes, an overwhelming scepticism – especially in the wake of the current economic crisis – about the political elites who supposedly govern in their interests? Is there not, at the same time, an obvious consternation on the part of these elites at this growing distance, signifying a crisis in their symbolic legitimacy? As a defensive or pre- emptive measure,4 the state becomes more draconian and predatory, increasingly obsessed with surveillance and control, defining itself through war and security, seeking to authorise itself through a politics of fear and exception. How should radical political thought respond to this situation, lagging behind – as it so often does – reality ‘on the ground’? My contention is that anarchism – or more precisely postanarchism – can provide some answers here. Indeed, anarchism might be seen as the hidden referent for radical political thought today: while its importance is scarcely acknowledged amongst the thinkers referred to above, anarchism can nevertheless offer critical resources for radical political theory, allowing it to transcend many of its current limitations and, indeed, providing it with a more consistent ethical and political framework. 5 -The state’s dialectic of prohibition and legalization sustains the biopolitical state of exception. This creates a biopolitical zone of indistinction, where certain people become invisible to society. Bracketed for Gendered Language. 6 -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 7 -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. 8 -The state’s regulation of access to rights is a gateway for biopolitical violence – people not seen as worthy of rights by the state get oppressed. 9 -Agamben ‘8: Giorgio Agamben writes in “Beyond Human Rights” in 2008. Giorgio Agamben (Italian: aˈɡambɛn; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, 4 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. http://jstor.reed.edu/stable/pdf/40644981.pdf; AB 10 -The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. 3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state. 11 -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. Against this, affirm an anarchy of becoming – a micropolitical reconfiguration of the subject that severs the state from the relationship to the self. 12 -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 13 -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. 14 -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. 15 -Part 2 is The Phenomenon of Speech 16 -I defend the whole resolution. Resolved: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech. The resolution is negative state action, so a pre-fiat framing is justified. 17 -Speech codes are biopolitical –the state decides the context of what hate speech is. 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. 18 -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 19 -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. 20 -Vote aff to reject the politics of aesthetics – we must recognize the role of speech as simply a form of communication. By implementing speech codes, you’re identifying types of speech as “ugly” and advocating the state to conceal them. This reinforces biopolitical control. 21 -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) 22 -Because aesthetic experience occupies the space between individual experience and social reality, the space created by the intersection of the various materialities evoked by electricity, it is both subjective and universal. The subjective nature of this universality provides both the utopian impulse Introduction 11 in aesthetic politics and aesthetic ideology’s coercive power. Aesthetic Materialism attempts to navigate between these poles by maintaining its focus on this very experience of subjective universality. In the aesthetic experience, the self seems to recede, as individuals give themselves over to the object (or, more properly, the perception of the object), and thus are left feeling as though anyone would have the same reaction. In that moment, it is inconceivable that anyone would not recognize the beauty, the sublimity, the humor, the ugliness of the thing perceived. The perceiving subject, in other words, recognizes no basis for this judgment in his or her particular interests, investments, desires. As such, this experience seems to place the individual outside civil society, the modern arena “of uncoerced human association and also the set of relational networks—formed for the sake of family, faith, interest, and ideology—that fill this space.”21 While an aesthetic experience might occur only because of one’s place within society— one’s social background, age, education, location, or privilege in relation to particular institutions—it does not directly or immediately involve the self in the negotiations, struggles, and identifications attendant in the working of civil society. Individuals may feel moved by a Picasso painting or Eliot’s “The Waste Land” only as a result of the training and education they have received due to their class position, their own individual histories crisscrossed by relations of power involving gender, nationality, and sexuality. Others may be touched by a renaissance Pietà or be moved by the beauty of a Thomas Kinkade painting due to a similar confluence of different overdetermined reasons. Yet that does not mean that the individual’s aesthetic experience of those objects necessarily feeds back into or undermines the social structures and ideologies giving rise to those particular encounters. In its intense focus on the sensuous perception of the object itself, the aesthetic momentarily interrupts both the dominant sense of the self as interested and autonomous and an instrumentalized orientation towards the world. In this way, aesthetics leads to “putting into question the individual’s ‘ordinary’ relation to all spheres of existence, and of reconstituting them as sites of aesthetic incompletion,” “the ceaseless problematization of and withdrawal from all normative judgment itself.”22 The most compelling attempts at revitalizing aesthetics have understood aesthetics in these terms, but have tended to move, too quickly, it seems to me, towards reading aesthetics as constituting a progressive politics focused on indeterminacy.23 Even in its recognition of the contingency of experience and identity, of the a mbivalence of representation, the aesthetic experience’s political effects—or even its tendencies—remain indeterminate. That is not to say that aesthetic experience remains permanently outside 12 Introduction the political. Instead, as “subjective universality” indicates, aesthetic experience always posits a reference to other people. In the aesthetic moment, the individual feels at one with some universal humanity who must have the same reaction. Yet the subjective nature of the event reiterates the observer’s detachment both from the object as a result of language’s mediation, the nervous system, and individual experience—and from any imagined universal community. These elements come together in the almost involuntary need to share this response—“Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that horrifying?” The question is simultaneously rhetorical—of course it’s beautiful—and is in need of confirmation because the experience’s universality is already in doubt. 23 -Organic interaction amongst one another is preferable to state regulation. The aff is key to creating a space beyond the law – we must reject the biopolitical state to critically re-interrogate our practices, developing our own identities in the process by allowing us as individuals to define what speech we want to express. 24 -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 25 -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. 26 -State identification restricts discourse to “acceptable speech” through speech codes, which enforce a one-sided view of speech and preclude holistic examination. This state censorship stagnates activism and transparent cooperative discourse amongst people, which forces complacency in the machinery of the state. 27 -Davis ‘99: Davis, Diane. “‘Addicted to Love’; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity.” Vol. 19 No. 4. 1999 28 -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. 29 -The failure of power structures is responsible for the rise of hate speech – it’s evidence of a failing state – the aff’s anarchy of becoming functionally solves hate speech because it rejects the state’s power. 30 -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) 31 -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. 32 -Part 3 is Framing 33 -The role of the ballot is to assume the position of an academic redefining educational spaces by evaluating critical pre-fiat discussion above government policy-making fiat arguments. 34 -Prefer this ROB for 2 reasons: 35 -1) The norm of blind adherence to fiat and poor political representation as a community has drained debate of meaning; restricting debate to fiat undermines debate about assumptions underlying policy and teaches us to not defend the process by which we make our conclusions. 36 -Gunder ‘9: senior planning lecturer at the Aukland University Michael. “Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning”. Pg. 11-12. //AB 37 -The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies of desired success, such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their desired enjoyment (cobblestones, chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum, this defines what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other, remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they are one and the same) is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as technical, rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "˜dominant stakeholders` can ensure the impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many whilst, of course, achieving their stakeholders’ specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469). The current post-democratic` milieu facilitates the above through avoidance of critical policy debate challenging favored orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of policy deficiencies, or alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while token institutions of liberal democracy’ are retained conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59). Consequently, the safe names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used or their work drawn upon by different stakeholders, while more critical voices are silenced by their inability to shape policy debates’ (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic development or spatial planning policy analyst thus continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying only the orthodox "successful” or "best practice” economic development or spatial planning responses. This further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo while providing "˜a cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer" isolating the political held from any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for public policy’ (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to generate similar policy responses for every competing local area or city-region, largely resulting in a zero-sum game (Blair and Kumar 1997). 38 -2) Scholarship and ideas get co-opted if we continually believe that the state is inevitable. The only way to get out of this cycle of state oppression is to think outside the structures of the state. If it’s utopian to reject the state, then that’s what’s needed to change society. This is a stance against the traditionalist government policy-maker paradigm. 39 -Newman ‘11: (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3); AB 40 -At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations. 41 -Part 4 is the Underview 42 -Aff gets RVIs on Theory – 2 reasons 43 -1. Reciprocity: I have to win theory and substance but they can win on either one, which violates reciprocity. Always prefer reciprocity on fairness since it’s the filter for fairness impacts – harms don’t matter if they don’t skew the field to one person’s favor. RVIS solve this since I can consolidate to one layer. 44 -2. Time skew: Forcing me to invest time on theory while I can’t generate offense is really abusive since it becomes a huge time suck. The time skew always hurts me since I have to generate terminal defense on every argument but they only have to extend a few with risk-of-offense. At best my argument quality is hurt since I can’t develop on either layer as well. And I have to spend time writing theory underviews instead of increasing aff substance. 45 -Neg authors that say the state is inevitable dogmatically view the world from the point of the dominant but flawed ontology. The neg’s so called “intellectuals” jobs depend on them representing capital as benevolent and inevitable. Their framework is an attempt to make the debate space a training ground for a new generation passive participants in the machinery of the state. 46 -Lambie ‘10: – Ph.D., joint-editor of the International Journal of Cuban Studies, and Lecturer in Public Policy at De Montfort University (George Lambie, “The Cuban Revolution in the 21st Century”, Pluto Press, pg. 150-152) //AB 47 -It is interesting that when most academics analyse revolutions and transformative processes, they focus almost exclusively on leaders. In turn, they seek to interpret the ideas and actions of these prominent figures based on the influence of other elites. These factors are important, but must be recognised as only partial explanations for most instances of significant socio-economic change. The issue of the role of intellectuals in society, and exactly what constitutes intellectual formation, is a complex debate (Lambie 2000). However, on the specific issue of academic approaches to leaders, the difficulty lies ultimately in the ideological composition of the academics themselves, which is rooted in the dominant ontology, one that emphasises individualism, elite leadership and an immutable order of human nature. Given this perspective, it is difficult to imagine a set of ideas or a consciousness emerging out of what seems to be thin air. From the ridicule of Marx’s observations on the autonomy of workers in the Paris Commune, to contemporary views that see socialism as utopian, there is an ideological intolerance of any idea that defies the implicit ontological parameters of liberalism. When the dominant liberal interpretive framework does encounter what appears to be spontaneous action and organisation at the grassroots level, it sees this in terms of civil society freeing itself from the state, and as an expression of self-help. This view is theorised in Hernando de Soto’s work The Other Path (1989), which interprets the survival strategies of the poor in developing countries as a blossoming of individual initiative. A similar ideological perspective permeates much of the NGO philosophy, with its emphasis on micro-credit and market-orientated initiatives to resolve problems in civil society without the involvement of the state. This kind of thinking also informs much of the policy-driven theory that dominates sections of academia in Western countries. For instance, as procedural democracies such as the UK struggle to deal with the ‘democratic deficit’, and governments become concerned about political legitimacy, policies are devised to enhance ‘participation’ and ‘citizenship’ in an attempt to give substance to liberal hegemony. Lack of ‘participation’ or understanding of ‘citizenship’ is seen as an educational issue, and citizens have to be instructed and ‘enabled’ by policy makers and academics to realise their ‘democratic’ rights. At its core, this is nothing more than a thinly concealed indoctrina- tion exercise to impose the rule of the market onto the organisation of local structures. Commenting on the role of academics and intellectuals in general, Wayne (2003:23–24) points out: One way in which intellectuals have attempted to explain their social role has been to depoliticise what it means to be elaborators and disseminators of ideas. This involves uncoupling knowledge production from vested social interests, defining professionalism as rising above the social conflict between capital and labour, and instead promoting ‘objectivity’ and ‘rationality’ as the very essence of what it is that intellectuals do ... the ideology of ‘objectivity’ has, under the guise of working for all humanity, justified their role to capitalists ... This attitude concerning the role of academics and intellectuals was famously defended by the French writer Romain Roland after the First World War, in his work Au-dessus de la mêlée (‘Above the Battle’) (1915). Roland’s position may be justified if one argues that the shock and horror of war temporarily divested life of meaning in the minds of rational people, and retreat into the ivory tower became a mode of defence against this malaise. However, modern intellectuals have no such excuse, and have increasingly become apparatchiks of a knowledge-production system that is driven by money, career climbing and prestige, all of which can be attained through conformity. Ultimately, only by grasping the idea that human nature is not immutable can one transcend these intellectual limitations and imagine the unimaginable. Martí, Guevara, Castro and other Cuban leaders understood this intellectually and intuitively, both by participating in the historical process themselves, and by not losing touch with the masses. Of course, the Cuban political process has fluctuated in the emphasis it has given to leadership or to participation, but the two have interacted more fully and more continuously than has been seen in any other country. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,48 +1,0 @@ 1 -Part 1 is Framing 2 -Welcome to the world of the aff where we no longer give a shit about the state and let it do its own thing. This is the time for the anarchy of becoming – a ideological separation of state and person. 3 -The specter haunting politics is power – we must transcend the current power structures of the state through the anarchy of the self. 4 -Newman ‘10: (Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory at the University of London at Goldsmiths, 2010, “The Politics of Postanarchism,” pub. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 104-107); AB 5 -We observe a similar silence about anarchism in more recent radical political thought, that which comes in the wake of poststructuralism. Indeed, in much contemporary continental theory we fi nd a series of themes, preoccupations and debates which bear a strong resemblance to those of anarchism. Amid the ruins of Marxism – or at least of a certain institutionalised and statist form of it – there is a desire among many thinkers today to develop new categories and directions for radical politics. There is the attempt, fi st, to find new forms of radical political subjectivity no longer based on the Marxist notion of the proletariat. There is a recognition that such a category is too narrow to express the different forms of oppression, modes of politicisation and ways of relating to one’s own work and existence that make up the contemporary world. However, there is also the recognition of the inadequacy of the ultimately liberal notion of ‘identity politics’ that characterised much new social movement theory. What is called for is new way of thinking about how, and by what processes, a subject becomes politicised – how does the subject become an egalitarian and collective subject? Secondly, there is, among many thinkers today, a rejection of authoritarian modes of political organisation – for instance, the centrally organised Marxist–Leninist vanguard party which would lead the proletariat to revolution, or the Communist and socialist parties in capitalist countries which sought to play the parliamentary game, thus abandoning any hope of emancipation from the state. There is a need, then, as Badiou would put it, for a politics without a party3 – new forms of political organisation that are no longer structured around the model of the party, as the party always has as its aim the reproduction of state power. Related to this, therefore, is the question of the state itself: the immovability of state power, despite the revolutionary programmes which promised its ‘withering away’, and, moreover, the increasingly authoritarian character of the so- called liberal democratic state, show us that the state remains perhaps the central problem in radical politics. Radical thought, therefore, sees politics increasingly as being situated beyond the state – there is a desire to find a space for politics outside the framework of state power, a space from which the hegemony of the state would be challenged. It seems to me that these themes and questions – political subjectivity beyond class, political organisation beyond the party and political action beyond the state – relate directly to anarchism. If these are the new directions that radical politics is moving in, then this would seem to suggest an increasingly anarchistic orientation. Indeed, this is a tendency that is being borne out in many radical movements and forms of resistance today. The emergence of the global anti- capitalist movement in recent times suggests a new form of politics, one that is much closer to anarchism in its aspirations and tactics, and in its decentralised, democratic modes of organisation. Also, the insurrections in Greece in December 2008 – which had an explicitly anarchist identification – are indicative of this libertarian moment in radical politics. It would seem that the prevailing form taken by radical politics today is anti- statist, anti- authoritarian and decentralised, and emphasises direct action rather than representative party politics and lobbying. Furthermore, is it not evident that there is a massive disengagement of ordinary people from normal political processes, an overwhelming scepticism – especially in the wake of the current economic crisis – about the political elites who supposedly govern in their interests? Is there not, at the same time, an obvious consternation on the part of these elites at this growing distance, signifying a crisis in their symbolic legitimacy? As a defensive or pre- emptive measure,4 the state becomes more draconian and predatory, increasingly obsessed with surveillance and control, defining itself through war and security, seeking to authorise itself through a politics of fear and exception. How should radical political thought respond to this situation, lagging behind – as it so often does – reality ‘on the ground’? My contention is that anarchism – or more precisely postanarchism – can provide some answers here. Indeed, anarchism might be seen as the hidden referent for radical political thought today: while its importance is scarcely acknowledged amongst the thinkers referred to above, anarchism can nevertheless offer critical resources for radical political theory, allowing it to transcend many of its current limitations and, indeed, providing it with a more consistent ethical and political framework. 6 -The state’s dialectic of prohibition and legalization sustains the biopolitical state of exception. This creates a biopolitical zone of indistinction, where certain people become invisible to society – I control the internal link to the neg K’s. Bracketed for Gendered Language. 7 -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 8 -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. 9 -The state’s regulation of access to rights is a gateway for biopolitical violence – people not seen as worthy of rights by the state get oppressed. 10 -Agamben ‘8: Giorgio Agamben writes in “Beyond Human Rights” in 2008. Giorgio Agamben (Italian: aˈɡambɛn; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, 4 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. http://jstor.reed.edu/stable/pdf/40644981.pdf; AB 11 -The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. 3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state. 12 -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. Against this, affirm an anarchy of becoming – a micropolitical reconfiguration of the subject that severs the state from the relationship to the self. 13 -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 14 -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. 15 -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. 16 -Part 2 is The Phenomenon of Speech 17 -Speech codes are biopolitical –the state decides the context of what hate speech is. 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. 18 -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 19 -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. 20 -Vote aff to reject the politics of aesthetics – we must recognize the role of speech as simply a form of communication. By implementing speech codes, you’re identifying types of speech as “ugly” and advocating the state to conceal them. This reinforces biopolitical control. 21 -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) 22 -Because aesthetic experience occupies the space between individual experience and social reality, the space created by the intersection of the various materialities evoked by electricity, it is both subjective and universal. The subjective nature of this universality provides both the utopian impulse Introduction 11 in aesthetic politics and aesthetic ideology’s coercive power. Aesthetic Materialism attempts to navigate between these poles by maintaining its focus on this very experience of subjective universality. In the aesthetic experience, the self seems to recede, as individuals give themselves over to the object (or, more properly, the perception of the object), and thus are left feeling as though anyone would have the same reaction. In that moment, it is inconceivable that anyone would not recognize the beauty, the sublimity, the humor, the ugliness of the thing perceived. The perceiving subject, in other words, recognizes no basis for this judgment in his or her particular interests, investments, desires. As such, this experience seems to place the individual outside civil society, the modern arena “of uncoerced human association and also the set of relational networks—formed for the sake of family, faith, interest, and ideology—that fill this space.”21 While an aesthetic experience might occur only because of one’s place within society— one’s social background, age, education, location, or privilege in relation to particular institutions—it does not directly or immediately involve the self in the negotiations, struggles, and identifications attendant in the working of civil society. Individuals may feel moved by a Picasso painting or Eliot’s “The Waste Land” only as a result of the training and education they have received due to their class position, their own individual histories crisscrossed by relations of power involving gender, nationality, and sexuality. Others may be touched by a renaissance Pietà or be moved by the beauty of a Thomas Kinkade painting due to a similar confluence of different overdetermined reasons. Yet that does not mean that the individual’s aesthetic experience of those objects necessarily feeds back into or undermines the social structures and ideologies giving rise to those particular encounters. In its intense focus on the sensuous perception of the object itself, the aesthetic momentarily interrupts both the dominant sense of the self as interested and autonomous and an instrumentalized orientation towards the world. In this way, aesthetics leads to “putting into question the individual’s ‘ordinary’ relation to all spheres of existence, and of reconstituting them as sites of aesthetic incompletion,” “the ceaseless problematization of and withdrawal from all normative judgment itself.”22 The most compelling attempts at revitalizing aesthetics have understood aesthetics in these terms, but have tended to move, too quickly, it seems to me, towards reading aesthetics as constituting a progressive politics focused on indeterminacy.23 Even in its recognition of the contingency of experience and identity, of the a mbivalence of representation, the aesthetic experience’s political effects—or even its tendencies—remain indeterminate. That is not to say that aesthetic experience remains permanently outside 12 Introduction the political. Instead, as “subjective universality” indicates, aesthetic experience always posits a reference to other people. In the aesthetic moment, the individual feels at one with some universal humanity who must have the same reaction. Yet the subjective nature of the event reiterates the observer’s detachment both from the object as a result of language’s mediation, the nervous system, and individual experience—and from any imagined universal community. These elements come together in the almost involuntary need to share this response—“Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that horrifying?” The question is simultaneously rhetorical—of course it’s beautiful—and is in need of confirmation because the experience’s universality is already in doubt. 23 -The aff is key to creating a space beyond the law – we must ignore the biopolitical state’s speech codes to critically re-interrogate our practices, developing our own identities in the process by allowing us as individuals to define what speech we want to express. 24 -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 25 -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. 26 -State identification restricts discourse to “acceptable speech” through speech codes, which enforce a one-sided view of speech and preclude holistic examination. This state censorship stagnates activism and transparent cooperative discourse amongst people, which forces complacency in the machinery of the state. 27 -Davis ‘99: Davis, Diane. “‘Addicted to Love’; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity.” Vol. 19 No. 4. 1999 28 -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. 29 -The failure of power structures is responsible for the rise of hate speech – it’s evidence of a failing state – the aff’s anarchy of becoming controls the internal link to defining your own place in the world. 30 -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) 31 -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. 32 -I defend the whole resolution as a thought experiment. Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech. The resolution is negative state action, so a pre-fiat framing is justified. 33 -Part 3 is Fiat’s Overrated 34 -Evaluate kritikal discussion above policy-making arguments. 35 -Reject policy arguments for 3 reasons: 36 -1) Restricting debate to fiat undermines debate about assumptions underlying policy and teaches us to not defend the process by which we make our conclusions. 37 -Gunder ‘9: senior planning lecturer at the Aukland University Michael. “Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning”. Pg. 11-12. //AB 38 -The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies of desired success, such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their desired enjoyment (cobblestones, chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum, this defines what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other, remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they are one and the same) is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as technical, rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "˜dominant stakeholders` can ensure the impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many whilst, of course, achieving their stakeholders’ specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469). The current post-democratic` milieu facilitates the above through avoidance of critical policy debate challenging favored orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of policy deficiencies, or alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while token institutions of liberal democracy’ are retained conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59). Consequently, the safe names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used or their work drawn upon by different stakeholders, while more critical voices are silenced by their inability to shape policy debates’ (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic development or spatial planning policy analyst thus continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying only the orthodox "successful” or "best practice” economic development or spatial planning responses. This further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo while providing "˜a cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer" isolating the political held from any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for public policy’ (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to generate similar policy responses for every competing local area or city-region, largely resulting in a zero-sum game (Blair and Kumar 1997). 39 -2) Scholarship and ideas get co-opted if we continually believe that the state is inevitable. The only way to get out of this cycle of state oppression is to think outside the structures of the state. If it’s utopian to reject the state, then that’s what’s needed to change society. This is a stance against the traditionalist government policy-maker paradigm. 40 -Newman ‘11: (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3); AB 41 -At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations. 42 -3) Authors that say the state is inevitable dogmatically view the world from the point of the dominant but flawed ontology. These so called “intellectuals” jobs depend on them representing capital as benevolent and inevitable. That’s an attempt to make the debate space a training ground for a new generation passive participants in the machinery of the state. 43 -Lambie ‘10: – Ph.D., joint-editor of the International Journal of Cuban Studies, and Lecturer in Public Policy at De Montfort University (George Lambie, “The Cuban Revolution in the 21st Century”, Pluto Press, pg. 150-152) //AB 44 -It is interesting that when most academics analyse revolutions and transformative processes, they focus almost exclusively on leaders. In turn, they seek to interpret the ideas and actions of these prominent figures based on the influence of other elites. These factors are important, but must be recognised as only partial explanations for most instances of significant socio-economic change. The issue of the role of intellectuals in society, and exactly what constitutes intellectual formation, is a complex debate (Lambie 2000). However, on the specific issue of academic approaches to leaders, the difficulty lies ultimately in the ideological composition of the academics themselves, which is rooted in the dominant ontology, one that emphasises individualism, elite leadership and an immutable order of human nature. Given this perspective, it is difficult to imagine a set of ideas or a consciousness emerging out of what seems to be thin air. From the ridicule of Marx’s observations on the autonomy of workers in the Paris Commune, to contemporary views that see socialism as utopian, there is an ideological intolerance of any idea that defies the implicit ontological parameters of liberalism. When the dominant liberal interpretive framework does encounter what appears to be spontaneous action and organisation at the grassroots level, it sees this in terms of civil society freeing itself from the state, and as an expression of self-help. This view is theorised in Hernando de Soto’s work The Other Path (1989), which interprets the survival strategies of the poor in developing countries as a blossoming of individual initiative. A similar ideological perspective permeates much of the NGO philosophy, with its emphasis on micro-credit and market-orientated initiatives to resolve problems in civil society without the involvement of the state. This kind of thinking also informs much of the policy-driven theory that dominates sections of academia in Western countries. For instance, as procedural democracies such as the UK struggle to deal with the ‘democratic deficit’, and governments become concerned about political legitimacy, policies are devised to enhance ‘participation’ and ‘citizenship’ in an attempt to give substance to liberal hegemony. Lack of ‘participation’ or understanding of ‘citizenship’ is seen as an educational issue, and citizens have to be instructed and ‘enabled’ by policy makers and academics to realise their ‘democratic’ rights. At its core, this is nothing more than a thinly concealed indoctrina- tion exercise to impose the rule of the market onto the organisation of local structures. Commenting on the role of academics and intellectuals in general, Wayne (2003:23–24) points out: One way in which intellectuals have attempted to explain their social role has been to depoliticise what it means to be elaborators and disseminators of ideas. This involves uncoupling knowledge production from vested social interests, defining professionalism as rising above the social conflict between capital and labour, and instead promoting ‘objectivity’ and ‘rationality’ as the very essence of what it is that intellectuals do ... the ideology of ‘objectivity’ has, under the guise of working for all humanity, justified their role to capitalists ... This attitude concerning the role of academics and intellectuals was famously defended by the French writer Romain Roland after the First World War, in his work Au-dessus de la mêlée (‘Above the Battle’) (1915). Roland’s position may be justified if one argues that the shock and horror of war temporarily divested life of meaning in the minds of rational people, and retreat into the ivory tower became a mode of defence against this malaise. However, modern intellectuals have no such excuse, and have increasingly become apparatchiks of a knowledge-production system that is driven by money, career climbing and prestige, all of which can be attained through conformity. Ultimately, only by grasping the idea that human nature is not immutable can one transcend these intellectual limitations and imagine the unimaginable. Martí, Guevara, Castro and other Cuban leaders understood this intellectually and intuitively, both by participating in the historical process themselves, and by not losing touch with the masses. Of course, the Cuban political process has fluctuated in the emphasis it has given to leadership or to participation, but the two have interacted more fully and more continuously than has been seen in any other country. 45 -Part 4 is the Underview 46 -Aff gets RVIs on Theory – 2 reasons 47 -1. Reciprocity: I have to win theory and substance but they can win on either one, which violates reciprocity. Always prefer reciprocity on fairness since it’s the filter for fairness impacts – harms don’t matter if they don’t skew the field to one person’s favor. RVIS solve this since I can consolidate to one layer. 48 -2. Time skew: Forcing me to invest time on theory while I can’t generate offense is really abusive since it becomes a huge time suck. The time skew always hurts me since I have to generate terminal defense on every argument but they only have to extend a few with risk-of-offense. At best my argument quality is hurt since I can’t develop on either layer as well. And I have to spend time writing theory underviews instead of increasing aff substance. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,52 +1,0 @@ 1 -1AC 2 -Pt. 1 Framing 3 -The state is inevitable but that doesn’t mean we should give it the power to have ontological jurisdiction. This is the time for the anarchy of becoming – a ideological separation of state and person. Postmodern identity politics are hopeless, it’s time for ontological fluidity. 4 -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. 5 -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 6 -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 vessence. 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. 7 -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. 8 -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. 9 -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 10 -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. 11 -Reject ressentiment because it’s the foundation of psychology that instills a revengeful hatred that deprecates existence – outweighs all other impacts. Bracketed for gendered language. 12 -Deleuze ‘83: Gilles, 1983, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pg. 34-36 BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE 13 -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. 14 -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. 15 -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 16 -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. 17 -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. 18 -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 19 -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 20 -And state heuristic debates are cruelly optimistic – means you vote aff on presumption. Liberalism is familiarity, not revolutionary. 21 -Berlant ‘11: Lauren, George M. Pullman Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago, Cruel Optimism, Routledge: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 33-6 22 -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. 23 -Pt. 2 Linguistics 24 -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. 25 -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 26 -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. 27 -Voting aff rejects the politics of aesthetics – we must recognize the role of speech as simply a form of communication. Words are byproducts of societal conditions – the aff’s anarchy of becoming controls the internal link to defining your own place in the world. 28 -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) 29 -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. 30 -Pigeonholing speech into categories obscures state violence and bars alterity. 31 -Davis ‘99: Davis, Diane. “‘Addicted to Love’; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity.” Vol. 19 No. 4. 1999 32 -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. 33 -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. 34 -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 35 -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. 36 -Denying the state the legitimacy and faith it craves causes it to implode from within – turns political engagement and material scenario-planning – DISENGAGEMENT solves. 37 -Baudrillard ‘83: Jean, IN THE SHADOW OF THE SILENT MAJORITIES OR THE END OF THE SOCIAL. 1983 38 -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. 39 -I defend the whole resolution as a thought experiment. 40 -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. 41 -Blind adherence to fiat has drained debate of meaning. The hegemonic structure you call fiat is a tactic of marginalization to prevent institutional subversion – LINK TURNS your T/theory standards – deliberation is useless without critical literature. 42 -Gunder ‘9: senior planning lecturer at the Aukland University Michael. “Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning”. Pg. 11-12.; AB 43 -The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies of desired success, such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their desired enjoyment (cobblestones, chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum, this defines what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other, remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they are one and the same) is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as technical, rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "˜dominant stakeholders` can ensure the impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many whilst, of course, achieving their stakeholders’ specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469). The current post-democratic` milieu facilitates the above through avoidance of critical policy debate challenging favored orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of policy deficiencies, or alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while token institutions of liberal democracy’ are retained conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59). Consequently, the safe names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used or their work drawn upon by different stakeholders, while more critical voices are silenced by their inability to shape policy debates’ (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic development or spatial planning policy analyst thus continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying only the orthodox "successful” or "best practice” economic development or spatial planning responses. This further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo while providing "˜a cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer" isolating the political held from any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for public policy’ (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to generate similar policy responses for every competing local area or city-region, largely resulting in a zero-sum game (Blair and Kumar 1997). 44 -Underview 45 -DEPENDS ON THE ROUND 46 -IT WILL EITHER BE... 47 -- PRE-EMPTIVE COUNTER-INTERP FOR THEORY/T 48 -- POLICY PRE-EMPTS 49 -- KANT PRE-EMPTS 50 -- METHOD K PRE-EMPTS 51 -- ANTI-BLACKNESS PRE-EMPTS 52 -- OTHER PRE-EMPTS - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,53 +1,0 @@ 1 -Part 1 is Framing 2 -We begin with a metaphor for the AC from the work of Franz Kafka in his story “Before the Law.” A man tries to gain access to the law, but a gatekeeper prevents him from doing so. The man spends everything he has, "no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.”” The man’s health only deteriorates as he ages. The gatekeeper recognizes the man’s approaching death and says, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.” 3 -As creator and gatekeeper of the law, the state-sovereign wants you to believe in the futility of action in the face of law. It sets a gatekeeper for every aspect of the law to protect sovereign interests and create a facade of its own legitimacy and the futility of any action but compliance. Overcoming ONE instance of the law’s all-powerfulness would be a symbolic destruction of the entire order, the series of gatekeepers, and disrupt this façade of all-powerfulness to provoke new knowledge – a harbinger of the divesting of the sovereign’s power to the people. 4 -Modern politics and ethics are morally hopeless - the state currently acts as the ultimate sovereign – it decides where and when rights are applied. 5 -Agamben ‘8: Giorgio Agamben writes in “Beyond Human Rights” in 2008. Giorgio Agamben (Italian: aˈɡambɛn; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, 4 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. http://jstor.reed.edu/stable/pdf/40644981.pdf; AB 6 -The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. 3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state. 7 -This is the distinction between qualified life and bare life – bare life lacks the protection of rights, whereas qualified life has this protection of rights. This ability to arbitrarily apply rights is the manifestation of state abuse – Qualified life is the Trojan horse that allows the state to consolidate its bio-political control. 8 -Downey ‘9: Anthony Downey writes in “Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Bare Life’ and the Politics of Aesthetics” on March 2009. Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 2, March, 2009, 109–125. Anthony Downey is director of the Master s Program in Contemporary Art at Sotheby s Institute of Art, London, and editor of Ibraaz, a research forum for visual culture in the Middle East and North Africa. http://www.anthonydowney.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2009-zones-of-indistinction.pdf; AB 9 -Lives lived on the margins of social, political, cultural, economic and geographical borders are lives half lived. Denied access to legal, economic and political redress, these lives exist in a limbo-like state that is largely preoccupied with acquiring and sustaining the essentials of life. The refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the dispossessed – all have been excluded, to different degrees, from the fraternity of the social sphere, appeal to the safety net of the nation-state and recourse to international law. They have been outlawed, so to speak, placed beyond recourse to law and yet still in a precarious relationship to law itself. Although there is a significant degree of familiarity to be found in these sentiments, there is an increasingly notable move both in the political sciences and in cultural studies to view such subject positions not as the exception to modernity but its exemplification. Which brings us to a far more radical proposal: what if the fact of discrimination, in all its injustice and strategic forms of exclusion, is the point at which we find not so much an imperfect modern subject – a subject existing in a ‘sub-modern’ phase that has yet to realise its potential – as we do the exemplary modern subject? What if the refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the dispossessed are not only constitutive of modernity but its emblematic subjects? It is with such points in mind that Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has developed a theory of marginalisation that goes beyond the binary distinctions to be had in dichotomies such as inside/outside, centre/margins, inclusion/exclusion. In albeit abbreviated terms for now, Agamben is interested in lives lived on the margins of social, political, juridical and biological representation, not for their exceptional qualities but for their exemplary status: the manner in which they are both representative of modernity and an admonitory warning to the ontological basis of the modern political subject. Modernity’s exceptions, he argues, predicate its social structure and political reasoning. The exemplary figure of that exceptionalism in historical terms is bare life homo sacer, an obscure figure of Roman law who, although once a citizen, is reduced to ‘bare life’ by sovereign decree and deprived of basic rights such as representation before the law.1 Homo sacer, the sacred and therefore separate person man – he who is set apart from others by law – is, for Agamben, the increasingly nascent figure of our times; a time in which we are witnessing the effective re-emergence of sovereign forms of power and the concomitant production of ‘bare life’ as a constituent element in the democratic order. It is to Agamben’s credit that he does not propose a discrete topology of victimhood in his thesis; rather, he is suggesting that the discretionary ability of the sovereign state to bring the weight of its unmediated power to bear upon the body of its subjects is an inherent part of living in a democracy. In Agamben’s eyes, in fine, we are not only all potentially homo sacer (homines sacri) and the de facto bearers of ‘bare life’ but this exceptional figure augurs a ‘coming community’ that is based not on rights as such but the suspension of rights. 10 -Qualified life opens space for a zone of indistinction, where people fall into the grey-zone of the invisible – legitimizes a state where all societal atrocities happen through the rhetoric of a state of exception. 11 -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 12 -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. 13 -The role of the judge is to evaluate critical discussion above fiated policy-making analysis – Debate should focus on creating a new generation of citizens that are critical thinkers educated about social problems—that’s key to equality. 14 -The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best uses counter-narratives to demystify the power of the state hierarchies—it’s the hope that we have for meaningful change that spills over this debate round. The judge as a critical educator has an obligation to question state biopolitical power. 15 -Gündoğdu ‘11: Ayten Gündoğdu writes in “Potentialities of human rights: Agamben and the narrative of fated necessity” on 19 July 2011. Contemporary Political Theory February 2012, Volume 11, Issue 1, pp 2–22. http://link.springer.com/article/10.10572Fcpt.2010.45; AB 16 -In his analysis of biopolitical sovereignty, Agamben provides us with what might be called a counternarrative of Western politics with the explicitly stated goal of ‘unveiling’ or ‘unmasking’ what has become mystified, hidden, secret or invisible, particularly with the prevalence of contractarian accounts of political power (1998, p. 8; 2005, p. 88). Agamben describes this critical task in terms of ‘disenchantment’, or the ‘patient work’ of unmasking the fiction or myth that covers up and sustains the violence of sovereignty (2005, p. 88). What underlies this urge to demystify and unveils is a particular understanding of myth as a deceptive narrative naturalizing and legitimizing violence in the name of the preservation of life. I use the term ‘counternarrative’ to call attention to what Agamben's account aims to do6: This is a critical analysis, as Agamben himself insists, that does not offer ‘historiographical theses or reconstructions’ but instead treats some historical phenomena as ‘paradigms’ so as to ‘make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context;’ to do this, it proceeds at ‘a historico-philosophical level’ (1998, p. 11; 2009, p. 9). In that sense, it is not an account that claims historical accuracy or factual verifiability. This is a crucial point that is sometimes overlooked by Agamben's critics who call into question his inaccurate treatment of historical phenomena such as the concentration camps.7 In addition, ‘counternarrative’ draws our attention to the inventive dimensions of Agamben's endeavor; as one of his critics aptly (though disapprovingly) puts it, ‘Agamben does not discover a concealed biopolitical paradigm stretching back to fourth-century Athens; rather he invents one’ (Finlayson, 2010, p. 116). The invention of a counternarrative of Western politics involves literary devices (e.g. hyperbole), which aim to provoke the readers and persuade them to abandon any politics centered on modern concepts such as sovereignty, rights and citizenship (LaCapra, 2007; cf. de la Durantaye, 2009). In analyzing Agamben's account as a ‘counternarrative’, I aim to attend to the goals that it sets for itself. It is these goals – particularly the goal of freeing human potentialities from myths that render the contingent necessary and mask other possibilities – that provide the starting point for my critical engagement with Agamben. Instead of resorting to an ‘outside’ – whether this be an alternative historical account or another theoretical tradition – I aim to read Agamben on his own terms, and suggest that as he tries to free human potentialities from contractarian myths, he might be entrapping them in another myth that ends up casting the contingent as necessary. Agamben's counternarrative of Western politics aims to uncover what has become hidden or invisible with ‘our modern habit of representing the political realm in terms of citizens’ rights, free will, and social contracts’ (1998, p. 106). Its main target is the contractarian accounts of sovereign power. As he identifies the production of bare life as the originary or foundational activity grounding sovereign power (1998, pp. 6, 83), he particularly aims to question the social contractarian ‘myth’ that covers up sovereign violence (1998, p. 109). After unveiling the foundational myths of Western politics, Agamben concludes that we cannot effectively respond to ‘the bloody mystification of a new planetary order’ if we let these myths continue to obstruct our political imagination (1998, p. 12). With his counternarrative presenting a catastrophic view of the historical present – a view that emphasizes how exception has become the rule, camp has become the paradigmatic structure organizing political space, and we have all virtually become homines sacri (1998, pp. 38, 176, 111) – Agamben aims to convince his readers of the need to think of a ‘nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life’ (2000, p. 112). This new politics requires the renunciation of concepts associated with sovereignty – for example, state, rights, citizenship. The contemporary predicament cannot be remedied by a return to conventional political categories and institutions, Agamben suggests, since these are deeply involved in the creation of this catastrophe in the first place. Almost anticipating his critics who would be puzzled by his renunciation of rights and rule of law at a time when the problem of legal dispossession increasingly threatens populations around the world, he explicitly states that the response to the current permanent state of exception cannot consist in confining it within constitutional boundaries and reaffirming the primacy of legal norms and rights (2005, p. 87).8 As legal norms and rights are ultimately grounded in the originary violence of separating a bare life, legal dispossession is already inscribed in them as an inescapable condition. Neither the liberal remedy of reasserting the rule of law, nor the Derridean strategy of ‘infinite negotiations’ with a law that is in force without any significance, are viable options (2005, p. 87; 1998, p. 54). Both are futile, if not lethally dangerous, endeavors.9 The only politically tenable option, Agamben contends, is to move out of sovereignty with ‘a complicated and patient strategy’ of getting the ‘door of the Law closed forever’ (1998, pp. 54, 55). 17 -Any attempt to make political change requires an analysis of bare life – the state always has the power to declare a state of exception, which reinforces cyclical violence against those without qualified life. 18 -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. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB 19 -At the threshold of the modern era, then, the realm of bare life begins to coincide with the political, and inclusion and exclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of indistinction. In these zones of indistinction, bare life, or homo sacer, becomes both the subject and the object of the political order: it is both the place for the organization of state power, in the forms of discipline and objectification described by Foucault, and the place for emancipation from it, through the birth of mod- ern democracy and the demand for human rights. This move of biological life to the center of the political scene in the West leads to a transformation of the political realm itself, one that effectively constitutes its depoliticization. That depoliticization takes place side by side with the politicization of bare life. Bare life is politicized and political life disappears. This irony is explained by the way the link forged in modernity between poli- tics and bare life, a link that underpins ideologies from the right and the left, has been ignored. As Agamben says, "if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because poli- tics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity. . . . Only a reflection that . . . interrogates the link between bare life and politics . . . will be able to bring the political out of its con- cealment."20 Any attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with an awareness of the impossibility of the classical distinction between private life and political existence and exam- ine the zones of indistinction into which the oppositions that produced modern politics in the West - inside/outside, right/left, public/private - have dissolved. Agamben proposes that "it is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, these difficult zones of indistinction, that the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought."21 In the zone of indistinction, a claim to a po- litically qualified life can no longer be effective as such. 20 -And biopolitical discourse come first. 21 -Campbell and Sitze ‘15: Timothy Campbell is a Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University and together with Adam Sitze, a professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social thought at the Amherst College he recently edited a new collection of essays on the topic of biopolitics. Campbell translated Roberto Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minnesota, 2008) and Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford, 2009). He is the author of Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (Minnesota, 2006), winner of the Media Ecology Association’s 2007 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics and and Improper Life: Biopolitics and Technology from Heidegger to Agamben (Minnesota, 2011). He also edits the series “Commonalities" for Fordham University Press and is currently completing his study of cinema and biopower titled Grace Notes: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life. http://biononymous.me/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/full_interview.pdf; AB 22 -What is biopolitics? Clearly, it's a moment, as Arendt, Agamben, and Esposito among others argue, when what the Ancient Greeks called bìos, or life, encounters the political, which is how they referred to life in the city or polis. This is important only because of the separation of life as bìos from life as life in the polis: bìos was domestic life, food, health, the household’s budget. In short, it is the moment when life encounters the political, which is what Arendt sketches so profoundly and at length in The Human Condition, portions of which we include in the reader. Let’s also remember that politikos did not include slaves nor women. I want to insist on the word encounter when describing the meeting of life and politics because encounter highlights a relation that isn’t — yet — a fusion. I continue to think it’s important to distinguish between life and politics; that finding an interval to hold open between them may provide us with an opportunity for thought that might otherwise go missing if we immediately assume we know the meaning of biopolitics or biopower. 23 - 24 -Part 2 is the Advocacy 25 -Thus, the advocacy: The United States Federal Government ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech in public colleges and universities. The resolution is negative state action, thus I garner both pre-fiat offense and fiated offense. Pre-fiat comes from the framing as an independent issue and the fiated comes from part 3 offense. 26 -Evaluate pre-fiat analysis before fiated offense. 27 -Jones ‘99: Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, ‘99 (Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163) 28 -The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction that make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the “philosophy of praxis” to political practice, Gramsci claims: It the theory does not tend to leave the “simple” in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and “simple” it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332-333). According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative “intellectual-moral bloc” should take place under the auspices of the Communist Party – a body he described as the “modern prince.” Just as Niccolo Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign barbarians, and create a virtu-ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern price could lead the working class on its journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125-205). Gramsci’s relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of domination – for example, in the case of gender – to class relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict.1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the “infallible party” has obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the enemies of emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous. History furnishes examples of progressive developments that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside the bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the particularly intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered as “resources of hope” for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They illustrate that ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical interaction of ideas and material reality. One clear security-related example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s. At that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals (the “alternative defense” school) encouraged and drew strength from peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on short-term policy but on the dominant discourses of strategy and security, a far more important result in the long run. The synergy between critical security intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both working in tandem can be witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of common security. As Thomas Risse-Kappen points out, the term “common security” originated in the contribution of peace researchers to the German security debate of the 1970s (Risse-Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). Initially, mainstream defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However, notions of common security were taken up by a number of different intellectuals communities, including the liberal arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in the center-left political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet “institutchiks” – members of the influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau 1996: 52-54; Risse-Kappen 1994: 196-200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995). These communities were subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, “in response to social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD” (Risse-Kappen 1994: 207). Similar pressures even had an effect on the Reagan administration. As Risse-Kappen notes: When the Reagan administration brought hard-liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the “freeze campaign” that revived the arms control process together with pressure from the European allies. (Risse-Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90-110). Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least have a substantial impact on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected impact of alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union. Through various East-West links, which included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such attendant notions as “nonoffensive defense” (these links are detailed in Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin , and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse-Kappen 1994: 203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in East-West relations in order to facilitate much-needed domestic reforms (“the interaction of ideas and material reality”). But what is significant is that the Soviets’ commitment to common security led to significant changes in force sizes and postures. These in turn aided in the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the territory of the former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As concepts such as common security, and collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223-260), are adopted by governments and military services, they inevitably become somewhat debased. The hope is that enough of the residual meaning can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the adoption of the concept of common security by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently) critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonsrates in relation to NATO expansion). The example of common security is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and play a role – a significant one at that – in making the world a better and safer place. Second, it points to potential future addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical security studies in particular. Third, it also underlines the role of ideas in the evolution in society. CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND THE THEORY-PRACTICE NEXUS Although most proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical intellectuals “are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless” (Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies, this means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making suffering humanity rather than raison d’etat the prism through which problems are viewed. Here the project stands full-square within the critical theory tradition. If “all theory is for someone and for some purpose,” then critical security studies is for “the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless,” and its purpose is their emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a fundamental reconceptualization of security with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But the question remains at the conceptual level of how these alternative types of theorizing – even if they are self-consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures – can become “a force for the direction of action.” Again, Gramsci’s work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramsci’s terminology, “historic blocs” (Gramsci 1971: 323-377). Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s view of power as a centaur, ahlf man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway through civil society and takes on the status of common sense; it becomes subconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions that were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marx’s well-worn phrase, “All that is solid melts into the air.” Gramsci’s intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a “war of position” (Gramsci 1971: 229-239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies, any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by helping to undermine the “natural,” “commonsense,” internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs created. I contend that Gramsci’s strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. THE TASKS OF CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES If the project of critical security studies is conceived in terms of war of position, then the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse. This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the prevailing security regimes, that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes. When this is attempted in the security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals, traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order. This challenge entails teasing out the often subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist façade. In this sense, proponents of critical security studies approximate to Foucault’s notion of “specific intellectuals” who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980: 132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of “speaking truth to power” (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod lines of speaking “truth against the world.” Of course, traditional strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that “strategists must be prepared to ‘speak truth to power’” (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that, whereas the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their power, the latter aim at a thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, critical theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that “the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth” (cited in Jameson 1990: 66). The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116-121). Thus, by criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously playing apart in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc and contributing to the development of a counterhegemonic position. There are a number of avenues of avenues open to critical security specialists in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds to other possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant pundistry to forward alternative views onto a broader stage. Nancy Fraser argues: “As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture …. As critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to” (Fraser 1989: 11). Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic Adorno, who argues: In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what lay at the root of the delusion. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such “unobtrusive yet insistent work” does not in itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes. The conceptual and the practical dangers of collapsing practice into theory must be guarded against. Rather, through their educational activities, proponent of critical security studies should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements. That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his account of New Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the country’s political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989: 108; see also COrtright 1993: 5-13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and strategy drew strength and succor from each other’s efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of the a “message in a bottle,” but in this case, contra Adorno’s expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be naïve to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing “professionalisation” of academic life (Said 1994: 49-62). Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability that they are extremely risk-averse. It pays – in all senses – to stick with the crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for “new targets for old weapons”). And, of course, the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking can connect with the practices of social movements and become a “force for the direction of action.” The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to challenge 29 -Instead of eliminating the law, you should adopt a politics of playing with the law — switch it from a sacred entity to a childish toy — we control the internal link to every epistemology in resisting sovereign violence. 30 -Mills ‘8: Catherine Mills writes in “Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridicial Justice.” South Atlantic Quarterly 107:1, Winter 2008 DOI 10.1215/00382876-2007-053 © 2007 Duke University Press. Pg 23 – 24 need college person’s credentials for pdf; AB 31 -To return to my starting point, more can now be said of the idea of playing with law as if it were a disused object, that is, a toy. It is now possible to better appreciate the perceived revolutionary potential of play and of the toy. As we have seen, the toy brings to light the “temporality of history in its pure differential and qualitative value.” That is, in making present “human temporality in itself, the pure differential margin between the ‘once’ and the ‘no longer’” (IH, 72), the toy permits a release from continuous and linear time and the realization of and return to history, understood as the true homeland of humanity (IH, 104–5). In relation to law, we can now say that as a disused object the law has lost its use value in the realm of the politicoeconomic and has instead been relegated to the profane use that can be made of it by children. The characterization of its being in force without significance appears to locate the law within the diachronic element of the “‘once’ . . . ‘no longer,’” rather than within the synchrony of miniaturization. This is significant because it highlights the ritualistic dimension of law, which compensates for the disjuncture of past and present, Agamben argues, by reabsorbing diachrony into synchrony. Play, however, transforms synchrony into diachrony by breaking the tie between past and present. This production of a differential margin in the dialectic of rite and play is the condition of history; it is that which allows for the now. As a toy and only as a toy, as an object of play, the rite of law contributes to the revelation of the essential historicity of the human. The ritualistic dimension of law is important for another reason as well. Agamben insists on the impossibility of the elimination of either diachronic or synchronic signification: in all games and rites, the one remains a stumbling block for the other, thereby preventing the attainment of a pure state of diachrony or synchrony. Thus, he writes, “at the end of the game,” the toy—the privileged signifier of absolute diachrony—“turns around into its opposite and is presented as the synchronic residue that the game can no longer eliminate” (IH, 79). This implies that playing with law does not mean eliminating the law, for there is actually a sense in which the law is rescued from its own obsolescence in play. Rather than being maintained solely in a state of decay characterized by the simple lack of practicoeconomic value as law, it is given a new use. But this does not take the form of a resacralization of the law and restoration of transcendental meaning or force. Instead, the new use of law takes the form of its deactivation or deposition. Before saying more of this, it is worth cautioning against the phrase “at the end of the game” used above, for in what sense would the game in which humanity plays with law have an end? To construe the game of playing with law as having an end would in fact push Agamben’s conception of the messianic toward an identification with the eschatological, a conflation that he explicitly resists in The Time That Remains.16 Thus, within his own characterization, it would be more accurate to insist on the endlessness of play. As with the activity of study with which it is intimately related in the paragraph in question, play is interminable; it has no end beyond pleasure. As Agamben writes in Idea of Prose, “Not only can study have no rightful end, it does not even desire one.”17 32 -And we solve negative kritiks, we view the law as more than just ends — it is part of an unraveling of the functioning of normative legality to develop a new vocabulary and mode of thought in addressing sovereign abuse – not a resacralized or canonical use of the law. 33 -Agamben ‘5: Giorgio Agamben writes in “State of Exception” – A translation by Kevin Attell. Giorgio Agamben is professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona. He is the author of ten previous books, including the prequel to this one, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, published in English by Stanford University Press. Kevin Attell is a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department at the University of California, Davis. He is the translator of Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal. https://books.google.com/books?id=9slkvuV3VS4Candprintsec=frontcover#v=onepageandq=in20the20kafkaandf=false; AB 34 -The stakes in the debate between Benjamin and Schmitt on the state of exception can now be defined more clearly. The dispute takes place in a zone of anomie that, on the one hand, must be maintained in relation to the law at all costs and, on the other, must be just as implacably released and freed from this relation. That is to say, at issue in the anomic zone is the relation between violence and law – in the last analysis, the status of violence as a cipher for human action. While Schmitt attempts every time to reinscribe violence within a juridical context, Benjamin responds to this gesture by seeking every time to assure it – as pure violence – and existence outside of the law. For reasons that we must try to clarify, this struggle for anomie seems to be as decisive for Western politics as the gigantomachia peri tes ousias, the “battle of giants concerning being,” that defines Western metaphysics. Here, pure violence as the extreme political object, as the “thing” of politics, is the counterpart to pure being, to pure existence as the ultimate metaphysical stakes; the strategy of the exception, which Benjamin seeks to answer with his reading of the “new attorney.” Obviously, it is not a question here of a transitional phase that never achieves its end, nor a process of infinite deconstruction that, in maintaining the law in a spectral life, can no longer get to the bottom of it. The decisive point here is that the law – no longer practiced but studied – is not justice, but only the gate that leads to it. What opens a passage toward justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivity inoperosita – that is, another use of the law. This precisely what the force-of-law (which keeps the law working in opera beyond its formal suspension seeks to prevent. Kafka’s characters – and this is why they interest us – have to do with this spectral figure of the law in the state of exception; they seek, each one following his or her own strategy, to “study” and deactivate it, to “play” with it. One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at the justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical (Benjamin 1992, 41). 35 -Part 3 is the State’s Iron Grasp 36 -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. 37 -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 38 -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. 39 -Free discourse is currently non-existent – looks like state authoritarianism than state protection 40 -Maloney Jr. ‘16: Cliff Maloney Jr. writes in “Colleges Have No Right to Limit Students’ Free Speech” on October 13th, 2016 for TIMES. Maloney is the Executive Director at Young Americans for Liberty. http://time.com/4530197/college-free-speech-zone/; AB 41 -In grade school, I learned that debate is defined as “a discussion between people in which they express different opinions about something.” Such open discourse was historically encouraged on our college campuses. Universities exemplified intellectual discussion and debate in America. No one voiced their opinions louder than students, professors and administrators. They pushed society’s limits by admitting women and people of color, and by encouraging diversity of thought amongst the college community. Historically, young people flocked to universities to learn more about the world around them, to encounter people from different backgrounds, to expand their minds and to form their own opinions. Unfortunately, things have changed. Recently on college campuses, our open discourse has been threatened, particularly when discussing politics. While the current presidential election represents polarizing wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties, we should be able to openly debate their policies and the direction in which they plan to take our country if elected. We should be able to discuss the abuse of power within our government and the consistent violations of our Bill of Rights. We should be able to participate in the free market of ideas. But our students are being silenced. University campuses are now home to a plethora of speech restrictions. From sidewalk-sized “free-speech zones” to the criminalization of microaggressions, America’s college campuses look and feel a lot more like an authoritarian dictatorship than they do the academic hubs of the modern free world. When rolling an inflated free-speech ball around campus, students at the University of Delaware were halted by campus police for their activities. A Young Americans for Liberty leader at Fairmont State University in West Virginia was confronted by security when he was attempting to speak with other students about the ideas he believes in. A man at Clemson University was barred from praying on campus because he was outside of the free-speech zone. And a student at Blinn College in Texas abolished her campus’ free-speech zone in a lawsuit after administrators demanded she seek special permission to advocate for self-defense. How have we let this happen in America, the land of the free? It’s because of what our universities have taught a generation of Americans: If you don’t agree with someone, are uncomfortable with an idea, or don’t find a joke funny, then their speech must be suppressed. Especially if they don’t politically agree with you. Instead of actually debating ideas that span topics from the conventional to the taboo, a generation of American students don’t engage, they just get enraged. In doing so, many students believe that they have a right to literally shut other people up. This is not only a threat to the First Amendment, but also to American democracy. In their manifestation, safe spaces and free-speech zones at public universities enable prejudice against unfavorable ideologies. Guised as progressive measures to ensure inclusion, these often unconstitutional policies exclude new and competing ideas, and are antithetical to a free academia. In excluding different ideologies, supposedly progressive campus speech codes do one thing: prevent the progression of ideas. Restrictive campus speech codes are, in fact, regressive. With over 750 chapters nationwide at Young Americans for Liberty, we are fighting against public universities that stifle free speech. We’ve launched the national Fight for Free Speech campaign to reform unconstitutional speech codes and abolish these so-called free-speech zones on college campuses. By hosting events such as large free speech balls, YAL chapters across the country are petitioning their campuses to adopt the University of Chicago’s principles on freedom of expression—the hallmark of campus speech policies. Our members have geared up with First Amendment organizations to ensure that their free speech rights on campus are protected. America is a land rooted in the ideas of a free society: the freedom to be who you are, to speak your mind and to innovate. By silencing our students and young people, we have started down a slippery slope. It is up to us to fight back to ensure that our First Amendment rights remain protected—not just on college campuses, but everywhere in America. 42 -Lack of free speech re-create the majority/minority divide that means that alternative views are systematically excluded from discourse and lose out on having voices heard. The state’s biopolitical meddling needs to stop – the 1AC is key to check oppressive power structures. 43 -Lipson ‘16: (Charles, real clear politics writer, “Social Justice Warriors Against Free Speech,” August 29, 2016, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/08/29/social_justice_warriors_against_free_speech_131628.html//LADI) 44 -Well, that didn't take long. The Social Justice Warriors have emerged from their safe spaces and begun attacking the University of Chicago's statement supporting free speech and opposing trigger warnings and safe spaces. They are complaining for a good reason: They don’t want free speech to spread to other campuses. What are the main arguments against the Chicago letter? One of my former graduate students sent me this report from a group website for her liberal arts college (a very fine school). What do her fellow alums say? Well, for one, they are surprised they even need to make arguments for their side. For years, they haven't had to. Administrators, like those at the University of Missouri, simply rolled over and played dead rather than confront them. But that was political cowardice, not real intellectual engagement. Now that the Social Justice Warriors must defend their position, what do they say? The arguments against Chicago's free-speech letter They object to "no trigger warnings" because it is insensitive to people who have experienced trauma and might need a "heads-up" if they are going to encounter triggering content in class. They object to "no safe spaces" because those are the only places where marginalized groups will feel completely free to voice their opinions. They say safe spaces are not about banning dissenting viewpoints but about banning hateful, bigoted speech that is truly harmful. They reject the idea that colleges should be places where ideas are freely exchanged because “not all ideas are equal and some are too offensive to have a place in the community.” The common theme is "we must all be more sensitive. Otherwise people will be harmed psychologically." What's right with those arguments, and what's wrong? First, let's consider trigger warnings. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a professor or teaching assistant saying, "We are going to discuss Greek myths and some of you might find them troubling." But it’s also perfectly fine if, all of a sudden in a class on Greek myths, the professor discusses one. The students at Columbia University actually wanted warnings before all myths. Their demand was not about helping one or two students in a large class. It was simply bullying under the cloak of "sensitivity." Anyway, universities are all about discussing sensitive subjects and raising troubling questions. If a university is really vigorous, then the whole place should be wrapped in a gigantic trigger warning. Finally, as a teacher, how can I possibly anticipate all the things that might trigger students in my class on "Big Wars From Ancient Greece to Early Modern Europe" (a lecture course I am teaching next year)? When I mention the Roman war with German tribes on the Rhine, how can I know that your grandfather died fighting on the Rhine in World War II? Of course, if your grandfather did die fighting on the Rhine, or if your mother was named Jocasta and you accidentally slept with her, you might be triggered by the class discussions. What then? Well, that is why universities have mental-health professionals to help you deal with your anxieties, fears, and depression. Again, it is fine if professors want to give students a heads-up, but it is a mistake to demand it of everyone. It is a much bigger mistake to stifle class discussion for fear of offending. That's not hypothetical. That is exactly what happens in classrooms now. (So does ideologically rigid teaching that demands students repeat the professor's views. But that's another topic for another day.) Safe spaces are another ruse. Are they really the only places where marginalized groups will feel completely free to voice their opinions, as these fashionable liberal-arts students say? We need to distinguish among three kinds of places on campus: classrooms, public spaces, and private (or semi-private) places like sororities or campus houses for co-religionists. If classrooms do not invite free expression, then something is badly wrong with the university. Actually, some classrooms do not. They are almost always the classrooms run by the ideological comrades of the students demanding safe spaces. If you think diverse viewpoints are welcome in classes for race and gender studies, you are living in a dream world. In public spaces, like dining halls, people do sometimes group themselves voluntarily by race, sports, or dormitories. Nothing wrong with that, although persistent segregation by race, ethnicity, or religion would be a setback for the students' college experience. Finally, it is perfectly fine for people to find their cozy spaces privately, at Hillel House (for Jewish students) or Calvert House (for Catholics) or a fraternity, sorority, or club. Who invades those private spaces? Normally, it's the Social Justice Warriors from the Dean's Office who object to students wearing sombreros to a party featuring Mexican food. What about the argument that "safe spaces aren't about banning dissenting viewpoints but about banning hateful, bigoted speech that is truly harmful"? The obvious problem is this: Who decides? You think your march is to support women's reproductive rights. Your roommate thinks it is about killing unborn babies. Which position is hateful or bigoted? Again, who decides? Which of these is so hateful that it has no place in an academic community? But let's take the clear-cut example of racial epithets, which are hate speech and add nothing to academic debate or learning. They do cause emotional harm, or at least they can. The difficulty here is "Where do we draw the line?" and, again, "Who draws it?" Is it hate speech to say, "He hates to spend money. What a Jew"? Most Jews would say yes, that's hateful. What if I said, "He hates to spend money. What a Scotsman"? Most Scots would say that recognizes their financial prudence. It is precisely because drawing these distinctions is so hard that our First Amendment, as interpreted by the courts, gives very wide latitude to speech and draws the line at specific threats to individuals and other palpable dangers. Canada, by contrast, has laws barring insults to minorities. (So do most European countries.) That's why a book arguing that Canadian Muslims were not assimilating and some were becoming radicals was prohibited and its authors harshly fined. The author and publisher spent years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, trying to reverse that ruling. In the U.S., the book sold well, though you probably never heard about it. Muslim-Americans seemed to survive it. There is real hate speech, of course, but you and I might not agree on what it is. And we might not agree on who gets to decide. I don't want some mid-level bureaucrat in the campus housing-and-dining office telling me what I cannot say or wear to a party. Get over it. By the way, the Yale professors who told students exactly that ~-~- try not to be bothered by Halloween costumes you don't like ~-~- were vilified, screamed at, taunted, and ultimately run out of their jobs in the housing system. Irony alert: They were brutally harassed by the sensitivity police. 45 -Free speech on college campuses is key to challenge U.S. imperialism and racism. 46 -Khan ‘16: Khan, Tariq. "Masking Oppression As “Free Speech”: An Anarchist Take." Agency. October 28, 2015. Web. December 08, 2016. http://www.anarchistagency.com/commentary/masking-oppression-as-free-speech-ananarchist-take/. 47 -In the present-day United States, a shallow idea of “free speech” is often wielded by the privileged as a way to direct attention away from critiques of existing conditions and systems; particularly critiques of capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. For example, two years ago when UC Berkeley students organized to keep comedian Bill Maher from speaking on their campus, leading media outlets framed it as a controversy about free speech rather than engaging with the much deeper critiques the students had about Maher’s perpetuation of US imperialist, Orientalist discourse which fuels militarism abroad and racist violence at home. Yet, while students who protest imperialist discourse are characterized as a threat to free speech, the actual threat to free speech in academia goes unchallenged by leading media outlets. October 8, 2015, at the Community College of Philadelphia, English professor Divya Nair spoke at a rally organized by students in protest of police recruiters on campus. The students and Professor Nair drew connections between colonialism and modern US policing; particularly the police tactic of recruiting poor people of color to act as the capitalist state’s footsoldiers to control poor Black and Brown communities. Later that day, school authorities suspended Professor Nair without pay, and they have since suspended three student group members who are facing disciplinary hearings. In the past few years there has been a noticeable campus crackdown on anti-colonialist expression. 48 -Open discourse and critical pedagogy are key to growing progressive social movements and counter-narratives against the oppressive structures of the state. 49 -Hudson ‘16: Mark Hudson writes in “Education for Change: Henry Giroux and Transformative Critical Pedagogy.” https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/1734; AB 50 -THESE ARE DIFFICULT times for teachers in U.S. public schools. The increasing size of schools, chronic underfunding of schools serving working-class students (especially students of color), work overload, school violence, professional isolation and the deskilling and devaluing of teachers' work have led to rising rates of teacher burnout in recent decades. The average career trajectory of a teacher in the United States is about five years.1 Meanwhile, the corporate-controlled media give voice to a conservative chorus calling for “school reform.” The “reforms” demanded include voucher plans and tax credits to force public schools to compete with private schools in the “free-market” economy, “raising standards” and “mandating competencies” through statewide and national standardized testing, and calls for public schools to abandon multicultural and secular humanist curricula in favor of “traditional values” and a back-to-basics “core curriculum.” These calls in reality amount to an attack on the public education system itself, and on public school teachers in particular. As education theorist Michael Apple has argued, (T)he political Right in the United States has been very successful in mobilizing support against the educational system and its employees, often exporting the crisis in the economy to the schools. Thus, one of its major achievements has been to shift the blame for unemployment and underemployment, for the loss of economic competitiveness, and for the supposed breakdown of “traditional” values and standards in the family, education, and paid and unpaid workplaces, from the economic, cultural, and social policies and effects of dominant groups to the school and other public agencies.2 This implies that legitimate questions of how to improve the U.S. public education system cannot be seriously addressed without simultaneously addressing the issues of economic exploitation, racist oppression and patriarchal gender relations that form the socio-economic context in which public schools operate. In other words, schools are not, as the right claims, the problem; rather, the very real problems of schools and those who work and learn in them cannot and will not be solved without a mass-based political movement from below against the injustices of capitalism, sexism and racism. Thus liberals and other moderates who oppose all or parts of the conservative education agenda but are silent about the essentially repressive nature of U.S. society have no real alternative to offer. At best, they can provide isolated examples of “enlightened” educational practices that perhaps benefit small groups of students and teachers but have little if any impact on the public education system as a whole.3 It follows that what is required to change schools is a critical, unambiguously left theory and practice of education which recognizes that schools cannot be analyzed and changed separately from the struggle to create a nonexploitative, nonracist and gender-egalitarian society. There is a history of efforts to create an oppositional theory and practice of education in the United States which goes back as least as far as the 1920s and 1930s, to the discussions of the Columbia Teachers College group, the best-known members of which are the social reconstructionists George Counts and Harold Rugg. Counts, author of the famous 1932 pamphlet Dare the School Build a New Social Order?, argued that the child-centered progressive education of his time in effect endorsed existing class relations, and that progressive educators should emancipate themselves from the influence of the “upper middle class” and become active agents of social change. Rugg was the author of a series of social studies textbooks which addressed issues of class conflict and racism, and which were very popular in the 1930s but driven off the market by right-wing political action groups in the 1940s.4 Little significant work was done in the 1940s and 1950s to further develop left theories of education, with U.S. leftists on the defensive in the education field as elsewhere. But out of the political and intellectual ferment of the 1960s and 1970s there have emerged a number of left education theorists, the most prolific and influential of whom is probably Henry Giroux. For the past twenty years Giroux has been in the forefront of efforts to develop a critical theory and practice of education applicable to conditions in the contemporary United States.5 The goal of this essay is to outline some key themes in Giroux's work and to encourage readers, especially teachers and future teachers, to familiarize themselves with his work in its entirety. I will also offer some constructive criticisms. Henry Giroux's first book Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling (1981) elaborated the philosophical foundations for a theory and practice of education that would be not only critical of established institutions and practices but also capable of transforming those institutions and practices, with the ultimate goal of transforming society itself. Giroux argues that earlier left approaches to schooling, such as Samuel Bowles' and Herbert Gintis'Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), focused too one-sidedly on the way schools reproduce the hierarchical division of labor in capitalist society and failed to account for the ways students and teachers resist this process. These approaches, by making class a central category of analysis, have provided important insights, such as the notion that schools cannot be analyzed outside the socio-economic context in which they operate, and have “helped to expose schools as sorting and tracking institutions that treat and teach working-class students and students of color in ways vastly different from their middle- and upper-class counterparts.” Yet they also have propagated “a monolithic view of domination and an unduly passive view of human beings” and have generally ignored the content of school curricula: Emphasizing the form of classroom encounters that replicate the social relations of the workplace, they do not consider how the dominant culture is mediated in schools through textbooks, through the assumptions that teachers use to guide their work, through the meanings that students use to negotiate their classroom experiences, and through the form and content of school subjects themselves.6 Thus Giroux argues that for the struggle for educational alternatives to move forward, we must move beyond reproductive approaches “by recognizing that reproduction is a complex phenomenon that not only serves the interest of domination but also contains the seeds of conflict and transformation.”7 Giroux's critique of the reproduction theorists rests on his reading of the critical Marxist concepts of ideology, hegemony and culture. Drawing on the early work of Lukacs and that of the Czech Marxist Karel Kosik, Giroux argues for “a dialectical conception of ideology that strips it of its narrow definition as simply false consciousness” and that “provides an analysis of how schools sustain and produce ideologies as well as how individuals and groups in concrete relationships negotiate, resist, or accept them.” This conception of ideology is closely related to Gramsci's notion of hegemony, which includes not only hegemonic ideologies (i.e. discourses that legitimate class rule) but also, just as important, the material practices that form the structure of daily experience. In schools, hegemony functions not only “through the significations embedded in school texts, films, and `official' teacher discourse” but also “in those practical experiences that need no discourse, the message of which lingers beneath a structured silence.” In the Gramscian conception, hegemony is not simply the imposition of the ideology of a dominant class upon subordinate classes; rather, it is “a mode of control that has to be fought for constantly in order to be maintained” in changing historical circumstances.8 Thus, in Giroux's view, Gramsci's notion that hegemony represents a pedagogical relationship through which the legitimacy of meaning and practice is struggled over makes it imperative that a theory of radical pedagogy take as its central task an analysis of both how hegemony functions in schools and how various forms of resistance and opposition either challenge or help to sustain it. 9 Giroux also argues for a politicized notion of culture, in which “culture would be defined in terms of its functional relationship to the dominant social formations and power relations in society.” This implies the notion of class-specific cultures, rather than culture, although it is important to remember that “Issues regarding gender and ethnicity, as well as the dynamics of nature, cannot be framed exclusively within class definitions.” But although “the link between power and culture cannot be reduced to a simple reflex of the logic of capital,” this link does lead directly to the concept of resistance as it relates to modes of radical pedagogy.10 Giroux contends that radical educators must begin by asking questions about the forms of resistance already employed by students in order to develop effective pedagogical strategies. As a starting point, he suggests asking: First, in what way do specific forms of resistance manifest themselves and what is their relationship to determinants in the wider social order? Second, how do these forms of resistance often end up supporting the modes of domination they attack? Put another way, how do the oppositional elements used by students to wrest some power from the authority of the school do the work in bringing about `the future that others have mapped for them'?11 51 -These questions are critically important because “symbolic power if not translated into political power simply ends up reinforcing dominant social relationships.” Giroux cites Paul Willis' study of a working-class “countercultural” group in an urban London high school as an example of the contradictory forms of student resistance. The students in Willis' study celebrated masculinity and physical labor, but at the cost of rejecting mental labor and a deep-seated sexism and racism. 52 -UNDERVIEW 53 -DEPENDS ON THE ROUND - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,4 +1,0 @@ 1 -The role of the judge is to evaluate critical discussion above fiated policy-making analysis – Debate should focus on creating a new generation of citizens that are critical thinkers educated about social problems—that’s key to equality. 2 -The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best uses counter-narratives to demystify the power of the state hierarchies—it’s the hope that we have for meaningful change that spills over this debate round. The judge as a critical educator has an obligation to question state biopolitical power. 3 -Gündoğdu ‘11: Ayten Gündoğdu writes in “Potentialities of human rights: Agamben and the narrative of fated necessity” on 19 July 2011. Contemporary Political Theory February 2012, Volume 11, Issue 1, pp 2–22. http://link.springer.com/article/10.10572Fcpt.2010.45; AB 4 -In his analysis of biopolitical sovereignty, Agamben provides us with what might be called a counternarrative of Western politics with the explicitly stated goal of ‘unveiling’ or ‘unmasking’ what has become mystified, hidden, secret or invisible, particularly with the prevalence of contractarian accounts of political power (1998, p. 8; 2005, p. 88). Agamben describes this critical task in terms of ‘disenchantment’, or the ‘patient work’ of unmasking the fiction or myth that covers up and sustains the violence of sovereignty (2005, p. 88). What underlies this urge to demystify and unveils is a particular understanding of myth as a deceptive narrative naturalizing and legitimizing violence in the name of the preservation of life. I use the term ‘counternarrative’ to call attention to what Agamben's account aims to do6: This is a critical analysis, as Agamben himself insists, that does not offer ‘historiographical theses or reconstructions’ but instead treats some historical phenomena as ‘paradigms’ so as to ‘make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context;’ to do this, it proceeds at ‘a historico-philosophical level’ (1998, p. 11; 2009, p. 9). In that sense, it is not an account that claims historical accuracy or factual verifiability. This is a crucial point that is sometimes overlooked by Agamben's critics who call into question his inaccurate treatment of historical phenomena such as the concentration camps.7 In addition, ‘counternarrative’ draws our attention to the inventive dimensions of Agamben's endeavor; as one of his critics aptly (though disapprovingly) puts it, ‘Agamben does not discover a concealed biopolitical paradigm stretching back to fourth-century Athens; rather he invents one’ (Finlayson, 2010, p. 116). The invention of a counternarrative of Western politics involves literary devices (e.g. hyperbole), which aim to provoke the readers and persuade them to abandon any politics centered on modern concepts such as sovereignty, rights and citizenship (LaCapra, 2007; cf. de la Durantaye, 2009). In analyzing Agamben's account as a ‘counternarrative’, I aim to attend to the goals that it sets for itself. It is these goals – particularly the goal of freeing human potentialities from myths that render the contingent necessary and mask other possibilities – that provide the starting point for my critical engagement with Agamben. Instead of resorting to an ‘outside’ – whether this be an alternative historical account or another theoretical tradition – I aim to read Agamben on his own terms, and suggest that as he tries to free human potentialities from contractarian myths, he might be entrapping them in another myth that ends up casting the contingent as necessary. Agamben's counternarrative of Western politics aims to uncover what has become hidden or invisible with ‘our modern habit of representing the political realm in terms of citizens’ rights, free will, and social contracts’ (1998, p. 106). Its main target is the contractarian accounts of sovereign power. As he identifies the production of bare life as the originary or foundational activity grounding sovereign power (1998, pp. 6, 83), he particularly aims to question the social contractarian ‘myth’ that covers up sovereign violence (1998, p. 109). After unveiling the foundational myths of Western politics, Agamben concludes that we cannot effectively respond to ‘the bloody mystification of a new planetary order’ if we let these myths continue to obstruct our political imagination (1998, p. 12). With his counternarrative presenting a catastrophic view of the historical present – a view that emphasizes how exception has become the rule, camp has become the paradigmatic structure organizing political space, and we have all virtually become homines sacri (1998, pp. 38, 176, 111) – Agamben aims to convince his readers of the need to think of a ‘nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life’ (2000, p. 112). This new politics requires the renunciation of concepts associated with sovereignty – for example, state, rights, citizenship. The contemporary predicament cannot be remedied by a return to conventional political categories and institutions, Agamben suggests, since these are deeply involved in the creation of this catastrophe in the first place. Almost anticipating his critics who would be puzzled by his renunciation of rights and rule of law at a time when the problem of legal dispossession increasingly threatens populations around the world, he explicitly states that the response to the current permanent state of exception cannot consist in confining it within constitutional boundaries and reaffirming the primacy of legal norms and rights (2005, p. 87).8 As legal norms and rights are ultimately grounded in the originary violence of separating a bare life, legal dispossession is already inscribed in them as an inescapable condition. Neither the liberal remedy of reasserting the rule of law, nor the Derridean strategy of ‘infinite negotiations’ with a law that is in force without any significance, are viable options (2005, p. 87; 1998, p. 54). Both are futile, if not lethally dangerous, endeavors.9 The only politically tenable option, Agamben contends, is to move out of sovereignty with ‘a complicated and patient strategy’ of getting the ‘door of the Law closed forever’ (1998, pp. 54, 55). - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,52 @@ 1 +1AC 2 +Pt. 1 Framing 3 +The state is inevitable but that doesn’t mean we should give it ontological jurisdiction. It’s time to define your relation to society instead of letting it define you. 4 +Liberalism tries to seize control of the state and direct the flow of history; this fails and maintains ongoing violence against the oppressed. Reliance on the state is dangerous. Against this, affirm an anarchy of becoming – a micropolitical ideological severance of the state from the self. 5 +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 6 +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 vessence. 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. 7 +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. 8 +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. 9 +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 10 +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. 11 +Reject ressentiment because it’s the foundation of psychology that instills a revengeful hatred that deprecates existence – outweighs all other impacts. Bracketed for gendered language. 12 +Deleuze ‘83: Gilles, 1983, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pg. 34-36 BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE 13 +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. 14 +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. 15 +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 16 +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. 17 +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. 18 +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 19 +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 20 +And state heuristic debates are cruelly optimistic – means presumption goes aff. Liberalism is familiarity, not revolutionary. 21 +Berlant ‘11: Lauren, George M. Pullman Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago, Cruel Optimism, Routledge: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 33-6 22 +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. 23 +Pt. 2 Linguistics 24 +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. 25 +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 26 +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. 27 +Voting aff rejects the politics of aesthetics – we must recognize the role of speech as simply a form of communication. Words are byproducts of societal conditions – the aff’s anarchy of becoming controls the internal link to defining your own place in the world. 28 +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) 29 +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. 30 +Pigeonholing speech into categories obscures state violence and bars alterity. 31 +Davis ‘99: Davis, Diane. “‘Addicted to Love’; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity.” Vol. 19 No. 4. 1999 32 +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. 33 +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. 34 +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 35 +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. 36 +Denying the state the legitimacy and faith it craves causes it to implode from within – turns political engagement and material scenario-planning – DISENGAGEMENT solves. 37 +Baudrillard ‘83: Jean, IN THE SHADOW OF THE SILENT MAJORITIES OR THE END OF THE SOCIAL. 1983 38 +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. 39 +I defend the whole resolution as a thought experiment. 40 +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. You can link back offense with a counter methodology. The 1AC comes before theory/T. 41 +Blind adherence to fiat has drained debate of meaning. The hegemonic structure you call fiat is a tactic of marginalization to prevent institutional subversion – LINK TURNS your T/theory standards – deliberation is useless without critical literature. 42 +Gunder ‘9: senior planning lecturer at the Aukland University Michael. “Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning”. Pg. 11-12.; AB 43 +The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies of desired success, such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their desired enjoyment (cobblestones, chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum, this defines what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other, remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they are one and the same) is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as technical, rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "˜dominant stakeholders` can ensure the impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many whilst, of course, achieving their stakeholders’ specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469). The current post-democratic` milieu facilitates the above through avoidance of critical policy debate challenging favored orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of policy deficiencies, or alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while token institutions of liberal democracy’ are retained conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59). Consequently, the safe names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used or their work drawn upon by different stakeholders, while more critical voices are silenced by their inability to shape policy debates’ (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic development or spatial planning policy analyst thus continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying only the orthodox "successful” or "best practice” economic development or spatial planning responses. This further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo while providing "˜a cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer" isolating the political held from any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for public policy’ (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to generate similar policy responses for every competing local area or city-region, largely resulting in a zero-sum game (Blair and Kumar 1997). 44 +Underview 45 +DEPENDS ON THE ROUND 46 +IT WILL EITHER BE... 47 +- PRE-EMPTIVE COUNTER-INTERP FOR THEORY/T 48 +- POLICY PRE-EMPTS 49 +- KANT PRE-EMPTS 50 +- METHOD K PRE-EMPTS 51 +- ANTI-BLACKNESS PRE-EMPTS 52 +- OTHER PRE-EMPTS - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,44 @@ 1 +Pt. 1 Framing 2 +The state is inevitable but that doesn’t mean we endow it with ontological power. Define your relation to society instead of letting it define you. 3 +Liberalism tries to seize control of the state and direct the flow of history; this fails and maintains ongoing violence against the oppressed. Reliance on the state is dangerous. Against this, affirm an anarchy of becoming – a micropolitical ideological severance of the state from the self that rejects structured ontology. 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 vessence. 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 the foundation of psychology that instills a revengeful hatred 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 presumption goes aff. Liberalism is familiarity, not revolutionary. 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 Speech Codes 23 +Speech codes mean unchecked state linguistic power – the state gets to define hate speech and avoid self-incrimination. 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 – speech shouldn’t be aestheticized. Words are byproducts of societal conditions. 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 +The aff is key to creating a space beyond the law – controls the internal link to all pessimism kritiks, including cap. 30 +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 31 +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. 32 +Short-term harms are non-unique because the state will oppress us over no matter what we do, but denying the state legitimacy causes the state to implode itself from overproduction – It’s try-or-die for the affirmative. 33 +Baudrillard ‘83: Jean, IN THE SHADOW OF THE SILENT MAJORITIES OR THE END OF THE SOCIAL. 1983 34 +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. 35 +I defend the whole resolution as a thought experiment. 36 +The role of the ballot is to reject traditional forms of policy scholarship in favor of voting for the debater with the best kritikal methodology. This means rejecting roleplaying, fiat, state good or heuristic arguments. Kritikal methodology refers to pre-fiat discursive literature and scholarship. It’s a means-based role of the judge. You can link back offense with a counter methodology. The 1AC comes before theory/T. 37 +Blind adherence to fiat has drained debate of meaning. Fiat is hegemonic marginalization to prevent institutional subversion – LINK TURNS your T/theory standards – deliberation is useless without critical literature. 38 +Gunder ‘9: senior planning lecturer at the Aukland University Michael. “Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning”. Pg. 11-12.; AB 39 +The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies of desired success, such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their desired enjoyment (cobblestones, chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum, this defines what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other, remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they are one and the same) is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as technical, rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "˜dominant stakeholders` can ensure the impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many whilst, of course, achieving their stakeholders’ specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469). The current post-democratic` milieu facilitates the above through avoidance of critical policy debate challenging favored orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of policy deficiencies, or alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while token institutions of liberal democracy’ are retained conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59). Consequently, the safe names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used or their work drawn upon by different stakeholders, while more critical voices are silenced by their inability to shape policy debates’ (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic development or spatial planning policy analyst thus continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying only the orthodox "successful” or "best practice” economic development or spatial planning responses. This further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo while providing "˜a cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer" isolating the political held from any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for public policy’ (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to generate similar policy responses for every competing local area or city-region, largely resulting in a zero-sum game (Blair and Kumar 1997). 40 +Prefer in-round empowerment – voting aff creates change right now by raising the middle finger to the state. Debate spaces are key – they have transformative potential. 41 +Vincent ‘13: Christopher J. Vincent writes in “Re-Conceptualizing our Performances: Accountability in Lincoln Douglas Debate” on October 26th, 2013 for Victory Briefs. http://www.vbriefly.com/2013/10/26/201310re-conceptualizing-our-performances-accountability-in-lincoln-douglas-debate/; AB 42 +Until we re-conceptualize the speech and the speech act, and until judges are comfortable enough to vote down debaters for a performance that perpetuates violence in the debate space, debaters and coaches alike will remain complacent in their privilege. As educators we must begin to shift the paradigm and be comfortable doing this. As a community we should stop looking at ourselves as isolated in a vacuum and recognize that the discourse and knowledge we produce in debate has real implications for how we think when we leave this space. Our performances must be viewed as of the body instead of just by it. As long as we continue to operate in a world where our performances are merely by bodies, we will continue to foster a climate of hostility and violence towards students of color, and in turn destroy the transformative potential this community could have. 43 +UNDERVIEW 44 +- Varies. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,48 @@ 1 +Part 1 is Framing 2 +Welcome to the world of the aff where we no longer give a shit about the state and let it do its own thing. This is the time for the anarchy of becoming – a ideological separation of state and person. 3 +The specter haunting politics is power – we must transcend the current power structures of the state through the anarchy of the self. 4 +Newman ‘10: (Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory at the University of London at Goldsmiths, 2010, “The Politics of Postanarchism,” pub. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 104-107); AB 5 +We observe a similar silence about anarchism in more recent radical political thought, that which comes in the wake of poststructuralism. Indeed, in much contemporary continental theory we fi nd a series of themes, preoccupations and debates which bear a strong resemblance to those of anarchism. Amid the ruins of Marxism – or at least of a certain institutionalised and statist form of it – there is a desire among many thinkers today to develop new categories and directions for radical politics. There is the attempt, fi st, to find new forms of radical political subjectivity no longer based on the Marxist notion of the proletariat. There is a recognition that such a category is too narrow to express the different forms of oppression, modes of politicisation and ways of relating to one’s own work and existence that make up the contemporary world. However, there is also the recognition of the inadequacy of the ultimately liberal notion of ‘identity politics’ that characterised much new social movement theory. What is called for is new way of thinking about how, and by what processes, a subject becomes politicised – how does the subject become an egalitarian and collective subject? Secondly, there is, among many thinkers today, a rejection of authoritarian modes of political organisation – for instance, the centrally organised Marxist–Leninist vanguard party which would lead the proletariat to revolution, or the Communist and socialist parties in capitalist countries which sought to play the parliamentary game, thus abandoning any hope of emancipation from the state. There is a need, then, as Badiou would put it, for a politics without a party3 – new forms of political organisation that are no longer structured around the model of the party, as the party always has as its aim the reproduction of state power. Related to this, therefore, is the question of the state itself: the immovability of state power, despite the revolutionary programmes which promised its ‘withering away’, and, moreover, the increasingly authoritarian character of the so- called liberal democratic state, show us that the state remains perhaps the central problem in radical politics. Radical thought, therefore, sees politics increasingly as being situated beyond the state – there is a desire to find a space for politics outside the framework of state power, a space from which the hegemony of the state would be challenged. It seems to me that these themes and questions – political subjectivity beyond class, political organisation beyond the party and political action beyond the state – relate directly to anarchism. If these are the new directions that radical politics is moving in, then this would seem to suggest an increasingly anarchistic orientation. Indeed, this is a tendency that is being borne out in many radical movements and forms of resistance today. The emergence of the global anti- capitalist movement in recent times suggests a new form of politics, one that is much closer to anarchism in its aspirations and tactics, and in its decentralised, democratic modes of organisation. Also, the insurrections in Greece in December 2008 – which had an explicitly anarchist identification – are indicative of this libertarian moment in radical politics. It would seem that the prevailing form taken by radical politics today is anti- statist, anti- authoritarian and decentralised, and emphasises direct action rather than representative party politics and lobbying. Furthermore, is it not evident that there is a massive disengagement of ordinary people from normal political processes, an overwhelming scepticism – especially in the wake of the current economic crisis – about the political elites who supposedly govern in their interests? Is there not, at the same time, an obvious consternation on the part of these elites at this growing distance, signifying a crisis in their symbolic legitimacy? As a defensive or pre- emptive measure,4 the state becomes more draconian and predatory, increasingly obsessed with surveillance and control, defining itself through war and security, seeking to authorise itself through a politics of fear and exception. How should radical political thought respond to this situation, lagging behind – as it so often does – reality ‘on the ground’? My contention is that anarchism – or more precisely postanarchism – can provide some answers here. Indeed, anarchism might be seen as the hidden referent for radical political thought today: while its importance is scarcely acknowledged amongst the thinkers referred to above, anarchism can nevertheless offer critical resources for radical political theory, allowing it to transcend many of its current limitations and, indeed, providing it with a more consistent ethical and political framework. 6 +The state’s dialectic of prohibition and legalization sustains the biopolitical state of exception. This creates a biopolitical zone of indistinction, where certain people become invisible to society – I control the internal link to the neg K’s. Bracketed for Gendered Language. 7 +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 8 +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. 9 +The state’s regulation of access to rights is a gateway for biopolitical violence – people not seen as worthy of rights by the state get oppressed. 10 +Agamben ‘8: Giorgio Agamben writes in “Beyond Human Rights” in 2008. Giorgio Agamben (Italian: aˈɡambɛn; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, 4 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. http://jstor.reed.edu/stable/pdf/40644981.pdf; AB 11 +The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. 3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state. 12 +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. Against this, affirm an anarchy of becoming – a micropolitical reconfiguration of the subject that severs the state from the relationship to the self. 13 +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 14 +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. 15 +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. 16 +Part 2 is The Phenomenon of Speech 17 +Speech codes are biopolitical –the state decides the context of what hate speech is. 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. 18 +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 19 +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. 20 +Vote aff to reject the politics of aesthetics – we must recognize the role of speech as simply a form of communication. By implementing speech codes, you’re identifying types of speech as “ugly” and advocating the state to conceal them. This reinforces biopolitical control. 21 +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) 22 +Because aesthetic experience occupies the space between individual experience and social reality, the space created by the intersection of the various materialities evoked by electricity, it is both subjective and universal. The subjective nature of this universality provides both the utopian impulse Introduction 11 in aesthetic politics and aesthetic ideology’s coercive power. Aesthetic Materialism attempts to navigate between these poles by maintaining its focus on this very experience of subjective universality. In the aesthetic experience, the self seems to recede, as individuals give themselves over to the object (or, more properly, the perception of the object), and thus are left feeling as though anyone would have the same reaction. In that moment, it is inconceivable that anyone would not recognize the beauty, the sublimity, the humor, the ugliness of the thing perceived. The perceiving subject, in other words, recognizes no basis for this judgment in his or her particular interests, investments, desires. As such, this experience seems to place the individual outside civil society, the modern arena “of uncoerced human association and also the set of relational networks—formed for the sake of family, faith, interest, and ideology—that fill this space.”21 While an aesthetic experience might occur only because of one’s place within society— one’s social background, age, education, location, or privilege in relation to particular institutions—it does not directly or immediately involve the self in the negotiations, struggles, and identifications attendant in the working of civil society. Individuals may feel moved by a Picasso painting or Eliot’s “The Waste Land” only as a result of the training and education they have received due to their class position, their own individual histories crisscrossed by relations of power involving gender, nationality, and sexuality. Others may be touched by a renaissance Pietà or be moved by the beauty of a Thomas Kinkade painting due to a similar confluence of different overdetermined reasons. Yet that does not mean that the individual’s aesthetic experience of those objects necessarily feeds back into or undermines the social structures and ideologies giving rise to those particular encounters. In its intense focus on the sensuous perception of the object itself, the aesthetic momentarily interrupts both the dominant sense of the self as interested and autonomous and an instrumentalized orientation towards the world. In this way, aesthetics leads to “putting into question the individual’s ‘ordinary’ relation to all spheres of existence, and of reconstituting them as sites of aesthetic incompletion,” “the ceaseless problematization of and withdrawal from all normative judgment itself.”22 The most compelling attempts at revitalizing aesthetics have understood aesthetics in these terms, but have tended to move, too quickly, it seems to me, towards reading aesthetics as constituting a progressive politics focused on indeterminacy.23 Even in its recognition of the contingency of experience and identity, of the a mbivalence of representation, the aesthetic experience’s political effects—or even its tendencies—remain indeterminate. That is not to say that aesthetic experience remains permanently outside 12 Introduction the political. Instead, as “subjective universality” indicates, aesthetic experience always posits a reference to other people. In the aesthetic moment, the individual feels at one with some universal humanity who must have the same reaction. Yet the subjective nature of the event reiterates the observer’s detachment both from the object as a result of language’s mediation, the nervous system, and individual experience—and from any imagined universal community. These elements come together in the almost involuntary need to share this response—“Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that horrifying?” The question is simultaneously rhetorical—of course it’s beautiful—and is in need of confirmation because the experience’s universality is already in doubt. 23 +The aff is key to creating a space beyond the law – we must ignore the biopolitical state’s speech codes to critically re-interrogate our practices, developing our own identities in the process by allowing us as individuals to define what speech we want to express. 24 +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 25 +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. 26 +State identification restricts discourse to “acceptable speech” through speech codes, which enforce a one-sided view of speech and preclude holistic examination. This state censorship stagnates activism and transparent cooperative discourse amongst people, which forces complacency in the machinery of the state. 27 +Davis ‘99: Davis, Diane. “‘Addicted to Love’; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity.” Vol. 19 No. 4. 1999 28 +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. 29 +The failure of power structures is responsible for the rise of hate speech – it’s evidence of a failing state – the aff’s anarchy of becoming controls the internal link to defining your own place in the world. 30 +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) 31 +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. 32 +I defend the whole resolution as a thought experiment. Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech. The resolution is negative state action, so a pre-fiat framing is justified. 33 +Part 3 is Fiat’s Overrated 34 +Evaluate kritikal discussion above policy-making arguments. 35 +Reject policy arguments for 3 reasons: 36 +1) Restricting debate to fiat undermines debate about assumptions underlying policy and teaches us to not defend the process by which we make our conclusions. 37 +Gunder ‘9: senior planning lecturer at the Aukland University Michael. “Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning”. Pg. 11-12. //AB 38 +The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies of desired success, such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their desired enjoyment (cobblestones, chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum, this defines what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other, remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they are one and the same) is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as technical, rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "˜dominant stakeholders` can ensure the impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many whilst, of course, achieving their stakeholders’ specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469). The current post-democratic` milieu facilitates the above through avoidance of critical policy debate challenging favored orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of policy deficiencies, or alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while token institutions of liberal democracy’ are retained conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59). Consequently, the safe names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used or their work drawn upon by different stakeholders, while more critical voices are silenced by their inability to shape policy debates’ (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic development or spatial planning policy analyst thus continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying only the orthodox "successful” or "best practice” economic development or spatial planning responses. This further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo while providing "˜a cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer" isolating the political held from any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for public policy’ (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to generate similar policy responses for every competing local area or city-region, largely resulting in a zero-sum game (Blair and Kumar 1997). 39 +2) Scholarship and ideas get co-opted if we continually believe that the state is inevitable. The only way to get out of this cycle of state oppression is to think outside the structures of the state. If it’s utopian to reject the state, then that’s what’s needed to change society. This is a stance against the traditionalist government policy-maker paradigm. 40 +Newman ‘11: (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3); AB 41 +At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations. 42 +3) Authors that say the state is inevitable dogmatically view the world from the point of the dominant but flawed ontology. These so called “intellectuals” jobs depend on them representing capital as benevolent and inevitable. That’s an attempt to make the debate space a training ground for a new generation passive participants in the machinery of the state. 43 +Lambie ‘10: – Ph.D., joint-editor of the International Journal of Cuban Studies, and Lecturer in Public Policy at De Montfort University (George Lambie, “The Cuban Revolution in the 21st Century”, Pluto Press, pg. 150-152) //AB 44 +It is interesting that when most academics analyse revolutions and transformative processes, they focus almost exclusively on leaders. In turn, they seek to interpret the ideas and actions of these prominent figures based on the influence of other elites. These factors are important, but must be recognised as only partial explanations for most instances of significant socio-economic change. The issue of the role of intellectuals in society, and exactly what constitutes intellectual formation, is a complex debate (Lambie 2000). However, on the specific issue of academic approaches to leaders, the difficulty lies ultimately in the ideological composition of the academics themselves, which is rooted in the dominant ontology, one that emphasises individualism, elite leadership and an immutable order of human nature. Given this perspective, it is difficult to imagine a set of ideas or a consciousness emerging out of what seems to be thin air. From the ridicule of Marx’s observations on the autonomy of workers in the Paris Commune, to contemporary views that see socialism as utopian, there is an ideological intolerance of any idea that defies the implicit ontological parameters of liberalism. When the dominant liberal interpretive framework does encounter what appears to be spontaneous action and organisation at the grassroots level, it sees this in terms of civil society freeing itself from the state, and as an expression of self-help. This view is theorised in Hernando de Soto’s work The Other Path (1989), which interprets the survival strategies of the poor in developing countries as a blossoming of individual initiative. A similar ideological perspective permeates much of the NGO philosophy, with its emphasis on micro-credit and market-orientated initiatives to resolve problems in civil society without the involvement of the state. This kind of thinking also informs much of the policy-driven theory that dominates sections of academia in Western countries. For instance, as procedural democracies such as the UK struggle to deal with the ‘democratic deficit’, and governments become concerned about political legitimacy, policies are devised to enhance ‘participation’ and ‘citizenship’ in an attempt to give substance to liberal hegemony. Lack of ‘participation’ or understanding of ‘citizenship’ is seen as an educational issue, and citizens have to be instructed and ‘enabled’ by policy makers and academics to realise their ‘democratic’ rights. At its core, this is nothing more than a thinly concealed indoctrina- tion exercise to impose the rule of the market onto the organisation of local structures. Commenting on the role of academics and intellectuals in general, Wayne (2003:23–24) points out: One way in which intellectuals have attempted to explain their social role has been to depoliticise what it means to be elaborators and disseminators of ideas. This involves uncoupling knowledge production from vested social interests, defining professionalism as rising above the social conflict between capital and labour, and instead promoting ‘objectivity’ and ‘rationality’ as the very essence of what it is that intellectuals do ... the ideology of ‘objectivity’ has, under the guise of working for all humanity, justified their role to capitalists ... This attitude concerning the role of academics and intellectuals was famously defended by the French writer Romain Roland after the First World War, in his work Au-dessus de la mêlée (‘Above the Battle’) (1915). Roland’s position may be justified if one argues that the shock and horror of war temporarily divested life of meaning in the minds of rational people, and retreat into the ivory tower became a mode of defence against this malaise. However, modern intellectuals have no such excuse, and have increasingly become apparatchiks of a knowledge-production system that is driven by money, career climbing and prestige, all of which can be attained through conformity. Ultimately, only by grasping the idea that human nature is not immutable can one transcend these intellectual limitations and imagine the unimaginable. Martí, Guevara, Castro and other Cuban leaders understood this intellectually and intuitively, both by participating in the historical process themselves, and by not losing touch with the masses. Of course, the Cuban political process has fluctuated in the emphasis it has given to leadership or to participation, but the two have interacted more fully and more continuously than has been seen in any other country. 45 +Part 4 is the Underview 46 +Aff gets RVIs on Theory – 2 reasons 47 +1. Reciprocity: I have to win theory and substance but they can win on either one, which violates reciprocity. Always prefer reciprocity on fairness since it’s the filter for fairness impacts – harms don’t matter if they don’t skew the field to one person’s favor. RVIS solve this since I can consolidate to one layer. 48 +2. Time skew: Forcing me to invest time on theory while I can’t generate offense is really abusive since it becomes a huge time suck. The time skew always hurts me since I have to generate terminal defense on every argument but they only have to extend a few with risk-of-offense. At best my argument quality is hurt since I can’t develop on either layer as well. And I have to spend time writing theory underviews instead of increasing aff substance. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,47 @@ 1 +Part 1 is Power to the People 2 +The specter haunting politics is power – we must transcend the current power structures of the state through anarchism. 3 +Newman ‘10: (Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory at the University of London at Goldsmiths, 2010, “The Politics of Postanarchism,” pub. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 104-107); AB 4 +We observe a similar silence about anarchism in more recent radical political thought, that which comes in the wake of poststructuralism. Indeed, in much contemporary continental theory we fi nd a series of themes, preoccupations and debates which bear a strong resemblance to those of anarchism. Amid the ruins of Marxism – or at least of a certain institutionalised and statist form of it – there is a desire among many thinkers today to develop new categories and directions for radical politics. There is the attempt, fi st, to find new forms of radical political subjectivity no longer based on the Marxist notion of the proletariat. There is a recognition that such a category is too narrow to express the different forms of oppression, modes of politicisation and ways of relating to one’s own work and existence that make up the contemporary world. However, there is also the recognition of the inadequacy of the ultimately liberal notion of ‘identity politics’ that characterised much new social movement theory. What is called for is new way of thinking about how, and by what processes, a subject becomes politicised – how does the subject become an egalitarian and collective subject? Secondly, there is, among many thinkers today, a rejection of authoritarian modes of political organisation – for instance, the centrally organised Marxist–Leninist vanguard party which would lead the proletariat to revolution, or the Communist and socialist parties in capitalist countries which sought to play the parliamentary game, thus abandoning any hope of emancipation from the state. There is a need, then, as Badiou would put it, for a politics without a party3 – new forms of political organisation that are no longer structured around the model of the party, as the party always has as its aim the reproduction of state power. Related to this, therefore, is the question of the state itself: the immovability of state power, despite the revolutionary programmes which promised its ‘withering away’, and, moreover, the increasingly authoritarian character of the so- called liberal democratic state, show us that the state remains perhaps the central problem in radical politics. Radical thought, therefore, sees politics increasingly as being situated beyond the state – there is a desire to find a space for politics outside the framework of state power, a space from which the hegemony of the state would be challenged. It seems to me that these themes and questions – political subjectivity beyond class, political organisation beyond the party and political action beyond the state – relate directly to anarchism. If these are the new directions that radical politics is moving in, then this would seem to suggest an increasingly anarchistic orientation. Indeed, this is a tendency that is being borne out in many radical movements and forms of resistance today. The emergence of the global anti- capitalist movement in recent times suggests a new form of politics, one that is much closer to anarchism in its aspirations and tactics, and in its decentralised, democratic modes of organisation. Also, the insurrections in Greece in December 2008 – which had an explicitly anarchist identification – are indicative of this libertarian moment in radical politics. It would seem that the prevailing form taken by radical politics today is anti- statist, anti- authoritarian and decentralised, and emphasises direct action rather than representative party politics and lobbying. Furthermore, is it not evident that there is a massive disengagement of ordinary people from normal political processes, an overwhelming scepticism – especially in the wake of the current economic crisis – about the political elites who supposedly govern in their interests? Is there not, at the same time, an obvious consternation on the part of these elites at this growing distance, signifying a crisis in their symbolic legitimacy? As a defensive or pre- emptive measure,4 the state becomes more draconian and predatory, increasingly obsessed with surveillance and control, defining itself through war and security, seeking to authorise itself through a politics of fear and exception. How should radical political thought respond to this situation, lagging behind – as it so often does – reality ‘on the ground’? My contention is that anarchism – or more precisely postanarchism – can provide some answers here. Indeed, anarchism might be seen as the hidden referent for radical political thought today: while its importance is scarcely acknowledged amongst the thinkers referred to above, anarchism can nevertheless offer critical resources for radical political theory, allowing it to transcend many of its current limitations and, indeed, providing it with a more consistent ethical and political framework. 5 +The state’s dialectic of prohibition and legalization sustains the biopolitical state of exception. This creates a biopolitical zone of indistinction, where certain people become invisible to society. Bracketed for Gendered Language. 6 +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 7 +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. 8 +The state’s regulation of access to rights is a gateway for biopolitical violence – people not seen as worthy of rights by the state get oppressed. 9 +Agamben ‘8: Giorgio Agamben writes in “Beyond Human Rights” in 2008. Giorgio Agamben (Italian: aˈɡambɛn; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, 4 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. http://jstor.reed.edu/stable/pdf/40644981.pdf; AB 10 +The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. 3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state. 11 +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. Against this, affirm an anarchy of becoming – a micropolitical reconfiguration of the subject that severs the state from the relationship to the self. 12 +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 13 +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. 14 +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. 15 +Part 2 is The Phenomenon of Speech 16 +I defend the whole resolution. Resolved: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech. The resolution is negative state action, so a pre-fiat framing is justified. 17 +Speech codes are biopolitical –the state decides the context of what hate speech is. 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. 18 +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 19 +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. 20 +Vote aff to reject the politics of aesthetics – we must recognize the role of speech as simply a form of communication. By implementing speech codes, you’re identifying types of speech as “ugly” and advocating the state to conceal them. This reinforces biopolitical control. 21 +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) 22 +Because aesthetic experience occupies the space between individual experience and social reality, the space created by the intersection of the various materialities evoked by electricity, it is both subjective and universal. The subjective nature of this universality provides both the utopian impulse Introduction 11 in aesthetic politics and aesthetic ideology’s coercive power. Aesthetic Materialism attempts to navigate between these poles by maintaining its focus on this very experience of subjective universality. In the aesthetic experience, the self seems to recede, as individuals give themselves over to the object (or, more properly, the perception of the object), and thus are left feeling as though anyone would have the same reaction. In that moment, it is inconceivable that anyone would not recognize the beauty, the sublimity, the humor, the ugliness of the thing perceived. The perceiving subject, in other words, recognizes no basis for this judgment in his or her particular interests, investments, desires. As such, this experience seems to place the individual outside civil society, the modern arena “of uncoerced human association and also the set of relational networks—formed for the sake of family, faith, interest, and ideology—that fill this space.”21 While an aesthetic experience might occur only because of one’s place within society— one’s social background, age, education, location, or privilege in relation to particular institutions—it does not directly or immediately involve the self in the negotiations, struggles, and identifications attendant in the working of civil society. Individuals may feel moved by a Picasso painting or Eliot’s “The Waste Land” only as a result of the training and education they have received due to their class position, their own individual histories crisscrossed by relations of power involving gender, nationality, and sexuality. Others may be touched by a renaissance Pietà or be moved by the beauty of a Thomas Kinkade painting due to a similar confluence of different overdetermined reasons. Yet that does not mean that the individual’s aesthetic experience of those objects necessarily feeds back into or undermines the social structures and ideologies giving rise to those particular encounters. In its intense focus on the sensuous perception of the object itself, the aesthetic momentarily interrupts both the dominant sense of the self as interested and autonomous and an instrumentalized orientation towards the world. In this way, aesthetics leads to “putting into question the individual’s ‘ordinary’ relation to all spheres of existence, and of reconstituting them as sites of aesthetic incompletion,” “the ceaseless problematization of and withdrawal from all normative judgment itself.”22 The most compelling attempts at revitalizing aesthetics have understood aesthetics in these terms, but have tended to move, too quickly, it seems to me, towards reading aesthetics as constituting a progressive politics focused on indeterminacy.23 Even in its recognition of the contingency of experience and identity, of the a mbivalence of representation, the aesthetic experience’s political effects—or even its tendencies—remain indeterminate. That is not to say that aesthetic experience remains permanently outside 12 Introduction the political. Instead, as “subjective universality” indicates, aesthetic experience always posits a reference to other people. In the aesthetic moment, the individual feels at one with some universal humanity who must have the same reaction. Yet the subjective nature of the event reiterates the observer’s detachment both from the object as a result of language’s mediation, the nervous system, and individual experience—and from any imagined universal community. These elements come together in the almost involuntary need to share this response—“Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that horrifying?” The question is simultaneously rhetorical—of course it’s beautiful—and is in need of confirmation because the experience’s universality is already in doubt. 23 +Organic interaction amongst one another is preferable to state regulation. The aff is key to creating a space beyond the law – we must reject the biopolitical state to critically re-interrogate our practices, developing our own identities in the process by allowing us as individuals to define what speech we want to express. 24 +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 25 +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. 26 +State identification restricts discourse to “acceptable speech” through speech codes, which enforce a one-sided view of speech and preclude holistic examination. This state censorship stagnates activism and transparent cooperative discourse amongst people, which forces complacency in the machinery of the state. 27 +Davis ‘99: Davis, Diane. “‘Addicted to Love’; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity.” Vol. 19 No. 4. 1999 28 +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. 29 +The failure of power structures is responsible for the rise of hate speech – it’s evidence of a failing state – the aff’s anarchy of becoming functionally solves hate speech because it rejects the state’s power. 30 +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) 31 +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. 32 +Part 3 is Framing 33 +The role of the ballot is to assume the position of an academic redefining educational spaces by evaluating critical pre-fiat discussion above government policy-making fiat arguments. 34 +Prefer this ROB for 2 reasons: 35 +1) The norm of blind adherence to fiat and poor political representation as a community has drained debate of meaning; restricting debate to fiat undermines debate about assumptions underlying policy and teaches us to not defend the process by which we make our conclusions. 36 +Gunder ‘9: senior planning lecturer at the Aukland University Michael. “Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning”. Pg. 11-12. //AB 37 +The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies of desired success, such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their desired enjoyment (cobblestones, chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum, this defines what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other, remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they are one and the same) is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as technical, rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "˜dominant stakeholders` can ensure the impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many whilst, of course, achieving their stakeholders’ specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469). The current post-democratic` milieu facilitates the above through avoidance of critical policy debate challenging favored orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of policy deficiencies, or alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while token institutions of liberal democracy’ are retained conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59). Consequently, the safe names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used or their work drawn upon by different stakeholders, while more critical voices are silenced by their inability to shape policy debates’ (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic development or spatial planning policy analyst thus continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying only the orthodox "successful” or "best practice” economic development or spatial planning responses. This further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo while providing "˜a cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer" isolating the political held from any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for public policy’ (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to generate similar policy responses for every competing local area or city-region, largely resulting in a zero-sum game (Blair and Kumar 1997). 38 +2) Scholarship and ideas get co-opted if we continually believe that the state is inevitable. The only way to get out of this cycle of state oppression is to think outside the structures of the state. If it’s utopian to reject the state, then that’s what’s needed to change society. This is a stance against the traditionalist government policy-maker paradigm. 39 +Newman ‘11: (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3); AB 40 +At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations. 41 +Part 4 is the Underview 42 +Aff gets RVIs on Theory – 2 reasons 43 +1. Reciprocity: I have to win theory and substance but they can win on either one, which violates reciprocity. Always prefer reciprocity on fairness since it’s the filter for fairness impacts – harms don’t matter if they don’t skew the field to one person’s favor. RVIS solve this since I can consolidate to one layer. 44 +2. Time skew: Forcing me to invest time on theory while I can’t generate offense is really abusive since it becomes a huge time suck. The time skew always hurts me since I have to generate terminal defense on every argument but they only have to extend a few with risk-of-offense. At best my argument quality is hurt since I can’t develop on either layer as well. And I have to spend time writing theory underviews instead of increasing aff substance. 45 +Neg authors that say the state is inevitable dogmatically view the world from the point of the dominant but flawed ontology. The neg’s so called “intellectuals” jobs depend on them representing capital as benevolent and inevitable. Their framework is an attempt to make the debate space a training ground for a new generation passive participants in the machinery of the state. 46 +Lambie ‘10: – Ph.D., joint-editor of the International Journal of Cuban Studies, and Lecturer in Public Policy at De Montfort University (George Lambie, “The Cuban Revolution in the 21st Century”, Pluto Press, pg. 150-152) //AB 47 +It is interesting that when most academics analyse revolutions and transformative processes, they focus almost exclusively on leaders. In turn, they seek to interpret the ideas and actions of these prominent figures based on the influence of other elites. These factors are important, but must be recognised as only partial explanations for most instances of significant socio-economic change. The issue of the role of intellectuals in society, and exactly what constitutes intellectual formation, is a complex debate (Lambie 2000). However, on the specific issue of academic approaches to leaders, the difficulty lies ultimately in the ideological composition of the academics themselves, which is rooted in the dominant ontology, one that emphasises individualism, elite leadership and an immutable order of human nature. Given this perspective, it is difficult to imagine a set of ideas or a consciousness emerging out of what seems to be thin air. From the ridicule of Marx’s observations on the autonomy of workers in the Paris Commune, to contemporary views that see socialism as utopian, there is an ideological intolerance of any idea that defies the implicit ontological parameters of liberalism. When the dominant liberal interpretive framework does encounter what appears to be spontaneous action and organisation at the grassroots level, it sees this in terms of civil society freeing itself from the state, and as an expression of self-help. This view is theorised in Hernando de Soto’s work The Other Path (1989), which interprets the survival strategies of the poor in developing countries as a blossoming of individual initiative. A similar ideological perspective permeates much of the NGO philosophy, with its emphasis on micro-credit and market-orientated initiatives to resolve problems in civil society without the involvement of the state. This kind of thinking also informs much of the policy-driven theory that dominates sections of academia in Western countries. For instance, as procedural democracies such as the UK struggle to deal with the ‘democratic deficit’, and governments become concerned about political legitimacy, policies are devised to enhance ‘participation’ and ‘citizenship’ in an attempt to give substance to liberal hegemony. Lack of ‘participation’ or understanding of ‘citizenship’ is seen as an educational issue, and citizens have to be instructed and ‘enabled’ by policy makers and academics to realise their ‘democratic’ rights. At its core, this is nothing more than a thinly concealed indoctrina- tion exercise to impose the rule of the market onto the organisation of local structures. Commenting on the role of academics and intellectuals in general, Wayne (2003:23–24) points out: One way in which intellectuals have attempted to explain their social role has been to depoliticise what it means to be elaborators and disseminators of ideas. This involves uncoupling knowledge production from vested social interests, defining professionalism as rising above the social conflict between capital and labour, and instead promoting ‘objectivity’ and ‘rationality’ as the very essence of what it is that intellectuals do ... the ideology of ‘objectivity’ has, under the guise of working for all humanity, justified their role to capitalists ... This attitude concerning the role of academics and intellectuals was famously defended by the French writer Romain Roland after the First World War, in his work Au-dessus de la mêlée (‘Above the Battle’) (1915). Roland’s position may be justified if one argues that the shock and horror of war temporarily divested life of meaning in the minds of rational people, and retreat into the ivory tower became a mode of defence against this malaise. However, modern intellectuals have no such excuse, and have increasingly become apparatchiks of a knowledge-production system that is driven by money, career climbing and prestige, all of which can be attained through conformity. Ultimately, only by grasping the idea that human nature is not immutable can one transcend these intellectual limitations and imagine the unimaginable. Martí, Guevara, Castro and other Cuban leaders understood this intellectually and intuitively, both by participating in the historical process themselves, and by not losing touch with the masses. Of course, the Cuban political process has fluctuated in the emphasis it has given to leadership or to participation, but the two have interacted more fully and more continuously than has been seen in any other country. - EntryDate
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