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Caselist.CitesClass[42]
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1 -Capitalism is the root cause of identity and race division—it’s rooted in underlying structures of power found in capitalist modes of production and their ideological elements—that means discussion of class is a prerequisite to solvency.
2 -McLauren et al ‘3:: V. and Peter McLaren, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of ‘Race’ and ‘Difference’”, UCLA, 2003, http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren20and20valerie.pdf
3 -However, it is still important to move beyond the discursive and cultural realms. It is necessary to understand the history of such cultural developments and their connection to class analysis. It is necessary to grasp the 'totalizing... power and function of capital' (153). In this sense, '"culture" is not the "other" of class but rather constitute part of a more comprehensive theorization of class relations' (153). Difference arises from social contradictions themselves stemming from domination and oppression in particular contexts. In this sense, separating class from culture is a misleading abstraction. What is needed is to understand why particular differences become important in particular circumstances. In some circumstances, culture is treated as if it were separate and autonomous, hence analyses can take that for granted as an abstract this is an example of the classic Marxian critique of the methods of political economy and abstract philosophy. A politics of difference often means little more than a demand for inclusion 'into the metropolitan salons of bourgeois representation' (154). This is nothing more than a demand for access to the cultural market place, and did assumes that difference is based on some essential cultural qualities and not constructed. Excessive attention to difference simply 'averts our gaze from relations of production' (154). Celebrations of difference can also 'mesh quite nicely with contemporary corporate interests precisely because they revere lifestyle' (154). The dangers of such uncritical celebrations life in their advocates' inability to distinguish between good and bad differences ~-~- why not celebrate different fascist parties for example? Class differences are not celebrated either. An empty liberal pluralism seems to inform the discussion. However, categories of difference can be ideological. In particular, different kinds of identity are 'central to the exploitative production/reproduction dialectic of capital' (155), especially those differences stressing race and gender. It is clear that 'people of colour' find themselves in the most exploited groups: as with women, these groups 'provide capital with its superexploited labour pools ~-~- a phenomenon that is on the rise all over the world' (156). The concept of superexploitation presumably refers to the need to exploit people even more than would be required on the basis of the production of surplus value alone? It is a way of generating super profits, characteristic of monopoly capital? There may also be a political issue ~-~- that some groups need to be exploited even more than would be required to make them conform to capitalist economic forms? I am most familiar with this argument when it is applied to women ~-~- women need to be superexploited in order to produce free domestic labour as well as paid wage labour. I'm not sure I grasped the point in connection with 'race': it may be necessary to superexploit black people in order to pursue a specific strategy of 'neo-colonialism'?. Class is not just another dimension of difference. It is necessarily related to capitalism, not just a 'subject position', but the source of value itself lots to discuss here of course. It is universal, and the only one which will require revolutionary change to abolish it. Other categories have their importance ~-~- gender is perhaps the most long-standing form of oppression, while racial identity can be the most immediate existentially, as in brutally racist societies ~-~- but class relations are fundamental to the whole capitalist system, including the state. It is also one of the more recent and therefore most open to doubt ~-~- 'a world without class is preeminently imaginable ~-~- indeed, such was the human world for the great majority of our species' time on earth' (quoting Kovel, page 157). For marxists, ending class is a prior necessity to ending all other forms of oppression. Recent marxist analysis has focused on the relations between class and other forms of division. All social constructs gain their force from the reproduction of capitalism. These social forms 'constitute the ways in which oppression is lived/experienced within a class-based system' (158), and they help to reproduce it. Class is thus central to exploitative relations of all kinds. Personal experiences, and the categories they generate, are valid, but should not be seen as completely self-explanatory. They must be transcended and traced back to a social and historical context. Many recent perspectives fail to explain how particular kinds of different have emerged ~-~- in particular, '"race" is not an adequate explanatory category on its own' (159), and focusing on it can obscure 'the actual structure of power and privilege' (159). 'Race' is not a scientific category anyway, although it persists in popular discourses and even in 'mainstream social sciences' (160). Gilroy is right to renounce it, even though it may weaken historical movements for liberation based on 'race struggles' (160). Instead, race needs to be seen as a construct rooted in underlying structures of power, especially those found in capitalist modes of production and their ideological elements. In this way, specific forms of racism will become more apparent. Race cannot be subsumed into class, but racism is only explicable with the development of capitalism ~-~- for example, 'Capitalism once relied on slave labour and needed an ideological legitimation' (161). Contemporary race-relations are still best understood as arising from the dynamics of capitalism, and challenging racism must therefore involve challenging capitalism. This would be much more threatening than a politics based on difference alone. Class differences have sharpened, deepened and become fundamental in recent years: it makes even more sense to see capitalism as 'an overarching totality... more universal, more ruthless and more deadly' (163) The connections can also be seen if we realise that 'the vast majority of the working class consists of women and people of colour' (quoting Foster, page 162). It does not make sense to ignore the class dimension in their experiences and struggles. Indeed, 'a good deal of post-marxist critique is subtly racist (not to mention essentialist) in so far as it implies that "people of colour" could not possibly be concerned with issues beyond those related to their racial, ethnic, cultural "difference"' (163). It also assumes that 'working class' means 'white'. Radicals may be posturing based on discourses of difference which simply reflect academic politics and a disinterest in economic exploitation outside. As Marx said about the young Hegelians, their battle seems to be about phrases and counterphrases, reflecting their own class positions, while capitalism itself remains uncriticised. Really radical positions have been marginalised by the academic left who celebrate differences while capitalism increasingly imposes a universality. Marxism should be revived if 'the triumph of globalised capitalism and its political bedfellow, neo-liberalism' are to be challenged (165). Inequalities of wealth and power exceed those in Marx's day. Exploitation and oppression need to be understood in modern context, applying marxism rather than rejecting it, and proceeding on both theoretical and a more politically engaged basis. It is common experience of exploitation rather than apparent differences that needs investigation. Of course, the struggles of black people against racism must not be ignored, but it should be traced to class relations. Notions of class may seem outdated, but those found in post-marxist analyses are even more so ~-~- '"experience of multiple oppressions no longer requires multiple theories of oppression because corporations multiply oppress (Starr, 2000)' (167). A common enemy is emerging on a global basis, as seen in globalised protest movements. A new socialist struggle is required.
4 -The determinism of capital causes life instrumentalism — it is this logic that mobilizes and allows for the oppressions they isolate.
5 -Dyer-Witherford ‘99: Professor of Library and Info. Sciences @ the Univ. of Western Ontarion, Nick. Cyber Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism.
6 -For capitalism, the use of machines as organs of “will over nature” is an imperative. The great insight of the Frankfurt School—an insight subsequently improved and amplified by feminists and ecologists—was that capital’s dual project of dominating both humanity and nature was intimately tied to the cultivation of “instrumental reason” that systematically objectifies, reduces, quantifies and fragments the world for the purposes of technological control. Business’s systemic need to cheapen labor, cut the costs of raw materials, and expand consumer markets gives it an inherent bias toward the piling-up of technological power. This priority—enshrined in phrases such as “progress,” “efficiency,” “productivity,” “modernization,” and “growth”—assumes an automatism that is used to override any objection or alternative, regardless of the environmental and social consequences. Today, we witness global vistas of toxification, deforestation, desertification, dying oceans, disappearing ozone layers, and disintegrating immune systems, all interacting in ways that perhaps threaten the very existence of humanity and are undeniably inflicting social collapse, disease, and immiseration across the planet. The degree to which this project of mastery has backfired is all too obvious.
7 -AND, cap causes extinction and endless structural violence – it is a try or die for the alt.
8 -Farbod ‘15: (Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)
9 -Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system ~-~- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return.
10 -This debate is about competing methodologies – the question of the ballot is whose ethical orientation best catalyzes political organization against Capitalism. Vote negative to accept the Communist Hypothesis, which is a recognition of socialism’s necessity and a historical analysis of cap. This is, in other words, a genealogical investigation and a representations alt.
11 -Walker 14: (Gavin, Assistant Professor of History and East Asian Studies at McGill University, “The Reinvention of Communism: Politics, History, Globality,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 113:4, Fall 2014)
12 -S in c e the turn of the twenty-first century, the term communism has returned to the theoretical and historical agenda with a striking force and a surprising novelty. 1 In a wide range of fields of knowledge, the questions of the actuality and the history of the world communist movement, the theoretical tendencies of communist thought, and the current political possibilities of new developments of communism have been revisited and addressed anew. In the social movements that have sprung up in nations around the world—from Spain to Greece to Quebec, throughout Latin America, Asia, Africa, and beyond—-the word communism has again acquired a critical force, not a force of nostalgia or simple retrospection, but a new and creative force. We can only be struck by the degree to which it now seems that communism, far from the dead end of the twentieth century it was long assumed to be, may be something profoundly of the twenty-first century, an idea and field of concepts whose time has come. When Antonio Negri emphasizes that the communists today are “alone and potent,” he alerts us to a crucial point that I want to highlight, from two divergent directions, in the following essay. Rather than see the contemporary communist moment simply as a “return,” implying a transposition of the same forces, forms, and contents, this moment indicates instead an open field for the reinvention of communism. The earlier modality of twentieth-century communism, linked above all to the existence and continuity established by the Soviet Union, no longer exists. No longer is there a national form or federated space that would serve as a “bulwark” of the communist project. In this sense, the communists today are alone. Yet Negri insists that the communists are alone and potent. This potency is derived, not as in the previous arrangement, from a site of institutional force that could be treated as a model of explanation, but from this fact of being alone, untethered, unguaranteed, not beholden to a specific historical telos. In this sense, the communists today are potent because they are alone. What does this new political solitude mean for the concepts and contents of communism in our contemporary moment? Two distinct trends emerge in this development of communism in our global present. One is the great historic movement that has transferred the center of gravity of a reinvented communist politics to the exterior of the West, taken in the broadest sense. This globality of communism is in essence a fulfillment of a promise rather than a historical accident, the fulfillment of a politics that from the outset sought a new theoretical and political destiny beyond the horizon of the national and local. The second is the striking link between this return—and reinvention—of communism and its site of return, one of which is without doubt the field of “critical theory.” What makes this site peculiar is that it too, like the political potential of communism itself, has been in a long retreat since the 1980s in the fields of knowledge production around the world. Theory’s originary impulse toward the politicization of knowledge, the immanent critique of the university, and its globality, the fact that theory has long provided a common language beyond the regime of national language, has been the target of an intense revanchist attack by institutional neoliberalism, conservative politics, and positivist knowledge work. But new experiences have emerged in recent years to produce a situation in which these two developments—one linked to the practical social movements and reinventions of political organization and the other linked to the crystallization of a new trend in theory—are experiencing complex and volatile articulations and points of contact. What we are seeing today is perhaps the first emergence of a new direction and politicization of theory itself, the first stirrings of a communist critical theory. P o litics: P e rs is te n c e a n d S cissio n One distinguishing feature of the current discussions of the “communist hypothesis” (Badiou), the “actuality of communism” (Bosteels), and “the communist horizon” (Dean) is a renewal of an insistence on the primacy of politics over the mere presupposition of a politics derived from the structural analysis of global capitalism’s current tendencies, level of technical composition, and scale of development of the productive forces. These thinkers maintain a conception of politics that upholds its rarity, its intermittent or hazardous quality. Rather than accept the given character of politics, in which it would become a figure of ubiquity or immanence (the banal argument that “everything is political”), the rethinking of the question of communism has also insisted on a divergent genealogy of what is and what is not political. Rather than a constantly presupposed undercurrent, this figure of politics would instead be, for instance, in Alain Badiou (2001), the rare event that grounds a political sequence and convokes a subject through a fidelity, or in Jacques Ranciere’s (1999) terms, the egalitarian proposal that suspends the representations possible in the dominant order (“the police”).2 This concept of politics is, above all, linked to new attempts to think the place of the subject of politics, and it is this point that provides an entry into the critical dimensions of this “communist hypothesis” within the theoretical field. The rethinking of communism today has distinguished itself as a trend in insisting on antagonism, contradiction, the subject, politics, and organization; it refuses gestures of diffusion, multiplicity as such, focusing on the dialectical conditions of the possible rather than the immanent conditions of the impossible. There is here a reaction to the monopoly held by a very specific register—the Derridean register of defeat and withdrawal, the Deleuzian register of immanence and multiplicity—within the broadly left trends of thought and knowledge production. Metapolitically speaking, we can observe within the works associated with this “communist hypothesis” a rebirth of simple, seemingly “obvious” concepts: truth, justice, fidelity, struggle, honor, courage, and so forth, concepts largely derided in the postdeconstruction trends of thought and relegated to the realm of the “popular,” avoided as vulgarities too “earnest” for the field of so-called theory. Instead, detachment, irony, withdrawal, defeat, finitude, the impossibility of presence, the impossibility of naming, the impossibility of an affirmative creation, and the impossibility of an interventionist politics proper often constitute the typical terms of theoretical work. There is thus in the recent communist current a refusal to accept this by-now rigid division of labor, one that has decisive consequences for both politics and critical theory itself. What lies behind this new vocabulary and new set of gestures? Above all, it is the insistence on a link between the internal dynamics of theory and the external situation, in particular, on the question of organization. Let us consider a few short texts that might be taken as a “pre-history” of this notion, a polemical period of Badiou’s work that expresses the essence of the overall problem: how to develop and conceptualize a theory of politics that is not simply a reflection or proof of a structural or given feature of the situation in which we find ourselves, a theory of politics that is not beholden to concepts of historical necessity. Behind this thesis lies a resistance to the notion that politics is involved in a flattening of phenomena, a fear of antagonism, the preference for holism over division, the emphasis on consensus, on “friendship,” against contestation. In 1977 Badiou launched a frontal attack against Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work for its implied political pitfalls. This attack on their “fascism of the potato” is excessive, dogmatic, beyond the demands of the political conjuncture (going so far as to identify them as “prefascist ideologues”). But it also contains an extremely important point for the paradox of organization within politics, perhaps the key kernel of the new trend inaugurated in theoretical work by the hypothesis of communism. In this text, Badiou (2012:199-200) reacts against Deleuze and Guattari’s celebration of multiplicity, appeals to escape, to flight, to becoming-multiple, becomingschizophrenic, becoming-minor, and so forth,3 by intersecting this theoretical work with the concrete terms of the political situation: We have seen this in May ’68: If you have the mass revolt, but not the proletarian antagonism, you obtain the victory of the bourgeois antagonism (of bourgeois politics). If you have ideas that are just, but not Marxism, you obtain the return to power of the bourgeois reformists of the Parti Socialiste. If you have the objective forces, but neither the programme nor the party, you obtain the revenge of Pompidou’s parliamentarianism, you obtain the return to the scene of the PCF and the unions. Badiou argues that Deleuze and Guattari fail to carry through the very ideas that found their major theoretical concepts. They support the mass revolt, but lack the antagonism between “friends” and “enemies” of the people; they have “just ideas”—freedom, the overturning of injustice, the defense of the workers, the poor, the targets of a vicious imperialism in and out of the metropole—but no structural features link the situation of domination with an affirmative politics of inversion; they include the objective forces of the masses in social motion, but lack direction, a concrete framework within which the mass movement can orient itself. Badiou argues that these elements finally invert into their opposites: the victory of bourgeois politics, reformism, parliamentarism, and so forth. But what is behind this charge, this accusation? Two elements subtend this polemic whose compositional elements are returning today to the theoretical scene through the return to the communist hypothesis, namely, persistence and scission. Badiou charges Deleuze and Guattari with the production of a theoretical system that is itself in a constant process of diverting, redirecting, and moving sideways to avoid “capture.” Such a politics cannot sustain the forces it unleashes; it can initiate moments of dissensus within the dominant order, but it cannot persist in a full overturning of their foundations or proceed from this moment of dissensus to a new hegemony over the situation. Such a mode of thought poses questions, identifies structural injustices, and marks points of rupture, but it nevertheless chooses, at the final moment, to refuse to uphold a strong division, a strong break, an insistence on one side over another, one line over another. Badiou (2012:199-200) puts this point in a dense and powerful formulation: “To think the multiple outside the two, outside scission, amounts to practicing in exteriority the dictatorship of the One.” If you think the multiple, you can expose the One to its internal disunity, the false impression of substantiality. But merely pointing to the multiple character of a social and political situation is not in itself a bridge to a politics. Remarking on the multivocal character of what appears as a unity is in no way a critique, much less an intervention, within this situation. Instead, the multivocal reality of the unitary image can always be recuperated precisely in the service of the One. In a circumstance of social struggle, it is never enough to point to the heterogeneous composition of all positions—“the police are also drawn from the lower stratum of society,” “their pensions are also being cut back by the state,” “within the ranks of the workers are some with terrible ideas,” “the activists are not as upstanding as they say they are,” and so on—and thereby to end in the original abstentionist position: “It’s all so complicated, it’s not just one thing and another.” This type of analysis, which always underscores the hybridity and mutual complicity of political scenarios, itself participates in the naive fantasy of imagining that exposing this multiplicity allows one out of the practice of partisanship. In such an optic, you can go on multiplying the options, always finding yet another option, always finding a “third way,” always insisting on escape from the binary, escape from the pressure of limited choices, always demanding an evacuation of responsibility, of having to uphold the consequences of a choice. To force a cut in the situation is to assert that the One is forever split, that there is a two-line struggle in every social and political scenario, that politics proper consists in this scission itself: the formation of an antagonism where previously there was only a semblance of unity. This is why Badiou emphasizes the Two—when you choose to say, “I don’t want either side, they’re all bad, we don’t have to make a choice, we don’t have to have just one thing,” what is installed in theory and in practice is not a splitting or splintering of the One into its infinitely heterogeneous elements (the thesis of multiplicity) but a withdrawal that allows the One to remain intact. This is precisely what Badiou calls, in the above formulation, “practicing in exteriority the dictatorship of the One.” By choosing flight or escape, the status quo (i.e., the One) reasserts itself, this time stronger than before, bolstered by the experience of finding in its own image of multiplicity a renewed unity. What remains a true politics is the courage to choose, to insist on the Two, to not fear division, separation, scission. To accept the responsibility of the choice, to accept that there is no way to opt out—that the act of a supposed withdrawal is in fact a refusal to countenance real movement, real overturning of the situation, a break that has to be sustained—is to accept the responsibility to uphold the choice despite the fact that there is no going back. What does this argument contain for the current rethinking of communism? Above all, it holds that politics is contained not in overturning the system of social binaries, or in finding a “third way,” or in escapism, defeatism, or abstention. A common thread today, in all the thinkers reinventing the term communism, is a long and arduous struggle for hegemony in the world of thought, a world devoted to concepts of the “death of the subject,” the refusal of binaries, the emphasis on incessant multiplicity, and so forth. This struggle for a new politics recognizes the dead end of these “philosophies of defeat,” in Bruno Bosteels’s terms. It recognizes that a new communist development will come, not from the endless work of withdrawal and negation as such, but from the affirmative and interventionist declaration that politics is possible and the status quo can be permanently fractured. And this fracture produces the need for a persistence, the ability to carry through the full consequences of the initial break.
13 -Cap is an inertial system—any vestige left remaining by the perm will inevitably spin back up. Like a many-headed hydra, it will regenerate with every attempt that attacks the instruments as opposed to the system itself – the perm fails.
14 -Kovel ‘2: Joel, The Enemy of Nature, Zed Books, p. 142-3
15 -The value-term that subsumes everything into the spell of capital sets going a kind of wheel of accumulation, from production to consumption and back, spinning ever more rapidly as the inertial mass of capital grows, and generating its force field as a spinning magnet generates an electrical field. This phenomenon has important implications for the reformability of the system. Because capital is so spectral, and succeeds so well in ideologically mystifying its real nature, attention is constantly deflected from the actual source of eco-destabilization to the instruments by which that source acts. The real problem, however, is the whole mass of globally accumulated capital, along with the speed of its circulation and the class structures sustaining this. That is what generates the force field, in proportion to its own scale; and it is this force field, acting across the numberless points of insertion that constitute the ecosphere, that creates ever larger agglomerations of capital, sets the ecological crisis going, and keeps it from being resolved. For one fact may be taken as certain — that to resolve the ecological crisis as a whole, as against tidying up one corner or another, is radically incompatible with the existence of gigantic pools of capital, the force field these induce, the criminal underworld with which they connect, and, by extension, the elites who comprise the transnational bourgeoisie. And by not resolving the crisis as a whole, we open ourselves to the spectre of another mythical creature, the many-headed hydra, that regenerated itself the more its individual tentacles were chopped away. To realize this is to recognize that there is no compromising with capital, no schema of reformism that will clean up its act by making it act more greenly or efficiently We shall explore the practical implications of this thesis in Part III, and here need simply to restate the conclusion in blunt terms: green capital, or non-polluting capital, is preferable to the immediately ecodestructive breed on its immediate terms. But this is the lesser point, and diminishes with its very success. For green capital (or ‘socially/ecologically responsible investing’) exists, by its very capital-nature, essentially to create more value, and this leaches away from the concretely green location to join the great pool, and follows its force field into zones of greater concentration, expanded profitability — and greater ecodestruction
16 -AND the role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan.
17 -The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best pushes radical politics to challenge the state’s power. The judge as a critical educator has an obligation to question state sovereign-hood for any hope of sustainable change in institutional society.
18 -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)
19 -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.
20 -AND, the knowledge claims of the AC are the starting points for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their diagnosis of the issue is wrong, you must drop them.
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1 -Extinction is inevitable—the will to survival embodied by the aff strips value from life and freezes becoming, which outweighs on magnitude — vote neg to comport our ethics towards the world-to-come—this can include endorsing their extinction discourse while still doing the plan—it’s a mutually exclusive strategy of joyous ethics that doesn’t affirm all death but undercuts the metaphysical justifications for all modes of oppression
2 -Mitchell ‘16: Wilfrid Laurier University (Audra, “Is IR going extinct?,” European Journal of International Relations 1–23, dml)
3 -Perhaps most profoundly, taking extinction seriously would involve relinquishing the fetishism of survival as it relates to dominant conceptions of the human rather than simply adapting these conceptions to new sources and registers of threat.6 In other words, it would be necessary to dispense with the imperative to ensure at all costs the survival of currently existing norms and modes of human life. However, why should emancipation from this imperative be desirable? Simply put, the imperative to preserve dominant, existing modes of human life monopolizes human energy, dominates frameworks of value and imposes stasis on extant life forms. This imperative imposes a kind of death (in the Heideggerian sense) on life forms: it prevents them from unfolding into their indeterminate, virtual possibilities, entrapping them in the mode of rigid metaphysical categories. The severing of possibilities of becoming can already be intuited within the biopolitical discourses of extinction discussed earlier. These discourses simultaneously frame the survival of ‘humanity-as-it-is’ as the dominant principle of being and highest value, while presenting it as imminently and irreversibly threatened (see Evans and Reid, 2014). Within this stark opposition, the political possibilities of becoming are precluded by the imperative to survive ‘as we are’ at all costs. What if, instead, it were possible to refuse the demand to survive — without embracing an extinction-wish or desiring the elimination of any species? In the context of IR, this would entail resisting the powerful discourses of biopolitical discipline, catastrophism, resilience and mitigation discussed earlier and becoming open to the possibilities of extinction, in two senses: in the sense that extinction may occur; and in the sense of the new modes of ethico-political action and forms of life it might enable. Being open to the possibility of extinction does not involve relinquishing all claims to continued existence or the desire to pursue them. Instead, by removing the imperative to secure the indefinite survival of dominant forms of life at all costs, it might free these energies to develop modes of being-otherwise. As Colebrook (2014a: 58) puts it: As long as we calculate the future as one of sustaining, maintaining, adapting and rendering ourselves viable … there would be no future for us other than an eventual, barely lived petering out. If, however, we entertained the erasure of the human … then there might be a future. (Colebrook, 2014a: 58) What visions, logics and inputs might IR contribute to this new future, and how might it be transformed as a result? Cosmopolitics and the possibilities of extinction Extinction is not only about endings; it can also be understood as a force that engenders ethico-political creativity in and with the conditions of finitude (Mitchell, 2016). Viewing (mass) extinction in this way consists of ‘a confrontation with perishing, finitude, and fragility but one that fills us with at least as much wonder as dread, more political energy than resignation, and takes seriously that apocalypses are not ends but irreversible transitions’ (Grove, 2015). This, in turn, involves reframing nihilism not as an apolitical collapse into apathy and submission to visions of the inevitable, but rather as a ‘speculative opportunity’ that opens up new futures (Brassier, 2007: xi). In other words, rather than promoting (only) a ‘will to nothingness’, let alone a malevolent extinction-wish, engaging with the possibilities of non-being can make it possible to embrace the indeterminacy of the universe and its creative forces. I shall now argue that it demands and enables a politics attuned to the biological, geological and cosmological forces of the universe: a cosmopolitics. According to Isabelle Stengers (2005), ‘cosmopolitics’ is politics rooted in the acknowledgement of the multiple, diverse and constantly transforming beings that constitute the cosmos. It hinges on the belief that all beings make interventions that shape, disrupt and transform political processes. Importantly, participation in these processes does not require representation in terms of human interests or even the ability to act or speak in a human-oriented sense. Indeed, Stengers (2005: 996) asserts that ‘the political arena is peopled with shadows of that which does not have, cannot have or does not want to have a political voice’. A range of beings — whether they are considered human and nonhuman, living and non-living, organic and inorganic — can intervene in politics by ‘forcing thought’ through their effects, properties, presence or absence. For instance, water can make its force felt politically by destroying human habitations and ecosystems in the form of floods, by withdrawing and creating droughts, or by sustaining and nurturing multiple life forms. For Stengers, these issues are not made political by humans: to the extent that they have an effect in the world, they are always-already political. According to Stengers, the interventions of multiple beings help to slow down processes of universalization central to traditional modes of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, the presence of other beings with conflicting interests and needs makes universalization, and political decisionmaking, ‘as difficult as possible’ (Stengers, 2005: 1003). Cosmopolitics is conflictual and agonistic: the insurgence of awkward subjects and the obstructions, disruptions and disjunctures they create can nurture pluralism and generate creative politics. Crucially, cosmopolitics is not simply an intensification or variant of cosmopolitanism. Whereas cosmopolitanism stresses the suffix -politan, cosmopolitics shifts emphasis to the prefix cosmo-, that is, it takes the cosmos, rather than human communities, as the basis and locus of political action. Cosmopolitanism, as Colebrook contends, is based on the extrapolation and expansion of a polity that, while it may be expanded to include other beings, is centrifugal to the figure of humanity. In other words, the cosmos of cosmopolitanism ‘is always an extension of the composed polity, an abstraction or idealization of man englobed in his world of human others’ (Colebrook, 2014a: 110). Even the most radical contemporary reframings of cosmopolitanism, in contrast, involve stretching the scope of the human-dominated polity to include all humans and (certain) nonhumans (see Linklater, 2011). Anthony Burke (2013, 2015) has attempted to radically rethink cosmopolitanism in terms of the intermeshing of complex processes, material conditions and (human and nonhuman) actors across planetary space-time. However, I want to argue that this project is better understood in the context of cosmopolitics, insofar as it seeks to render the cosmos the ontological basis of politics. I want to argue that a modified form of cosmopolitics — one attuned to the inhuman — is demanded by, and can ground meaningful responses to, (mass) extinction. Specifically, Stengers’s cosmopolitics acknowledges the role of the weak, marginalized and ‘shadowy’ subjects; it focuses largely on presence, that is, on the positive beings that interrupt human activities. In order to respond to mass extinction, cosmopolitics must place more focus on absence, negation and non-being. Colebrook hints at this in her call to ‘destroy cosmopolitanism for the sake of the cosmos’ (Colebrook, 2014a: 96) She claims that arguing that: if the crises of the twenty-first century were to prompt us to think at all it may be in a cosmic and inhuman mode, asking … what the elements of this earth are, what force they bear, how we are composed in relation to those forces. (Colebrook, 2014a: 114) If we consider (mass) extinction as one of these forces, a different kind of cosmopolitics emerges — one that responds to extinction and considerably adds to the conceptual mass of IR. This mode of cosmopolitics makes it possible to generate new forms of solidarity based not on the fear of collective annihilation, but rather on a sense of shared vulnerability that is the condition of earthly coexistence. For Rosi Braidotti (2013), such solidarities emerge from the defamiliarization of dominant norms of ‘humanity’, which, she argues, is best achieved by thinking as if ‘humanity’ were already extinct. This, she contends, compels humans to ‘think critically about who we are and what we are actually in the process of becoming’ (Braidotti, 2013: 49–50). From this perspective, attention to the inhuman, and to the possible extinction of humans, can produce an ‘enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or “earth” others’ (Braidotti, 2013: 49–50). The same processes of defamiliarization, Colebrook (2014a: 58) suggests, would make possible a radical new form of feminism that, in embracing ‘a thought of life beyond the human’, would place neither man nor woman at its centre (Colebrook, 2014b: 16). By unsettling the foundations of ‘humanity’ itself, she contends, thinking the inhuman makes it possible to transcend boundaries such as gender and race that essentialize characteristics as ‘essentially’ human. This would have profound importance for feminist, queer and decolonial international politics: it would undercut the metaphysical foundations of sources of exclusion and oppression against which they struggle. In short, contemplating the extinction of ‘the human’ makes it possible to imagine alternative, future life forms that bear resemblances to, but are not restricted by, existing norms of ‘humanity’. Moreover, a cosmopolitics attuned to the inhuman could profoundly transform global ethics by grounding it not in a politics of ressentiment, but rather one of gratitude. The geographer Nigel Clark (2011) argues that humans should embrace the finite, deeply contingent and potentially meaningless (in a transcendent, metaphysical sense) existence furnished by an indifferent Earth. Specifically, he claims that human existence is contingent upon conditions created by previous (largely extinct) life forms and by inhuman forces, both contemporary and temporally distant. From this perspective, existence is a gift given to humans (among others) but it is not given-for-us in the correlationist sense. Instead, humans are indebted to a chain of interlocking forces that are ultimately indifferent to their existence. Clark argues that humans should embrace this gift with the knowledge that it can, and eventually will, be withdrawn. This means accepting and honouring it without treating it as an entitlement or devaluing it on account of its finitude. His account contrasts sharply with the discourses of catastrophe, resilience and biopolitics discussed earlier, which devalue any mode of life that cannot be indefinitely sustained through human intervention. Clark finds an ethico-political alternative to these logics in an ethos of gratitude and reciprocation. For Clark, the latter is epitomized by the actions of the government of Kiribati — the small island state perhaps most imminently threatened by rising sea levels — in creating one of the world’s largest marine parks in 2006 (the Phoenix Islands Protected Area). In so doing, Clark contends, this community expressed unconditional gratitude for the gift of existence rather than resentment of its endangerment. Moreover, by seeking to protect and preserve the watery medium that threatens to destroy it, Kiribatians embodied a mode of meaningful response to disaster that was not constrained to sustaining survival-as-we-know-it. Moreover, a cosmopolitics attuned to extinction and to the inhuman would foster a new mode of future-oriented politics based not on the continuity of the present, but rather on the creative possibilities of discontinuity and unpredictable difference. For Evans and Reid (2014: 164), biopolitical responses to extinction reflect a ‘cult of mourning’ for the coming death of existing species life that ‘manages to turn the wondrous phenomenon of the emergence of new forms of life … into a problematic of security and threat’. Indeed, in popular literature on extinction, there is a marked tone of mourning and fear about what might ‘replace’ humans as Earth’s dominant species, and the readers’ focus is trained on monstrous figures such as robots, microbes or giant rats (see Zalasiewicz, 2008). In contrast, cosmopolitics attuned to extinction and the inhuman would be open to the new forms of being that might emerge from, or even in place of, humans. For instance, it might involve overcoming fear and revulsion of the hybrid or mutant creatures that are emerging, at least in part from human scientific interventions, treating them with love and care instead of abjection (see Haraway, 2011; Latour, 2012). Crucially, it would also involve embracing the defamiliarized modalities of currently existing humanity discussed earlier. This includes beings so transformed through technological and evolutionary change as to be almost unrecognizable to ‘us’ (currently existing humans), and the ‘defamiliarized’ beings no longer essentialized in terms of race, sex or gender. The cosmopolitics I am outlining here would embrace these beings-to-come instead of fearing and resenting them. This amounts to a kind of futural gratitude that mirrors the Kiribatian marine park — an ethics of comportment towards the unknowable other that might displace ‘us’. However, how can currently existing humans adopt such an ethics? Emmanuel Levinas (1998: 50) terms this mode of ethics ‘being-forbeyond-my-death’, that is, being ‘for a time that would be without me … in order to be for that which is after me’. Although Levinas is referring to human individuals and their comportment towards future generations of humans, this principle can be translated across species boundaries and to a collective register. It profoundly shifts the emphasis of human action — instead of attempting to secure existing conditions, it encourages ‘action for a world to come’, and responsiveness to the ethical demands of the (remote, unknowable) Other (Levinas, 1998: 51). Clark, writing in a Levinasian vein, agrees that embracing future life forms is not passive. Instead, it requires the ability to see ‘the intolerability of the world as it is presently imagined and demands the seemingly impossible; the creation of a new one’ (Clark, 2011: 195). Crucially, this ethos is not a replacement for security or the pursuit of indefinite survival, but rather a qualitatively different kind of politics. It cannot guarantee the survival of humanity-as-it-is — the goal to which all existing strategies and responses to extinction are oriented. It entails an ‘eschatology without hope for oneself’ (Levinas, 1998: 51): welcoming new worlds makes, and demands, no promises. While this ethos engenders cautious hope for undetermined futures, it cannot be made conditional on the survival of existing forms of life. Instead, it must be pursued ‘for the hell of it and for love of the world’ (Braidotti, 2010: 17). This shifts the logic of responsiveness to extinction from one of mastery and control to one of gratitude and hopeful, creative experimentation. As Clark (2011: 217, paraphrasing Allan Stoekl) puts it: we might have a better chance of prising the planet out of its downward ecological spiral accidentally, not as the goal of a grand, visionary project but as the unintended consequence of more joyous and generous living right here and now. In other words, adopting an attitude of hospitality and generosity towards other beings might help to open up a future of long-term flourishing for humans and other beings. However, as Clark argues, this kind of action needs to have the character of Derridean hospitality, that is, it needs to be undertaken without conditionality, or, in this case, the demand for security. Adopting this ethico-political orientation does not involve capitulation to extinction, and even less an extinction-wish. Instead, it widens the range of human responsiveness far beyond the spectrum of pre-emptive trauma, loss and tragedy, and a future of rapidly diminishing life lived in survival mode.
4 -Their appeal to catastrophe is nothing but an emotive training ground to fit the catastrophe within familiar modes of politics and lull the population into fear-laden productivity. Our frantic attempts to resolve such problems merely institutionalize the most horrendous homicidal violence and push us to the brink of war. The only political task left is that of the philosopher who interrupts the absorption of the resonance of fear that greases the wheels of modern power.
5 -Scranton ‘15: Jeremy Scranton, acclaimed journalist, activist and author, PhD in English from Princeton, currently teaching at Notre Dame, New York Times contributor, Iraq War veteran, Learning To Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of Civilization, City Lights Books, 2015, online
6 -“When it comes to global warming, differing visions of the human future are already hardening into conflict. Coal and oil companies and their government proxies have made their willingness to use military force to defend themselves and advance their interests spectacularly obvious. The labor wars of the 19th and 20th centuries show this clearly. The brutal decades-long war waged by the Nigerian government against its own people, undertaken with the outright support of Shell and Chevron, is another example, well documented in books such as A Year and a Day and Genocide in Nigeria by Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed for his activism. You’ve heard the call: We have to do something. We need to fight. We need to identify the enemy and go after them. Some respond, march, and chant. Some look away, deny what’s happening, and search out escape routes into imaginary tomorrows: a life off the grid, space colonies, immortality in paradise, explicit denial, or consumer satiety in a wireless, robot-staffed, 3D-printed techno-utopia. Meanwhile, the rich take shelter in their fortresses, trusting to their air conditioning, private schools, and well-paid guards. Fight. Flight. Flight. Fight. The threat of death activates our deepest animal drives. The aggression and fear that arise in response to perceived threats are some of the most intense emotions we ever experience. For human society to function at all, these instinctive reactions have to be carefully managed and channeled. Outbreaks of panic and hate are dangerous, but lower levels of aggression and fear help keep a population controllable and productive. Restrained aggression keeps people suspicious of collective action and working hard to overcome their fellows, while constant, generalized anxiety keeps people servile, unwilling to take risks, and yearning for comfort from whatever quarter, whether the dulling sameness of herd thought or the dumb security of consumer goods. Since at least September 11, 2001, people in the United States have been subject to an unprecedented terror campaign—not from Al Qaeda, but from the United States government. National domestic policy transformed “security” into constant fear, threatening its citizens at every turn: first with alarms of explosions and anthrax, then with prison, austerity-produced structural unemployment, and harassment, and finally with torture, SWAT tanks, snipers, drones, and total surveillance. Owing to the racial logic of US politics, in which white/black is the definitive semiotic distinction structuring American society, most of the government’s violence against its own citizens is directed against those with darker skin, but in subtler ways its terror campaign targets every single person who flies coach, watches the news, or uses the Internet. Fear comes to us every day in our encounters with increasingly militarized police and our humiliating interactions at metal detectors and ” “body-scan machines. Fear comes to us in the absence of job security, in our want of appeal when confronted by institutionalized inequality, and in our mistrust of corrupt institutions. Fear comes to us in widespread surveillance, in the form of a homeless woman or a hospitalized friend without adequate financial support, and in the constant nagging worry that we’re not working hard enough, not happy enough, never going to “make it.” Fear comes to us in weather porn, unpredictable shifts in formerly stable climate dynamics, and massive storms. More than in any other way, fear comes to us in images and messages, as social media vibrations, products of cultural technologies that we have interpolated into our lives. Going about our daily business, we receive constant messages of apprehension and danger, ubiquitous warnings, insistent needling jabs to the deep lizard brain. Somebody died. Something blew up. Something might blow up. Somebody attacked somebody. Somebody killed somebody. Guns. Crime. Immigrants. Terrorists. Arabs. Mexicans. White supremacists. Killer cops. Demonic thugs. Rape. ” “Murder. Global warming. Ebola. ISIS. Death. Death. Death. Sociologist Tom Pyszczynski writes: “People will do almost anything to avoid being afraid. When, despite the best efforts, fear and anxiety do break through, people go to incredible lengths to shut them down.”88 Sometimes when these vibrations shake us, we discharge them by passing them on, retweeting the story, reposting the video, hoping that others will validate our reaction, thus assuaging our fear by assuring ourselves that collective attention has been alerted to the threat. Other times we react with aversion, working to dampen the vibrations by searching out positive reinforcements, pleasurable images and videos, something funny, something—anything—to ease the fear. We buy something. We eat food. We pop a pill. We fuck. In either passing on the vibration or reacting against it, we let the fear short circuit our own autonomous desires, diverting us from our goals and loading ever more emotional static into our daily cognitive processing. We become increasingly distracted from our ambitions and increasingly susceptible to such distraction. And whether we retransmit or react, we reinforce channels of thought, perception, behavior, and emotion that, over time, come to shape our habits and our personality. As we train ourselves to resonate fear and aggression, we reinforce patterns of thought and feeling that shape a society that breeds the same. Fight-or-flight is compelling because it serves essential evolutionary purposes. It increases alertness and adrenaline flow, and generally works to keep the human animal alive. As we proceed into the Anthropocene, though, capitalism’s cultural machinery for balancing fear and aggression against desire and pleasure is grinding and sputtering sparks. What cultural theorist Lauren Berlant has identified as the “cruel optimism” of a system sustained by hopes that can never be fulfilled mixes dangerously with an atmosphere of beleaguered anxiety, increasing frustration with working-class and middle-class economic stagnation, and a pervasive sadistic voyeurism that grows by what it feeds on.89 While America’s fraying social infrastructure holds together, our fear and aggression can be channeled into labor, consumption, and economic competition, with professional sports, hyperviolent television, and occasional protests to let off steam. Once the social fabric begins to tear, though, we risk unleashing not only rioting, rebellion, and civil war, but homicidal politics the likes of which should make our blood run cold.” “Consider: Once among the most modern, Westernized nations in the Middle East, with a robust, highly educated middle class, Iraq has been blighted for decades by imperialist aggression, criminal gangs, interference in its domestic politics, economic liberalization, and sectarian feuding. Today it is being torn apart between a corrupt petrocracy, a breakaway Kurdish enclave, and a self-declared Islamic fundamentalist caliphate, while a civil war in neighboring Syria spills across its borders. These conflicts have likely been caused in part and exacerbated by the worst drought the Middle East has seen in modern history. Since 2006, Syria has been suffering ” “crippling water shortages that have, in some areas, caused 75 percent crop failure and wiped out 85 percent of livestock, left more than 800,000 Syrians without a livelihood, and sent hundreds of thousands of impoverished young men streaming into Syria’s cities.90 This drought is part of long-term warming and drying trends that are transforming the Middle East.91 Not just water but oil, too, is elemental to these conflicts. Iraq sits on the fifth-largest proven oil reserves in the world. Meanwhile, the Islamic State has been able to survive only because it has taken control of most of Syria’s oil and gas production. We tend to think of climate change and violent religious fundamentalism as isolated phenomena, but as Retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley argues, “you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.”92 A few hundred miles away, Israeli soldiers spent the summer of 2014 killing Palestinians in Gaza. Israel has also been suffering drought, while Gaza has been in the midst of a critical water crisis exacerbated by Israel’s military ” “aggression. The International Committee for the Red Cross reported that during summer 2014, Israeli bombers targeted Palestinian wells and water infrastructure.93 It’s not water and oil this time, but water and gas: some observers argue that Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” was intended to establish firmer control over the massive Leviathan natural gas field, discovered off the coast of Gaza in the eastern Mediterranean in 2010.94 Meanwhile, thousands of miles to the north, Russian-backed separatists fought fascist paramilitary forces defending the elected government of Ukraine, which was also suffering drought.95 Russia’s role as an oil and gas exporter in the region and the natural gas pipelines running through Ukraine from Russia to Europe cannot but be key issues in the conflict. Elsewhere, droughts in 2014 sent refugees from Guatemala and Honduras north to the US border, devastated crops in California and Australia, and threatened millions of lives in Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Afghanistan, India, Morocco, Pakistan, and parts of China. Across the world, massive protests and riots have swept Bosnia and Herzegovina, Venezuela, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, and Thailand, while conflicts rage on in Colombia, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Nigeria, Yemen, and India. And while the world burns, the United States has been playing chicken with Russia over control of Eastern Europe and the melting Arctic, and with China over control of Southeast Asia and the South China Sea, threatening global war on a scale not seen in seventy years. This is our present and future: droughts and hurricanes, refugees and border guards, war for oil, water, gas, and food. We experience this world of strife today in one of two modes: either it is our environment, and we are in it, or it comes to us as images, social excitation, retransmitted fear. People are fighting and dying in ruined cities all over the planet. Neighbors are killing each other. Old women are bleeding to death in bombed rubble and children are being murdered, probably as you read this sentence. To live in that world is horrific. Constant danger strains every nerve. The only things that matter are survival, killing the enemy, ” “reputation, and having a safe place to sleep. The experience of being human narrows to a cutting edge. I remember living in that world many years ago in occupied Baghdad. Today that world seems impossibly distant, yet every day it presses in on me in a never-ending stream of words, images, appeals, and reports. I see videos. I read stories. I see pictures of this or that suffering or injustice and I am moved. To act, perhaps, but more accurately to emote. To react. To feel. To perform. We do not usually ask where these feelings come from or who they serve, but we all know that the cultural technologies transmitting these affective vibrations are not neutral: news outlets shape information to fit their owners’ prejudices, while Facebook, Twitter, and Google shape our perceptions through hidden algorithms. The specialization and demographic targeting of contemporary media tend to narrow the channels of perception to the point that we receive only those images and vibrations which already harmonize with our own prejudices, our own pre-existing desires, thus intensifying our particular emotional reac” “tions along an increasingly limited band, impelling us to discharge our emotions within the same field of ready listeners, for which we are rewarded with “Likes” and “Favorites.” Our consciousness is shaped daily through feedback systems where some post or headline provokes a feeling and we discharge that feeling by provoking it in others. Social media like Facebook crowdsource catharsis, creating self-contained wave pools of aggression and fear, pity and terror, stagnant flows that go nowhere and do nothing. Pictures of children killed by bombs or police, or pictures of the devastation left in the wake of a tropical storm may move me to sadness and horror. Retransmitting such images will pass along that sadness and horror. My act of transmission will mark me as someone who has feelings about these things and who condemns them. I can rationalize my retransmission by saying that I am “raising awareness” or trying to influence public policy: I want my fellow citizens to be as horrified as I am, so they’ll think like I do, or so they’ll vote for a representative who works to prevent such horrors from happening, or maybe so that if ” “enough of us all think the same way and feel the same way, the organs and institutions of power will be forced to hear us and align themselves along our vibrations, the way a honeybee colony will pick a site for a new hive through the dance of its advance guard scouts. These are perfectly reasonable human assumptions, because that is how physical human collectives function. Anyone who has been in a crowd, a basketball team, a nightclub, a choir, or a protest knows how bodies resonate together. But politics is the energetic distribution of bodies in systems, and we live in a system of carbon-fueled capitalism that we shouldn’t expect to work in physical human ways for several reasons, especially when it comes to responding to the threat of global warming. First, our political and social media technologies are not neutral, but have been developed to serve particular interests, most notably targeted advertising, concentration of wealth, and ideological control, and the vibrations that seem to resonate most strongly along these channels are envy, adulation, outrage, fear, hatred, and mindless pleasure. Second, the more we pass on or react to social vibrations, the more we strengthen our habits of channeling and the less we practice autonomous reflection or independent critical thought. With every protest chant, retweet, and Facebook post, we become stronger resonators and weaker thinkers. Third, however intense our social vibrations grow, they remain locked within machinery that offers no political leverage: they do not translate into political action, because they do not connect to the flows of power. Finally, while the typical collective human response to threat is to identify an enemy, pick sides, and mobilize to fight, global warming offers no apprehensible foe. That hasn’t stopped people from trying to find one. The Flood Wall Street protesters say the enemy is American corporations. Tanzania’s Jakaya Kikwete and Nauru’s Baron Waqa say the problem is the United States and Great Britain. Shell Oil and the Environmental Defense Fund seem to think that it’s intractable UN bureaucracy that’s holding us up. Barack Obama has implied that it’s China. Tea Party Republicans prod us to ever more intense levels of manic despair? One way we might begin to answer these questions is by considering the problem of global warming in terms of Peter Sloterdijk’s idea of the philosopher as an interrupter: We live constantly in collective fields of excitation; this cannot be changed so long as we are social beings. The input of stress inevitably enters me; thoughts are not free, each of us can divine them. They come from the newspaper and wind up returning to the newspaper. My sovereignty, if it exists, can only appear by my letting the integrated impulsion die in me or, should this fail, by my retransmitting it in a totally metamorphosed, verified, filtered, or recoded form. It serves nothing to contest it: I am free only to the extent that I interrupt escalations and that I am able to immunize myself against infections of opinion. Precisely this continues to be the philosopher’s mission in society, if I may express myself in such pathetic terms. His mission is to show that a subject can be an interrupter, not merely a channel that allows thematic epidemics and waves of excitation to flow through it. The classics express this with the term ‘pondering.’ With this concept, ethics and energetics enter into contact: as a bearer of a philosophical function, I have neither the right nor the desire to be either a conductor in a stress-semantic chain or the automaton of an ethical imperative.97 Sloterdijk compares the conception of political function as collective vibration to a philosophical function of interruption. As opposed to disruption, which shocks a system and breaks wholes into pieces, interruption suspends continuous processes. It’s not smashing, but sitting with. Not blockage, but reflection. Sloterdijk sees the role of the philosopher in the human swarm as that of an aberrant anti-drone slow-dancing to its own rhythm, neither attuned to the collective beat nor operating mechanically, dogmatically, deontologically, but ” “continually self-immunizing against the waves of social energy we live in and amongst by perpetually interrupting its own connection to collective life. So long as one allows oneself to be “a conductor in a stress-semantic chain,” one is strengthening channels of retransmission regardless of content, thickening the reflexive connective tissues of mass society, making all of us more susceptible to such viral phenomena as nationalism, scapegoating, panic, and war fever. Interrupting the flows of social production is anarchic and counterproductive, like all good philosophy: if it works, it helps us stop and see our world in new ways. If it fails, as it often and even usually does, the interrupter is integrated, driven mad, ignored, or destroyed. What Sloterdijk helps us see is that responding autonomously to social excitation means not reacting to it, not passing it on, but interrupting it, then either letting the excitation die or transforming it completely. Responding freely to constant images of fear and violence, responding freely to the perpetual media circuits of pleasure and terror, responding freely to the ongoing ” “alarms of war, environmental catastrophe, and global destruction demands a reorientation of feeling so that every new impulse is held at a distance until it fades or can be changed. While life beats its red rhythms and human swarms dance to the compulsion of strife, the interrupter practices dying.”
7 -AND the aff causes endless structural violence with their death bad rhetoric. The invocation of “survival” as the basis of the plan makes all atrocities possible and removes the value of survival itself – in an attempt to save our world, they have destroyed it. Vote neg on impact.
8 -Callahan ‘73: Daniel Callahan, Fellow at the Institute of Society and Ethics, 1973, The Tyranny of Survival, Pages 91-93)
9 -The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The survival of the Aryan race was one of the official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting that survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable value. The main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jacques Monod, in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and bearing children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies. For all these reasons it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny survival as value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive singlemindedness that will stop at nothing. We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life—then how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories.
10 -The alternative is to vote negative as a method of rejecting the aff’s survivalist justification and freeing ourselves from the fear of death. Death is a neutral mechanism of nature - this is an independent avenue that necessitates the alternative.
11 -Epicurus 311 BCE: Letter to Meneocues, translated by Professor Robert Drew Hicks, http://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html, BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE
12 -Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the person who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. But in the world, at one time people shun death as the greatest of all evils, and at another time choose it as a respite from the evils in life. The wise person does not deprecate life nor do does they he fear the cessation of life. The thought of life is no offense to them him, nor is the cessation of life regarded as an evil. And even as people choose of food not merely and simply the larger portion, but the more pleasant, so the wise seek to enjoy the time which is most pleasant and not merely that which is longest. And he who admonishes the young to live well and the old to make a good end speaks foolishly, not merely because of the desirability of life, but because the same exercise at once teaches to live well and to die well. Much worse is he who says that it were good not to be born, but when once one is born to pass with all speed through the gates of Hades. For if he truly believes this, why does he not depart from life? It were easy for him to do so, if once he were firmly convinced. If he speaks only in mockery, his words are foolishness, for those who hear believe him not.
13 -AND discourse shapes reality – the way we come to our conclusions define the way we orient ourselves towards all problems in society. Since the discourse of the aff is independently bad, it is an independent reason to reject the aff, regardless of what benefits renewables or anything else supposedly good the aff advocates for. Discourse spills over to all decision-making in society, the 1AC plan is only relevant to this one hyper-specific policy, thus neg discourse is key.
14 -Doty ‘97: Roxanne Lynn Doty, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Arizona State University, Imperial Encounters, 1997, p. 169-171
15 -This study begins with the premise that representation is an inherent and important aspect of global political life and therefore a critical and legitimate area of inquiry. International relations are inextricably bound up with discursive practices-that put into circulation representations that are taken as "truth." The goal-of-analyzing these practices is not to reveal essential truths that have been obscured, but rather to examine bow certain representations underlie the production of knowledge and, identities and how these representations make various courses of action possible. AS Said (1979: 21) notes, Mere is no such thing as a delivered presence, but there is a re-presence, or representation. Such an assertion does not deny the existence of the material world, but rather suggests that material objects and subjects are constituted as such within discourse. SO, for example, when U.S. troops march into Grenada, this is certainly "real: though the march of troops across a piece of geographic space is in itself singularly uninteresting and socially irrelevant outside of the representations that produce meaning. It is only when "American" is attached to the troops and "Grenada” to the geographic space that meaning is created. What the physical behavior itself is, though, is still far from certain until discursive practices constitute it as an "invasion; a 'show of force," "training exercise, “a "rescue, “and SO on. What is "really" going on in such a situation is inextricably linked to the discourse within which it is located. To attempt a neat separation between discursive and nondiscursive practices, understanding the former as purely linguistic, assumes a series of Dichotomies – thought/reality appearance essence, mind matter, word/world, subjective/objective - that a critical genealogy calls into Question. Against this, the perspective taken here affirms the material and performative character of discourse. 'In suggesting that global politics, and specifically the aspect that has to do with relations between the North and the South, is linked to representational practices 1 am suggesting that the issues and concerns that constitute these relations occur within a 'reality' whose content has for the most part been defined by the representational practices of the ‘first world'. Focusing on discursive practices enables one to examine how the processes that produce "truth" and "knowledge" work and how they are articulated with the exercise of political, military, and economic power.
16 -The plan was already proposed in the context of the advantages and discourse of the 1AC meaning that any hypothetical implementation would be influenced by that rhetoric – it cannot be undone… this means no access to a perm.
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1 -The 1AC places faith in current institutional society and assumes that they could solve for the oppression that they talk about in the 1AC, but modern politics and ethics are morally hopeless - the state currently acts as the ultimate sovereign – it decides where and when rights are applied – no solvency for the aff. The link is their claim to solvency through a government policy plan.
2 -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
3 -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.
4 -THE ACT OF AFFIRMING IS AN ACT OF LINE DRAWING, SAYING THE LAW GOES TOO FAR IN THE CASE OF SPEECH CODES, BUT IS JUST RIGHT WHEN IT IS RESTRAINED ONLY BY THE CONSTITUTION, THIS FORM OF LINE DRAWING ONLY REIFIES THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, ENSNARING US IN THE TRAP OF POLITICS.
5 -Edkins and Pin-Fat 05: (Jenny Edkins, professor of international politics at Prifysgol Aberystwyth University (in Wales) and Veronique Pin-Fat, senior lecturer in politics at Manchester Universit, “Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence,” Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2005 34: pg. 14)
6 -One potential form of challenge to sovereign power consists of a refusal to draw any lines between zoe- and bios, inside and outside.59 As we have shown, sovereign power does not involve a power relation in Foucauldian terms. It is more appropriately considered to have become a form of governance or technique of administration through relationships of violence that reduce political subjects to mere bare or naked life. In asking for a refusal to draw lines as a possibility of challenge, then, we are not asking for the elimination of power relations and consequently, we are not asking for the erasure of the possibility of a mode of political being that is empowered and empowering, is free and that speaks: quite the opposite. Following Agamben, we are suggesting that it is only through a refusal to draw any lines at all between forms of life (and indeed, nothing less will do) that sovereign power as a form of violence can be contested and a properly political power relation (a life of power as potenza) reinstated. We could call this challenging the logic of sovereign power through refusal. Our argument is that we can evade sovereign power and reinstate a form of power relation by contesting sovereign power’s assumption of the right to draw lines, that is, by contesting the sovereign ban. Any other challenge always inevitably remains within this relationship of violence. To move outside it (and return to a power relation) we need not only to contest its right to draw lines in particular places, but also to resist the call to draw any lines of the sort sovereign power demands. The grammar of sovereign power cannot be resisted by challenging or fighting over where the lines are drawn. Whilst, of course, this is a strategy that can be deployed, it is not a challenge to sovereign power per se as it still tacitly or even explicitly accepts that lines must be drawn somewhere (and preferably more inclusively). Although such strategies contest the violence of sovereign power’s drawing of a particular line, they risk replicating such violence in demanding the line be drawn differently. This is because such forms of challenge fail to refuse sovereign power’s line-drawing ‘ethos’, an ethos which, as Agamben points out, renders us all now homines sacri or bare life. Taking Agamben’s conclusion on board, we now turn to look at how the assumption of bare life can produce forms of challenge. Agamben puts it in terms of a transformation: This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe-.... If we give the name form-of-life to this being that is only its own bare existence and to this life that, being its own form, remains inseparable from it we will witness the emergence of a field of research beyond the terrain defined by the intersection of politics and philosophy, medico-biological sciences and jurisprudence.60
7 -The standard is demystifying 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.
8 -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
9 -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)
10 -THIS MEANS THAT 1. THE AC DOESN’T MEET ROLE OF THE BALLOT, THERE IS NO COUNTERNARRATIVE BEING OFFERED, ONLY THE SAME MECHANISM THAT HAS BEEN HISTORICALLY USED THAT DOESN’T CHALLENGE THE STATE AND 2. AC MAKES THE ISSUE WORSE. MY EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT WORKING THROUGH THE LAW IS A WAY THAT THE STATE LEGITIMIZES ITSELF.
11 -THE ALTERNATIVE IS TO ENDORSE DESTITUENT POWER. POLITICAL NIHILISM DIVEST HOPE IN THE POLITICAL, THE DISCOURSE OF THE AC SITUATES OUR SOLUTION TO THE STATE OF EXPECTION INSIDE OF THE MECHANISM THAT CREATES THAT EXPECTION, THE NC ALLOWS US TO THINK OUTSIDE OF THE STATE
12 -Refusing attempts to reform the legal system dooms it to its own nihilistic destruction. We should instead consider the emergence of whatever-singularity, an acceptance of bare life instead of reforming it.
13 -Prozorov 10. Sergei Prozorov, professor of political and economic studies at the University of Helsinki, “Why Giorgio Agamben is an optimist,” Philosophy Social Criticism 2010 36: pg. 106
14 -In a later work, Agamben generalizes this logic and transforms it into a basic ethical imperative of his work: ‘There is often nothing reprehensible about the individual behavior in itself, and it can, indeed, express a liberatory intent. What is disgraceful – both politically and morally – are the apparatuses which have diverted it from their possible use. We must always wrest from the apparatuses – from all apparatuses – the possibility of use that they have captured.’32 As we shall discuss in the following section, this is to be achieved by a subtraction of ourselves from these apparatuses, which leaves them in a jammed, inoperative state. What is crucial at this point is that the apparatuses of nihilism themselves prepare their demise by emptying out all positive content of the forms-of-life they govern and increasingly running on ‘empty’, capable only of (inflict- ing) Death or (doing) Nothing.¶ On the other hand, this degradation of the apparatuses illuminates the ‘inoperosity’ (worklessness) of the human condition, whose originary status Agamben has affirmed from his earliest works onwards.33 By rendering void all historical forms-of-life, nihi- lism brings to light the absence of work that characterizes human existence, which, as irreducibly potential, logically presupposes the lack of any destiny, vocation, or task that it must be subjected to: ‘Politics is that which corresponds to the essential inoperability of humankind, to the radical being-without-work of human communities. There is pol- itics because human beings are argos-beings that cannot be defined by any proper oper- ation, that is, beings of pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly exhaust.’34¶ Having been concealed for centuries by religion or ideology, this originary inoperos- ity is fully unveiled in the contemporary crisis, in which it is manifest in the inoperative character of the biopolitical apparatuses themselves, which succeed only in capturing the sheer existence of their subjects without being capable of transforming it into a positive form-of-life:¶ Today, it is clear for anyone who is not in absolutely bad faith that there are no longer historical tasks that can be taken on by, or even simply assigned to, men. It was evident start- ing with the end of the First World War that the European nation-states were no longer capa- ble of taking on historical tasks and that peoples themselves were bound to disappear.35¶ Agamben’s metaphor for this condition is bankruptcy: ‘One of the few things that can be¶ declared with certainty is that all the peoples of Europe (and, perhaps, all the peoples of the Earth) have gone bankrupt’.36 Thus, the destructive nihilistic drive of the biopolitical machine and the capitalist spectacle has itself done all the work of emptying out positive forms-of-life, identities and vocations, leaving humanity in the state of destitution that Agamben famously terms ‘bare life’. Yet, this bare life, whose essence is entirely con- tained in its existence, is precisely what conditions the emergence of the subject of the coming politics: ‘this biopolitical body that is bare life must itself be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form-of-life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe.’37¶ The ‘happy’ form-of-life, a ‘life that cannot be segregated from its form’, is nothing but bare life that has reappropriated itself as its own form and for this reason is no longer separated between the (degraded) bios of the apparatuses and the (endangered) zoe that functions as their foundation.38 Thus, what the nihilistic self-destruction of the appara- tuses of biopolitics leaves as its residue turns out to be the entire content of a new form-of-life. Bare life, which is, as we recall, ‘nothing reprehensible’ aside from its con- finement within the apparatuses, is reappropriated as a ‘whatever singularity’, a being that is only its manner of being, its own ‘thus’.39 It is the dwelling of humanity in this irreducibly potential ‘whatever being’ that makes possible the emergence of a generic non-exclusive community without presuppositions, in which Agamben finds the possi- bility of a happy life.¶ If instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and sense- less form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects.40¶ Thus, rather than seek to reform the apparatuses, we should simply leave them to their self-destruction and only try to reclaim the bare life that they feed on. This is to be achieved by the practice of subtraction that we address in the following section.¶
15 -This divestment is the only solution to the state of exception – a complete rejection of the affirmative’s political futurity to find a new place for being within the world.
16 -Caldwell 4, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Louisville (Anne, “Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity” https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.2caldwell.html#authbio)
17 -Agamben's alternative is therefore radical. He does not contest particular aspects of the tradition. He does not suggest we expand the range of rights available to life. He does not call us to deconstruct a tradition whose power lies in its indeterminate status.21 Instead, he suggests we take leave of the tradition and all its terms. Whatever being is a life that defies the classifications of the tradition, and its reduction of all forms of life to homo sacer. Whatever being therefore has no common ground, no presuppositions, and no particular attributes. It cannot be broken into discrete parts; it has no essence to be separated from its attributes; and it has no common substrate of existence defining its relation to others. Whatever being cannot then be broken down into some common element of life to which additive series of rights would then be attached. Whatever being retains all its properties, without any of them constituting a different valuation of life (1993: 18.9). As a result, whatever being is "reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims) ~-~- and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself." (0.1-1.2). We should pay attention to this comparison. For what Agamben suggests is that whatever being is not any abstract, inaccessible life, perhaps promised to us in the future. Whatever being, should we care to see it, is all around us, wherever we reject the criteria sovereign power would use to classify and value life. "In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity ~-~- even that of a State identity within the State . . . What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without a representable condition of belonging" (Agamben 1993:85.6). At every point where we refuse the distinctions sovereignty and the state would demand of us, the possibility of a non-state world, made up of whatever life, appears.
EntryDate
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1 -2017-02-15 19:46:54.0
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1 -x
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1 -x
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1 -30
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1 -1
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1 -Sunset bhat Neg
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1 -JF - Agamben K
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1 -Stanford

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