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1 +Framework
2 +Currently, difference equals the other. This mantra is regurgitated by neoliberal elites, incessantly committing acts of violence on marginalized populations. This equivocation of difference destroys subjectivities and justifies violence. The role of the judge is to resist the conversion of difference to otherness.
3 +Schoolman 8 Morton Schoolman is Professor of Political Science at SUNY Albany, and the author of The Imaginary Witness: The Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse. “The new pluralism: William Connolly and the contemporary global condition”. Duke University Press, 2008. Page 1-2//roman
4 +That generous and warm feeling for living Nature which flooded my heart with such bliss, so that I saw the world around me as a Paradise, has now become an unbearable torment a sort of demon that persecutes me wherever I go... There is not one moment which does not consume you and yours, and not one moment when you yourself are not inevitably destructive; the most harmless walk costs the lives of poor, minute creatures; one step of your foot annihilates their painstaking constructions, and stamps a small world into its ignominious grave. My heart is worn out by this consuming power latent in the whole of Nature which has formed nothing that will not destroy its neighbor and itself... I see nothing but an eternally devouring monster. —GOETHE, The Sorrows of the Young Werther GOETHE'S THOUGHT OF AN INELIMINABLE violence plaguing life, a violence intrinsic to the human condition, haunts political theory after the Second World War. It invites reflection on the possibility that genocide may be the raison d'étre of violence organized by states which, as dupes of generic human drives, act to destroy the "other" as they organize those drives to serve systemic ends. Following this reflection is unavoidably another. Perhaps all "ordinary/' and everyday constructions and punishments of difference as otherness also may be driven by what is human, all too human. Political theorists drawn to this pessimism by the horror of holocaust could be drawn to theoretical schools under the spell of such thought as Goethe's and prone to the despair that it would induce. Thus was I drawn to the work of Max Horkheimer and of Theodor Adorno, whose Dialectic of Enlightenment seemed to support Goethe's claim. Seeking antidotes to the disease of reason diagnosed in this great work, I have found several, though they do not abound. Two in particular offer relief, in different ways, from the violence toward difference that Horkheimer and Adorno relentlessly track through their dark, genealogical history of reason. Both antidotes recognize violence that is not less embedded in modernity and not less ubiquitous than the violence that Goethe fears. Yet because neither antidote agrees with his premise that violence is the nature of human and nonhuman being, they both avoid the impotency attached to a trajectory of endless violence that is, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, aided and abetted by global capital without opposition. One antidote, an approach to the problem of violence toward difference that is thoroughly historical and political, is the politics and vision of a democracy of "agonistic respect" theorized by William Connolly. Agonistic respect promises an end to violence, though Connolly makes no such claim explicitly. A second approach to the problem of violence toward difference is developed in my own work, in which I turn to aesthetic theory to conceptualize a form of democratic individuality resistant to pressures to convert difference to otherness.l Having been influenced by George Kateb, my approach to violence perhaps is less political than Connolly's, indebted as it is to an ensemble of different democratic workings whose formative impact on the private sphere has been conceptualized in Kateb's The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture,2 a work whose contributions to my efforts I have gratefully recorded.3
5 +The role of the ballot is consistency with agonistic democracy. Respect and critical responsiveness create coherent discussions. Agonistic democracy allows for minorities to have a safe discursive environment.
6 +Bleiker 8 Roland Bleiker grew up in Zürich, Switzerland, where he was educated and worked as a lawyer. He then studied international relations in Paris, Toronto, Vancouver and Canberra. Bleiker worked for two years in a Swiss diplomatic mission in Panmunjom, the Korean DMZ. He held visiting research and teaching affiliations at Harvard, Cambridge, Humboldt, Tampere, Yonsei and Pusan National University as well as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. Bleiker’s current research focuses on the role of images and emotions in world politics. He coordinates an interdisciplinary Research Program on Visual Politics, which brings together several dozen scholars from across UQ. He is also collaborating with Emma Hutchison and David Campbell on an ARC-funded project that examines “how images shape responses to humanitarian crises.” “The new pluralism: William Connolly and the contemporary global condition”. Duke University Press, 2008. Page 114//roman
7 +Two civic virtues are necessary, Connolly believes, to render a journey toward a pluralist notion of democracy feasible in practice. The first is agonistic respect among multiple groups or individuals. This respect is necessary even when—indeed precisely when—these groups or individuals passionately disagree. Whereas the liberal notion of tolerance assumes a majority that occupies an authoritative center and bestows tolerance upon minorities, agonistic respect is operating when numerous interdependent minorities coexist and interact in a safe and respectful environment thus generating and sustaining a form of common governance.3-l These interacting units share a number of rights and duties, chief among them a willingness to respect each other's different faith or value system. Accepting difference, Connolly believes, should even include the recognition that each such value system, including one's own, is and should in principle be contestable.e-2 The second of Connolly's virtues in a world of deep pluralism is critical responsiveness: the willingness to listen carefully to others, particularly those who have not yet achieved sufficient recognition in the prevailing political and social setting. Not all demands by a new constituency should necessarily be accepted, but and Connolly admits this is the difficult part —existing norms or laws cannot necessarily serve as a base for judgment. A critical response must go beyond these foundations because they are often part of the problem itself. Whatever form it takes, the new, more critical attitude should involve cultivating a private disposition and the courage to express and defend this disposition in public.33
8 +Contention
9 +Thus the advocacy, public colleges and universities ought not restrict constitutionally protected free speech.
10 +
11 +Restriction on free speech are common, and more are coming now.
12 +Lukianoff 16, Greg Lukianoff, 1-4-2016, "Campus Free Speech Has Been in Trouble for a Long Time," Cato Unbound, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2016/01/04/greg-lukianoff/campus-free-speech-has-been-trouble-long-time //AD
13 +2015 will be remembered as a year in which campus free speech issues took center stage, receiving extensive coverage in outlets like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Slate, Vox, and Salon. Even President Obama voiced concerns about the lack of debate on college campuses. For those of us who have been fighting campus censors for years, it’s hard not to ask: “Where has everyone been?” My organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has been defending freedom of expression on campus since 1999. We can attest that free speech, open inquiry, and academic freedom have always been threatened on campus by one force or another, even long before we were founded. Most people are familiar with the supposed heyday of political correctness of the 1980s and 90s, but there is a popular misconception that speech codes and censorship were defeated in the courts of law and public opinion by the mid-90s. In reality, the threats to campus speech never went away. Before examining what has changed to alarm the public—rightfully—about the state of open discourse in higher education, it’s important to note what hasn’t changed. Speech Codes and Political Correctness Never Went Away Scholars, including First Amendment expert Robert O’Neil, claim that politically correct speech codes were given a “decent burial” in the mid-90s. But despite being repeatedly defeated in court, speech codes became the rule rather than the exception on campus. FIRE has been tracking and rating speech codes at hundreds of colleges and universities since 2006. Eight years ago, 75 percent of the institutions we surveyed maintained policies worthy of FIRE’s “red light” rating, meaning they clearly and substantially restricted freedom of speech. Since then, the percentage of schools with red light speech codes has steadily declined each year. This good news is due, at least in part, to FIRE’s aggressive campaigning and lawsuits. Over the past few years, the number of campuses with red light policies decreased from 62.1 percent (2013) to 55.2 percent (2015). And, in FIRE’s 2016 speech code report, that figure is below 50 percent (49.3 percent) for the first time. Unfortunately, this may be only a temporary high-water mark; pressure from students and the federal government makes the resurgence of speech codes almost inevitable. The past 15 years are rife with examples of speech-policing. There are the classic political correctness cases, such as the 2004 incident in which a University of New Hampshire student was evicted from his dorm for posting flyers joking that freshman women could lose the “Freshman 15” by walking up the dormitory stairs. In 2009, Yale University students were told they shouldn’t quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Bucknell University students were forbidden from handing out “Obama Stimulus Dollars.” But many cases do not follow the “PC” mold and just involve old-fashioned abuses of power. Examples include the University of Wisconsin-Stout’s censorship of a professor’s “Firefly” poster, Central New Mexico Community College’s shutdown of a student newspaper for publishing a “Sex Issue,” and former Valdosta State University student Hayden Barnes’ unjust expulsion for protesting a parking garage (which led to an eight-year-long legal battle that finally concluded in 2015). Federal Antidiscrimination Law as the Secret Engine of Campus Censorship Some trends that long precede (and may explain) the current threats to campus free speech include the massive expansion of the bureaucratic class at universities, which officially began outnumbering the number of full-time instructors in 2005, and the rise of the “risk management” industry, which makes a fortune teaching universities how to avoid lawsuits by regulating almost every aspect of student life. This brings us to the institution that is perhaps most responsible for exacerbating the problems of speech codes and hair-trigger censorship: the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). By the late 1980s, colleges were adopting “anti-harassment” codes that restricted protected speech. In the mid-1990s, the campus speech code phenomenon converged with the expansion of federal anti-discrimination law by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). OCR encouraged and even required harassment codes, and although its guidance tried to “balance” the need for these codes with the First Amendment, by the time FIRE was founded in 1999, universities were using the “federal government made me do it” excuse to justify even the most laughably unconstitutional speech codes. In 2003, in perhaps its most redeeming moment, OCR issued a letter clarifying that it has no power to mandate that universities—public or private—police speech that is protected under the First Amendment. OCR explained that public universities, which are bound by the First Amendment, cannot ban merely offensive speech. And if private universities, which are not bound by the First Amendment (except in California through the Leonard Law), pass such speech codes, OCR made clear that they can in no way argue that the federal government forced their hand. This message was never fully accepted by campus administrators, who wanted expansive speech codes, or by risk managers, who believed it was safer to discourage offensive speech than face a lawsuit. Nonetheless, the 2003 letter did help defuse an old excuse. Unfortunately, the Department of Education under the Obama administration has been much more aggressive, granting itself new powers and redefining harassment in such broad language that virtually any offensive speech could be considered a matter of federal oversight. In May 2013, OCR and the Department of Justice (DOJ) entered into a resolution agreement with the University of Montana that the agencies deemed “a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country.” This “blueprint” mandates an extraordinarily broad definition of sexual harassment: “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including “verbal conduct”—i.e., speech. The blueprint holds that this conduct need not be “objectively offensive” to constitute sexual harassment. This means that if a listener takes offense to any sex- or gender-related speech, no matter how irrationally or unreasonably, the speaker has engaged in sexual harassment. Additionally, the final UM policy reviewed and approved by OCR and DOJ as part of their resolution agreement goes beyond policing sex-related speech by also prohibiting discriminatory harassment on the basis of 17 different categories, including “political ideas.” Treating this resolution agreement as a “blueprint” puts public universities in an impossible situation: violate the First Amendment or risk investigation and the possible loss of federal funding. OCR backed away from its characterization of the Montana agreement as a “blueprint” in a November 2013 letter to me. But unlike the clarification it issued in 2003, OCR has never communicated this to universities. As a result, as universities revise their sexual misconduct policies, they now include the blueprint’s definition of sexual harassment. There can be little doubt that the number of institutions doing so will only increase until OCR clarifies that it cannot require universities to adopt such a definition. OCR is unlikely to forego unconstitutional speech-policing any time soon. In October, OCR announced that it would open a Title IX investigation into the University of Mary Washington after students filed a complaint about the school’s handling of sexist and racist Yik Yak posts. If this investigation leads to new federal “guidance” on colleges’ responsibility to police students’ social media activity, even more protected campus speech could be threatened. What Has Changed: Students Using Their Free Speech to Limit Free Speech The biggest and most noticeable change in campus censorship in recent years has been the shift in student attitudes. Today, students often demand freedom from speech rather than freedom of speech. Media coverage of the campus free speech crisis exploded in 2014 after a rash of “disinvitations”—student and faculty attempts to disinvite controversial speakers from campus, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde. Attention from the media has increased as more student-led efforts have gained popularity, such as demands for “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces,” and efforts to police so-called “microaggressions.” Critiquing PC culture is nothing new for conservative outlets, but even left-leaning authors at the New Republic, The Nation, New York Magazine, and The New York Timeshave been writing extensively about how these trends reflect very new, often alarming student attitudes about open discourse. In my 15 years at FIRE, students have historically been the most reliably pro-free-speech constituency on campus. Students often showed more common sense than the professoriate, and certainly much more than the administrators. But when stories about campus race-related protests inundated the news in the fall of 2015, I knew something had changed. It began when students at Wesleyan University demanded that the school’s primary student newspaper be defunded after it published a student op-ed that was critical of the Black Lives Matter movement. Shortly after, Wesleyan’s student government unanimously approved a resolution that will tentatively cut the paper’s printing budget by half. Things escalated when I saw firsthand that Yale students were demanding the resignations of two faculty members for sending out an email that questioned whether universities should tell students what they should or shouldn’t wear as Halloween costumes. Then, just days later, student protests at the University of Missouri soured when protesters manhandled a student journalist. These protests put First Amendment defenders and free speech advocates like me in a somewhat difficult position. Of course, I’m supportive of students exercising their free speech rights. Indeed, I find it refreshing that students have overcome their oft-diagnosed apathy towards serious social issues. However, it’s distressing that many of the protesters are using their free speech to demand limitations on others’ free speech. The irony of these demands was particularly prominent at the University of Missouri, where FIRE recently helped pass a state law making it illegal to limit free speech activities on public university campuses to tiny zones. This new law helped make the Mizzou students’ protests possible. But in a twist, the protesters created their own free speech exclusion zone to prevent media from covering the protest. Now student protestors at at least 75 American colleges and universities have released lists of demands “to end systemic and structural racism on campus.” Although this is a laudable goal, a troubling number of these demands would prohibit or chill campus speech. For example, many of the demands try to make the expression of racial bias, which is generally protected speech, a punishable offense. At Johns Hopkins University, protesters demand “impactful repercussions” for anyone who makes “Black students uncomfortable or unsafe for racial reasons.” Similarly, protesters at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University demand “strong repercussions and sanctions” for those who commit “racist actions and racial bias on campus.” And Emory University protestors want a bias response reporting system and sanctions for even “unintentional” acts or behaviors, including “gestures.” Others go as far as to mandate that universities forbid “hate speech.” At Missouri State University, protesters demand that administrators announce a “commitment to differentiating ‘hate speech’ from ‘freedom of speech.’” Protesters at Dartmouth College want “a policy with serious consequences against hate speech/crimes (e.g. Greek house expelled for racist parties).” Similarly, student protesters at the University of Wyoming demand that the code of conduct be revised to hold students accountable for hate speech, complete with “a detailed reporting structure.” The evidence that today’s students value freedom of speech less than their elders is not just anecdotal. In October, Yale University’s William F. Buckley, Jr. Program released a survey that found that 51 percent of U.S. college students favor campus speech codes, and that 72 percent support disciplinary action against “any student or faculty member on campus who uses language that is considered racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise offensive.” These troubling results were echoed by a November 2015 global survey from Pew Research Center finding that a whopping 40 percent of U.S. millennials ages 18–34 believe the government should be able to punish speech offensive to minority groups (as compared to only 12 percent of the Silent generation 70–87 year-olds, 24 percent of the Boomer generation 51–69 year-olds, and 27 percent of Gen Xers 35–50 year-olds). Conclusion Thankfully, through old strategies and new ones, we can improve the climate for free speech on campus. Just one student or professor can protect free expression for thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, by filing a lawsuit against his or her school with the help of FIRE’s Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project. SUFS is undefeated so far and has resulted in seven settlements that send the clear message to institutions that it will be expensive to ignore their obligations under the First Amendment. What’s more, with every speech-protective judgment, it becomes harder for administrators to defend themselves with “qualified immunity,” which shields individuals from personal liability where the law isn’t clear. Litigation might also be our best shot at forcing OCR to step back from its efforts to coerce institutions into adopting unconstitutional policies. Clearer and narrower policies than OCR’s May 2013 definition of “sexual harassment” have been struck down in court on numerous occasions. But until institutions see a real threat of an expensive judgment against them for overbroad harassment policies, they’ll continue to be motivated by the threat of OCR pulling their funding for what it seems to consider underbroad policies—i.e., colleges will err on the side of prohibiting protected expression. And because money talks, alumni should withhold donations to institutions that break the law or renege on promises to respect students’ and professors’ rights. And of course, anyone can contact his or her legislators and ask them to support bills—like the ones FIRE helped enact in Missouriand Virginia—that ensure students may fully exercise their free speech rights on public campuses statewide. These strategies may motivate schools to make quick changes, but free speech advocates know that long-lasting progress comes through cultural change. How do we teach a generation about the value of free expression when speech is too often presented as a problem to be overcome, rather than part of the solution to many social ills? This is our great challenge, and it must be faced with both determination and creativity if the always-fragile right of freedom of speech is to endure.
14 +Free speech is contestation – protests facilitate learning and expose problems within institutions. Specifically on universities, contestation is important to foster discussions and learning.
15 +ACLU 16. American Civil Liberties Union. For almost 100 years, the ACLU has worked to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States., “Hate Speech on Campus”, ACLU, 2016. https://www.aclu.org/other/hate-speech-campus//AD
16 +Many universities, under pressure to respond to the concerns of those who are the objects of hate, have adopted codes or policies prohibiting speech that offends any group based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. That's the wrong response, well-meaning or not. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects speech no matter how offensive its content. Speech codes adopted by government-financed state colleges and universities amount to government censorship, in violation of the Constitution. And the ACLU believes that all campuses should adhere to First Amendment principles because academic freedom is a bedrock of education in a free society. How much we value the right of free speech is put to its severest test when the speaker is someone we disagree with most. Speech that deeply offends our morality or is hostile to our way of life warrants the same constitutional protection as other speech because the right of free speech is indivisible: When one of us is denied this right, all of us are denied. Since its founding in 1920, the ACLU has fought for the free expression of all ideas, popular or unpopular. That's the constitutional mandate. Where racist, sexist and homophobic speech is concerned, the ACLU believes that more speech ~-~- not less ~-~- is the best revenge. This is particularly true at universities, whose mission is to facilitate learning through open debate and study, and to enlighten. Speech codes are not the way to go on campuses, where all views are entitled to be heard, explored, supported or refuted. Besides, when hate is out in the open, people can see the problem. Then they can organize effectively to counter bad attitudes, possibly change them, and forge solidarity against the forces of intolerance. College administrators may find speech codes attractive as a quick fix, but as one critic put it: "Verbal purity is not social change." Codes that punish bigoted speech treat only the symptom: The problem itself is bigotry. The ACLU believes that instead of opting for gestures that only appear to cure the disease, universities have to do the hard work of recruitment to increase faculty and student diversity; counseling to raise awareness about bigotry and its history, and changing curricula to institutionalize more inclusive approaches to all subject matter.
17 +Conservative flights of neo-liberalism have corrupted micropolitical sites – the 1AC’s engagement with the micropolitical motivates change which ruptures macropolitical exclusion.
18 +Campbell 08 (David Campbell insert quals. “The new pluralism: William Connolly and the contemporary global condition”. Duke University Press, 2008. Page 280-281) //WW JA 12/16/16
19 +In Connolly’s terms, what Hardt and Negri have failed to allow for with this either/ or logic is the relationship between micropolitics and macro-politics that animates large parts of Connolly’s recent writings. Micro-politics— related to arts of the self, and techniques of the self in some formulations— involves those practices that work on us or are drawn on by us to establish us, individually or collectively. They are techniques through which existing identities can be stabilized, new identities permitted, or new formations enabled. They can be located in a multitude of cultural and social sites (clubs, families, neighborhoods, the media, the military, religious groups, and the like) though they always work at numerous “in-between” points, nodes, and lines of the network state. Micropolitics flows from the paradoxical relationship of identity\ difference and is vital to a deep, multidimensional pluralism. 33 Notwithstanding the term and its examples, micropolitics cannot be confined to a sense of the local, regional, or substate. It is not a conception that translates into the idea of a confined space or particular scale. Instead, micropolitics indicates the significance of the transversal rather than the transnational, highlighting how the global is simultaneously local and the local necessarily global. As Connolly maintains, therefore, there is a constitutive relationship between the micropolitical and the macropolitical, with the latter understood in more formal political and institutional terms. As he writes, “micropolitics operates below the threshold of large legislative acts and executive initiatives, even as it ranges widely and sets conditions of possibility for these more visible actions. Technique and micropolitics form connective links joining practices of memory, perception, thinking, judgment, institutional design and political ethos.” 34 Although far from being the only transversal links—“market, antimarket practices (such as oligopolies, monopolies, and command systems), state decrees, and interstate agreements also play critical roles”— they do play an especially important role “below the threshold of political visibility inside every domain of life.” What the emphasis on the micropolitical points to is the significance of the visceral for contemporary thought and politics. In contrast to the epistemological register of intellectualism, where a sometimes narrow and shallow conception of reason governs thinking, the visceral is the densely layered register of political thought where affect— those dispositions to perceive, believe, associate, and decide— gives “texture and direction” to the “level of refined intellectuality.” Although it is infused with ideas and not antithetical to the intellectual, the visceral register is “not susceptible to modification by argument, dialogue or conversation alone.” 35 This is why methodological contests are often bitterly fought in the humanities and social sciences— each represents a question of faith as much as it does method. 36 Addressing the visceral register therefore means coming to terms with “the importance of relational techniques of the self and micro-politics. Such tactics mix image, movement, posture, concept and argument to new effect, simulating the process by which the habit in question became embodied the first time around.” 37 Paying attention to the affective and the visceral requires a new understanding of causality. Intellectualism implies a sense of what Connolly calls “efficient causality,” in which “you first separate factors and then show how one is the basic cause, or they cause each other, or how they together reflect a basic cause.” 38 In contrast— though not in place of efficient causality— there is emergent causality, whereby elements have effects at multiple levels, infusing areas and issues beyond their domain, and then, through adaptations, circuits, and feedback, themselves changing in response to these effects. Emergent causality thus refigures causation as resonance, whereby the elements affected fuse, “metabolizing into a moving complex.” 39 For Connolly this recasting of causation as resonance is the basis for a trenchant political critique of contemporary American politics at home and abroad. Seeing the country governed by a “theo-econopolitical machine”— the result of cowboy capitalism, evangelical Christians, the electronic news media, and the Republican Party forming an assemblage— Connolly offers a radical new way of explaining how (among other degradations) “state practices of torture,” “an international climate of fear and loathing against the Islamic world,” and “the Guantánamo Gulag” have come to be accepted, with lies and distortions about alternatives and those who promote them made equally acceptable. In large part, the power of the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine” is established by “media presentations that do much of their work below the level of explicit attention and encourage the intense coding of those experiences as they do.” 40 So while the objects of concern are micropolitical and American (at least in the first instance), the effects of concern are macropoliti-cal and global. Connolly’s jeremiad is an appeal to “citizens who refuse to have their thinking placed under the automatic purview of the regime in which they reside, of religious authorities tied to the state, or corporate interests linked to either.” 41 The task for those citizens— both in and beyond America, united in cross-state, non-national movements— is to engage in their own “micropolitical work on the subliminal register.” 42 This is an especially challenging task, because given the idea of emergent rather than efficient causality, and the techniques of the self employed below the level of conscious politics by the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine, it is not clear how this micropolitical resistance can be undertaken consciously and deliberately toward a desired outcome.
20 +Pluralism is a pre-requisite to societal change because it enables a re-orientation of values, but discourse must be paired with material change to be effective.
21 +Schoolman and Campbell 08 Morton Schoolman Morton Schoolman is Professor of Political Science at SUNY Albany, and the author of The Imaginary Witness: The Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse. David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame and the chairperson of the political science department. “Introduction: pluralism “old” and “new”’.//roman
22 +Thus, in Connolly's view, and in the view of other theorists whose work defined the critical temper, conventional pluralist theory is biased, burdened by normative assumptions, and top- heavy with methodologies masking an ideological and institutional infrastructure that organizes socioeconomic and political power to favor certain interests and groups. For Connolly and other theorists who share a critical temper, however, the burden of proof does not end with the demonstration of the biases of conventional pluralist theory. It is dedicated equally to developing alternative models of pluralist practice and to devising strategies for reform that bring democratic politics into conformity with the theory and practice of these models—although not entirely. As Connolly emphasizes, while proponents must be clear about the normative commitments embedded in their empirical models, their expectation and the expectation of their political allies and supporters must not be that the alternatives envisioned be fully attainable in practice. Practice always lags behind. Rather, alternative models are to provide bases for appraising the performance of the established pluralist system, including grounds to appreciate the achievements of existing pluralist practices, and they are to assist in setting goals for reform. Alternative models can also spur impulses for political reform and, importantly, create opportunities for reform by dramatizing future possibilities that can be realized through the political reorganization of already developed cultural and material resources. Put differently, alternative models can help to avoid the contented attitude toward the established political system that conventional pluralist theory often appears to encourage. Finally, alternative models also bring "the critical temper into sharper focus," which is to say that the critical temper has not completed its work until it turns back reflexively to appraise and revise as necessary every theoretical and practical aspect of critique. Such were the intended purposes of two alternative models of pluralism developed by Connolly in new works published not long after Political Science and Ideology and The Bias of Pluralism. In The Terms of Political Discourse (1974) Connolly explored how key concepts in politics are constructed from a normative point of view, and how normative differences among concepts can make them essentially contestable. "2 Connolly's larger intention here was to develop an alternative model of inquiry to the reigning positivist of modern pluralism and alternative models of pluralist politics. Indeed, in The Politicized Economy (1976) he and his coauthor Michael Best introduce an analysis of consumption distinguishing between consumer goods that expand inequality as they are generalized and consumer goods that reduce inequality as they are expanded to become inclusive goods.3 Their intention with this analysis was to construct an alternative model of pluralism able to reduce inequality and instruct political efforts to that end. Of course, the responsibility that the critical temper assumes is to move through political engagement at the theoretical level to political engagement at the practical level. This conventional way to formulate the relationship between theory and practice is somewhat misleading, though, for Connolly considers political theory generally a form of political practice, and in this context the critical temper itself instructs political strategy, for example by demonstrating the need and potential for reducing social and economic inequality. Connolly agrees with several of the theorists whose ideas fuel the critical temper that because its work broaches the political realm, the social science community can, like intellectuals as a whole, become an agent for political change and a pluralizing force within a political system whose barriers to democratic pluralism the critical temper understands well. The critical temper's political role grows out of its academic functions. It would help to "educate a larger public to the deficiencies of a biased pluralism," reopen "forgotten debates among social scientists, challenging the complacency of some and activating the latent concerns of others," and exert "constructive pressures on liberals in and around government. "4 Connolly is neither sanguine, nor cavalier, nor highly optimistic about improving the prospects for political reform through the allied agencies of the critical temper and its public. He recognizes that political strategy is the greatest challenge faced by the critics of conventional pluralist theory, because its theoretical advocates and the modern pluralist system of politics both work to define and limit the terms of political discourse. Yet he also recognizes that the challenge cannot be left to the routine politics of modern pluralism, to the positivist model of inquiry at one time dominant in the academy, or to the belief that the promise of a democratic pluralism will be redeemed by historical forces whose objectivity is vulnerable to the same criticism brought to bear on all other forms of positivism.
23 +They continue
24 +This is not to say that for Connolly conceptual revision is sufficient to produce political change. It is to insist that conceptual revision is a precondition for political change that prefigures it by alleging its necessity, suggesting its possibility, and opening opportunities and inferring strategies for change. Connolly’s many examples from the political life of the modern democratic world bear out this plurality of ways in which conceptual revision and political change are connected. To cite one, his consideration of “institutional racism” highlights the connection between revisions in the terms of our political discourse and the prefigured political changes that ensue. The claim that private and public institutions systematically discriminated against racial minorities was an interpretation of racism contesting established understandings that had underscored individual responsibility for racism. No sooner did the new concept of institutional racism enter into political life than members of the polity could not avoid considering the charge, even as they resisted it, that institutions in which they were implicated and that they believed to be legitimate unwittingly promoted inequality and lagged behind democratic progress achieved in other quarters of society. They were compelled to entertain the possibility that reform should be introduced through political strategies that solicited their support. If they were to abstain from involvement they now ran the risk of being implicated in racist beliefs from which they thought they were free. “Institutional racism” exemplifies how reflection on established concepts can call into question long-standing practices in which everyone is implicated, where reform supposes political action that depends upon antecedent conceptual revision. Politics— in this instance political struggle surrounding claims about discriminatory policies for which institutions are responsible— is bound up with struggles over the application and revision of familiar concepts.
25 +Unstable politics provides the chaos needed to generate ideas – proceduralism cedes public spaces to private institutions.
26 +Honig 13 (Bonnie Honig is a political, feminist, and legal theorist specializing in democratic theory. In 2013-14, she became Nancy Duke Lewis Professor-Elect of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University, succeeding Anne Fausto-Sterling in the Chair in 2014–15. Honig was formerly Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. “The optimistic agonist: an interview with Bonnie Honig,” OpenDemocracy. March 7, 2013. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/nick-pearce-bonnie-honig/optimistic-agonist-interview-with-bonnie-honig) //WW JA 12/15/16
27 +BH: Most liberal and deliberative democratic theory treats proceduralism as a substitute for political engagement or as exhaustive of proper modes of political engagement. So when one reads the written work of these thinkers, often one can find (as with Habermas) that there’s a way in which the procedural mode of politics is, in a subtle or hidden way, dependent upon other modes of politics, but these other modes are not treated in the same honorific terms as proceduralism or discourse ethics because these other modes are unstable, or frightening or marginal. They are sometimes allowed to inform politics but they must be translated into the stable forms that institutionalisation requires. Habermas talks about the sluices through which issues move from the streets into more formal channels. But unstable and marginal political movements or tumults conjure up the passion and loyalty that fidelity to procedure postulates. And they also provide the imagination and fantasy of possible and alternative futures that bring people into politics, sweep them up into movements or give them a reason to participate. That is why I say in my book Emergency Politics that, without the events that proceduralists want to marginalise – like the crowd protests in the streets of Philadelphia (discussed by Jason Frank inConstituent Moments) – for example, the idea of attachment to a constitution is about as ‘attractive as kissing a typewriter.’ In short, the secret lifeblood of the constitutional patriot is connected to things that are destabilising of orderly constitutionalism or proper proceduralism and therefore are defined out of the centre. But that centre of orderly politics is actually deeply dependent on the energy and animation and frankly, the fun, that come from gathering together around issues that are affectively charged. Arendt once asked, while sitting on a panel debate on feminism, ‘What would we lose if we win?’ For the proceduralist that’s a good question to think about. If you actually succeeded in turning politics into mere proceduralism – completely procedural practices with none of the tumult and chaos that attend democratic forms of life – you lose the things you need for a democratic form: first, the tumult and spontaneity and even surprise that attend entry into the public sphere, and, second, public things. Admittedly procedures themselves are public things, but you also need parks and schools, prisons, armies and land and all the kinds of things people can struggle and fight over. In the US now, many of these are privatised or subcontracted out by the government to private industry. For proceduralists, such public things are what the procedures are there to manage. What we’ve seen over the last 20 years of neo-liberalism is a tendency to privatise or undercut those public things. So Hannah Arendt’s great and annoying question about feminism, ‘What would we lose if we win?’ is poignant in the context of proceduralists’ struggle with neo-liberalism. If the proceduralists won we’d have great procedures, but we would have little need of them because we would have nothing to distribute, as all the public things would be privately owned or managed. NP: With regards to public objects, are you saying that democracy requires objects of engagement, affection, ownership and contest that, in some sense, must be public in order to exist? BH: Yes. I mean that democracy postulates not just a demos, the people, about which we debate so much when it comes to the politics of immigration, multiculturalism and assimilation. And it requires more than procedures, for reasons I just alluded to. Those are important dimensions of democratic theory and practice, but the other term which is talked about less, is objects, whose ‘thingness’ creates a sense of publicity beyond the so-called public sphere, and whose finitude creates friction. Public things, to borrow from Wittgenstein, cannot be anything or nothing. They are something, and if a thing is something, it has a kind of definiteness to it. This isn’t to reduce things to pure materialism – everything has a life in language – but in their thingness, public things have a kind of finitude to them, and the friction that comes of fighting over finite things, that friction can be seen as the electricity of political life, or one source of its charge. When we focus on the demos and on procedure, we take our eye off what we should see as the important ball in the game – having public objects. Under neo-liberalism it’s become quite clear that we can drown in proceduralism – there’s no problem keeping people busy with paperwork and accountability, or in the case of deliberative democrats for example, we can have important debates about how to redraw and then defend the borders of a democratic country legitimately – but if all those things take up all our time, we’ll look up from our papers and our borders one day, and see that there isn’t anything left to fight over. What democracy has always been about is fighting over the public thing. These could be airwaves, as in public broadcasting, or water or climate, or national history or education or parks, prisons, or the military and its codes, membership and responsibilities.
28 +Optimistic agonism is necessary for political action. Proceduralism and political withdrawal fail – they’re self-defeating, unrealistic, and ineffective.
29 +Honig 2 (Bonnie Honig is a political, feminist, and legal theorist specializing in democratic theory. In 2013-14, she became Nancy Duke Lewis Professor-Elect of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University, succeeding Anne Fausto-Sterling in the Chair in 2014–15. Honig was formerly Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. “The optimistic agonist: an interview with Bonnie Honig,” OpenDemocracy. March 7, 2013. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/nick-pearce-bonnie-honig/optimistic-agonist-interview-with-bonnie-honig) //WW JA 12/15/16
30 +BH: Optimism is the agonist’s greatest asset. People who would like to be able to withdraw from politics, who are tempted by the pleasures of private life untouched by contestation – in other words, who don’t think the private sphere is infused with power relations that need to be addressed – may feel put upon by the claims made by agonistic politics. It seems to refuse to them the withdrawal they seek. From their perspective, then, the claim that political contestation is unending seems to be quite pessimistic because, if your goal is withdrawal to a private life untouched by political engagement, the argument that engagement is inescapable seems pessimistic. But if you aspire to forms of life in common constellated around public things, in affectively charged ways that are both pleasurable and sometimes infuriating, built around finding, promoting and building shared public objects, engaged in some common cause, but not disciplined into oppressive forms of normalisation, then agonistic politics is very optimistic. Moreover, if you crave withdrawal but find waiting for you in the so-called private sphere, accretions of power and privilege that signal your impotence in a world beyond your control and influence, then agonism’s commitment to action in concert is for you, and its screams optimism. We have talked a lot about publicity and public things, but to be really clear it is around these things that equality and liberty and justice take shape. When they become merely procedural values, or when the form they take has to do with targets or indicators, they become shapeless and unrewarding values. They can only do the work that makes us value them if they are situated in the material life of citizens and residents together. And that I think is the optimism of agonistic politics. There is always an ongoing contestation, some of it in defence of historical achievements such as the welfare state, but agonism is not per se always oppositional or inherently contestational. It just anticipates resistance to all efforts to institute and maintain equality or justice. I argued in my first book that even the best of such efforts always generate remainders and so we agonists must also be attentive to those and aware that a further politics must follow to redress that. Thus, agonists hope that we can experience political engagement with pleasure and joy as well as the attending frustration that always comes with the friction of life in common.
31 +Underview
32 +Interpretation: Negative debaters may read counterplans as long as they don’t specify a right or permutations of rights to be restricted.
33 +To clarify, you can read a counterplan, but it cannot be like “restrict revenge porn and keep everything else”.
34 +
35 +Standards:
36 +Prep skew – I can’t research and prepare for every possible right that can be restricted. Explodes aff burden because we need to predict what counterplan you will read and independently prepare for that, whereas you only have to prep for a single aff.
37 + For example, you can say “restrict revenge porn” and I need to specifically find reasons why revenge porn is good because you still access the rest of the 1AC offense because we necessitate all free speech is allowed.
38 +
39 +Time Skew – You steal all of 1AC offense by reading the CP. Forces a 1AR restart and explodes structural time burden because we have to reformulate offense. Also kills our strategy because we need to find new ways to win the round because we cannot leverage the aff. Outweighs because we cannot have planes of contestation if you kill our ability to formulate concepts. Also controls internal link to clash-based education- we cant learn if our arguments don’t interact
EntryDate
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1 +2017-02-04 17:29:39.259
Judge
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1 +Anyone
Opponent
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1 +Anyone
ParentRound
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1 +13
Round
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1 +1
Team
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1 +Westwood Shhah Aff
Title
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1 +JF - 1AC - Agonistic Democracy
Tournament
... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
1 +Roosevelt

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