Tournament: Golden Desert | Round: 1 | Opponent: Marlborough SD | Judge: Calen Smith
1AC
ROB
The political process has changed – instead of trying to engage with society, we have become fixated on symbolic gestures and looking to personal ethics, leading to serial policy failure and the War on Terror. We need to engage with concrete action not ‘me-search’ and radical utopias. Thus the role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best deconstructs the security state through policy action.
Chandler 7 (David Chandler – Professor of International Relations and the Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster. He’s also the founding editor of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, “The Attraction of Post-Territorial Politics: Ethics and Activism in the International Sphere (The Inaugural Lecture of Professor David Chandler)”, http://www.davidchandler.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Inaugural-lecture.pdf, pgs. 1-9, EmmieeM)
Introduction. It seems that our engagement with and understanding of politics is increasingly shaped by global questions from international terrorism and the war in Iraq, to climate change, the WTO, humanitarian crises and relief from poverty. For many people the fact that politics has become global – that politics is no longer restricted to narrow questions and institutions at a national level, or mainly contested in territorial boxes of the nation state – demonstrates that the stakes are much higher today. On the one hand, it appears that Western powers have carte blanche for the assertion of power in the war on terror or new rights of preventive or humanitarian intervention, on the other, it appears that there are new forms of global struggle is well summed up in radical theorists Hardt and Negri’s view of a struggle between Empire and the Multitude – where every struggle and protest becomes a direct struggle against the Empire of global capital serviced under US leadership. I think that the stakes are high in the new global ethics and activism, but that the stakes are somewhat different to those laid out above. I want to discuss what I think these stakes are by drawing out the reasons for the shift in politics to the global level and the consequences of this process. The Demand for Global Politics. The stakes seem to exist largely at a global level at the same time as what is at stake in domestic politics seems to be increasingly diminished. There are local elections tomorrow; I guess that many people here will be voting. However, our relationship to the electoral process and its role in political life has changed. In the past, casting our vote gave us a sense of connection with society, a sense of connection to other voters who shared our support for a certain political programme and a sense of connection (albeit a hostile one) to those who supported opposing programmes. Voting meant something to us and gave us a sense of relationship to political representatives and to the government of the day. Today, if we vote, we experience not a sense of connection but one of disconnection; we don’t really feel that we share much with others who voted the same way and certainly don’t feel a sense of being part of a project or sharing a goal of the political party which we may have voted for. Today, elections do not give an incoming government the social and political legitimacy that elections did in the past. Governments have a fairly fragile and unmediated relationship with their societies, and individuals have an increasingly atomized sense of their social and political selves. However, politics is no less important to many of us today. Politics still gives us a sense of social connection and social rootedness and gives meaning to many of our lives. It is just that the nature and practices of this politics are different. We are less likely to engage in the formal politics of representation – of elections and governments – but in post-territorial politics, a politics where there is much less division between the private sphere and the public one and much less division between national, territorial, concerns and global ones. This type of politics is on the one hand ‘global’ but, on the other, highly individualized: it is very much the politics of our everyday lives – the sense of meaning we get from thinking about global warming when we turn off the taps when we brush our teeth, take our rubbish out for recycling or cut back on our car use – we might also do global politics in deriving meaning from the ethical or social value of our work, or in our subscription or support for good causes from Oxfam to Greenpeace and Christian Aid. I want to suggest that when we do ‘politics’ nowadays it is less the ‘old’ politics, of self-interest, political parties, and concern for governmental power, than the ‘new’ politics of global ethical concerns. I further want to suggest that the forms and content of this new approach to the political are more akin to religious beliefs and practices than to the forms of our social political engagement in the past. Global politics is similar to religious approaches in three vital respects: 1) global post-territorial politics are no longer concerned with power, its’ concerns are free-floating and in many ways, existential, and how we live our lives; 2) global politics revolve around practices with are private and individualized, they are about us as individuals and our ethical choices; 3) the practice of global politics tends to be non-instrumental, we do not subordinate ourselves to collective associations or parties and are more likely to give value to our aspirations, acts, or the fact of our awareness of an issue, as an end in-itself. It is as if we are upholding our goodness or ethicality in the face of an increasingly confusing, problematic and alienating world – our politics in this sense are an expression or voice, in Marx’s words, of ‘the heart in a heartless world’ or ‘the soul of a soulless condition’. The practice of ‘doing politics’ as a form of religiosity is a highly conservative one. As Marx argued, religion was the ‘opium of the people’ – this is politics as a sedative or pacifier: it feeds an illusory view of change at the expense of genuine social engagement and transformation. I want to argue that global ethical politics reflects and institutionalizes our sense of disconnection and social atomization and results in irrational and unaccountable government policy making. I want to illustrate my points by briefly looking at the practices of global ethics in three spheres, those of radical political activism, government policy making and academia. Radical activism. People often argue that there is nothing passive or conservative about radical political activist protests, such as the 2003 anti-war march, anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation protests, the huge march to Make Poverty History at the end of 2005, involvement in the World Social Forums or the radical jihad of Al-Qaeda. I disagree; these new forms of protest are highly individualized and personal ones – there is no attempt to build a social or collective movement. It appears that theatrical suicide, demonstrating, badge and bracelet wearing are ethical acts in themselves: personal statements of awareness, rather than attempts to engage politically with society. This is illustrated by the ‘celebration of differences’ at marches, protests and social forums. It is as if people are more concerned with the creation of a sense of community through differences than with any political debate, shared agreement or collective purpose. It seems to me that if someone was really concerned with ending war or with ending poverty or with overthrowing capitalism, that political views and political differences would be quite important. Is war caused by capitalism, by human nature, or by the existence of guns and other weapons? It would seem important to debate reasons, causes and solutions, it would also seem necessary to give those political differences an organizational expression if there was a serious project of social change. Rather than a political engagement with the world, it seems that radical political activism today is a form of social disengagement – expressed in the anti-war marchers’ slogan of ‘Not in My Name’, or the assumption that wearing a plastic bracelet or setting up an internet blog diary is the same as engaging in political debate. In fact, is seems that political activism is a practice whish isolates individuals who think that demonstrating a personal commitment or awareness of problems is preferable to engaging with other people who are often dismissed as uncaring or brain-washed by consumerism. The narcissistic aspect of the practice of this type of global politics are expressed clearly by individuals who are obsessed with reducing their carbon footprint, deriving their idealized sense of social connection from an ever increasing awareness of themselves and by giving ‘political’ meaning to every personal action. Global ethics appear to be in demand because they offer us a sense of social connection and meaning while at the same time giving us the freedom to construct the meaning for ourselves, to pick our causes of concern, and enabling us to be free of responsibilities for acting as part of a collective association, for winning an argument or for success at the ballot-box. While the appeal of global ethical politics is an individualistic one, the lack of success or impact of radical activism is also reflected in its rejection of any form of social movement or organization. Governments. Strange as it may seem, the only people who are keener on global ethics than radical activists are political elites. Since the end of the Cold War, global ethics have formed the core of foreign policy and foreign policy has tended to dominate domestic politics. Global ethics are at the centre of debates and discussion over humanitarian intervention, ‘healing the scar of Africa’, the war on terror and the ‘war against climate insecurity’. Tony Blair argued in the Guardian last week that ‘foreign policy is no longer foreign policy’ (Timothy Garten Ash, ‘Like it or Loath it, after 10 years Blair knows exactly what he stands for’, 26 April 2007), this is certainly true. Traditional foreign policy, based on strategic geo-political interests with a clear framework for policy-making, no longer seems so important. The government is down-sizing the old Foreign and Commonwealth Office where people were regional experts, spoke the languages and were engaged for the long-term, and provides more resources to the Department for International Development where its staff are experts in good causes. This shift was clear in the UK’s attempt to develop an Ethical Foreign Policy in the 1990s – an approach which openly claimed to have rejected strategic interests for values and the promotion of Britain’s caring and sharing ‘identity’. Clearly, the projection of foreign policy on the basis of demonstrations of values and identity, rather than an understanding of the needs and interests of people on the ground, leads to ill thought-through and short-termist policy-making, as was seen in the ‘value-based’ interventions from Bosnia to Iraq (see Blair’s recent Foreign Affairs article, ‘A Battle for Global Values’, 86:1 (2007), p.79-90). Governments have been more than happy to put global ethics at the top of the political agenda for – the same reasons that radical activists have been eager to shift to the global sphere – the freedom from political responsibility that it affords them. Every government and international institution has shifted from strategic and instrumental policy-making based on a clear political programme to the ambitious assertion of global causes – saving the planet, ending poverty, saving Africa, not just ending war but solving the causes of conflict etc – of course, the more ambitious the aim the less anyone can be held to account for success and failure. In fact, the more global the problem is, the more responsibility can be shifted to blame the US or the UN for the failure to translate ethical claims into concrete results. Ethical global questions, where the alleged values of the UN, the UK, the ‘civilised world’, NATO or the EU are on the line in ‘wars of choice’ from the war on terror to the war on global warming lack traditional instrumentality because they are driven less by the traditional interests of Realpolitik than the narcissistic search for meaning or identity. Governments feel the consequences of their lack of social connection, even more than we do as individuals; it undermines any attempt to represent shared interests or cohere political programmes. As Baudrillard suggests, without a connection to the ‘represented’ masses, political leaders are as open to ridicule and exposure as the ‘Emperor with no clothes’ (In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983, for example). It is this lack of shared social goals which makes instrumental policy-making increasingly problematic. As Donald Rumsfeld stated about the war on terror, ‘there are no metrics’ to help assess whether the war is being won or lost. These wars and campaigns, often alleged to be based on the altruistic claim of the needs and interests of others, are demonstrations and performances, based on ethical claims rather than responsible practices and policies. Max Weber once counterposed this type of politics – the ‘ethics of conviction’ – to the ‘ethics of responsibility’ in his lecture on ‘Politics as a Vocation’. The desire to act on the international scene without a clear strategy or purpose has led to highly destabilizing interventions from the Balkans to Iraq and to the moralization of a wide range of issues from war crimes to EU membership requirements. Academia. Today more and more people are ‘doing politics’ in their academic work. This is the reason for the boom in International Relations study and the attraction of other social sciences to the global sphere. I would argue that the attraction of IR for many people has not been IR theory but the desire to practice global ethics. The boom in the IR discipline has coincided with a rejection of Realist theoretical frameworks of power and interests and the sovereignty/anarchy problematic. However, I would argue that this rejection has not been a product of theoretical engagement with Realism but an ethical act of rejection of Realism’s ontological focus. It seems that our ideas and our theories say much more about us than the world we live in. Normative theorists and Constructivists tend to support the global ethical turn arguing that we should not be as concerned with ‘what is’ as with the potential for the emergence of global ethical community. Constructivists, in particular, focus upon the ethical language which political elites espouse rather than the practices of power. But the most dangerous trends in the discipline today are those frameworks which have taken up Critical theory and argue that focusing on the world as it exists is conservative ‘problem-solving’ while the task for critical theorists is to focus on emancipatory alternative forms of living or of thinking about the world. Critical thought then becomes a process of wishful thinking rather than one of engagement, with its advocates arguing that we need to focus on clarifying our own ethical frameworks and biases and positionality before thinking about or teaching on world affairs; in the process this becomes ‘me-search’ rather than research. We have moved a long way from Hedley Bull’s perspective that, for academic research to be truly radical, we had to put our values to the side to follow where the question or inquiry might lead. The inward-looking and narcissistic trends in academia, where we are more concerned with our ‘reflexivity’ – the awareness of our own ethics and values – than with engaging with the world, was brought home to me when I asked my IR students which theoretical frameworks they agreed with most and they replies mostly Critical theory and Constructivism despite the fact that they thought that states operated on the basis of power and self-interest in a world of anarchy. Their theoretical preferences were based more on what their choices said about them as ethical individuals than about how theory might be used to understand and engage with the world. Conclusion. I have attempted to argue that there is a lot at stake in the new politics of global ethics. Politics has become a religious activity, an activity which is no longer socially mediated; it is less and less an activity based on social engagement and the testing of ideas in public debate or in the academy. Doing politics today, whether in radical activism, government policy-making, or in academia, seems to bring people into a one-to-one relationship with global issues in the same way religious people have a one-to-one relationship with their God. Politics is increasingly like religion because when we look for meaning we find it inside ourselves rather than in the external consequences of our ‘political’ acts. What matters is the conviction or the act in itself: its connection to the global sphere is one that we increasingly tend to provide idealistically. Another way of expressing this limited sense of our subjectivity is in the popularity of globalization theory – the idea that instrumentality is no longer possible today because the world is such a complex and interconnected place and therefore there is no way of knowing the consequences of our actions. The more we engage in the new politics where there is an unmediated relationship between us as individuals and global issues, the less we engage instrumentally with the outside world and the less we engage with our peers and colleagues at the level of political or intellectual debate and organization. You may be thinking that I have gone some way to describing or identifying what the problems might be but I have not mentioned anything about a solution. I won’t dodge the issue. One thing that is clear is that the solution is not purely an intellectual or academic one; the demand for global ethics is generated by our social reality and social experiences. Marx spent some time considering a similar crisis of political subjectivity in 1840s Germany and in his writings – The German Ideology, ‘Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”’, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, and elsewhere – he raged against the idealism of contemporary thought and argued that the criticism of religion needed to be replaced by the criticism of politics – by political activism and social change based on the emerging proletariat. Nearly two centuries later it is more difficult to see an emerging political subject which can fulfill the task of ‘changing the world’ rather than merely ‘reinterpreting it’ through philosophy. I have two suggestions. Firstly, that there is a pressing need for an intellectual struggle against the idealism of global ethics. The point needs to be emphasized that our ‘freedom’ to engage in politics, to choose our identities and political campaigns, as well as governments’ freedom to choose their ethical campaigns and wars of choice, reflects a lack of social ties and social engagement. There is no global political struggle between Empire and its’ Radical Discontents, the Foucauldian temptation to see power and resistance everywhere is a product of wishful or lazy thinking dominated by the social categories of the past. The stakes are not in the global stratosphere but much closer to home. Politics appear to have gone global because there is a breakdown of genuine community and the construction of fantasy communities and fantasy connections in global space. Unless we bring politics back down to earth from heaven, our critical, social and intellectual lives will continue to be diminished ones. Secondly, on the basis that the political ‘freedom’ of our social atomization leads us into increasingly idealized approaches to the world we live in, we should take more seriously Bull’s injunction to pursue the question, or in Alain Badiou’s words subordinate ourselves to the ‘discipline of the real’. Subordination to the world outside ourselves is a powerful factor that can bind those interested in critical research, whereas the turn away from the world and the focus on our personal values can ultimately only be divisive. To facilitate external engagement and external judgement, I suggest we experiment with ways to build up social bonds with our peers that can limit our freedoms and develop our sense of responsibility and accountability to others. We may have to artificially construct these social connections but their value and instrumentality will have to be proven through our ability to engage with, understand, critique, and ultimately overcome the practices and subjectivities of our time.
Thus, the plan. Resolved: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech.
Downs 4 (Donald Alexander Downs – Professor of Political Science, Law and Journalism at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Oakland, California. He has won the Annisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Gladys M. Kammerer Award of the American Political Science Association, and has been in published in journals, encyclopedias, and professional books. “Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus”, pgs. Xx – xxi, http://www.thedivineconspiracy.org/Z5243N.pdf, EmmieeM)
During most of the twentieth century, threats to campus free speech and academic freedom came mostly from the right, and from outside institutions of higher learning. The new attacks on free thought that arose in the later 1980s turned this pattern on its head: they have arisen from leftist sources inside the ivory tower. It is for this reason that the new battles over free speech have sometimes taken on the characteristics of civil wars. The new type of censorship is “progressive” in aspiration, not “reactionary.” What this and other books reveal, however, is that progressive censorship has a way of producing illiberal, repressive consequences that are just as detrimental to open universities and minds as traditional forms of censorship. With the return of the more traditional threats to free thought after September 11, it is possible that the advocates of progressive censorship will realize the errors of their ways for the simple reason that it is their ox that is now being gored once again. It remains to be seen whether this is true. Whatever the case may be, it is time for all institutions to commit themselves to a more consistent approach that shows respect for free speech, academic freedom, and civil liberty for all members of the academic community regardless of their views or political pedigree. Accepting this responsibility means addressing threats to academic and intellectual freedom that emanate from causes and sources within the university, not just those that arise from without, as is the case with threats stemming from the war against terrorism. In this book, I attempt to show how political commitment on campus can help to bring about this retrieval of liberal principles.
Recognition
Colleges are the newest target of the security state – the perception that universities are uniquely capable of supporting democracy and dissent over the War on Terror and free enterprise drives right-wing extremists to enforce censorship, under the guise of advancing tolerance and rights
Giroux 6 (Henry A. Giroux – one of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy, PhD from Carnegie, was a professor at Boston University and scholar at Miami University. Was the founding Director of the Center for Education and Cultural Studies. Published by John Hopkins University Press, “Academic Freedom Under FIre: The Case for Critical Pedagogy, pgs. 1 – 9, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/203608/pdf, EmmieeM)
Higher education in the United States appears to be caught in a strange contradiction. By all objective measures, the American academic system is regarded as one of the finest educational systems in the world. A recent study conducted at Shanhai Jiao Tong University, for instance, evaluated five hundred of the world’s top universities and concluded that “The United States has 80 percent of the world’s twenty most distinguished research universities and about 70 percent of the top fifty. We lead the world in the production of new knowledge and its transmission to undergraduate, doctoral and postdoctoral students. Since the 1930s, the United States has dominated the receipt of Nobel Prizes, capturing roughly 60 percent of these awards” (qtd. In Jonathan Cole 2005a). But the American system of higher education is unique not only for the quality of its research universities and its role in preparing students for emerging industries that drive the new global economy; it is also renown, in spite of its limitations, as a democratic, secular, and open character” (Said 2004, 22). Offering faculty a substantial measure of academic freedom and students the opportunity to lean within a culture of questioning and critical engagement, American higher education strongly affirms, at least in principle, the knowledge, values, skills, and social relations required for producing individuals and social agents capable of addressing the political, economy, and social injustices that diminish the reality and promise of a substantive democracy at home and abroad. While the American university faces a growing number of problems that range from the increasing loss of federal and state funding, the incursion of corporate power, a galloping commercialization, and the growing influence of the national security state, it remains, with all its problems, as Edward Said insists, “the one public space available to real alternative intellectual practices: no other institution like it on such a scale exists anywhere else in the world today” (72). In spite of its broad-based, even global, recognition, higher education in the United States is currently being targeted by a diverse number of right-wing forces who have highjacked political power and have waged a focused campaign to undermine the principles of academic freedom, sacrifice critical university as a bastion of autonomy, independent thought, and uncorrupted inquiry. Ironically, by adopting the vocabulary of individual rights, academic freedom, balance, and tolerance, right-wing forces are waging a campaign designed to slander, even vilify, liberal and left-oriented professors, cut already meager federal funding for higher education, eliminate tenure, and place control of what is taught and said in classrooms under legislative oversight. There is more at work in the current attack than the rampant anti-intellectualism and paranoid style of American politics outlined in Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962) written over forty years ago. There is also the collective power of a radical Right that in its all-encompassing control of the government and most social institutions feels compelled to dismantle the open, questioning cultures of the academy. Viewed as a particularly potent threat and social irritant to several right-wing radicals, the academy, as Ellen Willis points out, “not only allows liberals and leftists to express their views, but provides them with the opportunity to make a living, get tenure, publish books, and influence students. Indeed, the academy is inherently a liberal institution, in the sense that it is grounded in the credo of the Enlightenment: the free pursuit and dissemination of knowledge for its own sake” (2005, B11). Underlying recent attacks on the university is an attempt not merely to counter dissent but to destroy it and in doing so to eliminate all of those remaining public spaces, spheres, and institutions that nourish and sustain a democratic civil society. Jonathan Cole, former provost at Columbia University, echoes this view in claiming that: Today, a half century after the 154 House of Un-American Activities Committee held congressional hearings on communists in American universities, faculty members are witnessing once again a rising tide of anti-intellectualism and threats to academic freedom. They are increasingly apprehensive about the influence of external politics on university decision making. The attacks on professors like Joseph Massad, Thomas Butler, Rashid Khalidi, Ward Churchill, and Edward Said, couples with other actions taken by the federal government in the name of national security, suggest that we may well be headed for another era of intolerance and repression. (Cole, Jonathan 2005a). Criticisms of the university as a bastion of dissent have a long and inglorious history in the United States, extending from attacks in the nineteenth century by religious fundamentalists to anti-communist witch-hunts conducted in the 1920s, 1930s, and again in the 1950s, during the infamous era of McCarthyism. The 1951 publication of God and Man at Yale, in which ultra conservative William F. Buckley railed against secularism at Yale University and called for the firing of socialist professors was but a precursor to the present era of politicized and paranoid academic assaults. Several of these efforts shared a commitment to the notion that the university and its dissenting intellectuals posed a threat to government power and to its entry into World War I, committed acts of treason by sympathizing with the Russian Revolution, and exhibited a vile form of anti-Americanism in their criticism of unbridled corporate power and capitalism more generally. These attacks, often launched by government committees, cast a dark cloud over the exercise of academic freedom and were largely aimed at specific individuals who were condemned either for their alleged communist fervor and left-wing affiliations or for political activities outside of the classroom. The most notorious of these attacks occurred during the 1950s when Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin spearheaded a government witch-hunt that resulted in the blacklisting and firing of many dissident intellectuals both in and out of the university (Schrecker 1988a, 1988b). During that period, many faculty members were not only fired, but untold others, especially non-tenured junior faculty, “censored themselves and eschewed political dissent” (Schrecker 2005, 103–04). Harkening back to the infamous McCarthy era, a newly reinvigorated war is currently being waged by Christian nationalists, reactionary neoconservatives, and corporate fundamentalists against the autonomy and integrity of all those independent institutions that foster social responsibility, critical thought, and critical citizenship—while the attack is being waged on numerous fronts, the universities are where the major skirmishes are taking place. Former University of Colorado President Elizabeth Hoffman warned her faculty audience in March 2005 that higher education was facing a grave danger from a “new McCarthyism that may be emerging in the United States” (qtd. in Ensslin 2005). Hoffman’s comments have been echoed by a range of distinguished intellectuals such as noted historian Joan W. Scott, writer Lewis Lapham, and prominent academics such as Stanley Aronowitz. One of the most noted historians of the McCarthy era, Ellen Schrecker, both furthers and qualifies this position by arguing that “today’s assault on the academy is more serious” because “unlike that of the McCarthy era, it reaches directly into the classroom” (2006, B20). Put differently, the assault being waged against higher education is not simply against dissenting professors and academic freedom, but also over who controls the hiring process, the organization of curricula, and the nature of pedagogy itself. What is crucial to recognize is that the rise of the “new McCarthyism” cannot simply be attributed to the radical curtailment of civil liberties that were initiated by the Bush administration after the cataclysmic events of September 11, 2001, though it must be recognized that “Academic freedom suffered serious setbacks . . . with the hasty passage of the bill with the Orwellian name, the Patriot Act, which has compromised privacy protections, eroded civil liberties and chilled dissent” (Doumani 2006, 14–15). Nor can it be entirely reduced to the logic of a newly energized post–9/11 patriotic correctness movement, most clearly exemplified by actions of the rightwing American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which issued a report shortly after the attacks accusing the “unpatriotic academy” of being the “weak link in America’s response to the attack” (Martin and Neal 2001, n.p.). Although the increasing power of the Republican Party and growing culture of fear and jingoistic patriotism emboldened religious, neoliberal, and rightwing activists who viewed the university as one of the last strongholds of liberal dissent and secular inquiry, the right-wing strategy to wage a political and pedagogical battle to strongly influence, if not control, those institutions that had a powerful educational influence on American life—such as the media and higher education—gained importance as a tactical strategy among conservatives long before 9/11. To understand the current attack on academe, it is necessary to comprehend the power conservatives attributed to the political nature of education and the significance this view had in shaping the long-term strategy they put into place in the 1960s and 1970s to win an ideological war against liberal intellectuals who argued for holding government and corporate power accountable as a precondition for extending and expanding the promise of an inclusive democracy. The current concerted assault on academia represents the high point of a fifty-year strategy that was first put into place by conservative ideologues such as Frank Chodorov, the founder of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, publisher and author William F. Buckley, former Nixon Treasury Secretary William Simon, and Michael Joyce, the former head of both the Olin Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The most succinct statement, if not founding document for establishing a theoretical framework and political blueprint for the current assault on the academy has become rather infamously known as the Powell Memo, released on august 23, 1971, and authored by Lewis F. Powell, who would later be appointed as a member of Supreme Court of the United States. Powell identified the American college campus “as the single most dynamic source” for producing and housing intellectuals “who are unsympathetic to the free enterprise system” (Powell 1971, n.p.). He was particularly concerned about the lack of conservatives on social sciences faculties and urged his supporters to use an appeal to academic freedom as an opportunity to argue for “political balance” on university campuses. Powell recognized that one crucial strategy in changing the political composition of higher education was to convince university administrators and boards of trustees that the most fundamental problem facing universities was “the imbalance of many faculties” (n.p.). Powell insisted that “the basic concepts of balance, fairness, and truth are difficult to resist, if properly presented to boards of trustees, by writing and speaking, and by appeals to alumni associations and groups” (n.p.). The Powell Memo was designed to develop a broad-based strategy not only to counter dissent but also to develop a material and ideological infrastructure with the capability to transform American public consciousness through a conservative pedagogical commitment to reproduce the knowledge, values, ideology, and social relations of the corporate state. For Powell, the war against liberalism and a substantive democracy was primarily a pedagogical and political struggle designed both to win the hears and minds of the general public and to build a power base capable of eliminating those public spaces, spheres, and institutions that nourish and sustain what Samuel Huntington would later call (in a 1975 study on the “governability of democracies” by the Trilateral Commission) an “excess of democracy” (Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki 1975, 27). Central to such efforts was Powell’s insistence that conservatives nourish a new generation of scholars who would inhabit the university and function as public intellectuals actively shaping the direction of policy issues. He also advocated the creation of a conservative speakers’ bureau, staffed by scholars capable of evaluating “textbooks, especially in economics, political science and sociology” (1971). In addition, he advocated organizing a corps of conservative public intellectuals who would monitor the dominant media, publish their own scholarly journals, books, and pamphlets, and invest in advertising campaigns to enlighten the American people on conservative issues and policies. The Powell Memo, while not the only influence, played an important role in convincing a “cadre of ultraconservative and self-mythologizing millionaires bent on rescuing the country form the hideous grasp of Satanic liberalism” to match their ideological fervor with their pocketbooks by “disbursing the collective sum of roughly $3 billion over a period of thirty years in order to build a network of public intellectuals, think tanks, advocacy groups, foundations, media outlets, and powerful lobbying interests” (Lapham 2004, 32; Johnson 2005). As Dave Johnson points out, the initial effort was slow but effective. In 1973, in response to the Powell memo, Joseph Coors and Christian-right leader Paul Weyrich founded the Heritage Foundation. Coors told Lee Edwards, historian of the Heritage Foundation, that the Powell memo persuaded him that American business was “ignoring a crisis.” In response, Coors decided to help provide the seed funding for the creation of what was to become the Heritage Foundation, giving $250,000. Subsequently, the Olin Foundation, under the direction of its president, former Treasury Secretary William Simon (author of the influential 1979 book A Time for Truth), began funding similar organizations in concert with “the Four Sisters”—Richard Mellon Scaife’s various foundations, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation,the Olin Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation—along with Coors’s foundations, foundations associated with the Koch oil family, and a group of large corporations. (Johnson 2005). The most powerful members of this group included Joseph Coors in Denver, Richard Mellon Scaife in Pittsburgh, John Olin in New York City, David and Charles Koch in Wichita, the Smith Richardson family in North Carolina and Harry Bradley in Milwaukee—all of whom agreed to finance a number of right-wing think tanks, which over the past thirty years have come to include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Koch Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. This formidable alliance of far right-wing foundations deployed their resources in building and strategically linking “an impressive array of almost 500 think tanks, centers, institutes and concerned citizens groups both within and outside of the academy. . . .A small sampling of these entities includes the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Claremont Institute, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Middle East Forum, Accuracy in Media, and the National Association of Scholars, as well as David Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture” (Jones 2006). For several decades, right-wing extremists have labored to put into place an ultra-conservative re-education machine – an apparatus for producing and disseminating a public pedagogy in which everything tainted with the stamp of liberal origin and the word “public” would be contested and destroyed. Commenting on the rise of this vast right-wing propaganda machine organized to promote the idea that democracy needs less critical thought and more citizens whose only role is to consume, noted author Lewis Lapham writes: The quickening construction of Santa’s workshops outside the walls of government and the academy resulted in the increased production of pamphlets, histories, monographs, and background briefings intended to bring about the ruin of the liberal idea in all its institutionalized forms – the demonization of the liberal press, the disparagement of liberal sentiment, the destruction of liberal education – and by the time Ronald Reagan arrived in triumph at the White House in 1980 the assembly lines were operated at full capacity. (Lapham 2004, 38). Higher Education and Post-9/11 McCarthyism. The events of September 11, 2001, strengthened many of the conservative forces already in place in American society and provided a new dynamism for the right-wing attack machine and pedagogical infrastructure. Individuals and groups who opposed Bush’s foreign and domestic policies were put on the defensive – some overtly harassed – as right-wing pundits, groups, and foundations repeatedly labeled them as traitors and un-American. In some cases, conservative accusations that seemed disturbing, if not disturbed, before the events of 9/11 now appeared perfectly acceptable, especially to the dominant media, when aligned with a culture of fear and insecurity (im)mobilized by the call for patriotism and national security. For instance, prior to September 11, there was a growing concern that the university was too removed from public life, too secular in its concerns, and too markedly elitist in its embrace of cosmopolitan modernity. After the events of 9/11, the nature of the conservative acrimony was marked by a new language but the goal was largely the same: to remove from the university all vestiges of dissent and to reconstruct it as an increasingly privatized sphere for reproducing the interests of the corporations and the national security state – while assuming a front-line position in the war against terror. In short, criticisms of Israeli government were labeled as anti-Semitic; universities were castigated as hot-beds of left-wing radicalism; conservative students alleged that they were being humiliated and discriminated against in college and university classrooms all across the country; Ward Churchill became the poster boy standing in for all faculty left of Bill O’Reilly; McCarthy-like black lists were posted on the internet by right-wing groups such as Campus Watch, ACTA, Target of Opportunity (see www.targetofopportunity.com/enemy_targets.htm), and DiscovertheNetworks.org attempting to both out and politically shame allegedly radical professors who were giving aid and comfort to the enemy because of their refusal to provide unqualified support of the Bush administration. Traditional right-wing complaints were now coded as part of the discourse calling for academic freedom, balance, and individual rights. Professors were no longer elitist; they were now accused of being both too liberal and un-American. Universities were accused of not giving equal weight to conservative concerns such as the teaching of a consensus-based view of American history, the celebration of Western civilization, and a notion of science mediated less through the presentation of argument, logic, and evidence than through an appeal to a religious and ideological grid of conservative moral values. Academic valance was now invoked as a way to promote a form of affirmative action for hiring conservative faculty, while academic freedom was redefined through the prism of student rights and as a legitimating referent for dismantling professional academic standards and imposing outside political oversight of the classroom. But if the strategy and project of conservative ideologues became more bold and persistent after 9/11, it is also fair to say that right-wing efforts and demands to reform higher education have within the last few years taken a dangerous turn that far exceeds the threat posed by the previous “cultural wars.” What is new about the current condemnation of the university is that a right-wing ideological coalition of Christian evangelicals, militant nationalists, market fundamentalists, and neoconservatives, among others, now control the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government, the top civilian ranks of the Pentagon, and most of the intelligence services. In the midst of such power, the Right has ample political, cultural, and economic resources to attempt to exercise total control over all aspects of public life and to implement and political agenda consistent with the goals of maintaining uncontested U.S. military and economic dominance globally. Beshara Doumani argues that it is crucial to understand the current campaign to discipline the academy unleashed after 9/11 as part of a sustained effort to shift public discourse in favor of four major agendas in foreign and domestic policies: dominating the globe through the doctrine of preemptive military intervention with special focus on the Middle East, dismantling the New Deal society, reversing the gains of the various civil rights and environmental movements, and blurring the line between the church and state. (Doumani 2006, 15–16). Central to implementing this project is the desperate attempt by right-wing forces to try “to neutralize two institutions where there is some minimal commitment to free and open inquiry – the media and university system” (Libal 2005). Right-wing efforts to roll back the gains of the welfare state and dismantle all institutions that serve the public good attest to the exercise of a logic of total control that is characteristic not only of all political movements with a totalitarian bent, but also symptomatic of a growing authoritarianism in the United States (Giroux 2005c). In light if this authoritarian agenda, the Bush administration has made it difficult for scientists, because of extraordinary laboratory constraints, to conduct important research unrelated to the war on terrorism.At the same time, scientists who have resisted the ban on stem-cell research as well as the official government position on global warming, HIV transmission, and sex education have been intimidated by Congressional committees who audit their work or threaten “to withdraw federal grant support for projects whose content they find substantively offensive” (Jonathan Cole 2005b, B7).The attempt to selectively restrict the free flow of independent or critical knowledge and ideas is also evident in the government’s attempt to obstruct efforts by foreign students, scholars, and citizens critical of American policies to obtain visas to teach, work, study, lecture, or travel in the United States, thereby “disrupting the flow of the best talent to American universities” (Jonathan Cole 2005b, B7).
The dissenter has become the terrorist to be eradicated – the security state has transformed college censorship into a tool of suppression for radical or brown students under the pretense of enforcing diversity and tolerance for right-wing students. Absent analysis of the War on Terror, liberation becomes impossible because struggles for racial or gender equality becomes coopted to further Islamaphobia and Middle East interventionism.
Chatterjee 14 (Piya Chatterjee – Gender and Woman’s Studies Chair of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Department at Scripps; B.A. from Wellesley in Political Science/Anthropology; M.A. at UChicago in Political Science/Anthropology; PhD at UChicago in Anthropology; numerous awards (professor of the year, bridging theory to practice grant, ford foundation grant, etc); Sunandra Maira – Professor of Asian American studies at UC Davis; Ed.D in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard; “The Imperial University: Race, War, and the Nation-State”, “Academic Contaiment” – entire section, pg. 17 – 25, https://www.csun.edu/cdsc/Imperial20University20Introduction20-20Piya20Chatterjee20and20Sunaina20Maira.pdf, “Academic Containment”, EmmieeM)
State warfare and militarism have shored up deeply powerful notions of patriotism, intertwined with a politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion, through the culture wars that have embroiled the U.S. academy. The fronts of “hot” and “cold” wars – military, cultural, and academic – have rested on an ideological framework that has defined the “enemy” as a threat to U.S. freedom and democracy. This enemy produced and propped up in the shifting culture wars – earlier the Communist, now the (Muslim) terrorist – has always been both external and internal. The overt policing of knowledge production, exemplified by right-wing groups such as ACTA, reveals an ideological battle cry in the “culture wars” that have burgeoned in the wake of the civil rights movement – and the containment and policing demanded within the academy. Defending the civilizational integrity of the nation requires producing a national subject and citizen by regulating the boundaries of what is permissible and desirable to express in national culture – and in the university. As Readings observed, “in modernity, the university becomes the model of the social bond that ties individuals in a common relation to the ideas of the nation-state.” Belonging is figured through the metaphor of patriotic citizenship, in the nation and in the academy, through displays of what Henry Giroux has also called “patriotic correctness”: “an ideology that privileges conformity over critical learning and that represents dissent as something akin to a terrorist act.” This is where the recent culture wars have shaped the politics of what we call academic containment. For right-wing activists, the nation must be fortified by an educational foundation that upholds, at its core, the singular superiority of Western civilization. A nation-state construed as being under attack is in a state of cultural crisis where any sign of disloyalty to the nation is an act of treachery, including acts perceived as intellectual betrayal. The culture wars have worked to uphold a powerful mythology about American democracy and the American Dream and a potent fiction about freedom of expression that in actuality contains academic dissent. This exceptionalist mythology has historically represented the U.S. nation as a beacon of individual liberty and a bulwark against the Evil Empire or Communist bloc; Third Worldist and left insurgent movements, including uprisings within the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and in Central America in the 1980s; Islamist militancy and anti-imperial movements since the 1980s; and the threat posed by all of these to the American “way of life.” The battle against Communism, anti-imperial Third Worldism, and so-called Islamofascism entailed regulating and containing movements sympathetic to these forces at home, including intellectuals with left-leaning tendencies and radical scholars or students – all those likely to contaminate young minds and indoctrinate students in “subversive or “anti-American” ideologies. What does it mean, then, to contain scholars who “cross the line” in their academic work or public engagement? Academic containment can take on many modalities: stigmatizing an academic as too “political,” devaluing and marginalizing scholarship, unleashing an FBI investigation, blacklisting, or not granting scholars the final passport into elite citizenship in the academic nation – that is, tenure. These various modalities of containment, which are discussed by Thomas Abowd, Laura Pulido, and Steven Salaita, among others, narrow the universe of discourse around what is really permissible, acceptable, and tolerable for scholars in the imperial university. All these modes are at work in the three important moments of ideological policing that we touch on here: World War I and the McCarthy era of the 1940s– 1950s, the COINTELPRO era from the late 1950s to early 1970s, and the post-9/ 11 era or “new Cold War,” which is the major focus of this book. Moments of social stress and open dissent about class politics in the United States during World War I and the first decades of the twentieth century make clear that containment worked in tandem with emerging definitions of “academic freedom.” As the U.S. professoriate began to build its ranks at the end of the nineteenth century and a few scholars 48 challenged the status quo, “academic freedom” emerged as a way to deal with these dissenters as well as the “relative insecurity” felt by many in this new profession. 49 Indeed, the tumult of the turn of the century led to a pattern within the academy that has persisted— the exclusion of ideas as well as behavior that the majority did not like and an increasingly internalized notion that “advocacy for social change” was a professional risk for academics. The AAUP’s Seligman Report of 1915 reveals that the notion of academic freedom was, in fact, “deeply enmeshed” with the “overall status, security, and prestige of the academic profession.” 50 Setting up procedural safeguards was important, but its language regarding “appropriate scholarly behavior” and cautiousness about responding to controversial matters in the academy (by ensuring that all sides of the case were presented) suggested the limits of dissent. Academic freedom, then, is a notion that is deeply bound up with academic containment— a paradox suggested in our earlier discussion of protest and inclusion/ incorporation in the academy and one that has become increasingly institutionalized since the formation of the AAUP. The academic repression of the McCarthy era received its impetus from President Truman’s March 22, 1947, executive order that “established a new loyalty secrecy program for federal employees.” However, the roots of institutional capitulation— by both administrators and faculty— when the state targeted academics who were communists or viewed as “sympathizers” are much deeper. It is also significant that the notion of “appropriate behavior” for faculty rested on a majoritarian academic “consensus” about “civil” and “collegial” comportment. For example, Ellen Schechter notes cases prior to the Cold War where scholars were fired not necessarily for their political affiliations per se but due to “their outspoken-ness.” 51 This repression from within— not just beyond— the academy reveals the cultures of academic containment where, as Pulido, Gumbs, and Rojas remind us, certain kinds of “unruliness” must be managed or excised. The logic of academic containment was dramatically staged during the civil rights and antiwar struggles, when the FBI surveilled and arrested Black Power, antiimperialist, and radical scholar-activists during the era of COINTELPRO (1956– 1971). Angela Davis, most famously, was fired from UCLA by then California governor Ronald Reagan for being a member of the Communist Party. Some of these radical intellectuals went on to develop and establish programs in ethnic studies, critical race studies, and women’s studies, fields that later became embroiled in the conservative attacks that unfolded in the 1980s and 1990s against the specter of an “un-American” and “divisive” multiculturalism . Works such as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted Our Higher Education, and in some ways also David Hollinger’s Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism generated anxieties about the presumed failure of university education to transmit an essential set of knowledges and a contentious debate about the divisiveness of multiculturalism and movements for group rights. 52 Right-wing hysteria and neoconservative moral panics in the culture wars were accompanied by liberal concerns that ethnic studies, and to some extent women’s studies and queer studies, were devolving into “identity politics.” Liberal -left intellectuals, such as Todd Gitlin , worried that ethnic and racial studies asserted an identitarianism that was an abandonment of a “proper” left politics. Salaita points out that Gitlin also criticized as irresponsible scholars who challenged the policies of the Israeli state, as have other progressive scholars open to critiques of militarism or colonialism— except in the case of Israel. In other words, the culture wars were fought not just between the right and left but within the liberal-progressive left as well. In her painful— and politically revealing— experience with Chicana/ o studies in California public institutions over the past twenty years, Rojas offers a glimpse “of the ways imperial projects order gender/ sexual/ racial politics at the public university” and the “resulting devastating violence deployed on subjects deemed dangerous to the colonial imaginary of a colonial , heteropatriarchal Chicano studies.” The difficult question that Rojas’s “testimonio” addresses is how to connect this hetero-masculinist logic and violence— what she calls heteropatriracialities— to the “incorporation” of ostensibly liberatory, decolonizing projects such as Chicano/ a studies that were birthed through the antiwar and antiracist movements of the 1960s. We view this perverse “incorporation” of ethnic studies as the result of a dangerous “internalization” of the imperial project of the university and also as meshing well with the hetero-masculinist and classed cultures that shape the dominant, everyday practices of the imperial academy. Containment is not abstract at all— it is marked decisively, and often violently, on specific kinds of bodies whose presence is definitively marked as “Other,” as evident in Abowd’s and Godrej’s chapters. If one speaks from already dangerous embodiments, structured historically, then that speech risks always being seen as a threat. The “natives” within the academy must be most careful and most civilized in their speech, as Rojas and Abowd suggest. Their queer/ sexed/ raced bodies mark always-possible threats. There are enough natives who perform the terms of civilization and capitulation and contain themselves: that is how empires have always ruled— through tokenism, exceptionalism, and divide-and-rule. When it comes from “within,” containment and silencing— as Rojas shows us— can be the most devastating of all. These stories of academic containment must be situated within the culture wars and also within the context of what Christopher Newfield, among other critics, calls a “long counterrevolution” against the gains of the civil rights and left movements of previous decades. 53 Newfield argues that right-wing movements waged a cultural offensive that targeted “progressive trends in the public universities” as an important front of “roundabout wars” on the middle class, waged through the “culture wars on higher education”: “The culture wars were economic wars” against the new, increasingly racially integrated middle class, “discrediting the cultural framework that had been empowering that group.” 54 In other words, the culture wars were also class wars staged on a racial battlefield, for the corporatization and privatization of the public university, as in California, occurred as it was becoming more racially integrated. 55 Several chapters illustrate the ways in which academic containment emerges with and though the containment of economic, racial, and cultural struggles . In Gumbs’s chapter, the class wars are situated in the racial management of student of color and immigrant populations in the CUNY system in the post– civil rights era of open admissions and campus occupations by students; violent policing to enforce “law and order” accompanied rising incarceration rates of people of color. Similarly, Godrej’s chapter illuminates the ways in which protests of university privatization and nonviolent civil disobedience by students and faculty during the current budget crisis in the University of California have been met with police brutality by increasingly militarized campuses; casting these movements as a threat evades the structural violence of tuition hikes, exclusion, impoverishment, home foreclosures, and the “neoliberal disinvestment in the concept of education as a public good.” In effect, the neoliberal structuring of the university is also a racial strategy of management of an increasingly diverse student population, as increasing numbers of minority and immigrant students have entered public higher education. Well-funded, neoconservative organizations and partisan groups, such as ACTA, David Horowitz’s Freedom Center, and Campus Watch, have placed ethnic studies, feminist and queer studies, and critical cultural studies in their bull’s-eye as the political project of leftist professors running amok in the academy and teaching biased curricula. In addition, campaigns such as Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights and Student Bill of Rights constructed the figure of a new victim in the culture wars: the “American student” whose freedom to challenge these partisan faculty had been suppressed .56 According to these right-wing campaigns, “radical” scholars were force-feeding U.S. college students with anti-American views, and right-wing students were being marginalized and “discriminated” against due to their political ideology and affirmative action programs. Thus the language of marginalization and exclusion was turned on its head, as the discourse of right-wing victimhood and ideological discrimination was unleashed against the political movements and intellectual projects that opposed racial and class inequality. In addition, the right appropriated the language of “diversity,” a key point of contradiction in the academic culture wars. For example, the “Students for Academic Freedom” campaign launched by Horowitz used the notion of “intellectual pluralism” to mask its well-orchestrated attack on the left. 57 The cultural right manufactured a portrait of itself as the true advocate of intellectual pluralism and freedom, remaking diversity through a “free market” model based on the right to choice in the marketplace of ideas. 58 The notion of choice, central to models of flexible accumulation and global economic competitiveness for proponents of neoliberal capitalism, underlies the tenet of intellectual choice. A “weak” multiculturalism and liberal notion of tolerance thus served the right well, for they used it to argue that the problem was not simply that of “diversity,” which they apparently embraced, but that there wasn’t enough “intellectual diversity” on college campuses. Teaching, and also research, was becoming one-sided, to the detriment of those upholding “true” American values, who were increasingly marginalized in hotbeds of left indoctrination into anti-Americanism on college campuses. In addition, as Pulido’s case study demonstrates, as faculty and administrators of color—not to mention women— have made their way into the ranks of university management, academic institutions can hide behind the language of racial (and gender) representativeness and tokenist inclusion to deflect critiques of systemic problems with faculty governance. The strategic co-option of the language of pluralism for academic containment is nowhere more evident than in the assault on progressive scholarship in Middle East studies and postcolonial studies and in the intense culture wars over Islam, the War on Terror, and Israel-Palestine. The 9/11 attacks and the heightened Islamaphobia they generated allowed Zionist and neoconservative groups to intensify accusations that progressive Middle East studies scholars and scholars critical of U.S. foreign policy were guilty of bias and “one-sided” partisanship, as observed in accounts of censure, suspicion, and vilification by Abowd, De Genova, and Salaita. The post-9/11 culture wars conjured up new and not-so-new phantoms of enemies – in particular, the racialized specter of the “terrorist.” This figure, and the racial panic associated with it, has been sedimented in the national imaginary as synonymous with the “Muslim” and the “Arab” since the Iranian Revolution of 1978 – 1979 and the First Intifada against Israeli occupation in the late 1980s. The War on terror consolidated Orientalist caricatures of Muslim fanatics and Arab militants, but it is important to note that these also dredged up avatars of a historical logic of containment and annihilation of indigenous others. The native, the barbarian, and the foreigner converge in this cultural imaginary that legitimizes violence against anti-Western, uncivilized regions incapable of democratic self-governance and that is produced by expert knowledge of other peoples and regions. The wars in Iraq and “Af-Pak” and the global hunt for terrorists entailed an intensified suspicion and scrutiny of ideologies that supported militant resistance or “anti-American” sentiments and necessitated academic research on communities that were supposedly “breeding grounds” for terrorism. The post-9/11 panic about Muslim terrorists and enemy aliens increasingly focused on the threat of “homegrown terrorism” as the War on terror shifted its focus to “radicalized” communities within the United States, especially Muslim American youth. At the same time, as Godrej observes, the criminalization of those considered threats to national security has included the violent repression of Occupy activists and student protesters and indefinite detention authorized by the PATRIOT (Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act and the National Defense Authorization Act. Protests focused on higher education thus blur into dissent against U.S. warfare and the homeland security state in a climate of heightened campus securitization and university collaboration with the FBI in the interest of “public safety.” Anarchists are considered domestic terror threats to be contained, and Muslim or Arab American students (or faculty) who are also anarchists are subjected to multiple levels of containment and scrutiny, as suggested in the chapter by Falcon et al. Academic containment is clearly part of a larger politics of repression and policing in the national security state that affects faculty and students as well as the campus climate in general. While the FBI has interviewed unknown numbers of Muslim and Arab American college students and infiltrated and monitored Muslim student organizations since 9/11, counterterrorism experts have generated models of “radicalization” of alienation. Regimes of surveillance, detention, and deportation of terrorists, or terrorist sympathizers lurking within the nation, are underwritten by a gendered and racialized logic: the imperative to save women, particularly Muslim and Middle Eastern women, from inherently misogynistic Muslim and Middle Eastern men. Cultural knowledge and academic expertise are needed to refine policies of humanitarian intervention in these imperial cartographies of nations or cultures whose women are in need of rescue and nations or civilizations in need of saving, as brilliantly argued by Jasbir Puar in her work on U.S. and Israeli homonationalisms. While it is easy to critique overtly racist commentators in the culture wars, we must note that it is not just right wing but also liberal critics and scholars who worry that a new “political correctness” is supposedly silencing critiques of cultures and religious communities whose social norms are inherently antithetical to Western secular modernity (that is, Muslims and Arabs). This allegation ignores the deafening silences in many quarters – including in the academy – about ongoing state terror against particular, racialized populations. Indeed, the antiwar movement has been dismally weak on most college campuses since 2003-2004 and there have barely been any campus protests against the wars and drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan that continue to be waged by Obama or against the prison at Guantanamo. A troubling trend since 9/11 is that U.S. liberal feminism concerned about the oppression of Muslim women – but not about the occupation, colonization, and devastation of their societies by warfare or neoliberal capitalism – has found perhaps unlikely allies in neocon activists in the culture wars, from Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Horowitz. And equally significantly, these external attacks on critical scholarship have occurred in a context where the neoliberal privatization of the university has accelerated and where attacks on women’s and gender studies, queer studies, and also ethnic studies programs have intensified. In addition, we see a gendered and racial logic in academic containment where the figure of the “angry Arab” (or Muslim) male scholar is often subjected to policing by a deeply politicized notion of academic “civility.” There is a general uneasiness about male scholars of color as inappropriately aggressive if they challenge the status quo, especially in the context of U.S. nationalisms and nationalisms allied with U.S. hegemony – that is, American Zionist movements. This is evident from the string of campaigns targeting Arab and Palestinian male academics in the United States, such as Sami Al-Arian, Joseph Massad, Rashid Khalidi, and Abowd, who alludes to the racial logic in the allegations drummed up against him by Zionist activists and the dismal, and in some cases hostile, response of the university administration. So while there are indeed Arab and Muslim female academics who have been targeted by Zionist campaigns, notably the Palestinian academic Nadia Abu El Haj, it is evident that Arab and Muslim masculinities are framed in the culture wars as inherently violent and potentially perverse. At the minimum, they are insufficiently conforming to or excessively threatening to white American masculinity, and, and worst, they are an existential threat to the nation, but in either case they must be contained. On the other hand, Arab and Muslim femininities are viewed by this same Orientalist logic as inherently victimized and in need of protection, but it is generally difficult to view the Arab or Muslim male scholar as in need of saving and support within the framework of liberal white “civility.” Abowd pinpoints the unease with “uppity” Arab male academics who challenge the powerful status quo in the academy in a climate in which Arabophobia, not to mention Islamophobia, has consolidated the conflation of critiques of Israel with sympathy for terrorism. This is a moment in which even campus boycott and divestment movements focused on Israel are attacked as “anti-Semitic,” as evident in the firestorm over the panel on boycott at Brooklyn College in 2013; there is a complex conflation of racialization, racism, gendering, and right-wing nationalism that is at work here, one that Puar and Salaita address. Furthermore, as Abowd notes, overtly racialized constructions and suspicion of Muslim male academics – or academics who might be Muslim – as inherently anti-Semitic and militant and who must be disciplined, emerge in unexpected moments and in academic spaces where one would assume this kind of blatant racial suspicion is impermissible. Falcon et al,’s chapter cites the poignant case of an Arab/Muslim American male student who was removed from the classroom by police and was considered a “threat” due to his radical, anti-imperialism critiques, which not surprising, he felt increasingly fearful of expressing in class. Their chapter reminds us that we need to think more deeply about how the post-9/11 apparatus of policing and surveillance has affected students who feel the most vulnerable and has transformed the classroom environment. The racial and gendered logic of academic containment is powerfully evident in De Genova’s autobiographical chapter, which suggests that the critique of white male scholars who directly challenge dominant ideologies of militarism and U.S. foreign policy, if expressed in terms that unsettle the acceptable academic consensus in elite institutions, is also deeply troubling and compels other academics to distance themselves from dissent considered beyond the pale. Processes of racialization and gendering – the building of consensus around war and nation making – are intertwined with the daily work and lived experience of scholars within the university, making it a highly charged site in debates about the mission of higher education and the future of the nation-state.
Any form of free speech restrictions leads to massive overreach and censorship of minority movements – empirically proven
Gey 98 (Steven G. Gey – John W. and Ashley E. Frost Professor of Law, Florida State University College of Law, “Postmodern Censorship Revisited: A Reply to Richard Delgado”, “Professor Delgado and the Problem of Government Overreaching” – partway through, EmmieeM)
Professor Delgado responds to the problem of controlling the application of speech-regulation statues by denying that the problem exists. Delgado argues that “few, if any, of the dangers of censorship loom” when the government adopts postmodern censorship proposals such as university speech codes. Likewise, Delgado criticizes my “fixation on the supposed political dangers of hate-speech regulation” and laments my “repeated deployment of the shopworn slippery-slope argument that if courts give government the power to regulate speech in one area, it will soon seize even more and use it in *1083 ways minorities might not like.” Apparently, Delgado believes that these “supposed political dangers” exist mainly in my fertile imagination. “One notices immediately that Gey makes this argument almost entirely by means of hypothetical language,” Delgado notes; he then concludes that “anything is possible, of course, but it just has not happened.” The assertion that I fail to provide concrete examples of government overreaching in the regulation of speech will come as somewhat of a surprise to readers who managed to digest more than three hundred footnotes in my article – many of which refer to specific examples of such excesses. Indeed, a careful reading of Delgado’s response reveals that he completely discounts many of these examples on the grounds that they “took place long before hate-speech rules were in effect and were more the product of political excess than lack of First Amendment zeal.” The fact that “political excess” in the pursuit of censorship frequently has been able to override “First Amendment zeal” is precisely my point. Delgado asks us to discount the admitted excesses of previous generations of censors by placing our faith in the judgment and restraint of the new censors. Such faith is unwarranted, however. By their nature, censors are seldom sensitive to the consequences of their actions, and blind faith in those who exercise censorship power will offer little or no protection for those whose views challenge the cherished values of officials representing the status quo. Delgado’s blithe dismissal of my observation that modern censorship proposals pose dangers of overreaching identical in scope to those evident in prior eras of “political excess” provides further cause for hesitation in giving the postmodern censors the power they seek. For example, Delgado asserts without equivocation that “Western democracies that have enacted hate-speech laws, such as Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, have scarcely suffered a diminution of respect for free speech.” But even a brief glance at how hate-speech laws actually have been enforced in Western democracies unencumbered by the First Amendment exposes a much more troublesome reality. 1084* Consider the British experience, for example. One of the first prosecutions under the British statue prohibiting incitement to racial hatred involved Michael Malik, a.k.a Michael X, who was the leader of the Racial Adjustment Action society, A Black Power movement in Britain. Malik was sent to prison for twelve months for making vaguely threatening statements deemed critical of whites. Soon after his conviction, four prominent members of another Black Power organization were convicted under the same statute for similar statements they made at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. Among the statements cited in the prosecution’s case was one defendant’s assertion that “Anglo-Saxons are the number one enemy of the human race and are responsible for racialism. Each time we kill a white man in Africa they say we are going back to the jungle, but is not England a jungle?” Canadian hate-speech laws have been applied in a similarly uneven fashion. In 1989, soon after Iranian religious officials issued a bounty for the death of author Salman Rushdie, Canadian customs officials used the Canadian hate-speech laws to justify seizing copies of Rushdie’s offending novel, The Satanic Verses. The officials acted on the complaint of the Islamic Society of North America, which wanted the book banned. In explaining this action, a spokesperson for the customs department told the Chicago Tribune that “this department’s obligation is to protect Canadian society from the importation of materials that don’t conform to Canadian values. . . We treat complaints we receive quite seriously.” The Canadian authorities’ lack of judgment in the Rushdie case was not an isolated incident: The same Canadian law was also used to justify Canadian customs’ month-long seizure of a file sympathetic to Nelson Mandela because *1085 it “stirred ill feelings against white South Africans.” Both the Rushdie book and the Mandela film were eventually allowed into the country. But it says something disturbing about the psychology of censorship that Canadian customs officials attended so closely to the feelings of white South Africans and treated complaints against The Satanic Verses “quite seriously” at a time when the novel was a focal point of international efforts on behalf of artistic freedom. These incidents underscore an obvious point that Delgado repeatedly denies: Censors usually take their job seriously, which inevitably leads to official overreaching in the noble service of regulating “bad” ideas. Part of the problem in applying hate-speech laws consistently is that such laws often are premised explicitly on the desire to suppress a particular point of view. Rigorous adherence to such a premise will require officials to suppress even ambiguous expressions of the prohibited viewpoint, which will lead to official misjudgment and suppression of legitimate debate. Contrary to Delgado’s confident assertions about the benign effects of hate-speech regulation in other Western countries, evidence from these countries confirms the tendency towards overzealous suppression. Consider, for example, the application of French hate-speech laws to the works of historians who challenge accepted accounts of recent historical events. These laws were first applied to University of Lyon Professor Robert Faurisson and the French magazine Le Choc du Mois The Shock of the Month. Faurisson and Le Choc were convicted under a 1990 French hate-speech law criminalizing expression disputing the existence of the Holocaust. The conviction was based on an article written by Faurisson in which he asserted that “no Jews were gassed to death in World War II concentration camps.” Given the absurdity of Faurisson’s views, this prosecution caused little distress. But the French government soon applies the same law to Roger Garaudy’s book, The Founding Myths of Israeli Policy. Unlike Faurisson, Garaudy does not deny that the Nazis killed millions of Jews. Rather, Garaudy’s offenses are that he chooses to call these killings “pogroms” or “massacres” rather than “genocide” or a *1086 “Holocaust,” and that he claims “that Jewish leaders in the 1940s exaggerated the Holocaust in order to help gain political support for the establishment of the state of Israel.” The fact that a criminal prosecution could be based on a historian's choice of nouns is troubling, even when applied to a Holocaust skeptic. Moreover, the use of French hate-speech laws to sanitize historical debate has not stopped with Garaudy, nor has it been limited to discussions of the Holocaust. In 1995, a French court fined Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis the equivalent of $ 2000 for comments he made in an interview with Le Monde about Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1915. Lewis's infraction was to deny that the word "genocide" could be applied legitimately to the Armenian situation, since, in Lewis's view, there was no evidence that Turkey engaged in a "deliberate, planned extermination or attempted extermination of a people." 
Security thrives on insecurity – the state fabricates dangerous “Others” to justify endless warfare in order to sustain hegemony and the myth of perpetual threats. Any weighing calculus that fails to account for the invisible violence happening in the status quo is epistemologically flawed – only through acknowledging that the War on Terror is fueled by the torture and slaughter of ordinary citizens can we deconstruct securitization.
McClintock 9 (Anne McClintock – B.A in English from University of Cape Town; M.Phil in Linguistics at the University of Cambridge; PhD in English Literature from Columbia; previous Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at Columbia“Paranoid Empire: Specters From Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib”, pgs. 50-54, http://english110fall2014leroy.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2014/06/13.1.mcclintock.pdf, EmmieeM)
The question is still open: what is the purpose of Guantanamo Bay? Is it a prison for “terrorists”? Is it an interrogation camp for suspects? Or is it perhaps something altogether more harrowing? By now it has been established that most of the men, and yes, the teenagers imprisoned, and many of them tortured, at Guantanamo are neither terrorists nor “enemy combatants” but innocent people. By now it has also been established that most of the men and, yes, the women and children imprisoned, and many of them tortured, at Abu Ghraib and other US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan are likewise neither terrorists not enemy combatants but innocent people, most often picked up in random sweeps or handed over for considerable bounty: taxi drivers, shepherds, shopkeepers, laborers, prostitutes, relatives of possible “suspects,” and in some cases children and the very elderly, people who, by the government’s own admission, could not provide and have not provided “actionable intelligence.” The specters from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib place in our hands a profound and compromising question: what is the motive for torturing people whom the government and the interrogators know are innocent? This may appear to be a simple question, but it is not. It is a terrible question with terrible implications, not only for the people immeserated by ruinous US occupation but also for how we understand what kind of empire it is that now extends its ghostly filaments beyond Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib throughout the shadowy, global gulag or secret interrogation prisons, “black sites,” torture ships, and of-shore internment camps now know to straddle the world. Simply to ask the question, why torture innocent people? Is to enter a dark labyrinth, a labyrinth or imperial paranoia marked on all sides by flashpoints of violence and atrocity (the massacres at Haditha, Fallujah, Nisour Square, Azizabad, and Nadali only a handful among many), a labyrinth haunted by the historical ghostings and half-concealed specters that I call “imperial déjà vu.” By now it is fair to say that the United States has come to be dominated by two grand and dangerous hallucinations: the promise of benign US globalization and the permanent threat of the “war on terror.” I have come to feel that we cannot understand the extravagance of the violence to which the US government has committed itself after 9/11 – two countries invaded, thousands of innocent people imprisoned, killed, and tortured – unless we grasp a defining feature of our moment, that is, deep and disturbing doubleness with respect to power. Taking shape, as it now does, around fantasies of global omnipotence (Operation Infinite Justice, the War to End All Evil) coinciding with nightmares of impending attack, the United States has entered the domain of paranoia: dream world and catastrophe. For it is only in paranoia that one finds simultaneously and in such condensed form both deliriums of absolute power and forebodings of perpetual threat. Hence the spectral and nightmarish quality of the “war on terror,” a limitless war against a limitless threat, a war vaunted by the US administration to encompass all of space persisting without end. But the war on terror is into a real war, for “terror” is not an identifiable enemy nor a strategic, real-world target. The war on terror is what William Gibson calls elsewhere “a consensual hallucination,” and the US government can fling its military might against ghostly apparitions and hallucinate a victory over all evil only at the cost of catastrophic self-delusion and the infliction of great calamities elsewhere. I have come to feel that we urgently need to make visible (the better politically to challenge) those established but concealed circuits of imperial violence that now animate the war on terror. We need, as urgently, to illuminate the continuities that connect those circuits of imperial violence abroad with the vast, internal shadowlands of prisons and supermaxes – the modern “slave-ships on the middle passage to nowhere” – that have come to characterize the United States as a super-carceral state. Can we, the uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of national things? If a long-established but primarily covert US imperialism has, since 9/11, manifested itself more aggressively as an overt empire, does the terrain and object of intellectual inquiry, as well as the claims of political responsibility, not also extend beyond that useful fiction of the “exceptional nation” to embrace the shadowlands of empire? If so, how can we theorize the phantasmagoric, imperial violence that has come so dreadfully to constitute our kinship with the ordinary people, an imperial violence which in collusion with a complicit corporate media would render itself invisible, casting states of emergency into fitful shadow and fleshly bodies into specters? For imperialism is not something that happens elsewhere, an offshore fact to be deplored but as easily ignored. Rather, the force of empire comes to reconfigure, from within, the nature and violence of the nation-state itself, giving rise to perplexing questions: Who under an empire are “we”, the people? And who are the ghosted, ordinary people beyond the nation-state who, in turn, constitute “us”? We now inhabit a crisis of violence and the visible. How do we insist on seeing the violence that the imperial state attempts to render invisible, while also seeing the ordinary people afflicted by that violence? For to allow the spectral, disfigured people (especially those under torture) obliged to inhabit the haunted no-places and penumbra of empire to be made visible as ordinary people is to forfeit the long-held US claim of moral and cultural exceptionalism, the traditional self-identity of the United States as the uniquely superior, universal standard-bearer of moral authority, a tenacious, national mythology of originary innocence now in tatters. The deeper question, however, is not only how to see but also how to theorize and oppose the violence without becoming beguiled by the seductions of spectacle alone.6 Perhaps in the labyrinths of torture we must also find a way to speak with ghosts, for specters disturb the authority of vision and the hauntings of popular memory disrupt the great forgettings of official history. Paranoia. Why paranoia? Can we fully understand the proliferating circuits of imperial violence—the very eclipsing of which gives to our moment its uncanny, phantasmagoric cast—without understanding the pervasive presence of the paranoia that has come, quite violently, to manifest itself across the political and cultural spectrum as a defining feature of our time? By paranoia, I mean not simply Hofstadter’s famous identification of the US state’s tendency toward conspiracy theories.7 Rather, I conceive of paranoia as an inherent contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided phantasm that oscillates precariously between deliriums of grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat, a deep and dangerous doubleness with respect to power that is held in unstable tension, but which, if suddenly destabilized (as after 9/11), can produce pyrotechnic displays of violence. The pertinence of understanding paranoia, I argue, lies in its peculiarly intimate and peculiarly dangerous relation to violence.8 Let me be clear: I do not see paranoia as a primary, structural cause of US imperialism nor as its structuring identity. Nor do I see the US war on terror as animated by some collective, psychic agency, submerged mind, or Hegelian “cunning of reason,” nor by what Susan Faludi calls a national “terror dream.”9 Nor am I interested in evoking paranoia as a kind of psychological diagnosis of the imperial nation-state. Nations do not have “psyches” or an “unconscious”; only people do. Rather, a social entity such as an organization, state, or empire can be spoken of as “paranoid” if the dominant powers governing that entity cohere as a collective community around contradictory cultural narratives, self-mythologies, practices, and identities that oscillate between delusions of inherent superiority and omnipotence, and phantasms of threat and engulfment. The term paranoia is analytically useful here, then, not as a description of a collective national psyche, nor as a description of a universal pathology, but rather as an analytically strategic concept, a way of seeing and being attentive to contradictions within power, a way of making visible (the better politically to oppose) the contradictory flashpoints of violence that the state tries to conceal. Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person and society, between psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather than binary, for its violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate memories of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and revenge, in such a way as to be productive at times of unspeakable violence. For how else can we understand such debauches of cruelty? A critical question still remains: does not something terrible have to happen to ordinary people (military police, soldiers, interrogators) to instill in them, as ordinary people, in the most intimate, fleshly ways, a paranoid cast that enables them to act compliantly with, and in obedience to, the paranoid visions of a paranoid state? Perhaps we need to take a long, hard look at the simultaneously humiliating and aggrandizing rituals of militarized institutions, whereby individuals are first broken down, then reintegrated (incorporated) into the larger corps as a unified, obedient fighting body, the methods by which schools, the military, training camps— not to mention the paranoid image-worlds of the corporate media—instill paranoia in ordinary people and fatally conjure up collective but unstable fantasies of omnipotence.10 In what follows, I want to trace the flashpoints of imperial paranoia into the labyrinths of torture in order to illuminate three crises that animate our moment: the crisis of violence and the visible, the crisis of imperial legitimacy, and what I call “the enemy deficit.” I explore these flashpoints of imperial paranoia as they emerge in the torture at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. I argue that Guantánamo is the territorializing of paranoia and that torture itself is paranoia incarnate, in order to make visible, in keeping with Hazel Carby’s brilliant work, those contradictory sites where imperial racism, sexuality, and gender catastrophically collide.11
Free speech codes shut down campus criticism and replace it with government-approved propaganda – there’s a massive spillover effect because journalism grads lose the ability to pursue controversial pieces and censorship becomes normalized
Sanders 6 (Chris Sanders –  University of Arizona Law Review, “Censorship 101: Anti-Hazelwood Laws and the Preservation of Free Speech at Colleges and Universities”, “Say no More: Hazelwood’s Dangers For College Students’ Free Expression” – through the end of “Too Much Freedom: How the Extension of Hazelwood to Universities Could Endanger the Future of the First Amendment”, pgs. 171 – 173, https://www.law.ua.edu/pubs/lrarticles/Volume2058/Issue201/sanders.pdf , EmmieeM)
Post-Hazelwood censorship disputes have not been limited to high schools; a number of colleges and universities have gotten in on the action as well. In 2003, the acting president of Hampton University in Virginia seized the entire press run of the student newspaper, Hampton Script, after it printed her letter responding to a story about a school cafeteria’s healthcode violations on page three, rather than on the front page as she requested. An Indiana university last year briefly instituted a policy to require students to get approval from the school’s marketing department before speaking with reporters. In Alabama, an art student sued in late 2005 after university officials removed his artwork, which included nudity, from an on-campus exhibit that cautioned visitors before they entered that some of the works might contain nudity. And a growing number of higher education institutions have begun to test the First Amendment’s boundaries by establishing “free speech zones” that limit the on-campus locations where citizens can express their grievances and by instituting (frequently overbroad) “speech codes” in an attempt to combat racial and sexual harassment. In today’s atmosphere of increasing collegiate regulation of student speech, the application of the Hazelwood test to universities could unintentionally cripple college journalism. Because most colleges’ student publications receive some form of financial assistance from the university – either directly through student fee allocations or indirectly through the provision of free or low-cost office space or equipment – the Hazelwood framework established for school-sponsored student expression potentially could apply to the vast majority of college publications. Such an outcome would leave student newspaper or yearbook editors in a difficult position: Do they play nice and allow administrators to exercise prior review, which could convert their publications into little more than propaganda-laden puff pieces, or do they stick to their ethical guns and risk funding cuts or worse? Under Hazelwood, college editors would be forced to conduct a cost-benefit analysis when faced with a column that expresses an unpopular opinion or a story that could make their school look bad. Inevitably, like many of their high school counterparts, some might decide to forego the hassle. The fallout from Hazelwood’s application to colleges would not be limited to newspapers and yearbooks. Other forms of student expression such as a student group’s choice of speaker or performance artist, could be subject to administrative veto. Newly created publications would be especially vulnerable, as they would likely have a more difficult time demonstrating their status as a public forum than established publications. Even professors could wake up one day to discover that the academic freedom they have cherished for so long is now nothing more than “a professional courtesy that college administrators may lawfully disregard on pedagogical grounds.” If Hazelwood arrives on college campuses, it is difficult to see a stopping point for the wreckage it could leave in its wake. 2. “Too Much Freedom”: How the Extension of Hazelwood to Universities Could Endanger the Future of the First Amendment. Because Hazelwood, intentionally or otherwise, greatly expanded secondary school officials’ powers to censor student speech on a host of topics, college effectively provides many young people with their first taste of largely unfettered free speech rights. If Hazelwood follows students to universities, however, their introduction to a fully functioning free press could be delayed for years longer. This result would be disastrous for the journalism profession, which soon would find its ranks filled with freshly minted journalism school graduates inadequately prepared to pursue controversial stories aggressively and to endure the backlash therefrom. It also likely would exacerbate what appears to be a disturbing trend in American society: the existence of a sizable plurality of citizens who do not understand the importance of free speech rights. A 2004 University of Connecticut survey of more than 112,000 high school students found that 32 of them think the press has “too much freedom” and that 36 believe newspapers should clear their reporting with the government before publications. Meanwhile, the 2005 State of the First Amendment survey discovered that those beliefs often do not change much once citizens reach the age of maturity; 23 of the survey’s adult respondents said the First Amendment “goes too far in the rights it guarantees,” down from almost 50 in 2002 (shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks). The extension of Hazelwood to colleges could lead an even larger number of Americans, during some of their most formative years, to become more accepting of official limitations on the content of their speech. That, in turn, could pave a dangerous path toward vastly expanded federal and state speech regulation and a society in which “free” speech is nothing more than a distant memory from an earlier time.
Discourse is a pre-requisite to change – relationships must first be made visible before reformation can occur
Wingenbach 11 (Ed, Notre Dame Government and international studies PhD, “Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy,” pg 190-198, https://books.google.com/books?id=7-8JrC64UgwCandprintsec=frontcover//LADI)
Third, because Knops ignores the situated source of antagonism and the persistence of hegemony in the construction of meaning he misconceives the problem of subordination and oppression. The objective of agonistic democracy is not to eliminate all relations of domination and oppression; this sort of utopian aspiration leads precisely to the rationalist exclusions they are at pains to expose. Rather, the goal is to craft conditions under which these relations can be made visible, and thus contested. The common values that make agonism possible, and their dominant institutional interpretations, inevitably and explicitly favor some identities, interests, or other articulations of subjectivity over others. In fact, these values and their dominant interpretations act to shape subjectivity so that they are seen not as constructions but simply "the way things are." Because Knops assumes the project of agonism is to eliminate these hegemonic relations of domination, he also assumes that Mouffe needs to establish an unbiased and objective set of criteria by which to identify and ameliorate these injustices. Hence his claim that her theory ultimately must rely on rationalist arguments. But agonism does not share this aspiration. Instead pluralist agonism accepts that the inevitability of injustice is the price of democratic plurality, and endeavors to identify practices that render these injustices amenable to contestation. Agonism hopes to set interpretation against interpretation, identity against identity, hegemonic claim against hegemonic claim, so that in the perpetual conflict between citizens the burden of domination shifts and moves. Where Knops sees unbiased consensus on rational principles eliminating domination, Mouffe sees an elaboration of hegemonic power so thorough as to make the injustices it produces not merely invisible but unthinkable. When Knops concludes that Mouffe's agonism should be seen as an adjunct to deliberation, one that calls attention to "the erroneous projection of one party's understandings onto another, constraining their meanings - it is fraught with the possibility of hegemony" (2007, 125), he is mistakenly subsuming agonism into deliberation by eliding the ontological distinctions between the two accounts. Deliberative democracy has faith that careful scrutiny of arguments, rational evaluation of principles, and deliberation oriented toward understanding will produce an unforced consensus shorn of power, domination, and manipulation. Its reconstruction of democratic principles is one that aspires to transcend the ambiguity of the everyday in order to resolve injustice. It takes this possibility as a real one, because its ontology is fundamentaily committed to the universality of human nature. Agonistic democrats refuse any such commitments, asserting instead that the premises of social life are themselves products of humanity, and that the ontology within which our politics emerges is itself a product of political assertions. No standard can be found or created that can extract us from this process of meaning creation, and thus all political standards should be understood as both historically constraining (we cannot start anew) and subject to collective reconstruction (we can act upon our situation by rendering it visible). Nonetheless, Knops's confusion is understandable-how is one to know what this process of contestation and reinterpretation looks like, absent some institutional suggestions consistent with the particularity of the history that makes agonism attractive? Political liberalism, modified as I suggested in the last chapter, helps clarify this question. Pluralist agonism requires some shared commitments without which the unavoidably contentious process of disputing hegemonic interpretations will descend into antagonism. Precisely because the clashes of politics are not oriented toward consensus, and precisely because democratic engagement always involves challenges with the potential to become explicitly violent (as all challenges are, at some level, hegemonic contestations), some institutional norms are needed to confine or limit the range of these battles. Agonism proposes that our situated context may provide governing norms that permit the procedures of contestation to occur, without those same norms becoming idealized or acquiring pseudo¬transcendent status. We begin from "our" norms, which contain within them some commitment to fundamental values (liberty/equality), but make the contest over the meaning and implementation of these norms a central aspect of institutional and political debate. Schmittian violence emerges when contestants cannot perceive a commonality sufficient to justify limitations of the tactics employed. But the commonality that permits these shared limits need not hold extra-political status. Put differently, the concern of critics of agonism seems to be that the barrier to violence can only be effective if it is itself uncontaminated by the conflicts it is meant to mediate, or can be sufficiently abstracted from these conflicts as to play a semi-transcendental role. If the boundaries of engagement are recognized as being themselves in play, then they will lack sufficient purchase to restrain politics. Thus the proposed dichotomy: either agonism will collapse into warfare, or agonism presupposes a hidden extra-political claim. Emphasizing the post-foundational elements from which agonism derives helps illustrate why this dichotomy can be plausibly refused. This is why the tum to Rawls (and, to a lesser extent, Habermas) is useful for agonistic democracy. Political liberalism details the way institutional and cultural structures shape and constrain political engagement without demanding an external anchor. Political liberalism is a situated reconstruction of the emergence of the values of liberal democracy and the operation of those values upon citizens. It is only the Rawlsian insistence upon a well-ordered society that makes political liberalism appear as a moralized account of democratic politics rather than a situated and contingent one. As I show in the previous chapter, the effectiveness of the situated norms of liberalism does not, ultimately, depend upon the semi-transcendental status Rawls evokes. That these values are ours historically, and that they shape our identities and aspirations contingently, provides sufficient status to guide political action. Highlighting this contingency and inviting citizen engagement in conflicts over the interpretation and application of these values need not weaken their pragmatic significance. It is only dangerous to expose the contingency of our deeply shared ontopolitical premises if one of those premises suggests that legitimacy must be derived from criteria not subject to human agency. It is on this point that agonism captures better than many theories the central insights of democratic theory. To the extent democracy is identified with individual and collective autonomy from imposed authority, to the extent democracy is identified with individual and collective agency over the terms of social cooperation, and to the extent democracy is identified with the rights of individuals and collectives to challenge these authorities and those terms, an agonistic account of democracy as situated historically while engaged in ongoing reconstruction of the contingent but deeply shared values of liberal democracy represents a powerful vision. It shares with other post-metaphysical theorists, like Habermas and Rawls, an emphasis on the reconstructive aspects of democratic theory, designed to adduce from extant practices and necessary assumptions the best possible description of legitimate democratic politics. But it pushes these reconstructive projects further by demanding that the practices and institutions of democracy itself be engaged in this reconstruction rather than merely governed by it. Agonistic democracy emerged reactively, offered as an alternative vision of liberalism, deliberation, and democratic engagement. The emphasis of this work on critique, practices of identity, contestation of power, exposure of hegemonic interpretations, and so on depict a vision of democracy that is primarily procedural: democracy reflects practices that take place within the existing realm of the political. Agonism thus explicitly situates itself within existing institutional forms, not outside them. Unlike radical democracy, agonistic thinkers propose not a revolution but a reformation, urging that extant democratic resources be strengthened, democratic values reinterpreted, and hegemonic structures exposed and contested. To the extent agonism is transformative, it is transformative from within the horizon of politics from which it emerges. Agonism does not evoke sudden and rapid change in the character of social order. Over time agonism might lead, directly and indirectly, to dramatic reforms to, and even revolutionary redesign of, democratic institutions, but that change is inevitably slow. This makes agonism appear conservative when compared to radical democracy, as radical democracy takes as its goal the near term transformation and elimination of social and economic injustice. Agonism aspires to create a democratic social order that will lead to the amelioration or destruction of injustice, but recognizes that such injustices are embedded in the context of politics within which such work occurs and against which organization, mobilization, and resistance must take place. Agonism does not represent transformation, but it creates democratic conditions out of which real transformation might arise. To claim that liberalism in its Rawlsian variant represents the best path for agonism is not a capitulation to the narratives of liberalism and its inevitable injustices, nor an endorsement of chastened conservatism about social change. It is to recognize that transformative politics begins within existing politics, and that an effective strategy must identify the structures most amenable to that project. Agonism as a political practice demands both the common ontopolitical framework within which conflict can take place and an institutional framework open to this practice. Political liberalism offers both, without also requiring agonism to shed its skepticism about foundational or teleological claims. Agonism presupposes active engagement with the situated character of social life in order to grasp our own circumstances without demanding to be liberated from them. Political liberalism takes these circumstances as the frame from which a governing interpretation of justice emerges; as long as this conception remains open to further reinterpretation (as it can be once severed from the insistence on stability) political liberalism supports agonistic politics. The objections of Mouffe and others can be attributed to Rawls's insistence that the governing interpretation of the political embody an overlapping consensus with deep roots in comprehensive moral doctrines, and which can be invoked to resolve contentious questions of democratic life. But as I demonstrated in the previous chapter, the political conception can also be understood as a relatively contingent modus vivendi, subject itself to debate when invoked to resolve conflict. For Rawls an overlapping consensus is necessary to forestall the sort of deeper public debate and passionate engagement that agonistic democrats hope to foster. Understanding the political conception as the negotiated but revisable shared interpretation of liberal democratic principles permits both the channeling of passionate conflict into agonistic engagement and the possibility that the governing interpretation can be itself an object of engagement. In fact, Mouffe makes the same distinction as Rawls between a political conception ("commitment to principles") and substantive moral doctrines, as does Connolly when he describes the practices of contemporary democratic citizenship: They embrace their faith at one level, and recoil back upon it at another to come to terms with the obdurate fact that it does not convince millions of others. Sometimes their own commitment is punctuated with a residual element of uncertainty. That seems noble to me, but perhaps not necessary to deep pluralism. What is needed is pursuit of a bicameral orientation to citizenship and being, in which you embrace your creed as you bring it into the public realm; and then recoil back without deep resentment on its contestability to open up negotiating space with others (Schoolman 2008: 316). The agonistic practice so envisioned is strikingly similar to that proposed by Rawls: citizens hold their own moral doctrines as true and complete, while recognizing that the entrance of this doctrine into the public realm will expose your absolute in its partiality. The bicameralism Connolly describes mirrors the distinction between comprehensive doctrines and the political conception, with the difference that Connolly does not think that faith is incompatible with democratic negotiation. Rawls excludes the metaphysical because it undermines the overlapping consensus, which must be minimal in order to be consensual. An agonistic political liberalism maintains this model without the demand that the passions, ideals, and beliefs of citizens be confined to the private realm. Since the political conception is recognizably partial, understood as hegemonic, and an explicit subject of political engagement, the line between metaphysical and political need not be policed. What the political conception does, once generated, is provide a guiding framework within which democratic conflicts can be engaged openly, where a real possible result of that engagement is a revision of the negotiated interpretation that is the condition of agonistic encounters. Mouffe asserts that "a difficult balance has to be struck between, on the one hand, democracy understood as a set of procedures required to cope with plurality, and, on the other, democracy as the adherence to values which inform a particular mode of coexistence" (1993: 131 ). Political liberalism shorn of the imperative to consensus capture this balance by offering the framework through which democratic societies can manage plurality by articulating a shared understanding of liberal values, while also permitting this articulation to be contested and revised. Agonism thus forestalls the idea that any democratic institution can claim substantive legitimacy for its use of power-any act of government is an act of a particular identity or interest acting upon (not implementing) the collective. There are collectively binding decisions but no collective decisions; the institutional conditions of democratic agonism are much like those described by Dahl's vision of polyarchy, where minorities rule and liberty is preserved by ensuring that no minority comes to dominate in the name of a fictionalized popular identity. Similarly, Connolly envisages a society "made up of intersecting and independent minorities of numerous types and sorts who occupy the same territorial space and who negotiate an ethos of engagement between themselves" (2000: 92). This is the structural argument for an agonistic liberalism-a competitive environment of plural identities and interests will tend to undercut any and all claims to overcome contingency, thus cultivating practices that make visible and contest hegemonic interpretations. If this can happen within an agonistic cultural order, within a shared symbolic framework (liberty/equality), exercised by citizens informed by an ethos of reciprocity and presumptive gratitude (which will, of course, require some material conditions to be maintained), it is likely to maximize inclusion and minimize domination. Under such circumstances the range of emancipatory visions and contested democratic norms is likely to be vast. Since the shared interpretation of common principles that permits agonistic participation is itself subject to the same regular challenge and renegotiation, the mechanism for significant democratic change resides at the heart of agonistic liberalism. And to the extent the experience of living in a society in which peaceful but passionate negotiation and renegotiation of the inherited values that bind people collectively is likely to shape subjectivity, as post-foundational thinkers and theian liberals all suggest, the possibilities for dramatic transformation to the ontopolitical grounds of that social order increase as citizens come to see both conflict and reciprocity as living norms of political life. There is room in this modus vivendi for radical visions of the future, and room for these visions to transform the temporary hegemony of the political conception of justice. While no political order, liberal or otherwise, can ever attain full transparency, consensus, or inclusion, an institutional commitment to negotiate and renegotiate terms of agreement that are themselves both the condition of further conflict and themselves subjects of this same conflict offers a vision of political life sufficiently capacious to render transformative change conceivable. I began this book with a discussion of post-foundationalism and its implications for politics. Agonistic democracy, I claimed, offers the account of democratic politics best suited to post-foundational circumstances in which claims to have achieved a stable consensus to guide political action, whether rooted in truth, nature, identity, morality, rationality, or any other extra-contextual criteria, cannot be sustained. I also argued that the justification for democracy, agonistic or otherwise, does not derive from the recognition of post-foundational conditions; like any other hegemonic ideal democracy is a situated product of the history within which its dominant position emerged. That is not to say that convergence on some sort of democratic norms is unlikely, as absent massive coercion or uncommon homogeneity the radical pluralism post-foundationalism tends to provoke is also likely to undermine claims to authority based upon claims of truth. In the case of western societies with liberal democratic histories, however, the convergence of post-foundational pluralism and an historical framework that privileges the values of equality and liberty produces circumstances in which democratic institutions are the unavoidable default for politics. A commitment to liberalism also shapes these historical conditions, so attempts to articulate an appropriate vision of democratic politics that expresses these situated values and embraces a post-foundational account of meaning must also grapple with the powerful role liberalism plays in the interpretation of democratic values in western democracies. These constraints are neither optional nor binding. We find ourselves always already inhabiting a history of meaning, practice, and identity, and these elements of our being are not infinitely malleable. They may be transformed, reinterpreted, and eventually even overcome, but such work begins with recognition of our limitations. Marx, despite his otherwise universalistic commitments, captured these circumstances as clearly anything in Heidegger's work, writing in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that "men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted." The inherited circumstances of western democratic theory include the powerful presence of liberalism, and a viable theory aspiring to deepen democratic possibilities must grapple with this fact. This commitment to dealing with the world as we find it helps explain the recurrent frustration with agonism expressed by more radical critics. Because pluralist agonists focus on the situated possibilities inherent to the hegemonic interpretations and norms already in place and then try to expand these possibilities, they appear to those committed to the complete transformation of contemporary liberalism to be defending the status quo. Tally makes this argument in his review of Mouffe: The most damning critique of On the Political may be that it winds up reinforcing the status quo ... Indeed, Mouffe's agonistic politics does not seem very radical at all. Whenever Mouffe addresses practical matters, she uses the language of adversarial or agonistic politics, but evokes tame and familiar scenes. Mouffe argues for a pluralism that recognizes real differences, but that also ensures that everyone plays by the same rules. "Partisans" who really want to change the political landscape may not be allowed to participate (2007: 7-8). Vazquez-Arroyo (2004) develops a similar critique of Connolly. There are two problems with this critique, and addressing each will help clarify why an agonistic pluralism is best cultivated within liberal institutional bounds. First, the critique underestimates the democratic capacities of liberalism, associating all liberal accounts with a broader indictment of capitalist rationality. Second, the critique fails to account for the situated character of politics, asserting a transformative radicalism that agonism rejects. Often the objection to liberalism offered by radical theorists represents an objection to an idea of liberalism imbricated with existing structures of inequality, a rationalistic account of individual interests, and the problems of global capitalism. Liberalism thus represents a constellation of problems against which democratic advocates position themselves. Dietz identifies this view of liberalism as an abstracted enemy of democracy: "The polemic that afflicts so many current studies of democracy and citizenship is most evident at the level of discourse on liberal ism, where this complex and multifaceted historical phenomenon has become little more than an ideational enemy, or a suspect to be processed and called forth for 'rebuke'" (1998: 116). But liberalism is as complex and pluralistic as any other major account of contemporary politics, and both its theoretical and historical specificity should not be elided. Some aspects of liberal politics contribute to visions of subjectivity that will generate resentment and oppression, but elements within these same theories might also be used to mitigate such pressures. Some versions of liberalism identify closely with capitalism and neo-liberal aspirations, but others endeavor to identify an economic order consistent with liberal values without offering any such privilege to markets or competition. Some versions of liberalism presuppose strong forms of rationality while others are attentive to the variety of ways different identities organize and prioritize their values and actions. There is no single liberalism, and-democratic theory would do well to be attentive to the range of possibilities available within this plurality. Instead, liberalism "in much contemporary democratic theory, particularly post-structural and post¬foundational work, is taken to embody the flaws of modernity generally and thus becomes the flaw that democratic theorizing is intended to overcome" (Dietz 1998: 117). But a theory of democracy that takes historicity seriously cannot reduce liberalism to polemic and the dominant mode of democratic institution to that which is to be overcome. That liberal democracy is in practice and theory flawed is beyond dispute, but if it also lacks any potential to nurture a more democratic and less flawed practice then there is little hope for post-foundational democratic theory. If only a rupture and overcoming can achieve democratic outcomes and democracy will ever be over the horizon of history, a democratic theory of institutions and engagement rather than resistance and aspiration is impossible. I hope to have shown by looking carefully at Rawlsian liberalism as a singular and situated example of a particular and historically viable form of liberalism that the more radical aspirations of democratic theory need not begin and end with the rejection of the dominant interpretation of democracy within and against which political action must engage. Agonistic theory can offer an account of democracy mindful of both the danger and the potential of the liberal hegemony. Agonism does not envision contestation extending "all the way" down, as it were. The ontopolitical foundations of agonistic democracy are contingent and revisable, but they cannot be the constant object of debate. If, as I have tried to argue, a post-foundational politics demands the recognition both of the contingency of foundations and the situated limits to the range of possible meanings found in any particular grounds of the political, then an agonistic politics must also be a bounded politics. Agonism works within historicity in order to expand the constellation of conceivable conflicts, without rejecting the tragic reality that limits to inclusion are endemic to politics. Hegemony can be productive or destructive, democratic or authoritarian, contested or univocal, but hegemony cannot be universal. Post-foundational politics embraces the inevitability of boundaries and limits, and then works to make those boundaries as wide as possible without turning debates into ontological conflicts, conflicts that cannot but be violent as they take place outside the grounds of shared ontopolitical premises. Calling perspectives that accept the contingent liberal principles of democratic politics legitimate may seem dangerous, as it implies that perspectives beyond this consensus are illicit and excluded. And it does so imply. But the language of legitimacy is unavoidable for post-foundational politics. "Contrary to the dialogic approach, the democratic debate is conceived as a real confrontation. Adversaries do fight - even fiercely - but according to a shared set of rules, and their positions, despite being ultimately irreconcilable, are accepted as legitimate perspectives" (Mouffe 2005a: 52). The condition of peaceful democratic agonism is a willingness to accept some set of principles, interpretations, or procedures as legitimate, even if that legitimacy is understood as subject to legitimate conflict itself. Pluralist agonism endeavors not to utterly transform the political in order to bring about a new democratic dawn. Instead, it aspires to deepen, extend, and intensify the democratic capacity for contestation and questioning already latent within the situated norms and hegemonic articulations of the political. At some point the confrontation between principles is so vast that the contest must be antagonistic, and enemies simply cannot recognize one another as legitimate. Political liberalism offers a set of principles and practices compatible with the type of "conflictual consensus" agonistic democrats advocate, while also highlighting the historically contingent yet also ontologically powerful status of these same principles. Post-foundationalism dictates democratic theorizing both pay close attention to the ontopolitical grounds of any proposed politics and propose ways to preserve the pluralism that inevitably follows from the recognition of contingency. A theory of agonistic democracy embedded within a modified version of political liberalism can support institutions capable of addressing both imperatives, and the institutions it supports are not remarkably different from those envisioned by liberal theory. The resources necessary for agonistic transformation are present in the political institutions, political culture, and political theory of contemporary democracy. The modified political liberalism proposed in this book is probably not the only institutional possibility for agonistic democracy, but its plausibility demonstrates that institutionalization is neither incompatible with agonistic principles nor impossible to develop within existing social norms. By situating liberalism explicitly within a post-foundational ontology, liberalism is transformed in significant ways and its practices opened up to greater contestation, generosity, and active re-constitution.
Underview
The affirmative is an act of carpentry – the world is a really messed up place, but you cannot deny the existence of 6 billion people who cannot survive absent infrastructure and networks that provide food, transportation, and medicine. Empty critiques and radical upheavals devoid of concrete proposals are incomprehensible, doomed to failure, and drive people towards reigning ideology
Bryant 12 — Levi R. Bryant, Professor of Philosophy at Collin College, holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Loyola University in Chicago, 2012 (“Underpants Gnomes: A Critique of the Academic Left,” Larval Subjects—Levi R. Bryant’s philosophy blog, November 11th, Available Online at http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/, Accessed 02-21-2014)
I must be in a mood today–half irritated, half amused–because I find myself ranting.  Of course, that’s not entirely unusual.  So this afternoon I came across a post by a friend quoting something discussing the environmental movement that pushed all the right button.  As the post read, For mainstream environmentalism– conservationism, green consumerism, and resource management –humans are conceptually separated out of nature and mythically placed in privileged positions of authority and control over ecological communities and their nonhuman constituents.  What emerges is the fiction of a marketplace of ‘raw materials’ and ‘resources’ through which human-centered wants, constructed as needs, might be satisfied.  The mainstream narratives are replete with such metaphors carbon trading!.  Natural complexity _{mutuality, and diversity are rendered virtually meaningless given discursive parameters that reduce nature to discrete units of exchange measuring extractive capacities.  Jeff Shantz, “Green Syndicalism” While finding elements this description perplexing– I can’t say that I see many environmentalists treating nature and culture as distinct or suggesting that we’re sovereigns of nature –I do agree that we conceive much of our relationship to the natural world in economic terms (not a surprise that capitalism is today a universal).  This, however, is not what bothers me about this passage. What I wonder is just what we’re supposed to do even if all of this is true?  What, given existing conditions, are we to do if all of this is right?  At least green consumerism, conservation, resource management, and things like carbon trading are engaging in activities that are making real differences.  From this passage–and maybe the entire text would disabuse me of this conclusion–it sounds like we are to reject all of these interventions because they remain tied to a capitalist model of production that the author (and myself) find abhorrent.  The idea seems to be that if we endorse these things we are tainting our hands and would therefore do well to reject them altogether. The problem as I see it is that this is the worst sort of abstraction (in the Marxist sense) and wishful thinking.  Within a Marxo-Hegelian context, a thought is abstract when it ignores all of the mediations in which a thing is embedded.  For example, I understand a robust tree abstractly when I attribute its robustness, say, to its genetics alone, ignoring the complex relations to its soil, the air, sunshine, rainfall, etc., that also allowed it to grow robustly in this way.  This is the sort of critique we’re always leveling against the neoliberals.  They are abstract thinkers.  In their doxa that individuals are entirely responsible for themselves and that they completely make themselves by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, neoliberals ignore all the mediations belonging to the social and material context in which human beings develop that play a role in determining the vectors of their life.  They ignore, for example, that George W. Bush grew up in a family that was highly connected to the world of business and government and that this gave him opportunities that someone living in a remote region of Alaska in a very different material infrastructure and set of family relations does not have.  To think concretely is to engage in a cartography of these mediations, a mapping of these networks, from circumstance to circumstance (what I call an “onto-cartography”).  It is to map assemblages, networks, or ecologies in the constitution of entities. Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction.  It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives.  This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative.  Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park: YouTube video omitted The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: Phase 1:  Collect Underpants Phase 2:  ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work: YouTube video omitted Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left.  Our plan seems to be as follows: Phase 1:  Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2:  ? (Question Mark) Phase 3:  Revolution and complete social transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2.  Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless.  In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives.  In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1.  Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart.  Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand.  How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him?  Who are these things for?  We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world.  To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics.  Again, who are these things for?  Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world?  If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound!  Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing? But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes.  We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse.  We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?).  This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology.  These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business.  Well done! But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie.  Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2.  We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail.  How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals}

?  We live on a planet of 6 billion people.  These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption.  That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc. What are your proposals?  How will you meet these problems?  How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure?  Marx and Lenin had proposals.  Do you?  Have you even explored the cartography of the problem?  Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization.  Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles?  Who is addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri and Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement).   At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically.  Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists.  We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell.  Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical paradigm, Laruelle. I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound.  How would he provide for the energy needs of that school?  How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound way?  How would she provide food for the students?  What would be her plan for waste disposal?  And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature, the federal government, and all the families of these students?  What is your plan?  What is your alternative?  I think there are alternatives.  I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam.  If you want to make a truly revolutionary contribution, this is where you should start.  Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you aren’t proposing real plans?  But we haven’t even gotten to that point.  Instead we’re like underpants gnomes, saying “revolution is the answer!” without addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would concretely go about building those alternatives.  Masturbation. “Underpants gnome” deserves to be a category in critical theory; a sort of synonym for self-congratulatory masturbation.  We need less critique not because critique isn’t important or necessary–it is–but because we know the critiques, we know the problems.  We’re intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe.  We best every opponent with critique.  We occupy a position of moral superiority with critique.  But do we really do anything with critique?  What we need today, more than ever, is composition or carpentry.  Everyone knows something is wrong.  Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them.  Even the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory.  None of us, however, are proposing alternatives.  Instead we prefer to shout and denounce.  Good luck with that.