Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 1 | Opponent: Winston Churchill JL | Judge: Nathan Johnston
Part 1 is the Tale of Destruction
World War 2:
A desire for an ending
200,000:
The number of civilian deaths
2:
The number of nuclear bombs dropped
Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
Two Japanese cities forever impacted
The bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were praised as the almighty saviors to America because it led to Japanese surrender in World War II.
Steele 1, , Diana. "America's Reaction to the Atomic Bomb." Dickinson College. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Apr. 2012. http://users.dickinson.edu/~history/product/steele/seniorthesis.htm
Hailed as the ender of the war and the reason the Japanese surrendered without an invasion was, the atomic bomb's destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki received very little praise from the America public, at least in print that is. From the time of the atomic bombings until the end of the year, only a few letters or editorials were written in direct praise of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One of the first appeared on 16 August in The New York Times in a response to a letter printed on the 11 August. William O. Morse of Greenwich, Connecticut wrote in a letter to the editor, a response to the letter from William Church Osborn. He writes "It is my opinion that only a minority will concur in that verdict eventually we shall feel shame toward the atomic bomb and certainly on my own behalf I want to protest vigorously against even an implication of being included among the 'we' who subscribe to any such view."25 Morse then reveals that he has no sympathy for the victims of the bombs, saying it "is precisely what war is today. . . a senseless, dirty, brutal operation."26 He goes on to justify the bombing of Hiroshima by concurring with the official statements given by President Truman that "Hiroshima is (or was) a manufacturing and distribution center and the military purpose of bombing it is obvious. . . . We, as a nation, are not to blame for the monstrous advances made in the science of war, nor that women, and indeed the whole civilian population, being quite as essential to its waging as the fighting men themselves, have become the objects of its merciless fury."27 Finally, he concludes his praise of the atomic bomb and United States government by writing: "That our Government had the courage, the foresight and the wisdom to resolve as it did the challenge of the grave decision which confronted it need never, as I see it, bring the red blush of shame to any American, but rather a sense of thankfulness and pride."28 Few others, however, were as clearly unremorseful for the deaths of the Japanese civilian as Morse. Others were more subtle, using language to convey their feelings instead of saying outright the Japanese deserved to die. Irving H. Flamm of Chicago, Illinois wrote to Time magazine, believing that the atomic bomb had done much for mankind and should be praised for doing such an incredible job at it. He saw the atomic bomb as having "in one fell swoop, struck down three enemies of human progress. It destroyed the hopes of the Jap fascists and their followers; it shattered the illusions of the isolationists; and it all but demolished the silly argument that governmental planning is ineffective and incompatible with democracy. It was public investment and government planning--the kind of planning that we rejected in peacetime--that enabled us to discover the instrument which finally smashed the last hopes of those who still think in terms of superior and inferior people, predatory individualism, and unrestrained aggressiveness."29 When referring to "those who still think in terms of superior and inferior," Flamm was referring to the "Jap fascists" who finally received what they deserved. Although the American public was not quick to publicly state their opinions on the destruction of human life in Japan in letters such as these, the support behind the dropping of the bomb was overwhelming. When the American people were asked in a Gallup Poll taken from 10-15 August 1945 whether or not they approved or disapproved of the use of atomic bombs on Japanese cities, 85 percent approved, ten percent disapproved and five had no opinion.30 Then when asked if the development of the atomic bomb was a good or bad thing, 69 percent said it was a good thing, 17 percent said it was bad, and 14 percent had no opinion.31 This was asked just eighteen days after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan and two weeks after the second. After this date, no further Gallup Polls were taken concerning the approval of Americans of the atomic bomb; however, later unofficial polls taken in December showed that support for the atomic bomb had not decreased from the August Gallup Poll figures and Americans still felt that the atomic bombing of Japan was a good decision.
The bombings of Japan were the result of American imperialism- Japan was practically already beat in WW2- Nuclear bombs were entirely unnecessary, but the US wanted to be a dominant force post WW2 to maintain its status as a hegemon- to impose its will upon the world. The US’ imperialist agenda rendered non-white bodies disposable in the quest for global dominance.
Cannon ’03, Fighting for Socialism in the “American Century” (c) Resistance Books 2001 (c) Resistance Books 2001 ISBN 1876646217; Published by Resistance Books 23 Abercrombie St, Chippendale NSW 2008, Permission for on-line publication provided by Resistance Books for use by the James P. Cannon Internet Archive in 2003., https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1945/hiroshima.htm
In the Times today there is a report from the Tokyo radio about Nagasaki which states that “the centre of the once thriving city has been turned into a vast devastation, with nothing left except rubble as far as the eye could see”. Photographs showing the bomb damage appeared on the front page of the Japanese newspaper Mainichi. The report says: “One of these pictures revealed a tragic scene 10 miles away from the centre of the atomic air attack”, where farm houses were either crushed down or the roofs torn asunder. The broadcast quoted a photographer of the Yamaha Photographic Institute, who had rushed to the city immediately after the bomb hit, as having said: “For Nagasaki is now a dead city, all the areas being literally razed to the ground. Only a few buildings are left, standing conspicuously from the ashes.” The photographer said that “the toll of the population was great and even the few survivors have not escaped some kind of injury.” So far the Japanese press has quoted only one survivor of Hiroshima.¶ In two calculated blows, with two atomic bombs, American imperialism killed or injured half a million human beings. The young and the old, the child in the cradle and the aged and infirm, the newly married, the well and the sick, men, women, and children—they all had to die in two blows because of a quarrel between the imperialists of Wall Street and a similar gang in Japan.¶ This is how American imperialism is bringing civilisation to the Orient. What an unspeakable atrocity! What a shame has come to America, the America that once placed in New York harbour a Statue of Liberty enlightening the world. Now the world recoils in horror from her name. Even some of the preachers who blessed the war have been moved to protest. One said in an interview in the press: “America has lost her moral position.” Her moral position? Yes. She lost that all right. That is true. And the imperialist monsters who threw the bombs know it. But look what they gained. They gained control of the boundless riches of the Orient. They gained the power to exploit and enslave hundreds of millions of people in the Far East. And that is what they went to war for—not for moral position, but for profit.¶ Another preacher quoted in the press, reminding himself of something he had once read in the Bible about the meek and gentle Jesus, said it would be useless to send missionaries to the Far East anymore. That raises a very interesting question which I am sure they will discuss among themselves. One can imagine an interesting discussion taking place in the inner circles of the House of Rockefeller and the House of Morgan, who are at one and the same time—quite by accident of course—pillars of finance and pillars of the church and supporters of missionary enterprises of various kinds. “What shall we do with the heathens in the Orient? Shall we send missionaries to lead them to the Christian heaven or shall we send atomic bombs to blow them to hell?” There is a subject for debate, a debate on a macabre theme. But in any case, you can be sure that where American imperialism is involved, hell will get by far the greater number of the customers.¶ American imperialism has brought upon itself the fear and hatred of the whole world. American imperialism is regarded throughout the world today as the enemy of mankind. The First World War cost 12 million dead. Twelve million. The Second World War, within a quarter of a century, has already cost not less than 30 million dead; and there are not less than 30 million more to be starved to death before the results of the war are totalled up.¶ What a harvest of death capitalism has brought to the world! If the skulls of all of the victims could be brought together and piled into one pyramid, what a high mountain that would make. What a monument to the achievements of capitalism that would be, and how fitting a symbol of what capitalist imperialism really is. I believe it would lack only one thing to make it perfect. That would be a big electric sign on the pyramid of skulls, proclaiming the ironical promise of the Four Freedoms. The dead at least are free from want and free from fear. But the survivors live in hunger and terror of the future.
Steele 2, , Diana. "America's Reaction to the Atomic Bomb." Dickinson College. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Apr. 2012. http://users.dickinson.edu/~history/product/steele/seniorthesis.htm
The majority of American citizens were ignorant of the facts of nuclear energy and the effects that it has on people. They did not know that hundred, even thousands of Japanese men, women, and children would die each day from the resulting radiation sickness from the two nuclear bombs or that thousands more would die in years to come from cancer and leukemia. A vast amount of information surrounding the atomic bombings was suppressed by the United States' military as being militarily sensitive, when in actuality, the government did not want the public to know the incredible amount of suffering and destruction it had brought on the average Japanese citizen. However, the government and military are not entirely responsible for the lack of knowledge the average American had concerning the atomic bombs. Americans did not "probe for the truth behind the bomb, or even ask tough questions about what we were being told. We seem to have preferred the myth. Few wished even to see whether there might be something behind the troubling information which somehow kept seeping out."95 It was far easier for the average American to live in ignorance than face the harshness of enlightenment. The result was an incredible silence among the American public in regards to the atomic weapon. The silence, however, was compromising in itself. As Gar Alperovitz wrote, "To be silent about the past is to accept the decision silently, with no challenge. It is thereby also to sustain and silently nurture the idea that nuclear weapons can and should be used or threatened to be used. To confront Hiroshima requires that if we choose to be silent we know what it means to be silent--to be acquiescent."96 By their silence, the Americans directly following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became as comparable in the resulting destruction and horror as the scientists who invented it and the men who let the bombs drop from their airplanes' doors. Thus the average American after World War II became like the average German during World War II: guilty by silence. ¶
Part 2 is the Advocacy
Vote affirmative to prohibit the production of nuclear power in order to honor those affected by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The mythical narrative of war successes, and the courageous, democracy-loving American hero buries, destroys, and manipulates the specters of the past, a constant war to eliminate the ghosts of 1945 that preserve the true realities of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks.
Lazare explains Hiroshima’s mayor Kazumi Matsui wish in ‘15, Sarah Lazare, August 6, 2015, reporting about the 70th anniversary of the bomb in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, staff writier, “70 Years After Bombing Hiroshima Calls to Abolish Nuclear Weapons”, Common Dreams, http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/08/06/70-years-after-bombing-hiroshima-calls-abolish-nuclear-weapons
As tens of thousands gathered in Hiroshima on Thursday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the U.S. dropping of the atomic bomb, people from Japan and across the globe urged world leaders to honor the lives of those killed and wounded by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, we must abolishing nuclear weapons once and for all.¶ A bell rang in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park where a massive crowd, with heads bowed, held a moment of silence at 8:15 AM to mark the exact instant the bomb was dropped.Roughly 150,000 people were killed in the bombing and aftermath. The U.S. military followed the attack on Hiroshima by dropping a second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, which killed approximately 75,000 people.¶ "To coexist we must abolish the absolute evil and ultimate inhumanity that are nuclear weapons," declared Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui in a speech at the ceremony. "Now is the time to start taking action."¶ Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has advocated a nuclear power restart overmajority public opposition, also called for the and nuclear disarmament at the ceremony, which was attended by representatives of over 100 countries. Meanwhile, protesters werereportedly blocked from attending the memorial by police.¶ In a meeting with survivors of the bombing following the ceremony, Abe was skewered forhis efforts to undo pacifist components of the country's constitution and embrace military buildup. "These bills will bring the tragedy of war to our nation once again," said 86-year-old Yukio Yoshioka. "They must be withdrawn."¶ Moreover, some drew a direct line between the horrors of the atomic bombings and the more recent Fukushima nuclear meltdown.¶ "The horror of these bombings should be taken as a warning of the threats of nuclear weapons, but instead, the government is locking Japan into a nuclear future. Whether for military or civil purposes, nuclear energy is never peaceful. It carries the threat of nuclear weapons development, and as the 2011 Fukushima disaster demonstrated to the world, nuclear energy is and neither safe, nor clean," said Junichi Sato, Greenpeace Japan Executive Director, in a statement released Thursday.¶ "The trauma felt by Japanese people after the Fukushima accident—and also by thousands of people affected by other nuclear disasters, such as Chernobyl—should never again be endured, which is why we firmly believe that peace—not war—is the best form of self defence," Sato added.¶ Many are also calling on the U.S.—the only country to ever drop a nuclear bomb on civilian populations—to is also called to embrace disarmament and reverse its ongoing nuclear buildup.
Part 3 is Solvency
The Legal Dictionary, No Date
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Nuclear+Power
Nuclear Power¶ A form of energy produced by an atomic reaction, capable of producing an alternative source of electrical power to thatsupplied by coal, gas, or oil.¶ The dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, by the United States in 1945 initiated the ¶ atomic age. Nuclear energy immediately became a military weapon of terrifying magnitude. For the physicists who worked on the atom bomb, the promise of nuclear energy was not solely military. They envisioned nuclear power as a safe, clean, cheap, and abundant source of energy that would end society's dependence on fossil fuels. At the end of World War II, leaders called for the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
We need to prohibit nuclear power to honor victims and ensure that this manmade catastrophe never occurs again---only total prohibition solves
Goodman ’15, Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan, August 5, 2015, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 70 Years After the Atomic Bombs Were Dropped, truthdig.com,
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hiroshima_and_nagasaki_70_years_after_the_atomic_bombs_were_dropped_2015080
The world changed irrevocably 70 years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, when the United States dropped the first nuclear weapon in history on the civilian population of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, the second and, to date, final atomic weapon used against human targets was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Hundreds of thousands were killed. Many were horrifically burned, and thousands suffered the long-term impacts of radiation poisoning. Survivors of those two horrible blasts, called “hibakusha” in Japanese, still live, and still recount their experiences. While the world has avoided nuclear attacks since those two days in 1945, the potential for nuclear devastation is forever hanging over us. Born from the ashes of those two awful bomb blasts, however, was a nuclear abolition movement that still wages a peaceful campaign to eliminate these weapons.¶ “I was a child at the age of 10 ... when Japan experienced the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Kenzaburo Oe told me in Tokyo last year. Now 80 years old, Oe is the 1994 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and is one of Japan’s most highly respected intellectuals and humanitarians. “At the time, what was a great shock to me, but also my mother, our families, all the people at that time, was of course the atomic bomb. This was a greater catastrophe than anything we had ever known.”¶ For all of his great writings, known around the world, Oe said it is his greatest shame that he never wrote a novel about the atomic bombings. He gives great credit to the wounded survivors for keeping the stories alive: “Japan was under U.S. military occupation, and at that time it was not possible for the hibakusha, which is what we call the survivors of the atomic bombs, to create any kind of organization of their own. And five years following the bombings was when they were first able to create their own organization. At that time, their lone slogan was to never allow this to be repeated, never to allow any more hibakusha to be created.”¶ The hibakusha have served as the core of the Japanese peace movement ever since, taking as their symbol the origami peace crane. Sadako Sasaki was a 2-year-old girl when Hiroshima was leveled by the bomb. Sadako lived, but at the age of 12 was diagnosed with leukemia, one of the diseases caused by the bomb’s lingering radiation. A friend in the hospital told her that if she folded 1,000 origami cranes, she would be granted a wish. Hoping to defeat her disease, she began making the intricate paper cranes. She died on Oct. 25, 1955.¶ The peace movement in Japan still lives, though, as people there organize to abolish nuclear weapons, but also to eliminate nuclear power plants. Oe told the French newspaper Le Monde, ““Hiroshima must be engraved in our memories: It’s a catastrophe even more dramatic than natural disasters, because it’s man-made ... by showing the same disregard for human life in nuclear power stations, it is the worst betrayal of the memory of the victims of Hiroshima.” The movement to permanently shut down Japan’s fleet of nuclear power plants seemed on the verge of success after the Fukushima disaster in March 2011. The conservative government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that came to power after the disaster, however, has vowed to revive nuclear power there, restarting dormant plants and even building new ones.
The plan has a risk of solvency- public support has spilled up into political consensus- the mayor of Hiroshima agrees with activists and survivors that the plan is an effective method to demonstrate remorse for America’s past atrocities with nuclear power and confront historical and current policies that are haunted by imperialism that perpetuates a culture of exploitation and oppression.
Part 4 is Framing
The hauntological approach of the aff is key- the ghost disrupts current notions of the state- - reveals to us the cruelty of the state and reminds us that we are constructed from past events.
Auchter ’12, Jessica Auchter, March 2012, Ghostly Politics: Statecraft, Monumentalization, and a Logic of Haunting, Arizona State University, https://repository.asu.edu/attachments/93467/content/tmp/package-sHM4ah/Auchter_asu_0010E_11492.pdf
It bears mentioning here that this is not a treatise on which memorialization is appropriate or not. I do not impose this. I merely try to track the fragments of ghosts. Neither is looking for haunting about looking for death. Death is everywhere, particularly as a result of the processes of conflict and war that so often form the basis of a focus on international politics. And it is not about ghosts as the individual spirits of those who have died. The ghost of the state also lingers in the exercise of power to construct identity, narrative, and order.65 Hauntings are rather about specific kinds of social and political and even economic practices that are themselves imbued with tension and contestation. They are about an alternative way of viewing that takes into account the ghostly, which exists and operates on the margins of what is generally considered traditional politics. Traditional politics is the state apparatus, the rational, the visible. The specter disrupts this notion of visibility, because it is by nature¶ invisible through traditional means. Indeed it further disrupts this schema because¶ we cannot see it, while it looks at us and sees us not see it even as it is there. This¶ spectral asymmetry disrupts all specularity. ‘We do not see who looks at us.’66¶ So the specter also represents that which is often invisible to us about how the¶ state functions: the mechanisms of statecraft, of ordering and limiting and of¶ identity construction. It represents that which is invisible to us about the power¶ relations involved in performances of statecraft in identity construction through¶ the way narratives are constructed about past events.¶ 67 This is partially because¶ these events are in fact not past in a linear conception of time, as evidenced by the¶ lingering traces of ghosts. We need not view ghosts either as simply traces. They¶ are as wholly existential as you or I, and indeed remind us that our own existence¶ and our own identities are precarious, constructed, and at the margins of political¶ life as much as those of ghosts.
Auchter 2, Jessica Auchter, March 2012, Ghostly Politics: Statecraft, Monumentalization, and a Logic of Haunting, Arizona State University, https://repository.asu.edu/attachments/93467/content/tmp/package-sHM4ah/Auchter_asu_0010E_11492.pdf
This is the condition that Agamben says we find ourselves in today, a blurring of life and death itself, and a thorough penetration of state power in all facets of life. Interestingly, Foucault defines one of the features of biopolitics as the¶ gradual disqualification of the death, the way in which death shifted from a¶ spectacle to something private, shameful, and taboo. Death was hidden away¶ because it marked a status of being beyond sovereign power.¶ 79 But this is no¶ longer the case in the contemporary emergence of thanatopolitics, according to¶ Agamben. What Agamben offers here by exploring the merging of sovereign¶ power and biopower is precisely an opening into what power the sovereign has over death and the discourses at work that have rendered death depoliticized.¶ Therefore what we are seeing in the exercise of contemporary politics is not¶ simply sovereign power, or the right to let live and make die, or simply biopower,¶ the right to make live and let die, but a thanatopolitical merging of the two in the¶ right to make live and make die, the incursion of the sovereign in the decision¶ about not only who lives and who dies, but what it means to live and die.¶ Charlotte Epstein characterizes this as a feature of contemporary statecraft that is¶ evident in the war-on-terror, which she argues has stripped security to its bare¶ essentials: literally life and death itself.80¶ This relies on Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, and his conclusion that¶ racism in fact explains how contemporary biopolitics operates. Racism, as¶ Foucault explains it, is the underlying sentiment for genocidal politics such as the¶ Holocaust, precisely because it operates at the biological level to differentiates¶ between lives that count and lives that are not lives at all. The racism function¶ tells us that if you want to live, the other must die. The death of the other is¶ posited as that which not only guarantees my safety, but also makes my life¶ healthier.81 Foucault aptly argues that death in this instance need not be simply¶ rote killing, but can involve exposure to death, increasing the risk of death,¶ expulsion, rejection, and political death.¶ 82 Judith Butler draws on this notion to¶ elaborate ungrievable lives, lives considered to be already ontologically dead because they are placed outside of the realm of sovereign power even while they¶ are subject to the at time extremely brutal exercise of this same sovereign power.¶ Butler’s notion of precarious life examines the idea that certain lives are¶ considered more legitimately grievable than others; that is, we value specific lives¶ (and deaths) more than others. She analyzes this in the context of 9/11, the wars¶ in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Israel-Palestinian conflict, to argue that certain¶ lives are framed utilizing nationalist and familial narratives, which forecloses our¶ capacity to mourn in global dimensions. This is because we are unable to¶ conceive of certain lives as lives. The media and the state establish the narratives¶ by which the human being in its grievability is established.83 My task is to¶ explore the intersection of the ordering mechanisms of statecraft with the¶ construction of identity through narratives constructing the grievability of lives,¶ and perhaps, the way in which statecraft is haunted by these ungrievable lives. I did not seek out ghosts or hauntings for this project. My journey started¶ with memorials and political contestation over construction of memorials. But as¶ I looked at this phenomenon, I began to notice traces of ghosts, to notice the¶ effects of hauntings, and to become interested in tracing them and their political¶ effects. I began to notice that my writings themselves were haunted with the¶ underlying current that there was something important about these hauntings that¶ needed to be explored. My field work in Rwanda and my explorations of the USMexico¶ border and the 9/11 memorial imaginary only affirmed that these¶ hauntings were of political importance and worth exploring and enabled me to be able to tell the story. These hauntings, evident through the construction of space¶ and political inscription on the body, impact the way we think about concepts¶ such as sovereignty, power, and citizenship. Though this project takes finding ghosts as its aim, my goal is in fact not¶ to make ghosts known. Rendering ghosts intelligible would be to appropriate¶ them within a logic of visibility, to render them visible according to an external¶ logic which seeks to reinforce the lines between life and death, grievable and¶ ungrievable. Indeed some have referred to ghosts as ‘hovering between life and¶ death, presence and absence.’84 But in fact ghosts do not hover between life and¶ death. There is no between because ghosts exist prior to ontology, prior to the¶ construction of the dichotomy of life and death. If there is no life and there is no¶ death, ghosts cannot hover between the two. Hauntology allows us to look for¶ ghosts in places other than the marginalized interstices of international politics,¶ and acknowledge their hauntings in life, in death, and in the very ontological¶ construction of meaning of life and death, and the power at play that is implicated¶ in drawing these lines. The task here, then, is to trace the political effects of¶ haunting and hauntings, and acknowledge that there may be some bodies and¶ some ghosts that are unknowable, but that this is itself a hauntological status with¶ political significance and disrupts the previously accepted order of knowledge. It¶ is an ethical practice undertaken here: to find ghosts without rendering them¶ visible and knowable within a logic that replicates the subjugation and marginalization of specters and the construction of certain lives and bodies as¶ ungrievable.
The 1AC allows us to recognize our past mistake and express grievances to the lives lost.
Auchter ’12, Jessica Auchter, March 2012, Ghostly Politics: Statecraft, Monumentalization, and a Logic of Haunting, Arizona State University, https://repository.asu.edu/attachments/93467/content/tmp/package-sHM4ah/Auchter_asu_0010E_11492.pdf
This repetitive construction of the mirror maintains the division between¶ self and other perpetrated by the mirror function. The mirror makes the ultimate¶ distinction: between living and dead, to decide what is worthy of life and what¶ counts as nearly invisible or invisible (deathly, spectral). But this distinction is¶ itself made using human instrumentality: the mirror is itself a human instrument.¶ What the specter demonstrates to us is that this ultimate distinction between living and dead is not ultimate after all. What counts as worthy of life, as grievable life in Butler’s terms, is a socially constructed decision. The ungrievable lives continue to haunt as specters, to disrupt frameworks of spectrality, that which distinguishes a life of value from one without, one which may as well be dead, and as a result to disrupt frameworks of statecraft. Marilyn Ivy refers to ghosts as indicators that the structure of remembering through memorialization is not completely effective. What this means is that the line between life and death that remembering the dead institutes is not secure.72 Indeed, Derrida’s project of deconstruction, according to Antonio Negri, is precisely about ‘a radical questioning of the problem of life and death.’7 This mirror function, derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis, reveals the¶ basis of the politics of recognition, how we recognize ourselves and indeed how¶ we recognize (or do not recognize) others. It allows for exploration of how the¶ line between life and death is socially constructed. Bringing in ghosts, then, or¶ that which is perceived as invisible in the mirror, allows for exploration of¶ marginalized or ungrievable lives, and indeed how power is implicated in the¶ construction of the line between life and death. It reveals the logic of haunting¶ underlying contemporary statecraft which relies on the construction of¶ subjectivity through decisions about life and death itself. Statecraft, then, must¶ decide on which lives are lives precisely in order to function, in order to craft the state. To paraphrase Tom Lewis, the ghost, the specter, ‘surfaces as the figure of¶ undecideability that must be exorcized as the Other if a being is to be acquired.’74Thus the exploration undertaken by this dissertation of ghosts and¶ hauntings is not simply one focused on the dead. It also focuses on the logic of¶ haunting, that construction of the lines that delineate life from death, grievable¶ lives from ungrievable lives. It focuses on the use of haunting as a political tool¶ to delineate those worthy lives and worthy stories, and on the marginalization of¶ lives considered to be less valuable or grievable, but also on the way the¶ ungrievable and unmemorializable lives still haunt us, even if we don’t notice it at¶ first. This project is an attempt to not only trace the relationship between¶ haunting and statecraft, but also to listen to these lives and these voices, to try to¶ pay attention to the things we should, ethically, be haunted by, to examine and¶ recover these marginalized and ungrievable lives. What does it mean to be¶ haunted by these bodies? Bodies themselves narrate a story of what happened.¶ When they die, they need to be explained,75 rather than simply being buried, both¶ literally and figuratively. It is these explanations that I attempt to ferret out from¶ the mass graves and bleached bones in the desert and rubble.
Chen 10 (Kuan-Hsing, professor in the Graduate Institute for Social Research and Cultural Studies @ Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, pp. 211 - 212)
This I have called “Asia as method,” and yet it is impossible to definitely state what this might mean. Takeuchi Yoshimi, "Asia As Method" The critical analysis of nationalist thought is also necessarily an intervention in a political discourse of our own time. Reflecting on the intellectual struggles of nationalist writers of a bygone era, we are made aware of the way in which we relate our own theory and practice; judging their assessment of political possibilities, we begin to ponder the possibilities open to us today. Thus, analysis itself becomes politics; interpretation acquires the undertones of a polemic. In such circumstances, to pretend to speak in the “objective” voice of history is to dissimulate. By marking our own text with the signs of battle, we hope to go a little further towards a more open and self-aware discourse. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World Knowledge production is one of the major sites in which imperialism operates and exercises its power. The analyses in the preceding chapters suggest that the underdevelopment of deimperialization movements is a significant contributing factor in local, regional, and global conflicts throughout the contemporary world. This underdevelopment, I submit, has to do with the current conditions of knowledge production, which have serious structural limitations. To breakthrough the impasse, critical intellectual work on deimperialization first and foremost has to transform these problematic conditions, transcend the structural limitations, and uncover alternative possibilities. Leaving Asia for America To confront the long-lasting impact of “leaving Asia for America” ( tuōyǎ rùměi ) since the Second World War in East Asia in general, and Taiwan in particular, this chapter puts forward “Asia as method” as a critical proposition to transform the existing knowledge structure and at the same time to transform ourselves. The potential of Asia as method is this: using the idea of Asia as an imaginary anchoring point, societies in Asia can become each other’s points of reference, so that the understanding of the self may be transformed, and subjectivity rebuilt. On this basis, the diverse historical experiences and rich social practices of Asia maybe mobilized to provide alternative horizons and perspectives. This method of engagement, I believe, has the potential to advance a different understanding of world history. At the same time, the formulation of Asia as method is also an attempt to move forward on the tripartite problematic of decolonization, deimperialization, and de–cold war. To briefly recap the analysis developed over the previous four chapters: the historical processes of imperialization, colonization, and the cold war have become mutually entangled structures, which have shaped and conditioned both intellectual and popular knowledge production. Through the use of Asia as method, a society in Asia may be inspired by how other Asian societies deal with problems similar to its own, and thus overcome unproductive anxieties and develop new paths of engagement. In proposing a means for self-transformation through shifting our points of reference toward Asia and the third world, Asia as method is grounded in the critical discourses of an earlier generation of thinkers, with whom we now imagine new possibilities.
Cho ‘8 (Grace M., Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology @ College of Staten Island, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, pp. 46-49)
While there are methods for fleshing out the ghost, I do not want to fetishize any of them as the correct alternative to standard practices of sociology. When not practiced self-critically, any method can run counter to the goals of my project—to study unconscious thought and dislocated memory, to see what emerges from the holes in history, and to explore the possibility of a wit- ness to trauma that is an assemblage of disparate elements rather than an individual speaking subject. I therefore use multiple methods of dream work and experimental forms of autoethnography to explore the yanggongju’s haunting of the Korean diaspora. But in order to bring alive these methods of remembering trauma, they must not only be written on the page but also expressed through other bearers of unconscious thought such as embodied performance. The field of performance studies, for example, has explored the relationship between trauma and performance, showing that performance, in many cultures, is a way of summoning ghosts.53 It also suggests that the constellations of affect between performers and audience in a live performance embody and transmit trauma.54 If trauma is an experience that is folded into the body but never quite reaches cognition, or thought that is stored but cannot yet emerge because it precedes the technological apparatus required to decode it, performance is one such apparatus that allows that unconscious experience to emerge.55 As Jill Bennett says of the performance artist who treats the subject of trauma, “The artist does not merely describe an inner experience but allows such experience to fold back into the world in a manner that can inform understandings both about the nature of relationships to others and about the political nature of violence and pain.”56 This project combines elements of writing history and memory that are performative in their iterations to allow unconscious experience folded into the body to then fold back into the world, thus creating affective circuits between bodies.¶ As important as it is to use multiple methods, it is just as important to employ “multiple drafts.” Johnston suggests that a contemporary psyche no longer inscribes itself in text through stream of consciousness but rather does so through the reworkings of multiple drafts.57 The methodological byproducts of this process are unexpected juxtapositions, repetitions, discarded thought fragments, and the same story told differently each time. In order to engage the repetition of trauma, the same moments must be revisited, the same phantomized words reiterated. The result of these practices is a performance of traumatic effects—temporal or spatial dislocation, projection, hallucination—in order to unravel the haunting silence that generates ghosts. While such effects are evident throughout the book, they are most notable in the concluding chapter, in which disaggregated pieces of social facts are reassembled, repeated, and laid alongside remnants of an entirely different story. This method of juxtaposition creates unlikely connections and makes gaps more apparent. It exposes the fractures in what was previously a sensible story about the Korean diaspora, and it does so in order to make way for a violently submerged memory to come to the surface.¶ This is a project that must speak in more than one voice. It calls the reader, in Orr’s words, “to turn an other ear toward what might (im)possibly be heard of spiraling effects, of inarticulate experiences of more than one story at a time, . . . the chattering stammering conversation with the dead and about death.”58 The presence of a ghost compels us to listen to these voices and to hear more than one story at a time. Therefore, some of the chapters are somewhat experimental in terms of the voices used, while others are presented in a more “academic” voice. Sometimes the voice is my own, but often my voice is interrupted by the multiplicity of unconscious thoughts that threaten the integrity of a single authoritative voice. Many of the voices in this text are inauthentic. As in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, there are borrowed voices that are a nagging presence in these pages—those of other authors such as Abraham and Torok, Gordon, and Rose, as well as Cha herself.59 Alongside and in conjunction with these speak other borrowed voices that have not enjoyed the same privileges of authorship, those whose words were never legitimated through print. Some of the voices in this text are seemingly irrational to the point of madness, but if a ghost can take on the guise of a hallucination, what might we venture to gain by listening to what those voices have to say?60¶ I want to tell you a story about the yanggongju, but I also want to resist the tendency toward creating a piece of work whose politics remain at the level of representation about a lost or suppressed history. To tell a story of trauma is not to tell of what was lost but to meditate on the ways in which, as Cheng says, “cultural trauma . . . recurs as a profoundly unlocatable event.”61 Rather than claiming to uncover the truth about what really happened to Korean women during the history of U.S. military involvement or to recover these women’s lost memories, I hope that this work will look for the traces of haunting around us. To give form to the haunted spaces marked by trauma creates openings for trauma’s productive possibilities. Rather than privileging research methods that are organized around the argument, this project shifts the focus of research from content to affect. I am just as concerned about what the presentation of evidence does as what it says. What affects are produced in listeners, and what affects get stored away to be released in the future? As Gordon writes, “Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition.”62 What is produced in this process, I hope, will be new bodies that can offer insight about the present and that “make the irrecoverable the condition of a new political agency,” in the words of Butler.63 This project is a staging of words, of traumas Clough calls “too deeply embodied for an I to speak them.”64 Where flesh and paper meet and unconscious is rendered into text, I share the stage with these ghosts
