Tournament: College Prep | Round: 2 | Opponent: idk | Judge: idk
the framing issue for this debate is that desire inevitably lacks as a result of the structure of language on the speaking organism-analysis of that gap is key to developing strategies to combat offensive language.
Edkins 3 (Jenny, U of Wales Aberystwyth, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, p. 11-14)LA *Pronoun replacements by ||| in the text.
In the psychoanalytic account the subject is formed around a lack, and in the face of trauma. We become who we are by finding our place within the social order and family structures into which we are born. That social order is produced in symbolic terms, through language. Language does not just name things that are already there in the world. Language divides up the world in particular ways to produce for every social grouping what it calls 'reality'. Each language - each symbolic or social order has its own way of doing this. Crucially, none of these |||social orders||| are complete; none of them can find a place for everything. This is a logical limitation, not a question of a symbolic or social order being insufficiently developed. Completeness or closure is impossible. There is always, inevitably, something that is missed out, something that cannot be symbolised, and this is one part of what psychoanalytic theory calls 'the real'. In its birth into the symbolic or social order, into language, the subject is formed around, and through a veiling of, that which cannot be symbolized the traumatic real. The real is traumatic, and has to be hidden or forgotten, because it is a threat to the imaginary completeness of the subject. The 'subject' only exists in as far as the person finds their place within the social or symbolic order. But no place that the person occupies as a mother, friend, consumer, activistcan fully express what that person is. There is always something more. Again, this is not a question of people not fitting into the roles available for them and a call for more person-friendly societies. Nor does it concern multiple or fragmented identities in a postmodern world. It is a matter of a structural impossibility. If someone is, say, a political activist, there is always the immediate question of whether they are sufficiently involved to count as an activist: don't activists have to be more committed, to take part in more than just demonstrations, shouldn't they stand for office? On the other hand, are they perhaps more than an activist does that description do justice to what they are, to their role in the party? There is always an excess, a surplus, in one direction or the other. However, we choose on the whole to ignore this - to forget this impossibility, and to act as if completeness and closure were possible. We hide the traumatic real, and stick with the fantasy of what we call social reality. As I have argued elsewhere, the political is that which enjoins us not to forget the traumatic real but rather to acknowledge the constituted and provisional nature of what we call social reality. Politics refers to the sphere of activity and institutions that is called 'politics' as opposed to 'economics' or 'society'. Politics is part of what we call social reality. It exists within the agendas and frameworks that are already accepted within the social order. The political, in its 'properly traumatic dimension', on the other hand, concerns the real. It refers to events in which politics of the first sort and its institutions are brought into being. This can be the day-to-day production and reproduction of the social and symbolic order. This continual process has to take place; the social order is not natural, it doesn't exist unless it is produced continually. The political also takes place at moments when major upheavals occur that replace a preceding social and legal system and set up a new order in its place. At such points, the symbolism and ideology that concealed the fragile and contingent nature of authority collapse altogether and there is a brief interregnum before the new order imposes a different form of concealment. The way that time figures in the psychoanalytic account is interesting. A certain non-linearity is evident: time no longer moves unproblematically from past through present to future. In a sense, subjects only retrospectively become what they already are - they only ever will have been. And the social order too shares this retroactive constitution. The subject and the social order in which the subject finds a place are both in a continual process of becoming. Neither exists as a fixed entity in the present moment, as the common-sense view in western culture mightlead us to expect. Both are always in the process of formation. This is because the two are so intimately related. The person is formed, not through a process of interaction with the social order (since that would mean thinking of the social as already there), but by imagining or supposing that the social order exists. This supposing by the individual is what brings the social into being. We have to imagine that others will respond to us before we speak, but it is only our speaking, of course, that enables them to respond. But supposing that the social exists does not only produce the social order, it also, simultaneously, brings the individual into existence too. When our speaking elicits a response, we recognise ourselves as subjects in that response. This recognition is belated when viewed through the lens of a linear temporality: it is not at the moment we decide to speak that we see who we are, but only a moment later, when we get a response. The response tells us not who we are now, since we are no longer that - we have already changed. It tells us who we were, at the moment when we spoke. This is the sense in which we never are, we only ever will hazy been. Like the distant stars, whose past we know from the light that has taken millions of years to reach us but whose present we can only guess at, we can only know what we were, not what we are. And even that is also a guess, of course. In a similar way, when we listen to a sentence being spoken, we can predict what is being said, but we cannot be sure we were right until the sentence is completed and over. Some forms of speech - rhetoric and jokes for example - play on that unpredictability. The uncertainty and unpredictability that this involves can be unsettling. In the rational west, we tend to seek certainty and security above all. We don't like not knowing. So we pretend that we do. Or that if we don't we could, given sufficient scientific research effort and enough money. We forget the uncertainties involved and adopt a view that what we call social reality - which Slavoj Zizek calls social fantasy -- is basically knowable. We adopt an ontology– a view of being and the nature of things - that depends on a progressive linear notion of time. Things can 'be' in our modern western sense only in the context of this temporality. They 'are' because they have a history in time, but they are at the same time separate from that history. But central to this solution to doubt is forgetting, as we have seen. The fantasy is only convincing if, once it has been put in place, we can forget that it is a fantasy. What we are forgetting some would say deliberately - is the real, that which cannot be symbolised, and that which is produced as an excess or surplus by any attempt at symbolisation. We do not remember the trauma that lies at the root of subjectivity, the lack or gap that remains, even within what we call social reality. This position leads to a depoliticisation. We forget that a complete, non-antagonistic society is impossible. We strive for completion and closure, often at any price. There are a number of ways in which this is done, according to Zizek.'' The first is communitarian attempts to produce a close homogeneous society arche-politics. Political struggle disappears because everyone agrees on everything. 'The second, most common in the liberal west, Zizek calls para-politics. Here the political is replaced by politics. Standardised competition takes place between accepted political parties according to pre-set rules, the prize being a turn at executive control of the state bureaucracy. Politics has become policing or managerial control. In the third meta-politics, political conflict is seen as a shadow theatre, with the important events taking place in another scene, that of economic processes. Politics should be cancelled when economic processes have worked themselves out (as scientific materialism predicts) and matters can be decided by rational debate and the collective will. Finally, we have ultra-politics, where political struggle becomes warfare, and the military are called in. There is no common ground for debate and politics is militarised. If we are to resist such attempts to 'gentrify' or depoliticise the political we have to recall the constituted, provisional and historically contingent nature of every social order, of every ontology. This position, which Zizek calls 'traversing the fantasy', 'tarrying with the negative' or fidelity to the ontological crack in the universe, is uncomfortable." It involves an acceptance of the lack of trauma at the centre of the subject and the non-existence of any complete, closed social order.
Given the disjunction between utopian imaginations and the inability of language to express those desires, vote affirmative to accept the lack and traverse the fantasy—only this can avoid serial policy failure. Modern day policy making is founded upon the will for mastery.
Fotaki 10 (Marianna, Organization Studies Group @ Manchester Business School, Why do public policies fail so often? Exploring health policy-making as an imaginary and symbolic construction, Organization 2010 17: 703, Sage, 713-716)Utnif
Towards an alternative conception of public policy-making So far, I have suggested that health policies often fail because the fantasmatic foundations of the policy-making process are not acknowledged as such. Using the example of patient choice, I have also suggested that the reasons for its re-introduction into the UK health care system and throughout Europe, despite limited success in the past, might be better understood through applying the psychoanalytic conception of subjective fantasy. In exploring the limits and possibilities of one particular policy, my aim was to demonstrate how powerful social fantasies are created and how their splitting from organizational reality enables the idealization of the health task. Lacanian and Kleinian psychoanalysis were drawn upon to put forward the article’s key arguments and to further the understanding of the less tangible processes present in public policy making. I have brought together the mental processes that Klein has described and which were then used extensively to explain organizational phenomena, with my central argument about the (unrecognized) role of the imaginary aspects of the policy-making process. Both theories in their own unique ways highlighted the role of fantasy as a necessary stimulant for policy development but also as an impediment to its realization. I have combined the idea of fragmented subjectivity taken from Lacan’s work and socially sanctioned defences from object relations theory, to offer an alternative conception of public policy formation and to explore the reasons behind frequent policy failures. The Lacanian ontology of the subject was used to highlight the role of fantasy as an enabler of social projects. Having its roots in unconscious mental life, fantasy becomes the stimulant driving forward public policies such as patient choice, even though many of these policies are bound to fail as is the case for all imaginary projects. But failure is not necessarily seen as an adverse outcome, but rather as an opportunity to rethink the ideas of purposefulness and teleology in the context of organizations and social endeavours more generally. The Lacanian perspective introduces the productive element held in the recognition of the inevitability of failure, by unveiling the imaginary nature of striving for idealistic policies and the liberating potential of accepting loss. His conception of loss is so much more radical than in object relations theory, where mourning can bring some sort of reparation and make up for it. In Lacan’s work loss originates in the longings of the individual psyche for completeness, which is unattainable, and yet this is what sustains us as desiring subjects. If we lacked loss there would be nothing to desire. Human desire, for Lacan, is a constitutive aspect of human subjectivity and is not driven by rational considerations, as economists would like us to believe. If anything the subject is enmeshed in its imaginary constructs in order to deflect the reality of the human condition. Nor is it a desire for the promised outcome only, but rather (or also) for the symbol that the outcome stands for. Put differently, the incessant search in the subject is for the signified meaning and not for the signifier itself. I have suggested that many public policies are intrinsically idealistic as they are instigated by way of setting desire in motion. So in the case of individual choice in health, the underlying fantasy that drives this policy is the fantasy of freedom (of choice), and by extension the fantasy of control over the uncontrollable. While its stated aim is to achieve diverse (and potentially conflicting) public policy objectives, the policy reflects the contradictions of human subjectivity on a societal level as well. In other words, the patient choice paradox is that it overtly ignores the unconscious motivations implicit in the everyday reality of patient–doctor encounter (for example, by assuming that rationality over-rides patients’ fears and vulnerabilities), and yet takes (unwittingly) account of the fantasy, which is illusory but is also an indispensable aspect of our existence. The analysis moved then towards the thesis that policy tends to be idealistic because it is not meant to withstand an immediate reality test but to express mythical, imaginary and arguably unrealizable societal aspirations and longings. In this sense the discrepancies and discontinuities present in patient choice policy are but an expression of the contradictions that sustain the lack, fragmentation and splitting of the subject, and so are the unspoken, conflicting and often impossible societal tasks performed by public institutions. I have also argued that by distancing itself from operational reality, public policy making expresses societal strife and desire on a fantasy level, whilst health organizations are left in the position of a dependent subject, having passively to reflect it without being able to implement unworkable policies. For this reason, the stated objectives that choice policy is expected to achieve (such as equity and efficiency for example), may be used to deflect attention away from the need to admit the deeper defensive role of health care policy (see also Fotaki, 2006). Yet because the tacit and unspoken functions of health policy related to death anxiety and inexorable facts of life are relegated to the unconscious, they give rise to all kinds of defensive policy rhetoric by policy makers who identify with the ideals they proclaim and then feel obliged to justify them. While policy makers express societal fantasies projected onto them by their constituencies, various professional groups or patient advocates are in their own ways involved in the construction of unattainable ideals, as they too pursue and legitimize their specific projects. The role of fantasy in relation to patient choice seems obvious, but can this be generalized across all policy making processes in relation to health or other areas of public policy making? The answer is an unequivocal yes. The fantasmatic structuration of public policy making is revealed in the difficulty of accepting the limitations that are intrinsic to human predicament and ‘to give up the dream of being all, of living forever, of narcissistic omnipotence and of living in the world that never frustrates our desires’ (Moi, 2004: 869). Health and social care is about dealing with the finitude of our physical bodies. Yet these concerns are no less relevant to the education system, for example, which is unconsciously preoccupied with ensuring the survival of future generations (see Obholzer, 1994) or economic development and the idea of ‘progress’ more generally, all of which enact omnipotent fantasies of the limitless possibilities in their own distinct ways. Being a part of the symbolic order, which is structured in lack and loss, these imaginary pursuits cannot be easily (if at all) translated into workable policy objectives. But where does this all leave policy makers and how can they purposefully integrate Lacanian and Kleinian insights by bringing them to bear on policy formation and implementation? A legitimate question is: if policies are about societal fantasies that cannot be fulfilled, would this not mean that all policies are bound to fail? More fundamentally, aren’t policies meant to address real issues rather than fantasmatic pursuits that cannot be realized? These are important questions as public policies are first and foremost about addressing issues that most of us care about, and a great deal of effort goes into their design and articulation. Therefore, I would not wish to suggest that policies are not about engaging with real problems. In contrast, my proposition is that socially constructed objects of fantasy are stirred up successfully only when policies concern issues that matter. Such is the case of patient choice for example. Yet if policy-making is not to remain locked in searching for unattainable fantasms (of choice for all), originating in the imaginary reflections of the illusory self, we would have to recognize them for what they are. If, on the other hand, we carry on mis-taking them for reality, they will continue to mirror the misrecognized vision of ourselves and our society. The unique strength of psychoanalytic thought is that it demonstrates the injustice towards the other and alienation of the subject whenever we cling to impossible fantasies originating in the imaginary (Leeb, 2008). The emancipatory potential of psychoanalysis on the other hand, lies in its power to highlight (and dispel) the imaginary nature of the subjective drive for unity, certainty and stability which underpins various societal projects. But psychoanalysis does not only warn us about the consequences of mistaking the infinite desires of the psyche with the finitude of human bodies. More crucially it acknowledges the productive role of fantasy, and of its failure, in the social arena. In so doing, psychoanalysis presents us with a way of bridging fantasy with reality in our social and political endeavors. The incorporation of psychoanalytic insights, I have suggested, as a necessary means for rethinking health policy making, is not meant to supplant economic and political explanations of social and organizational life. Instead it is offered to elucidate the co-existence and subtle interplay between psychic mechanisms and calculating rationality that policy makers, politicians, professionals and users of services rely on to make their decisions. Both theories of Lacanian and Kleinian psychoanlaysis drawn upon in this article imply the necessity of recognizing underlying imaginary dynamics as a starting point in the journey towards realistic policy-making. To do so we need firstly to accept the imaginary structuration of the desire to attain the unattainable. This recognition will lead to an acknowledgement and acceptance of the intrinsic instability and conflicting nature of the policy-making process, overcoming the splits between policy design and implementation. In addition to political and financial constraints, policies are simultaneously driven (and limited) by the ambiguity and non-unified subjectivity of those who design them and the users/beneficiaries who are themselves split, enigmatic and multi-dimensional subjects. Such a policy, which is reflective of its context and of itself, would not easily be drawn into seeking simplistic ‘solutions’ reflecting the fantasies of the ego. It would also not become the mirror showing our deepest socially sanctioned desires/fantasies, that we are then encouraged to enact mindlessly. As I have shown, the rhetorical pronouncements of ‘Choice for All’ for example, stand for an injunction to exercise and enjoy (choice) even if it involves the experience of being ill or cared for. The call for the recognition of the fantasmatic structuration of the policy process does not however suggest a blank slate authorization of policies designed without thought as to how they can (not) be implemented in a complex multi-organization such as the National Health Service. As I have argued, when policies are conceived at ‘a distance’ from organizational reality, they cannot relate to patient requirements and cannot be translated into organizational realities. This brings me to my second and more important point, about the necessity of re-considering policy-making processes, as an inclusive process involving those who are concerned with policy implementation: health professionals, and users of services. By engaging users and providers in decision-making and the co-production of services as self-aware subjects rather than as constituencies whose fantasies can be manipulated, there might be a possibility to break through the cycle of policy repetition and blame apportioning. More importantly, reconciling failure as an opportunity that keeps desire alive rather than an outcome to be avoided might create an opening for more realistic policy formation. This in itself is a depressing process as one must also give up the idealized objects, accepting the impossibility of ever attaining them. Yet only by accepting the necessity of Samuel Beckett’s injunction to: ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ (Beckett, 1983: 7) may the process of un-encumbering oneself from the ideals that bind our ego begin. A participative policy making process that bridges fantasy and reality is a first step in such a direction. It would foster an engagement of self-aware subjects accepting the burden of their subjectivity and taking responsibility for their ontological predicament without surrendering to it, rather than a responsibilization of individual users of services or professionals. By re-considering the very idea of policy as grounded in an imaginary projection of a soon to be perfect world, we would have to learn to stop demanding such perfection of our politicians, and they would have to stop believing that they could deliver it. The comprehensive interpretation of policy-making at a societal level and through the lens of organizational defences suggested in this article might contribute to a better understanding of the possibilities and limitations of developing patients’ autonomy, beyond normalizing the ‘management of expectations’. It will also challenge a linear model of policy-making and policy analysis, which separates design from its implementation, showing it to be inadequate. But for this to happen, the unconscious motivations that create and undo policies will have to be appreciated. Taking into account the inevitability of fantasy in policy-making and the inevitability of its failure, may not free us once and for all from the tyranny of imaginary pursuits. It might, however, enable a journey towards the discovery of new ways of desiring, engaging and being in organizations and society.
Exploiting the gap between language and reality opens the possibility to subvert injurious language.
Butler, 1997 (Judith American philosopher and gender theorist; Full-time Unicorn Excitable Speech. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997. Print)
Thus a statement may be made that, on the basis of a grammatical analysis alone, appears to be no threat. But the threat emerges precisely through the act that the body performs in the speaking the act. Or the threat emerges as the apparent effect of a performative act only to be rendered harmless through the bodily demeanor of the act {any theory of acting knows this). The threat prefigures or, indeed, promises a bodily act, and yet is already a bodily act, thus· establishing in its very gesture the contours of the act to come. The act of threat and the threatened act are, of course, distinct, but they are related as a chiasmus. Although not identical, they are both bodily acts: the first act, the threat, only makes sense in terms of the act that it prefigures. The threat begins a temporal horizon within which the organizing aim is the act that is threatened; the threat begins the action by which the fulfillment of the threatened act might be achieved. And yet, a threat can be derailed, defused, can fail to furnish the act that it threatens. The threat states the impending certitude of another, forthcoming act, but the statement itself cannot produce that forthcoming act as one of its necessary effects. This failure to deliver on the threat does not call into question the status of the speech act as a threat-it merely questions its efficacy. The self-conceit that empowers the threat, however, is that the speech act that is the threat will fully materialize that act threatened by the speech. Such speech is, however, vulnerable to failure, and it is that vulnerability that must be exploited to counter the threat. For the threat to work, it requires certain kinds of circumstances, and it requires a venue of power by which its performative effects might be materialized. The teleology of action conjured by the threat is disruptible by various kinds of infelicities. Nevertheless, the fantasy of sovereign action that structures the threat is that a certain kind of saying is at once the performance of the act referred to in that saying; this would be an illocutionary performative, in Austin's view, one that immediately does what it says. The threat may well solicit a response, however, that it never anticipated, losing its own sovereign sense of expectation in the face of a resistance it advertently helped to produce. Instead of obliterating the possibility of response, paralyzing the addressee with fear, the threat may well be countered by a different kind of performative act, one that exploits the redoubled action of the threat (what is intentionally and non-intentionally performed in any speaking), to turn one part of that speaking against the other, confounding the performative power of the threat.
Working to discover linguistic agency is key, because language is at the root of both the survival and the death of the body.
Butler, 1997 (Judith American philosopher and gender theorist; Full-time Unicorn Excitable Speech. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997. Print)
"Linguistic survival" implies that a certain kind of surviving takes place in language. Indeed, the discourse on hate speech continually makes such references. To claim that language injures or, to cite the phrase used by Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda, that "words wound" is to combine linguistic and physical vocabularies. The use of a term such as "wound" suggests that language can act in ways that parallel the infliction of physical pain and injury. Charles R. Lawrence III refers to racist speech as a "verbal assault;' underscoring that the effect of racial invective is "like receiving a slap in the face. The injury is instantaneous'
68) Some forms of racial invective also "produce physical symptoms that temporarily disable the victim ... :· (68) These formulations suggest that linguistic injury acts like physical injury, but the use of the simile suggests that this is, after all, a comparison of unlike things. Consider, though, that the comparison might just as well imply that the two can be compared only metaphorically. Indeed, it appears that there is no language specific to the problem of linguistic injury, which is, as it were, forced to draw its vocabulary from physical injury. In this sense, it appears that the metaphorical connection between physical and linguistic vulnerability is essential to the description of linguistic vulnerability itself. On the one hand, that there appears to be no description that is "proper" to linguistic injury makes it more difficult to identify the specificity of linguistic vulnerability over and against physical vulnerability. On the other hand, that physical metaphors seize upon nearly every occasion to describe linguistic injury suggests that this somatic dimension may be important to the understanding of linguistic pain. Certain words or certain forms of address not only operate as threats to one's physical well-being, but there is a strong sense in which the body is alternately sustained and threatened through modes of address. Language sustains the body not by bringing it into being or feeding it in a literal way; rather, it is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the body first becomes possible. To understand this, one must imagine an impossible scene, that of a body that has not yet been given social definition, a body that is, strictly speaking, not accessible to us, that nevertheless becomes accessible on the occasion of an address, a call, an interpellation that does not "discover" this body, but constitutes it fundamentally. We may think that to be addressed one must first be recognized, but here the Althusserian reversal of Hegel seems appropriate: the address constitutes a being within the possible circuit of recognition and, accordingly, outside of it, in abjection. We may think that the situation is more ordinary: certain already constituted bodily subjects happen to be called this or that. But why do the names that the subject is called appear to instill the fear of death and the question of whether or not one will survive? Why should a merely linguistic address produce such a response of fear? Is it not, in part, because the contemporary address recalls and reenacts the formative ones that gave and give existence? Thus, to be addressed is not merely to be recognized for what one already is, but to have the very term conferred by which the recognition of existence becomes possible. One comes to "exist" by virtue of this fundamental dependency on the address of the Other. One "exists" not only by virtue of being recognized, but, in a prior sense, by being recognizable. The terms that facilitate recognition are themselves conventional, the effects and instruments of a social ritual that decide, often through exclusion and violence, the linguistic conditions of survivable subjects. If language can sustain the body, it can also threaten its existence. Thus, the question of the specific ways that language threatens violence seems bound up with the primary dependency that any speaking being has by virtue of the interpellative or constitutive address of the Other. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry makes the point that the threat of violence is a threat to language, its world-making and sensemaking possibility. Her formulation tends to set violence and language in opposition, as the inverse of each other. What if language has within it its own possibilities for violence and for world-shattering? For Scarry, the body is not only anterior to language, but she argues persuasively that the body's pain is inexpressible in language, that pain shatters language, and that language can counter pain even as it cannot capture it. She shows that the morally imperative endeavor to represent the body in pain is confounded (but not rendered impossible) by the unrepresentability of the pain that it seeks to represent. One of the injurious consequences of torture, in her view, is that the one tortured loses the ability to document in language the event of torture; thus, one of the effects of torture is to efface its own witness. Scarry also shows how certain discursive forms, such as interrogation, aid and abet the process of torture. Here, however, language assists violence, but appears not to wield its own violence. This raises the following question: if certain kinds of violence disable language, how do we account for the specific kind of injury that language itself performs?
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that produces the better means of confronting the resenttiment that structures policy making. Vote affirmative to work within the gap between the real and the symbolic. The recognition of the disjuncture between speech and effect is crucial to open agency.
Butler, 1997 (Judith American philosopher and gender theorist; Full-time Unicorn Excitable Speech. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997. Print)
Those who seek to fix with certainty the link between certain speech acts and their injurious effects will surely lament the open temporality of the speech act. That no speech act has to perform injury as its effect means that no simple elaboration of speech acts will provide a standard by which the injuries of speech might be effectively adjudicated. Such a loosening of the link between act and injury, however, opens up the possibility for a counter-speech, a kind of talking back, that would be foreclosed by the tightening of that link. Thus, the gap that separates the speech act from its future effects has its auspicious implications: it begins a theory of linguistic agency that provides an alternative to the relentless search for legal remedy. The interval between instances of utterance not only makes the repetition and resignification of the utterance possible, but shows how words might, through time, become disjoined from their power to injure and recontextualized in more affirmative modes. I hope to make clear that by affirmative, I mean "opening up the possibility of agency; where agency is not the restoration of a sovereign autonomy in speech, a replication of conventional notions of mastery.
Language is not static, but rather a fluid assemblage. Resignification has altered the meaning of words, and speech codes fail to account for the constantly shifting nature of language.
Butler, 1997 (Judith American philosopher and gender theorist; Full-time Unicorn Excitable Speech. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997. Print)
To decide the matter of what is a threat or, indeed, what is a word that wounds, no simple inspection of words will suffice. We may think that an elaboration of the institutional conditions of utterance is necessary to identify the probability that certain kinds of words will wound under such circumstances. But the circumstances alone do not make the words wound. Or we may be compelled to claim that any word can be a word that wounds, that it depends on its deployment, and that the deployment of words is not reducible to the circumstances of their utterance. This last makes sense, but such a view cannot tell us why certain words wound in the way that they do, or why it is more difficult to separate certain words from their power to wound. Indeed, recent efforts to establish the incontrovertibly wounding power of certain words seem to founder on the question of who does the interpreting of what such words mean and what they perform. The recent regulations governing lesbian and gay self-definition in the military or, indeed, the recent controversies over rap music suggest that no clear consensus is possible on the question of whether there is a clear link between the words that are uttered and their putative power to injure. To argue, on the one hand, that the offensive effect of such words is fully contextual, and that a shift of context can exacerbate or minimize that offensiveness, is still not to give an account of the power that such words are said to exercise. To claim, on the other hand, that some utterances are always offensive, regardless of context, that they carry their contexts with them in ways that are too difficult to shed, is still not to offer a way to understand how context is invoked and restaged at the moment of utterance. Neither view can account for the restaging and resignifying of offensive utterance, deployments of linguistic power that seek at once to expose and counter the offensive exercise of speech. I will consider these at greater length in the chapters to come, but consider for a moment how often such terms are subject to resignification. Such a redoubling of injurious speech takes place not only in rap music and in various forms of political parody and satire, but in the political and social critique of such speech, where "mentioning" those very terms is crucial to the arguments at hand, and even in the legal arguments that make the call for censorship, in which the rhetoric that is deplored is invariably proliferated within the context of legal speech. Paradoxically, the explicit legal and political arguments that seek to tie such speech to certain contexts fail to note that even in their own discourse, such speech has become citational, breaking with the prior contexts of its utterance and acquiring new contexts for which it was not intended. The critical and legal discourse on hate speech is itself a restaging of the performance of hate speech. The present discourse breaks with the prior ones, but not in any absolute sense. On the contrary, the present context and its apparent "break" with the past are themselves legible only in terms of the past from which it breaks. The present context does, however, elaborate a new context for such speech, a future context, not yet delineable and, hence, not yet precisely a context.
Resentment of Speech Codes leads to backlash
Leanord 3, James. Jul 9 19:54:18 2016. Killing with Kindness: Speech Codes in the American University. Content downloaded/printed from HeinOnline (http://heinonline.org).DA=7/9/16.-SVJK)
In fact, the effect of the codes will probably be negative. The one certain reaction to thought codes is resentment. We should not be surprised when students and others react to the yoke of censorship with contempt and derision. As a general matter, people reject paternalistic attempts to control their thoughts and to order their relationships with others. Speech codes communicate an unstated assumption that students cannot be trusted to interact with members of other groups without the benevolent guidance of the campus authorities. Nor should we deceive ourselves by thinking that the backlash will be confined to the archetypal "white male" student. Surely the black law student at Michigan who called a classmate "white trash" must have felt immeasurable resentment at having to write a humiliating letter of apology. 79 It is doubtful that a sense of equality will emerge from an atmosphere of resentment against university paternalism.
Speech Codes Only push hate speech under the rug and makes it worse
Leanord 6, James. Jul 9 19:54:18 2016. Killing with Kindness: Speech Codes in the American University. Content downloaded/printed from HeinOnline (http://heinonline.org).DA=7/9/16.-SVJK)
Perhaps the most insidious effect of thought restrictions is the removal of offensive thought from public view. I know of no one who argues that speech codes alone will eliminate discriminatory feelings or achieve a condition of equality and harmony on campus. In fact, it is likely that speech restrictions alone will only alter the choice of words or the forum for discussion. The most blatantly offensive words will disappear; but in their place will come more subtle forms of discourse and newer modes of expression. The most hateful expressions will be driven underground where they will exist undetected. Surely the values of equality and harmony will be better served when offensive thoughts are exposed to the public and their speakers are forced to answer to public criticism and disapproval.4 And surely the ugliness of a thought is a reason to expose rather than hide it.
Vote aff to embrace the death drive - this is the only radical act available in the debate round. this negativity exposes the compulsion to repeat traumatic loss and confronts social violence at its foundations.
McGowan 13
Todd, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, Symploke, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE): 2013, p. 283-86
There is no path leading from the death drive to utopia. The death drive undermines every attempt to construct a utopia; it is the enemy of the good society. It is thus not surprising that political thought from Plato onward has largely ignored this psychic force of repetition and negation. But this does not mean that psychoanalytic thought concerning the death drive has only a negative value for political theorizing. It is possible to conceive of a positive politics of the death drive. The previous chapters have attempted to lay out the political implications of the death drive, and, on this basis, we can sketch what a society founded on a recognition of the death drive might look like. Such a recognition would not involve a radical transformation of society: in one sense, it would leave everything as it is. In contemporary social arrangements, the death drive subverts progress with repetition and leads to the widespread sacrifice of self-interest for the enjoyment of the sacrifice itself. This structure is impervious to change and to all attempts at amelioration. But in another sense, the recognition of the death drive would change everything. Recognizing the centrality of the death drive would not eliminate the proclivity to sacrifice for the sake of enjoyment, but it would change our relationship to this sacrifice. Rather than being done for the sake of an ultimate enjoyment to be achieved in the future, it would be done for its own sake. The fundamental problem with the effort to escape the death drive and pursue the good is that it leaves us unable to locate where our enjoyment lies. By positing a future where we will attain the ultimate enjoyment (either through the purchase of the perfect commodity or through a transcendent romantic union or through the attainment of some heavenly paradise), we replace the partial enjoyment of the death drive with the image of a complete enjoyment to come. There is no question of fully enjoying our submission to the death drive. We will always remain alienated from our mode of enjoying. As Adrian Johnston rightly points out, "Transgressively 'overcoming' the impediments of the drives doesn't enable one to simply enjoy enjoyment.”1 But we can transform our relationship to the impediments that block the full realization of our drive. We can see the impediments as the internal product of the death drive rather than as an external limit. The enjoyment that the death drive provides, in contrast to the form of enjoyment proffered by capitalism, religion, and utopian politics, is at once infinite and limited. This oxymoronic form of enjoyment operates in the way that the concept does in Hegel's Logic. The concept attains its infinitude not through endless progress toward a point that always remains beyond and out of reach but through including the beyond as a beyond within itself. As Hegel puts it, "The universality of the concept is the achieved beyond, whereas that bad infinity remains afflicted with a beyond which is unattainable but remains a mere progression to infinity.”2 That is to say, the concept transforms an external limit into an internal one and thereby becomes both infinite and limited. The infinitude of the concept is nothing but the concept's own self-limitation. The enjoyment that the death drive produces also achieves its infinitude through self-limitation. It revolves around a lost object that exists only insofar as it is lost, and it relates to this object as the vehicle for the infinite unfurling of its movement. The lost object operates as the self-limitation of the death drive through which the drive produces an infinite enjoyment. Rather than acting as a mark of the drive's finitude, the limitation that the lost object introduces provides access to infinity. A society founded on a recognition of the death drive would be one that viewed its limitations as the source of its infinite enjoyment rather than an obstacle to that enjoyment. To take the clearest and most traumatic example in recent history, the recognition of the death drive in 1930s Germany would have conceived the figure of the Jew not as the barrier to the ultimate enjoyment that must therefore be eliminated but as the internal limit through which German society attained its enjoyment. As numerous theorists have said, the appeal of Nazism lay in its ability to mobilize the enjoyment of the average German through pointing out a threat to that enjoyment. The average German under Nazism could enjoy the figure of the Jew as it appeared in the form of an obstacle, but it is possible to recognize the obstacle not as an external limit but as an internal one. In this way, the figure of the Jew would become merely a figure for the average German rather than a position embodied by actual Jews.
Closer to home, one would recognize the terrorist as a figure representing the internal limit of global capitalist society. Far from serving as an obstacle to the ultimate enjoyment in that society, the terrorist provides a barrier where none otherwise exists and thereby serves as the vehicle through which capitalist society attains its enjoyment. The absence of explicit limitations within contemporary global capitalism necessitates such a figure: if terrorists did not exist, global capitalist society would have to invent them. But recognizing the terrorist as the internal limit of global capitalist society would mean the end of terrorism. This recognition would transform the global landscape and deprive would-be terrorists of the libidinal space within which to act. Though some people may continue to blow up buildings, they would cease to be terrorists in the way that we now understand the term. A self-limiting society would still have real battles to fight. There would remain a need for this society to defend itself against external threats and against the cruelty of the natural universe. Perhaps it would require nuclear weapons in space to defend against comets or meteors that would threaten to wipe out human life on the planet. But it would cease positing the ultimate enjoyment in vanquishing an external threat or surpassing a natural limit. The external limit would no longer stand in for a repressed internal one. Such a society would instead enjoy its own internal limitations and merely address external limits as they came up. Psychoanalytic theory never preaches, and it cannot help us to construct a better society. But it can help us to subtract the illusion of the good from our own society. By depriving us of this illusion, it has the ability to transform our thinking about politics. With the assistance of psychoanalytic thought, we might reconceive politics in a direction completely opposed to that articulated by Aristotle, to which I alluded in the introduction. In the Politics, Aristotle asserts: "Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for everyone always acts in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.”3 Though later political thinkers have obviously departed from Aristotle concerning the question of the content of the good society, few have thought of politics in terms opposed to the good. This is what psychoanalytic thought introduces. If we act on the basis of enjoyment rather than the good, this does not mean that we can simply construct a society that privileges enjoyment in an overt way. An open society with no restrictions on sexual activity, drug use, food consumption, or play in general would not be a more enjoyable one than our own. That is the sure path to impoverishing our ability to enjoy, as the aftermath of the 1960s has made painfully clear. One must arrive at enjoyment indirectly. A society centered around the death drive would not be a better society, nor would it entail less suffering. Rather than continually sacrificing for the sake of the good, we would sacrifice the good for the sake of enjoyment. A society centered around the death drive would allow us to recognize that we enjoy the lost object only insofar as it remains lost.
frameworks that deprioritize discussions of their assumptions independently cause violence—that’s an impact turn to plan focus
Butler 2k (Judith, Prof @ UC Berkeley and European Graduate School, Changing the Subject: Judith Butler's Politics of Radical Resignification, interview conducted by Olson, Gary A.; Worsham, Lynn, JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, v20 n4 p727-65 Fall 2000, http://jaconlinejournal.com/archives/vol20.4/olson-changing.pdf) LA
A. I'm always glad to have Nancy's arguments. I feel that we have a productive disagreement. I guess I'll say one thing about one of the points she regularly makes. Nancy and some other social theorists who are profoundly influenced by the Habermasian school worry that I am always interested in producing new possibilities but that I don't say which possibilities are good to pursue and which are bad to pursue, that I don't have a set of strong norms that would tell us which possibilities to actualize and which not. Certainly, I don't want all possibilities realized, so why don't I distinguish among them? What I would answer to that is that when we ask the question, "How ought we to live and what possibilities should we collectively seek to realize?" we always ask it within a given horizon of possibilities that are already established- what is imaginable. What worries me is that we very often make decisions about what life to pursue and what possibilities to realize without ever asking how our very notions of "what is possible," "what is livable," "what is imaginable" are constrained in advance, and maybe in some very politically consequential ways. For instance, say you're in a human rights organization that hasn't thought about the problem of gay and lesbian human rights-violence against gays and lesbians, the radical pathologization or psychiatrization or imprisonment of gays and lesbians. And say you are considering which strategies to pursue in the field but that the field of possibilities is delimited in advance such that gay and lesbian lives are not thinkable within the field. What does it mean to make a normative judgment on that basis when you have not critically interrogated how the field of possibility is itself constituted, and constituted through some pretty violent exclusions? It's not as if I wouldn't make such decisions or don't think there are hard decisions to make; what worries me is that the rush to decision-ism and to strong normativity very often fails to consider what is meant by some of the very basic terms that it assumes. For example, what is a deciding person? How are decisions made? What is the field of possibilities that is delimited in advance to me? What is outside that field? I worry that there is a critical dimension to political normativity (and even a normative dimension) that is missing, because if there's a violent circumscription of the possible-that is to say, certain lives are not considered lives, certain human capacities are not considered human- what does it mean that we take that for granted as we proceed to decide what we ought and ought not to do? It means that in our effort to be normative we perform a violence and an exclusion for which we are not accountable, and in my view that produces a massive contradiction. Of course, Martha Nussbaum has also made a very strong attack on me, but I think it actually has nothing to do with my work. It doesn't strike me as an engaged or careful reading, and I presume that it does probably epitomize a certain frustration that a certain kind of liberal American politics has with a critical approach to some of its most important issues. She wants to be able to make strong paternalistic claims about women's conditions; she wants to be able to use the language of universality without interrogating it; she wants to be able to tell us how Indian women suffer; and she wants to be able to, in her words, make "an assault" on local cultures when it is mandated by universal concerns. I see her as being very much opposed to the problem of cultural translation and cultural difference; she thinks they get in the way of strong normative arguments. We can see something like a resurgence ofa certain kind of white feminism here that doesn't want to have to hear about difference, that wants to be able to make its strong claims and speak in the name of "reason," and speak in the name of everyone without having to hear them, without having to learn what it might mean to hear them. So, I'm sorry about that. It seems to me to be full of a kind of displaced animosity, but I think people can read it for what it is. Let me make one final comment. You've asked me about difficult writing, and you've asked me whether I think the State has any role in the adjudication of hate speech. These are in effect questions about whether what I write is readable, whether what I am for is translatable into contemporary politics in an obvious or clear way. I think that I probably produce a certain amount of anxiety, or what Foucault calls the politics of discomfort, and I don't do that just to be annoying. For me, there's more hope in the world when we can question what is taken for granted, especially about what it is to be a human, which is a really fundamental question. What qualifies as a human, as a human subject, as human speech, as human desire? How do we circumscribe human speech or desire? At what cost? And at what cost to whom? These are questions that I think are important and that function within everyday grammar, everyday language, as taken-far-granted notions. We feel that we know the answers. We know what family is, we know what desire is, we know what a human subject is, we know what speech is, we know what is comprehensible, we know its limits. And I think that this feeling of certainty leads to a terrible parochialism. Taking for granted one's own linguistic horizon as the ultimate linguistic horizon leads to an enormous parochialism and keeps us from being open to radical difference and from undergoing the discomfort and the anxiety of realizing that the scheme of intelligibility on which we rely funda- mentally is not adequate, is not common, and closes us off from the possibility ofunderstanding others and ourselves in a more fundamen- tally capacious way.
Training DA - Training debaters so that they might enter the “real world” of policymaking only recreates repressive structures
Levinson 7 (Brett, New York State @ Binghamton, In Theory, Politics Does not Exist, http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.907/18.1levinson.txt) LA
We noted that, in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan derides the Parisian students who believe that to act politically one must go out of the classroom and "onto the street" (143-49, 197-208). Lacan--who in key moments of the seminar discusses these matters after class outside on the "streets," in "public" exchanges--suggests to the students the opposite. Students act politically only insofar as they do their duty, which is to be students, that is to say, readers and writers, analysts, whose aim is knowledge and whose object is language--not masters, academics, or hysterics. If bodies at a university, or in analysis, are to yield a politics, they can do so solely by executing the freedom from mastery and master signifiers that jouissance and knowledge grant, for that joy or "effervescence" cannot be contained within the office/classroom. It sallies forth as object of the drive and object of attraction, potentially gathering the undefined masses. Out of these masses, the happening, if it is to happen at all, occurs: the effervescence of the masses can indeed take any direction, including the direction of politics or socialism. They do not guarantee socialism, yet one can guarantee that there will be no socialism without them. As defined by Lacan, then, analysis is not a design for socialism; but absent the analytic design, no socialism has a chance to come. Hence, the student who leaves behind his responsibility as student, who abandons knowledge in favor of action, is not seeking the student-freedom that he proclaims but precisely the master who blocks that freedom--as well as himself as that master. To the brash student Lacan replies: "the revolutionary aspiration has only a single possible outcome--of ending up as the master's discourse . . . . What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one."
