Tournament: Golden Desert | Round: 6 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake JN | Judge: Herby Kojima
===Contention 1 is the lack===

====Creating disjunctions between speech and effect deconstructs the power of hate speech. ====
Butler, 1997 (Judith ~American philosopher and gender theorist; Full-time Unicorn~ Excitable Speech. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997. Print)
The sovereign conceit emerges in hate speech discourse in several ways. The one who
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Do Things with Words, as an amusing catalogue of such failed performatives.

====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
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a sovereign autonomy in speech, a replication of conventional notions of mastery.

Speech Codes Only push hate speech under the rug and make 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
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ugliness of a thought is a reason to expose rather than hide it.

Yiannapolous proves backlash

Kristen Guerra, 1/14,Washington Post, January 14 2016, "Protests derail UC Davis event with Breitbart's Milo Yiannopoulos, 'Pharma Bro' Martin Shkreli," https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/01/14/protests-derail-uc-davis-event-with-breitbarts-milo-yiannopoulos-pharma-bro-martin-shkreli/?utm_term=.859d289d9c54
A college campus event hosting Milo Yiannopoulos and Martin Shkreli, two controversial and polarizing
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Yiannopoulos "a champion of hate speech against people of color and women."

Codes just gives hate speech more credibility and exposure. Berkeley proves

Melissa Batchelor Warnke, 2-2-2017, "Berkeley protesters just fell into the most obvious trap imaginable. Again," latimes, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-berkely-protest-milo-yiannopoulos-20170202-story.html
An attention-thirsty bigot came to speak at UC Berkeley last night (I
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will slice and dice this footage to show the moral depravity of progressives. 

Contention 2 is primacy

Alumnis aren't donating because of restrictions on free speech.

Anemona Hartocollis, 8-4-2016, "College Students Protest, Alumni's Fondness Fades and Checks Shrink," New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/us/college-protests-alumni-donations.html?_r=1
Scott MacConnell cherishes the memory of his years at Amherst College, where he discovered
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1975, when the college began admitting women, according to the college. 

Trump will cut funding if colleges restrict free speech

Joshua Zeitz, 02/02/2017, "Trump threatens to pull U.C. Berkeley funding after protests against Milo Yiannopoulos turn violent," POLITICO, http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/trump-uc-berkeley-milo-yiannopoulos-234530
"If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?" Trump wrote on Twitter on Thursday morning.

Endowments are key to U.S. competition and innovation

Steven R. Leigh, March 14 2014, "Endowments and the future of higher education," No Publication, http://www.colorado.edu/artsandsciences/news-events/message-dean/endowments-and-future-higher-education
Prominent universities rely heavily on endowments to support their many academic missions. Yale University
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affirm the importance of higher education and enduringly preserve its viability and vitality.

Loss of innovation devastates American primacy

Taylor 4 – Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Mark, "The Politics of Technological Change: International Relations versus Domestic Institutions," Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 4/1/2004, http://www.scribd.com/doc/46554792/Taylor) RGP
I. Introduction Technological innovation is of central importance to the study of international relations
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, and war, international systems would not exist in the first place.

Two impacts, 1. Loss of U.S. Primacy causes nuclear proliferation.

Rosen, professor of National Security and Military Affairs at Harvard University, 2003
(Stephen, "An Empire, If you Can Keep It", National Interest, Spring, lexis, ldg)
Rather than wrestle with such difficult and unpleasant problems,  the United States could give
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is not at all clear that the alternatives are that much more attractive. 

Proliferation guarantees escalation and nuclear war

Utgoff, Institute for Defense Analyses deputy director, 02
~Victor A., former National Security Council staff, "Proliferation, Missile Defence and American Ambitions," Survival, vol. 44, p85-102~
Once a conflict reaches the point where nuclear weapons are employed, the stresses felt
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a hill to bury the bodies of dead cities or even whole nations.

2. Retreat of US power causes Russian imperialism—-Putin is seeking to take advantage of weakness, and only strength deters him

Wilson 15 – MPA @ Princeton, American foreign policy advisor and the current executive vice president at the Atlantic Council of the United States, Deputy Director of the Private Office of the NATO Secretary General, decorated by the Presidents of Estonia, Hungary, Latvia and Poland for his efforts to advance transatlantic relations
(Damon, "A Transatlantic Strategy to Deter Putin's Aggression," US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Europe and Regional Security Cooperation, Lexis)
If we fail to stop Putin in Ukraine, we will face a series of
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who are bearing a far∂ greater economic cost to their own economies. 

Contention 3 is warming

The trump administration will censor professors teaching climate change.

Tania Lombrozo, 11-21-2016, "What Does A Trump Presidency Mean For Climate-Change Education?," NPR.org, http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/11/21/502847128/what-does-a-trump-presidency-mean-for-climate-change-education
More generally, there's speculation and concern about what a Trump presidency will mean for
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the expertise and support they need to teach climate change confidently and accurately.

Restrictions on free speech chills warming education, link is supercharged by trumps secretary of education.

Ann Reid and Glenn Branch, 1-18-2017, "Will education secretary pick Betsy DeVos dilute science instruction?," STAT, https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/18/betsy-devos-education-evolution-climate-change/ Ann Reid and Glenn Branch, 1-18-2017, "Will education secretary pick Betsy DeVos dilute science instruction?," STAT, https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/18/betsy-devos-education-evolution-climate-change/
What will the incoming administration mean for science education in the United States? In
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courage to tackle forthrightly topics that may provoke community disapproval or even hostility.

High quality training and research at colleges is key to solve warming

Snibbe 15 Kris Snibbe, "Colleges have 'special' role in fighting climate change," Harvard Gazette, 3/17/2015 AZ

In an address to faculty and students at Tsinghua University today, Harvard President Drew
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answer the big questions ultimately will yield substantive solutions to this global challenge.

Unmitigated warming causes a litany of impacts leading to extinction

Klein 14 (Naomi, award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics, member of the board of directors of 350.org, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, 2014, pg. 12-14)
But the bigger problem—and the reason Copenhagen caused such great despair—is
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are now convinced thatglobal warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization."

Contention 4 is the underview

Liberalism is good- objective measurements indicate that the world is structurally improving as a result- prefer concrete data over the neg's abstract theorization

Drezner, Tufts University's Fletcher School professor of International Politics , 2013
~Dan, "The Year of Living Hegemonically," 12-27-13, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/12/27/the_year_of_living_hegemonically~~
These sorts of trends tend to give U.S. strategists the heebie-
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politics at Tufts University's Fletcher School and a contributing editor to Foreign Policy.

Extinction comes first

Bostrom 12—Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, and Director of the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology at the University of Oxford, recipient of the 2009 Eugene R. Gannon Award for the Continued Pursuit of Human Advancement, holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the London School of Economics ~March 6, 2012, Nick Bostrom interview with Ross Andersen, a freelance writer, a regular contributor to the technology channel at The Atlantic, "We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction," The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/~~
Some have argued that we ought to be directing our resources toward humanity's existing problems
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eliminating poverty or curing malaria, which would be tremendous under ordinary standards.

War turns structural violence but not the other way around

Joshua Goldstein, Int'l Rel Prof @ American U, 2001, War and Gender, p. 412
First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working
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on injustice as the main cause of war seems to be empirically inadequate.

Tournament: berkeley | Round: 6 | Opponent: canyon crest RP | Judge: olivia panchal
survivors of sexual assault seek protection from colleges- yet they are left with gag orders- issues of silence that will result in punishment if broken.

Kingkade ‘15, Tyler, 7/22/15, Huffington Post Breaking the Silence, http:www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sexual-assault-victims-punishment_us_55ada33de4b0caf721b3b61c/ 
A neighbor overheard Vanessa and her boyfriend shouting and the sound of something — her body, it turns out — hitting the dorm room wall one night in May 2014. The neighbor reported the fight to a residential assistant, who then reported it to Columbia University officials. ¶ As a result, Vanessa, who asked to use a pseudonym for privacy reasons, was called into a meeting the following week with a university official overseeing sexual violence cases at Columbia.¶ The university wanted to investigate the incident, but Vanessa did not want to make a report. She was not ready to admit that she was in a violent relationship. “I kept holding off on the investigation, waiting for him to get his shit together, and that never happened,” Vanessa said.¶ Despite Vanessa’s unwillingness to participate in an investigation, the university imposed a no-contact order between Vanessa her and her boyfriend. Columbia officials told her that the university would consider punishing her if she broke the no-contact order, according to emails obtained by The Huffington Post — even though she was the one suspected to be in an abusive relationship. The punishment, officials said, could be as severe as suspension.¶ Vanessa and her boyfriend were still dating, so neither abided by the directive. But that meant that when Vanessa finally was ready to have her boyfriend’s behavior investigated, she couldn’t bring her case to the university, because that would have meant admitting that she had violated the order. ¶ Colleges issue no-contact orders as a tool to protect victims from their alleged assailants, and apply confidentiality rules to prevent students from airing the school’s dirty laundry. Several students told HuffPost they were threatened with possible suspension if they violated what they consider to be gag orders.¶ Indeed, in a number of cases, colleges issued veiled threats of punishment to survivors of reported sexual assaults, often telling them to keep their cases hush-hush in phrasing that some experts believe may violate federal law. ¶ “Even if they never carry out the threat, the fact is that it’s chilling the speech of a lot of victims,” said Adam Goldstein, an attorney at the Student Press Law Center, an independent watchdog group that has long been concerned with college-imposed gag orders.¶ These threats have prevented sexual violence victims from getting protection from their universities or from police, made it difficult to get emotional support from friends and to discuss their experiences in public, shielded the colleges from outside scrutiny and, in some cases, simply made victims feel like they were the ones on trial. In Vanessa’s case, she says the threat of punishment for breaking the no-contact order pushed her even further into her boyfriend’s arms, since the rule prevented him from getting checked in to visit her at her dorm. Instead, Vanessa spent more time off-campus with him, which she now admits was “dangerous” because the university couldn’t protect her there. ¶ One student at Pace University complained last year that the no-contact order she and her alleged assailant were issued made her feel even more victimized. The directives stipulated that they could not talk about the case to friends on campus, which she felt was effectively a gag order.¶ “In a sense, it was blackmailing me to keep quiet,” the Pace student said.¶ Colby Bruno, senior legal counsel at the Victim Rights Law Center in Boston, says the way colleges are applying no-contact orders, placing an equal onus on both students, is misguided.¶ “They think if we don’t do this to both people, then we are in violation of our obligations under Title IX to be equitable,” he said. “That’s not the case.”¶ At Pomona College in California, alleged victims are told they cannot share the name of the accused person, what their sanctions are or what came up in the investigation.¶ Yenli Wong, a recent Pomona graduate, said that during her senior year she had wanted to write a blog piece for HuffPost about being sexually assaulted, but didn’t want to get in trouble for breaking the school’s confidentiality rules about the investigation that had taken place. Wong had no intention of revealing her assailant’s name — she just wanted to tell her story. But the school had previously told her that breaking the gag order would open her up to disciplinary charges.¶ In an email, Pomona Dean Miriam Feldblum told Wong that her blog post could “refer to specific relevant policy sections in the Handbook, such as ‘non-consensual sexual contact,’” but could not disclose details from the “alleged policy violation statement.”¶ Wong says Feldblum’s response was nonsensical to her, because it didn’t explain whether the blog post would be considered a violation of the gag order.¶ “I felt very trapped and was extremely worried that the college might punish me if I spoke out about what happened to me,” Wong said.
Gag orders exist out of misapplication of ferpa. They create a culture of silence on college campuses and hide sexual assault under the rug.
Kristen Lombardi, 12-1-2009, "Russell Case Russell," Center for Public Integrity, https://www.publicintegrity.org/news/Russell-Case250ARussell
The school later defended its mandatory confidentiality policy before the U.S. Department of Education even while softening the language. Relating the gag order back in the room, Sisson, Russell says, provided a strong incentive to keep quiet: If you talk of the verdict, you’ll face disciplinary charges. At the time, the exchange didn’t faze Russell, who says she did as told in an effort to get justice. But five years later, she’s come to see the school’s old confidentiality policy as emblematic of just how far colleges and universities will go to keep secret cases of alleged sexual assault. And a recent ruling by the Education Department against UVA for a policy “inconsistent with the letter and spirit” of the law has resulted in significant changes there. But an array of practices at UVA and college campuses elsewhere continues to shroud the college judicial system in controversy. Indeed, a nine-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity has found that a thick blanket of secrecy still envelops cases involving allegations of sexual assault on campus. One national study reports that roughly one in five women who attend college will become the victim of a rape or an attempted rape by the time she graduates. But while the vast majority of students who are sexually assaulted remain silent — just over 95 percent, according to a study funded by the research arm of the U.S. Justice Department — those who come forward can encounter mystifying disciplinary proceedings, secretive school administrations, and off-the-record negotiations. At times, policies lead to dropped complaints and, in cases like Russell’s, gag orders later found to be illegal. Many college administrators believe the existing processes provide a fair and effective way to deal with ultra-sensitive allegations, but alleged victims say these processes leave them feeling like victims a second time. The Center has interviewed 48 experts familiar with the disciplinary process — student affairs administrators, conduct hearing officers, assault services directors, victim advocates — as well as 33 female students who have reported being raped by other students. The inquiry has included a review of records in select cases, and examinations of 10 years worth of complaints filed against institutions with the U.S. Education Department under Title IX and the Clery Act — two laws requiring schools to respond to assault claims and to offer key rights to alleged victims. The Center has also surveyed 152 crisis-services programs and clinics on or near college campuses nationwide over the past year. Just over half the students interviewed by the Center have reported they unsuccessfully sought criminal charges and instead had to seek justice in closed, school-run administrative proceedings that led either to academic penalties or no punishment at all for their alleged assailants, leaving them feeling betrayed by a process they say has little transparency or accountability. Some of those students, including Russell, said they were ordered to keep quiet about the proceedings and threatened with punishment if they did not. Still other students said administrators discouraged them from pursuing rape complaints. Survey respondents indicated similar problems with the closed procedures on campuses. Undoubtedly, another law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, complicates the issue. FERPA forbids schools from divulging students’ educational records, including disciplinary records. Administrators believe it binds them to silence on case details, but others aren’t so sure. Under FERPA, colleges can release names of students found “responsible” for committing violent acts. But “we don’t,” concedes Rick Olshak, associate dean of students at Illinois State University, “and I don’t know anyone who does, frankly.” Victim advocates contend that colleges use the law as a smokescreen to cover up campus crimes. “Most institutions have a strong interest in keeping sexual assaults as quiet as possible,” says David Lisak, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts- Boston, who has trained college administrators on combating sexual violence. Typically, Lisak notes, administrators view campus sexual assault as “a very negative piece of publicity,” tarnishing institutional reputations, and heightening fears among tuition-paying parents and students for whom colleges are aggressively competing. College administrators bristle at the idea they’re shielding rapes. But they admit they’ve wrestled with confidentiality in campus assault proceedings because of FERPA and the Clery Act. Confusion over the laws has reinforced what critics see as a culture of silence that casts doubt on the credibility of the process. “People will think we’re running star chambers,” says Don Gehring, founder of the Association for Student Conduct Administration, referring to secret, arbitrary courts in old England. “And that’s what’s happening now.” Kathryn Russell’s Allegations Russell first approached the UVA administration in February 2004. UVA is required by Title IX regulations to respond “promptly and equitably” when a student alleges sexual assault — investigating the claim and taking action to eliminate harm. Most institutions, including UVA, list “sexual assault” or “sexual misconduct” as prohibited acts in their official standards of conduct — allegations of which automatically trigger internal disciplinary processes. A petite, perky student who counted herself “a nerd,” Russell reported that she had been raped on February 13 by a fellow junior whom she’d gotten to know through a class and a club the year before. On a campus prone to what UVA assault-services director Claire Kaplan calls “a culture of silence around sexual assault,” administrators say they have strived to encourage reporting. “We try to make it clear that UVA … has zero tolerance for sexual offenders,” says Patricia Lampkin, vice president for student affairs, “and that students need to report all assaults.” In 2004, Russell became one of eight to recount an alleged rape in a UVA dorm. Eight days after filing an incident report; after telling UVA police she had “unwanted sexual contact”; after informing UVA doctors of “worsening pain” from allegedly forced sex , Russell found herself repeating the story to Penny Rue, then dean of students. The dean gave Russell a 12-page document, entitled “UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PROCEDURES FOR SEXUAL ASSAULT CASES,” which outlined options for adjudicating complaints. It included this language: Confidentiality of the hearings process is of great importance to all involved. Identity of the reporting or accused student and any formal discipline resulting from the hearing may not be publicly disclosed…. Rue didn’t dwell on the policy at first. Instead, Russell remembers the dean doing what many victim advocates say is common: discouraging her from pursuing a hearing. Rue, Russell charges, recommended mediation — an equally shrouded process in which, according to the UVA procedures, “all verbal statements … must remain confidential,” including “offers of apologies and concessions.” “I didn’t want to talk to him,” recalls Russell, of her alleged assailant, so mediation seemed out of the question. She would later initiate her complaint in a March 19 e-mail to Rue. In ensuing days, the dean would informally “confront” Russell’s alleged assailant, who claimed he’d had consensual sex with Russell. In his March 30, 2004, statement to UVA administrators, the accused student portrayed Russell as a willing flirt at a bar who turned sexual aggressor in her dorm, and who repeatedly “grabbed my genitals and wanted me not to leave.” The individual in question did not respond to multiple calls, e-mails, and letters from the Center seeking comment. Rue now works as vice chancellor of student affairs at the University of California, San Diego. In an August 2005 letter addressed to UVA’s associate general counsel, obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, Rue confirmed meeting Russell and handing her the school’s written procedures. The dean said she’d been careful to lay out all the options. “I let her know that it was her decision whether to pursue charges,” Rue wrote in the letter, “and that the University would support her either way.” Rue declined to discuss Russell’s case with the Center, as did other former and current UVA officials familiar with it, despite a waiver from Russell granting permission for them to do so. Informal Proceedings Common Days before filing her complaint, Russell learned that the local district attorney wouldn’t press criminal charges — a typical outcome. Experts say the reasons are simple: Most cases involving campus rape allegations come down to he-said-she-said accounts of sexual acts that clearly occurred; they lack independent corroboration like physical evidence or eyewitness testimony. At times, alcohol and drugs play such a central role, students can’t remember details. Given all this, says Gary Pavela, who ran judicial programs at the University of Maryland, College Park, “A prosecutor says, ‘I’m not going to take this to a jury.’” Often, the only venues in which to resolve these cases are on campus. Internal disciplinary panels, like the UVA Sexual Assault Board, exist in various forms on most campuses. But they’re not the only way schools handle rape allegations. For decades, informal proceedings run by an administrator have represented the most common method to adjudicate disciplinary matters. Typically, an administrator meets with both students, separately, in an attempt to resolve a complaint. Occasionally, they “mediate” the incident. Officials find such adjudication appealing in uncontested situations. If a dean elicits a confession, says Olshak, of Illinois State, who headed the student conduct association in 2001, “We’ll be able to resolve the complaint quickly, easily, and without the confrontation of a judicial hearing.” Resolution, as in formal hearings, can mean expulsion, suspension, probation, or another academic penalty, like an assigned research paper. By all accounts, informal processes take place almost as frequently as formal ones ; at UVA, for example, the administration has held 16 hearings since 1998, as compared to 10 informal meetings. And these proceedings can turn out positively for student victims. In January 2005, Carrie Ressler, then a junior at Concordia University, near Chicago, reported being raped by a football player after attending a party in his dorm. On January 19, within hours of the alleged assault, the police arrested the student athlete; by October, he’d pled guilty to battery for “knowingly making physical contact of an insulting nature,” court records show. At Concordia, Ressler’s report landed on the desk of Dean of Students Jeffrey Hynes. The morning of the arrest, the dean summoned her to his office. “He told me he’d be telling the perpetrator he needed to leave by choice,” she remembers Hynes saying. “If not, he’d be expelled.” Within days, the athlete had left Concordia. Hynes declined to comment on Ressler’s case. “The dean acted in my interests,” Ressler says. She recognizes, though, that the informal adjudication served the university’s interests, too. “I got the sense from the dean that the school wanted to keep this case hush-hush.” Many victim advocates share Ressler’s opinion on this. Often, these victim advocates charge, informal proceedings serve to sweep campus assaults under the rug. Both the Justice Department and the Education Department explicitly say in guidance documents that schools should not encourage mediation in sexual assault cases. Yet Katherine Lawson, an attorney at the Victim Rights Law Center, in Boston, says she’s heard one local administrator boast they haven’t held a full sexual assault hearing in years. “This meant to us that they had managed to pressure students to drop a complaint, mediate, or take some lesser administrative route,” she explains, which kept cases quiet. At times, these proceedings even leave the victim advocates in the dark. Says one crisis-services coordinator at a Massachusetts university, “I don’t have any idea what goes on in those little deans’ meetings.” College Hearings: Little Transparency More formal proceedings are sometimes no less shrouded. College disciplinary hearings, unlike courts, lack the trappings of transparency — campus spectators. Advocates can’t attend unless serving as “advisers” to students. Only integral participants like board members or administrators have any clue when a hearing occurs. “They’re secret because they’re closed,” says S. Daniel Carter, of Security on Campus Inc., a watchdog group. Administrators see it differently, arguing that there are important distinctions between “secrecy” and “privacy.” They can’t open up internal proceedings — formal or informal — because that would amount to granting access to private educational records, which FERPA prohibits, they say. But that doesn’t mean they’re operating in secret. “Not providing private information to the rest of the world is respecting confidentiality and respecting FERPA as a law,” says Mary Beth Mackin, assistant dean of student life at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. And while proceedings remain hidden to outsiders, administrators maintain they’re conducted so students feel they’re as open as possible. 

Thus the plan:  Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not issue gag orders

Gag orders aren’t constitutional restrictions on speech. 

LeBouef 15, Trisha LeBouef, 6/16/15http:www.splc.org/blog/splc/2015/06/colleges-cannot-enforce-gag-orders-on-sexual-assault-victims
The U.S. Department of Education, the agency charged with enforcing FERPA, has ruled multiple times that sexual assault victims who speak about their cases do not violate FERPA, and that colleges cannot enforce gag orders on victims.¶ Congress amended FERPA in the 1990 Student Right-to-Know Act specifically to provides that the outcomes of sexual assault cases are not protected by FERPA when shared with the victim. And federal Clery Act regulations -- regulations that implement the federal campus crime awareness statute -- require that the outcome of a disciplinary case involving a sex offense be disclosed to both accuser and accused.¶ In a 2008 ruling involving the University of Virginia, the Department of Education stated that a university “cannot require an accuser to agree to abide by its non-disclosure policy, in writing or otherwise, as a precondition to accessing judicial proceeding outcomes and sanction information under the Clery Act.” That means colleges that threaten students with discipline for talking about their own sexual assault cases are in violation of federal law.¶ FERPA applies to education records that are maintained by an agency or institution. Student speech, however, is not an education record, so speech between student journalists and sexual assault victims by definition cannot violate FERPA. In the same way, any student newspaper that quotes sexual assault victims as part of its reporting does not violate FERPA.
Standard is resolving structural violence, Being able to share one’s story and having support groups is to recuperate from trauma that survivors go through

Birdsell 14, Bonnie (2014) "Reevaluating Gag Orders and Rape Shield Laws in the Internet Age: How Can We Better Protect Victims?," Seton Hall Legislative Journal: Vol. 38: Iss. 1, Article 4. Available at: http:scholarship.shu.edu/shlj/vol38/iss1/4
Prohibiting a victim from telling his or her story, or even from discussing the details of a court case, is detrimental not only from a constitutional perspective but from a psychological one.122 The process of sharing the details of such a traumatic event and the legal proceedings surrounding it often helps victims to address the violence they have suffered and thus, help them to heal.123 The mental and physical effects of rape, and the lingering after-effects of rape, often go much deeper than the act itself.124 Rape, and the apprehension and memory thereof, manifests in the mind as frequent sense of dread, nagging, and anxiety, which instills in many women a necessary mindset of constant vigilance.125 The stories that victims share with their loved ones, the media, or other victims can give these individuals the chance to define the event for themselves.126 In a sense, it is a method of taking control over an event the victim actually had no control over.127 This kind of self-definition is important for victims in general, but it is especially important for victims of rape and sexual assault, who have historically been shamed and silenced by the rest of society. Allowing victims to have a voice and to use that voice is crucial to the positive progression of society.129 It is essential to make legislators aware of victims’ discontent with the laws governing this area so that they in their capacity as lawmakers may fully understand the suitability or unsuitability of their laws in a real-world context.130 In fact, it is absolutely central to the legal system to recognize its shortcomings in order for there to be a possibility of propelling it forward.131 It is critical for both victims and legislators that victims tell their stories, and that their stories are heard by people in a position to provide assistance.1
External impact is that Discussion stymies rape culture and exposes prevalent sexual assault on campuses. 

Dockterman 14, Eliana, 3/14/14, Rape Victims Talk About Why They Tweeted Their Stories, TIME,
http://time.com/25150/rape-victims-talk-about-tweeting-their-experiences-publicly/
A spontaneous conversation about sexual assault on social media sparks a debate over whether public sharing helps victims heal or hurts them.¶ JoAnne Cusick was wearing a pink floral sundress and jelly sandals when she was sexually assaulted at the age of eight by a group of neighborhood boys. Believing that she was to blame, she kept the secret for nine years until she told a priest about the attack during confession. He assured her that she was innocent in the eyes of God, and the eyes of the world.¶ Twenty-eight years later, Cusick, now a 37-year-old nurse living in Colorado, shared that secret on social media joining hundreds of other victims who tweeted their stories of assault. These women (and a number of men) were responding to a simple question that went viral on Twitter Wednesday night asking victims what they were wearing when they were assaulted. Within hours, a long list of outfits—ranging from sweatshirts to pajamas to bathing suits—accompanied by stories of rape and assault filled Twitter feeds, replacing the normal news items and GIFs.¶ The huge response ignited a conversation on social media and blogs among victims and health professionals as to whether sharing stories on highly public, semi-anonymous social media forums could be a healthy step in the recovery process—a way to make those who’ve been assaulted feel less alone, less stigmatized and shamed. Or does sharing leave survivors open to online shaming and undermine a more traditional route of coping, like therapy?¶ The debate started when Christine Fox, a young woman who tweets under the handle @steenfox, got into an argument on Twitter with someone a follower who insisted that women who wear revealing outfits are at fault if they are sexually assaulted. Fox invited those on the social media network who had been victims of rape or sexual assault to tweet the outfits they wore at the time of the attack in hopes of convincing this man not to victim blame.¶ “I was trying to make him understand that it absolutely does not make a difference, and that the responsibility does not lie on women,” she told The Root. Over the next several hours, Fox received hundreds of replies. With the users’ permission, she retweeted stories as she received them.¶ The campaign of sorts took on another life when Adrienne Simpson from Philadelphia, who has never been a victim of sexual assault, saw the conversation on Twitter and thought that it could take on a new visual format. “I am a marketer, so I think in campaigns and imagery,” she tells TIME. “I was thinking they need pictures with this because that’s what’s going to drive home the idea that you can have on corduroy pants and a camouflage shirt—there’s nothing remotely sexual about that—and this can still happen to you.”¶ She created five images from the texts of five tweets that caught her attention: the camouflage shirt and cords a 15-year-old had been wearing; a school uniform (buttoned-up polo, knee-length khaki shorts) worn by a 13-year-old; a sundress a 19-year-old was wearing to Church on Sunday when she was raped by her 50-year-old minister; jeans and a hoodie for a 22-year-old girl who was acting as a designated driver at a party and whose soda was roofied; and—the one that got the most retweets all night—the Barney pajamas worn by a seven-year-old when she was raped.¶ She added a hashtag: #RapeHasNoUniform. “I think as a victim, when you speak out, you want it to matter. The bigger this gets, the more it matters. I think it should be an organized, public campaign.”¶ But without expecting attention or publicity, many just tweeted in the hopes of helping others. “The assault had nothing to do with anything I did. And I think hearing one survivor being able to say that is a good for people who may still be blaming themselves,” Cusick tells TIME. She has shared her story with friends before, and says she felt comfortable opening up on Twitter.¶ Sarah Webster said she tweeted with a similar motive. Webster has tweeted about her assault in the past and says that nothing is too private for her to share on her account, which is focused on sex and body image. During the course of the Twitter conversation, the question of whether most assailants are strangers or not arose, and Webster decided it was important to share her story. Webster says she was raped by someone she was very close to and hoped her experience would show others that even those you trust can be perpetrators. “I was sexually assaulted by someone I knew, and at the time I wasn’t wearing anything at all. It was in my home by someone who was never supposed to do that to me,” she says. “I wanted to contribute another side of the story.”¶ Scott Berkowitz, the President and Founder of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) was not surprised that seeing so many people share the same experience on Twitter motivated people to share their stories for the first time. “Having this whole community of other people who have been through something similar can be really empowering for people,” he says. “I think there’s safety in numbers. We see that in a lot of scenarios with sexual assault survivors. When there’s allegations, say, against a particular priest that becomes public, suddenly many other people who were abused by that person are okay with coming forward.”¶ Those who posted compared the spontaneous movements to Take Back the Night and Slut Walk—two organized campaigns that have aimed to create safe environments for rape victims to share their stories, debunk the notion of victim blaming and restore safety to campuses and neighborhoods. The popularity of such projects proves that large groups of victims speaking out can bolster other survivors’ confidence. But unlike past movements, this one took place on social media, which can be simultaneously both anonymous and extremely public.¶ 
Contention 2 is framework

Omission isn’t exclusion  

Rorty ‘2 Richard, Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford; “Hope and the Future”; Peace Review; V. 14; N. 2; p. 152-3 shree

I have no quarrel with Cornell’s and Spivak’s claim that “what is missing in a literary text or historical narrative leaves its mark through the traces of its expulsion.” For that seems simply to say that any text will presuppose the existence of people, things, and institutions that it hardly mentions. So the readers of a literary text will always be able to ask themselves questions such as: “Who prepared the sumptuous dinner the lovers enjoyed?” “How did they get the money to afford that meal?” The reader of a historical narrative will always be able to wonder about where the money to . nance the war came from and about who got to decide whether the war would take place.
“Expulsion,” however, seems too pejorative a term for the fact that no text can answer all possible questions about its own background and its own presuppositions. Consider Captain Birch, the agent of the East Indian Company charged with persuading the Rani of Sirmur not to commit suicide. Spivak is not exactly “expelling” Captain Birch from her narrative by zeroing in on the Rani, even though she does not try to . nd out much about Birch’s early days as a subaltern, nor about the feelings of pride or shame or exasperation he may have experienced in the course of his conversations with the Rani. In the case of Birch, Spivak does not try to “gently blow precarious ashes into their ghostly shape,” nor does she speculate about the possible sublimity of his career.
Nor should she. Spivak has her own . sh to fry and her own witness to bear, just as Kipling had his when he spun tales of the humiliations to which newly arrived subalterns were subjected in the regimental messes of the Raj. So do all authors of literary texts and historical narratives, and such texts and narratives should not always be read as disingenuous exercises in repression. They should be read as one version of a story that could have been told, and should be told, in many other ways.
Representations of suffering are good, silence is comparatively worse
Kleinman and Kleinman 96
(Arthur and Joan. “The appeal of experience; the dismay of images: Cultural appropriations of suffering in our times,” Daedalus. Winter 1996. Vol.125, Iss. 1;  pg. 1-24 pgs)
It is necessary to balance the account of the globalization of commercial and professional images with a vastly different and even more dangerous cultural process of appropriation: the totalitarian state's erasure of social experiences of suffering through the suppression of images. Here the possibility of moral appeal through images of human misery is prevented, and it is their absence that is the source of existential dismay. Such is the case with the massive starvation in China from 1959 to 1961. This story was not reported at the time even though more than thirty million Chinese died in the aftermath of the ruinous policies of the Great Leap Forward, the perverse effect of Mao's impossible dream of forcing immediate industrialization on peasants. Accounts of this, the world's most devastating famine, were totally suppressed; no stories or pictures of the starving or the dead were published. An internal report on the famine was made by an investigating team for the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. It was based on a detailed survey of an extremely poor region of Anwei Province that was particularly brutally affected. The report includes this numbing statement by Wei Wu-ji, a local peasant leader from Anwei: Originally there were 5,000 people in our commune, now only 3,200 remain. When the Japanese invaded we did not lose this many: we at least could save ourselves by running away! This year there's no escape. We die shut up in our own houses. Of my 6 family members, 5 are already dead, and I am left to starve, and I'll not be able to stave off death for long.(30) Wei Wu-ji continued: Wang Jia-feng from West Springs County reported that cases of eating human meat were discovered. Zhang Sheng-jiu said, "Only an evil man could do such a thing!" Wang Jia-feng said, "In 1960, there were 20 in our household, ten of them died last year. My son told his mother 'I'll die of hunger in a few days.'" And indeed he did.(31) The report also includes a graphic image by Li Qin-ming, from Wudian County, Shanwang Brigade: In 1959, we were prescheduled to deliver 58,000 jin of grain to the State, but only 35,000 jin were harvested, hence we only turned over 33,000 jin, which left 2,000 jin for the commune. We really have nothing to eat. The peasants eat hemp leaves, anything they can possibly eat. In my last report after I wrote, "We have nothing to eat," the Party told me they wanted to remove my name from the Party Roster. Out of a population of 280, 170 died. In our family of five, four of us have died leaving only myself. Should I say that I'm not broken hearted?(32) Chen Zhang-yu, from Guanyu County, offered the investigators this terrible  Last spring the phenomenon of cannibalism appeared. Since Comrade Chao Wu-chu could not come up with any good ways of prohibiting it, he put out the order to secretly imprison those who seemed to be at death's door to combat the rumors. He secretly imprisoned 63 people from the entire country. Thirty-three died in prison.(33) The official report is thorough and detailed. It is classified neibu, restricted use only. To distribute it is to reveal state secrets. Presented publicly it would have been, especially if it had been published in the 1960s, a fundamental critique of the Great Leap, and a moral and political delegitimation of the Chinese Communist Party's claim to have improved the life of poor peasants. Even today the authorities regard it as dangerous. The official silence is another form of appropriation. It prevents public witnessing. It forges a secret history, an act of political resistance through keeping alive the memory of things denied.34 The totalitarian state rules by collective forgetting, by denying the collective experience of suffering, and thus creates a culture of terror. The absent image is also a form of political appropriation; public silence is perhaps more terrifying than being overwhelmed by public images of atrocity. Taken together the two modes of appropriation delimit the extremes in this cultural process.(35) Our critique of appropriations of suffering that do harm does not mean that no appropriations are valid. To conclude that would be to undermine any attempt to respond to human misery. It would be much more destructive than the problem we have identified; it would paralyze social action. We must draw upon the images of human suffering in order to identify human needs and to craft humane responses.
Treating contigent grounds as transcendental or arbituary leads to eruptions of violence- oppression isn’t natural or inevitable, it is the result of specific policy decisions that can be reversed given institutional analysis
Wingenbach, Notre Dame Government and international studies PhD, 2011
(Ed, Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy, pg 4-12)
This contingency does not render the standard capricious: a kilogram is a kilogram everywhere, even given the minor indeterminacy of the current standard, and one cannot simply assert one's own definition and expect to be understood. Recognition of the historically conditioned emergence of the particular definition of the mass of the kilogram removes none of its power, importance, or centrality to the way contemporary humans make sense of reality. The kilogram is necessary, whether in its current form as a human artifact or a future form as a numeric standard anchored in natural constants. It is, to use Butler's (1992) term, a "contingent foundation." That the kilogram is arbitrary does not make it false. Without the kilogram the metric system would be inexplicable. A standardized kilogram permits us to understand the natural world and communicate that understanding to one another. The habits and practices of billions of people testify to its reality. The foundational character of the kilogram dominates its contingent status, to the point that its contingency seems irrelevant to anyone not engaged in the problem of its measurement. To ask if its value is "true" is to ask a nonsensical question. To argue that the absence of a transcendent anchor for the kilogram would produce a chaos of relativism in global measurement is to assert an absurdity. Much debate in contemporary political theory engages arguments analogous to the attempt to measure the kilogram, absent the awareness of the necessary contingency of the principles debated. Political theories in the dominant mode postulate, stipulate, investigate, and deduce first principles upon which to erect justifications for political institutions and practices. Or they articulate the telos toward which human beings tend, toward which societies are directed, and under which human flourishing might be increased. Political theorists argue about whether or not these principles or claims are true, where true does not merely reference wide-spread social agreement but access to normative reality. Often these arguments recognize explicitly the pragmatic character of political behavior and institutions while implicitly introducing a quasi-transcendent standard to buttress the conclusions reached; variously, these implicit foundations include concepts like reason, human nature, the popular will, the categorical imperative, the market, human capacities, religious scripture, neurological discoveries, and so on. The post-foundational approach to political theory asserts that any normative justification for a set of coherent political claims will have at its core a kilogram. At some point a theory of politics must assert the centrality of a claim that cannot be further defended, a claim that when queried from outside the system in which it makes sense and to which it provides coherence is exposed as a contingent assertion of social will. From the post-foundational perspective all political systems are similarly dependent upon contingent foundations, whether theorized or not. To understand the development of agonistic democratic theory it is important to distinguish post-foundationalism from anti-foundationalism. Both share a range of philosophical assumptions and draw from overlapping intellectual lineages reaching back at least to Rorty (1979), who identified "anti¬foundationalism as a slogan for a complex cluster of ideas previously lacking resonant expression" (Simpson 1987: 1-2, quoted in Seery 1999: 467). These hared presumptions are described by Fish: Anti-foundationalism teaches that questions of fact, truth, correctness, validity, and clarity can neither be posed nor answered in reference to some extracontextual, ahistorical, nonsituational reality, or rule, or law, or value; rather, anti-foundationalism asserts, all of these matters are intelligible and debatable only within the precincts of the contexts or situations or paradigms or communities that give them their local and changeable shape (1989, 344). As anti-foundational work in political theory became more sophisticated, a divergence emerged between thinkers focused on exposing the limits of foundationalism as the key step in making emancipation possible and those emphasizing that recognition of the inevitability of founding narratives is a condition offurther work to reform them (For a detailed discussion, see Marchart 2007). The two dispositions differ significantly in how they understand the status of contingent foundations and their political implications. With the caveat that all such classifications are overbroad and reductive for specific thinkers, I suggest the central distinctions between post- and anti- foundationalism lie in their disparate analyses of the necessity of foundations and their different aspirations for human emancipation. These two distinctions are rooted in a third: their understanding of the status of "truth." Both positions recognize that the contingent foundations upon which political systems depend produce and sustain relations of power. The "givens" that ground any social order delineate the terms of social identity, determine the characteristics that will be systematically rewarded or define the terms of universality against which deviance will emerge, provide the range of acceptable values against which action will be conceptualized, and establish the appropriate domain of political questions. All of these outcomes, which shift across cultures and time as social foundations differ, shape the allocation of resources, privilege, and cultural advantages that translate into political power. Both post- and anti-foundational theorists recognize that the distribution of power emerging from a particular set of foundations also tends to render these foundations invisible, as the anchor to any system of meaning will, from within, appear inevitable. Anti-foundationalism describes a constellation of approaches found in philosophy, literary theory, anthropology, sociology, legal theory, cultural studies, and political theory.1 Anti-foundationalist political theories suggest the narratives that impose and sustain social relations are inherently oppressive because of the necessary exclusions of difference required to maintain the illusion of totality and coherence. Foundational narratives are, on this account, always a threat to otherness, always a danger to particularity and individuality, and always reflect hegemonic power. They further assert that all such narratives must be resisted in order to open up the possibility of human emancipation. Otherness and difference can only emerge in the space created by critical resistance to hegemony and meta-narrative. Bevir describes this tendency quite well: Anti-foundationalists stress the ineluctability of differences and hence the failings of any notion of totality or unity. Differences generate meaning in language; it prevents any meta-theory from covering the diversity of what we know; and it disrupts the romantic dream of harmony in nature and society. A Among others, Fish lists the following as notable practitioners of anti-foundational theorizing: Hilary Putnam, W.V. Quine, Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Hayden White, Thomas Kuhn, Michael Fried, Sanford Levinson, Barbara Hermstein Smith, Jonathan Culler, Frank Lentricchia, Jane Tompkins, Stanley Fish, Martin Heidegger, Hans Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and the "entire tradition of the sociology of knowledge" (1989, 345). While this list includes thinkers that would be described as post- rather than anti-foundational in my analysis, it does illuminate the wide and deep influence of this intellectual disposition. Within the more narrowly circumscribed realm of political theory with which this argument is concerned, the most prominent purveyors of anti-foundationalism as I understand it are Rorty, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and (some interpretations of) Foucault, all of whom can be read to encourage an unceasing resistance to naturalism, meta-narrative, and power as the route to emancipatory politics related concern to defend the otherness of the individual against an invidious social power dominates post-modem political theories (2007: 48). While the diagnosis of the danger varies amongst different thinkers, all assert some version of the claim that emancipation can only occur in resistance to foundational claims, even if such claims will always reassert themselves in some way. Identifying the failings of narratives creates space for freedom and individual creativity to emerge. By contrast, foundational claims are always hostile to difference and thus always incompatible with emancipation. The anti-foundationalist "hostility to all unities or totalities - what I would call a sort of positive aesthetic dandyism - leads them to denounce community as inimical to difference" (Bevir 2007: 48). For the anti-foundationalist, then, the role of political theory is to expose the artifice of narratives in order to permit the emergence of resistance and creativity. All foundations are problematic, because all foundations produce relations of power and meaning that undermine the emancipatory potential of human creativity, while imultaneously producing excluded and oppressed subjectivities. This description would be true even for radically democratic foundations. Little (2008: 176), drawing upon Zizek and others, argues that the "issue, then, is partly about the extent to which democracy is inclusive or exclusive but, more fundamentally, it is also about the way in which all democracies are exclusive and antagonistic to their Others, to some extent, in order to regulate the behaviour of and conduct between those who are included." For an anti-foundationalist emancipation demands neither the improvement of narratives nor the creation of more inclusive, still imperfect, foundations, as all foundations are oppressive. The post-foundational position shares the diagnosis of the exclusive and oppressive character of foundational narratives but rejects the conclusion that emancipation primarily demands resistance. This rejection arises not from an embrace of totality or dismissal of the emancipatory ideal but the recognition that ocial foundations are unavoidable. While it is accurate to assert that meaning, identity, power, and other core aspects of political life emerge contingently within the play of language and the developments of history, it is not accurate to assert that these foundations can be escaped or weakened so dramatically as to lose their hold on subjects. As social creatures without access to transcendent truths or unmediated ontological knowledge, meaning will always depend upon some constellation of assumptions shared by the community within which politics takes place. In practice, human beings rely upon foundations, regardless of their ultimate status. It is simply not possible to escape them completely, or even to relativize them so utterly that their impact is of minor consequence. We require some sort of ontology, even if only shallowly held, to render social order possible. White's (2000) concept of weak ontology provides a useful framework to understand post-foundational claims. We experience our own histories as both contingent and fundamental. We find ourselves inhabiting a set of "ontological - gures" that emerge from our situatedness in a particular history, culture, and language. We can recognize that these figures shape our subjectivity in ways that are both not optional to our identity and not fully accessible to choice or reason, while also understanding that these fundamental elements of our personal and communal identities are not "true" in any sense that exceeds our own practices and history. White's summary of weak ontology expresses the commitment of post-foundationalism (though he uses the term non-foundationalism) succinctly: "first, it holds that one's most basic commitments regarding self, other, and the beyond human are taken to be both fundamental and contestable; and, second, it holds that this contestability extends as well to one's assessments of the strong ontologies of others" (2009: 815). The necessary condition of social life is some sort of shared horizon of meaning, some sort of ground upon which politics takes place. It is important to post-foundational politics that the contingent status of this ground be made visible. It is important that pretension to universality be exposed. But it is not desirable to liberate subjects from the foundational narratives within which they unavoidably live. Moreover, the post-foundationalist assertion of the necessity of contingently held ground allows it to evaluate the normative status of various foundational claims. For anti-foundationalism all foundations are obstacles to emancipatory politics, and all should be resisted. Post-foundationalism, by contrast, can offer judgments about the relative virtues and dangers of various ontologies and work to move any particular ontology closer to a more contingent understanding. Marchart articulates this difference when he asserts: what came to be called post-foundationalism should not be confused with anti¬foundationalism. What distinguishes the former from the latter is that it does not assume the absence of any ground; what it assumes is the absence of an ultimate ground, since it is only on the basis of such absence that grounds, in the plural, are possible. The problem is therefore posed not in terms of no foundations (the logic of all-or-nothing), but in terms of contingent foundations. Hence post-foundational ism does not stop after having assumed the absence of final ground and so it does not tum into anti-foundationalist nihilism, existentialism or pluralism, all of which would assume the absence of any ground and would result in complete meaninglessness, absolute freedom or total autonomy. Nor does it tum into a sort of post-modem pluralism for which all meta-narratives have equally melted into air, for what is still accepted by post-foundationalism in the necessity for some ground (2007: 14). Marchart's passage articulates the distinction between the aspiration to escape or destroy foundations, which he rightfully asserts would lead to incoherent politics and individualist anomie, and the aspiration to actively embrace the contingent necessity of already existing foundations in order to foster in those grounds a greater opportunity for democratic politics. Some foundations are better, some are worse, and all are necessary; the task of post-foundational political thought is to highlight the weakness of our social grounds, the costs they impose on otherness, and the resources available within them to develop an emancipatory politics. Why, if they generally agree about the deleterious impact of universalized or insufficiently decentered foundations, do the two approaches differ so dramatically in their prescriptions for political action? I assert that anti-foundationalism presumes a liberatory narrative ofresistance to certainty and rule. An implicit assumption of an anti-foundational politics is that once the non-universal status of foundations becomes apparent and foundations are deprived of universal pretensions, subjects will be able to free themselves of violence, oppression, inequality, etc. The most common version of this supposition is found in post-modernist visions of politics ( often derived from the work of Lyotard or Baudrillard), in which the erosion of foundations permits the free play of difference and recognition of the local and particular status of all political claims. Absent competition for central status in the system of signs, there is no need for conflict and violence. Such a politics involves practices of repetition, creative re-appropriation, linguistic inventiveness, and constant negotiations of difference without the need to resort to violence. Ermarth describes the outcome thusly: "The shift of emphasis engages us in the play of systems in which all definition is differential and internal to a system, and thus no basis for truth claims beyond local negotiations and outcomes. That shift of emphasis forecloses on the endless wars over possession of Truth that modern rationalism sponsors" (2007: 15). Sometimes this optimism is linked explicitly to a progressive account of history in which the overcoming of metaphysics leads to a higher stage of truth. White (2009) identifies this tendency in the work of Vattimo (2004), rejecting his confidence that because foundations are violent in their essence, overcoming of foundations will lead to a "higher stage of truth" and the dissolution of violence. Marchart (2007: 159) aptly names this tendency "emancipatory apriorism." Theorists who posit emancipatory apriorism presume that once politics is adequately theorized emancipatory and/or egalitarian results will follow. Ranciere's account of democratic politics as "a rupture in the logic of arche" (2001: 14) perhaps best illustrates this ethos of anti-foundationalism: an emancipatory politics only emerges in the contestation of the grounding principles that shape the dominant order. Politics does not occur within foundational orders but instead "exists as a deviation from this normal order of things" (2001: 18). Politics thus names a resistance to or disturbance of the "symbolic constitution of the social," understood in Ranciere's thought as "the police" (2001: 20); any foundation that establishes itself as uncontested ( even if recognizably contingent) imperils the possibility of democratic politics. In the case of anti-foundational emancipatory apriorism, the most common claim is that once difference is liberated from the artificial tyranny of universality, only democratic politics can follow, as only democratic politics can accommodate the absence of common ground envisioned. Alternatively, some accounts imply a "natural" tendency toward emancipatory politics, a tendency that is currently obscured by the totalizing and exclusivist narratives that dominate politics. Neither position is compelling. Why must an emancipatory or democratic politics follow from the destruction of foundations? Neither theory nor empirical observation dictates such an outcome. To assert a tendency toward freedom in the absence of totalizing narratives is to assert another universal narrative; to claim that particular political structures will emerge in response to an ontological revelation requires one to ignore the gap between politics and the political, ontic and ontological, practice and theoretical understanding. Regardless of its source, emancipatory apriorism is incompatible with any political theory that takes seriously the insights of post-structuralism, post-modernism, or post¬foundationalism. Which is not to say an emancipatory outcome cannot follow from the destabilization of foundations, but rather that such results are merely one possibility among many. Which is also to say that emancipatory outcomes require further work on foundations. A post-foundational approach to politics avoids emancipatory apriorism. Recognizing the persistence of foundations reveals that any progress toward any type of emancipatory ideal will require the generation of grounds to support practices consistent with the goal. The practices of politics are shaped by and occur within the context of meaning provided by the political. This distinction, broadly accepted in contemporary political thought, identifies the difference between the everyday practices of politics, generally directed instrumentally toward practical ends, and the theoretical, cultural, and apparently self-evident conceptions of the world within which daily politics takes place. The political describes the grounds upon which politics takes place, and it demarcates the possibilities and limits of everyday practice. The political, for the most part, constitutes politics. Shifts in the political shift the parameters of thinkable politics and define the bounds of what can be recognized as specifically political interventions. It is not implausible to describe politics as the ontic expression of a political ontology. This conceptualization of politics leads contemporary thinkers to focus on the constitutive elements of political life over the practical: changing the political leads to enduring changes in politics, while shifts in politics are likely to either reinscribe the basis of the political or revert to the mean of the foundational order. The political should be understood as a foundation for politics, though a foundation always susceptible to transformation. Foundational theorists hope to get the political "right," by bringing culture, institutions, mores, and values into alignment with the truth of reason or human nature or whichever other absolute they champion. Anti-foundationalist thinkers wish to liberate subjects from the imposition of the political, which is viewed as a font of power to be resisted. In fact, for some post-modernists the emphasis on play, negotiation, and re-appropriation seems to emphasize a politics liberated as much as possible from the political. Ermarth asserts the post-modem political rests entirely on the specific practices enacted by all persons who, combining their languages half aware, using inadvertent repetitions, half-baked memories, conscious choice and trained instinct, all make more creative or less creative use of the various languages and grammars available to them, always positioned and conditioned by the particular grammar but always specifying them in ways potentially new (2007: 14). On this account the danger of politics would be that subjects accept the pretension to universality or consensus that the political potentially privileges. Since the post-modem political emphasizes the unfettered play of grammars and discourses, the proper object of political theory is the displacement or destruction of the political as foundation in order to make space for the political as merely politics. Post-foundationalism accepts neither alternative, instead recognizing the essential necessity of foundational claims while working to highlight the contingency of these grounds. Marchart explains this position well: What occurs within the moment of the political, and what can be excavated out of the work of many post-foundational political theorists as an "underlying logic," is the following double-folded movement. On the one hand, the political, as the instituting moment of society, functions as a supplementary ground to the groundless stature of society, yet on the other hand this supplementary ground withdraws in the very "moment" in which it institutes the social. As a result, society will always be in search for an ultimate ground, while the maximum that can be achieved will be a fleeting and contingent grounding by way of politics - a plurality of partial grounds (2007: 8). Marchart describes the constitutive gap between grounds and action that permits the institution of political society while also always undermining the stability of the social. The antic experience of politics takes place against a background experienced as stable and real; politics cannot take place without the social and society cannot persist without a foundation of meaning. At the same time this foundation, the political, is itself unstable and contingent. Thus post-foundational theorists recognize both the necessity of foundations and the inadequacy of those foundations as a justificatory (rather than authorizing) ground for political actions. Politics becomes dangerous when it insists on treating contingent grounds as either transcendental or arbitrary. The former turns the inevitable but essentially malleable exclusions of a particular foundation into naturalized oppressions that may be unrecognized and uncontested. The latter offers the false hope that once arbitrary traditions are overturned an emancipated agent will emerge within the freedom of unmoored and fragmentary narratives. The post-foundational position embraces the necessity of foundations while committing to continuous interrogation and contestation of these contingently-formed grounds. For the post-foundationalist, then, the route to an emancipatory politics requires an engagement with existing foundations in order to highlight their contestability. Ideally, a grounding narrative that incorporates into its assumptions the contingency of its status would produce a politics attuned to the incompleteness and possibilities inherent in any social order. Like the gap between ideal and real, principle and practice, the gap between the political and politics means that foundations always fail to fully ground the social upon which they depend. If this failure can be made visible without demanding an escape from incompleteness, it becomes possible to envision a politics that both accepts and interrogates its authorizing narratives, a politics that creates the conditions for human beings to begin to exert intentional influence upon the ground of the social without lapsing into totalitarian or atomistic practices. White's notion of weak ontology provides one model of this sort of politics, in which subjects recognize their situated and constitutive relationship to a particular ontology while also accepting that their ontological commitments are not themselves attached to any transcendent or natural anchor. Such subjects accept that their ontological commitments are not optional, while also accepting that the contingent status of their commitments renders them particular, local, and non-universalizable. Butler offers a similar analysis in her account of the manner in which all theory posits foundations "constituted through exclusions which, taken into account, expose the foundational premise as a contingent and contestable presumption" (1992: 7). Any attempt to elucidate coherently the operations of politics will begin to expose the inadequacy of all attempts to provide a full and final grounding for social life. It is thus the task of theory "to interrogate what the theoretical move that establishes foundations authorizes, and what precisely it excludes or forecloses" (Butler 1992: 7). The task of post-foundational political theory is not to destroy foundations but to make their contingency visible so that politics can incorporate into its regular practice the ongoing interrogation, contestation, and re-formation of the necessary but always necessarily incomplete and inadequate grounds of social and political life.

Political engagement is an empowering process which is in itself revolutionary—the alternative is right wing takeover—politics goes on without you
Mouffe 9, Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, Chantal, 2009, “The Importance of Engaging the State,” What is Radical Politics Today? Edited by Jonathan Pugh, 230-231, 234-237

The way we envisage social criticism has very important consequences for radical politics. Radical politics today is often characterised in terms of desertion, exodus and refusal to engage with existing institutions. Whereas I believe that radical politics should instead be concerned with building political engagement, through developing competing, antagonistic political claims. My aim here is to highlight the main differences between these two characterisations. The first could roughly be described as ‘critique as withdrawal’; the second as ‘critique as engagement’. I will argue that, ultimately, the problem with the form of radical politics advocated by ‘critique as withdrawal’ is that it has a flawed understanding of the very nature of ‘the political’ itself. Critique as withdrawal The model of social criticism and radical politics put forward by Michel Hardt and Antonio Negri in their books Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004) is a good illustration of ‘critique as withdrawal’. Empire is often referred to as the Communist manifesto for the twenty-first century in academic and activist conferences. In this book, the authors call for a total break with modernity and the elaboration of a postmodern approach. In their view such a break is required because of the crucial transformations of globalisation and the subsequent workers’ struggle experienced by our society during the last decades of the twentieth century. According to Hardt and Negri, these transformations can be broadly summarised in the following way: 1. Sovereignty has taken a new form: there is a new global sovereignty, which Hardt and Negri call ‘Empire’. They argue that this Empire is a new imperialism that replaces the attempt by nation states to extend their own sovereignty beyond their borders. In contrast to old-style imperialism, the current Empire has no territorial centre of power and no fixed boundaries; it is decentred and deterritorialised, progressively incorporating the entire global realm with open, expanding frontiers.
Mouffe continues …
Critique as engagement I will now turn to presenting the way I envisage the form of social criticism best suited to radical politics today. I agree with Hardt and Negri that it is important to understand the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. But I consider that the dynamics of this transition is better apprehended within the framework of the approach outlined in the book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). What I want to stress is that many factors have contributed to this transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, and that it is necessary to recognise its complex nature. My problem with Hardt and Negri’s view is that, by putting so much emphasis on the workers’ struggles, they tend to see this transition as if it was driven by one single logic: the workers’ resistance to the forces of capitalism in the post-Fordist era. They put too much emphasis upon immaterial labour. In their view, capitalism can only be reactive and they refuse to accept the creative role played both by capital and by labour. To put it another way, they deny the positive role of political struggle. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics we use the word ‘hegemony’ to describe the way in which meaning is given to institutions or practices: for example, the way in which a given institution or practice is defined as ‘oppressive to women’, ‘racist’ or ‘environmentally destructive’. We also point out that every hegemonic order is therefore susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices – feminist, anti-racist, environmentalist, for example. This is illustrated by the plethora of new social movements which presently exist in radical politics today (Christian, anti-war, counter-globalisation, Muslim, and so on). Clearly not all of these are workers’ struggles. In their various ways they have nevertheless attempted to influence and have influenced a new hegemonic order. This means that when we talk about ‘the political’, we do not lose sight of the ever present possibility of heterogeneity and antagonism within society. There are many different ways of being antagonistic to a dominant order in a heterogeneous society – it need not only refer to the workers’ struggles. I submit that it is necessary to introduce this hegemonic dimension when one envisages the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. This means abandoning the view that a single logic (workers’ struggles) is at work in the evolution of the work process; as well as acknowledging the pro-active role played by capital. In order to do this we can find interesting insights in the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello who, in their book The New Spirit of  Capitalism (2005), bring to light the way in which capitalists manage to use the demands for autonomy of the new movements that developed in the 1960s, harnessing them in the development of the post-Fordist networked economy and transforming them into new forms of control. They use the term ‘artistic critique’ to refer to how the strategies of the counter-culture (the search for authenticity, the ideal of selfmanagement and the anti-hierarchical exigency) were used to promote the conditions required by the new mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period. From my point of view, what is interesting in this approach is that it shows how an important dimension of the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism involves rearticulating existing discourses and practices in new ways. It allows us to visualise the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism in terms of a hegemonic intervention. To be sure, Boltanski and Chiapello never use this vocabulary, but their analysis is a clear example of what Gramsci called ‘hegemony through neutralisation’ or ‘passive revolution’. This refers to a situation where demands which challenge the hegemonic order are recuperated by the existing system, which is achieved by satisfying them in a way that neutralises their subversive potential. When we apprehend the transition from Fordism to post- Fordism within such a framework, we can understand it as a hegemonic move by capital to re-establish its leading role and restore its challenged legitimacy. We did not witness a revolution, in Marx’s sense of the term. Rather, there have been many different interventions, challenging dominant hegemonic practices. It is clear that, once we envisage social reality in terms of ‘hegemonic’ and ‘counter-hegemonic’ practices, radical politics is not about withdrawing completely from existing institutions. Rather, we have no other choice but to engage with hegemonic practices, in order to challenge them. This is crucial; otherwise we will be faced with a chaotic situation. Moreover, if we do not engage with and challenge the existing order, if we instead choose to simply escape the state completely, we leave the door open for others to take control of systems of authority and regulation. Indeed there are many historical (and not so historical) examples of this. When the Left shows little interest, Right-wing and authoritarian groups are only too happy to take over the state. The strategy of exodus could be seen as the reformulation of  the idea of communism, as it was found in Marx. There are many points in common between the two perspectives. To be sure, for Hardt and Negri it is no longer the proletariat, but the Multitude which is the privileged political subject. But in both cases the state is seen as a monolithic apparatus of domination that cannot be transformed. It has to ‘wither away’ in order to leave room for a reconciled society beyond law, power and sovereignty. In reality, as I’ve already noted, others are often perfectly willing to take control. If my approach – supporting new social movements and counterhegemonic practices – has been called ‘post-Marxist’ by many, it is precisely because I have challenged the very possibility of such a reconciled society. To acknowledge the ever present possibility of antagonism to the existing order implies recognising that heterogeneity cannot be eliminated. As far as politics is concerned, this means the need to envisage it in terms of a hegemonic struggle between conflicting hegemonic projects attempting to incarnate the universal and to define the symbolic parameters of social life. A successful hegemony fixes the meaning of institutions and social practices and defines the ‘common sense’ through which a given conception of reality is established. However, such a result is always contingent, precarious and susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic interventions. Politics always takes place in a field criss-crossed by antagonisms. A properly political intervention is always one that engages with a certain aspect of the existing hegemony. It can never be merely oppositional or conceived as desertion, because it aims to challenge the existing order, so that it may reidentify and feel more comfortable with that order. Another important aspect of a hegemonic politics lies in establishing linkages between various demands (such as environmentalists, feminists, anti-racist groups), so as to transform them into claims that will challenge the existing structure of power relations. This is a further reason why critique involves engagement, rather than disengagement. It is clear that the different demands that exist in our societies are often in conflict with each other. This is why they need to be articulated politically, which obviously involves the creation of a collective will, a ‘we’. This, in turn, requires the determination of a ‘them’. This obvious and simple point is missed by the various advocates of the Multitude. For they seem to believe that the Multitude possesses a natural unity which does not need political articulation. Hardt and Negri see ‘the People’ as homogeneous and expressed in a unitary general will, rather than divided by different political conflicts. Counter-hegemonic practices, by contrast, do not eliminate differences. Rather, they are what could be called an ‘ensemble of differences’, all coming together, only at a given moment, against a common adversary. Such as when different groups from many backgrounds come together to protest against a war perpetuated by a state, or when environmentalists, feminists, anti-racists and others come together to challenge dominant models of development and progress. In these cases, the adversary cannot be defined in broad general terms like ‘Empire’, or for that matter ‘Capitalism’. It is instead contingent upon the particular circumstances in question – the specific states, international institutions or governmental practices that are to be challenged. Put another way, the construction of political demands is dependent upon the specific relations of power that need to be targeted and transformed, in order to create the conditions for a new hegemony. This is clearly not an exodus from politics. It is not ‘critique as withdrawal’, but ‘critique as engagement’. It is a ‘war of position’ that needs to be launched, often across a range of sites, involving the coming together of a range of interests. This can only be done by establishing links between social movements, political parties and trade unions, for example. The aim is to create a common bond and collective will, engaging with a wide range of sites, and often institutions, with the aim of transforming them. This, in my view, is how we should conceive the nature of radical politics.

Underview
1.Counterinterpretation: Any is a determiner and it refers to some.
Google, No Date, https://www.google.com/search?q=define+anyandoq=define+anyandaqs=chrome..69i57j69i60j69i65j69i59.1255j0j7andsourceid=chromeandie=UTF-8
determiner and pronoun determiner: any; pronoun: any 1. used to refer to one or some of a thing or number of things, no matter how much or many. "I don't have any choice" anyone. "they are unlikely to be known by name to any but specialists" synonyms: anyone, anybody, any individual/person; any group "we no longer give to any, unless they represent one of our top five charities" 2. whichever of a specified class might be chosen. "these constellations are visible at any hour of the night" adverb adverb: any 1. (used for emphasis) at all; in some degree. "he wasn't any good at basketball" synonyms: at all, in the least, to any extent, in/to any degree "is your father any better?" USinformal used alone, not qualifying another word. "I didn't hurt you any"
SCOTUS ruled that “any” implies limitations on the object they refer to. Von Eintel 11
Kai Von Fintel, 7-6-2011, "Justice Breyer, Professor Austin, and the Meaning of 'Any'," Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3248 MG
In a recent interview, Supreme Court Justice Breyer lists the five books that have influenced his thinking the most. Among them: J.L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words. Breyer says: JL Austin was an ordinary language philosopher. When I studied in Oxford, I went to one of his classes and I read his books. How to Do Things with Words teaches us a lot about how ordinary language works. It is useful to me as a judge, because it helps me avoid the traps that linguistic imprecision can set. If I had to pick a single thing that I draw from Austin's work it would be that context matters. It enables us to understand, when someone makes a statement, what that statement refers to and what that person meant. When I see the word "any" in a statute, I immediately know it's unlikely to mean "anything" in the universe. "Any" will have a limitation on it, depending on the context. When my wife says, "there isn't any butter," I understand that she's talking about what is in our refrigerator, not worldwide. We look at context over and over, in life and in law. Austin suggests that there is good reason to look beyond text to context. Context is very important when you examine a statement or law. A statement made by Congress, under certain formal conditions, becomes a law. Context helps us interpret language, including the language of a statute. Purpose is often an important part of context. So Austin probably encourages me to put more weight on purpose. It is very interesting that Breyer should choose the word "any" as an example of why context matters. A few years back, there was in fact a Supreme Court decision (Small v. United States) that hinged on the meaning of "any" (pdf of the decision here). And as it turns out, Justice Breyer wrote the decision for the majority (made up of Breyer, Stevens, O'Connor, Souter, and Ginsburg; ah the good old days). The background: Petitioner Small was convicted in a Japanese Court of trying to smuggle firearms and ammunition into that country. He served five years in prison and then returned to the United States, where he bought a gun. Federal authorities subsequently charged Small under 18 U. S. C. §922(g)(1), which forbids "any person … convicted in any court … of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year … to … possess … any firearm." Small subsequently argued that any court was not meant to encompass foreign courts, only domestic ones. The Supreme Court agreed. The arguments in the decision are a good case study of semantics/pragmatics in the real (well, legal) world. Here are some excerpts: The question before us is whether the statutory reference "convicted in any court" includes a conviction entered in a foreign court. The word "any" considered alone cannot answer this question. In ordinary life, a speaker who says, "I'll see any film," may or may not mean to include films shown in another city. In law, a legislature that uses the statutory phrase " 'any person' " may or may not mean to include " 'persons' " outside "the jurisdiction of the state." See, e.g., United States v. Palmer, 3 Wheat. 610, 631 (1818) (Marshall, C. J.) ("General words," such as the word "'any,' " must "be limited" in their application "to those objects to which the legislature intended to apply them"); Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League, 541 U. S. 125, 132 (2004) (" 'any' " means "different things depending upon the setting"); United States v. Alvarez-Sanchez, 511 U. S. 350, 357 (1994) ("Respondent errs in placing dispositive weight on the broad statutory reference to 'any' law enforcement officer or agency without considering the rest of the statute"); Middlesex County Sewerage Authority v. National Sea Clammers Assn., 453 U. S. 1, 15-16 (1981) (it is doubtful that the phrase " 'any statute' " includes the very statute in which the words appear); Flora v. United States, 362 U. S. 145, 149 (1960) ("Any sum," while a "catchall" phase, does not "define what it catches"). Thus, even though the word "any" demands a broad interpretation, see, e.g., United States v. Gonzales, 520 U. S. 1, 5 (1997), we must look beyond that word itself.

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."

Tournament: Stanford | Round: 6 | Opponent: Hawkens | Judge: kolloru, mahadev
Politics today is founded upon the exclusion of death and the reduction of life to mere industrial prolongation, creating a bureaucratic regime of death that encodes the possibility for all exclusions
Robinson 12
(Andrew Robinson, political theorist and activist based in the UK, “An A to Z of Theory | Jean Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism and the Exclusion of Death” Ceasefire Magazine, March 30, 2012, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-2/)
The passage to capitalism: Symbolic exchange – or rather, its suppression – plays a central role in the emergence of capitalism.   Baudrillard sees a change happening over time. Regimes based on symbolic exchange (differences are exchangeable and related) are replaced by regimes based on equivalence (everything is, or means, the same). Ceremony gives way to spectacle, immanence to transcendence. Baudrillard’s view of capitalism is derived from Marx’s analysis of value. Baudrillard accepts Marx’s view that capitalism is based on a general equivalent. Money is the general equivalent because it can be exchanged for any commodity. In turn, it expresses the value of abstract labour-time. Abstract labour-time is itself an effect of the regimenting of processes of life, so that different kinds of labour can be compared. Capitalism is derived from the autonomisation or separation of economics from the rest of life. It turns economics into the ‘reality-principle’. It is a kind of sorcery, connected in some way to the disavowed symbolic level. It subtly shifts the social world from an exchange of death with the Other to an eternal return of the Same. Capitalism functions by reducing everything to a regime based on value and the production of value. To be accepted by capital, something must contribute value. This creates an immense regime of social exchange. However, this social exchange has little in common with symbolic exchange. It ultimately depends on the mark of value itself being unexchangeable. Capital must be endlessly accumulated. States must not collapse. Capitalism thus introduces the irreversible into social life, by means of accumulation. According to Baudrillard, capitalism rests on an obsession with the abolition of death. Capitalism tries to abolish death through accumulation. It tries to ward off ambivalence (associated with death) through value (associated with life. But this is bound to fail. General equivalence – the basis of capitalism – is itself the ever-presence of death. The more the system runs from death, the more it places everyone in solitude, facing their own death. Life itself is fundamentally ambivalent. The attempt to abolish death through fixed value is itself deathly. Accumulation also spreads to other fields. The idea of progress, and linear time, comes from the accumulation of time, and of stockpiles of the past. The idea of truth comes from the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Biology rests on the separation of living and non-living. According to Baudrillard, such accumulations are now in crisis. For instance, the accumulation of the past is undermined, because historical objects now have to be concealed to be preserved – otherwise they will be destroyed by excessive consumption. Value is produced from the residue or remainder of an incomplete symbolic exchange. The repressed, market value, and sign-value all come from this remainder. To destroy the remainder would be to destroy value. Capitalist exchange is always based on negotiation, even when it is violent. The symbolic order does not know this kind of equivalential exchange or calculation. And capitalist extraction is always one-way. It amounts to a non-reversible aggression in which one act (of dominating or killing) cannot be returned by the other. It is also this regime which produces scarcity – Baudrillard here endorses Sahlins’ argument. Capitalism produces the Freudian “death drive”, which is actually an effect of the capitalist culture of death. For Baudrillard, the limit to both Marx and Freud is that they fail to theorise the separation of the domains they study – the economy and the unconscious. It is the separation which grounds their functioning, which therefore only occurs under the regime of the code. Baudrillard also criticises theories of desire, including those of Deleuze, Foucault, Freud and Lacan. He believes desire comes into existence based on repression. It is an effect of the denial of the symbolic. Liberated energies always leave a new remainder; they do not escape the basis of the unconscious in the remainder. Baudrillard argues that indigenous groups do not claim to live naturally or by their desires – they simply claim to live in societies. This social life is an effect of the symbolic. Baudrillard therefore criticises the view that human liberation can come about through the liberation of desire. He thinks that such a liberation will keep certain elements of the repression of desire active. Baudrillard argues that the processes which operate collectively in indigenous groups are repressed into the unconscious in metropolitan societies. This leads to the autonomy of the psyche as a separate sphere. It is only after this repression has occurred that a politics of desire becomes conceivable. He professes broad agreement with the Deleuzian project of unbinding energies from fixed categories and encouraging flows and intensities. However, he is concerned that capitalism can recuperate such releases of energy, disconnecting them so they can eventually reconnect to it. Unbinding and drifting are not fatal to capitalism, because capitalism itself unbinds things, and re-binds things which are unbound. What is fatal to it is, rather, reversibility. Capitalism continues to be haunted by the forces it has repressed. Separation does not destroy the remainder. Quite the opposite. The remainder continues to exist, and gains power from its repression. This turns the double or shadow into something unquiet, vampiric, and threatening. It becomes an image of the forgotten dead. Anything which reminds us of the repressed aspects excluded from the subject is experienced as uncanny and threatening. It becomes the ‘obscene’, which is present in excess over the ‘scene’ of what is imagined. This is different from theories of lack, such as the Lacanian Real. Baudrillard’s remainder is an excess rather than a lack. It is the carrier of the force of symbolic exchange. Modern culture dreams of radical difference. The reason for this is that it exterminated radical difference by simulating it. The energy of production, the unconscious, and signification all in fact come from the repressed remainder. Our culture is dead from having broken the pact with monstrosity, with radical difference. The West continues to perpetrate genocide on indigenous groups. But for Baudrillard, it did the same thing to itself first – destroying its own indigenous logics of symbolic exchange. Indigenous groups have also increasingly lost the symbolic dimension, as modern forms of life have been imported or imposed. This according to Baudrillard produces chronic confusion and instability. Gift-exchange is radically subversive of the system. This is not because it is rebellious. Baudrillard thinks the system can survive defections or exodus. It is because it counterposes a different ‘principle of sociality’ to that of the dominant system. According to Baudrillard, the mediations of capitalism exist so that nobody has the opportunity to offer a symbolic challenge or an irreversible gift. They exist to keep the symbolic at bay. The affective charge of death remains present among the oppressed, but not with the ‘properly symbolic rhythm’ of immediate retaliation. The Church and State also exist based on the elimination of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard is highly critical of Christianity for what he takes to be a cult of suffering, solitude and death. He sees the Church as central to the destruction of earlier forms of community based on symbolic exchange. Baudrillard seems to think that earlier forms of the state and capitalism retained some degree of symbolic exchange, but in an alienated, partially repressed form. For instance, the imaginary of the ‘social contract’ was based on the idea of a sacrifice – this time of liberty for the common good. In psychoanalysis, symbolic exchange is displaced onto the relationship to the master-signifier. I haven’t seen Baudrillard say it directly, but the impression he gives is that this is a distorted, authoritarian imitation of the original symbolic exchange. Nonetheless, it retains some of its intensity and energy. Art, theatre and language have worked to maintain a minimum of ceremonial power. It is the reason older orders did not suffer the particular malaise of the present. It is easy to read certain passages in Baudrillard as if he is bemoaning the loss of these kinds of strong significations. This is initially how I read Baudrillard’s work. But on closer inspection, this seems to be a misreading. Baudrillard is nostalgic for repression only to the extent that the repressed continued to carry symbolic force as a referential. He is nostalgic for the return of symbolic exchange, as an aspect of diffuse, autonomous, dis-alienated social groups. Death: Death plays a central role in Baudrillard’s theory, and is closely related to symbolic exchange. According to Baudrillard, what we have lost above all in the transition to alienated society is the ability to engage in exchanges with death. Death should not be seen here in purely literal terms. Baudrillard specifies early on that he does not mean an event affecting a body, but rather, a form which destroys the determinacy of the subject and of value – which returns things to a state of indeterminacy. Baudrillard certainly discusses actual deaths, risk-taking, suicide and so on. But he also sees death figuratively, in relation to the decomposition of existing relations, the “death” of the self-image or ego, the interchangeability of processes of life across different categories. For instance, eroticism or sexuality is related to death, because it leads to fusion and communication between bodies. Sexual reproduction carries shades of death because one generation replaces another. Baudrillard’s concept of death is thus quite similar to Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque. Death refers to metamorphosis, reversibility, unexpected mutations, social change, subjective transformation, as well as physical death. According to Baudrillard, indigenous groups see death as social, not natural or biological. They see it as an effect of an adversarial will, which they must absorb. And they mark it with feasting and rituals. This is a way of preventing death from becoming an event which does not signify. Such a non-signifying event is absolute disorder from the standpoint of symbolic exchange. For Baudrillard, the west’s idea of a biological, material death is actually an idealist illusion, ignoring the sociality of death. Poststructuralists generally maintain that the problems of the present are rooted in the splitting of life into binary oppositions. For Baudrillard, the division between life and death is the original, founding opposition on which the others are founded. After this first split, a whole series of others have been created, confining particular groups – the “mad”, prisoners, children, the old, sexual minorities, women and so on – to particular segregated situations. The definition of the ‘normal human’ has been narrowed over time. Today, nearly everyone belongs to one or another marked or deviant category. The original exclusion was of the dead – it is defined as abnormal to be dead. “You livies hate us deadies”. This first split and exclusion forms the basis, or archetype, for all the other splits and exclusions – along lines of gender, disability, species, class, and so on. This discrimination against the dead brings into being the modern experience of death. Baudrillard suggests that death as we know it does not exist outside of this separation between living and dead. The modern view of death is constructed on the model of the machine and the function. A machine either functions or it does not. The human body is treated as a machine which similarly, either functions or does not. For Baudrillard, this misunderstands the nature of life and death. The modern view of death is also necessitated by the rise of subjectivity. The subject needs a beginning and an end, so as to be reducible to the story it tells. This requires an idea of death as an end. It is counterposed to the immortality of social institutions. In relation to individuals, ideas of religious immortality is simply an ideological cover for the real exclusion of the dead. But institutions try to remain truly immortal. Modern systems, especially bureaucracies, no longer know how to die – or how to do anything but keep reproducing themselves. The internalisation of the idea of the subject or the soul alienates us from our bodies, voices and so on. It creates a split, as Stirner would say, between the category of ‘man’ and the ‘un-man’, the real self irreducible to such categories. It also individualises people, by destroying their actual connections to others. The symbolic haunts the code as the threat of its own death. The society of the code works constantly to ward off the danger of irruptions of the symbolic. The mortal body is actually an effect of the split introduced by the foreclosure of death. The split never actually stops exchanges across the categories. In the case of death, we still ‘exchange’ with the dead through our own deaths and our anxiety about death. We no longer have living, mortal relationships with objects either. They are reduced to the instrumental. It is as if we have a transparent veil between us. Symbolic exchange is based on a game, with game-like rules. When this disappears, laws and the state are invented to take their place. It is the process of excluding, marking, or barring which allows concentrated or transcendental power to come into existence. Through splits, people turn the other into their ‘imaginary’. For instance, westerners invest the “Third World” with racist fantasies and revolutionary aspirations; the “Third World” invests the west with aspirational fantasies of development. In separation, the other exists only as an imaginary object. Yet the resultant purity is illusory. For Baudrillard, any such marking or barring of the other brings the other to the core of society. “We all” become dead, or mad, or prisoners, and so on, through their exclusion. The goal of ‘survival’ is fundamental to the birth of power. Social control emerges when the union of the living and the dead is shattered, and the dead become prohibited. The social repression of death grounds the repressive socialisation of life. People are compelled to survive so as to become useful. For Baudrillard, capitalism’s original relationship to death has historically been concealed by the system of production, and its ends. It only becomes fully visible now this system is collapsing, and production is reduced to operation. In modern societies, death is made invisible, denied, and placed outside society. For example, elderly people are excluded from society. People no longer expect their own death. As a result, it becomes unintelligible. It keeps returning as ‘nature which will not abide by objective laws’. It can no longer be absorbed through ritual. Western society is arranged so death is never done by someone else, but always attributable to ‘nature’. This creates a bureaucratic, judicial regime of death, of which the concentration camp is the ultimate symbol. The system now commands that we must not die – at least not in any old way. We may only die if law and medicine allow it. Hence for instance the spread of health and safety regulations. On the other hand, murder and violence are legalised, provided they can be re-converted into economic value. Baudrillard sees this as a regressive redistribution of death. It is wrested from the circuit of social exchanges and vested in centralised agencies. For Baudrillard, there is not a social improvement here. People are effectively being killed, or left to die, by a process which never treats them as having value. On the other hand, even when capitalism becomes permissive, inclusive and tolerant, it still creates an underlying anxiety about being reduced to the status of an object or a marionette. This appears as a constant fear of being manipulated. The slave remains within the master’s dialectic for as long as ‘his’ life or death serves the reproduction of domination. A fatal ontology?: In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard suggests an ontology which backs up his analysis of death. The world itself is committed to extremes and to radical antagonism. It is bored of meaning. There is an ‘evil genie’, a principle of Evil which constantly returns in the form of seduction. Historical processes are really pushed forward by this principle. All energy comes from fission and rupture. These cannot be replaced by production or mechanical processes. There is no possibility of a collective project or a coherent society, only the operation of such forces. Every order exists only to be transgressed and dismantled. The world is fundamentally unreal. This leads to a necessity of irony, which is to say, the slippage of meaning. Historically, the symbolic was confined to the metaphysical. It did not affect the physical world. But with the rise of models, with the physical world derived increasingly from the code, the physical world is brought within the symbolic. It becomes reversible. The rational principle of linear causality collapses. The world is, and always remains, enigmatic. People will give for seduction or for simulation what they would never give for quality of life. Advertising, fashion, gambling and so on liberate ‘immoral energies’ which hark back to the magical or archaic gamble on the power of thought against the power of reality. Neoliberalism is in some ways an ultimate release of such diabolical forces. People will look for an ecstatic excess of anything – even boredom or oppression. In this account, the principle of evil becomes the only fixed point. Desire is not inescapable. What is inescapable is the object and its seduction, its ‘principle of evil’. The object at once submits to law and breaks it in practice, mocking it. Its own “game” cannot be discerned. It is a poor conductor of the symbolic order but a good conductor of signs.  The drive towards spectacles, illusions and scenes is stronger than the desire for survival.
Speech codes inherently place value on free speech which leads to endless scapegoating and apathy. The over-proliferation of information collapses under its own weight – more knowledge doesn’t change reality.
Baudrillard 81
Jean I would put quals, but it wouldn’t change anything anyway, “Simulacra and Simulations,” pg. 79-81
 We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning. Consider three hypotheses. Either information produces meaning (a negentropic factor), but cannot make up for the brutal loss of signification in every domain. Despite efforts to reinject message and content, meaning is lost and devoured faster than it can be reinjected. In this case, one must appeal to a base productivity to replace failing media. This is the whole ideology of free speech, of media broken down into innumerable individual cells of transmission, that is, into "antimedia" (pirate radio, etc.). Or information has nothing to do with signification. It is something else, an operational model of another order, outside meaning and of the circulation of meaning strictly speaking. This is Shannon's hypothesis: a sphere of information that is purely functional, a technical medium that does not imply any finality of meaning, and thus should also not be implicated in a value judgment. A kind of code, like the genetic code: it is what it is, it functions as it does, meaning is something else that in a sense comes after the fact, as it does for Monod in Chance and Necessity. In this case, there would simply be no significant relation between the inflation of information and the deflation of meaning. Or, very much on the contrary, there is a rigorous and necessary correlation between the two, to the extent that information is directly destructive of meaning and signification, or that it neutralizes them. The loss of meaning is directly linked to the dissolving, dissuasive action of information, the media, and the mass media. The third hypothesis is the most interesting but flies in the face of every commonly held opinion. Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial. Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus value of meaning homologous to the economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of capital. Information is thought to create communication, and even if the waste is enormous, a general consensus would have it that nevertheless, as a whole, there be an excess of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social just as consensus would have it that material production, despite its dysfunctions and irrationalities, opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose. We are all complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our social organization would collapse. Well, the fact is that it is collapsing, and for this very reason: because where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs. Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social. And for two reasons. 1. Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. The nondirective interview, speech, listeners who call in, participation at every level, blackmail through speech: "You are concerned, you are the event, etc." More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience, the antitheater of communication, which, as one knows, is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the negative. Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning. It is useless to ask if it is the loss of communication that produces this escalation in the simulacrum, or whether it is the simulacrum that is there first for dissuasive ends, to short-circuit in advance any possibility of communication (precession of the model that calls an end to the real). Useless to ask which is the first term, there is none, it is a circular process that of simulation, that of the hyperreal. The hyperreality of communication and of meaning. More real than the real, that is how the real is abolished. Thus not only communication but the social functions in a closed circuit, as a lure to which the force of myth is attached. Belief, faith in information attach themselves to this tautological proof that the system gives of itself by doubling the signs of an unlocatable reality. But one can believe that this belief is as ambiguous as that which was attached to myths in ancient societies. One both believes and doesn't. One does not ask oneself, "I know very well, but still." A sort of inverse simulation in the masses, in each one of us, corresponds to this simulation of meaning and of communication in which this system encloses us. To this tautology of the system the masses respond with ambivalence, to deterrence they respond with disaffection, or with an always enigmatic belief. Myth exists, but one must guard against thinking that people believe in it: this is the trap of critical thinking that can only be exercised if it presupposes the naivete and stupidity of the masses. 2. Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scène of communication, the mass media, the pressure of information pursues an irresistible destructuration of the social. Thus information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but, on the contrary, to total entropy.*1 Thus the media are producers not of socialization, but of exactly the opposite, of the implosion of the social in the masses. And this is only the macroscopic extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign. This implosion should be analyzed according to McLuhan's formula, the medium is the message, the consequences of which have yet to be exhausted. That means that all contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event whatever the contents, whether they are conformist or subversive. A serious problem for all counterinformation, pirate radios, antimedia, etc. But there is something even more serious, which McLuhan himself did not see. Because beyond this neutralization of all content, one could still expect to manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the real by using the impact of the medium as form. If all the content is wiped out, there is perhaps still a subversive, revolutionary use value of the medium as such. That is and this is where McLuhan's formula leads, pushed to its limit there is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be determined. Even the "traditional" status of the media themselves, characteristic of modernity, is put in question. McLuhan's formula, the medium is the message, which is the key formula of the era of simulation (the medium is the message the sender is the receiver the circularity of all poles the end of panoptic and perspectival space such is the alpha and omega of our modernity), this very formula must be imagined at its limit where, after all the contents and messages have been volatilized in the medium, it is the medium itself that is volatilized as such. Fundamentally, it is still the message that lends credibility to the medium, that gives the medium its determined, distinct status as the intermediary of communication. Without a message, the medium also falls into the indefinite state characteristic of all our great systems of judgment and value. A single model, whose efficacy is immediate, simultaneously generates the message, the medium, and the "real." Finally, the medium is the message not only signifies the end of the message, but also the end of the medium. There are no more media in the literal sense of the word (I'm speaking particularly of electronic mass media) that is, of a mediating power between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another. Neither in content, nor in form. Strictly, this is what implosion signifies. The absorption of one pole into another, the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of meaning, the erasure of distinct terms and oppositions, including that of the medium and of the real thus the impossibility of any mediation, of any dialectical intervention between the two or from one to the other. Circularity of all media effects. Hence the impossibility of meaning in the literal sense of a unilateral vector that goes from one pole to another. One must envisage this critical but original situation at its very limit: it is the only one left us. It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable. The fact of this implosion of contents, of the absorption of meaning, of the evanescence of the medium itself, of the reabsorption of every dialectic of communication in a total circularity of the model, of the implosion of the social in the masses, may seem catastrophic and desperate. But this is only the case in light of the idealism that dominates our whole view of information. We all live by a passionate idealism of meaning and of communication, by an idealism of communication through meaning, and, from this perspective, it is truly the catastrophe of meaning that lies in wait for us. But one must realize that "catastrophe" has this "catastrophic" meaning of end and annihilation only in relation to a linear vision of accumulation, of productive finality, imposed on us by the system. Etymologically, the term itself only signifies the curvature, the winding down to the bottom of a cycle that leads to what one could call the "horizon of the event," to an impassable horizon of meaning: beyond that nothing takes place that has meaning for us but it suffices to get out of this ultimatum of meaning in order for the catastrophe itself to no longer seem like a final and nihilistic day of reckoning, such as it functions in our contemporary imaginary. Beyond meaning, there is the fascination that results from the neutralization and the implosion of meaning. Beyond the horizon of the social, there are the masses, which result from the neutralization and the implosion of the social. What is essential today is to evaluate this double challenge the challenge of the masses to meaning and their silence (which is not at all a passive resistance) the challenge to meaning that comes from the media and its fascination. All the marginal, alternative efforts to revive meaning are secondary in relation to that challenge. Evidently, there is a paradox in this inextricable conjunction of the masses and the media: do the media neutralize meaning and produce unformed informe or informed informée masses, or is it the masses who victoriously resist the media by directing or absorbing all the messages that the media produce without responding to them? Sometime ago, in "Requiem for the Media," I analyzed and condemned the media as the institution of an irreversible model of communication without a response. But today? This absence of a response can no longer be understood at all as a strategy of power, but as a counterstrategy of the masses themselves when they encounter power. What then? Are the mass media on the side of power in the manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning, in the violence perpetrated on meaning, and in fascination? Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle? Mogadishu-Stammheim: the media make themselves into the vehicle of the moral condemnation of terrorism and of the exploitation of fear for political ends, but simultaneously, in the most complete ambiguity, they propagate the brutal charm of the terrorist act, they are themselves terrorists, insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction (cf. Umberto Eco on this eternal moral dilemma: how can one not speak of terrorism, how can one find a good use of the media there is none). The media carry meaning and countermeaning, they manipulate in all directions at once, nothing can control this process, they are the vehicle for the simulation internal to the system and the simulation that destroys the system, according to an absolutely Mobian and circular logic and it is exactly like this. There is no alternative to this, no logical resolution. Only a logical exacerbation and a catastrophic resolution. With one caution. We are face to face with this system in a double situation and insoluble double bind exactly like children faced with the demands of the adult world. Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects. The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he responds with a double strategy. To the demand of being an object, he opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, a total claim to subjecthood. To the demand of being a subject he opposes, just as obstinately and efficaciously, an object's resistance, that is to say, exactly the opposite: childishness, hyperconformism, total dependence, passivity, idiocy. Neither strategy has more objective value than the other. The subject-resistance is today unilaterally valorized and viewed as positive just as in the political sphere only the practices of freedom, emancipation, expression, and the constitution of a political subject are seen as valuable and subversive. But this is to ignore the equal, and without a doubt superior, impact of all the object practices, of the renunciation of the subject position and of meaning precisely the practices of the masses that we bury under the derisory terms of alienation and passivity. The liberating practices respond to one of the aspects of the system, to the constant ultimatum we are given to constitute ourselves as pure objects, but they do not respond at all to the other demand, that of constituting ourselves as subjects, of liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost, of voting, producing, deciding, speaking, participating, playing the game a form of blackmail and ultimatum just as serious as the other, even more serious today. To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood. But this strategy is more reflective of the earlier phase of the system, and even if we are still confronted with it, it is no longer the strategic terrain: the current argument of the system is to maximize speech, the maximum production of meaning. Thus the strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and of the spoken word or of the hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of non-reception. It is the strategy of the masses: it is equivalent to returning to the system its own logic by doubling it, to reflecting meaning, like a mirror, without absorbing it. This strategy (if one can still speak of strategy) prevails today, because it was ushered in by that phase of the system which prevails. To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on "consciousness raising," indeed a "raising of the unconscious" of subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech. 

The will to harmonize geopolitics is self-defeating. The moment impacts appears, they immediately disappears as it is swamped by media indeterminacy. This confusion produces constant implosive violence as we attempt to impose meaning onto the map of the globe.
Artrip and Debrix 14. Ryan E. Artrip, Doctoral Student, ASPECT, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and Francois Debrix, professor of political science at Virginia Polytechnical Institute, “The Digital Fog of War: Baudrillard and the Violence of Representation,” Volume 11, Number 2 (May, 2014)
The story that needs to be told is thus not about the undoubtedly deplorable “truth” or fact of explosive and warlike violence, but about a violence of another sort. In the radical digital transparency of the global scene, we (members of the demos) often have full or direct exposure to explosivity, as we saw above with the image of terror. But what still needs to be thought and problematized is implosivity or what may be called implosive violence. Implosive violence is a violence for which we do not, and perhaps will never, have much of a language (Rancière, 2007: 123). Although, not having a language for it or, rather, as we saw above, seeking to find a language to talk about it and, perhaps, to make sense of it is still sought after. This is, perhaps, what digital pictures of war/terror violence seek to capture or want to force through. Implosive violence, often digitally rendered these days, is in close contact with media technologies and representational devices and techniques because it seeks representation and meaning. This is why implosive violence insists on calling in wars (against terror, for example) and on mobilizing war machines (against terrorist others, against vague enemy figures), but wars and war machines that no longer have—to the extent that they ever had—a clearly identifiable object and subject, or a clear mission/purpose. As such, this implosive violence and its wars (the new Western/global way of war, perhaps) must remain uncertain, unclear, foggy, inwardly driven, representational, and indeed virulent. They must remain uncertain and confused even as they are digitally operative and desperately capture events/images to give the impression that meanings/significations can and will be found. Yet, as we saw above, it is not meanings exactly that must be found, but information and the endless guarantee of its immediate circulation. As information occupies the empty place of meaning, certainty, or truth, images must be instantaneously turned into appearances that search for meanings that will never be discovered because, instead, a proliferation of information-worthy facts and beliefs will take over (perhaps this is what US fake pundit and comedian Stephen Colbert famously referred to as “truthiness”). Or, as Baudrillard puts it, “free from its former enemies, humanity now has to create enemies from within, which in fact produces a wide variety of inhuman metastases” (Baudrillard, 2003). Thus, this implosive violence is destined to be a global violence since it "is the product of a system that tracks down any form of negativity and singularity, including of course death as the ultimate form of singularity. … It is a violence that, in a sense, puts an end to violence itself and strives to establish a world where anything related to the natural must disappear  … Better than a global violence, we should call it a global virulence. This form of violence is indeed viral. It moves by contagion, produces by chain reaction, and little by little it destroys our immune systems and our capacities to resist" (2003; our italics).
The overproliferation of harmony has created the Great Firewall, a complementary strategy of media bombardment and ideaotainement alongside massive censorship of any text deemed subversive.
vote aff to affirm  The online culture known as恶搞 (Ègǎo) which effectively plays slightly on these linguistic codes to subvert meaning - the rendering of和谐 (héxié) into河蟹 (héxiè), of harmony into river crab, forming a poetic revolution in the shadow of the firewall.
Our 1AC is a cancerous counter-simulacra, a river crab within the communicative infrastructure of meaning-making, metastasizing as a linguistic onco-operativity of meaninglessness that forces the system of communication to lash out against itself in a suicidal autodestructivity.
Nordin 12
(Astrid H.M. Nordin Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, “Time, Space and Multiplicity in China’s Harmonious World”, 2012, The University of Manchester Library, https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/uk-ac-man-scw:186417, pages 174-213)

ITERATION AND LANGUAGE PLAY: RESISTNIG HARMONISATION Previous chapters of this thesis have examined how the Chinese discourse on “harmony” operates by way of exclusion of discord, and through the violent spatio- temporal double-act of inclusion into sameness and exclusion as “behind”. If such attempts at harmonisation of others have been traced in various times and spaces, this is not to imply that they are not crucially linked to the sovereign power of the policy discourse, by way of which we began the exploration of harmony in this thesis: Hu’s harmony. This version of harmony has bordered its national space in many ways, including by the insistence on territorial sovereignty so closely associated with Hu’s “harmonious world” policy. This insistence on sovereignty and non-interference has been deployed precisely to legitimate in the international arena the various forms of harmonisation that have come to be associated with harmonious world’s policy twin, “harmonious society”. Being harmonised online One key tactic employed by the state for containing dissidence and making resistance more difficult has been through harmonising expression on the Internet. Where some may initially have imagined the Internet to provide the space for near-unlimited freedom of expression and provide a tool to hold government accountable, more empirical studies soon resulted in more sober analyses (Chase and Mulvenon, 2002; Kurlantzick, 2004; Lagerkvist, 2005). On the one hand, the state has been active in trying to include the public through e- governance and “guidance” (导向), and by shaping opinion through overt or covert propaganda online (Lagerkvist, 2005: 206). Officials have portrayed the implementation of information and communications technologies in police and security organs as a “necessary strategic choice”, echoing Hu’s view of the future in terms of an “inevitable choice” (Minister of Public Security, Jia Chunwang, in Huliang - 175 - zhoukan, 2002, cited in Lagerkvist, 2005). One example of such propaganda is the anonymous participation in online fora by what netizens call the “50 cent party”, individuals paid to tow the party line and steer online discussion so as to be favourable to the party. Another example is the increasing amount of what Johan Lagerkvist has called “ideotainment”. This term denotes “the juxtaposition of images, symbolic representations, and sounds of popular Web and mobile phone culture together with both subtle and overt ideological constructs and nationalistic propaganda”, which may be exemplified by the Online Expo examined in the previous chapter (Lagerkvist, 2008: 121). The desired outcome of such e-governance, according to Lagerkvist, is “installing a machine” that can provide “‘scientific and correct’ knowledge among citizens and state officials” (2005: 197). The success of the state in achieving the goals of its inclusionary “thought work” (思想工作) nonetheless remains questionable (Lynch, 1999). On the other hand, the state has been simultaneously active in trying to exclude the public, through deleting posts and blocking the Internet. Border regions like Xinjiang have been without Internet access for long periods as a way to hinder communication and spread of information about the work of their “harmony makers” and to pre-empt the spread of “splittism”.115 A parallel strategy deployed to keep the flow of information harmonious and pure throughout China has been to surround Chinese virtual space by a “Great Firewall”, a programme that blocks many sites based outside China from being accessed from within China (including Google+, Facebook, Twitter and other social media), and to simultaneously demand extensive policing and censorship of sites located “inside” this walled space. An important part of this exclusionary censorship practice has been the widespread blocking of specific words in online communication. A message that includes one of the thousands of characters that at any particular moment is deemed “sensitive” can be instantly deleted by censorship software. The line between acceptable and unacceptable expression remains elusive and shifting (Breslin and Shen, 2010: 266). In drawing it, however, explanatory emphasis is on a language of “health”, with censorship purported to 115 The blackouts were noted in the Western mainstream press (Blanchard, 2009; AFP, 2011). For a fuller explanation of exactly what this blockage entailed in terms of access, see Summers (2009) - 176 - cleanse “pollution” and “unhealthy” elements in favour of “health” and “hygiene” (Lagerkvist, 2008: 123, 134). In response to the governmental policing of the Internet, and to its “harmony makers” in off-line conflicts, the notion of having “been harmonised” (bei4hexie4le 被和谐了) has grown popular as a way of expressing discontent. The use of this passive grammatical voice (bei 被), dubbed by one commentator the “passive subversive” (Kuhn, 2010), indicates that one has been coercively made to (appear to) do something. The term gained such popularity that the “passive tense era” (beishidai4被时代) made the top of the list of Southern4Metropolis4Weekly’s 2009 list of most popular neologisms (Southern Metropolis Weekly, 2009), and bei4was made quasi-official when an arm of the Education Ministry elected it the Chinese character of the year in 2009. Lei Yi, one judge of the event and a historian of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the term won by a landslide by popular Internet vote: “we felt we should recognize this result … so we named ‘bei’ as the character most representative of China’s situation last year” (in Kuhn, 2010). Doubleleaf, a Beijing-based blogger who had his blog “harmonised”, meaning shut down, emphasised in an interview the subversive nature of bei: for centuries we’ve been told that the emperor represented the people’s interests … or that some organization or some leader represented our interests. People did not realize that they had ‘been represented’. This word of the year signals the awakening of citizens’ consciousness (in Kuhn, 2010).4 Chinese netizens have made use of this language in particular to criticise the Chinese censorship of the Internet to shut down any uncomfortable discussion. For example, one Flash animation, found at an online competition to raise awareness about scientific development and harmonious society, features a Bulletin Board System (BBS) comment thread that gets “harmonised”. It shows the BBS thread of net jargon, discussions of a famous person, people trading insults and the posts being suddenly deleted. When one netizen asks what happened the answer is “they have been harmonised”. Finally, a smiling Hu Jintao appears alongside the slogan “Everyone is responsible for a harmonious society” (renren4you4ze4hexie4shehui4人人有责，和谐社会) (Martinsen, 2007; Zhuru cilei, 2007). Egao: Resistance in the sphere of politics and the political The Flash animation that has “been harmonised” is part of a wider form of online culture known as egao4(恶搞), which has become popular since the launch of the harmonious policies and received international attention since around 2006. The term is made up of characters e (恶), which means bad or evil, and gao (搞), which means to change or deal with, leading to translations of the word as “evil jokes” (Li Hongmei, 2011: 71), “reckless doings” (Meng Bingchun, 2009: 52), or simply “spoofing” (Lagerkvist, 2010: 150). This spoofing culture uses irony and satire to mock power holders as well as government policies and practices. Scholars have almost universally described egao as a form of “resistance”, “subversion” or “contestation”.116 Many base their claim on George Orwell’s comment that “every joke is a tiny revolution” (for example Li Hongmei, 2011: 72; Tang Lijun and Bhattacharya, 2011: 2.4). To a number of commentators, it is moreover based on an understanding of a discrepancy between on the one hand PRC party-state language, including tifa like “harmonious world” and “harmonious society”, and on the other hand an “alternative political discourse” (Meng Bingchun, 2009: 39) or “hidden transcript” (Perry, 2007: 10; Esarey and Xiao Qiang, 2008: 752; Meng Bingchun, 2009: 39), including expressions like having “been harmonised”.117 The most pervasive scholarly interpretation of this relation between official and unofficial discourse has been in terms of Bakhtinian carnival – an unruly and fantastic time and space in medieval and renaissance Europe. One volume characterizes the entire Chinese cyberspace as a quasi-separate space of the carnivalesque (Herold and Marolt, 2011). On this understanding, the carnival is an event in a time and space 116 For example Séverine Arsène (2010), Larry Diamond (2010: 74), Nigel Inkster (2010: 7.2), Tang Lijun and Yang Peidong (2011: 680, 682, 687), Seth Wiener (2011: 156) and Xiao Qiang (Xiao Qiang, 2011a: 52). 117 Scholars have discussed this discrepancy in various contexts. See for examples Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz (2001), He Zhou (2008), Esarey and Xiao Qiang (2008), Patricia Thornton (2002). - 178 - where rules are suspended, separate from normal constraints (Herold, 2011: 11, 12). It is the antithesis of normal life, “free and unrestricted” (Bakhtin cited in Herold, 2011: 12). Similarly, to Li Hongmei, this space “marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (Bakhtin, 1984 1965: 10, cited in Li Hongmei, 2011: 72). Meng Bingchun reads a “collective attempt at resistance” (2011: 44) in the egao “virtual carnival” (2011: 45, 46). This resistance is said to be directed against the “official” (Meng Bingchun, 2011: 46) or “established” (Li Hongmei, 2011: 71) order. Tang Lijun and Syamantak Bhattacharya, despite reading egao as carnivalesque, take it to reveal a “widespread feeling of powerlessness, rather than offering the general public any political power” (2011). Nonetheless, they see in such online spoofs “the potential to generate a chain of related satirical work, which can create a satire movement and subject power to sustained shame and ridicule” (Tang Lijun and Bhattacharya, 2011). One scholar who has remained decidedly skeptical to such claims about resistance is Johan Lagerkvist, who asks with regards to egao: “is it a weapon4of4the4weak, or is it a rather feeble expression among well-heeled and largely apolitical urban youth-” (2010: 151). Lagerkvist explains egao as “permeated with irony and an ambivalence that occasionally resembles, or indeed is, resistance” (2010: 146). Nonetheless, to him, “the crux of the matter is only what larger influence you have on politics, if that is at all desired, if your critique is too subtle” (2010: 146). Therefore, he concludes: instead of viewing the egao phenomenon as politically subversive, at least in the short term, it may make more sense to view it as the growth of an alternate civility, more indicative of social and generational change, building up ever more pressure against the political system – in the long term (Lagerkvist, 2010: 158). To Lagerkvist the point of egao then, for now at least, is to vent anger in a non- revolutionary manner. Egao is “neither performed to be, nor perceived as, a direct threat against the Party-state” (Lagerkvist, 2010: 159). In this chapter I take Lagerkvist’s point that irony is not by4definition radical or revolutionary. This claim in itself, however, says little about what it does do (or undo), but simply leaves the question open. In previous analyses of egao, the focus is clearly on potential for changing politics, but none of the authors sustain any discussion about what they mean by this “politics”. In order to understand their disagreement, we can benefit from returning to the distinction made at the outset of this thesis between politics in the narrow sense, or politics,4and politics in the wider sense, or the4 political. I have taken the latter to be concerned with “the establishment of that very social order which sets out a particular, historically specific account of what counts as politics and defines other areas of social life as not politics” (Edkins, 1999: 2). On such a reading, “depoliticization” is equal to “a reduction to calculability” or the application of rules (Edkins, 1999: 1, 11). To repoliticize, again, is instead “to interrupt discourse, to challenge what have, through discursive practices, been constituted as normal, natural, and accepted ways of carrying on” (Edkins, 1999: 12). In view of this differentiation between politics and the political, Lagerkvist’s evaluation of egao with regards to what larger influence it has on politics seems to refer to politics in the narrow sense, rather than the political. Tang and Bhattacharya’s judgment of egao4with reference to its potential to “create a satire movement” seems to be concerned with the same narrow politics. These accounts, then, dismiss egao as not political unless it can achieve some movement or influence with regards to politics (in the narrow sense). This makes the scholars’ readings of egao themselves depoliticizing. My concern, by contrast, is rather with the question of the political, and I will comment on this in more detail at the end of this chapter.118 It is in this realm of discourse and the political that I ground an understanding of resistance. The previous chapter pointed to the problems of conceptualizing resistance as revealing “realities”, “the facts”, when what we are dealing with is a hyperreal system. Rather, I argued, we need to think about theory and resistance as a challenge. What does this mean- Roland Bleiker has written about the type of resistance that occurs in this realm of the discursive, a resistance that revolves around interactions between different types of speech. To him: 118 My discussion of the literatures on egao in relation to politics and the political here draws on Nordin and Richaud (2012), where we discuss the distinction as perceived by the young netizens who produce and consume it, based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews. overtly committed art forms often do no more than promote a particular position…. Aesthetic politics, by contrast, has to do with the ability of artistic engagements to challenge, in a more fundamental way, how we think about and represent the political. Here the political content lies in the aesthetic form itself, which often is not political in an explicit and immediately recognisable manner (Bleiker, 2009: 8). On this understanding, Bleiker has shown that engaging with language is engaging in social struggle (2000: 43). Alternative forms of language, he argues, can challenge “the state’s promotion of a black-and-white, one-dimensional and teleological approach to history” by celebrating multiplicity and making ambivalence part of language (Bleiker, 2000: 43). He moreover shows that this is part of global politics through drawing on David Campbell to the effect that the everyday life in which these forms of linguistic resistance are deployed is not “a synonym for the local level, for in it global interconnections, local resistances, transterritorial flows, state politics, regional dilemmas, identity formations, and so on are always already present” (Campbell, 1996: 23, cited in Bleiker, 2000: 44). Alternative forms of speech and writing, then, show how political change can be brought about by forms of resistance that “deliberately and self-consciously stretch, even violate existing linguistic rules” because in doing so they can provide us “with different eyes, with the opportunity to reassess anew the spatial and political and, I would add, temporal dimensions of global life” (Bleiker, 2000: 45). Rather than seeking a quick-fix by revealing the scandalous “truth”, or forming a mass movement explicitly aimed at intervening in narrow politics, this discursive form of resistance works through pushing gradually at the terms in which we can conceive of the world. It thereby “resists the temptation to provide ‘concrete’ answers to ‘concrete’ questions” (Bleiker, 2000: 45). In the rest of this chapter I examine egao as one particular instance that can help us think further about such linguistic resistance in/to “harmonious world”. Resisting harmonisation and deconstructive reading The above example of having “been harmonised” shows how Chinese netizens are “being harmonised” by the government, but also how they are negotiating such “harmonisation” through language and grammar. This is what I mean when I write that tifa are iterative. By re-citing official language and reinscribing it in other chains of meaning, Chinese netizens are turning its purported message against itself. Where Hu’s harmony purports to be inclusive, peaceful and open, its re-iteration with a simple grammatical modifier, bei, reads this official take on harmony as being exclusive, violent and working to close down possibilities for difference. This shows us that language is indeed a crucial part not only for the government to try to harmonise dissidents, but also for these to negotiate (or possibly resist) such harmonisation. This language play is thus made possible by iterability, which means we can remove the repeatable meaning of a term like “harmony” from the specific context in which it was first deployed and “recognize other possibilities in it by inscribing it or grafting4it onto other chains” (Derrida, 1988: 9, cf. Massey, 2005: 19). For this reason “harmony” does not have one fixed meaning, but we can play with it, graft it into other chains of signification that can reveal meanings that were always already there in harmony in the first place. This possibility is exploited by netizens. We can read deconstruction taking place in the term “harmony” in many places. What dissident use does is precisely shake it loose from its intended meaning in Hu’s policy documents, reversing and displacing its meaning, without therefore separating it from that policy discourse. Below I illustrate how this takes place in various tactics of resisting harmonisation in China. The point is to not simply accept “harmony” as having one straightforward meaning, to obey, avoid or bin the term. Instead, we can, as Baudrillard would have it, “recycle” it in potentially subversive ways. Recycling4harmony4(和谐)41:4Close4reading4of4the4radicals4that4make4up4a4character4 - 182 - Figure 9: Close reading the radicals of “harmony” (Source: Danwei.org) Derrida’s way of reading a text is often termed “close reading”, which involves paying attention to the details of structure, grammar and etymology of a term or text. This is a tactic we often use in academia when we discuss the meaning of Chinese terms through a close reading of the radicals that make up a character. This is also a common practice among netizens, in online discussions and in other media, like the above logo from the Economic4Observer for its feature section on the 2006 NPC and CPPCC Sessions (Martinsen, 2006). The English term “harmony” comes from Greek harmos or harmonía, meaning “joint, agreement, concord”.119 和谐 is usually translated as “harmonious” or “concordant”, the individual characters carrying the same meaning. 谐 is composed of radicals 讠(言) “words” and 皆 “all”.120 With the 口 “mouth” radical the 和 character, pronounced hé, can signify singing in harmony, or talking together.121 If what we see in China’s current “harmonising” of dissidents is a harmonious society or harmonious world, harmony here retains only its meaning of “singing in harmony” (as we saw through the example of Expo avatars singing the Expo song in harmony), its “talking together” is only in “agreement” or “concord”. 119 According to dictionary definition (Hoad, 1993; Oxford Dictionaries, 2011c: 6.3996.3910). 120 According to dictionary definition (Karlgren, 1974 1923: 364; Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995). 121 According to dictionary definition (Wieger, 1965 1915: Lesson 121a; Karlgren, 1974 1923: 70; Lindqvist, 1991: 187; Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995: 1.602.601). - 183 - Recycling4harmony4(和谐)42:4Differently4pronounced4Chinese4character4gives4alternative4 meaning4 Figure 10: 和 pronounced hú1is the battle cry when winning a game of mah\jong (Source: Zhang Facai, 2008) This, however, takes us to another tactic of bringing out and playing with the differently pronounced alternative meanings that Chinese characters often have. 和 can also be pronounced hú, a battle cry of victory when completing a game of mah- jong. Through this battle cry competition or conflict returns to visibility in harmony, as the excluded term on which it relies. This disruption acknowledges the antagonism involved in play, unsettling the notion of permanent harmonious “win-win” purported by the party-state. It reminds us of the violence we have traced in previous chapters of a dominant China’s turning other into self. What goes on in this reading is in a sense the first of the two moves of Derrida’s deconstructive double gesture. We have read Hu’s harmony in a way that is faithful to its purported meaning, where the end-state of “harmony” rests on the exclusion of violence, discord and conflict. His harmonious world, as we saw in chapter 1, is one that has done away with misgivings and estrangement, where everyone wins and no one loses. The “inevitable choice” (or what if we were nasty we could call “the single prescribed future without responsibility of choosing”) is a future harmonious world order where China will always stand for “fairness and justice”. Anyone who disagrees with this sense of justice is simply wrong and irrational, euphemised as “unscientific”. - 184 - What the pronunciation hú does is acknowledge the excluded other of Hu’s “harmony”, namely discord and competition. Hú can only be achieved after vanquishing the opponent, there is no win-win here.122 The hú of mah-jong, just like the harmonious Tianxia utopia, is premised on the superiority of the self to the other. Only this hierarchy can establish order, harmony or hú. Acknowledging that competition is always already there in harmony, implied in the alternative pronunciation hú, I propose that we can acknowledge a third tactic of resistance, the play with homonymous characters. Recycling4harmony44(和谐)43:4“Rivercrab”4(héxiè)4as4a4nearWhomonym4for4“harmony”4 (héxié)4 Derrida’s first deconstructive move is reversal, identifying an operational binary – such as harmony/discord – and showing how the exclusion of the second term from the first is artificial and that in fact the first is reliant on the second. An equally important move is displacement, the creation of a term that is not fully contained within the old order. We can get at such a displacement through paying attention to “rivercrabs” (héxiè4河蟹), a near homonym for “harmony” (héxié4和谐). Before I go on to discuss these rivercrabs in more detail, I should point out that these two deconstructive moves are not separate, chronologically or otherwise. My discussion of them here in turn is for the benefit of my reader, in order to illustrate more clearly what this dissident language play can do for us. Similar sounding characters are often used to replace sensitive words as a way to get through the keyword searches of censorship software that has been bolstered as a way to simultaneously avoid and criticise “being harmonised”. When netizens are blocked by harmonising government software from writing “harmony” (héxié 和谐), they can replace the term by the similar sounding characters for “rivercrabs” (héxiè 河蟹). In recent years, the rivercrab has become popular as a signifier of resistance. In 122 Indeed, the very game of mah-jong is itself involved in contestation as a battle ground for politics, where popular practice has been shown to resist official campaigns to regulate and “sanitize” a “popular mah-jong” (民间麻将) and promote “healthy mahjong” (健康麻将4or 卫生麻将, meaning no gambling) as “a competitive national sport and a symbol of China’s distinctive cultural legacy” (Festa, 2006: 9). - 185 - popular Chinese language a “crab” is a violent bully, making its image a new playful and satirical, but heavily political, way of criticising the harmonising “rivercrab society” (Xiao Qiang, 2007).123 Figure 11: Insist on three watches, establish rivercrab society (Source: Xuanlv, 2010) One popular satire on it can be seen in the above rivercrab with three watches. The caption overhead reads: “insist on three watches, establish rivercrab society” (jianchi4 san4ge4daibiao4,4chuangjian4hexie4shehui4坚持三个戴表， 创建河蟹社会). The first phrase is a nonsensical mockery of the party slogan “insist on the three represents” (jianchi4san4 ge4daibiao4坚持三个代表)124 and the second is a mockery of the slogan “establish harmonious society” (chuangjian4hexie4shehui4创建和谐社会). The political tactic here is one of intentional (mis)reading of official discourse, an iteration of party-state language against itself in order to reveal aspects of harmony that remain hidden from view in official discourse. Again, the acknowledgement of the purported message and its hierarchical binary as well as the first deconstructive move of reversing that hierarchy are here in this picture, this is not a separate stand-alone symbol or event. 123 As a simple indication of the popularity of satirical depictions of the “rivercrab”, a Google image search for the Chinese term “rivercrab society” (河蟹社会) gave ca 212 000 hits on 3 March 2011. 124 The “three represents” is previous General Secretary Jiang Zemin’s legacy tifa, which became a guiding ideology of the CCP at its Sixteenth Party Congress in 2002, together with Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and Deng Xiaoping Theory. It stipulates that the CCP should be representative to advanced social productive forces, advanced culture, and the interests of the overwhelming majority. The tifa was part of the shift to Chineseness as a legitimising force of the CCP as a ruling party representative of the majority of Chinese people as opposed to its original legitimisation as a vanguard revolutionary party driven by the “proletariat”. It also helped legitimise the inclusion of capitalist business elites into the party. However, the rivercrab also displaces this binary and functions as a new term which does not obey that order in any simple manner, but rather shakes it up and brings to the fore the irresolvable contradiction between these terms. To clarify the position of my analysis here in relation to Derrida’s, I speak of the rivercrab as a “second term” which displaces the harmony/discord binary implied in Hu’s harmonious world and society. As such, it does not obey the order of that binary in a simple manner. However, it also does not necessarily function as a new “master term” in the way Derrida often seems to understand the role of a new term. This mockingly reiterative form of resistance is not confined to the Internet egao culture, but has spread beyond its online origins to impact both on official state media and on forms of resistance offline. Artist Ai Weiwei staged one such example that received attention in the West some time before his infamous detention by the authorities. When his newly built Shanghai studio was to be demolished by the authorities, Ai threw a grand farewell party in November 2010, to which he invited several hundred friends, bands and other supporters to feast on a banquet consisting of rivercrabs. Ai was put in house arrest in Beijing to prevent him from attending the banquet, but the event took place nonetheless with supporters chanting: “in a harmonious society, we eat rivercrabs” (Branigan, 2010). Party\state response The official party-state strategies of responding to such resistance take the form of harmonising it, ignoring it, or on occasion acknowledging its presence whilst attempting to again re-read its meaning, significance and implications in an effort at downplaying its critical potential. With respect to the “passive subversive” bei making the top of lists of neologisms in 2009, a Xinhua article displays the latter tactic. The article stresses state tolerance through emphasising that the poll, which resulted in bei4being elected character of the year, was “jointly conducted by a linguistic research centre under the Ministry of Education and the state-run Commercial Press”. The tense was said “to convey a sense of helplessness in deciding one’s own fate” and to reflect “dissatisfaction over the abuse of official power” (Xinhua, 2010c). The example of “being suicided” (bei4zisha4被自杀) was discussed, explaining that the abuse of official power concerned was perpetrated by a local official, who was duly sentenced to death by higher authorities. Other examples were “being volunteered” (bei4ziyuan 被自愿) and “being found a job” (bei4jiuye4被就业). From the “passive subversive” bei4the article turns into proof of how good and improving the government is: ‘bei’ was not censored in the government-run poll of buzzwords, and grassroots’ voices are finally being heard and even recognized by the government … The government is beginning to respond to inquiries from the public, instead of ‘dodging’ them as it did before (Xinhua, 2010c). Yet much resistance is still treated with violence or silence by Chinese official sources. According to interviews by Tessa Thorniley at Ai Weiwei’s rivercrab banquet over 40 domestic media sources were invited and none showed up, and amongst the over 50 media outlets that interviewed Ai in house arrest regarding the event the only domestic media that spoke to him was the English language edition of conservative paper Global4Times4(Goldkorn, 2010). Within half a year of the rivercrab banquet, Ai had been detained by Chinese police, accused of a number of crimes. After 81 days in detention he was released on “bail” (取保候审), on the condition that he did “not speak” (Branigan, 2011; Committee to Protect Journalists, 2011; US Asia law NYU, 2011). During his disappearance Chinese Internet sites such as Sina Weibo blocked searches on Ai Weiwei (艾未未), a number of his nicknames and puns on his name, including “艾未” (Ai Wei), “未未” (Wei Wei), “艾” (Ai), “未” (Wei), “艾胖子” (Fatty Ai), “胖子” (Fatty) and “月半子” (Moon Half Son). They also blocked writing including the term “未来”, meaning “future”, which is built up of characters similar to “Weiwei” (Xiao Qiang, 2011b). ONCO\OPERATIVE HARMONY From the above analysis we see that there are similarities between Derridean approaches to reading deconstruction in academia and practices of subversive iteration of “harmony” amongst dissident netizens in contemporary China. The possibilities for alliances that reside within such shared tactics are potentially valuable to both parties and may help us here to bridge the theory/practice divide. - 188 - Derrida and Baudrillard were both masters of language play, frequently building on the various meanings that can be drawn out of words by way of their etymological roots, their different pronunciations, by playing with homonyms and near-homonyms and by combining words into new ones to reverse and displace previous binaries. Such techniques pervade the writing of both thinkers.125 However, this is not to say that the similar practice of Chinese language that I outline above is an entirely new phenomenon created by recent practices of Internet censorship and/or influences from some “Western postmodernity”. On the contrary, the struggles and practices that I have outlined have a long and rich history in China. Linguistic play with characters and homonyms has been a sensitive topic in China for millennia. Such practices have also been known to academics in the Anglophone world for decades. For example, a 1938 article argues that literary persecution was especially cruel during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911 AD) (Ku Chieh-Kang, 1938 1935: 254), and continues with a description that could just as well be of contemporary Chinese censorship regimes on the Internet: under the circumstances they Chinese scholars, artists, intellectuals and others could do nothing but resort to veiled satire. This being the situation, their words and writings were spied on and scrutinized; if they did not use every care they suffered the severest punishments (Ku Chieh-Kang, 1938 1935: 254).126 But, the author continues, although the Qing were the worst offenders, similar practices of harsh censorship had taken place since the Qin (361-206 BC) and Han (206 BC-8 AD), the first two dynasties of what is typically considered imperial China. 125 In Derrida, some such terms that I have touched upon in the course of this thesis include iterability, which plays on “reiterate” and combines the Latin iter (“again”) with the Sanskrit itara4(“other”) (Wortham, 2010: 78), and différance, which combines the two meanings of French différence, difference and deferral, “changing an ‘e’ to an ‘a’ adds time to space” (Massey, 2005: 49). It also includes terms such as artifactuality, activirtuality, circonfession, avenir/à4venir, hauntologie and so on. Despite what may be interpreted as a dismissal at points of Derrida’s deployment of word play (as discussed in chapter 1. See also Baudrillard, 1996 1990: 25), Baudrillard uses very similar tactics in his deployment of terms such as seduction, drawing on the original Latin sense of seducere, “to lead away”, and semiorrhage, semiotic haemorrhage (Baudrillard, 2002 2000: 208). 126 I should be noted that this article was written by a Chinese author at a time when the 1911 nationalist revolution had recently thrown the Qing dynasty from power, which may have affected this commentary. - 189 - The article goes on to list numerous death sentences during the Ming dynasty (1368- 1644 AD), occasioned by the “homophonic nature of certain words employed” (1938 1935: 262). As in contemporary PRC, although “misreading” set texts could be very dangerous (1938 1935: 296-301), the attempt to provide set phrases and pre- structured models for expression could not prevent such double meanings from seeping through text (1938 1935: 263). There is thus Chinese historical precedent of interplay between violent oppression of speech and the kind of linguistic resistance that builds on reiterative, mocking punnery in ways similar to the contemporary deployment of rivercrabs. Crabs as cancerous disease Where associations emerging from Chinese language aligns crabs with harmony, bullies and competition, most European languages associate it with the disharmony of the body that shares its name: cancer.127 In what follows I introduce the European roots of this term in order to foreground my subsequent analysis of the above “harmony/rivercrabs”, where I argue that these “rivercrabs” operate precisely according to a cancerous logic. The term “cancer” is originally Latin, meaning “crab or creeping ulcer”, with its etymological roots in Greek karkinos, said to have been applied to such tumours because they were surrounded by swollen veins that looked like the limbs of a crab (Demaitre, 1998: 620-6; Oxford Dictionaries, 2011b). Although the European term, like the Chinese one, has mythological connotations,128 a contemporary dictionary entry for “cancer” describes it as “a malignant growth or tumour resulting from an uncontrolled division of cells”, but also as “an evil or destructive practice or phenomenon that is hard to contain or eradicate” (Oxford Dictionaries, 2011b). 127 Scandinavian languages have interpreted cancer to equate a crayfish, rather than a crab, to give the Swedish kräfta, Norwegian kreft4and Danish kræft. 128 In astronomy, the “Cancer” constellation represents Hercules crushing a crab with his foot. This tale derives from Greek mythology, where the crab nipped Heracles when he was battling the monster Hydra and was crushed. The mother deity Hera who was at odds with Heracles at the time honoured the crab’s courageous efforts by placing it in the heaven. In astrology, the cancer/crab is the fourth sign of the zodiac, which the sun enters at the northern summer solstice, about 21 June (Oxford Dictionaries, 2011a). The term also has spatial connotations, indicating the direction south, as in the tropic of cancer. - 190 - In this second capacity, cancer is not separate from contemporary understandings of international politics and visions of a harmonious world. Rather, the language of cancer and tumours has long been common in IR and politics, and cancer is frequently used as a metaphor for moral and political ills on the body politic to be cured or removed.129 At the same time, descriptions of biomedical cancer often resort to metaphors or similes borrowed from societal relations130 and from military conflict and battle.131 In Chinese language, the close link between security in the medical and political realms is explicit in the character zhi (治), which refers to both therapy (zhi4 liao 治療) and governance (zhi4li 治理) (Unschuld, 2010: xxvi; Cheung, 2011: 7). Many studies have shown how the knowledge systems of Western biomedicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) reflect the intellectual and political landscape in which they respectively developed.132 As such, many have understood the spatial distance between China and Europe as a foundation for an epistemological difference in understanding of their medical bodies, which directly parallels that which is claimed to underpin the understanding of the 129 Hobbes gave a detailed analysis of dangers to the state as illnesses to the body politic (Hobbes, 1996: 221-30), building on an established metaphor of societies as bodies (Hale, 1971). For another example of early European use, Italian thinker Francesco Guicciardini, writing in the 16th century, constantly repeats the metaphors of medicine and cure. Guiccardini identifies the disease with the Italian city states’ willingness to ally with outside states that are more powerful than themselves, and cautions against ignoring “how dangerous it is to use medicine which is stronger than the nature of the disease” (Guicciardini, 1984: 20-1). The French Revolution saw the use of illness/therapy metaphors to justify the terreur as a cure for societal illness (Musolff, 2003: 328). In contemporary scholarship, Susan Sontag in her famous Illness4as4Metaphor singled out cancer as a type of “master illness” that is “implicitly genocidal” (Sontag, 1991: 73-4, 84). Otto Santa Anna describes how the American civil rights movement used cancer as a metaphor for racism in the 1960s (Santa Anna, 2003: 215-16, 222). In contemporary IR Kevin Dunn has written at length about the how Mobutu’s cancer-ridden body led to a recasting of him as a cancer on the body politic of the Republic of Zaire, and Zaire in turn as a tumour on the region (Dunn, 2003: especially 139-42). See also Deborah Wills (2009) for recent use of “cancer” terminology in English language IR, and Wang Yizhou (2010: 11) for similar use in Chinese language IR. 130 For a good overview of such metaphorical use in patients and media, see Lupton (2003). For a good overview of other forms of cultural and artistic expression relating to the narrativisation of cancer, see Stacey (1997). 131 For such military metaphors, see for example Annas (1995: 745), Clarke (1996: 188), Stibbe (1997), Clarke and Robinson (1999: 273-4), Lupton (2003: 72), Reisfield and Wilson (2004) and Williams Camus (2009). 132 For its treatment in recently discovered Chinese medical literature, see Lo and Cullen (2005). For commentary on the parallel emergence of political and medical epistemologies in imperial China, see Unschuld (2010). For commentary on parallel developments of political and medical knowledge in Europe, see Have (1987) and Stibbe (1997). - 191 - Chinese geo-body, examined in previous chapters.133 Western biomedicine, it is thus said, follows Descartes and builds on the idea that parts of the body are discrete and can be calculated, measured and cured in isolation (Have, 1987; Kaptchuk, 2000). Chinese medicine is said to build instead on a “holistic” idea of the body where illness is explained in terms of a “pattern of disharmony” (Kaptchuk, 2000: 4). Just as a bounded notion of space is typically portrayed in terms of an imposition on China by Western imperialism, so too is a biomedical imaginary and representation of discrete body parts portrayed as an imposition by the West and a catching up by a China that had fallen behind (Cheung, 2011: 9; Gilman, 1988: 149, 151, 154). With regards to the geo-body, I have argued throughout previous chapters that its two spatial imaginaries (that of discrete units and that of a holistic system) are not mutually exclusive, but rather coexist in practices in contemporary China. The scope of this thesis does not allow for a thorough deconstruction of the parallel epistemology that is applied to debates over the medical body.134 Suffice it to say at this point that contemporary literature on Chinese medicine typically reflects on how biomedicine and TCM are complementary.135 Most importantly for my argument here, and as I will explain in what follows, TCM and biomedicine have produced strikingly 133 This imagination of the human body is particularly clear in writing on pictorial representations thereof. The negotiation of Chinese-Western power relations and self/other hierarchisation through modes of pictorial representation has been traced in the mid-19th Century medical paintings of Lam Qua, who focused on depicting tumours on Chinese bodies for Western consumption. Discussions of these can be found in Gilman (1988) and Heinrich (2008), as can some of Lam Qua’s pictures of tumours and abscesses (Gilman, 1988: 150; Heinrich, 2008: 50, 54, 55, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87), as well as earlier and later Chinese images of such growths (Heinrich, 2008: 57, 91, 92; see also Barnes, 2005: 292). 134 Such an endeavour might point to the early exchange and hybrid nature of information, and to similarities of TCM and early forms of European medicine: the inner body as masculine (or Yang) and the outer body as feminine (or Yin) (for expression in European tradition, see Erickson, 1997: 10, for expression in Chinese tradition, see Liu Zhanwen and Liu Liang, 2009: 12); the focus on balance of a holistic system (for expression in European tradition, see Turner, 2003: 2, for expression in Chinese tradition, see Unschuld, 2010: xxve); the focus on bodily flows and the understanding of blockage of flows as cause for disease (for expression in European tradition, see Turner, 2003: 2, for expression in Chinese tradition, see Liu Zhanwen and Liu Liang, 2009: 28), the discursive parallels to the societal body and the need for governance of both societal and medical body (for expression in European tradition, see Porter, 1997: 158; Turner, 2003: 2, for expression in Chinese tradition, see Unschuld, 2010), and so on. 135 There are many examples of this (for example Cui Yong et al., 2004; Bao Ting et al., 2010; Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010; Dorsher and Peng Zengfu, 2010; Wong and Sagar, 2010). - 192 - similar responses to the appearance of cancer: to cleanse and purge in conjunction with studied manipulation of the immune system. Reading cancer and the autoimmune in Baudrillard and Derrida The previous chapter drew on Baudrillard’s interest in the pre-programmed character of contemporary culture to examine the (re)production of human bodies as computer coded avatars on the Expo screen. His interest in the coding of the human body also extended to the replication and transmission of data on the micro level, in the form of genetic code and cellular regeneration. As pure information, the human body is not understood as the source of selfhood, but rather as an effect produced by the code (Baudrillard, 1994 1981: 98, see also Toffoletti in Smith, 2010: 28). Embedded in this code is the potential for cancer and autoimmune disease (Baudrillard, 2002 2000: 98, 207).136 According to Baudrillard, consumer society or European democracy is driven by a “perverse” logic (2002 2000: 97, 207), where a range of phenomena – terrorism, fascism, violence, depression, and so on – are the outcome of “an excess of organization, regulation and rationalization within a system” (2002 2000: 97). These societies tend to suffer from an excess of rationality and logic, surveillance and control, which in turn leads to the emergence for no apparent reason of “internal pathologies … strange dysfunctions … unforeseeable, incurable accidents … anomalies”, which disrupt the system’s capacity for totality, perfection and reality invention (2002 2000: 97). This is the logic that Baudrillard reads of an excessive system that fuels the growth of anomalies – just like cancer and autoimmune disease (Baudrillard, 2002 2000). What characterises these anomalies in Baudrillard’s theorising is that “they have not come from elsewhere, from ‘outside’ or from afar, but are rather a product of the ‘over-protection’ of the body – be it social or individual” (Smith, 2010: 59): 136 Like cancer, the question of immunity reinforces the close link between the governance of the socio- political and the bio-medical body, as “immunity” was originally a legal concept in ancient Rome (Cohen, 2009: 3). For my analysis of cancer and autoimmunity in Baudrillard’s work, I focus on the various articles collected in Screened Out (2002 2000), and particularly the essay “Aids: Virulence or Prophylaxis-” (2002 1997). every structure, system or social body which ferrets out its negative, critical elements to expel them or exorcise them runs the risk of catastrophe by total implosion and reversion, just as every biological body which hunts down and eliminates all its germs, bacillae and parasites – in short, all its biological enemies – runs the risk of cancer or, in other words, of a positivity devouring its own cells. It runs the risk of being devoured by its own anti-bodies (Baudrillard, 2002 1997: 3). On this reading, “the system’s overcapacity to protect, normalise and integrate” (Smith, 2010: 60) (we could say “harmonise”) is shown throughout society as natural immunity is replaced by artificial systems of immunity – like pre-programmed firewalls (Baudrillard, 2002 2000: 98). This replacement happens in the name of science and progress (or perhaps a “scientific outlook on development”). Derrida developed a strikingly similar deployment of the autoimmune, where for example the West since 9/11 is “producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm” (2003a: 99).137 Derrida analyses this “perverse” logic in terms of an autoimmune process (2003a: 99); “that strange behaviour where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunise itself against its ‘own’ immunity” (2003a: 94). This term recalls previous Derridean terms,138 but particularly reinforces Baudrillard’s claim about cancer and immunity: “in an over-protected space, the body loses all its defences” (Baudrillard, 2002 1997: 3). In this way, to Baudrillard and Derrida, in cancer and autoimmunity it is the system’s own logic that turns it against itself; the code works too well in its overzealous cleansing, integrating, normalising logic. Derrida reads in this process a double and contradictory discourse of concurrent immunity and auto-immunity in endless circulation, where the system “conducts a 137 For Derrida, I draw mostly on his reading in “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides” on 9/11 (2003a) and in Rogues:4Two4Essays4on4Reason (2005 2003-a), rather than on earlier mention of autoimmunity in texts such as “Faith and Knowledge” (1998) or Resistances4of4Psychoanalysis (1998 1996, for some comments on the use of the "autoimmune" in this volume, see Wortham, 2010: 160). 138 As expressed by one commentator: “undecideability, aporia, antinomy, double bind: autoimmunity is explicitly inscribed in Rogues into a veritable ‘best of collection’ of Derrideo-phemes or deconstructo- nyms” (Naas, 2006: 29). - 194 - terrible war against that which protects it only by threatening it” (1998: 46).139 The immune and the autoimmune may not, then, be easily distinguishable: “murder was already turning into suicide, and the suicide, as always, let itself be translated into murder” (Derrida, 2005 2003-a: 59). Derrida and Baudrillard – and others who have since deployed this aspect of their analyses140 – tend to describe autoimmunity as generated by the current Western system, although they sometimes indicate the more general nature of such praxis (Thomson, 2005). I have argued in previous chapters that other phenomena they bring to our attention (such as the deconstructibility of language, or simulacra) cannot be confined in time and space to a bounded notion of “the West”, “late capitalism”, “postmodernity” or some other unit to which we posit China as the “other country”. In the same way, the observed “unfettered process of a techno-metastatic production of value, the hyperinflation of meaning and signs” is not confined to democracy/capitalism/the West/America that they take as the primary focus of their analyses (I. C. R., 2007). Rather, this cancer has its parallel in contemporary China, precisely in the form of rivercrabs. Reading cancer and the (auto)immune through biomedicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine To explain this point, and to dispel any understanding of my argument in terms of a Chinese “catching up”, let me elaborate slightly on how biomedicine and TCM have understood cancer. 139 Derrida sometimes takes the term to denote a specific targeting of a body’s defence mechanisms, its “protecting itself against its self-protection” (Derrida, 1998: 73, note 27), which is closer to the biomedical definition of autoimmunity and further from its description of certain forms of cancer. At other times, the autoimmune involves an attack against any part of the body, “in short against its own” (son4propre4tout4court) (Derrida, 1998: 44). We note here the numerous meanings of French “propre”, translated here as “own”, but which also means self-possession, propriety, property and importantly cleanliness, stressing again the cleansing that I emphasise in this chapter (cf. Spivak's translation in Derrida, 1976 1967: 26). Where some have found this ambiguity problematic (Haddad, 2004: 39-41), I think it points to an important aspect of autoimmunity that is the impossibility of separating a part that “defends” a (geo)body from one that simply “is”. It acknowledges the malleability of the system. For this reason I also allow for (auto)immunity and cancer to denote the same process, as they do to Baudrillard. 140 For example Bulley (2009: 12, 25-29), Vaughan-Williams (2007: 183-92), Osuri (2006: 500), Thomson (2005), and Haddad (2004: 30). - 195 - The disease that in English is called cancer is called ai (癌) in modern TCM terminology, and cancerous tumours can also be referred to as liu (瘤).141 TCM philosophy is based on the idea that a body is healthy when it is in harmony, and illness and pain occur when harmony fails to be achieved, manifest in a “pattern of disharmony” (Bao Ting et al., 2010: 171).142 Cancer/ai/liu is on this view “a systemic disease from the start” (Schipper et al., 1995; Wong and Sagar, 2010: 3). Cancer and tumours are understood as the manifestation of disharmony (Bao Ting et al., 2010: 170; Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010: 344), and more specifically of the relative lack of Zhengqi4(正气), a concept analogous to the biomedical notion of immune system competency/strength (Abbate, 2006; Dorsher and Peng Zengfu, 2010: 57). The understanding of TCM’s potential to aid the body in restoring harmony is similarly centred on immunity.143 Biomedicine, which has been associated with the West and with the imagination of body-parts as discrete and calculable, explains cancer in a very similar way, emphasising the role of immunity. In this school of thought, cancer is a development where transformed cells “acquire the ability to disregard the constraints of its environment and the body normal control mechanisms” sic (Wong and Sagar, 2010: 3), or “the abnormal and uncontrollable proliferation of cells which have the potential to spread to distant sites” (Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010: 343). Like TCM, biomedicine thus understands cancer as immune system failure (Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010: 349). Microscopically, cancer cells display features indicative of a faster proliferative rate and disorganised alignment in relation to other cells, and 141 The first known description of ai comes from Wei4Ji4Bao4Shu circa 1171 AD, in the Song Dynasty (Pan Mingji, 1992, in Bao Ting et al., 2010: 57). Cancerous tumours were also referred to as liu in inscriptions on oracle bones over 3,500 years old (Pan Mingji, 1992, in Bao Ting et al., 2010: 57). 142 For a more thorough explanation for the lay person of the philosophical foundations of TCM as well as an outline of its foundational texts, see Liu Zhanwen and Liu Liang (2009). 143 This is a marked trait throughout contemporary TCM literatures (Abbate, 2006; Lahans, 2008; Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010: 342, 349; Dorsher and Peng Zengfu, 2010: 57; Wong and Sagar, 2010: 3, 4, 15). TCM scepticism of biomedical forms of treatment – such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy – stems from their “collateral damage”, the killing of normal cells along with the malign cancer cells, which leads to further immune suppression and hence further reduction of zhengqi. TCM treatment focuses on strengthening zhengqi in order to maximize the immunity of the system beset by cancer. Herbal medicines used to treat cancer are thus (partly) focused on strengthening the body’s general immunity (fuzheng) (Lahans, 2008; Dorsher and Peng Zengfu, 2010: 57). - 196 - differences between cancer cells and normal cells are increasingly understood at the level of genetic code (Marcovitch, 2005: 111). The very code that is pre-programmed in the system thus has the capacity to produce the cells that threaten it, and the spread of malignancy in the system is a result of its failed attempts at “regulation” and cleansing. Like cancer/ai/liu, the Chinese crab has early associations with cleaning and purification of spaces, with one legend having the emperor using the crab to rid his palace of the scorpions, fleas, mosquitoes, and mice that disturbed his harmony and caused dis-ease.144 In Europe, like in China, cancer has a long history of association with insufficient cleansing, since its description in pre-modern pathologies that attributed it to insufficient purging of black bile.145 One contemporary cancer self-help book likewise describes cancer in terms of societal disorder strikingly reminiscent of disruptions to the harmony conveyed by Hu Jintao and Zhao Tingyang respectively: “cancer growths are made up of cells which belong to our body but which have stopped behaving in a co-operative and orderly fashion” (Reynolds, 1987: 26, cited in Lupton, 2003: 71). It further observes that the multiplication of cancer cells “has no purpose … unlike normal body cells we can think of cancer cells as unco-operative, disobedient, and independent … normal cells exist peacefully side by side with their neighbours” (Reynolds, 1987: 27, cited in Lupton, 2003: 71). This description is certainly fitting to characterise the Chinese “rivercrabs” described above. Crabs/cancer disturb and threaten the harmony of the system. They are truly “malignant” in the sense that they disregard normal mechanisms of control and cleansing (they are unco-operative), and they are capable of spatio-temporal spread into secondary deposits or “metastases”. As such, we may understand crabs/cancer in terms of the European medieval rendition as a parasitic animal (Pouchelle, 1990: 169; Demaitre, 1998: 624), pervasive also in contemporary society (Herzlich and Pierret, 1987). 144 Renditions of this lore can also be found online (The Vanishing Tattoo, 2011). 145 On this understanding, breast cancer for example was caused by insufficient cleansing by menstruation of the blood from the dregs of spoiled black bile (Caulhiaco and McVaugh, 1997: n. 9, 94, see also Demaitre, 1998: 618 and notes 37, 38). An overview of the development of European ideas of cancer can be found in Demaitre (1998). - 197 - Yet, crabs/cancer are indeed “a systemic disease from the start” (Wong and Sagar, 2010: 3), their malignancy is a direct product of the code. The possibility for drawing out the various meanings of hexie4和谐 explored at the outset of this chapter was always already there in the character – through its pictographic make-up, its alternative pronunciation as hú and through its homonym the rivercrab. Moreover, the ironic critique displayed by these iterations was provoked by Hu’s policy of overzealous “harmonisation” and the online deployment of rivercrabs came about as a way to simultaneously avoid and criticise “being harmonised” by the great firewall and other government censorship software. In this way, it is the harmonious system itself that produces that which leads to disharmony. As such, rivercrabs are not simply unco-operative, but onco-operative: they operate like cancerous metastases that derive from the code of the system itself to cause dis-harmony and dis-ease. THE COEVAL MULTIPLICITIES OF ONCO\OPERATIVE HARMONY The claim I have made up to this point of the chapter is that the Chinese “harmonious” system is not so different from what Derrida and Baudrillard describe in contemporary “Western democracy” or late capitalist “consumer society”. Although China is often recast as the opposite of these systems and their logic – the “other country” – it seems to suffer from the same autoimmune problems. Its symptoms may be different, but the onco-operative character of its dis-ease is the same. What, then, are the implications of such an illness – and how do we deal with it- Looking for cures in an onco\operative system Biomedical and TCM treatments of cancer/ai/liu do, as I have indicated above, follow a similar pattern to those commonly prescribed for dealing with unco-operative elements of the geo-body. Biomedicine typically resorts to screening, “surgical strikes”, chemo- and radio-therapies (Marcovitch, 2005: 112). The lack of precision of these therapies give them a quasi-suicidal nature through which the parts of the body deemed “healthy” or “normal” become collateral damage. This in turn often further endangers the system through weakening its immune system. The alternative approach, of strengthening the system’s own immune capacity or zhengqi, urges the - 198 - system to auto-harmonise, to turn the bad qi into the good – another form of cleansing, or “purging the excessive” and ousting “evil Qi” (Liu Zhanwen and Liu Liang, 2009: 30). Both these ways of dealing with unco-operative elements of the medical body thus echo the problems seen in relating to “others” in the geo-body: we eliminate through radical separation (cutting off) or through radical harmonisation (turning the bad into the good). In this way, the onco-operative character of the system means its over-zealous attempts at cleansing – through therapy (zhi4liao) and governance (zhi4li) – actually come to threaten the system itself. This, in turn, exposes an aporia at the very heart of the system, in that the dis-ease must be cured, but cannot be cured without sacrificing the system itself: “there is no effective prevention or therapy; the metastases invade the whole network ‘virtually’ … He who lives by the same will die by the same” (Baudrillard, 2002 1997: 2). Or, in Derrida’s words: “there is no absolutely reliable prophylaxis against the autoimmune. By definition” (Derrida, 2005 2003-b: 150-1). To Baudrillard, the fact that cancer is a reflection of the body’s victimisation by the disruption of its genetic formula is thus what makes it impossible for conventional medicine to cure it: “the current pathology of the body is now beyond the reach of conventional medicine, since it affects the body not as form, but as formula” (2002 1997: 1). To put it a different way, the fact that the system itself produces, through its own code, that which threatens it means there is little use looking to the rationality of the system to combat its excrescences: “it is a total delusion to think extreme phenomena can be abolished. They will, rather, become increasingly extreme as our systems become increasingly sophisticated” (Baudrillard, 2002 1997: 7). On Baudrillard’s reading, spontaneous self-regulation of systems is something well- known: systems produce accidents or glitches in their own programme, interfering with their own operation (Baudrillard, 2002 1997: 5). This enables systems to survive on a basis contrary to their own principles, against their own value-systems: they have to have such a system, but they also have to deny it and operate in opposition to it…. But it is entirely as though the species were … producing … through cancer, which is a disruption of the genetic code and therefore a pathology of information, a resistance to the all-powerful principle of - 199 - cybernetic control…. With … cancer, we might be said to be paying the prize for our own system: we are exorcising its banal virulence in a fatal form (Baudrillard, 2002 1997: 5). Again, this is precisely how rivercrabs operate: they metastasise and spread through a disruption of the code that lets them slip through it’s pre-programmed screening/fire- wall/censorship. This is indeed a resistance to cybernetic control, but one generated by the system itself. If we bring this analysis back to the discipline of IR, this way of understanding cancer complicates things. Within Chinese IR, Wang Yizhou has argued that analysing terrorism in terms of cancer calls for the question of how cancer comes into being. He reads it as a symptom of structural imbalance (Wang Yizhou, 2010: 11). Where military action can only “cure the symptom but not the source”, harmonisation or re- balancing of the system will prevent radicalism from breeding (2010: 16). In view of the above explanation of cancer, we may concur with both him and Baudrillard that traditional treatment may only serve to aggravate the problem through weakening the system and causing collateral damage. However, having excavated the forms of therapy suggested by the “alternative” of “harmonisation” by TCM or Chinese IR, it appears that it stands equally powerless. Increasing harmonisation is unlikely to curb cancer/crabs, but may rather contribute to spurring them on. There is no use looking to the systems own rationality to combat the crabs it produces. Spatiotemporal bordering in an onco\operative system What, then, are the spatio-temporal implications of these crabs, as metastases of an (auto)immune and onco-operative system- Nick Vaughan-Williams (2007) has productively drawn on Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity to discuss spatial and temporal bordering. The temporal bordering he discusses draws on Brian Massumi’s description of “flashes of … sovereign power” as a particular form of pre-programmed decision making in the “space of a moment” (Massumi, 2005: 6; Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 187-8). This parallels what Baudrillard thinks of as a pre-programmed instantaneous operation. Understanding borders in terms of this decisionist ontology highlights the specificity of contemporary wordplay and rivercrabs, in relation to previous historical deployment of homonyms to avoid censorship in China, as described earlier in this chapter. Previous forms of bordering decisions with regards to such homonymous wordplay involved a deliberative process of human interpretation. In this era of the virtual and the hyper-real, the bordering decision is pre-programmed and instantaneous. Vaughan-Williams, following Massumi, argues that this approach is the temporal equivalent of a tautology: “the time form of the decision that strikes like lightning is the foregone conclusion. When it arrives, it always seems to have preceded itself. Where there is a sign of it, it has always already hit” (Massumi, 2005: 6, cited in Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 188). This form of decision is accordingly a foregone conclusion (or following Hu perhaps an “inevitable choice”) “because it sidesteps or effaces the blurriness of the present in favor of a perceived need to act on the future without delay”, in the face of a threat of an indefinite future yet to come (Vaughan- Williams, 2007: 188; Massumi, 2005: 4-5). Both authors read this as a temporal shift, from “prevention” to “pre-emption”, from the temporal register of the indefinite future tense to the future perfect tense: the “always-will-have-been-already” (Massumi, 2005: 6-10; Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 188). In parallel to the autoimmune, this politics induces rather than responds to events: rather than acting in the present to avoid an occurrence in the future, pre- emption brings the future into the present. It makes present the future consequences of an eventuality that may or may not occur, indifferent to its actual occurrence. The event’s consequences precede it, as if it had already occurred (Massumi, 2005: 7-8, cited in Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 188). The Chinese practice of censoring/harmonising specific terms through its Great Firewall works through this form of pre-programmed code, which sensors in a “flash of sovereign power”. Terms are censored pre-emptively to harmonise some not-yet- existing but possible future dissident deployment of a once unthreatening term (such as the term “future” 未来 itself, as seen earlier in this chapter in relation to Ai Weiwei’s detention). In this manner, PRC Internet censorship policy acts as a temporal bordering process: it pre-empts threats to the government’s version of “harmonious world/society” that come from the future, thus securing time and the future as something that belongs to the state and not to the crabs or dissidents (c.f. Vaughan- Williams, 2007: 189). As an actual wall, the form of electronic bordering that is exercised by the Great Firewall is also a form of spatial bordering, in that it is intimately connected to questions of sovereignty, territory and governmental power. Vaughan-Williams draws on William Walters to refer to this spatial bordering as “firewalling” – in contemporary China another term for having “been harmonised” by the Great Firewall is having “been GFWed” (Walters, 2006, for examples see Calon, 2007; Chow, 2010). The self-attacking or autoimmune logic of such GFW-ing is clear in the “blocking” of Internet and telephone access that was used in attempts to harmonise Xinjiang during the 2009 riots. This firewalling was intended to prevent “splittism” from spreading, yet could only do so by splitting Xinjiang as a spatial unit off from the rest of China, in virtual/physical space. This, too, is the spacing by which the Great Firewall operates – to maintain a harmonious space, that space must be sealed off as a (virtual) geobody from the rest of the world. Again, what is described in Vaughan-Williams as “innovations in the ways sovereign power attempts to secure the temporal and spatial borders of political community” could refer to something less localised in time and space than may at first appear (Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 191). The practices of Internet “harmonisation” in China can thus be described in terms of a bordering of time and space that has parallels in contemporary expressions of (auto)immunity in the European system. Having said this, the particular practice of using homonymous characters like the rivercrab, to simultaneously criticise and avoid “being harmonised” on the Chinese Internet, is a locally specific way of negotiating this particular kind of virtual bordering in time and space. This particular form and double function differentiates it from other forms of satire or political irony that can be found in other systems around the world. Moreover, in attempting to secure time and space as belonging to the state, these harmonising Chinese censorship regimes effectively provoke the kind of critical wordplay that I exemplify here through rivercrabs. In this way, cancer/crabs work within the system and yet repeatedly escape it: where “harmonisation” may be understood as an attempt at temporal bordering, the experience of cancer has been described as a disturbance to such temporality, a “falling out of time” (Stacey, 1997: 10). The more the Chinese government attempts to secure, cleanse and harmonise, the more creative and subversive are the iterations that use its language against itself. Rivercrab metastases and heterotemporalities As a consequence of this (auto)immune logic of the onco-operative system, rivercrabs, like cancer cells, increasingly display features indicative of a faster proliferative rate and disorganised alignment in relation to other cells (Marcovitch, 2005: 111). In the “here-now”, crabs, like cancer, are marked by the way they spread and metastasise through mutation of the code. In this way, we can understand how Chinese crabs similarly migrate, multiply and change in what is precisely an “iterative” manner. Every crab draws on previous iterations of harmony and crabs, but also mutates into something different. One example of such a “metastasis” can be seen in the figure below. It shows a replica of the logo for the computer game “World of Warcraft”, saying instead “Rivercrab World” (hexie4shijie 河蟹世界). The text at the top means “do things others could never do” (做别人永远做不到的事), and the one below means “the late arrival of the battle expedition” (迟到的远征). The links to themes discussed throughout this thesis are marked, including the direct link to Hu’s “harmonious world” policy, the competition inherent in games and play and the violent military underpinning of harmonious world. Figure 12: Rivercrab world of warcraft (Source: Heifenbrug, 2008) - 203 - The rivercrab metastasises in similar ways into numerous constellations – some very close copies, some with more creative distance. The rivercrab recurrently appears on blogs and can be found in an online dictionary compiled by China Digital Times (Xiao Qiang, 2010; China Digital Space, 2011a), where it appears together with dozens of other characters and expressions that have metastasised from similar homonymic wordplay and in reaction to governmental harmonisation. It also appears as a permanent feature on the cap of another Internet meme, the “Green Dam Girl” (绿坝娘). The Green Dam Girl is an anthropomorphism of the “Green Dam Youth Escort” software (绿坝·花季护航) that was developed under the direction of the Chinese government to filter Internet content on individual computers.146 The Green Dam Girl and rivercrab also appear in merchandise (Xu Yuting, 2009; Gaofudev, 2011; Lotahk, 2011), numerous cartoons (Hecaitou, 2009a; Hexie Farm, 2011) and music videos (Stchi, 2009; Tutuwan, 2009; DZS manyin, 2010) that typically work through copies of copies, interweaving the themes and symbols discussed throughout this thesis. In one such music video, the connection between rivercrabs, harmony and Tianxia is once more highlighted (Tutuwan, 2009). This cover-song called “Harmony or die” features the chorus “Green dam, green dam – rivercrab/harmonise your entire family (lv4ba,4lv4ba,4hexie4ni4quanjia4绿坝绿坝 – 河蟹／和谐你全家), sometimes writing the same- sounding lyrics as “harmony” (和谐), sometimes as “rivercrab” (河蟹) in the subtitles. The second verse begins: Green dam - green dam, will kill you in the bud. Rivercrabs all under heaven, arrogant attributes erupt She has asked you not to open your eyes too wide Is it possible that she is envious and jealous-147 146 According to China Digital Space: “Pre-installation of Green Dam software was originally intended for all new computers; however, because the proposed policy proved deeply unpopular, mandatory pre-installation has been delayed to an undetermined date. Green Dam girl first appeared sporadically in June 2009 on Baidu’s online encyclopaedia” (China Digital Space, 2011b). Some, however, suggested that the actual reason for the government’s about-face was the many security flaws within the software that allowed hackers to take over computers (jozjozjoz, 2009), and that it was built on copyright and open sourcecode violations (Koman, 2009). Popular Chinese blogger Hecaitou (和菜头) says the Green Dam Girl shows the creativity of the post-80s generation in resisting Internet regulation (Hecaitou, 2009a). 147 绿坝‐绿坝 把你萌杀 (lv4ba4W4lv4ba,4ba4ni4meng4sha) - 204 - This kind of video typically brings together numerous key elements discussed here with reference to the onco-operative nature of contemporary Chinese society: the Green Dam Girl, rivercrabs, harmony, Internet censorship, cleansing and Tianxia.148 This mixing of online lingo and symbols is reiterated also in art off-line. In a 2011 art exhibition at the Postmaster Gallery in New York, Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung exhibited his mixed media installation “The Travelogue of Dr. Brain Damages” (Hung, 2011). The installation was a response to the increasing harmonisation of artistic and netizen dissidence in China, and explored the role of the Internet in facilitating “both freedom and suppression” (Hung, 2011). The Chinese title Naocan4youji4(脑残游记) is a wordplay on Lao4Can4youji (老残游记), “The Travelogue of Lao Can”, a late Qing dynasty novel attacking the injustice and hypocrisy of government officials at the time. The project thus questioned whether the Internet in China is an effective tool for social change, through remixing Chinese netizens’ meme languages with Western icons. The installation consisted of 10 framed digital prints, a 6-minute long video and a ping-pong table sculpture, seen in the figure below. Several of the prints in this installation include replicas of one or more rivercrabs, often copied from images circulated on blogs. For example, in the piece titled “Justice Bao faces the Red Sun everyday” (天天见红日), Bao4Zheng (包拯), a Song dynasty judge who is a symbol of justice in China, is holding a laptop of the “Great Firewall” brand displaying a copy of the rivercrab with three watches that was discussed at the beginning of this chapter (Hung, 2011). On the walls behind the prints were written in large red characters: “You are not a real man until you have leaped the Great Wall of China” (Bu4fan4changcheng4fei4haohan 不翻长城非好汉), which is one character from the original quote from Mao: “You are not a real man until you have been to the Great Wall of China” (Bu4dao4changcheng4fei4 河蟹天下 傲娇属性大爆发 (hexie4Tianxia,4aojiao4shuxing4de4baofa) 拜托了你们 眼别睁态大 (baituo4le4nimen,4yan4bie4zheng4tai4da) 莫非羡慕妒嫉了吗- (mofei4xianmu4duji4le4ma-) My translation. Full video with Chinese subtitles can be found online (Tutuwan, 2009). 148 See for example (Hrehnr, 2009b; Stchi, 2009, which later got a avatar dancetroop found at Hrehnr, 2009a; DZS manyin, 2010). - 205 - haohan 不到长城非好汉). The calligraphic style recalls the hand-painted signs that forbid uncivilised behaviour (like spitting) and promote harmonisation in Chinese cities, but also the signs that appear on walls to be demolished. Figure 13: “Ping, ping, no pong” artwork by Kenneth Tin\Kin Hung (Source: Kenneth Tin\King Hung) The central sculpture of the installation, seen in the figure above, was titled “Ping, ping, no pong” (Ping,4ping,4wu4pang4乒乒无乓) and consisted of a ping-pong table with a whole cut out in the shape of a rivercrab on the Chinese side panel. The net was replaced by a sculptured wall, symbolising the Great Firewall of China, and accompanied by a ping-pong ball to symbolise the exchange of information (Hung, 2011). The sculpture highlights how the purported harmonious “win-win” of mutuality is undermined by harmonisation, in the form of the rivercrab. Through depicting the rivercrab as a clearly visible and distinct hole or void, this installation also highlighted the undecidable nature of rivercrabs as neither present nor absent, but simultaneously both. The metastasising, hybridising, prostheticising, mutating displacement of harmony 和谐/rivercrabs 河蟹 goes so far as to penetrate and reformulate the very characters themselves, as can be seen in the images below. The mutating of characters into new ones became popular after China’s Ministry of Education unveiled a list of standardised Chinese characters in common usage, including 44 characters that were - 206 - slightly revised in their print formats in the Song style, a popular Chinese character style in book printing format (Jiang Aitao, 2009). This re-formation of characters has grown in popularity since 2009, and can be seen in off-line art such as Hung’s (on the ping-pong racket above) and on blogs and webpages on the Internet.149 Figure 14: Hybrid hexie1shehui, rearranging the characters for 河蟹社會 (Source: Keso) The image above shows a T-shirt printed by critical blogger Keso. The print displays a rearrangement of the classical Chinese characters, used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, for “rivercrab society” (hexie shehui 河蟹社会). The characters below similarly display an amalgamation of the characters for “harmony” (hexie 和谐) and “rivercrab” (hexie 河蟹). 149 The first instance of this trend may be when on August 31 2009, netizens created three new Chinese characters together with other digital artwork within twelve hours. These new characters can be seen on Hecaitou’s blog and include a character pronounced “nan”, which combines the characters for “brain damage” (naocan4脑残), which is online lingo used to describe someone incapable of thinking straight because they have been crippled by party ideology; “wao” combining the characters for “fifty cents” (wumao 五毛) in a reference to the “Fifty cent party” which is an online term for online commentators paid and trained by the government to anonymously spin online debate in favour of the Party Line; and “diang”, combining the characters for the CCP Central Committee (dangzhongyang 党中央) interpreted to mean “the ultimate, sacred, absolutely correct, cannot be questioned; you get the shit beaten out of you but cannot say a word” (意思是至高无上的，神圣的， 绝对正确的，不容质疑的， 抽你丫没商量的) (Hecaitou, 2009b, for English language commentary at China Digital Times, see Xiao Qiang, 2009). - 207 - Figure 15: Hybrid hexie, combining the characters 和谐 and 河蟹 (Source: Alison, 2010) This hybridisation of crabs has clear parallels to Baudrillard’s alignment of metastases and prostheses, where the fractal (geo)body, “fated to see its own external functions multiply, is at the same time doomed to unstoppable internal division among its own cells. It metastasises: the internal, biological metastases are in a way symmetrical with those external metastases, the prostheses, the networks, the connections” (Baudrillard, 2002 2000: 3). In this way rivercrabs, too, metastasise in time and space. Heterotemporalities and the undecidability of rivercrabs Having examined the hybrid nature of the metastasising crabs, the final point I want to argue is that this hybridity, in combination with the autoimmune logics of which they are part, imbues them with a radical undecidability. Derrida too emphasises this link between the autoimmunitary and undecidability: suppression in the name of the (harmonious) system may be legitimate in protecting it from those who threaten it, but is simultaneously autoimmunitary in exposing the immune system by which the system defends itself as an “a4priori abusive use of force” (Derrida, 2005 2003-a). In this final section I thus want to emphasise the links between cancer/crabs and undecidability of the future against which harmonisation attempts to secure “harmonious world/society”. The undecidable nature of cancer/crabs is visible in an aspect of the lore surrounding them, that refers to the way the crab moves in time and space, in a forward and backwards motion that has been connected to threatening dishonesty, but also to the inability to decide something one way or the other, or to predict where it is going (Demaitre, 1998). This undecidability embodied in the crab is also emphasised by the Chinese interpretation of harmony that sees its roots in cooking. The crab can at times be poisonous and as a bottom-feeder it often includes contaminated substances. At the same time, however, it is considered a delicacy and is believed to nourish the marrow and semen, making it a symbol of male potency and virility (The Vanishing Tattoo, 2011). As crabs are considered exemplary “salty” they can in the logic of TCM either disturb or restore harmony of the body through their effect on the kidneys, and can thus cause or treat cancer (Lu, 1986: 52, 125-6; Wong and Sagar, 2010: 16).150 Like Derrida’s reading of the pharmakon in “Plato’s Pharmacy”, the crab, then, is simultaneously potential poison and potential cure – indeed Derrida says that “the pharmakon is another name, an old name, for this autoimmunitary logic”.151 Again, the interpretation of the crab as alimentary poison/cure as always already central to the concept of harmony can be seen in the building blocks of the harmony concept itself. An alternative explanation of the character 和 reads the radical to the left 禾, which depicts standing grain,152 with the radical to the right 口, which depicts an opening or mouth.153 Together they link harmony to eating, or having plenty of grain 禾 to eat 口.154 David Hall and Roger Ames accordingly argue that “harmony is the art of combining and blending two or more foodstuffs so they come together with mutual benefit and enhancement without losing their separate and particular identities, and yet with the effect of constituting a frictionless whole” (Hall and Ames, 1998: 181, cited in Callahan, 2011: 259). Callahan also draws on this metaphor in a famous passage from the Spring4and4Autumn4Annals (Lüshi4chunqiu 呂氏春秋), where a minister uses it to explain to his king the art of empire building: “your state is too 150 For one example of such a cure: “Bake one male crab and one female crab and grind into powder, take the powder with wine all at once to facilitate healing of breast cancer” (Lu, 1986: 126). 151 Derrida (2003a: 124, see also, Derrida, 1976 1967: 292; 1981 1972; 1995 1989-a: 233; Derrida, 2005 2003-a: 52, 82, 157). This is also how Chinese lore traditionally conceives of poisons/cures more generally, as is clear from the “Five Poisons” (wu4du 五毒), incidentally near-homonymous with “no poison” (wu4du4无毒). These are, like the crab, actually five animals that have traditionally been held to counteract harmful influences through counteracting poison with poison. They also had corresponding medicines made from five animals or corresponding herbs, used to treat ulcers and abscesses, probably through active ingredients such as mercury and arsenic (Yetts, 1923: 2; Williams, 1976). 152 According to a dictionary definition (Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995: 4.2588.1). 153 According to a dictionary definition (Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995: 1.566.14). 154 This etymology can be found in a number of dictionaries and books on Chinese characters (Wieger, 1965 1915: 121a; Karlgren, 1974 1923: 70; Lindqvist, 1991: 187; Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995: 1.602.1). small and is inadequate to have the full complement of the necessary ingredients. It is only once you are the Emperor that you would have the full complement” (Lvshi4 chunqiu, 1996, cited in Callahan, 2011: 260). To Callahan, this shows the constructed nature of harmony, built through “an active political process, and judged from a particular perspective – in this case the king’s perspective” (Callahan, 2011: 260). In Chinese mythology, the crab is similarly associated with sovereign power and violent might, as well as with guarding and screening the passage into secured spaces. For example, in Chinese mythology and popular fiction, the Chrystal Palaces of the Dragon Kings of the Four Seas are guarded by shrimp soldiers and crab generals (Mythical Realm, 2011). This stands as a parallel to the guarding of Chinese sovereign space by the Great Firewall, and the Green Dam Girl with her crab sign of repressive authority. At the same time, however, this crustacean army is parodied in the Chinese idiom of “shrimp soldiers and crab generals” (xiabing4xiejiang4虾兵蟹将), which is used to denote useless troops, a connotation which remains with contemporary Internet users, as can be seen in the image below, which depicts shrimp soldiers and crab generals as precisely “ineffective troops” (Lee, 2011). Figure 16: Shrimp soldiers and crab generals: Ineffective troops (Source: Sean Lee) What is clear from these metastases and their association is the undecidability of these crabs of the onco-operative Chinese system. They are simultaneously poison and cure, effective harmonisers and useless troops, a consequence of sovereign bordering of time and space and that which “falls through” or escapes such confines. This undecidability is inseparable from the “mutual contamination” seen above in the crabs’ interaction with their environment and with other species of the zoology that has emerged as part of netizens’ play with humorous homonyms in the face of Internet harmonisation. It is this “mutual contamination” that I think makes these rivercrabs and their peers step up to the challenge of coeval multiplicities that was outlined in chapter 2 of this thesis, which Hutchings articulated as the attempt to think “heterotemporality” which refers to “ultimately neither one present nor many presents, but a mutual contamination of ‘nows’ that participate in a variety of temporal trajectories, and which do not derive their significance from the one meta-narrative about how they all fit together” (Hutchings, 2008: 166). These différantial metastases, differentiated and deferred through spacing, are of the system yet fall through the cracks of its time and space to engage in a “mutual contamination of ‘nows’” that each incorporates undecidable futures in the “here-now”. Their very undecidability means that we have to take responsibility in the “here-now” for which of their possible readings, or temporal trajectories, we chose to put across. In this chapter I have chosen to put across one such narrative, of crabs as (auto)immune metastases of an onco-operative harmony. Their significance, however, cannot be ultimately decided or locked in by this narrative – it is not a meta-narrative from which we can judge how they all fit together. It is indeed impossible to do justice to the excess of meaning embodied in these crabs. Nonetheless, I have traced some of them here and pointed to some of their significance, in a way that I believe can emphasise their radical undecidability as a “plurality of trajectories” or “simultaneity of stories-so-far”. CONCLUSION In this chapter I have explored how Hu’s version of a harmonious world is being challenged and reproduced by a particular form of Chinese egao word play that works through deploying official language against itself. These redeployments make visible how Hu’s harmony has come to work through violent “harmonisation” of others. I have argued that these forms of wordplay draw on tactics similar to Derrida’s in particular, but also to Baudrillard’s, thus providing for a resonance here between academic scholarship and dissident practice in China. I have moreover argued that these forms of resistance are inherently linked to Hu’s “harmonious world/society” through the autoimmune logic of what I have termed an onco-operative system: a system that in seeking to protect and cleanse itself actually violates itself as the consequence of a violent non-recognition of the “other” in the self. In exploring this quasi-suicidal interplay of harmony and rivercrabs, I have shown how they are intimately linked to party-state attempts at spatial and temporal bordering as a means to maintain a cleansed/harmonious timespace. Deconstruction highlights the impossibility of ever making a clear-cut division between inside and outside, self and other and thus brings out a key feature of the logics of “harmonious world” (or perhaps any system). Resistance to4harmony/harmonisation can in this way not be thought outside the resistance of4harmony/harmonisation, the resistance of the system itself to itself, of and to its “self” as “other”, a resistance of the “other” of itself to itself. For this reason, it is impossible for harmony to acquire the conceptual unity or self-identity which would be needed in order for it to be placed as a secure “object” to be straightforwardly resisted, critiqued or condemned. In this manner I have insisted on the impossibility of succeeding in creating such a purified space or object, and on the undecidability of both harmony and crabs: like harmony, the crabs are simultaneously poison and cure, they are intimately linked to the possibility of the system in the first place, yet threaten it with murder/suicide. Because of a tendency of any community to close in on itself and exclude the outside on which it relies for survival works according to an autoimmune logic, “this tendency is not a perversion of proper community (whether inoperative, unavowable, - 212 - or coming, as for Blanchot, Nancy, Agamben), but the condition of its existence” (Thomson, 2005). This is certainly the case for Hu’s “harmonious world”. In this way “this self-contesting attestation keeps the auto-immune community alive, which is to say, open to something other and more than itself” (Derrida, 1998: 51). Finally, then, I have argued that this undecidability is what makes it possible to think of this onco- operative system of metastases in terms of the “heterotemporalities” or “coeval multiplicities”. Returning to the question of the political in harmony/rivercrabs, it seems the claim that the online world of egao4offers a “free and unrestricted” time and space of Bakhtinian carnival is premature. Rivercrabs are used to circumvent constraints, not abolish them, and constraints are certainly still in place. The descriptions of this culture as a separate sphere or “the antithesis of normal life” seem similarly exaggerated. However, Lagerkvist’s idea that egao4is for venting anger as4opposed4to offering the public political power hinges on a focus on politics in the narrow sense, which is seen throughout prior analyses of egao. Much previous scholarship rests on the assumption that egao4should be judged on its potential to influence politics, to contest the legitimacy, accountability or policy of the PRC government. Others imply that it should be measured against its potential to cultivate collective resistance, collective empowerment or grassroots communities. If measured against such standards, rivercrabs certainly appear as “ineffective troops” in battling out Chinese politics. They make us laugh, but offer no way out, no alternative telos towards which a movement of mass resistance can be directed. They even refuse to adapt a single meaning and always oscillate – they are simultaneously harmony and rivercrab, resisting and perpetuating the proliferation of harmony. Precisely herein lies the political potential of rivercrabs. Previous scholarship has aimed to understand the meaning of egao, to pin down its potential significance in terms of a resisance/not resistance divide of politics. I suggest instead that we can approach such phenomena by way of interrogating the political, where “repolitcization” involves a disruption of the regular proliferation of allochronically organized harmony, a “challenge” to “what have, through discursive practices, been - 213 - constituted as normal, natural, and accepted ways of carrying on” (Edkins, 1999: 12). Through repeatedly deploying expressions like having “been harmonised” or “rivercrab world” the meaning of the official “harmonious world” discourse is “hollowed out” or “disrupted”, rather than contested head on. The point is not necessarily to resist or not resist, but to “make strange”. This is what pushes rivercrabs into the political, where multiple meanings or doings – of words and purported significance – leads to instances of openness where we need to make “impossible decisions” with regards to their use and interpretation. It is only if we shift the focus from politics to the political that it makes sense to conceive of this language play as “alternative political discourse” (Meng Bingchun, 2011: 39) or “alternate civility” (Lagerkvist, 2010: 158). With this said, repoliticisation is not stable, but egao too is repeatedly depoliticised, by being designated as unimportant or as meaning only one thing (only revolution, only apolitical escapism, only4a potential to become a proper political movement). The point of this chapter is not to designate to egao another correct4meaning, but to indicate the undecidability of this meaning-making process. The point, precisely, is to open back up the question of egao as potentially political even if it does not lead to a revolutionary politics. Because of the onco-operative logic of the system “our solutions to problems, our attempts to perfect the world… are but a step on the way to worse viruses developing” (Coulter, 2004). The question, then, has to be asked: “what is cancer a resistance to, what even worse eventuality is it saving us from-” (Baudrillard, 1993 1990: 10). It is thus to the question of eventualities that I turn in my conclusion, to the (im)possibility of openness to this Other “to come”.

Tournament: Stanford | Round: 6 | Opponent: Hawkens | Judge: kolloru, mahadev
Politics today is founded upon the exclusion of death and the reduction of life to mere industrial prolongation, creating a bureaucratic regime of death that encodes the possibility for all exclusions
Robinson 12
(Andrew Robinson, political theorist and activist based in the UK, “An A to Z of Theory | Jean Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism and the Exclusion of Death” Ceasefire Magazine, March 30, 2012, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-2/)
The passage to capitalism: Symbolic exchange – or rather, its suppression – plays a central role in the emergence of capitalism.   Baudrillard sees a change happening over time. Regimes based on symbolic exchange (differences are exchangeable and related) are replaced by regimes based on equivalence (everything is, or means, the same). Ceremony gives way to spectacle, immanence to transcendence. Baudrillard’s view of capitalism is derived from Marx’s analysis of value. Baudrillard accepts Marx’s view that capitalism is based on a general equivalent. Money is the general equivalent because it can be exchanged for any commodity. In turn, it expresses the value of abstract labour-time. Abstract labour-time is itself an effect of the regimenting of processes of life, so that different kinds of labour can be compared. Capitalism is derived from the autonomisation or separation of economics from the rest of life. It turns economics into the ‘reality-principle’. It is a kind of sorcery, connected in some way to the disavowed symbolic level. It subtly shifts the social world from an exchange of death with the Other to an eternal return of the Same. Capitalism functions by reducing everything to a regime based on value and the production of value. To be accepted by capital, something must contribute value. This creates an immense regime of social exchange. However, this social exchange has little in common with symbolic exchange. It ultimately depends on the mark of value itself being unexchangeable. Capital must be endlessly accumulated. States must not collapse. Capitalism thus introduces the irreversible into social life, by means of accumulation. According to Baudrillard, capitalism rests on an obsession with the abolition of death. Capitalism tries to abolish death through accumulation. It tries to ward off ambivalence (associated with death) through value (associated with life. But this is bound to fail. General equivalence – the basis of capitalism – is itself the ever-presence of death. The more the system runs from death, the more it places everyone in solitude, facing their own death. Life itself is fundamentally ambivalent. The attempt to abolish death through fixed value is itself deathly. Accumulation also spreads to other fields. The idea of progress, and linear time, comes from the accumulation of time, and of stockpiles of the past. The idea of truth comes from the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Biology rests on the separation of living and non-living. According to Baudrillard, such accumulations are now in crisis. For instance, the accumulation of the past is undermined, because historical objects now have to be concealed to be preserved – otherwise they will be destroyed by excessive consumption. Value is produced from the residue or remainder of an incomplete symbolic exchange. The repressed, market value, and sign-value all come from this remainder. To destroy the remainder would be to destroy value. Capitalist exchange is always based on negotiation, even when it is violent. The symbolic order does not know this kind of equivalential exchange or calculation. And capitalist extraction is always one-way. It amounts to a non-reversible aggression in which one act (of dominating or killing) cannot be returned by the other. It is also this regime which produces scarcity – Baudrillard here endorses Sahlins’ argument. Capitalism produces the Freudian “death drive”, which is actually an effect of the capitalist culture of death. For Baudrillard, the limit to both Marx and Freud is that they fail to theorise the separation of the domains they study – the economy and the unconscious. It is the separation which grounds their functioning, which therefore only occurs under the regime of the code. Baudrillard also criticises theories of desire, including those of Deleuze, Foucault, Freud and Lacan. He believes desire comes into existence based on repression. It is an effect of the denial of the symbolic. Liberated energies always leave a new remainder; they do not escape the basis of the unconscious in the remainder. Baudrillard argues that indigenous groups do not claim to live naturally or by their desires – they simply claim to live in societies. This social life is an effect of the symbolic. Baudrillard therefore criticises the view that human liberation can come about through the liberation of desire. He thinks that such a liberation will keep certain elements of the repression of desire active. Baudrillard argues that the processes which operate collectively in indigenous groups are repressed into the unconscious in metropolitan societies. This leads to the autonomy of the psyche as a separate sphere. It is only after this repression has occurred that a politics of desire becomes conceivable. He professes broad agreement with the Deleuzian project of unbinding energies from fixed categories and encouraging flows and intensities. However, he is concerned that capitalism can recuperate such releases of energy, disconnecting them so they can eventually reconnect to it. Unbinding and drifting are not fatal to capitalism, because capitalism itself unbinds things, and re-binds things which are unbound. What is fatal to it is, rather, reversibility. Capitalism continues to be haunted by the forces it has repressed. Separation does not destroy the remainder. Quite the opposite. The remainder continues to exist, and gains power from its repression. This turns the double or shadow into something unquiet, vampiric, and threatening. It becomes an image of the forgotten dead. Anything which reminds us of the repressed aspects excluded from the subject is experienced as uncanny and threatening. It becomes the ‘obscene’, which is present in excess over the ‘scene’ of what is imagined. This is different from theories of lack, such as the Lacanian Real. Baudrillard’s remainder is an excess rather than a lack. It is the carrier of the force of symbolic exchange. Modern culture dreams of radical difference. The reason for this is that it exterminated radical difference by simulating it. The energy of production, the unconscious, and signification all in fact come from the repressed remainder. Our culture is dead from having broken the pact with monstrosity, with radical difference. The West continues to perpetrate genocide on indigenous groups. But for Baudrillard, it did the same thing to itself first – destroying its own indigenous logics of symbolic exchange. Indigenous groups have also increasingly lost the symbolic dimension, as modern forms of life have been imported or imposed. This according to Baudrillard produces chronic confusion and instability. Gift-exchange is radically subversive of the system. This is not because it is rebellious. Baudrillard thinks the system can survive defections or exodus. It is because it counterposes a different ‘principle of sociality’ to that of the dominant system. According to Baudrillard, the mediations of capitalism exist so that nobody has the opportunity to offer a symbolic challenge or an irreversible gift. They exist to keep the symbolic at bay. The affective charge of death remains present among the oppressed, but not with the ‘properly symbolic rhythm’ of immediate retaliation. The Church and State also exist based on the elimination of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard is highly critical of Christianity for what he takes to be a cult of suffering, solitude and death. He sees the Church as central to the destruction of earlier forms of community based on symbolic exchange. Baudrillard seems to think that earlier forms of the state and capitalism retained some degree of symbolic exchange, but in an alienated, partially repressed form. For instance, the imaginary of the ‘social contract’ was based on the idea of a sacrifice – this time of liberty for the common good. In psychoanalysis, symbolic exchange is displaced onto the relationship to the master-signifier. I haven’t seen Baudrillard say it directly, but the impression he gives is that this is a distorted, authoritarian imitation of the original symbolic exchange. Nonetheless, it retains some of its intensity and energy. Art, theatre and language have worked to maintain a minimum of ceremonial power. It is the reason older orders did not suffer the particular malaise of the present. It is easy to read certain passages in Baudrillard as if he is bemoaning the loss of these kinds of strong significations. This is initially how I read Baudrillard’s work. But on closer inspection, this seems to be a misreading. Baudrillard is nostalgic for repression only to the extent that the repressed continued to carry symbolic force as a referential. He is nostalgic for the return of symbolic exchange, as an aspect of diffuse, autonomous, dis-alienated social groups. Death: Death plays a central role in Baudrillard’s theory, and is closely related to symbolic exchange. According to Baudrillard, what we have lost above all in the transition to alienated society is the ability to engage in exchanges with death. Death should not be seen here in purely literal terms. Baudrillard specifies early on that he does not mean an event affecting a body, but rather, a form which destroys the determinacy of the subject and of value – which returns things to a state of indeterminacy. Baudrillard certainly discusses actual deaths, risk-taking, suicide and so on. But he also sees death figuratively, in relation to the decomposition of existing relations, the “death” of the self-image or ego, the interchangeability of processes of life across different categories. For instance, eroticism or sexuality is related to death, because it leads to fusion and communication between bodies. Sexual reproduction carries shades of death because one generation replaces another. Baudrillard’s concept of death is thus quite similar to Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque. Death refers to metamorphosis, reversibility, unexpected mutations, social change, subjective transformation, as well as physical death. According to Baudrillard, indigenous groups see death as social, not natural or biological. They see it as an effect of an adversarial will, which they must absorb. And they mark it with feasting and rituals. This is a way of preventing death from becoming an event which does not signify. Such a non-signifying event is absolute disorder from the standpoint of symbolic exchange. For Baudrillard, the west’s idea of a biological, material death is actually an idealist illusion, ignoring the sociality of death. Poststructuralists generally maintain that the problems of the present are rooted in the splitting of life into binary oppositions. For Baudrillard, the division between life and death is the original, founding opposition on which the others are founded. After this first split, a whole series of others have been created, confining particular groups – the “mad”, prisoners, children, the old, sexual minorities, women and so on – to particular segregated situations. The definition of the ‘normal human’ has been narrowed over time. Today, nearly everyone belongs to one or another marked or deviant category. The original exclusion was of the dead – it is defined as abnormal to be dead. “You livies hate us deadies”. This first split and exclusion forms the basis, or archetype, for all the other splits and exclusions – along lines of gender, disability, species, class, and so on. This discrimination against the dead brings into being the modern experience of death. Baudrillard suggests that death as we know it does not exist outside of this separation between living and dead. The modern view of death is constructed on the model of the machine and the function. A machine either functions or it does not. The human body is treated as a machine which similarly, either functions or does not. For Baudrillard, this misunderstands the nature of life and death. The modern view of death is also necessitated by the rise of subjectivity. The subject needs a beginning and an end, so as to be reducible to the story it tells. This requires an idea of death as an end. It is counterposed to the immortality of social institutions. In relation to individuals, ideas of religious immortality is simply an ideological cover for the real exclusion of the dead. But institutions try to remain truly immortal. Modern systems, especially bureaucracies, no longer know how to die – or how to do anything but keep reproducing themselves. The internalisation of the idea of the subject or the soul alienates us from our bodies, voices and so on. It creates a split, as Stirner would say, between the category of ‘man’ and the ‘un-man’, the real self irreducible to such categories. It also individualises people, by destroying their actual connections to others. The symbolic haunts the code as the threat of its own death. The society of the code works constantly to ward off the danger of irruptions of the symbolic. The mortal body is actually an effect of the split introduced by the foreclosure of death. The split never actually stops exchanges across the categories. In the case of death, we still ‘exchange’ with the dead through our own deaths and our anxiety about death. We no longer have living, mortal relationships with objects either. They are reduced to the instrumental. It is as if we have a transparent veil between us. Symbolic exchange is based on a game, with game-like rules. When this disappears, laws and the state are invented to take their place. It is the process of excluding, marking, or barring which allows concentrated or transcendental power to come into existence. Through splits, people turn the other into their ‘imaginary’. For instance, westerners invest the “Third World” with racist fantasies and revolutionary aspirations; the “Third World” invests the west with aspirational fantasies of development. In separation, the other exists only as an imaginary object. Yet the resultant purity is illusory. For Baudrillard, any such marking or barring of the other brings the other to the core of society. “We all” become dead, or mad, or prisoners, and so on, through their exclusion. The goal of ‘survival’ is fundamental to the birth of power. Social control emerges when the union of the living and the dead is shattered, and the dead become prohibited. The social repression of death grounds the repressive socialisation of life. People are compelled to survive so as to become useful. For Baudrillard, capitalism’s original relationship to death has historically been concealed by the system of production, and its ends. It only becomes fully visible now this system is collapsing, and production is reduced to operation. In modern societies, death is made invisible, denied, and placed outside society. For example, elderly people are excluded from society. People no longer expect their own death. As a result, it becomes unintelligible. It keeps returning as ‘nature which will not abide by objective laws’. It can no longer be absorbed through ritual. Western society is arranged so death is never done by someone else, but always attributable to ‘nature’. This creates a bureaucratic, judicial regime of death, of which the concentration camp is the ultimate symbol. The system now commands that we must not die – at least not in any old way. We may only die if law and medicine allow it. Hence for instance the spread of health and safety regulations. On the other hand, murder and violence are legalised, provided they can be re-converted into economic value. Baudrillard sees this as a regressive redistribution of death. It is wrested from the circuit of social exchanges and vested in centralised agencies. For Baudrillard, there is not a social improvement here. People are effectively being killed, or left to die, by a process which never treats them as having value. On the other hand, even when capitalism becomes permissive, inclusive and tolerant, it still creates an underlying anxiety about being reduced to the status of an object or a marionette. This appears as a constant fear of being manipulated. The slave remains within the master’s dialectic for as long as ‘his’ life or death serves the reproduction of domination. A fatal ontology?: In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard suggests an ontology which backs up his analysis of death. The world itself is committed to extremes and to radical antagonism. It is bored of meaning. There is an ‘evil genie’, a principle of Evil which constantly returns in the form of seduction. Historical processes are really pushed forward by this principle. All energy comes from fission and rupture. These cannot be replaced by production or mechanical processes. There is no possibility of a collective project or a coherent society, only the operation of such forces. Every order exists only to be transgressed and dismantled. The world is fundamentally unreal. This leads to a necessity of irony, which is to say, the slippage of meaning. Historically, the symbolic was confined to the metaphysical. It did not affect the physical world. But with the rise of models, with the physical world derived increasingly from the code, the physical world is brought within the symbolic. It becomes reversible. The rational principle of linear causality collapses. The world is, and always remains, enigmatic. People will give for seduction or for simulation what they would never give for quality of life. Advertising, fashion, gambling and so on liberate ‘immoral energies’ which hark back to the magical or archaic gamble on the power of thought against the power of reality. Neoliberalism is in some ways an ultimate release of such diabolical forces. People will look for an ecstatic excess of anything – even boredom or oppression. In this account, the principle of evil becomes the only fixed point. Desire is not inescapable. What is inescapable is the object and its seduction, its ‘principle of evil’. The object at once submits to law and breaks it in practice, mocking it. Its own “game” cannot be discerned. It is a poor conductor of the symbolic order but a good conductor of signs.  The drive towards spectacles, illusions and scenes is stronger than the desire for survival.
Speech codes inherently place value on free speech which leads to endless scapegoating and apathy. The over-proliferation of information collapses under its own weight – more knowledge doesn’t change reality.
Baudrillard 81
Jean I would put quals, but it wouldn’t change anything anyway, “Simulacra and Simulations,” pg. 79-81
 We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning. Consider three hypotheses. Either information produces meaning (a negentropic factor), but cannot make up for the brutal loss of signification in every domain. Despite efforts to reinject message and content, meaning is lost and devoured faster than it can be reinjected. In this case, one must appeal to a base productivity to replace failing media. This is the whole ideology of free speech, of media broken down into innumerable individual cells of transmission, that is, into "antimedia" (pirate radio, etc.). Or information has nothing to do with signification. It is something else, an operational model of another order, outside meaning and of the circulation of meaning strictly speaking. This is Shannon's hypothesis: a sphere of information that is purely functional, a technical medium that does not imply any finality of meaning, and thus should also not be implicated in a value judgment. A kind of code, like the genetic code: it is what it is, it functions as it does, meaning is something else that in a sense comes after the fact, as it does for Monod in Chance and Necessity. In this case, there would simply be no significant relation between the inflation of information and the deflation of meaning. Or, very much on the contrary, there is a rigorous and necessary correlation between the two, to the extent that information is directly destructive of meaning and signification, or that it neutralizes them. The loss of meaning is directly linked to the dissolving, dissuasive action of information, the media, and the mass media. The third hypothesis is the most interesting but flies in the face of every commonly held opinion. Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial. Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus value of meaning homologous to the economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of capital. Information is thought to create communication, and even if the waste is enormous, a general consensus would have it that nevertheless, as a whole, there be an excess of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social just as consensus would have it that material production, despite its dysfunctions and irrationalities, opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose. We are all complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our social organization would collapse. Well, the fact is that it is collapsing, and for this very reason: because where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs. Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social. And for two reasons. 1. Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. The nondirective interview, speech, listeners who call in, participation at every level, blackmail through speech: "You are concerned, you are the event, etc." More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience, the antitheater of communication, which, as one knows, is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the negative. Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning. It is useless to ask if it is the loss of communication that produces this escalation in the simulacrum, or whether it is the simulacrum that is there first for dissuasive ends, to short-circuit in advance any possibility of communication (precession of the model that calls an end to the real). Useless to ask which is the first term, there is none, it is a circular process that of simulation, that of the hyperreal. The hyperreality of communication and of meaning. More real than the real, that is how the real is abolished. Thus not only communication but the social functions in a closed circuit, as a lure to which the force of myth is attached. Belief, faith in information attach themselves to this tautological proof that the system gives of itself by doubling the signs of an unlocatable reality. But one can believe that this belief is as ambiguous as that which was attached to myths in ancient societies. One both believes and doesn't. One does not ask oneself, "I know very well, but still." A sort of inverse simulation in the masses, in each one of us, corresponds to this simulation of meaning and of communication in which this system encloses us. To this tautology of the system the masses respond with ambivalence, to deterrence they respond with disaffection, or with an always enigmatic belief. Myth exists, but one must guard against thinking that people believe in it: this is the trap of critical thinking that can only be exercised if it presupposes the naivete and stupidity of the masses. 2. Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scène of communication, the mass media, the pressure of information pursues an irresistible destructuration of the social. Thus information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but, on the contrary, to total entropy.*1 Thus the media are producers not of socialization, but of exactly the opposite, of the implosion of the social in the masses. And this is only the macroscopic extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign. This implosion should be analyzed according to McLuhan's formula, the medium is the message, the consequences of which have yet to be exhausted. That means that all contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event whatever the contents, whether they are conformist or subversive. A serious problem for all counterinformation, pirate radios, antimedia, etc. But there is something even more serious, which McLuhan himself did not see. Because beyond this neutralization of all content, one could still expect to manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the real by using the impact of the medium as form. If all the content is wiped out, there is perhaps still a subversive, revolutionary use value of the medium as such. That is and this is where McLuhan's formula leads, pushed to its limit there is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be determined. Even the "traditional" status of the media themselves, characteristic of modernity, is put in question. McLuhan's formula, the medium is the message, which is the key formula of the era of simulation (the medium is the message the sender is the receiver the circularity of all poles the end of panoptic and perspectival space such is the alpha and omega of our modernity), this very formula must be imagined at its limit where, after all the contents and messages have been volatilized in the medium, it is the medium itself that is volatilized as such. Fundamentally, it is still the message that lends credibility to the medium, that gives the medium its determined, distinct status as the intermediary of communication. Without a message, the medium also falls into the indefinite state characteristic of all our great systems of judgment and value. A single model, whose efficacy is immediate, simultaneously generates the message, the medium, and the "real." Finally, the medium is the message not only signifies the end of the message, but also the end of the medium. There are no more media in the literal sense of the word (I'm speaking particularly of electronic mass media) that is, of a mediating power between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another. Neither in content, nor in form. Strictly, this is what implosion signifies. The absorption of one pole into another, the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of meaning, the erasure of distinct terms and oppositions, including that of the medium and of the real thus the impossibility of any mediation, of any dialectical intervention between the two or from one to the other. Circularity of all media effects. Hence the impossibility of meaning in the literal sense of a unilateral vector that goes from one pole to another. One must envisage this critical but original situation at its very limit: it is the only one left us. It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable. The fact of this implosion of contents, of the absorption of meaning, of the evanescence of the medium itself, of the reabsorption of every dialectic of communication in a total circularity of the model, of the implosion of the social in the masses, may seem catastrophic and desperate. But this is only the case in light of the idealism that dominates our whole view of information. We all live by a passionate idealism of meaning and of communication, by an idealism of communication through meaning, and, from this perspective, it is truly the catastrophe of meaning that lies in wait for us. But one must realize that "catastrophe" has this "catastrophic" meaning of end and annihilation only in relation to a linear vision of accumulation, of productive finality, imposed on us by the system. Etymologically, the term itself only signifies the curvature, the winding down to the bottom of a cycle that leads to what one could call the "horizon of the event," to an impassable horizon of meaning: beyond that nothing takes place that has meaning for us but it suffices to get out of this ultimatum of meaning in order for the catastrophe itself to no longer seem like a final and nihilistic day of reckoning, such as it functions in our contemporary imaginary. Beyond meaning, there is the fascination that results from the neutralization and the implosion of meaning. Beyond the horizon of the social, there are the masses, which result from the neutralization and the implosion of the social. What is essential today is to evaluate this double challenge the challenge of the masses to meaning and their silence (which is not at all a passive resistance) the challenge to meaning that comes from the media and its fascination. All the marginal, alternative efforts to revive meaning are secondary in relation to that challenge. Evidently, there is a paradox in this inextricable conjunction of the masses and the media: do the media neutralize meaning and produce unformed informe or informed informée masses, or is it the masses who victoriously resist the media by directing or absorbing all the messages that the media produce without responding to them? Sometime ago, in "Requiem for the Media," I analyzed and condemned the media as the institution of an irreversible model of communication without a response. But today? This absence of a response can no longer be understood at all as a strategy of power, but as a counterstrategy of the masses themselves when they encounter power. What then? Are the mass media on the side of power in the manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning, in the violence perpetrated on meaning, and in fascination? Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle? Mogadishu-Stammheim: the media make themselves into the vehicle of the moral condemnation of terrorism and of the exploitation of fear for political ends, but simultaneously, in the most complete ambiguity, they propagate the brutal charm of the terrorist act, they are themselves terrorists, insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction (cf. Umberto Eco on this eternal moral dilemma: how can one not speak of terrorism, how can one find a good use of the media there is none). The media carry meaning and countermeaning, they manipulate in all directions at once, nothing can control this process, they are the vehicle for the simulation internal to the system and the simulation that destroys the system, according to an absolutely Mobian and circular logic and it is exactly like this. There is no alternative to this, no logical resolution. Only a logical exacerbation and a catastrophic resolution. With one caution. We are face to face with this system in a double situation and insoluble double bind exactly like children faced with the demands of the adult world. Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects. The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he responds with a double strategy. To the demand of being an object, he opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, a total claim to subjecthood. To the demand of being a subject he opposes, just as obstinately and efficaciously, an object's resistance, that is to say, exactly the opposite: childishness, hyperconformism, total dependence, passivity, idiocy. Neither strategy has more objective value than the other. The subject-resistance is today unilaterally valorized and viewed as positive just as in the political sphere only the practices of freedom, emancipation, expression, and the constitution of a political subject are seen as valuable and subversive. But this is to ignore the equal, and without a doubt superior, impact of all the object practices, of the renunciation of the subject position and of meaning precisely the practices of the masses that we bury under the derisory terms of alienation and passivity. The liberating practices respond to one of the aspects of the system, to the constant ultimatum we are given to constitute ourselves as pure objects, but they do not respond at all to the other demand, that of constituting ourselves as subjects, of liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost, of voting, producing, deciding, speaking, participating, playing the game a form of blackmail and ultimatum just as serious as the other, even more serious today. To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood. But this strategy is more reflective of the earlier phase of the system, and even if we are still confronted with it, it is no longer the strategic terrain: the current argument of the system is to maximize speech, the maximum production of meaning. Thus the strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and of the spoken word or of the hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of non-reception. It is the strategy of the masses: it is equivalent to returning to the system its own logic by doubling it, to reflecting meaning, like a mirror, without absorbing it. This strategy (if one can still speak of strategy) prevails today, because it was ushered in by that phase of the system which prevails. To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on "consciousness raising," indeed a "raising of the unconscious" of subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech. 

The will to harmonize geopolitics is self-defeating. The moment impacts appears, they immediately disappears as it is swamped by media indeterminacy. This confusion produces constant implosive violence as we attempt to impose meaning onto the map of the globe.
Artrip and Debrix 14. Ryan E. Artrip, Doctoral Student, ASPECT, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and Francois Debrix, professor of political science at Virginia Polytechnical Institute, “The Digital Fog of War: Baudrillard and the Violence of Representation,” Volume 11, Number 2 (May, 2014)
The story that needs to be told is thus not about the undoubtedly deplorable “truth” or fact of explosive and warlike violence, but about a violence of another sort. In the radical digital transparency of the global scene, we (members of the demos) often have full or direct exposure to explosivity, as we saw above with the image of terror. But what still needs to be thought and problematized is implosivity or what may be called implosive violence. Implosive violence is a violence for which we do not, and perhaps will never, have much of a language (Rancière, 2007: 123). Although, not having a language for it or, rather, as we saw above, seeking to find a language to talk about it and, perhaps, to make sense of it is still sought after. This is, perhaps, what digital pictures of war/terror violence seek to capture or want to force through. Implosive violence, often digitally rendered these days, is in close contact with media technologies and representational devices and techniques because it seeks representation and meaning. This is why implosive violence insists on calling in wars (against terror, for example) and on mobilizing war machines (against terrorist others, against vague enemy figures), but wars and war machines that no longer have—to the extent that they ever had—a clearly identifiable object and subject, or a clear mission/purpose. As such, this implosive violence and its wars (the new Western/global way of war, perhaps) must remain uncertain, unclear, foggy, inwardly driven, representational, and indeed virulent. They must remain uncertain and confused even as they are digitally operative and desperately capture events/images to give the impression that meanings/significations can and will be found. Yet, as we saw above, it is not meanings exactly that must be found, but information and the endless guarantee of its immediate circulation. As information occupies the empty place of meaning, certainty, or truth, images must be instantaneously turned into appearances that search for meanings that will never be discovered because, instead, a proliferation of information-worthy facts and beliefs will take over (perhaps this is what US fake pundit and comedian Stephen Colbert famously referred to as “truthiness”). Or, as Baudrillard puts it, “free from its former enemies, humanity now has to create enemies from within, which in fact produces a wide variety of inhuman metastases” (Baudrillard, 2003). Thus, this implosive violence is destined to be a global violence since it "is the product of a system that tracks down any form of negativity and singularity, including of course death as the ultimate form of singularity. … It is a violence that, in a sense, puts an end to violence itself and strives to establish a world where anything related to the natural must disappear  … Better than a global violence, we should call it a global virulence. This form of violence is indeed viral. It moves by contagion, produces by chain reaction, and little by little it destroys our immune systems and our capacities to resist" (2003; our italics).
The overproliferation of harmony has created the Great Firewall, a complementary strategy of media bombardment and ideaotainement alongside massive censorship of any text deemed subversive.
vote aff to affirm  The online culture known as恶搞 (Ègǎo) which effectively plays slightly on these linguistic codes to subvert meaning - the rendering of和谐 (héxié) into河蟹 (héxiè), of harmony into river crab, forming a poetic revolution in the shadow of the firewall.
Our 1AC is a cancerous counter-simulacra, a river crab within the communicative infrastructure of meaning-making, metastasizing as a linguistic onco-operativity of meaninglessness that forces the system of communication to lash out against itself in a suicidal autodestructivity.
Nordin 12
(Astrid H.M. Nordin Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, “Time, Space and Multiplicity in China’s Harmonious World”, 2012, The University of Manchester Library, https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/uk-ac-man-scw:186417, pages 174-213)

ITERATION AND LANGUAGE PLAY: RESISTNIG HARMONISATION Previous chapters of this thesis have examined how the Chinese discourse on “harmony” operates by way of exclusion of discord, and through the violent spatio- temporal double-act of inclusion into sameness and exclusion as “behind”. If such attempts at harmonisation of others have been traced in various times and spaces, this is not to imply that they are not crucially linked to the sovereign power of the policy discourse, by way of which we began the exploration of harmony in this thesis: Hu’s harmony. This version of harmony has bordered its national space in many ways, including by the insistence on territorial sovereignty so closely associated with Hu’s “harmonious world” policy. This insistence on sovereignty and non-interference has been deployed precisely to legitimate in the international arena the various forms of harmonisation that have come to be associated with harmonious world’s policy twin, “harmonious society”. Being harmonised online One key tactic employed by the state for containing dissidence and making resistance more difficult has been through harmonising expression on the Internet. Where some may initially have imagined the Internet to provide the space for near-unlimited freedom of expression and provide a tool to hold government accountable, more empirical studies soon resulted in more sober analyses (Chase and Mulvenon, 2002; Kurlantzick, 2004; Lagerkvist, 2005). On the one hand, the state has been active in trying to include the public through e- governance and “guidance” (导向), and by shaping opinion through overt or covert propaganda online (Lagerkvist, 2005: 206). Officials have portrayed the implementation of information and communications technologies in police and security organs as a “necessary strategic choice”, echoing Hu’s view of the future in terms of an “inevitable choice” (Minister of Public Security, Jia Chunwang, in Huliang - 175 - zhoukan, 2002, cited in Lagerkvist, 2005). One example of such propaganda is the anonymous participation in online fora by what netizens call the “50 cent party”, individuals paid to tow the party line and steer online discussion so as to be favourable to the party. Another example is the increasing amount of what Johan Lagerkvist has called “ideotainment”. This term denotes “the juxtaposition of images, symbolic representations, and sounds of popular Web and mobile phone culture together with both subtle and overt ideological constructs and nationalistic propaganda”, which may be exemplified by the Online Expo examined in the previous chapter (Lagerkvist, 2008: 121). The desired outcome of such e-governance, according to Lagerkvist, is “installing a machine” that can provide “‘scientific and correct’ knowledge among citizens and state officials” (2005: 197). The success of the state in achieving the goals of its inclusionary “thought work” (思想工作) nonetheless remains questionable (Lynch, 1999). On the other hand, the state has been simultaneously active in trying to exclude the public, through deleting posts and blocking the Internet. Border regions like Xinjiang have been without Internet access for long periods as a way to hinder communication and spread of information about the work of their “harmony makers” and to pre-empt the spread of “splittism”.115 A parallel strategy deployed to keep the flow of information harmonious and pure throughout China has been to surround Chinese virtual space by a “Great Firewall”, a programme that blocks many sites based outside China from being accessed from within China (including Google+, Facebook, Twitter and other social media), and to simultaneously demand extensive policing and censorship of sites located “inside” this walled space. An important part of this exclusionary censorship practice has been the widespread blocking of specific words in online communication. A message that includes one of the thousands of characters that at any particular moment is deemed “sensitive” can be instantly deleted by censorship software. The line between acceptable and unacceptable expression remains elusive and shifting (Breslin and Shen, 2010: 266). In drawing it, however, explanatory emphasis is on a language of “health”, with censorship purported to 115 The blackouts were noted in the Western mainstream press (Blanchard, 2009; AFP, 2011). For a fuller explanation of exactly what this blockage entailed in terms of access, see Summers (2009) - 176 - cleanse “pollution” and “unhealthy” elements in favour of “health” and “hygiene” (Lagerkvist, 2008: 123, 134). In response to the governmental policing of the Internet, and to its “harmony makers” in off-line conflicts, the notion of having “been harmonised” (bei4hexie4le 被和谐了) has grown popular as a way of expressing discontent. The use of this passive grammatical voice (bei 被), dubbed by one commentator the “passive subversive” (Kuhn, 2010), indicates that one has been coercively made to (appear to) do something. The term gained such popularity that the “passive tense era” (beishidai4被时代) made the top of the list of Southern4Metropolis4Weekly’s 2009 list of most popular neologisms (Southern Metropolis Weekly, 2009), and bei4was made quasi-official when an arm of the Education Ministry elected it the Chinese character of the year in 2009. Lei Yi, one judge of the event and a historian of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the term won by a landslide by popular Internet vote: “we felt we should recognize this result … so we named ‘bei’ as the character most representative of China’s situation last year” (in Kuhn, 2010). Doubleleaf, a Beijing-based blogger who had his blog “harmonised”, meaning shut down, emphasised in an interview the subversive nature of bei: for centuries we’ve been told that the emperor represented the people’s interests … or that some organization or some leader represented our interests. People did not realize that they had ‘been represented’. This word of the year signals the awakening of citizens’ consciousness (in Kuhn, 2010).4 Chinese netizens have made use of this language in particular to criticise the Chinese censorship of the Internet to shut down any uncomfortable discussion. For example, one Flash animation, found at an online competition to raise awareness about scientific development and harmonious society, features a Bulletin Board System (BBS) comment thread that gets “harmonised”. It shows the BBS thread of net jargon, discussions of a famous person, people trading insults and the posts being suddenly deleted. When one netizen asks what happened the answer is “they have been harmonised”. Finally, a smiling Hu Jintao appears alongside the slogan “Everyone is responsible for a harmonious society” (renren4you4ze4hexie4shehui4人人有责，和谐社会) (Martinsen, 2007; Zhuru cilei, 2007). Egao: Resistance in the sphere of politics and the political The Flash animation that has “been harmonised” is part of a wider form of online culture known as egao4(恶搞), which has become popular since the launch of the harmonious policies and received international attention since around 2006. The term is made up of characters e (恶), which means bad or evil, and gao (搞), which means to change or deal with, leading to translations of the word as “evil jokes” (Li Hongmei, 2011: 71), “reckless doings” (Meng Bingchun, 2009: 52), or simply “spoofing” (Lagerkvist, 2010: 150). This spoofing culture uses irony and satire to mock power holders as well as government policies and practices. Scholars have almost universally described egao as a form of “resistance”, “subversion” or “contestation”.116 Many base their claim on George Orwell’s comment that “every joke is a tiny revolution” (for example Li Hongmei, 2011: 72; Tang Lijun and Bhattacharya, 2011: 2.4). To a number of commentators, it is moreover based on an understanding of a discrepancy between on the one hand PRC party-state language, including tifa like “harmonious world” and “harmonious society”, and on the other hand an “alternative political discourse” (Meng Bingchun, 2009: 39) or “hidden transcript” (Perry, 2007: 10; Esarey and Xiao Qiang, 2008: 752; Meng Bingchun, 2009: 39), including expressions like having “been harmonised”.117 The most pervasive scholarly interpretation of this relation between official and unofficial discourse has been in terms of Bakhtinian carnival – an unruly and fantastic time and space in medieval and renaissance Europe. One volume characterizes the entire Chinese cyberspace as a quasi-separate space of the carnivalesque (Herold and Marolt, 2011). On this understanding, the carnival is an event in a time and space 116 For example Séverine Arsène (2010), Larry Diamond (2010: 74), Nigel Inkster (2010: 7.2), Tang Lijun and Yang Peidong (2011: 680, 682, 687), Seth Wiener (2011: 156) and Xiao Qiang (Xiao Qiang, 2011a: 52). 117 Scholars have discussed this discrepancy in various contexts. See for examples Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz (2001), He Zhou (2008), Esarey and Xiao Qiang (2008), Patricia Thornton (2002). - 178 - where rules are suspended, separate from normal constraints (Herold, 2011: 11, 12). It is the antithesis of normal life, “free and unrestricted” (Bakhtin cited in Herold, 2011: 12). Similarly, to Li Hongmei, this space “marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (Bakhtin, 1984 1965: 10, cited in Li Hongmei, 2011: 72). Meng Bingchun reads a “collective attempt at resistance” (2011: 44) in the egao “virtual carnival” (2011: 45, 46). This resistance is said to be directed against the “official” (Meng Bingchun, 2011: 46) or “established” (Li Hongmei, 2011: 71) order. Tang Lijun and Syamantak Bhattacharya, despite reading egao as carnivalesque, take it to reveal a “widespread feeling of powerlessness, rather than offering the general public any political power” (2011). Nonetheless, they see in such online spoofs “the potential to generate a chain of related satirical work, which can create a satire movement and subject power to sustained shame and ridicule” (Tang Lijun and Bhattacharya, 2011). One scholar who has remained decidedly skeptical to such claims about resistance is Johan Lagerkvist, who asks with regards to egao: “is it a weapon4of4the4weak, or is it a rather feeble expression among well-heeled and largely apolitical urban youth-” (2010: 151). Lagerkvist explains egao as “permeated with irony and an ambivalence that occasionally resembles, or indeed is, resistance” (2010: 146). Nonetheless, to him, “the crux of the matter is only what larger influence you have on politics, if that is at all desired, if your critique is too subtle” (2010: 146). Therefore, he concludes: instead of viewing the egao phenomenon as politically subversive, at least in the short term, it may make more sense to view it as the growth of an alternate civility, more indicative of social and generational change, building up ever more pressure against the political system – in the long term (Lagerkvist, 2010: 158). To Lagerkvist the point of egao then, for now at least, is to vent anger in a non- revolutionary manner. Egao is “neither performed to be, nor perceived as, a direct threat against the Party-state” (Lagerkvist, 2010: 159). In this chapter I take Lagerkvist’s point that irony is not by4definition radical or revolutionary. This claim in itself, however, says little about what it does do (or undo), but simply leaves the question open. In previous analyses of egao, the focus is clearly on potential for changing politics, but none of the authors sustain any discussion about what they mean by this “politics”. In order to understand their disagreement, we can benefit from returning to the distinction made at the outset of this thesis between politics in the narrow sense, or politics,4and politics in the wider sense, or the4 political. I have taken the latter to be concerned with “the establishment of that very social order which sets out a particular, historically specific account of what counts as politics and defines other areas of social life as not politics” (Edkins, 1999: 2). On such a reading, “depoliticization” is equal to “a reduction to calculability” or the application of rules (Edkins, 1999: 1, 11). To repoliticize, again, is instead “to interrupt discourse, to challenge what have, through discursive practices, been constituted as normal, natural, and accepted ways of carrying on” (Edkins, 1999: 12). In view of this differentiation between politics and the political, Lagerkvist’s evaluation of egao with regards to what larger influence it has on politics seems to refer to politics in the narrow sense, rather than the political. Tang and Bhattacharya’s judgment of egao4with reference to its potential to “create a satire movement” seems to be concerned with the same narrow politics. These accounts, then, dismiss egao as not political unless it can achieve some movement or influence with regards to politics (in the narrow sense). This makes the scholars’ readings of egao themselves depoliticizing. My concern, by contrast, is rather with the question of the political, and I will comment on this in more detail at the end of this chapter.118 It is in this realm of discourse and the political that I ground an understanding of resistance. The previous chapter pointed to the problems of conceptualizing resistance as revealing “realities”, “the facts”, when what we are dealing with is a hyperreal system. Rather, I argued, we need to think about theory and resistance as a challenge. What does this mean- Roland Bleiker has written about the type of resistance that occurs in this realm of the discursive, a resistance that revolves around interactions between different types of speech. To him: 118 My discussion of the literatures on egao in relation to politics and the political here draws on Nordin and Richaud (2012), where we discuss the distinction as perceived by the young netizens who produce and consume it, based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews. overtly committed art forms often do no more than promote a particular position…. Aesthetic politics, by contrast, has to do with the ability of artistic engagements to challenge, in a more fundamental way, how we think about and represent the political. Here the political content lies in the aesthetic form itself, which often is not political in an explicit and immediately recognisable manner (Bleiker, 2009: 8). On this understanding, Bleiker has shown that engaging with language is engaging in social struggle (2000: 43). Alternative forms of language, he argues, can challenge “the state’s promotion of a black-and-white, one-dimensional and teleological approach to history” by celebrating multiplicity and making ambivalence part of language (Bleiker, 2000: 43). He moreover shows that this is part of global politics through drawing on David Campbell to the effect that the everyday life in which these forms of linguistic resistance are deployed is not “a synonym for the local level, for in it global interconnections, local resistances, transterritorial flows, state politics, regional dilemmas, identity formations, and so on are always already present” (Campbell, 1996: 23, cited in Bleiker, 2000: 44). Alternative forms of speech and writing, then, show how political change can be brought about by forms of resistance that “deliberately and self-consciously stretch, even violate existing linguistic rules” because in doing so they can provide us “with different eyes, with the opportunity to reassess anew the spatial and political and, I would add, temporal dimensions of global life” (Bleiker, 2000: 45). Rather than seeking a quick-fix by revealing the scandalous “truth”, or forming a mass movement explicitly aimed at intervening in narrow politics, this discursive form of resistance works through pushing gradually at the terms in which we can conceive of the world. It thereby “resists the temptation to provide ‘concrete’ answers to ‘concrete’ questions” (Bleiker, 2000: 45). In the rest of this chapter I examine egao as one particular instance that can help us think further about such linguistic resistance in/to “harmonious world”. Resisting harmonisation and deconstructive reading The above example of having “been harmonised” shows how Chinese netizens are “being harmonised” by the government, but also how they are negotiating such “harmonisation” through language and grammar. This is what I mean when I write that tifa are iterative. By re-citing official language and reinscribing it in other chains of meaning, Chinese netizens are turning its purported message against itself. Where Hu’s harmony purports to be inclusive, peaceful and open, its re-iteration with a simple grammatical modifier, bei, reads this official take on harmony as being exclusive, violent and working to close down possibilities for difference. This shows us that language is indeed a crucial part not only for the government to try to harmonise dissidents, but also for these to negotiate (or possibly resist) such harmonisation. This language play is thus made possible by iterability, which means we can remove the repeatable meaning of a term like “harmony” from the specific context in which it was first deployed and “recognize other possibilities in it by inscribing it or grafting4it onto other chains” (Derrida, 1988: 9, cf. Massey, 2005: 19). For this reason “harmony” does not have one fixed meaning, but we can play with it, graft it into other chains of signification that can reveal meanings that were always already there in harmony in the first place. This possibility is exploited by netizens. We can read deconstruction taking place in the term “harmony” in many places. What dissident use does is precisely shake it loose from its intended meaning in Hu’s policy documents, reversing and displacing its meaning, without therefore separating it from that policy discourse. Below I illustrate how this takes place in various tactics of resisting harmonisation in China. The point is to not simply accept “harmony” as having one straightforward meaning, to obey, avoid or bin the term. Instead, we can, as Baudrillard would have it, “recycle” it in potentially subversive ways. Recycling4harmony4(和谐)41:4Close4reading4of4the4radicals4that4make4up4a4character4 - 182 - Figure 9: Close reading the radicals of “harmony” (Source: Danwei.org) Derrida’s way of reading a text is often termed “close reading”, which involves paying attention to the details of structure, grammar and etymology of a term or text. This is a tactic we often use in academia when we discuss the meaning of Chinese terms through a close reading of the radicals that make up a character. This is also a common practice among netizens, in online discussions and in other media, like the above logo from the Economic4Observer for its feature section on the 2006 NPC and CPPCC Sessions (Martinsen, 2006). The English term “harmony” comes from Greek harmos or harmonía, meaning “joint, agreement, concord”.119 和谐 is usually translated as “harmonious” or “concordant”, the individual characters carrying the same meaning. 谐 is composed of radicals 讠(言) “words” and 皆 “all”.120 With the 口 “mouth” radical the 和 character, pronounced hé, can signify singing in harmony, or talking together.121 If what we see in China’s current “harmonising” of dissidents is a harmonious society or harmonious world, harmony here retains only its meaning of “singing in harmony” (as we saw through the example of Expo avatars singing the Expo song in harmony), its “talking together” is only in “agreement” or “concord”. 119 According to dictionary definition (Hoad, 1993; Oxford Dictionaries, 2011c: 6.3996.3910). 120 According to dictionary definition (Karlgren, 1974 1923: 364; Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995). 121 According to dictionary definition (Wieger, 1965 1915: Lesson 121a; Karlgren, 1974 1923: 70; Lindqvist, 1991: 187; Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995: 1.602.601). - 183 - Recycling4harmony4(和谐)42:4Differently4pronounced4Chinese4character4gives4alternative4 meaning4 Figure 10: 和 pronounced hú1is the battle cry when winning a game of mah\jong (Source: Zhang Facai, 2008) This, however, takes us to another tactic of bringing out and playing with the differently pronounced alternative meanings that Chinese characters often have. 和 can also be pronounced hú, a battle cry of victory when completing a game of mah- jong. Through this battle cry competition or conflict returns to visibility in harmony, as the excluded term on which it relies. This disruption acknowledges the antagonism involved in play, unsettling the notion of permanent harmonious “win-win” purported by the party-state. It reminds us of the violence we have traced in previous chapters of a dominant China’s turning other into self. What goes on in this reading is in a sense the first of the two moves of Derrida’s deconstructive double gesture. We have read Hu’s harmony in a way that is faithful to its purported meaning, where the end-state of “harmony” rests on the exclusion of violence, discord and conflict. His harmonious world, as we saw in chapter 1, is one that has done away with misgivings and estrangement, where everyone wins and no one loses. The “inevitable choice” (or what if we were nasty we could call “the single prescribed future without responsibility of choosing”) is a future harmonious world order where China will always stand for “fairness and justice”. Anyone who disagrees with this sense of justice is simply wrong and irrational, euphemised as “unscientific”. - 184 - What the pronunciation hú does is acknowledge the excluded other of Hu’s “harmony”, namely discord and competition. Hú can only be achieved after vanquishing the opponent, there is no win-win here.122 The hú of mah-jong, just like the harmonious Tianxia utopia, is premised on the superiority of the self to the other. Only this hierarchy can establish order, harmony or hú. Acknowledging that competition is always already there in harmony, implied in the alternative pronunciation hú, I propose that we can acknowledge a third tactic of resistance, the play with homonymous characters. Recycling4harmony44(和谐)43:4“Rivercrab”4(héxiè)4as4a4nearWhomonym4for4“harmony”4 (héxié)4 Derrida’s first deconstructive move is reversal, identifying an operational binary – such as harmony/discord – and showing how the exclusion of the second term from the first is artificial and that in fact the first is reliant on the second. An equally important move is displacement, the creation of a term that is not fully contained within the old order. We can get at such a displacement through paying attention to “rivercrabs” (héxiè4河蟹), a near homonym for “harmony” (héxié4和谐). Before I go on to discuss these rivercrabs in more detail, I should point out that these two deconstructive moves are not separate, chronologically or otherwise. My discussion of them here in turn is for the benefit of my reader, in order to illustrate more clearly what this dissident language play can do for us. Similar sounding characters are often used to replace sensitive words as a way to get through the keyword searches of censorship software that has been bolstered as a way to simultaneously avoid and criticise “being harmonised”. When netizens are blocked by harmonising government software from writing “harmony” (héxié 和谐), they can replace the term by the similar sounding characters for “rivercrabs” (héxiè 河蟹). In recent years, the rivercrab has become popular as a signifier of resistance. In 122 Indeed, the very game of mah-jong is itself involved in contestation as a battle ground for politics, where popular practice has been shown to resist official campaigns to regulate and “sanitize” a “popular mah-jong” (民间麻将) and promote “healthy mahjong” (健康麻将4or 卫生麻将, meaning no gambling) as “a competitive national sport and a symbol of China’s distinctive cultural legacy” (Festa, 2006: 9). - 185 - popular Chinese language a “crab” is a violent bully, making its image a new playful and satirical, but heavily political, way of criticising the harmonising “rivercrab society” (Xiao Qiang, 2007).123 Figure 11: Insist on three watches, establish rivercrab society (Source: Xuanlv, 2010) One popular satire on it can be seen in the above rivercrab with three watches. The caption overhead reads: “insist on three watches, establish rivercrab society” (jianchi4 san4ge4daibiao4,4chuangjian4hexie4shehui4坚持三个戴表， 创建河蟹社会). The first phrase is a nonsensical mockery of the party slogan “insist on the three represents” (jianchi4san4 ge4daibiao4坚持三个代表)124 and the second is a mockery of the slogan “establish harmonious society” (chuangjian4hexie4shehui4创建和谐社会). The political tactic here is one of intentional (mis)reading of official discourse, an iteration of party-state language against itself in order to reveal aspects of harmony that remain hidden from view in official discourse. Again, the acknowledgement of the purported message and its hierarchical binary as well as the first deconstructive move of reversing that hierarchy are here in this picture, this is not a separate stand-alone symbol or event. 123 As a simple indication of the popularity of satirical depictions of the “rivercrab”, a Google image search for the Chinese term “rivercrab society” (河蟹社会) gave ca 212 000 hits on 3 March 2011. 124 The “three represents” is previous General Secretary Jiang Zemin’s legacy tifa, which became a guiding ideology of the CCP at its Sixteenth Party Congress in 2002, together with Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and Deng Xiaoping Theory. It stipulates that the CCP should be representative to advanced social productive forces, advanced culture, and the interests of the overwhelming majority. The tifa was part of the shift to Chineseness as a legitimising force of the CCP as a ruling party representative of the majority of Chinese people as opposed to its original legitimisation as a vanguard revolutionary party driven by the “proletariat”. It also helped legitimise the inclusion of capitalist business elites into the party. However, the rivercrab also displaces this binary and functions as a new term which does not obey that order in any simple manner, but rather shakes it up and brings to the fore the irresolvable contradiction between these terms. To clarify the position of my analysis here in relation to Derrida’s, I speak of the rivercrab as a “second term” which displaces the harmony/discord binary implied in Hu’s harmonious world and society. As such, it does not obey the order of that binary in a simple manner. However, it also does not necessarily function as a new “master term” in the way Derrida often seems to understand the role of a new term. This mockingly reiterative form of resistance is not confined to the Internet egao culture, but has spread beyond its online origins to impact both on official state media and on forms of resistance offline. Artist Ai Weiwei staged one such example that received attention in the West some time before his infamous detention by the authorities. When his newly built Shanghai studio was to be demolished by the authorities, Ai threw a grand farewell party in November 2010, to which he invited several hundred friends, bands and other supporters to feast on a banquet consisting of rivercrabs. Ai was put in house arrest in Beijing to prevent him from attending the banquet, but the event took place nonetheless with supporters chanting: “in a harmonious society, we eat rivercrabs” (Branigan, 2010). Party\state response The official party-state strategies of responding to such resistance take the form of harmonising it, ignoring it, or on occasion acknowledging its presence whilst attempting to again re-read its meaning, significance and implications in an effort at downplaying its critical potential. With respect to the “passive subversive” bei making the top of lists of neologisms in 2009, a Xinhua article displays the latter tactic. The article stresses state tolerance through emphasising that the poll, which resulted in bei4being elected character of the year, was “jointly conducted by a linguistic research centre under the Ministry of Education and the state-run Commercial Press”. The tense was said “to convey a sense of helplessness in deciding one’s own fate” and to reflect “dissatisfaction over the abuse of official power” (Xinhua, 2010c). The example of “being suicided” (bei4zisha4被自杀) was discussed, explaining that the abuse of official power concerned was perpetrated by a local official, who was duly sentenced to death by higher authorities. Other examples were “being volunteered” (bei4ziyuan 被自愿) and “being found a job” (bei4jiuye4被就业). From the “passive subversive” bei4the article turns into proof of how good and improving the government is: ‘bei’ was not censored in the government-run poll of buzzwords, and grassroots’ voices are finally being heard and even recognized by the government … The government is beginning to respond to inquiries from the public, instead of ‘dodging’ them as it did before (Xinhua, 2010c). Yet much resistance is still treated with violence or silence by Chinese official sources. According to interviews by Tessa Thorniley at Ai Weiwei’s rivercrab banquet over 40 domestic media sources were invited and none showed up, and amongst the over 50 media outlets that interviewed Ai in house arrest regarding the event the only domestic media that spoke to him was the English language edition of conservative paper Global4Times4(Goldkorn, 2010). Within half a year of the rivercrab banquet, Ai had been detained by Chinese police, accused of a number of crimes. After 81 days in detention he was released on “bail” (取保候审), on the condition that he did “not speak” (Branigan, 2011; Committee to Protect Journalists, 2011; US Asia law NYU, 2011). During his disappearance Chinese Internet sites such as Sina Weibo blocked searches on Ai Weiwei (艾未未), a number of his nicknames and puns on his name, including “艾未” (Ai Wei), “未未” (Wei Wei), “艾” (Ai), “未” (Wei), “艾胖子” (Fatty Ai), “胖子” (Fatty) and “月半子” (Moon Half Son). They also blocked writing including the term “未来”, meaning “future”, which is built up of characters similar to “Weiwei” (Xiao Qiang, 2011b). ONCO\OPERATIVE HARMONY From the above analysis we see that there are similarities between Derridean approaches to reading deconstruction in academia and practices of subversive iteration of “harmony” amongst dissident netizens in contemporary China. The possibilities for alliances that reside within such shared tactics are potentially valuable to both parties and may help us here to bridge the theory/practice divide. - 188 - Derrida and Baudrillard were both masters of language play, frequently building on the various meanings that can be drawn out of words by way of their etymological roots, their different pronunciations, by playing with homonyms and near-homonyms and by combining words into new ones to reverse and displace previous binaries. Such techniques pervade the writing of both thinkers.125 However, this is not to say that the similar practice of Chinese language that I outline above is an entirely new phenomenon created by recent practices of Internet censorship and/or influences from some “Western postmodernity”. On the contrary, the struggles and practices that I have outlined have a long and rich history in China. Linguistic play with characters and homonyms has been a sensitive topic in China for millennia. Such practices have also been known to academics in the Anglophone world for decades. For example, a 1938 article argues that literary persecution was especially cruel during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911 AD) (Ku Chieh-Kang, 1938 1935: 254), and continues with a description that could just as well be of contemporary Chinese censorship regimes on the Internet: under the circumstances they Chinese scholars, artists, intellectuals and others could do nothing but resort to veiled satire. This being the situation, their words and writings were spied on and scrutinized; if they did not use every care they suffered the severest punishments (Ku Chieh-Kang, 1938 1935: 254).126 But, the author continues, although the Qing were the worst offenders, similar practices of harsh censorship had taken place since the Qin (361-206 BC) and Han (206 BC-8 AD), the first two dynasties of what is typically considered imperial China. 125 In Derrida, some such terms that I have touched upon in the course of this thesis include iterability, which plays on “reiterate” and combines the Latin iter (“again”) with the Sanskrit itara4(“other”) (Wortham, 2010: 78), and différance, which combines the two meanings of French différence, difference and deferral, “changing an ‘e’ to an ‘a’ adds time to space” (Massey, 2005: 49). It also includes terms such as artifactuality, activirtuality, circonfession, avenir/à4venir, hauntologie and so on. Despite what may be interpreted as a dismissal at points of Derrida’s deployment of word play (as discussed in chapter 1. See also Baudrillard, 1996 1990: 25), Baudrillard uses very similar tactics in his deployment of terms such as seduction, drawing on the original Latin sense of seducere, “to lead away”, and semiorrhage, semiotic haemorrhage (Baudrillard, 2002 2000: 208). 126 I should be noted that this article was written by a Chinese author at a time when the 1911 nationalist revolution had recently thrown the Qing dynasty from power, which may have affected this commentary. - 189 - The article goes on to list numerous death sentences during the Ming dynasty (1368- 1644 AD), occasioned by the “homophonic nature of certain words employed” (1938 1935: 262). As in contemporary PRC, although “misreading” set texts could be very dangerous (1938 1935: 296-301), the attempt to provide set phrases and pre- structured models for expression could not prevent such double meanings from seeping through text (1938 1935: 263). There is thus Chinese historical precedent of interplay between violent oppression of speech and the kind of linguistic resistance that builds on reiterative, mocking punnery in ways similar to the contemporary deployment of rivercrabs. Crabs as cancerous disease Where associations emerging from Chinese language aligns crabs with harmony, bullies and competition, most European languages associate it with the disharmony of the body that shares its name: cancer.127 In what follows I introduce the European roots of this term in order to foreground my subsequent analysis of the above “harmony/rivercrabs”, where I argue that these “rivercrabs” operate precisely according to a cancerous logic. The term “cancer” is originally Latin, meaning “crab or creeping ulcer”, with its etymological roots in Greek karkinos, said to have been applied to such tumours because they were surrounded by swollen veins that looked like the limbs of a crab (Demaitre, 1998: 620-6; Oxford Dictionaries, 2011b). Although the European term, like the Chinese one, has mythological connotations,128 a contemporary dictionary entry for “cancer” describes it as “a malignant growth or tumour resulting from an uncontrolled division of cells”, but also as “an evil or destructive practice or phenomenon that is hard to contain or eradicate” (Oxford Dictionaries, 2011b). 127 Scandinavian languages have interpreted cancer to equate a crayfish, rather than a crab, to give the Swedish kräfta, Norwegian kreft4and Danish kræft. 128 In astronomy, the “Cancer” constellation represents Hercules crushing a crab with his foot. This tale derives from Greek mythology, where the crab nipped Heracles when he was battling the monster Hydra and was crushed. The mother deity Hera who was at odds with Heracles at the time honoured the crab’s courageous efforts by placing it in the heaven. In astrology, the cancer/crab is the fourth sign of the zodiac, which the sun enters at the northern summer solstice, about 21 June (Oxford Dictionaries, 2011a). The term also has spatial connotations, indicating the direction south, as in the tropic of cancer. - 190 - In this second capacity, cancer is not separate from contemporary understandings of international politics and visions of a harmonious world. Rather, the language of cancer and tumours has long been common in IR and politics, and cancer is frequently used as a metaphor for moral and political ills on the body politic to be cured or removed.129 At the same time, descriptions of biomedical cancer often resort to metaphors or similes borrowed from societal relations130 and from military conflict and battle.131 In Chinese language, the close link between security in the medical and political realms is explicit in the character zhi (治), which refers to both therapy (zhi4 liao 治療) and governance (zhi4li 治理) (Unschuld, 2010: xxvi; Cheung, 2011: 7). Many studies have shown how the knowledge systems of Western biomedicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) reflect the intellectual and political landscape in which they respectively developed.132 As such, many have understood the spatial distance between China and Europe as a foundation for an epistemological difference in understanding of their medical bodies, which directly parallels that which is claimed to underpin the understanding of the 129 Hobbes gave a detailed analysis of dangers to the state as illnesses to the body politic (Hobbes, 1996: 221-30), building on an established metaphor of societies as bodies (Hale, 1971). For another example of early European use, Italian thinker Francesco Guicciardini, writing in the 16th century, constantly repeats the metaphors of medicine and cure. Guiccardini identifies the disease with the Italian city states’ willingness to ally with outside states that are more powerful than themselves, and cautions against ignoring “how dangerous it is to use medicine which is stronger than the nature of the disease” (Guicciardini, 1984: 20-1). The French Revolution saw the use of illness/therapy metaphors to justify the terreur as a cure for societal illness (Musolff, 2003: 328). In contemporary scholarship, Susan Sontag in her famous Illness4as4Metaphor singled out cancer as a type of “master illness” that is “implicitly genocidal” (Sontag, 1991: 73-4, 84). Otto Santa Anna describes how the American civil rights movement used cancer as a metaphor for racism in the 1960s (Santa Anna, 2003: 215-16, 222). In contemporary IR Kevin Dunn has written at length about the how Mobutu’s cancer-ridden body led to a recasting of him as a cancer on the body politic of the Republic of Zaire, and Zaire in turn as a tumour on the region (Dunn, 2003: especially 139-42). See also Deborah Wills (2009) for recent use of “cancer” terminology in English language IR, and Wang Yizhou (2010: 11) for similar use in Chinese language IR. 130 For a good overview of such metaphorical use in patients and media, see Lupton (2003). For a good overview of other forms of cultural and artistic expression relating to the narrativisation of cancer, see Stacey (1997). 131 For such military metaphors, see for example Annas (1995: 745), Clarke (1996: 188), Stibbe (1997), Clarke and Robinson (1999: 273-4), Lupton (2003: 72), Reisfield and Wilson (2004) and Williams Camus (2009). 132 For its treatment in recently discovered Chinese medical literature, see Lo and Cullen (2005). For commentary on the parallel emergence of political and medical epistemologies in imperial China, see Unschuld (2010). For commentary on parallel developments of political and medical knowledge in Europe, see Have (1987) and Stibbe (1997). - 191 - Chinese geo-body, examined in previous chapters.133 Western biomedicine, it is thus said, follows Descartes and builds on the idea that parts of the body are discrete and can be calculated, measured and cured in isolation (Have, 1987; Kaptchuk, 2000). Chinese medicine is said to build instead on a “holistic” idea of the body where illness is explained in terms of a “pattern of disharmony” (Kaptchuk, 2000: 4). Just as a bounded notion of space is typically portrayed in terms of an imposition on China by Western imperialism, so too is a biomedical imaginary and representation of discrete body parts portrayed as an imposition by the West and a catching up by a China that had fallen behind (Cheung, 2011: 9; Gilman, 1988: 149, 151, 154). With regards to the geo-body, I have argued throughout previous chapters that its two spatial imaginaries (that of discrete units and that of a holistic system) are not mutually exclusive, but rather coexist in practices in contemporary China. The scope of this thesis does not allow for a thorough deconstruction of the parallel epistemology that is applied to debates over the medical body.134 Suffice it to say at this point that contemporary literature on Chinese medicine typically reflects on how biomedicine and TCM are complementary.135 Most importantly for my argument here, and as I will explain in what follows, TCM and biomedicine have produced strikingly 133 This imagination of the human body is particularly clear in writing on pictorial representations thereof. The negotiation of Chinese-Western power relations and self/other hierarchisation through modes of pictorial representation has been traced in the mid-19th Century medical paintings of Lam Qua, who focused on depicting tumours on Chinese bodies for Western consumption. Discussions of these can be found in Gilman (1988) and Heinrich (2008), as can some of Lam Qua’s pictures of tumours and abscesses (Gilman, 1988: 150; Heinrich, 2008: 50, 54, 55, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87), as well as earlier and later Chinese images of such growths (Heinrich, 2008: 57, 91, 92; see also Barnes, 2005: 292). 134 Such an endeavour might point to the early exchange and hybrid nature of information, and to similarities of TCM and early forms of European medicine: the inner body as masculine (or Yang) and the outer body as feminine (or Yin) (for expression in European tradition, see Erickson, 1997: 10, for expression in Chinese tradition, see Liu Zhanwen and Liu Liang, 2009: 12); the focus on balance of a holistic system (for expression in European tradition, see Turner, 2003: 2, for expression in Chinese tradition, see Unschuld, 2010: xxve); the focus on bodily flows and the understanding of blockage of flows as cause for disease (for expression in European tradition, see Turner, 2003: 2, for expression in Chinese tradition, see Liu Zhanwen and Liu Liang, 2009: 28), the discursive parallels to the societal body and the need for governance of both societal and medical body (for expression in European tradition, see Porter, 1997: 158; Turner, 2003: 2, for expression in Chinese tradition, see Unschuld, 2010), and so on. 135 There are many examples of this (for example Cui Yong et al., 2004; Bao Ting et al., 2010; Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010; Dorsher and Peng Zengfu, 2010; Wong and Sagar, 2010). - 192 - similar responses to the appearance of cancer: to cleanse and purge in conjunction with studied manipulation of the immune system. Reading cancer and the autoimmune in Baudrillard and Derrida The previous chapter drew on Baudrillard’s interest in the pre-programmed character of contemporary culture to examine the (re)production of human bodies as computer coded avatars on the Expo screen. His interest in the coding of the human body also extended to the replication and transmission of data on the micro level, in the form of genetic code and cellular regeneration. As pure information, the human body is not understood as the source of selfhood, but rather as an effect produced by the code (Baudrillard, 1994 1981: 98, see also Toffoletti in Smith, 2010: 28). Embedded in this code is the potential for cancer and autoimmune disease (Baudrillard, 2002 2000: 98, 207).136 According to Baudrillard, consumer society or European democracy is driven by a “perverse” logic (2002 2000: 97, 207), where a range of phenomena – terrorism, fascism, violence, depression, and so on – are the outcome of “an excess of organization, regulation and rationalization within a system” (2002 2000: 97). These societies tend to suffer from an excess of rationality and logic, surveillance and control, which in turn leads to the emergence for no apparent reason of “internal pathologies … strange dysfunctions … unforeseeable, incurable accidents … anomalies”, which disrupt the system’s capacity for totality, perfection and reality invention (2002 2000: 97). This is the logic that Baudrillard reads of an excessive system that fuels the growth of anomalies – just like cancer and autoimmune disease (Baudrillard, 2002 2000). What characterises these anomalies in Baudrillard’s theorising is that “they have not come from elsewhere, from ‘outside’ or from afar, but are rather a product of the ‘over-protection’ of the body – be it social or individual” (Smith, 2010: 59): 136 Like cancer, the question of immunity reinforces the close link between the governance of the socio- political and the bio-medical body, as “immunity” was originally a legal concept in ancient Rome (Cohen, 2009: 3). For my analysis of cancer and autoimmunity in Baudrillard’s work, I focus on the various articles collected in Screened Out (2002 2000), and particularly the essay “Aids: Virulence or Prophylaxis-” (2002 1997). every structure, system or social body which ferrets out its negative, critical elements to expel them or exorcise them runs the risk of catastrophe by total implosion and reversion, just as every biological body which hunts down and eliminates all its germs, bacillae and parasites – in short, all its biological enemies – runs the risk of cancer or, in other words, of a positivity devouring its own cells. It runs the risk of being devoured by its own anti-bodies (Baudrillard, 2002 1997: 3). On this reading, “the system’s overcapacity to protect, normalise and integrate” (Smith, 2010: 60) (we could say “harmonise”) is shown throughout society as natural immunity is replaced by artificial systems of immunity – like pre-programmed firewalls (Baudrillard, 2002 2000: 98). This replacement happens in the name of science and progress (or perhaps a “scientific outlook on development”). Derrida developed a strikingly similar deployment of the autoimmune, where for example the West since 9/11 is “producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm” (2003a: 99).137 Derrida analyses this “perverse” logic in terms of an autoimmune process (2003a: 99); “that strange behaviour where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunise itself against its ‘own’ immunity” (2003a: 94). This term recalls previous Derridean terms,138 but particularly reinforces Baudrillard’s claim about cancer and immunity: “in an over-protected space, the body loses all its defences” (Baudrillard, 2002 1997: 3). In this way, to Baudrillard and Derrida, in cancer and autoimmunity it is the system’s own logic that turns it against itself; the code works too well in its overzealous cleansing, integrating, normalising logic. Derrida reads in this process a double and contradictory discourse of concurrent immunity and auto-immunity in endless circulation, where the system “conducts a 137 For Derrida, I draw mostly on his reading in “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides” on 9/11 (2003a) and in Rogues:4Two4Essays4on4Reason (2005 2003-a), rather than on earlier mention of autoimmunity in texts such as “Faith and Knowledge” (1998) or Resistances4of4Psychoanalysis (1998 1996, for some comments on the use of the "autoimmune" in this volume, see Wortham, 2010: 160). 138 As expressed by one commentator: “undecideability, aporia, antinomy, double bind: autoimmunity is explicitly inscribed in Rogues into a veritable ‘best of collection’ of Derrideo-phemes or deconstructo- nyms” (Naas, 2006: 29). - 194 - terrible war against that which protects it only by threatening it” (1998: 46).139 The immune and the autoimmune may not, then, be easily distinguishable: “murder was already turning into suicide, and the suicide, as always, let itself be translated into murder” (Derrida, 2005 2003-a: 59). Derrida and Baudrillard – and others who have since deployed this aspect of their analyses140 – tend to describe autoimmunity as generated by the current Western system, although they sometimes indicate the more general nature of such praxis (Thomson, 2005). I have argued in previous chapters that other phenomena they bring to our attention (such as the deconstructibility of language, or simulacra) cannot be confined in time and space to a bounded notion of “the West”, “late capitalism”, “postmodernity” or some other unit to which we posit China as the “other country”. In the same way, the observed “unfettered process of a techno-metastatic production of value, the hyperinflation of meaning and signs” is not confined to democracy/capitalism/the West/America that they take as the primary focus of their analyses (I. C. R., 2007). Rather, this cancer has its parallel in contemporary China, precisely in the form of rivercrabs. Reading cancer and the (auto)immune through biomedicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine To explain this point, and to dispel any understanding of my argument in terms of a Chinese “catching up”, let me elaborate slightly on how biomedicine and TCM have understood cancer. 139 Derrida sometimes takes the term to denote a specific targeting of a body’s defence mechanisms, its “protecting itself against its self-protection” (Derrida, 1998: 73, note 27), which is closer to the biomedical definition of autoimmunity and further from its description of certain forms of cancer. At other times, the autoimmune involves an attack against any part of the body, “in short against its own” (son4propre4tout4court) (Derrida, 1998: 44). We note here the numerous meanings of French “propre”, translated here as “own”, but which also means self-possession, propriety, property and importantly cleanliness, stressing again the cleansing that I emphasise in this chapter (cf. Spivak's translation in Derrida, 1976 1967: 26). Where some have found this ambiguity problematic (Haddad, 2004: 39-41), I think it points to an important aspect of autoimmunity that is the impossibility of separating a part that “defends” a (geo)body from one that simply “is”. It acknowledges the malleability of the system. For this reason I also allow for (auto)immunity and cancer to denote the same process, as they do to Baudrillard. 140 For example Bulley (2009: 12, 25-29), Vaughan-Williams (2007: 183-92), Osuri (2006: 500), Thomson (2005), and Haddad (2004: 30). - 195 - The disease that in English is called cancer is called ai (癌) in modern TCM terminology, and cancerous tumours can also be referred to as liu (瘤).141 TCM philosophy is based on the idea that a body is healthy when it is in harmony, and illness and pain occur when harmony fails to be achieved, manifest in a “pattern of disharmony” (Bao Ting et al., 2010: 171).142 Cancer/ai/liu is on this view “a systemic disease from the start” (Schipper et al., 1995; Wong and Sagar, 2010: 3). Cancer and tumours are understood as the manifestation of disharmony (Bao Ting et al., 2010: 170; Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010: 344), and more specifically of the relative lack of Zhengqi4(正气), a concept analogous to the biomedical notion of immune system competency/strength (Abbate, 2006; Dorsher and Peng Zengfu, 2010: 57). The understanding of TCM’s potential to aid the body in restoring harmony is similarly centred on immunity.143 Biomedicine, which has been associated with the West and with the imagination of body-parts as discrete and calculable, explains cancer in a very similar way, emphasising the role of immunity. In this school of thought, cancer is a development where transformed cells “acquire the ability to disregard the constraints of its environment and the body normal control mechanisms” sic (Wong and Sagar, 2010: 3), or “the abnormal and uncontrollable proliferation of cells which have the potential to spread to distant sites” (Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010: 343). Like TCM, biomedicine thus understands cancer as immune system failure (Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010: 349). Microscopically, cancer cells display features indicative of a faster proliferative rate and disorganised alignment in relation to other cells, and 141 The first known description of ai comes from Wei4Ji4Bao4Shu circa 1171 AD, in the Song Dynasty (Pan Mingji, 1992, in Bao Ting et al., 2010: 57). Cancerous tumours were also referred to as liu in inscriptions on oracle bones over 3,500 years old (Pan Mingji, 1992, in Bao Ting et al., 2010: 57). 142 For a more thorough explanation for the lay person of the philosophical foundations of TCM as well as an outline of its foundational texts, see Liu Zhanwen and Liu Liang (2009). 143 This is a marked trait throughout contemporary TCM literatures (Abbate, 2006; Lahans, 2008; Chiaramonte and Lao Lixing, 2010: 342, 349; Dorsher and Peng Zengfu, 2010: 57; Wong and Sagar, 2010: 3, 4, 15). TCM scepticism of biomedical forms of treatment – such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy – stems from their “collateral damage”, the killing of normal cells along with the malign cancer cells, which leads to further immune suppression and hence further reduction of zhengqi. TCM treatment focuses on strengthening zhengqi in order to maximize the immunity of the system beset by cancer. Herbal medicines used to treat cancer are thus (partly) focused on strengthening the body’s general immunity (fuzheng) (Lahans, 2008; Dorsher and Peng Zengfu, 2010: 57). - 196 - differences between cancer cells and normal cells are increasingly understood at the level of genetic code (Marcovitch, 2005: 111). The very code that is pre-programmed in the system thus has the capacity to produce the cells that threaten it, and the spread of malignancy in the system is a result of its failed attempts at “regulation” and cleansing. Like cancer/ai/liu, the Chinese crab has early associations with cleaning and purification of spaces, with one legend having the emperor using the crab to rid his palace of the scorpions, fleas, mosquitoes, and mice that disturbed his harmony and caused dis-ease.144 In Europe, like in China, cancer has a long history of association with insufficient cleansing, since its description in pre-modern pathologies that attributed it to insufficient purging of black bile.145 One contemporary cancer self-help book likewise describes cancer in terms of societal disorder strikingly reminiscent of disruptions to the harmony conveyed by Hu Jintao and Zhao Tingyang respectively: “cancer growths are made up of cells which belong to our body but which have stopped behaving in a co-operative and orderly fashion” (Reynolds, 1987: 26, cited in Lupton, 2003: 71). It further observes that the multiplication of cancer cells “has no purpose … unlike normal body cells we can think of cancer cells as unco-operative, disobedient, and independent … normal cells exist peacefully side by side with their neighbours” (Reynolds, 1987: 27, cited in Lupton, 2003: 71). This description is certainly fitting to characterise the Chinese “rivercrabs” described above. Crabs/cancer disturb and threaten the harmony of the system. They are truly “malignant” in the sense that they disregard normal mechanisms of control and cleansing (they are unco-operative), and they are capable of spatio-temporal spread into secondary deposits or “metastases”. As such, we may understand crabs/cancer in terms of the European medieval rendition as a parasitic animal (Pouchelle, 1990: 169; Demaitre, 1998: 624), pervasive also in contemporary society (Herzlich and Pierret, 1987). 144 Renditions of this lore can also be found online (The Vanishing Tattoo, 2011). 145 On this understanding, breast cancer for example was caused by insufficient cleansing by menstruation of the blood from the dregs of spoiled black bile (Caulhiaco and McVaugh, 1997: n. 9, 94, see also Demaitre, 1998: 618 and notes 37, 38). An overview of the development of European ideas of cancer can be found in Demaitre (1998). - 197 - Yet, crabs/cancer are indeed “a systemic disease from the start” (Wong and Sagar, 2010: 3), their malignancy is a direct product of the code. The possibility for drawing out the various meanings of hexie4和谐 explored at the outset of this chapter was always already there in the character – through its pictographic make-up, its alternative pronunciation as hú and through its homonym the rivercrab. Moreover, the ironic critique displayed by these iterations was provoked by Hu’s policy of overzealous “harmonisation” and the online deployment of rivercrabs came about as a way to simultaneously avoid and criticise “being harmonised” by the great firewall and other government censorship software. In this way, it is the harmonious system itself that produces that which leads to disharmony. As such, rivercrabs are not simply unco-operative, but onco-operative: they operate like cancerous metastases that derive from the code of the system itself to cause dis-harmony and dis-ease. THE COEVAL MULTIPLICITIES OF ONCO\OPERATIVE HARMONY The claim I have made up to this point of the chapter is that the Chinese “harmonious” system is not so different from what Derrida and Baudrillard describe in contemporary “Western democracy” or late capitalist “consumer society”. Although China is often recast as the opposite of these systems and their logic – the “other country” – it seems to suffer from the same autoimmune problems. Its symptoms may be different, but the onco-operative character of its dis-ease is the same. What, then, are the implications of such an illness – and how do we deal with it- Looking for cures in an onco\operative system Biomedical and TCM treatments of cancer/ai/liu do, as I have indicated above, follow a similar pattern to those commonly prescribed for dealing with unco-operative elements of the geo-body. Biomedicine typically resorts to screening, “surgical strikes”, chemo- and radio-therapies (Marcovitch, 2005: 112). The lack of precision of these therapies give them a quasi-suicidal nature through which the parts of the body deemed “healthy” or “normal” become collateral damage. This in turn often further endangers the system through weakening its immune system. The alternative approach, of strengthening the system’s own immune capacity or zhengqi, urges the - 198 - system to auto-harmonise, to turn the bad qi into the good – another form of cleansing, or “purging the excessive” and ousting “evil Qi” (Liu Zhanwen and Liu Liang, 2009: 30). Both these ways of dealing with unco-operative elements of the medical body thus echo the problems seen in relating to “others” in the geo-body: we eliminate through radical separation (cutting off) or through radical harmonisation (turning the bad into the good). In this way, the onco-operative character of the system means its over-zealous attempts at cleansing – through therapy (zhi4liao) and governance (zhi4li) – actually come to threaten the system itself. This, in turn, exposes an aporia at the very heart of the system, in that the dis-ease must be cured, but cannot be cured without sacrificing the system itself: “there is no effective prevention or therapy; the metastases invade the whole network ‘virtually’ … He who lives by the same will die by the same” (Baudrillard, 2002 1997: 2). Or, in Derrida’s words: “there is no absolutely reliable prophylaxis against the autoimmune. By definition” (Derrida, 2005 2003-b: 150-1). To Baudrillard, the fact that cancer is a reflection of the body’s victimisation by the disruption of its genetic formula is thus what makes it impossible for conventional medicine to cure it: “the current pathology of the body is now beyond the reach of conventional medicine, since it affects the body not as form, but as formula” (2002 1997: 1). To put it a different way, the fact that the system itself produces, through its own code, that which threatens it means there is little use looking to the rationality of the system to combat its excrescences: “it is a total delusion to think extreme phenomena can be abolished. They will, rather, become increasingly extreme as our systems become increasingly sophisticated” (Baudrillard, 2002 1997: 7). On Baudrillard’s reading, spontaneous self-regulation of systems is something well- known: systems produce accidents or glitches in their own programme, interfering with their own operation (Baudrillard, 2002 1997: 5). This enables systems to survive on a basis contrary to their own principles, against their own value-systems: they have to have such a system, but they also have to deny it and operate in opposition to it…. But it is entirely as though the species were … producing … through cancer, which is a disruption of the genetic code and therefore a pathology of information, a resistance to the all-powerful principle of - 199 - cybernetic control…. With … cancer, we might be said to be paying the prize for our own system: we are exorcising its banal virulence in a fatal form (Baudrillard, 2002 1997: 5). Again, this is precisely how rivercrabs operate: they metastasise and spread through a disruption of the code that lets them slip through it’s pre-programmed screening/fire- wall/censorship. This is indeed a resistance to cybernetic control, but one generated by the system itself. If we bring this analysis back to the discipline of IR, this way of understanding cancer complicates things. Within Chinese IR, Wang Yizhou has argued that analysing terrorism in terms of cancer calls for the question of how cancer comes into being. He reads it as a symptom of structural imbalance (Wang Yizhou, 2010: 11). Where military action can only “cure the symptom but not the source”, harmonisation or re- balancing of the system will prevent radicalism from breeding (2010: 16). In view of the above explanation of cancer, we may concur with both him and Baudrillard that traditional treatment may only serve to aggravate the problem through weakening the system and causing collateral damage. However, having excavated the forms of therapy suggested by the “alternative” of “harmonisation” by TCM or Chinese IR, it appears that it stands equally powerless. Increasing harmonisation is unlikely to curb cancer/crabs, but may rather contribute to spurring them on. There is no use looking to the systems own rationality to combat the crabs it produces. Spatiotemporal bordering in an onco\operative system What, then, are the spatio-temporal implications of these crabs, as metastases of an (auto)immune and onco-operative system- Nick Vaughan-Williams (2007) has productively drawn on Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity to discuss spatial and temporal bordering. The temporal bordering he discusses draws on Brian Massumi’s description of “flashes of … sovereign power” as a particular form of pre-programmed decision making in the “space of a moment” (Massumi, 2005: 6; Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 187-8). This parallels what Baudrillard thinks of as a pre-programmed instantaneous operation. Understanding borders in terms of this decisionist ontology highlights the specificity of contemporary wordplay and rivercrabs, in relation to previous historical deployment of homonyms to avoid censorship in China, as described earlier in this chapter. Previous forms of bordering decisions with regards to such homonymous wordplay involved a deliberative process of human interpretation. In this era of the virtual and the hyper-real, the bordering decision is pre-programmed and instantaneous. Vaughan-Williams, following Massumi, argues that this approach is the temporal equivalent of a tautology: “the time form of the decision that strikes like lightning is the foregone conclusion. When it arrives, it always seems to have preceded itself. Where there is a sign of it, it has always already hit” (Massumi, 2005: 6, cited in Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 188). This form of decision is accordingly a foregone conclusion (or following Hu perhaps an “inevitable choice”) “because it sidesteps or effaces the blurriness of the present in favor of a perceived need to act on the future without delay”, in the face of a threat of an indefinite future yet to come (Vaughan- Williams, 2007: 188; Massumi, 2005: 4-5). Both authors read this as a temporal shift, from “prevention” to “pre-emption”, from the temporal register of the indefinite future tense to the future perfect tense: the “always-will-have-been-already” (Massumi, 2005: 6-10; Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 188). In parallel to the autoimmune, this politics induces rather than responds to events: rather than acting in the present to avoid an occurrence in the future, pre- emption brings the future into the present. It makes present the future consequences of an eventuality that may or may not occur, indifferent to its actual occurrence. The event’s consequences precede it, as if it had already occurred (Massumi, 2005: 7-8, cited in Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 188). The Chinese practice of censoring/harmonising specific terms through its Great Firewall works through this form of pre-programmed code, which sensors in a “flash of sovereign power”. Terms are censored pre-emptively to harmonise some not-yet- existing but possible future dissident deployment of a once unthreatening term (such as the term “future” 未来 itself, as seen earlier in this chapter in relation to Ai Weiwei’s detention). In this manner, PRC Internet censorship policy acts as a temporal bordering process: it pre-empts threats to the government’s version of “harmonious world/society” that come from the future, thus securing time and the future as something that belongs to the state and not to the crabs or dissidents (c.f. Vaughan- Williams, 2007: 189). As an actual wall, the form of electronic bordering that is exercised by the Great Firewall is also a form of spatial bordering, in that it is intimately connected to questions of sovereignty, territory and governmental power. Vaughan-Williams draws on William Walters to refer to this spatial bordering as “firewalling” – in contemporary China another term for having “been harmonised” by the Great Firewall is having “been GFWed” (Walters, 2006, for examples see Calon, 2007; Chow, 2010). The self-attacking or autoimmune logic of such GFW-ing is clear in the “blocking” of Internet and telephone access that was used in attempts to harmonise Xinjiang during the 2009 riots. This firewalling was intended to prevent “splittism” from spreading, yet could only do so by splitting Xinjiang as a spatial unit off from the rest of China, in virtual/physical space. This, too, is the spacing by which the Great Firewall operates – to maintain a harmonious space, that space must be sealed off as a (virtual) geobody from the rest of the world. Again, what is described in Vaughan-Williams as “innovations in the ways sovereign power attempts to secure the temporal and spatial borders of political community” could refer to something less localised in time and space than may at first appear (Vaughan-Williams, 2007: 191). The practices of Internet “harmonisation” in China can thus be described in terms of a bordering of time and space that has parallels in contemporary expressions of (auto)immunity in the European system. Having said this, the particular practice of using homonymous characters like the rivercrab, to simultaneously criticise and avoid “being harmonised” on the Chinese Internet, is a locally specific way of negotiating this particular kind of virtual bordering in time and space. This particular form and double function differentiates it from other forms of satire or political irony that can be found in other systems around the world. Moreover, in attempting to secure time and space as belonging to the state, these harmonising Chinese censorship regimes effectively provoke the kind of critical wordplay that I exemplify here through rivercrabs. In this way, cancer/crabs work within the system and yet repeatedly escape it: where “harmonisation” may be understood as an attempt at temporal bordering, the experience of cancer has been described as a disturbance to such temporality, a “falling out of time” (Stacey, 1997: 10). The more the Chinese government attempts to secure, cleanse and harmonise, the more creative and subversive are the iterations that use its language against itself. Rivercrab metastases and heterotemporalities As a consequence of this (auto)immune logic of the onco-operative system, rivercrabs, like cancer cells, increasingly display features indicative of a faster proliferative rate and disorganised alignment in relation to other cells (Marcovitch, 2005: 111). In the “here-now”, crabs, like cancer, are marked by the way they spread and metastasise through mutation of the code. In this way, we can understand how Chinese crabs similarly migrate, multiply and change in what is precisely an “iterative” manner. Every crab draws on previous iterations of harmony and crabs, but also mutates into something different. One example of such a “metastasis” can be seen in the figure below. It shows a replica of the logo for the computer game “World of Warcraft”, saying instead “Rivercrab World” (hexie4shijie 河蟹世界). The text at the top means “do things others could never do” (做别人永远做不到的事), and the one below means “the late arrival of the battle expedition” (迟到的远征). The links to themes discussed throughout this thesis are marked, including the direct link to Hu’s “harmonious world” policy, the competition inherent in games and play and the violent military underpinning of harmonious world. Figure 12: Rivercrab world of warcraft (Source: Heifenbrug, 2008) - 203 - The rivercrab metastasises in similar ways into numerous constellations – some very close copies, some with more creative distance. The rivercrab recurrently appears on blogs and can be found in an online dictionary compiled by China Digital Times (Xiao Qiang, 2010; China Digital Space, 2011a), where it appears together with dozens of other characters and expressions that have metastasised from similar homonymic wordplay and in reaction to governmental harmonisation. It also appears as a permanent feature on the cap of another Internet meme, the “Green Dam Girl” (绿坝娘). The Green Dam Girl is an anthropomorphism of the “Green Dam Youth Escort” software (绿坝·花季护航) that was developed under the direction of the Chinese government to filter Internet content on individual computers.146 The Green Dam Girl and rivercrab also appear in merchandise (Xu Yuting, 2009; Gaofudev, 2011; Lotahk, 2011), numerous cartoons (Hecaitou, 2009a; Hexie Farm, 2011) and music videos (Stchi, 2009; Tutuwan, 2009; DZS manyin, 2010) that typically work through copies of copies, interweaving the themes and symbols discussed throughout this thesis. In one such music video, the connection between rivercrabs, harmony and Tianxia is once more highlighted (Tutuwan, 2009). This cover-song called “Harmony or die” features the chorus “Green dam, green dam – rivercrab/harmonise your entire family (lv4ba,4lv4ba,4hexie4ni4quanjia4绿坝绿坝 – 河蟹／和谐你全家), sometimes writing the same- sounding lyrics as “harmony” (和谐), sometimes as “rivercrab” (河蟹) in the subtitles. The second verse begins: Green dam - green dam, will kill you in the bud. Rivercrabs all under heaven, arrogant attributes erupt She has asked you not to open your eyes too wide Is it possible that she is envious and jealous-147 146 According to China Digital Space: “Pre-installation of Green Dam software was originally intended for all new computers; however, because the proposed policy proved deeply unpopular, mandatory pre-installation has been delayed to an undetermined date. Green Dam girl first appeared sporadically in June 2009 on Baidu’s online encyclopaedia” (China Digital Space, 2011b). Some, however, suggested that the actual reason for the government’s about-face was the many security flaws within the software that allowed hackers to take over computers (jozjozjoz, 2009), and that it was built on copyright and open sourcecode violations (Koman, 2009). Popular Chinese blogger Hecaitou (和菜头) says the Green Dam Girl shows the creativity of the post-80s generation in resisting Internet regulation (Hecaitou, 2009a). 147 绿坝‐绿坝 把你萌杀 (lv4ba4W4lv4ba,4ba4ni4meng4sha) - 204 - This kind of video typically brings together numerous key elements discussed here with reference to the onco-operative nature of contemporary Chinese society: the Green Dam Girl, rivercrabs, harmony, Internet censorship, cleansing and Tianxia.148 This mixing of online lingo and symbols is reiterated also in art off-line. In a 2011 art exhibition at the Postmaster Gallery in New York, Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung exhibited his mixed media installation “The Travelogue of Dr. Brain Damages” (Hung, 2011). The installation was a response to the increasing harmonisation of artistic and netizen dissidence in China, and explored the role of the Internet in facilitating “both freedom and suppression” (Hung, 2011). The Chinese title Naocan4youji4(脑残游记) is a wordplay on Lao4Can4youji (老残游记), “The Travelogue of Lao Can”, a late Qing dynasty novel attacking the injustice and hypocrisy of government officials at the time. The project thus questioned whether the Internet in China is an effective tool for social change, through remixing Chinese netizens’ meme languages with Western icons. The installation consisted of 10 framed digital prints, a 6-minute long video and a ping-pong table sculpture, seen in the figure below. Several of the prints in this installation include replicas of one or more rivercrabs, often copied from images circulated on blogs. For example, in the piece titled “Justice Bao faces the Red Sun everyday” (天天见红日), Bao4Zheng (包拯), a Song dynasty judge who is a symbol of justice in China, is holding a laptop of the “Great Firewall” brand displaying a copy of the rivercrab with three watches that was discussed at the beginning of this chapter (Hung, 2011). On the walls behind the prints were written in large red characters: “You are not a real man until you have leaped the Great Wall of China” (Bu4fan4changcheng4fei4haohan 不翻长城非好汉), which is one character from the original quote from Mao: “You are not a real man until you have been to the Great Wall of China” (Bu4dao4changcheng4fei4 河蟹天下 傲娇属性大爆发 (hexie4Tianxia,4aojiao4shuxing4de4baofa) 拜托了你们 眼别睁态大 (baituo4le4nimen,4yan4bie4zheng4tai4da) 莫非羡慕妒嫉了吗- (mofei4xianmu4duji4le4ma-) My translation. Full video with Chinese subtitles can be found online (Tutuwan, 2009). 148 See for example (Hrehnr, 2009b; Stchi, 2009, which later got a avatar dancetroop found at Hrehnr, 2009a; DZS manyin, 2010). - 205 - haohan 不到长城非好汉). The calligraphic style recalls the hand-painted signs that forbid uncivilised behaviour (like spitting) and promote harmonisation in Chinese cities, but also the signs that appear on walls to be demolished. Figure 13: “Ping, ping, no pong” artwork by Kenneth Tin\Kin Hung (Source: Kenneth Tin\King Hung) The central sculpture of the installation, seen in the figure above, was titled “Ping, ping, no pong” (Ping,4ping,4wu4pang4乒乒无乓) and consisted of a ping-pong table with a whole cut out in the shape of a rivercrab on the Chinese side panel. The net was replaced by a sculptured wall, symbolising the Great Firewall of China, and accompanied by a ping-pong ball to symbolise the exchange of information (Hung, 2011). The sculpture highlights how the purported harmonious “win-win” of mutuality is undermined by harmonisation, in the form of the rivercrab. Through depicting the rivercrab as a clearly visible and distinct hole or void, this installation also highlighted the undecidable nature of rivercrabs as neither present nor absent, but simultaneously both. The metastasising, hybridising, prostheticising, mutating displacement of harmony 和谐/rivercrabs 河蟹 goes so far as to penetrate and reformulate the very characters themselves, as can be seen in the images below. The mutating of characters into new ones became popular after China’s Ministry of Education unveiled a list of standardised Chinese characters in common usage, including 44 characters that were - 206 - slightly revised in their print formats in the Song style, a popular Chinese character style in book printing format (Jiang Aitao, 2009). This re-formation of characters has grown in popularity since 2009, and can be seen in off-line art such as Hung’s (on the ping-pong racket above) and on blogs and webpages on the Internet.149 Figure 14: Hybrid hexie1shehui, rearranging the characters for 河蟹社會 (Source: Keso) The image above shows a T-shirt printed by critical blogger Keso. The print displays a rearrangement of the classical Chinese characters, used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, for “rivercrab society” (hexie shehui 河蟹社会). The characters below similarly display an amalgamation of the characters for “harmony” (hexie 和谐) and “rivercrab” (hexie 河蟹). 149 The first instance of this trend may be when on August 31 2009, netizens created three new Chinese characters together with other digital artwork within twelve hours. These new characters can be seen on Hecaitou’s blog and include a character pronounced “nan”, which combines the characters for “brain damage” (naocan4脑残), which is online lingo used to describe someone incapable of thinking straight because they have been crippled by party ideology; “wao” combining the characters for “fifty cents” (wumao 五毛) in a reference to the “Fifty cent party” which is an online term for online commentators paid and trained by the government to anonymously spin online debate in favour of the Party Line; and “diang”, combining the characters for the CCP Central Committee (dangzhongyang 党中央) interpreted to mean “the ultimate, sacred, absolutely correct, cannot be questioned; you get the shit beaten out of you but cannot say a word” (意思是至高无上的，神圣的， 绝对正确的，不容质疑的， 抽你丫没商量的) (Hecaitou, 2009b, for English language commentary at China Digital Times, see Xiao Qiang, 2009). - 207 - Figure 15: Hybrid hexie, combining the characters 和谐 and 河蟹 (Source: Alison, 2010) This hybridisation of crabs has clear parallels to Baudrillard’s alignment of metastases and prostheses, where the fractal (geo)body, “fated to see its own external functions multiply, is at the same time doomed to unstoppable internal division among its own cells. It metastasises: the internal, biological metastases are in a way symmetrical with those external metastases, the prostheses, the networks, the connections” (Baudrillard, 2002 2000: 3). In this way rivercrabs, too, metastasise in time and space. Heterotemporalities and the undecidability of rivercrabs Having examined the hybrid nature of the metastasising crabs, the final point I want to argue is that this hybridity, in combination with the autoimmune logics of which they are part, imbues them with a radical undecidability. Derrida too emphasises this link between the autoimmunitary and undecidability: suppression in the name of the (harmonious) system may be legitimate in protecting it from those who threaten it, but is simultaneously autoimmunitary in exposing the immune system by which the system defends itself as an “a4priori abusive use of force” (Derrida, 2005 2003-a). In this final section I thus want to emphasise the links between cancer/crabs and undecidability of the future against which harmonisation attempts to secure “harmonious world/society”. The undecidable nature of cancer/crabs is visible in an aspect of the lore surrounding them, that refers to the way the crab moves in time and space, in a forward and backwards motion that has been connected to threatening dishonesty, but also to the inability to decide something one way or the other, or to predict where it is going (Demaitre, 1998). This undecidability embodied in the crab is also emphasised by the Chinese interpretation of harmony that sees its roots in cooking. The crab can at times be poisonous and as a bottom-feeder it often includes contaminated substances. At the same time, however, it is considered a delicacy and is believed to nourish the marrow and semen, making it a symbol of male potency and virility (The Vanishing Tattoo, 2011). As crabs are considered exemplary “salty” they can in the logic of TCM either disturb or restore harmony of the body through their effect on the kidneys, and can thus cause or treat cancer (Lu, 1986: 52, 125-6; Wong and Sagar, 2010: 16).150 Like Derrida’s reading of the pharmakon in “Plato’s Pharmacy”, the crab, then, is simultaneously potential poison and potential cure – indeed Derrida says that “the pharmakon is another name, an old name, for this autoimmunitary logic”.151 Again, the interpretation of the crab as alimentary poison/cure as always already central to the concept of harmony can be seen in the building blocks of the harmony concept itself. An alternative explanation of the character 和 reads the radical to the left 禾, which depicts standing grain,152 with the radical to the right 口, which depicts an opening or mouth.153 Together they link harmony to eating, or having plenty of grain 禾 to eat 口.154 David Hall and Roger Ames accordingly argue that “harmony is the art of combining and blending two or more foodstuffs so they come together with mutual benefit and enhancement without losing their separate and particular identities, and yet with the effect of constituting a frictionless whole” (Hall and Ames, 1998: 181, cited in Callahan, 2011: 259). Callahan also draws on this metaphor in a famous passage from the Spring4and4Autumn4Annals (Lüshi4chunqiu 呂氏春秋), where a minister uses it to explain to his king the art of empire building: “your state is too 150 For one example of such a cure: “Bake one male crab and one female crab and grind into powder, take the powder with wine all at once to facilitate healing of breast cancer” (Lu, 1986: 126). 151 Derrida (2003a: 124, see also, Derrida, 1976 1967: 292; 1981 1972; 1995 1989-a: 233; Derrida, 2005 2003-a: 52, 82, 157). This is also how Chinese lore traditionally conceives of poisons/cures more generally, as is clear from the “Five Poisons” (wu4du 五毒), incidentally near-homonymous with “no poison” (wu4du4无毒). These are, like the crab, actually five animals that have traditionally been held to counteract harmful influences through counteracting poison with poison. They also had corresponding medicines made from five animals or corresponding herbs, used to treat ulcers and abscesses, probably through active ingredients such as mercury and arsenic (Yetts, 1923: 2; Williams, 1976). 152 According to a dictionary definition (Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995: 4.2588.1). 153 According to a dictionary definition (Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995: 1.566.14). 154 This etymology can be found in a number of dictionaries and books on Chinese characters (Wieger, 1965 1915: 121a; Karlgren, 1974 1923: 70; Lindqvist, 1991: 187; Hanyu4da4zidian4weiyuanhui, 1995: 1.602.1). small and is inadequate to have the full complement of the necessary ingredients. It is only once you are the Emperor that you would have the full complement” (Lvshi4 chunqiu, 1996, cited in Callahan, 2011: 260). To Callahan, this shows the constructed nature of harmony, built through “an active political process, and judged from a particular perspective – in this case the king’s perspective” (Callahan, 2011: 260). In Chinese mythology, the crab is similarly associated with sovereign power and violent might, as well as with guarding and screening the passage into secured spaces. For example, in Chinese mythology and popular fiction, the Chrystal Palaces of the Dragon Kings of the Four Seas are guarded by shrimp soldiers and crab generals (Mythical Realm, 2011). This stands as a parallel to the guarding of Chinese sovereign space by the Great Firewall, and the Green Dam Girl with her crab sign of repressive authority. At the same time, however, this crustacean army is parodied in the Chinese idiom of “shrimp soldiers and crab generals” (xiabing4xiejiang4虾兵蟹将), which is used to denote useless troops, a connotation which remains with contemporary Internet users, as can be seen in the image below, which depicts shrimp soldiers and crab generals as precisely “ineffective troops” (Lee, 2011). Figure 16: Shrimp soldiers and crab generals: Ineffective troops (Source: Sean Lee) What is clear from these metastases and their association is the undecidability of these crabs of the onco-operative Chinese system. They are simultaneously poison and cure, effective harmonisers and useless troops, a consequence of sovereign bordering of time and space and that which “falls through” or escapes such confines. This undecidability is inseparable from the “mutual contamination” seen above in the crabs’ interaction with their environment and with other species of the zoology that has emerged as part of netizens’ play with humorous homonyms in the face of Internet harmonisation. It is this “mutual contamination” that I think makes these rivercrabs and their peers step up to the challenge of coeval multiplicities that was outlined in chapter 2 of this thesis, which Hutchings articulated as the attempt to think “heterotemporality” which refers to “ultimately neither one present nor many presents, but a mutual contamination of ‘nows’ that participate in a variety of temporal trajectories, and which do not derive their significance from the one meta-narrative about how they all fit together” (Hutchings, 2008: 166). These différantial metastases, differentiated and deferred through spacing, are of the system yet fall through the cracks of its time and space to engage in a “mutual contamination of ‘nows’” that each incorporates undecidable futures in the “here-now”. Their very undecidability means that we have to take responsibility in the “here-now” for which of their possible readings, or temporal trajectories, we chose to put across. In this chapter I have chosen to put across one such narrative, of crabs as (auto)immune metastases of an onco-operative harmony. Their significance, however, cannot be ultimately decided or locked in by this narrative – it is not a meta-narrative from which we can judge how they all fit together. It is indeed impossible to do justice to the excess of meaning embodied in these crabs. Nonetheless, I have traced some of them here and pointed to some of their significance, in a way that I believe can emphasise their radical undecidability as a “plurality of trajectories” or “simultaneity of stories-so-far”. CONCLUSION In this chapter I have explored how Hu’s version of a harmonious world is being challenged and reproduced by a particular form of Chinese egao word play that works through deploying official language against itself. These redeployments make visible how Hu’s harmony has come to work through violent “harmonisation” of others. I have argued that these forms of wordplay draw on tactics similar to Derrida’s in particular, but also to Baudrillard’s, thus providing for a resonance here between academic scholarship and dissident practice in China. I have moreover argued that these forms of resistance are inherently linked to Hu’s “harmonious world/society” through the autoimmune logic of what I have termed an onco-operative system: a system that in seeking to protect and cleanse itself actually violates itself as the consequence of a violent non-recognition of the “other” in the self. In exploring this quasi-suicidal interplay of harmony and rivercrabs, I have shown how they are intimately linked to party-state attempts at spatial and temporal bordering as a means to maintain a cleansed/harmonious timespace. Deconstruction highlights the impossibility of ever making a clear-cut division between inside and outside, self and other and thus brings out a key feature of the logics of “harmonious world” (or perhaps any system). Resistance to4harmony/harmonisation can in this way not be thought outside the resistance of4harmony/harmonisation, the resistance of the system itself to itself, of and to its “self” as “other”, a resistance of the “other” of itself to itself. For this reason, it is impossible for harmony to acquire the conceptual unity or self-identity which would be needed in order for it to be placed as a secure “object” to be straightforwardly resisted, critiqued or condemned. In this manner I have insisted on the impossibility of succeeding in creating such a purified space or object, and on the undecidability of both harmony and crabs: like harmony, the crabs are simultaneously poison and cure, they are intimately linked to the possibility of the system in the first place, yet threaten it with murder/suicide. Because of a tendency of any community to close in on itself and exclude the outside on which it relies for survival works according to an autoimmune logic, “this tendency is not a perversion of proper community (whether inoperative, unavowable, - 212 - or coming, as for Blanchot, Nancy, Agamben), but the condition of its existence” (Thomson, 2005). This is certainly the case for Hu’s “harmonious world”. In this way “this self-contesting attestation keeps the auto-immune community alive, which is to say, open to something other and more than itself” (Derrida, 1998: 51). Finally, then, I have argued that this undecidability is what makes it possible to think of this onco- operative system of metastases in terms of the “heterotemporalities” or “coeval multiplicities”. Returning to the question of the political in harmony/rivercrabs, it seems the claim that the online world of egao4offers a “free and unrestricted” time and space of Bakhtinian carnival is premature. Rivercrabs are used to circumvent constraints, not abolish them, and constraints are certainly still in place. The descriptions of this culture as a separate sphere or “the antithesis of normal life” seem similarly exaggerated. However, Lagerkvist’s idea that egao4is for venting anger as4opposed4to offering the public political power hinges on a focus on politics in the narrow sense, which is seen throughout prior analyses of egao. Much previous scholarship rests on the assumption that egao4should be judged on its potential to influence politics, to contest the legitimacy, accountability or policy of the PRC government. Others imply that it should be measured against its potential to cultivate collective resistance, collective empowerment or grassroots communities. If measured against such standards, rivercrabs certainly appear as “ineffective troops” in battling out Chinese politics. They make us laugh, but offer no way out, no alternative telos towards which a movement of mass resistance can be directed. They even refuse to adapt a single meaning and always oscillate – they are simultaneously harmony and rivercrab, resisting and perpetuating the proliferation of harmony. Precisely herein lies the political potential of rivercrabs. Previous scholarship has aimed to understand the meaning of egao, to pin down its potential significance in terms of a resisance/not resistance divide of politics. I suggest instead that we can approach such phenomena by way of interrogating the political, where “repolitcization” involves a disruption of the regular proliferation of allochronically organized harmony, a “challenge” to “what have, through discursive practices, been - 213 - constituted as normal, natural, and accepted ways of carrying on” (Edkins, 1999: 12). Through repeatedly deploying expressions like having “been harmonised” or “rivercrab world” the meaning of the official “harmonious world” discourse is “hollowed out” or “disrupted”, rather than contested head on. The point is not necessarily to resist or not resist, but to “make strange”. This is what pushes rivercrabs into the political, where multiple meanings or doings – of words and purported significance – leads to instances of openness where we need to make “impossible decisions” with regards to their use and interpretation. It is only if we shift the focus from politics to the political that it makes sense to conceive of this language play as “alternative political discourse” (Meng Bingchun, 2011: 39) or “alternate civility” (Lagerkvist, 2010: 158). With this said, repoliticisation is not stable, but egao too is repeatedly depoliticised, by being designated as unimportant or as meaning only one thing (only revolution, only apolitical escapism, only4a potential to become a proper political movement). The point of this chapter is not to designate to egao another correct4meaning, but to indicate the undecidability of this meaning-making process. The point, precisely, is to open back up the question of egao as potentially political even if it does not lead to a revolutionary politics. Because of the onco-operative logic of the system “our solutions to problems, our attempts to perfect the world… are but a step on the way to worse viruses developing” (Coulter, 2004). The question, then, has to be asked: “what is cancer a resistance to, what even worse eventuality is it saving us from-” (Baudrillard, 1993 1990: 10). It is thus to the question of eventualities that I turn in my conclusion, to the (im)possibility of openness to this Other “to come”.