Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Email: ashbhat10@gmail.com
Facebook: Ashwin Bhat
Cell Phone: 503-703-0222

If you want me to disclose and I haven't already, then ask me. Contact me if there are any questions or anything. I use email and Facebook more than my phone.

Tournament: Misc | Round: Triples | Opponent: x | Judge: x
I read Anarchy of Becoming V4. Agamben's an old AC.

Tournament: X | Round: 1 | Opponent: X | Judge: X
I'm a West Coast debater... 1AR theory isn't my style. If I read something, I'll put it here.

Tournament: Early Disclosure - NDCA and TOC | Round: Semis | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Part 1 is Framing
We begin with a metaphor for the AC from the work of Franz Kafka in his story “Before the Law.” A man tries to gain access to the law, but a gatekeeper prevents him from doing so. The man spends everything he has, "no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.”” The man’s health only deteriorates as he ages. The gatekeeper recognizes the man’s approaching death and says, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”
As creator and gatekeeper of the law, the state-sovereign wants you to believe in the futility of action in the face of law. It sets a gatekeeper for every aspect of the law to protect sovereign interests and create a facade of its own legitimacy and the futility of any action but compliance. Overcoming ONE instance of the law’s all-powerfulness would be a symbolic destruction of the entire order, the series of gatekeepers, and disrupt this façade of all-powerfulness to provoke new knowledge – a harbinger of the divesting of the sovereign’s power to the people.
Modern politics and ethics are morally hopeless - the state currently acts as the ultimate sovereign – it decides where and when rights are applied.
Agamben ‘8: Giorgio Agamben writes in “Beyond Human Rights” in 2008. Giorgio Agamben (Italian: aˈɡambɛn; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, 4 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. http://jstor.reed.edu/stable/pdf/40644981.pdf; AB
The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. 3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.
This is the distinction between qualified life and bare life – bare life lacks the protection of rights, whereas qualified life has this protection of rights. This ability to arbitrarily apply rights is the manifestation of state abuse – Qualified life is the Trojan horse that allows the state to consolidate its bio-political control.
Downey ‘9: Anthony Downey writes in “Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Bare Life’ and the Politics of Aesthetics” on March 2009. Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 2, March, 2009, 109–125. Anthony Downey is director of the Master s Program in Contemporary Art at Sotheby s Institute of Art, London, and editor of Ibraaz, a research forum for visual culture in the Middle East and North Africa. http://www.anthonydowney.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2009-zones-of-indistinction.pdf; AB
Lives lived on the margins of social, political, cultural, economic and geographical borders are lives half lived. Denied access to legal, economic and political redress, these lives exist in a limbo-like state that is largely preoccupied with acquiring and sustaining the essentials of life. The refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the dispossessed – all have been excluded, to different degrees, from the fraternity of the social sphere, appeal to the safety net of the nation-state and recourse to international law. They have been outlawed, so to speak, placed beyond recourse to law and yet still in a precarious relationship to law itself. Although there is a significant degree of familiarity to be found in these sentiments, there is an increasingly notable move both in the political sciences and in cultural studies to view such subject positions not as the exception to modernity but its exemplification. Which brings us to a far more radical proposal: what if the fact of discrimination, in all its injustice and strategic forms of exclusion, is the point at which we find not so much an imperfect modern subject – a subject existing in a ‘sub-modern’ phase that has yet to realise its potential – as we do the exemplary modern subject? What if the refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the dispossessed are not only constitutive of modernity but its emblematic subjects? It is with such points in mind that Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has developed a theory of marginalisation that goes beyond the binary distinctions to be had in dichotomies such as inside/outside, centre/margins, inclusion/exclusion. In albeit abbreviated terms for now, Agamben is interested in lives lived on the margins of social, political, juridical and biological representation, not for their exceptional qualities but for their exemplary status: the manner in which they are both representative of modernity and an admonitory warning to the ontological basis of the modern political subject. Modernity’s exceptions, he argues, predicate its social structure and political reasoning. The exemplary figure of that exceptionalism in historical terms is bare life homo sacer, an obscure figure of Roman law who, although once a citizen, is reduced to ‘bare life’ by sovereign decree and deprived of basic rights such as representation before the law.1 Homo sacer, the sacred and therefore separate person man – he who is set apart from others by law – is, for Agamben, the increasingly nascent figure of our times; a time in which we are witnessing the effective re-emergence of sovereign forms of power and the concomitant production of ‘bare life’ as a constituent element in the democratic order. It is to Agamben’s credit that he does not propose a discrete topology of victimhood in his thesis; rather, he is suggesting that the discretionary ability of the sovereign state to bring the weight of its unmediated power to bear upon the body of its subjects is an inherent part of living in a democracy. In Agamben’s eyes, in fine, we are not only all potentially homo sacer (homines sacri) and the de facto bearers of ‘bare life’ but this exceptional figure augurs a ‘coming community’ that is based not on rights as such but the suspension of rights.
Qualified life opens space for a zone of indistinction, where people fall into the grey-zone of the invisible – legitimizes a state where all societal atrocities happen through the rhetoric of a state of exception.
Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
More than this inclusion by exclusion, sovereign power in the West is constituted by its ability to suspend itself in a state of exception, or ban: "The originary relation of law to life is not application but abandonment."15 The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign is at the same time inside and outside the sovereign order: the sovereign can suspend the law. What defines the rule of law is the state of exception when law is suspended. The very space in which juridical order can have validity is created and defined through the sovereign exception. However, the exception that defines the structure of sovereignty is more complex than the inclusion of what is outside by means of an interdiction.16 It is not just a question of creating a distinction between inside and outside: it is the tracing of a threshold between the two, a location where inside and outside enter into a zone of indistinction. It is this state of exception, or the zone of indistinction between inside and outside, that makes the modern juridical order of the West possible. The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provisional state of danger as a means of establishing the Nazi state it- self. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its boundaries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the normal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitutive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded exclusion from human law (killing him these people does not count as homicide) and he is excluded exclusion from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the exclusion of both the sacred and the profane.
The role of the judge is to evaluate critical discussion above fiated policy-making analysis – Debate should focus on creating a new generation of citizens that are critical thinkers educated about social problems—that’s key to equality.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best uses counter-narratives to demystify the power of the state hierarchies—it’s the hope that we have for meaningful change that spills over this debate round. The judge as a critical educator has an obligation to question state biopolitical power.
Gündoğdu ‘11: Ayten Gündoğdu writes in “Potentialities of human rights: Agamben and the narrative of fated necessity” on 19 July 2011.  Contemporary Political Theory February 2012, Volume 11, Issue 1, pp 2–22. http://link.springer.com/article/10.10572Fcpt.2010.45; AB
In his analysis of biopolitical sovereignty, Agamben provides us with what might be called a counternarrative of Western politics with the explicitly stated goal of ‘unveiling’ or ‘unmasking’ what has become mystified, hidden, secret or invisible, particularly with the prevalence of contractarian accounts of political power (1998, p. 8; 2005, p. 88). Agamben describes this critical task in terms of ‘disenchantment’, or the ‘patient work’ of unmasking the fiction or myth that covers up and sustains the violence of sovereignty (2005, p. 88). What underlies this urge to demystify and unveils is a particular understanding of myth as a deceptive narrative naturalizing and legitimizing violence in the name of the preservation of life. I use the term ‘counternarrative’ to call attention to what Agamben's account aims to do6: This is a critical analysis, as Agamben himself insists, that does not offer ‘historiographical theses or reconstructions’ but instead treats some historical phenomena as ‘paradigms’ so as to ‘make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context;’ to do this, it proceeds at ‘a historico-philosophical level’ (1998, p. 11; 2009, p. 9). In that sense, it is not an account that claims historical accuracy or factual verifiability. This is a crucial point that is sometimes overlooked by Agamben's critics who call into question his inaccurate treatment of historical phenomena such as the concentration camps.7 In addition, ‘counternarrative’ draws our attention to the inventive dimensions of Agamben's endeavor; as one of his critics aptly (though disapprovingly) puts it, ‘Agamben does not discover a concealed biopolitical paradigm stretching back to fourth-century Athens; rather he invents one’ (Finlayson, 2010, p. 116). The invention of a counternarrative of Western politics involves literary devices (e.g. hyperbole), which aim to provoke the readers and persuade them to abandon any politics centered on modern concepts such as sovereignty, rights and citizenship (LaCapra, 2007; cf. de la Durantaye, 2009). In analyzing Agamben's account as a ‘counternarrative’, I aim to attend to the goals that it sets for itself. It is these goals – particularly the goal of freeing human potentialities from myths that render the contingent necessary and mask other possibilities – that provide the starting point for my critical engagement with Agamben. Instead of resorting to an ‘outside’ – whether this be an alternative historical account or another theoretical tradition – I aim to read Agamben on his own terms, and suggest that as he tries to free human potentialities from contractarian myths, he might be entrapping them in another myth that ends up casting the contingent as necessary. Agamben's counternarrative of Western politics aims to uncover what has become hidden or invisible with ‘our modern habit of representing the political realm in terms of citizens’ rights, free will, and social contracts’ (1998, p. 106). Its main target is the contractarian accounts of sovereign power. As he identifies the production of bare life as the originary or foundational activity grounding sovereign power (1998, pp. 6, 83), he particularly aims to question the social contractarian ‘myth’ that covers up sovereign violence (1998, p. 109). After unveiling the foundational myths of Western politics, Agamben concludes that we cannot effectively respond to ‘the bloody mystification of a new planetary order’ if we let these myths continue to obstruct our political imagination (1998, p. 12). With his counternarrative presenting a catastrophic view of the historical present – a view that emphasizes how exception has become the rule, camp has become the paradigmatic structure organizing political space, and we have all virtually become homines sacri (1998, pp. 38, 176, 111) – Agamben aims to convince his readers of the need to think of a ‘nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life’ (2000, p. 112). This new politics requires the renunciation of concepts associated with sovereignty – for example, state, rights, citizenship. The contemporary predicament cannot be remedied by a return to conventional political categories and institutions, Agamben suggests, since these are deeply involved in the creation of this catastrophe in the first place. Almost anticipating his critics who would be puzzled by his renunciation of rights and rule of law at a time when the problem of legal dispossession increasingly threatens populations around the world, he explicitly states that the response to the current permanent state of exception cannot consist in confining it within constitutional boundaries and reaffirming the primacy of legal norms and rights (2005, p. 87).8 As legal norms and rights are ultimately grounded in the originary violence of separating a bare life, legal dispossession is already inscribed in them as an inescapable condition. Neither the liberal remedy of reasserting the rule of law, nor the Derridean strategy of ‘infinite negotiations’ with a law that is in force without any significance, are viable options (2005, p. 87; 1998, p. 54). Both are futile, if not lethally dangerous, endeavors.9 The only politically tenable option, Agamben contends, is to move out of sovereignty with ‘a complicated and patient strategy’ of getting the ‘door of the Law closed forever’ (1998, pp. 54, 55).
Any attempt to make political change requires an analysis of bare life – the state always has the power to declare a state of exception, which reinforces cyclical violence against those without qualified life.
Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
At the threshold of the modern era, then, the realm of bare life begins to coincide with the political, and inclusion and exclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of indistinction. In these zones of indistinction, bare life, or homo sacer, becomes both the subject and the object of the political order: it is both the place for the organization of state power, in the forms of discipline and objectification described by Foucault, and the place for emancipation from it, through the birth of mod- ern democracy and the demand for human rights. This move of biological life to the center of the political scene in the West leads to a transformation of the political realm itself, one that effectively constitutes its depoliticization. That depoliticization takes place side by side with the politicization of bare life. Bare life is politicized and political life disappears. This irony is explained by the way the link forged in modernity between poli- tics and bare life, a link that underpins ideologies from the right and the left, has been ignored. As Agamben says, "if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because poli- tics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity. . . . Only a reflection that . . . interrogates the link between bare life and politics . . . will be able to bring the political out of its con- cealment."20 Any attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with an awareness of the impossibility of the classical distinction between private life and political existence and exam- ine the zones of indistinction into which the oppositions that produced modern politics in the West - inside/outside, right/left, public/private - have dissolved. Agamben proposes that "it is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, these difficult zones of indistinction, that the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought."21 In the zone of indistinction, a claim to a po- litically qualified life can no longer be effective as such.
And biopolitical discourse come first.
Campbell and Sitze ‘15: Timothy Campbell is a Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University and together with Adam Sitze, a professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social thought at the Amherst College he recently edited a new collection of essays on the topic of biopolitics. Campbell translated Roberto Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minnesota, 2008) and Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford, 2009). He is the author of Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (Minnesota, 2006), winner of the Media Ecology Association’s 2007 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics and and Improper Life: Biopolitics and Technology from Heidegger to Agamben (Minnesota, 2011). He also edits the series “Commonalities" for Fordham University Press and is currently completing his study of cinema and biopower titled Grace Notes: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life. http://biononymous.me/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/full_interview.pdf; AB
What is biopolitics? Clearly, it's a moment, as Arendt, Agamben, and Esposito among others argue, when what the Ancient Greeks called bìos, or life, encounters the political, which is how they referred to life in the city or polis. This is important only because of the separation of life as bìos from life as life in the polis: bìos was domestic life, food, health, the household’s budget. In short, it is the moment when life encounters the political, which is what Arendt sketches so profoundly and at length in The Human Condition, portions of which we include in the reader. Let’s also remember that politikos did not include slaves nor women. I want to insist on the word encounter when describing the meeting of life and politics because encounter highlights a relation that isn’t — yet — a fusion. I continue to think it’s important to distinguish between life and politics; that finding an interval to hold open between them may provide us with an opportunity for thought that might otherwise go missing if we immediately assume we know the meaning of biopolitics or biopower. 

Part 2 is the Advocacy
Thus, the advocacy: The United States Federal Government ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech in public colleges and universities. The resolution is negative state action, thus I garner both pre-fiat offense and fiated offense. Pre-fiat comes from the framing as an independent issue and the fiated comes from part 3 offense.
Evaluate pre-fiat analysis before fiated offense.
Jones ‘99: Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, ‘99 (Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)
The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction that make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the “philosophy of praxis” to political practice, Gramsci claims: It the theory does not tend to leave the “simple” in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and “simple” it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332-333). According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative “intellectual-moral bloc” should take place under the auspices of the Communist Party – a body he described as the “modern prince.” Just as Niccolo Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign barbarians, and create a virtu-ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern price could lead the working class on its journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125-205). Gramsci’s relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of domination – for example, in the case of gender – to class relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict.1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the “infallible party” has obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the enemies of emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous. History furnishes examples of progressive developments that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside the bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the particularly intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered as “resources of hope” for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They illustrate that ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical interaction of ideas and material reality. One clear security-related example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s. At that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals (the “alternative defense” school) encouraged and drew strength from peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on short-term policy but on the dominant discourses of strategy and security, a far more important result in the long run. The synergy between critical security intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both working in tandem can be witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of common security. As Thomas Risse-Kappen points out, the term “common security” originated in the contribution of peace researchers to the German security debate of the 1970s (Risse-Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). Initially, mainstream defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However, notions of common security were taken up by a number of different intellectuals communities, including the liberal arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in the center-left political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet “institutchiks” – members of the influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau 1996: 52-54; Risse-Kappen 1994: 196-200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995). These communities were subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, “in response to social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD” (Risse-Kappen 1994: 207). Similar pressures even had an effect on the Reagan administration. As Risse-Kappen notes: When the Reagan administration brought hard-liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the “freeze campaign” that revived the arms control process together with pressure from the European allies. (Risse-Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90-110). Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least have a substantial impact on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected impact of alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union. Through various East-West links, which included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such attendant notions as “nonoffensive defense” (these links are detailed in Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin , and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse-Kappen 1994: 203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in East-West relations in order to facilitate much-needed domestic reforms (“the interaction of ideas and material reality”). But what is significant is that the Soviets’ commitment to common security led to significant changes in force sizes and postures. These in turn aided in the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the territory of the former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As concepts such as common security, and collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223-260), are adopted by governments and military services, they inevitably become somewhat debased. The hope is that enough of the residual meaning can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the adoption of the concept of common security by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently) critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonsrates in relation to NATO expansion). The example of common security is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and play a role – a significant one at that – in making the world a better and safer place. Second, it points to potential future addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical security studies in particular. Third, it also underlines the role of ideas in the evolution in society. CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND THE THEORY-PRACTICE NEXUS Although most proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical intellectuals “are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless” (Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies, this means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making suffering humanity rather than raison d’etat the prism through which problems are viewed. Here the project stands full-square within the critical theory tradition. If “all theory is for someone and for some purpose,” then critical security studies is for “the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless,” and its purpose is their emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a fundamental reconceptualization of security with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But the question remains at the conceptual level of how these alternative types of theorizing – even if they are self-consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures – can become “a force for the direction of action.” Again, Gramsci’s work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramsci’s terminology, “historic blocs” (Gramsci 1971: 323-377). Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s view of power as a centaur, ahlf man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway through civil society and takes on the status of common sense; it becomes subconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions that were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marx’s well-worn phrase, “All that is solid melts into the air.” Gramsci’s intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a “war of position” (Gramsci 1971: 229-239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies, any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by helping to undermine the “natural,” “commonsense,” internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs created. I contend that Gramsci’s strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. THE TASKS OF CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES If the project of critical security studies is conceived in terms of war of position, then the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse. This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the prevailing security regimes, that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes. When this is attempted in the security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals, traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order. This challenge entails teasing out the often subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist façade. In this sense, proponents of critical security studies approximate to Foucault’s notion of “specific intellectuals” who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980: 132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of “speaking truth to power” (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod lines of speaking “truth against the world.” Of course, traditional strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that “strategists must be prepared to ‘speak truth to power’” (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that, whereas the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their power, the latter aim at a thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, critical theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that “the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth” (cited in Jameson 1990: 66). The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116-121). Thus, by criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously playing apart in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc and contributing to the development of a counterhegemonic position. There are a number of avenues of avenues open to critical security specialists in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds to other possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant pundistry to forward alternative views onto a broader stage. Nancy Fraser argues: “As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture …. As critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to” (Fraser 1989: 11). Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic Adorno, who argues: In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what lay at the root of the delusion. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such “unobtrusive yet insistent work” does not in itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes. The conceptual and the practical dangers of collapsing practice into theory must be guarded against. Rather, through their educational activities, proponent of critical security studies should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements. That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his account of New Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the country’s political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989: 108; see also COrtright 1993: 5-13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and strategy drew strength and succor from each other’s efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of the a “message in a bottle,” but in this case, contra Adorno’s expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be naïve to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing “professionalisation” of academic life (Said 1994: 49-62). Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability that they are extremely risk-averse. It pays – in all senses – to stick with the crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for “new targets for old weapons”). And, of course, the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking can connect with the practices of social movements and become a “force for the direction of action.” The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to challenge
Instead of eliminating the law, you should adopt a politics of playing with the law — switch it from a sacred entity to a childish toy — we control the internal link to every epistemology in resisting sovereign violence.
Mills ‘8: Catherine Mills writes in “Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridicial Justice.” South Atlantic Quarterly 107:1, Winter 2008 DOI 10.1215/00382876-2007-053 © 2007 Duke University Press. Pg 23 – 24 need college person’s credentials for pdf; AB
To return to my starting point, more can now be said of the idea of playing with law as if it were a disused object, that is, a toy. It is now possible to better appreciate the perceived revolutionary potential of play and of the toy. As we have seen, the toy brings to light the “temporality of history in its pure differential and qualitative value.” That is, in making present “human temporality in itself, the pure differential margin between the ‘once’ and the ‘no longer’” (IH, 72), the toy permits a release from continuous and linear time and the realization of and return to history, understood as the true homeland of humanity (IH, 104–5). In relation to law, we can now say that as a disused object the law has lost its use value in the realm of the politicoeconomic and has instead been relegated to the profane use that can be made of it by children. The characterization of its being in force without significance appears to locate the law within the diachronic element of the “‘once’ . . . ‘no longer,’” rather than within the synchrony of miniaturization. This is significant because it highlights the ritualistic dimension of law, which compensates for the disjuncture of past and present, Agamben argues, by reabsorbing diachrony into synchrony. Play, however, transforms synchrony into diachrony by breaking the tie between past and present. This production of a differential margin in the dialectic of rite and play is the condition of history; it is that which allows for the now. As a toy and only as a toy, as an object of play, the rite of law contributes to the revelation of the essential historicity of the human. The ritualistic dimension of law is important for another reason as well. Agamben insists on the impossibility of the elimination of either diachronic or synchronic signification: in all games and rites, the one remains a stumbling block for the other, thereby preventing the attainment of a pure state of diachrony or synchrony. Thus, he writes, “at the end of the game,” the toy—the privileged signifier of absolute diachrony—“turns around into its opposite and is presented as the synchronic residue that the game can no longer eliminate” (IH, 79). This implies that playing with law does not mean eliminating the law, for there is actually a sense in which the law is rescued from its own obsolescence in play. Rather than being maintained solely in a state of decay characterized by the simple lack of practicoeconomic value as law, it is given a new use. But this does not take the form of a resacralization of the law and restoration of transcendental meaning or force. Instead, the new use of law takes the form of its deactivation or deposition. Before saying more of this, it is worth cautioning against the phrase “at the end of the game” used above, for in what sense would the game in which humanity plays with law have an end? To construe the game of playing with law as having an end would in fact push Agamben’s conception of the messianic toward an identification with the eschatological, a conflation that he explicitly resists in The Time That Remains.16 Thus, within his own characterization, it would be more accurate to insist on the endlessness of play. As with the activity of study with which it is intimately related in the paragraph in question, play is interminable; it has no end beyond pleasure. As Agamben writes in Idea of Prose, “Not only can study have no rightful end, it does not even desire one.”17
And we solve negative kritiks, we view the law as more than just ends — it is part of an unraveling of the functioning of normative legality to develop a new vocabulary and mode of thought in addressing sovereign abuse – not a resacralized or canonical use of the law.
Agamben ‘5: Giorgio Agamben writes in “State of Exception” – A translation by Kevin Attell. Giorgio Agamben is professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona. He is the author of ten previous books, including the prequel to this one, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, published in English by Stanford University Press. Kevin Attell is a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department at the University of California, Davis. He is the translator of Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal. https://books.google.com/books?id=9slkvuV3VS4Candprintsec=frontcover#v=onepageandq=in20the20kafkaandf=false; AB
The stakes in the debate between Benjamin and Schmitt on the state of exception can now be defined more clearly. The dispute takes place in a zone of anomie that, on the one hand, must be maintained in relation to the law at all costs and, on the other, must be just as implacably released and freed from this relation. That is to say, at issue in the anomic zone is the relation between violence and law – in the last analysis, the status of violence as a cipher for human action. While Schmitt attempts every time to reinscribe violence within a juridical context, Benjamin responds to this gesture by seeking every time to assure it – as pure violence – and existence outside of the law. For reasons that we must try to clarify, this struggle for anomie seems to be as decisive for Western politics as the gigantomachia peri tes ousias, the “battle of giants concerning being,” that defines Western metaphysics. Here, pure violence as the extreme political object, as the “thing” of politics, is the counterpart to pure being, to pure existence as the ultimate metaphysical stakes; the strategy of the exception, which Benjamin seeks to answer with his reading of the “new attorney.” Obviously, it is not a question here of a transitional phase that never achieves its end, nor a process of infinite deconstruction that, in maintaining the law in a spectral life, can no longer get to the bottom of it. The decisive point here is that the law – no longer practiced but studied – is not justice, but only the gate that leads to it. What opens a passage toward justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivity inoperosita – that is, another use of the law. This precisely what the force-of-law (which keeps the law working in opera beyond its formal suspension seeks to prevent. Kafka’s characters – and this is why they interest us – have to do with this spectral figure of the law in the state of exception; they seek, each one following his or her own strategy, to “study” and deactivate it, to “play” with it. One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at the justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical (Benjamin 1992, 41).
Part 3 is the State’s Iron Grasp
Speech codes let the state arbitrarily define linguistic constraints – it empowers hate speech when it wants to. The state shields itself from self-incrimination by punishing individuals whose speech is evidentiary of the state’s failure. This leaves the individual vulnerable and the state all-powerful.
Butler ‘97: Judith Butler writes in “Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.” Judith Butler is Chancellor's Professor in the departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also the author of Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, co-author of Feminist Contentions, and co-editor! with Joan W. Scotti of Feminists Theorize the Political All are available from Routledge; AB
I consider the logic of this policy in the next chapter, and I propose to return to that figure of efficacious and offensive utterance toward the end of this one. In the interim, however, I aim to consider the construal of hate speech as offensive conduct, the effort to construe pornography as hate speech, and the concomitant effort to seek re- SOVEREIGN PERFORMATIVES course to the state to remedy the injuries allegedly caused by hate speech. What happens when we seek recourse to the state to regulate such speech? In particular, how is he regulatory power of the state enhanced through such an appeal? This is, perhaps, a familiar argument that I hope to make in a less than familiar way. My concern is not only with the protection of civil liberties against the incursion of the state, but with the peculiar discursive power given over to the state through the process of legal redress. I would like to suggest a formulation for the problem that might seem paradoxical, but which I think, even in its hyperbolic mode, might shed some light on the problem that regulating hate, speech poses. That formulation is this: the state produces hate speech, and by this I do not mean that the state is accountable for the various slurs, epithets, and forms of invective that currently circulate throughout the population. I mean only that the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of publically acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain that consequential line of demarcation. The inflated and efficacious utterance attributed to hate speech in some of the politicized contexts discussed above is itself modeled on the speech of a sovereign state, understood as a sovereign speech act, a speech act with the power to do what it says. This sovereign power is attributed to hate speech when it is said to "deprive" us of rights and liberties. The power attributed to hate speech is a power of absolute and efficacious agency, performativity and transitivity at once (it does what it says and it does what it says it will do to the one addressed by the speech). Precisely this power of legal language is that to which we refer when we call upon the state to effect the regulation of offensive speech. The problem, then, is not that the force of the sovereign performative is wrong, but when used by citizens it is wrong, and when intervened upon by the state, it is, in these contexts, right. The same kind of force, however, is attributed to the performative in both instances, and that version of performative power is never brought into question by those who pursue heightened regulation. What is this power? And how are we to account for its sustained production within hate speech discourse, as well as its continuing allure? Before venturing an answer to these questions, it seems worth noting that this invocation of the sovereign performative takes place against the background of a political situation in which power is no longer constrained within the sovereign form of the state. Diffused throughout disparate and competing domains of the state apparatus, and through civil society in diffuse forms as well, power cannot be easily or definitively traced to a single subject who is its "speaker:' to a sovereign representative of the state. To the extent that Foucault is right to describe contemporary relations of power as emanating from a number of possible sites, power is no longer constrained by the parameters of sovereignty. The difficulty of describing power as a sovereign formation, however, in no way precludes fantasizing or figuring power in precisely that way; to the contrary, the historical loss of the sovereign 78 1 organization of power appears to occasion the fantasy of its return-a return, I want to argue, . that takes place in language, in the figure of the performative. The emphasis on the performative phantasmatically resurrects the performative in language, establishing language as a displaced site of politics and specifying that displacement as driven by a wish to return to a simpler and more reassuring map of power, one in which the assumption of sovereignty remains secure.
Free discourse is currently non-existent – looks like state authoritarianism than state protection
Maloney Jr. ‘16: Cliff Maloney Jr. writes in “Colleges Have No Right to Limit Students’ Free Speech” on October 13th, 2016 for TIMES. Maloney is the Executive Director at Young Americans for Liberty. http://time.com/4530197/college-free-speech-zone/; AB
In grade school, I learned that debate is defined as “a discussion between people in which they express different opinions about something.” Such open discourse was historically encouraged on our college campuses. Universities exemplified intellectual discussion and debate in America. No one voiced their opinions louder than students, professors and administrators. They pushed society’s limits by admitting women and people of color, and by encouraging diversity of thought amongst the college community. Historically, young people flocked to universities to learn more about the world around them, to encounter people from different backgrounds, to expand their minds and to form their own opinions. Unfortunately, things have changed. Recently on college campuses, our open discourse has been threatened, particularly when discussing politics. While the current presidential election represents polarizing wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties, we should be able to openly debate their policies and the direction in which they plan to take our country if elected. We should be able to discuss the abuse of power within our government and the consistent violations of our Bill of Rights. We should be able to participate in the free market of ideas. But our students are being silenced. University campuses are now home to a plethora of speech restrictions. From sidewalk-sized “free-speech zones” to the criminalization of microaggressions, America’s college campuses look and feel a lot more like an authoritarian dictatorship than they do the academic hubs of the modern free world. When rolling an inflated free-speech ball around campus, students at the University of Delaware were halted by campus police for their activities. A Young Americans for Liberty leader at Fairmont State University in West Virginia was confronted by security when he was attempting to speak with other students about the ideas he believes in. A man at Clemson University was barred from praying on campus because he was outside of the free-speech zone. And a student at Blinn College in Texas abolished her campus’ free-speech zone in a lawsuit after administrators demanded she seek special permission to advocate for self-defense. How have we let this happen in America, the land of the free? It’s because of what our universities have taught a generation of Americans: If you don’t agree with someone, are uncomfortable with an idea, or don’t find a joke funny, then their speech must be suppressed. Especially if they don’t politically agree with you. Instead of actually debating ideas that span topics from the conventional to the taboo, a generation of American students don’t engage, they just get enraged. In doing so, many students believe that they have a right to literally shut other people up. This is not only a threat to the First Amendment, but also to American democracy. In their manifestation, safe spaces and free-speech zones at public universities enable prejudice against unfavorable ideologies. Guised as progressive measures to ensure inclusion, these often unconstitutional policies exclude new and competing ideas, and are antithetical to a free academia. In excluding different ideologies, supposedly progressive campus speech codes do one thing: prevent the progression of ideas. Restrictive campus speech codes are, in fact, regressive. With over 750 chapters nationwide at Young Americans for Liberty, we are fighting against public universities that stifle free speech. We’ve launched the national Fight for Free Speech campaign to reform unconstitutional speech codes and abolish these so-called free-speech zones on college campuses. By hosting events such as large free speech balls, YAL chapters across the country are petitioning their campuses to adopt the University of Chicago’s principles on freedom of expression—the hallmark of campus speech policies. Our members have geared up with First Amendment organizations to ensure that their free speech rights on campus are protected. America is a land rooted in the ideas of a free society: the freedom to be who you are, to speak your mind and to innovate. By silencing our students and young people, we have started down a slippery slope. It is up to us to fight back to ensure that our First Amendment rights remain protected—not just on college campuses, but everywhere in America.
Lack of free speech re-create the majority/minority divide that means that alternative views are systematically excluded from discourse and lose out on having voices heard. The state’s biopolitical meddling needs to stop – the 1AC is key to check oppressive power structures.
Lipson ‘16: (Charles, real clear politics writer, “Social Justice Warriors Against Free Speech,” August 29, 2016, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/08/29/social_justice_warriors_against_free_speech_131628.html//LADI)
Well, that didn't take long. The Social Justice Warriors have emerged from their safe spaces and begun attacking the University of Chicago's statement supporting free speech and opposing trigger warnings and safe spaces. They are complaining for a good reason: They don’t want free speech to spread to other campuses. What are the main arguments against the Chicago letter? One of my former graduate students sent me this report from a group website for her liberal arts college (a very fine school). What do her fellow alums say? Well, for one, they are surprised they even need to make arguments for their side. For years, they haven't had to. Administrators, like those at the University of Missouri, simply rolled over and played dead rather than confront them. But that was political cowardice, not real intellectual engagement. Now that the Social Justice Warriors must defend their position, what do they say? The arguments against Chicago's free-speech letter They object to "no trigger warnings" because it is insensitive to people who have experienced trauma and might need a "heads-up" if they are going to encounter triggering content in class. They object to "no safe spaces" because those are the only places where marginalized groups will feel completely free to voice their opinions. They say safe spaces are not about banning dissenting viewpoints but about banning hateful, bigoted speech that is truly harmful. They reject the idea that colleges should be places where ideas are freely exchanged because “not all ideas are equal and some are too offensive to have a place in the community.” The common theme is "we must all be more sensitive. Otherwise people will be harmed psychologically." What's right with those arguments, and what's wrong? First, let's consider trigger warnings. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a professor or teaching assistant saying, "We are going to discuss Greek myths and some of you might find them troubling." But it’s also perfectly fine if, all of a sudden in a class on Greek myths, the professor discusses one. The students at Columbia University actually wanted warnings before all myths. Their demand was not about helping one or two students in a large class. It was simply bullying under the cloak of "sensitivity." Anyway, universities are all about discussing sensitive subjects and raising troubling questions. If a university is really vigorous, then the whole place should be wrapped in a gigantic trigger warning. Finally, as a teacher, how can I possibly anticipate all the things that might trigger students in my class on "Big Wars From Ancient Greece to Early Modern Europe" (a lecture course I am teaching next year)? When I mention the Roman war with German tribes on the Rhine, how can I know that your grandfather died fighting on the Rhine in World War II? Of course, if your grandfather did die fighting on the Rhine, or if your mother was named Jocasta and you accidentally slept with her, you might be triggered by the class discussions. What then? Well, that is why universities have mental-health professionals to help you deal with your anxieties, fears, and depression. Again, it is fine if professors want to give students a heads-up, but it is a mistake to demand it of everyone. It is a much bigger mistake to stifle class discussion for fear of offending. That's not hypothetical. That is exactly what happens in classrooms now. (So does ideologically rigid teaching that demands students repeat the professor's views. But that's another topic for another day.) Safe spaces are another ruse. Are they really the only places where marginalized groups will feel completely free to voice their opinions, as these fashionable liberal-arts students say? We need to distinguish among three kinds of places on campus: classrooms, public spaces, and private (or semi-private) places like sororities or campus houses for co-religionists. If classrooms do not invite free expression, then something is badly wrong with the university. Actually, some classrooms do not. They are almost always the classrooms run by the ideological comrades of the students demanding safe spaces. If you think diverse viewpoints are welcome in classes for race and gender studies, you are living in a dream world. In public spaces, like dining halls, people do sometimes group themselves voluntarily by race, sports, or dormitories. Nothing wrong with that, although persistent segregation by race, ethnicity, or religion would be a setback for the students' college experience. Finally, it is perfectly fine for people to find their cozy spaces privately, at Hillel House (for Jewish students) or Calvert House (for Catholics) or a fraternity, sorority, or club. Who invades those private spaces? Normally, it's the Social Justice Warriors from the Dean's Office who object to students wearing sombreros to a party featuring Mexican food. What about the argument that "safe spaces aren't about banning dissenting viewpoints but about banning hateful, bigoted speech that is truly harmful"? The obvious problem is this: Who decides? You think your march is to support women's reproductive rights. Your roommate thinks it is about killing unborn babies. Which position is hateful or bigoted? Again, who decides? Which of these is so hateful that it has no place in an academic community? But let's take the clear-cut example of racial epithets, which are hate speech and add nothing to academic debate or learning. They do cause emotional harm, or at least they can. The difficulty here is "Where do we draw the line?" and, again, "Who draws it?" Is it hate speech to say, "He hates to spend money. What a Jew"? Most Jews would say yes, that's hateful. What if I said, "He hates to spend money. What a Scotsman"? Most Scots would say that recognizes their financial prudence. It is precisely because drawing these distinctions is so hard that our First Amendment, as interpreted by the courts, gives very wide latitude to speech and draws the line at specific threats to individuals and other palpable dangers. Canada, by contrast, has laws barring insults to minorities. (So do most European countries.) That's why a book arguing that Canadian Muslims were not assimilating and some were becoming radicals was prohibited and its authors harshly fined. The author and publisher spent years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, trying to reverse that ruling. In the U.S., the book sold well, though you probably never heard about it. Muslim-Americans seemed to survive it. There is real hate speech, of course, but you and I might not agree on what it is. And we might not agree on who gets to decide. I don't want some mid-level bureaucrat in the campus housing-and-dining office telling me what I cannot say or wear to a party. Get over it. By the way, the Yale professors who told students exactly that -- try not to be bothered by Halloween costumes you don't like -- were vilified, screamed at, taunted, and ultimately run out of their jobs in the housing system. Irony alert: They were brutally harassed by the sensitivity police.
Free speech on college campuses is key to challenge U.S. imperialism and racism.
Khan ‘16: Khan, Tariq. "Masking Oppression As “Free Speech”: An Anarchist Take." Agency. October 28, 2015. Web. December 08, 2016. http://www.anarchistagency.com/commentary/masking-oppression-as-free-speech-ananarchist-take/.
In the present-day United States, a shallow idea of “free speech” is often wielded by the privileged as a way to direct attention away from critiques of existing conditions and systems; particularly critiques of capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. For example, two years ago when UC Berkeley students organized to keep comedian Bill Maher from speaking on their campus, leading media outlets framed it as a controversy about free speech rather than engaging with the much deeper critiques the students had about Maher’s perpetuation of US imperialist, Orientalist discourse which fuels militarism abroad and racist violence at home. Yet, while students who protest imperialist discourse are characterized as a threat to free speech, the actual threat to free speech in academia goes unchallenged by leading media outlets. October 8, 2015, at the Community College of Philadelphia, English professor Divya Nair spoke at a rally organized by students in protest of police recruiters on campus. The students and Professor Nair drew connections between colonialism and modern US policing; particularly the police tactic of recruiting poor people of color to act as the capitalist state’s footsoldiers to control poor Black and Brown communities. Later that day, school authorities suspended Professor Nair without pay, and they have since suspended three student group members who are facing disciplinary hearings. In the past few years there has been a noticeable campus crackdown on anti-colonialist expression.
Open discourse and critical pedagogy are key to growing progressive social movements and counter-narratives against the oppressive structures of the state.
Hudson ‘16: Mark Hudson writes in “Education for Change: Henry Giroux and Transformative Critical Pedagogy.” https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/1734; AB
THESE ARE DIFFICULT times for teachers in U.S. public schools. The increasing size of schools, chronic underfunding of schools serving working-class students (especially students of color), work overload, school violence, professional isolation and the deskilling and devaluing of teachers' work have led to rising rates of teacher burnout in recent decades. The average career trajectory of a teacher in the United States is about five years.1 Meanwhile, the corporate-controlled media give voice to a conservative chorus calling for “school reform.” The “reforms” demanded include voucher plans and tax credits to force public schools to compete with private schools in the “free-market” economy, “raising standards” and “mandating competencies” through statewide and national standardized testing, and calls for public schools to abandon multicultural and secular humanist curricula in favor of “traditional values” and a back-to-basics “core curriculum.” These calls in reality amount to an attack on the public education system itself, and on public school teachers in particular. As education theorist Michael Apple has argued, (T)he political Right in the United States has been very successful in mobilizing support against the educational system and its employees, often exporting the crisis in the economy to the schools. Thus, one of its major achievements has been to shift the blame for unemployment and underemployment, for the loss of economic competitiveness, and for the supposed breakdown of “traditional” values and standards in the family, education, and paid and unpaid workplaces, from the economic, cultural, and social policies and effects of dominant groups to the school and other public agencies.2 This implies that legitimate questions of how to improve the U.S. public education system cannot be seriously addressed without simultaneously addressing the issues of economic exploitation, racist oppression and patriarchal gender relations that form the socio-economic context in which public schools operate. In other words, schools are not, as the right claims, the problem; rather, the very real problems of schools and those who work and learn in them cannot and will not be solved without a mass-based political movement from below against the injustices of capitalism, sexism and racism. Thus liberals and other moderates who oppose all or parts of the conservative education agenda but are silent about the essentially repressive nature of U.S. society have no real alternative to offer. At best, they can provide isolated examples of “enlightened” educational practices that perhaps benefit small groups of students and teachers but have little if any impact on the public education system as a whole.3 It follows that what is required to change schools is a critical, unambiguously left theory and practice of education which recognizes that schools cannot be analyzed and changed separately from the struggle to create a nonexploitative, nonracist and gender-egalitarian society. There is a history of efforts to create an oppositional theory and practice of education in the United States which goes back as least as far as the 1920s and 1930s, to the discussions of the Columbia Teachers College group, the best-known members of which are the social reconstructionists George Counts and Harold Rugg. Counts, author of the famous 1932 pamphlet Dare the School Build a New Social Order?, argued that the child-centered progressive education of his time in effect endorsed existing class relations, and that progressive educators should emancipate themselves from the influence of the “upper middle class” and become active agents of social change. Rugg was the author of a series of social studies textbooks which addressed issues of class conflict and racism, and which were very popular in the 1930s but driven off the market by right-wing political action groups in the 1940s.4 Little significant work was done in the 1940s and 1950s to further develop left theories of education, with U.S. leftists on the defensive in the education field as elsewhere. But out of the political and intellectual ferment of the 1960s and 1970s there have emerged a number of left education theorists, the most prolific and influential of whom is probably Henry Giroux. For the past twenty years Giroux has been in the forefront of efforts to develop a critical theory and practice of education applicable to conditions in the contemporary United States.5 The goal of this essay is to outline some key themes in Giroux's work and to encourage readers, especially teachers and future teachers, to familiarize themselves with his work in its entirety. I will also offer some constructive criticisms. Henry Giroux's first book Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling (1981) elaborated the philosophical foundations for a theory and practice of education that would be not only critical of established institutions and practices but also capable of transforming those institutions and practices, with the ultimate goal of transforming society itself. Giroux argues that earlier left approaches to schooling, such as Samuel Bowles' and Herbert Gintis'Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), focused too one-sidedly on the way schools reproduce the hierarchical division of labor in capitalist society and failed to account for the ways students and teachers resist this process. These approaches, by making class a central category of analysis, have provided important insights, such as the notion that schools cannot be analyzed outside the socio-economic context in which they operate, and have “helped to expose schools as sorting and tracking institutions that treat and teach working-class students and students of color in ways vastly different from their middle- and upper-class counterparts.” Yet they also have propagated “a monolithic view of domination and an unduly passive view of human beings” and have generally ignored the content of school curricula: Emphasizing the form of classroom encounters that replicate the social relations of the workplace, they do not consider how the dominant culture is mediated in schools through textbooks, through the assumptions that teachers use to guide their work, through the meanings that students use to negotiate their classroom experiences, and through the form and content of school subjects themselves.6 Thus Giroux argues that for the struggle for educational alternatives to move forward, we must move beyond reproductive approaches “by recognizing that reproduction is a complex phenomenon that not only serves the interest of domination but also contains the seeds of conflict and transformation.”7 Giroux's critique of the reproduction theorists rests on his reading of the critical Marxist concepts of ideology, hegemony and culture. Drawing on the early work of Lukacs and that of the Czech Marxist Karel Kosik, Giroux argues for “a dialectical conception of ideology that strips it of its narrow definition as simply false consciousness” and that “provides an analysis of how schools sustain and produce ideologies as well as how individuals and groups in concrete relationships negotiate, resist, or accept them.” This conception of ideology is closely related to Gramsci's notion of hegemony, which includes not only hegemonic ideologies (i.e. discourses that legitimate class rule) but also, just as important, the material practices that form the structure of daily experience. In schools, hegemony functions not only “through the significations embedded in school texts, films, and `official' teacher discourse” but also “in those practical experiences that need no discourse, the message of which lingers beneath a structured silence.” In the Gramscian conception, hegemony is not simply the imposition of the ideology of a dominant class upon subordinate classes; rather, it is “a mode of control that has to be fought for constantly in order to be maintained” in changing historical circumstances.8 Thus, in Giroux's view, Gramsci's notion that hegemony represents a pedagogical relationship through which the legitimacy of meaning and practice is struggled over makes it imperative that a theory of radical pedagogy take as its central task an analysis of both how hegemony functions in schools and how various forms of resistance and opposition either challenge or help to sustain it. 9 Giroux also argues for a politicized notion of culture, in which “culture would be defined in terms of its functional relationship to the dominant social formations and power relations in society.” This implies the notion of class-specific cultures, rather than culture, although it is important to remember that “Issues regarding gender and ethnicity, as well as the dynamics of nature, cannot be framed exclusively within class definitions.” But although “the link between power and culture cannot be reduced to a simple reflex of the logic of capital,” this link does lead directly to the concept of resistance as it relates to modes of radical pedagogy.10 Giroux contends that radical educators must begin by asking questions about the forms of resistance already employed by students in order to develop effective pedagogical strategies. As a starting point, he suggests asking: First, in what way do specific forms of resistance manifest themselves and what is their relationship to determinants in the wider social order? Second, how do these forms of resistance often end up supporting the modes of domination they attack? Put another way, how do the oppositional elements used by students to wrest some power from the authority of the school do the work in bringing about `the future that others have mapped for them'?11
These questions are critically important because “symbolic power if not translated into political power simply ends up reinforcing dominant social relationships.” Giroux cites Paul Willis' study of a working-class “countercultural” group in an urban London high school as an example of the contradictory forms of student resistance. The students in Willis' study celebrated masculinity and physical labor, but at the cost of rejecting mental labor and a deep-seated sexism and racism.
UNDERVIEW
DEPENDS ON THE ROUND

Tournament: Golden Desert | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Part 1 is Power to the People
The specter haunting politics is power – we must transcend the current power structures of the state through anarchism.
Newman ‘10: (Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory at the University of London at Goldsmiths, 2010, “The Politics of Postanarchism,” pub. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 104-107); AB
We observe a similar silence about anarchism in more recent radical political thought, that which comes in the wake of poststructuralism. Indeed, in much contemporary continental theory we fi nd a series of themes, preoccupations and debates which bear a strong resemblance to those of anarchism. Amid the ruins of Marxism – or at least of a certain institutionalised and statist form of it – there is a desire among many thinkers today to develop new categories and directions for radical politics. There is the attempt, fi st, to find new forms of radical political subjectivity no longer based on the Marxist notion of the proletariat. There is a recognition that such a category is too narrow to express the different forms of oppression, modes of politicisation and ways of relating to one’s own work and existence that make up the contemporary world. However, there is also the recognition of the inadequacy of the ultimately liberal notion of ‘identity politics’ that characterised much new social movement theory. What is called for is new way of thinking about how, and by what processes, a subject becomes politicised – how does the subject become an egalitarian and collective subject? Secondly, there is, among many thinkers today, a rejection of authoritarian modes of political organisation – for instance, the centrally organised Marxist–Leninist vanguard party which would lead the proletariat to revolution, or the Communist and socialist parties in capitalist countries which sought to play the parliamentary game, thus abandoning any hope of emancipation from the state. There is a need, then, as Badiou would put it, for a politics without a party3 – new forms of political organisation that are no longer structured around the model of the party, as the party always has as its aim the reproduction of state power. Related to this, therefore, is the question of the state itself: the immovability of state power, despite the revolutionary programmes which promised its ‘withering away’, and, moreover, the increasingly authoritarian character of the so- called liberal democratic state, show us that the state remains perhaps the central problem in radical politics. Radical thought, therefore, sees politics increasingly as being situated beyond the state – there is a desire to find a space for politics outside the framework of state power, a space from which the hegemony of the state would be challenged. It seems to me that these themes and questions – political subjectivity beyond class, political organisation beyond the party and political action beyond the state – relate directly to anarchism. If these are the new directions that radical politics is moving in, then this would seem to suggest an increasingly anarchistic orientation. Indeed, this is a tendency that is being borne out in many radical movements and forms of resistance today. The emergence of the global anti- capitalist movement in recent times suggests a new form of politics, one that is much closer to anarchism in its aspirations and tactics, and in its decentralised, democratic modes of organisation. Also, the insurrections in Greece in December 2008 – which had an explicitly anarchist identification – are indicative of this libertarian moment in radical politics. It would seem that the prevailing form taken by radical politics today is anti- statist, anti- authoritarian and decentralised, and emphasises direct action rather than representative party politics and lobbying. Furthermore, is it not evident that there is a massive disengagement of ordinary people from normal political processes, an overwhelming scepticism – especially in the wake of the current economic crisis – about the political elites who supposedly govern in their interests? Is there not, at the same time, an obvious consternation on the part of these elites at this growing distance, signifying a crisis in their symbolic legitimacy? As a defensive or pre- emptive measure,4 the state becomes more draconian and predatory, increasingly obsessed with surveillance and control, defining itself through war and security, seeking to authorise itself through a politics of fear and exception. How should radical political thought respond to this situation, lagging behind – as it so often does – reality ‘on the ground’? My contention is that anarchism – or more precisely postanarchism – can provide some answers here. Indeed, anarchism might be seen as the hidden referent for radical political thought today: while its importance is scarcely acknowledged amongst the thinkers referred to above, anarchism can nevertheless offer critical resources for radical political theory, allowing it to transcend many of its current limitations and, indeed, providing it with a more consistent ethical and political framework.
The state’s dialectic of prohibition and legalization sustains the biopolitical state of exception.  This creates a biopolitical zone of indistinction, where certain people become invisible to society. Bracketed for Gendered Language.
Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
More than this inclusion by exclusion, sovereign power in the West is constituted by its ability to suspend itself in a state of exception, or ban: "The originary relation of law to life is not application but abandonment."15 The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign is at the same time inside and outside the sovereign order: the sovereign can suspend the law. What defines the rule of law is the state of exception when law is suspended. The very space in which juridical order can have validity is created and defined through the sovereign exception. However, the exception that defines the structure of sovereignty is more complex than the inclusion of what is outside by means of an interdiction.16 It is not just a question of creating a distinction between inside and outside: it is the tracing of a threshold between the two, a location where inside and outside enter into a zone of indistinction. It is this state of exception, or the zone of indistinction between inside and outside, that makes the modern juridical order of the West possible. The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provisional state of danger as a means of establishing the Nazi state it- self. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its boundaries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the normal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitutive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded exclusion from human law (killing him these people does not count as homicide) and he is excluded exclusion from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the exclusion of both the sacred and the profane.
The state’s regulation of access to rights is a gateway for biopolitical violence – people not seen as worthy of rights by the state get oppressed.
Agamben ‘8: Giorgio Agamben writes in “Beyond Human Rights” in 2008. Giorgio Agamben (Italian: aˈɡambɛn; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, 4 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. http://jstor.reed.edu/stable/pdf/40644981.pdf; AB
The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. 3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.
Liberalism tries to seize control of the state and direct the flow of history; This fails and maintains ongoing violence against the oppressed by maintaining state control. Against this, affirm an anarchy of becoming – a micropolitical reconfiguration of the subject that severs the state from the relationship to the self.
Call ‘2: (Lewis Call, Associate Professor of History at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, 2002, Postmodern Anarchism. Lexington: Lexington Books, pp. 47-56); AB
But the usual suspects have another, much more serious problem. Even if postmodern liberals can reject Nietzsche’s assaults on capitalism and the liberal state – and it is easy enough to locate passages in Nietzsche’s books where he seems to contradict these assaults – those who would use Nietzsche to shore up the eroding foundations of liberal democracy must contend with the even more powerful and radical forms of anarchy which are to be found in Nietzsche’s thought. They must contend, for example, with Nietzsche’s well-known anarchy of the subject. A number of commentators have pointed out that one of Nietzsche’s main contributions to political thought is his destruction of the conventional concepts of human subjectivity which lie at the basis of most modern political theories. Keith Ansell-Pearson suggests, for example, that the Genealogy aims “to show that one of the central ideas of moral and political theory, that of a human subject in possession of conscience and a free will, is not a natural given. William Connolly points out that after Nietzsche “the subject is not simply or unambiguously the self which establishes its unity, freedom, independence and self-transparency. And the assault on conventional (i.e., post-Enlightenment) ideas of subjectivity is not simply a metaphysical or epistemological issue. It is also a deeply political issue which has profound implications for the consruction of political theories and institutions. Those implications do not bode well for liberalism. Mark Warren summarizes the problem nicely: “Because liberals put a metaphysical placeholder in the space of the individual, they failed to theorize this space. As a result, they justified liberal forms of the state in terms of a historically conditioned effect mistaken for a universal essence. This is why Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism in Western culture as the collapse of the individual agent also implicates the individualistic metaphysics of liberalism. Nietzsche’s assault on modern subjectivity, then, undermines the philosophical foundations of the liberal state. After Nietzsche, liberals find themselves thrown into a confusing postmodern world of multiple subject positions and decentered identities. They are forces to develop a new kind of liberal politics, one which will not rely upon epistemologically suspect categories of individuality. This is, as we have seen, a difficult task, and one which liberals rarely complete in a satisfying way. Let us now look in more detail at Nietzsche’s anarchy of the subject. Nietzsche famously regarded the free will which is central to most conventional notions of subjectivity as an egregious error. For example, he notes in Human, All Too Human that “we do not accuse nature of immorality when it sends thunderstorms and makes us wet: why do we call the harmful man immoral?” Because in the latter case we assume a voluntary commanding free will, in the former necessity. But this distinction is an error. Here Nietzsche seems to be advocating a kind of radical determinism: he views individual actions not as the product of some chimerical free will, but rather as the indirect product of the social and cultural forces which have constituted the individual who performs those actions. Of course, this has radical implications for political theory. If we understand individual actions as the product of the society and culture which produced the individual, then society is quite literally to blame for what its members do. This naturally renders conventional ideas of punishment radically incoherent. “How is it that every execution offends us more than a murder?” Nietzsche demands. “It is the coldness of the judges, the scrupulous preparation, the insight that here a human being used as a means of deterring others. For it is not guilt that is being punished, even when it exists: this lies in educators, parents, environment, in us, not in the murderer – I mean the circumstances that cause him to become one.” This is a key point for the postmodern anarchist. If we accept that humans possess no metaphysical, pre-social essence, if we accept that they are little more than nodal points where various social, economic, and cultural forces converge to produce the illusion of subjectivity, then the punishments schemes of the liberal state make no sense. Indeed, on this reading it would make more sense to execute the system itself, since it is the system that is guilty of manufacturing criminals. Revolutionaries who follow this kind of interpretation would also, perhaps, be less likely to allow their uprisings to descend into the kind of mindless terror, which was, unfortunately, to be found in abundance in France during the 1790s, in Russia during the 1920s and 1930s, or in China during the 1950s. I say this because the radical denial of free will applies to the rulers as well as the ruled. This point was made, remarkably enough, by Bakunin, who observed in 1869 that “the kings, the oppressors, exploiters of all kinds, are as guilty as the criminals who have emerged from the masses; like them, they are the evildoers who are not guilty, since they, too, are involuntary products of the present social order.” Let the guillotine be deployed, then, not against aristocratic or bourgeois tyrants but against the philosophy of subjectivity which gives such tyrants their power in the first place. Nietzsche continues his assault on traditional forms of subjectivity and consciousness in Beyond Good and Evil, questioning whether “there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘ego,’ and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking – that I know what thinking is.” An obvious assault on the old Cartesian concept of subjectivity (“I think, therefore I am”), Nietzsche’s critique of consciousness also has dramatic political meaning. These “thinking egos” – the rational, autonomous dramatic political meaning. These “thinking egos” – the rational, autonomous subjects who have dominated political discourse since the Enlightenment – are supposedly the beings who vote in liberal elections, who serve on the liberal juries which decide the fate of the supposedly autonomous criminals who stand before them, who use the media to inform themselves about issues so that they may form rational opinions, and so on. In short, a whole host of liberal theories and institutions depend upon a certain idea of subjectivity which is, after Nietzsche, extremely difficult to sustain. This anarchy of the subject makes possible another, possibly even more radical form of anarchy, an anarchy of becoming. If Nietzsche is right about the status of the subject in the late modern period – and an entire tradition of twentieth-century Continental philosophy suggests that his analysis is at least presciently persuasive with regards to the postmodern period – then we must radically rethink what it means to be human. Previous concepts of subjectivity (and thus previous political theories) focused on being: I am this autonomous person, I am this rational citizen of a liberal democracy. Nietzsche shifts our attention to becoming. If, as he argues, the subject has no firm metaphysical ground and no center, if indeed our subjectivity is in a constant state of flux, then the meaning of our lives must be constantly changing. It is, of course, somewhat alarming to think that we might have no fixed being, that our essence (if we have one) must reside in a constant stream of transformations. However, the thought of becoming can also be a very liberating thought. All radical thinking demands change, and Nietzsche’s demands more than most. To the conventional radical’s demands for social and political change, Nietzsche adds the demand for a change in our very consciousness, in the way we view our relationship to time and history. In this sense, Nietzsche’s thought stands as one of the most radical ever conceived, for it asserts nothing less than this: change is the very heart of who and what we are. And this is true, says Nietzsche, not only of ourselves but of our world. “If the world had a goal, it must have been reaches. If it were in any way capable of pausing and becoming fixed, of ‘being,’ if in the whole course of its becoming it possessed even for a moment of this capability of ‘being,’ then all becoming would long since have come to an end, along with all thinking, all ‘spirit.’ The fact of ‘spirit’ as a form of becoming proves that the world has no goal, no final state, and is incapable of being.” For Nietzsche, the world has no teleology, no destination. The forces of history do not direct us toward a Zeitgeist named Hegel. Indeed, if Hegel was the preeminent philosopher of the state, Nietzsche’s philosophy of perpetual becoming can only herald the state’s demise.
HE CONTINUES… So: Nietzsche’s thought, which explodes all manifestations of the conventional political subject – its rationality, its language, its thoughts, its theories, its states, its economics – stand at the origin of the subversive counteridea which I call postmodern anarchism. Such an anarchism represents a tactical use of Nietzsche’s thinking, not (as the usual suspects propose) to shore up the rapidly eroding theoretical foundations of liberal democracy but rather to finish off that withered remnant of subject-centered post-Enlightenment politics, in order to open up a space for something more interesting. Postmodern anarchism asserts that the problems which face us today are not the result of flaws in our political structures which can be alleviated through reform of through the seizure of state power. Rather, the problem lies in the structures themselves, and in the epistemologies which sustain those structures. Nietzsche’s anarchy of the subject makes it quite clear that our culture is to blame for the sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves. Following this guilty verdict, modern political culture in general and liberal political culture in particular may expect to receive a death sentence. The liberals warn that this way lies madness. We say: we cannot know what may lie further down this river of becoming. But at least we know that it will be radically different from the disastrous political situation in which we find ourselves presently. Perhaps the greatest appeal of postmodern Nietzschean anarchism lies in the fact that it runs little risk of falling into theoretical and political traps faced by all merely modern revolutions. Marxims and nineteenth-century anarchism criticized capital, bourgeois values, and the liberal state – but they did so using the language, the terms, and the theoretical tools of the very bourgeois order they sought to undermine. Lenin and Mao sought to reshape the state into something which could sanction genuine political and economic freedom, but they retained so many of the old forms that they ended up reproducing the old varieties of repression and exploitation. “The problem for revolutionaries today,” as Deleuze argues, is to unite within the purpose of a particular struggle without falling into the despotic and bureaucratic organization of the party or state apparatus, a nomadic unit related to the outside that will not revive an internal despotic unity. Perhaps this is what is most profound in Nietzsche’s thought and marks the extent of his break with philosophy, at least so far as it is manifested in the aphorism: he made thought into a machine of war – a battering ram – into a nomadic force. As always, it is the performative effect of Nietzsche’s thought, rather than its explicit content, which concerns us. And one crucial effect of his thinking is that it removes philosophy from the horizons of the state. And it is an event whose ramifications will continue to be felt for some time. Just as news of the death of God takes a long time reach us, so too does news of the death of the state. But the word of these deaths draws inexorably nearer. For no God and no state can hope to survive a full engagement with that thinking which detonates all fixed human identities and reveals as mere phantasms of consciousness all fixed politics, economics, and culture.
Part 2 is The Phenomenon of Speech
I defend the whole resolution. Resolved: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech. The resolution is negative state action, so a pre-fiat framing is justified.
Speech codes are biopolitical –the state decides the context of what hate speech is. The state shields itself from self-incrimination by punishing individuals whose speech is evidentiary of the state’s failure. This leaves the individual vulnerable and the state all-powerful.
Butler ‘97: Judith Butler writes in “Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.” Judith Butler is Chancellor's Professor in the departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also the author of Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, co-author of Feminist Contentions, and co-editor! with Joan W. Scotti of Feminists Theorize the Political All are available from Routledge; AB
I consider the logic of this policy in the next chapter, and I propose to return to that figure of efficacious and offensive utterance toward the end of this one. In the interim, however, I aim to consider the construal of hate speech as offensive conduct, the effort to construe pornography as hate speech, and the concomitant effort to seek re- SOVEREIGN PERFORMATIVES course to the state to remedy the injuries allegedly caused by hate speech. What happens when we seek recourse to the state to regulate such speech? In particular, how is he regulatory power of the state enhanced through such an appeal? This is, perhaps, a familiar argument that I hope to make in a less than familiar way. My concern is not only with the protection of civil liberties against the incursion of the state, but with the peculiar discursive power given over to the state through the process of legal redress. I would like to suggest a formulation for the problem that might seem paradoxical, but which I think, even in its hyperbolic mode, might shed some light on the problem that regulating hate, speech poses. That formulation is this: the state produces hate speech, and by this I do not mean that the state is accountable for the various slurs, epithets, and forms of invective that currently circulate throughout the population. I mean only that the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of publically acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain that consequential line of demarcation. The inflated and efficacious utterance attributed to hate speech in some of the politicized contexts discussed above is itself modeled on the speech of a sovereign state, understood as a sovereign speech act, a speech act with the power to do what it says. This sovereign power is attributed to hate speech when it is said to "deprive" us of rights and liberties. The power attributed to hate speech is a power of absolute and efficacious agency, performativity and transitivity at once (it does what it says and it does what it says it will do to the one addressed by the speech). Precisely this power of legal language is that to which we refer when we call upon the state to effect the regulation of offensive speech. The problem, then, is not that the force of the sovereign performative is wrong, but when used by citizens it is wrong, and when intervened upon by the state, it is, in these contexts, right. The same kind of force, however, is attributed to the performative in both instances, and that version of performative power is never brought into question by those who pursue heightened regulation. What is this power? And how are we to account for its sustained production within hate speech discourse, as well as its continuing allure? Before venturing an answer to these questions, it seems worth noting that this invocation of the sovereign performative takes place against the background of a political situation in which power is no longer constrained within the sovereign form of the state. Diffused throughout disparate and competing domains of the state apparatus, and through civil society in diffuse forms as well, power cannot be easily or definitively traced to a single subject who is its "speaker:' to a sovereign representative of the state. To the extent that Foucault is right to describe contemporary relations of power as emanating from a number of possible sites, power is no longer constrained by the parameters of sovereignty. The difficulty of describing power as a sovereign formation, however, in no way precludes fantasizing or figuring power in precisely that way; to the contrary, the historical loss of the sovereign 78 1 organization of power appears to occasion the fantasy of its return-a return, I want to argue, . that takes place in language, in the figure of the performative. The emphasis on the performative phantasmatically resurrects the performative in language, establishing language as a displaced site of politics and specifying that displacement as driven by a wish to return to a simpler and more reassuring map of power, one in which the assumption of sovereignty remains secure.
Vote aff to reject the politics of aesthetics – we must recognize the role of speech as simply a form of communication. By implementing speech codes, you’re identifying types of speech as “ugly” and advocating the state to conceal them. This reinforces biopolitical control.
Gilmore ‘9: Paul Gilmore (Paul Gilmore, Associate Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach – scholar critical work in dealing with the history, transatlantic dimensions, and political promises of American Romantic literature - Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism, Published 01/01/2009)
Because aesthetic experience occupies the space between individual experience and social reality, the space created by the intersection of the various materialities evoked by electricity, it is both subjective and universal. The subjective nature of this universality provides both the utopian impulse Introduction 11 in aesthetic politics and aesthetic ideology’s coercive power. Aesthetic Materialism attempts to navigate between these poles by maintaining its focus on this very experience of subjective universality. In the aesthetic experience, the self seems to recede, as individuals give themselves over to the object (or, more properly, the perception of the object), and thus are left feeling as though anyone would have the same reaction. In that moment, it is inconceivable that anyone would not recognize the beauty, the sublimity, the humor, the ugliness of the thing perceived. The perceiving subject, in other words, recognizes no basis for this judgment in his or her particular interests, investments, desires. As such, this experience seems to place the individual outside civil society, the modern arena “of uncoerced human association and also the set of relational networks—formed for the sake of family, faith, interest, and ideology—that fill this space.”21 While an aesthetic experience might occur only because of one’s place within society— one’s social background, age, education, location, or privilege in relation to particular institutions—it does not directly or immediately involve the self in the negotiations, struggles, and identifications attendant in the working of civil society. Individuals may feel moved by a Picasso painting or Eliot’s “The Waste Land” only as a result of the training and education they have received due to their class position, their own individual histories crisscrossed by relations of power involving gender, nationality, and sexuality. Others may be touched by a renaissance Pietà or be moved by the beauty of a Thomas Kinkade painting due to a similar confluence of different overdetermined reasons. Yet that does not mean that the individual’s aesthetic experience of those objects necessarily feeds back into or undermines the social structures and ideologies giving rise to those particular encounters. In its intense focus on the sensuous perception of the object itself, the aesthetic momentarily interrupts both the dominant sense of the self as interested and autonomous and an instrumentalized orientation towards the world. In this way, aesthetics leads to “putting into question the individual’s ‘ordinary’ relation to all spheres of existence, and of reconstituting them as sites of aesthetic incompletion,” “the ceaseless problematization of and withdrawal from all normative judgment itself.”22 The most compelling attempts at revitalizing aesthetics have understood aesthetics in these terms, but have tended to move, too quickly, it seems to me, towards reading aesthetics as constituting a progressive politics focused on indeterminacy.23 Even in its recognition of the contingency of experience and identity, of the a mbivalence of representation, the aesthetic experience’s political effects—or even its tendencies—remain indeterminate. That is not to say that aesthetic experience remains permanently outside 12 Introduction the political. Instead, as “subjective universality” indicates, aesthetic experience always posits a reference to other people. In the aesthetic moment, the individual feels at one with some universal humanity who must have the same reaction. Yet the subjective nature of the event reiterates the observer’s detachment both from the object as a result of language’s mediation, the nervous system, and individual experience—and from any imagined universal community. These elements come together in the almost involuntary need to share this response—“Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that horrifying?” The question is simultaneously rhetorical—of course it’s beautiful—and is in need of confirmation because the experience’s universality is already in doubt.
Organic interaction amongst one another is preferable to state regulation. The aff is key to creating a space beyond the law – we must reject the biopolitical state to critically re-interrogate our practices, developing our own identities in the process by allowing us as individuals to define what speech we want to express.
Noterman and Pusey ‘12: (Elsa Noterman is Program Associate at the Community Strategies Group of the Aspen Insitute, Andre Pusey is a PhD candidate in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK, “Inside, Outside, and on the Edge of the Academy: Experiments in Radical Pedagogies” in Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Action, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, pp. 192-194); AB
So, how do we build this new kind of open and ephemeral institution? We think it is important to open up spaces in which we can both experiment with, and critically reflect upon, radical pedagogical practices. The crisis of the university is a crisis that throws up new openings and possibilities for what a university could be. These spaces can work toward pushing the boundaries of the academy by concretely asking, “what can a university do?” in praxis We need to engage in a discussion about how we can go forward as critical-radical researchers inside, outside and on the periphery of the academy. Is there any place for us within the institution as it is? Or as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2004) suggest, is the “only possible with the relationship to the university today . . . a criminal one”? This opens up the question/possibility of what Virno terms “exodus,” but which might also be described as “desertion.” This is not a territorial exodus, or a fleeing from, but rather a desertion of one’s assigned role, in this case of the “critical” yet docile body (Foucault, 2004) of the academic. As Harney and Moten (2004) put it, “to be in but not of is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.” In part, the Really Open University is an experiment in just this. The creation of spaces in which we can begin to interrogate the role of the university and of the academic, not just as theoretical exercise, but within an implicitly antagonistic, yet not wholly reactive, space of political engagement. This is a messy space that avoids any pure politics, or identitarian overcoding, neither overtly anarchist, nor Marxist, nor simply an “anticuts” group, yet neither a purely utopian reimagining. This is necessarily a “cramped space,” of (im)possibility, as Deleuze (2005) states, “creation takes place in bottlenecks.” Many elements of the edu-struggle will ultimately want to close down the categories again, in order to give more weight to their ideological underpinnings, trying to make the moment fit their politics, rather than seizing the moment in all its wealth of potentiality. The ROU views ‘crisis as possibility’ arguing that it is “up to us to decide the universities future.”17 But through what concrete actions might we actually develop a “really open university”? One way to begin may be through the occupation of the spaces where we work, play and consume, and the reappropriation of this time and space for our own (common) ends. This may help to promote new lines of questioning and open up new connectivities. One way to discuss this occupation and reappropriation, might be the literal forced reclamation of space, though direct action. This has, of course, been a tried and tested method across history, and we have seen the tactic of occupation has begun to some extent become popular again, with the recent occupations at universities across the UK, but to a much larger extent across Europe and the United States. We think there is an interesting dynamic, however, between defensive and offensive uses of occupation. We do not wish to set up a binary, but rather are interested in the qualitative shifts and activities that can occur within the occupied space itself, rather than simply the obstructive element of occupation. This problematic has been explored in the U.S. occupations movement through the often heated debate about the utility of political demands, versus occupation without demands. For example, “Occupation mandates the inversion of the standard dimensions of space. Space in an occupation is not merely the container of our bodies, it is a plane of potentiality that has been frozen by the logic of the commodity” (Inoperative Committee, 2009). Another way to discuss the occupation and reappropriation of time and space might be through the creation of new spaces that prefigure the new forms we may wish a reimagined university to take. A concrete example of this is the model of the autonomous social center, or “infoshop,” found within anarchist and autonomous activist practices (Atton, 1999). Social centers are place-based, self-managed spaces. They can be squatted, rented or cooperatively owned (Pusey, 2010). A particularly rich history of social centers can be found in Italy, but they exist all across Europe. In the United States the closest approximation to the autonomous social centers seems to be the network of radical bookstores and “infoshops” such as Red Emma’s in Baltimore and Bluestockings in New York City (Kanuga, 2010). Some academics at the University of Lincoln are attempting to develop a cooperatively run “social science center” that utilizes a social center type autonomous space, where they can practice radical pedagogical methods (Winn, 2010). The idea is that students will be able to enroll for free and staff will still be paid. We can imagine, based on our experiences and research within social centers in the UK, that this would be controversial within anarchist circles, both for its relationship with the institution of the university, and also because of its payment of academic staff. Payment for some roles performed within some spaces has been a source of much debate and contention within social centers within the UK (Chatterton, 2008). These spaces generally rely on the good will and free time of volunteers. However, many spaces cite burnout and lack of participation as major issues within social centers (UK Social Centres Network, 2008). The “dole autonomy” (Aufheben, 1999), which helped facilitate earlier cycles of struggle, has been very much weakened with successive government attacks on the welfare state, and students increasingly forced to take employment while studying means that there are far fewer people around with the “free time” to help enable projects such as these. It is, perhaps, through the establishment of self-organized alternative educational practices, and open and ephemeral institutions that we can start to value ideas for their own merit, rather than capitalist value—to create spaces and places where we can discard the price tags of commodified knowledge and instrumental learning, and instead appreciate the value of ideas and concepts themselves, while rediscovering the subversiveness of teaching.
State identification restricts discourse to “acceptable speech” through speech codes, which enforce a one-sided view of speech and preclude holistic examination. This state censorship stagnates activism and transparent cooperative discourse amongst people, which forces complacency in the machinery of the state.
Davis ‘99: Davis, Diane. “‘Addicted to Love’; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity.” Vol. 19 No. 4. 1999
Our fix of finitude, however, reminds us that this so-called home is haunted. In fact, etymologically speaking, "what haunts is also a haunt something that doubles. . .for a familiar place. Haunting belongs to the family of Heim" (Ronell, Dictations xviii). Heim, then, is never not unheimlich; a home is never not haunted. What goes for the subject's home-base, ethos, is spooked, relentlessly, by itsown fractal interiorities, its own unditchable and unsharable alterity?its finitude, which is precisely what it shares with others.15 There never was any "internal peace" in "self-identification," as Lyotard has warned, that was not purchased at the price of what itmust exorcise: "The Volk shuts itself up in theHeim, and it identifies itself through the narratives attached to names" (Differend 151)?that is, through the identification associated with Geschlecht? exorcising its spooks so as to preserve its illusion of stasis, of sobriety. When "communication" signifies only "reasonable exchange" among subjects, you can bet that alterity already will have been barred from the conversation. This is why Nancy charges that "the conventional chatter that attempts to promote reasonable exchange" as synonymous with communication "serves only to obscure violence, betrayal, and lies" ("Exscription" 319)? serves, that is, only to cover over the finitude itought to be exposing. It may be that any theory of communication that places a speaking subject in charge of building community effaces the sharing it attempts to promote. The "subject representing," after all, is not the same as the "being-communicating" (Nancy, Inoperative 24). Communication. . .happens? it is beyond our control; it is, in fact, who we are: communication is "the predicament of being" for any ekstatic existent (24). In as much as this existent functions as "threshold," it is continuously exposed to an in-common outside and so is always already communicating finite being to finite being by virtue of that exposure, by virtue of an involuntary. . .touch. There is no escaping community or this irrepressible communication, which neither expresses a bondage nor approximates a Vulcan mind-meld but simply operates as an exposition of the finitude.. .that.. .we.. .share?an exposition, as George Bataille has put it, that "tears us together" (22). A subject's representations can aim to crank up this rustle of finitude or to tune it out, but communication will have been happening, either way.
Maybe this needs to be made explicit: this originary "communication," this sharing, does not signify "under/standing." That is,what "communication" gives us to understand, Nancy explains, is only "that there is no common understanding of or in community, that sharing does not constitute an understanding (or a concept, or an intuition, or a schema), that it does not constitute a knowledge, and that it gives no one, including community itself, mastery over being-in-common" ("Myth Interrupted" 69). Communication is no more or less than the exposition of the overflowing, inappropriable, unsharable finitude that we share. And neither speaking nor writing is a means of this communication; rather, each is "communication itself, an exposure" (Nancy, Inoperative 31). Communication as understanding, Nancy observes, "is always disappointing," it's always "the communication of a disappointment, a nonpossibility, awithdrawal of communication" ("Speaking" 314-15). One can never be sure that a communique will arrive at itsdestination, and one can be fairly certain that ifitdoes, itwon't arrive aswhat itwas when itwas sent. And yet, in all the missed connections, in all the another communication is exposed: a communication that communicates the withdrawal or understanding and/but also the opening of another kind of sharing (315).16
This is not to say that what gets said is insignificant. But it is to say that a certain irrepressible communication is not about exchanging information, arguing a point, or expressing a bond: it's only about exposing understanding's withdrawal and so exposing finitude. . .as what we share. The ethical question par excellence for the third sophistic rhetorician is not how to move an audience toward a predetermined action or attitude but rather how to crank up the "noise," the excess, the interference that must be silenced for the sake of "reasonable erits," for the sake of cutting unifying figures. The question, in other words, that finitude prompts is not how to use language to build community; it is, rather, how to amplify the communications of community that are drowned out by the processes of identification.
The failure of power structures is responsible for the rise of hate speech – it’s evidence of a failing state – the aff’s anarchy of becoming functionally solves hate speech because it rejects the state’s power.
Gilmore ‘9: Paul Gilmore (Paul Gilmore, Associate Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach – scholar critical work in dealing with the history, transatlantic dimensions, and political promises of American Romantic literature - Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism, Published 01/01/2009)
From this reading, Shelley’s idea of the poet as an unacknowledged legislator wielding a sword of lightning takes on a new light, revealing the limitations as well as the power of poetry as a political force. Eschewing the utopianism of the late Enlightenment, Shelley electrifies the human imagination, rendering it both the medium where the mental and the physical meet and the source of intellectual and physical freedom. As such, the materiality of electric poetry lies not just in its physicality—in language being registered by the senses—but in its genesis within and action upon the social world. Poetry is material because it is literally words, which are material themselves, but it is also material in a sociohistorical sense, the product of material conditions of political and economic structures. In “Defence,” for example, Shelley indicates that it is poetry’s embeddeness in what we might now call social discourse that gives it its “electric life,” as that life is “less the poets’ spirit than the spirit of the age” (7:140). Similarly, in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, in further developing the figure of lightning thought, Percy elaorates this relationship between mind and the world, gesturing to its political implications: “The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition, or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or is about to be restored” (2:173). Echoing Schlegel’s prediction about the lightning charge of poetry, Percy at once envisions political revolution and at the same time insists that the changes to come are unpredictable, are “unimagined.” Thus, in concluding his preface to Prometheus Unbound, Percy acknowledges his “‘passion for reforming the world,’” but insists that his poetry does not contain “a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence” (2:174). As Kaufman, from an Adornian-Marxist position, Paul Hamilton, from a Habermasian-Public Sphere approach, and Redfield, from a de Manian–deconstructive angle, have all differently argued, it is this refusal of political commitment that allows Shelley to provide an alternative understanding of aesthetic politics.27 Through acknowledging the material opacity of language itself and by gesturing to the radical indeterminacy of meaning, in drawing on materialist understandings of the mind and the basis of the self in the senses, and in recognizing the sociohistorical conditions and material means by which poetry is disseminated, Percy Shelley emerges as a theorist and practitioner of a kind of aesthetics imagined to engender critical thinking about one’s self and the world, a process of constantly questioning received ideas that opens the self to new experiences and new perspectives that might provide the ground for sociopolitical change but that refuses to offer a political programme.
Part 3 is Framing
The role of the ballot is to assume the position of an academic redefining educational spaces by evaluating critical pre-fiat discussion above government policy-making fiat arguments.
Prefer this ROB for 2 reasons:
1) The norm of blind adherence to fiat and poor political representation as a community has drained debate of meaning; restricting debate to fiat undermines debate about assumptions underlying policy and teaches us to not defend the process by which we make our conclusions.
Gunder ‘9: senior planning lecturer at the Aukland University Michael. “Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning”. Pg. 11-12. AB
The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies of desired success, such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their desired enjoyment (cobblestones, chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum, this defines what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other, remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they are one and the same) is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as technical, rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "˜dominant stakeholders` can ensure the impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many whilst, of course, achieving their stakeholders’ specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469). The current post-democratic` milieu facilitates the above through avoidance of critical policy debate challenging favored orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of policy deficiencies, or alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while token institutions of liberal democracy’ are retained conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59). Consequently, the safe names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used or their work drawn upon by different stakeholders, while more critical voices are silenced by their inability to shape policy debates’ (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic development or spatial planning policy analyst thus continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying only the orthodox "successful” or "best practice” economic development or spatial planning responses. This further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo while providing "˜a cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer" isolating the political held from any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for public policy’ (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to generate similar policy responses for every competing local area or city-region, largely resulting in a zero-sum game (Blair and Kumar 1997).
2) Scholarship and ideas get co-opted if we continually believe that the state is inevitable. The only way to get out of this cycle of state oppression is to think outside the structures of the state. If it’s utopian to reject the state, then that’s what’s needed to change society. This is a stance against the traditionalist government policy-maker paradigm.
Newman ‘11: (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3); AB
At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations.
Part 4 is the Underview
Aff gets RVIs on Theory – 2 reasons

1. Reciprocity: I have to win theory and substance but they can win on either one, which violates reciprocity. Always prefer reciprocity on fairness since it’s the filter for fairness impacts – harms don’t matter if they don’t skew the field to one person’s favor. RVIS solve this since I can consolidate to one layer.
   2. Time skew: Forcing me to invest time on theory while I can’t generate offense is really abusive since it becomes a huge time suck. The time skew always hurts me since I have to generate terminal defense on every argument but they only have to extend a few with risk-of-offense. At best my argument quality is hurt since I can’t develop on either layer as well. And I have to spend time writing theory underviews instead of increasing aff substance.
   Neg authors that say the state is inevitable dogmatically view the world from the point of the dominant but flawed ontology.  The neg’s so called “intellectuals” jobs depend on them representing capital as benevolent and inevitable.  Their framework is an attempt to make the debate space a training ground for a new generation passive participants in the machinery of the state.
   Lambie ‘10: – Ph.D., joint-editor of the International Journal of Cuban Studies, and Lecturer in Public Policy at De Montfort University (George Lambie, “The Cuban Revolution in the 21st Century”, Pluto Press, pg. 150-152) AB
   It is interesting that when most academics analyse revolutions and transformative processes, they focus almost exclusively on leaders. In turn, they seek to interpret the ideas and actions of these prominent figures based on the influence of other elites. These factors are important, but must be recognised as only partial explanations for most instances of significant socio-economic change. The issue of the role of intellectuals in society, and exactly what constitutes intellectual formation, is a complex debate (Lambie 2000). However, on the specific issue of academic approaches to leaders, the difficulty lies ultimately in the ideological composition of the academics themselves, which is rooted in the dominant ontology, one that emphasises individualism, elite leadership and an immutable order of human nature. Given this perspective, it is difficult to imagine a set of ideas or a consciousness emerging out of what seems to be thin air. From the ridicule of Marx’s observations on the autonomy of workers in the Paris Commune, to contemporary views that see socialism as utopian, there is an ideological intolerance of any idea that defies the implicit ontological parameters of liberalism. When the dominant liberal interpretive framework does encounter what appears to be spontaneous action and organisation at the grassroots level, it sees this in terms of civil society freeing itself from the state, and as an expression of self-help. This view is theorised in Hernando de Soto’s work The Other Path (1989), which interprets the survival strategies of the poor in developing countries as a blossoming of individual initiative. A similar ideological perspective permeates much of the NGO philosophy, with its emphasis on micro-credit and market-orientated initiatives to resolve problems in civil society without the involvement of the state. This kind of thinking also informs much of the policy-driven theory that dominates sections of academia in Western countries. For instance, as procedural democracies such as the UK struggle to deal with the ‘democratic deficit’, and governments become concerned about political legitimacy, policies are devised to enhance ‘participation’ and ‘citizenship’ in an attempt to give substance to liberal hegemony. Lack of ‘participation’ or understanding of ‘citizenship’ is seen as an educational issue, and citizens have to be instructed and ‘enabled’ by policy makers and academics to realise their ‘democratic’ rights. At its core, this is nothing more than a thinly concealed indoctrina- tion exercise to impose the rule of the market onto the organisation of local structures. Commenting on the role of academics and intellectuals in general, Wayne (2003:23–24) points out: One way in which intellectuals have attempted to explain their social role has been to depoliticise what it means to be elaborators and disseminators of ideas. This involves uncoupling knowledge production from vested social interests, defining professionalism as rising above the social conflict between capital and labour, and instead promoting ‘objectivity’ and ‘rationality’ as the very essence of what it is that intellectuals do ... the ideology of ‘objectivity’ has, under the guise of working for all humanity, justified their role to capitalists ... This attitude concerning the role of academics and intellectuals was famously defended by the French writer Romain Roland after the First World War, in his work Au-dessus de la mêlée (‘Above the Battle’) (1915). Roland’s position may be justified if one argues that the shock and horror of war temporarily divested life of meaning in the minds of rational people, and retreat into the ivory tower became a mode of defence against this malaise. However, modern intellectuals have no such excuse, and have increasingly become apparatchiks of a knowledge-production system that is driven by money, career climbing and prestige, all of which can be attained through conformity. Ultimately, only by grasping the idea that human nature is not immutable can one transcend these intellectual limitations and imagine the unimaginable. Martí, Guevara, Castro and other Cuban leaders understood this intellectually and intuitively, both by participating in the historical process themselves, and by not losing touch with the masses. Of course, the Cuban political process has fluctuated in the emphasis it has given to leadership or to participation, but the two have interacted more fully and more continuously than has been seen in any other country.

Tournament: Golden Desert | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Logan WC | Judge: Panel
Part 1 is Framing
Welcome to the world of the aff where we no longer give a shit about the state and let it do its own thing. This is the time for the anarchy of becoming – a ideological separation of state and person.
The specter haunting politics is power – we must transcend the current power structures of the state through the anarchy of the self.
Newman ‘10: (Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory at the University of London at Goldsmiths, 2010, “The Politics of Postanarchism,” pub. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 104-107); AB
We observe a similar silence about anarchism in more recent radical political thought, that which comes in the wake of poststructuralism. Indeed, in much contemporary continental theory we fi nd a series of themes, preoccupations and debates which bear a strong resemblance to those of anarchism. Amid the ruins of Marxism – or at least of a certain institutionalised and statist form of it – there is a desire among many thinkers today to develop new categories and directions for radical politics. There is the attempt, fi st, to find new forms of radical political subjectivity no longer based on the Marxist notion of the proletariat. There is a recognition that such a category is too narrow to express the different forms of oppression, modes of politicisation and ways of relating to one’s own work and existence that make up the contemporary world. However, there is also the recognition of the inadequacy of the ultimately liberal notion of ‘identity politics’ that characterised much new social movement theory. What is called for is new way of thinking about how, and by what processes, a subject becomes politicised – how does the subject become an egalitarian and collective subject? Secondly, there is, among many thinkers today, a rejection of authoritarian modes of political organisation – for instance, the centrally organised Marxist–Leninist vanguard party which would lead the proletariat to revolution, or the Communist and socialist parties in capitalist countries which sought to play the parliamentary game, thus abandoning any hope of emancipation from the state. There is a need, then, as Badiou would put it, for a politics without a party3 – new forms of political organisation that are no longer structured around the model of the party, as the party always has as its aim the reproduction of state power. Related to this, therefore, is the question of the state itself: the immovability of state power, despite the revolutionary programmes which promised its ‘withering away’, and, moreover, the increasingly authoritarian character of the so- called liberal democratic state, show us that the state remains perhaps the central problem in radical politics. Radical thought, therefore, sees politics increasingly as being situated beyond the state – there is a desire to find a space for politics outside the framework of state power, a space from which the hegemony of the state would be challenged. It seems to me that these themes and questions – political subjectivity beyond class, political organisation beyond the party and political action beyond the state – relate directly to anarchism. If these are the new directions that radical politics is moving in, then this would seem to suggest an increasingly anarchistic orientation. Indeed, this is a tendency that is being borne out in many radical movements and forms of resistance today. The emergence of the global anti- capitalist movement in recent times suggests a new form of politics, one that is much closer to anarchism in its aspirations and tactics, and in its decentralised, democratic modes of organisation. Also, the insurrections in Greece in December 2008 – which had an explicitly anarchist identification – are indicative of this libertarian moment in radical politics. It would seem that the prevailing form taken by radical politics today is anti- statist, anti- authoritarian and decentralised, and emphasises direct action rather than representative party politics and lobbying. Furthermore, is it not evident that there is a massive disengagement of ordinary people from normal political processes, an overwhelming scepticism – especially in the wake of the current economic crisis – about the political elites who supposedly govern in their interests? Is there not, at the same time, an obvious consternation on the part of these elites at this growing distance, signifying a crisis in their symbolic legitimacy? As a defensive or pre- emptive measure,4 the state becomes more draconian and predatory, increasingly obsessed with surveillance and control, defining itself through war and security, seeking to authorise itself through a politics of fear and exception. How should radical political thought respond to this situation, lagging behind – as it so often does – reality ‘on the ground’? My contention is that anarchism – or more precisely postanarchism – can provide some answers here. Indeed, anarchism might be seen as the hidden referent for radical political thought today: while its importance is scarcely acknowledged amongst the thinkers referred to above, anarchism can nevertheless offer critical resources for radical political theory, allowing it to transcend many of its current limitations and, indeed, providing it with a more consistent ethical and political framework.
The state’s dialectic of prohibition and legalization sustains the biopolitical state of exception.  This creates a biopolitical zone of indistinction, where certain people become invisible to society – I control the internal link to the neg K’s. Bracketed for Gendered Language.
Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
More than this inclusion by exclusion, sovereign power in the West is constituted by its ability to suspend itself in a state of exception, or ban: "The originary relation of law to life is not application but abandonment."15 The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign is at the same time inside and outside the sovereign order: the sovereign can suspend the law. What defines the rule of law is the state of exception when law is suspended. The very space in which juridical order can have validity is created and defined through the sovereign exception. However, the exception that defines the structure of sovereignty is more complex than the inclusion of what is outside by means of an interdiction.16 It is not just a question of creating a distinction between inside and outside: it is the tracing of a threshold between the two, a location where inside and outside enter into a zone of indistinction. It is this state of exception, or the zone of indistinction between inside and outside, that makes the modern juridical order of the West possible. The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provisional state of danger as a means of establishing the Nazi state it- self. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its boundaries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the normal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitutive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded exclusion from human law (killing him these people does not count as homicide) and he is excluded exclusion from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the exclusion of both the sacred and the profane.
The state’s regulation of access to rights is a gateway for biopolitical violence – people not seen as worthy of rights by the state get oppressed.
Agamben ‘8: Giorgio Agamben writes in “Beyond Human Rights” in 2008. Giorgio Agamben (Italian: aˈɡambɛn; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, 4 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. http://jstor.reed.edu/stable/pdf/40644981.pdf; AB
The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. 3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.
Liberalism tries to seize control of the state and direct the flow of history; This fails and maintains ongoing violence against the oppressed by maintaining state control. Against this, affirm an anarchy of becoming – a micropolitical reconfiguration of the subject that severs the state from the relationship to the self.
Call ‘2: (Lewis Call, Associate Professor of History at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, 2002, Postmodern Anarchism. Lexington: Lexington Books, pp. 47-56); AB
But the usual suspects have another, much more serious problem. Even if postmodern liberals can reject Nietzsche’s assaults on capitalism and the liberal state – and it is easy enough to locate passages in Nietzsche’s books where he seems to contradict these assaults – those who would use Nietzsche to shore up the eroding foundations of liberal democracy must contend with the even more powerful and radical forms of anarchy which are to be found in Nietzsche’s thought. They must contend, for example, with Nietzsche’s well-known anarchy of the subject. A number of commentators have pointed out that one of Nietzsche’s main contributions to political thought is his destruction of the conventional concepts of human subjectivity which lie at the basis of most modern political theories. Keith Ansell-Pearson suggests, for example, that the Genealogy aims “to show that one of the central ideas of moral and political theory, that of a human subject in possession of conscience and a free will, is not a natural given. William Connolly points out that after Nietzsche “the subject is not simply or unambiguously the self which establishes its unity, freedom, independence and self-transparency. And the assault on conventional (i.e., post-Enlightenment) ideas of subjectivity is not simply a metaphysical or epistemological issue. It is also a deeply political issue which has profound implications for the consruction of political theories and institutions. Those implications do not bode well for liberalism. Mark Warren summarizes the problem nicely: “Because liberals put a metaphysical placeholder in the space of the individual, they failed to theorize this space. As a result, they justified liberal forms of the state in terms of a historically conditioned effect mistaken for a universal essence. This is why Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism in Western culture as the collapse of the individual agent also implicates the individualistic metaphysics of liberalism. Nietzsche’s assault on modern subjectivity, then, undermines the philosophical foundations of the liberal state. After Nietzsche, liberals find themselves thrown into a confusing postmodern world of multiple subject positions and decentered identities. They are forces to develop a new kind of liberal politics, one which will not rely upon epistemologically suspect categories of individuality. This is, as we have seen, a difficult task, and one which liberals rarely complete in a satisfying way. Let us now look in more detail at Nietzsche’s anarchy of the subject. Nietzsche famously regarded the free will which is central to most conventional notions of subjectivity as an egregious error. For example, he notes in Human, All Too Human that “we do not accuse nature of immorality when it sends thunderstorms and makes us wet: why do we call the harmful man immoral?” Because in the latter case we assume a voluntary commanding free will, in the former necessity. But this distinction is an error. Here Nietzsche seems to be advocating a kind of radical determinism: he views individual actions not as the product of some chimerical free will, but rather as the indirect product of the social and cultural forces which have constituted the individual who performs those actions. Of course, this has radical implications for political theory. If we understand individual actions as the product of the society and culture which produced the individual, then society is quite literally to blame for what its members do. This naturally renders conventional ideas of punishment radically incoherent. “How is it that every execution offends us more than a murder?” Nietzsche demands. “It is the coldness of the judges, the scrupulous preparation, the insight that here a human being used as a means of deterring others. For it is not guilt that is being punished, even when it exists: this lies in educators, parents, environment, in us, not in the murderer – I mean the circumstances that cause him to become one.” This is a key point for the postmodern anarchist. If we accept that humans possess no metaphysical, pre-social essence, if we accept that they are little more than nodal points where various social, economic, and cultural forces converge to produce the illusion of subjectivity, then the punishments schemes of the liberal state make no sense. Indeed, on this reading it would make more sense to execute the system itself, since it is the system that is guilty of manufacturing criminals. Revolutionaries who follow this kind of interpretation would also, perhaps, be less likely to allow their uprisings to descend into the kind of mindless terror, which was, unfortunately, to be found in abundance in France during the 1790s, in Russia during the 1920s and 1930s, or in China during the 1950s. I say this because the radical denial of free will applies to the rulers as well as the ruled. This point was made, remarkably enough, by Bakunin, who observed in 1869 that “the kings, the oppressors, exploiters of all kinds, are as guilty as the criminals who have emerged from the masses; like them, they are the evildoers who are not guilty, since they, too, are involuntary products of the present social order.” Let the guillotine be deployed, then, not against aristocratic or bourgeois tyrants but against the philosophy of subjectivity which gives such tyrants their power in the first place. Nietzsche continues his assault on traditional forms of subjectivity and consciousness in Beyond Good and Evil, questioning whether “there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘ego,’ and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking – that I know what thinking is.” An obvious assault on the old Cartesian concept of subjectivity (“I think, therefore I am”), Nietzsche’s critique of consciousness also has dramatic political meaning. These “thinking egos” – the rational, autonomous dramatic political meaning. These “thinking egos” – the rational, autonomous subjects who have dominated political discourse since the Enlightenment – are supposedly the beings who vote in liberal elections, who serve on the liberal juries which decide the fate of the supposedly autonomous criminals who stand before them, who use the media to inform themselves about issues so that they may form rational opinions, and so on. In short, a whole host of liberal theories and institutions depend upon a certain idea of subjectivity which is, after Nietzsche, extremely difficult to sustain. This anarchy of the subject makes possible another, possibly even more radical form of anarchy, an anarchy of becoming. If Nietzsche is right about the status of the subject in the late modern period – and an entire tradition of twentieth-century Continental philosophy suggests that his analysis is at least presciently persuasive with regards to the postmodern period – then we must radically rethink what it means to be human. Previous concepts of subjectivity (and thus previous political theories) focused on being: I am this autonomous person, I am this rational citizen of a liberal democracy. Nietzsche shifts our attention to becoming. If, as he argues, the subject has no firm metaphysical ground and no center, if indeed our subjectivity is in a constant state of flux, then the meaning of our lives must be constantly changing. It is, of course, somewhat alarming to think that we might have no fixed being, that our essence (if we have one) must reside in a constant stream of transformations. However, the thought of becoming can also be a very liberating thought. All radical thinking demands change, and Nietzsche’s demands more than most. To the conventional radical’s demands for social and political change, Nietzsche adds the demand for a change in our very consciousness, in the way we view our relationship to time and history. In this sense, Nietzsche’s thought stands as one of the most radical ever conceived, for it asserts nothing less than this: change is the very heart of who and what we are. And this is true, says Nietzsche, not only of ourselves but of our world. “If the world had a goal, it must have been reaches. If it were in any way capable of pausing and becoming fixed, of ‘being,’ if in the whole course of its becoming it possessed even for a moment of this capability of ‘being,’ then all becoming would long since have come to an end, along with all thinking, all ‘spirit.’ The fact of ‘spirit’ as a form of becoming proves that the world has no goal, no final state, and is incapable of being.” For Nietzsche, the world has no teleology, no destination. The forces of history do not direct us toward a Zeitgeist named Hegel. Indeed, if Hegel was the preeminent philosopher of the state, Nietzsche’s philosophy of perpetual becoming can only herald the state’s demise.
HE CONTINUES… So: Nietzsche’s thought, which explodes all manifestations of the conventional political subject – its rationality, its language, its thoughts, its theories, its states, its economics – stand at the origin of the subversive counteridea which I call postmodern anarchism. Such an anarchism represents a tactical use of Nietzsche’s thinking, not (as the usual suspects propose) to shore up the rapidly eroding theoretical foundations of liberal democracy but rather to finish off that withered remnant of subject-centered post-Enlightenment politics, in order to open up a space for something more interesting. Postmodern anarchism asserts that the problems which face us today are not the result of flaws in our political structures which can be alleviated through reform of through the seizure of state power. Rather, the problem lies in the structures themselves, and in the epistemologies which sustain those structures. Nietzsche’s anarchy of the subject makes it quite clear that our culture is to blame for the sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves. Following this guilty verdict, modern political culture in general and liberal political culture in particular may expect to receive a death sentence. The liberals warn that this way lies madness. We say: we cannot know what may lie further down this river of becoming. But at least we know that it will be radically different from the disastrous political situation in which we find ourselves presently. Perhaps the greatest appeal of postmodern Nietzschean anarchism lies in the fact that it runs little risk of falling into theoretical and political traps faced by all merely modern revolutions. Marxims and nineteenth-century anarchism criticized capital, bourgeois values, and the liberal state – but they did so using the language, the terms, and the theoretical tools of the very bourgeois order they sought to undermine. Lenin and Mao sought to reshape the state into something which could sanction genuine political and economic freedom, but they retained so many of the old forms that they ended up reproducing the old varieties of repression and exploitation. “The problem for revolutionaries today,” as Deleuze argues, is to unite within the purpose of a particular struggle without falling into the despotic and bureaucratic organization of the party or state apparatus, a nomadic unit related to the outside that will not revive an internal despotic unity. Perhaps this is what is most profound in Nietzsche’s thought and marks the extent of his break with philosophy, at least so far as it is manifested in the aphorism: he made thought into a machine of war – a battering ram – into a nomadic force. As always, it is the performative effect of Nietzsche’s thought, rather than its explicit content, which concerns us. And one crucial effect of his thinking is that it removes philosophy from the horizons of the state. And it is an event whose ramifications will continue to be felt for some time. Just as news of the death of God takes a long time reach us, so too does news of the death of the state. But the word of these deaths draws inexorably nearer. For no God and no state can hope to survive a full engagement with that thinking which detonates all fixed human identities and reveals as mere phantasms of consciousness all fixed politics, economics, and culture.
Part 2 is The Phenomenon of Speech
Speech codes are biopolitical –the state decides the context of what hate speech is. The state shields itself from self-incrimination by punishing individuals whose speech is evidentiary of the state’s failure. This leaves the individual vulnerable and the state all-powerful.
Butler ‘97: Judith Butler writes in “Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.” Judith Butler is Chancellor's Professor in the departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also the author of Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, co-author of Feminist Contentions, and co-editor! with Joan W. Scotti of Feminists Theorize the Political All are available from Routledge; AB
I consider the logic of this policy in the next chapter, and I propose to return to that figure of efficacious and offensive utterance toward the end of this one. In the interim, however, I aim to consider the construal of hate speech as offensive conduct, the effort to construe pornography as hate speech, and the concomitant effort to seek re- SOVEREIGN PERFORMATIVES course to the state to remedy the injuries allegedly caused by hate speech. What happens when we seek recourse to the state to regulate such speech? In particular, how is he regulatory power of the state enhanced through such an appeal? This is, perhaps, a familiar argument that I hope to make in a less than familiar way. My concern is not only with the protection of civil liberties against the incursion of the state, but with the peculiar discursive power given over to the state through the process of legal redress. I would like to suggest a formulation for the problem that might seem paradoxical, but which I think, even in its hyperbolic mode, might shed some light on the problem that regulating hate, speech poses. That formulation is this: the state produces hate speech, and by this I do not mean that the state is accountable for the various slurs, epithets, and forms of invective that currently circulate throughout the population. I mean only that the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of publically acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain that consequential line of demarcation. The inflated and efficacious utterance attributed to hate speech in some of the politicized contexts discussed above is itself modeled on the speech of a sovereign state, understood as a sovereign speech act, a speech act with the power to do what it says. This sovereign power is attributed to hate speech when it is said to "deprive" us of rights and liberties. The power attributed to hate speech is a power of absolute and efficacious agency, performativity and transitivity at once (it does what it says and it does what it says it will do to the one addressed by the speech). Precisely this power of legal language is that to which we refer when we call upon the state to effect the regulation of offensive speech. The problem, then, is not that the force of the sovereign performative is wrong, but when used by citizens it is wrong, and when intervened upon by the state, it is, in these contexts, right. The same kind of force, however, is attributed to the performative in both instances, and that version of performative power is never brought into question by those who pursue heightened regulation. What is this power? And how are we to account for its sustained production within hate speech discourse, as well as its continuing allure? Before venturing an answer to these questions, it seems worth noting that this invocation of the sovereign performative takes place against the background of a political situation in which power is no longer constrained within the sovereign form of the state. Diffused throughout disparate and competing domains of the state apparatus, and through civil society in diffuse forms as well, power cannot be easily or definitively traced to a single subject who is its "speaker:' to a sovereign representative of the state. To the extent that Foucault is right to describe contemporary relations of power as emanating from a number of possible sites, power is no longer constrained by the parameters of sovereignty. The difficulty of describing power as a sovereign formation, however, in no way precludes fantasizing or figuring power in precisely that way; to the contrary, the historical loss of the sovereign 78 1 organization of power appears to occasion the fantasy of its return-a return, I want to argue, . that takes place in language, in the figure of the performative. The emphasis on the performative phantasmatically resurrects the performative in language, establishing language as a displaced site of politics and specifying that displacement as driven by a wish to return to a simpler and more reassuring map of power, one in which the assumption of sovereignty remains secure.
Vote aff to reject the politics of aesthetics – we must recognize the role of speech as simply a form of communication. By implementing speech codes, you’re identifying types of speech as “ugly” and advocating the state to conceal them. This reinforces biopolitical control.
Gilmore ‘9: Paul Gilmore (Paul Gilmore, Associate Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach – scholar critical work in dealing with the history, transatlantic dimensions, and political promises of American Romantic literature - Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism, Published 01/01/2009)
Because aesthetic experience occupies the space between individual experience and social reality, the space created by the intersection of the various materialities evoked by electricity, it is both subjective and universal. The subjective nature of this universality provides both the utopian impulse Introduction 11 in aesthetic politics and aesthetic ideology’s coercive power. Aesthetic Materialism attempts to navigate between these poles by maintaining its focus on this very experience of subjective universality. In the aesthetic experience, the self seems to recede, as individuals give themselves over to the object (or, more properly, the perception of the object), and thus are left feeling as though anyone would have the same reaction. In that moment, it is inconceivable that anyone would not recognize the beauty, the sublimity, the humor, the ugliness of the thing perceived. The perceiving subject, in other words, recognizes no basis for this judgment in his or her particular interests, investments, desires. As such, this experience seems to place the individual outside civil society, the modern arena “of uncoerced human association and also the set of relational networks—formed for the sake of family, faith, interest, and ideology—that fill this space.”21 While an aesthetic experience might occur only because of one’s place within society— one’s social background, age, education, location, or privilege in relation to particular institutions—it does not directly or immediately involve the self in the negotiations, struggles, and identifications attendant in the working of civil society. Individuals may feel moved by a Picasso painting or Eliot’s “The Waste Land” only as a result of the training and education they have received due to their class position, their own individual histories crisscrossed by relations of power involving gender, nationality, and sexuality. Others may be touched by a renaissance Pietà or be moved by the beauty of a Thomas Kinkade painting due to a similar confluence of different overdetermined reasons. Yet that does not mean that the individual’s aesthetic experience of those objects necessarily feeds back into or undermines the social structures and ideologies giving rise to those particular encounters. In its intense focus on the sensuous perception of the object itself, the aesthetic momentarily interrupts both the dominant sense of the self as interested and autonomous and an instrumentalized orientation towards the world. In this way, aesthetics leads to “putting into question the individual’s ‘ordinary’ relation to all spheres of existence, and of reconstituting them as sites of aesthetic incompletion,” “the ceaseless problematization of and withdrawal from all normative judgment itself.”22 The most compelling attempts at revitalizing aesthetics have understood aesthetics in these terms, but have tended to move, too quickly, it seems to me, towards reading aesthetics as constituting a progressive politics focused on indeterminacy.23 Even in its recognition of the contingency of experience and identity, of the a mbivalence of representation, the aesthetic experience’s political effects—or even its tendencies—remain indeterminate. That is not to say that aesthetic experience remains permanently outside 12 Introduction the political. Instead, as “subjective universality” indicates, aesthetic experience always posits a reference to other people. In the aesthetic moment, the individual feels at one with some universal humanity who must have the same reaction. Yet the subjective nature of the event reiterates the observer’s detachment both from the object as a result of language’s mediation, the nervous system, and individual experience—and from any imagined universal community. These elements come together in the almost involuntary need to share this response—“Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that horrifying?” The question is simultaneously rhetorical—of course it’s beautiful—and is in need of confirmation because the experience’s universality is already in doubt.
The aff is key to creating a space beyond the law – we must ignore the biopolitical state’s speech codes to critically re-interrogate our practices, developing our own identities in the process by allowing us as individuals to define what speech we want to express.
Noterman and Pusey ‘12: (Elsa Noterman is Program Associate at the Community Strategies Group of the Aspen Insitute, Andre Pusey is a PhD candidate in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK, “Inside, Outside, and on the Edge of the Academy: Experiments in Radical Pedagogies” in Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Action, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, pp. 192-194); AB
So, how do we build this new kind of open and ephemeral institution? We think it is important to open up spaces in which we can both experiment with, and critically reflect upon, radical pedagogical practices. The crisis of the university is a crisis that throws up new openings and possibilities for what a university could be. These spaces can work toward pushing the boundaries of the academy by concretely asking, “what can a university do?” in praxis We need to engage in a discussion about how we can go forward as critical-radical researchers inside, outside and on the periphery of the academy. Is there any place for us within the institution as it is? Or as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2004) suggest, is the “only possible with the relationship to the university today . . . a criminal one”? This opens up the question/possibility of what Virno terms “exodus,” but which might also be described as “desertion.” This is not a territorial exodus, or a fleeing from, but rather a desertion of one’s assigned role, in this case of the “critical” yet docile body (Foucault, 2004) of the academic. As Harney and Moten (2004) put it, “to be in but not of is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.” In part, the Really Open University is an experiment in just this. The creation of spaces in which we can begin to interrogate the role of the university and of the academic, not just as theoretical exercise, but within an implicitly antagonistic, yet not wholly reactive, space of political engagement. This is a messy space that avoids any pure politics, or identitarian overcoding, neither overtly anarchist, nor Marxist, nor simply an “anticuts” group, yet neither a purely utopian reimagining. This is necessarily a “cramped space,” of (im)possibility, as Deleuze (2005) states, “creation takes place in bottlenecks.” Many elements of the edu-struggle will ultimately want to close down the categories again, in order to give more weight to their ideological underpinnings, trying to make the moment fit their politics, rather than seizing the moment in all its wealth of potentiality. The ROU views ‘crisis as possibility’ arguing that it is “up to us to decide the universities future.”17 But through what concrete actions might we actually develop a “really open university”? One way to begin may be through the occupation of the spaces where we work, play and consume, and the reappropriation of this time and space for our own (common) ends. This may help to promote new lines of questioning and open up new connectivities. One way to discuss this occupation and reappropriation, might be the literal forced reclamation of space, though direct action. This has, of course, been a tried and tested method across history, and we have seen the tactic of occupation has begun to some extent become popular again, with the recent occupations at universities across the UK, but to a much larger extent across Europe and the United States. We think there is an interesting dynamic, however, between defensive and offensive uses of occupation. We do not wish to set up a binary, but rather are interested in the qualitative shifts and activities that can occur within the occupied space itself, rather than simply the obstructive element of occupation. This problematic has been explored in the U.S. occupations movement through the often heated debate about the utility of political demands, versus occupation without demands. For example, “Occupation mandates the inversion of the standard dimensions of space. Space in an occupation is not merely the container of our bodies, it is a plane of potentiality that has been frozen by the logic of the commodity” (Inoperative Committee, 2009). Another way to discuss the occupation and reappropriation of time and space might be through the creation of new spaces that prefigure the new forms we may wish a reimagined university to take. A concrete example of this is the model of the autonomous social center, or “infoshop,” found within anarchist and autonomous activist practices (Atton, 1999). Social centers are place-based, self-managed spaces. They can be squatted, rented or cooperatively owned (Pusey, 2010). A particularly rich history of social centers can be found in Italy, but they exist all across Europe. In the United States the closest approximation to the autonomous social centers seems to be the network of radical bookstores and “infoshops” such as Red Emma’s in Baltimore and Bluestockings in New York City (Kanuga, 2010). Some academics at the University of Lincoln are attempting to develop a cooperatively run “social science center” that utilizes a social center type autonomous space, where they can practice radical pedagogical methods (Winn, 2010). The idea is that students will be able to enroll for free and staff will still be paid. We can imagine, based on our experiences and research within social centers in the UK, that this would be controversial within anarchist circles, both for its relationship with the institution of the university, and also because of its payment of academic staff. Payment for some roles performed within some spaces has been a source of much debate and contention within social centers within the UK (Chatterton, 2008). These spaces generally rely on the good will and free time of volunteers. However, many spaces cite burnout and lack of participation as major issues within social centers (UK Social Centres Network, 2008). The “dole autonomy” (Aufheben, 1999), which helped facilitate earlier cycles of struggle, has been very much weakened with successive government attacks on the welfare state, and students increasingly forced to take employment while studying means that there are far fewer people around with the “free time” to help enable projects such as these. It is, perhaps, through the establishment of self-organized alternative educational practices, and open and ephemeral institutions that we can start to value ideas for their own merit, rather than capitalist value—to create spaces and places where we can discard the price tags of commodified knowledge and instrumental learning, and instead appreciate the value of ideas and concepts themselves, while rediscovering the subversiveness of teaching.
State identification restricts discourse to “acceptable speech” through speech codes, which enforce a one-sided view of speech and preclude holistic examination. This state censorship stagnates activism and transparent cooperative discourse amongst people, which forces complacency in the machinery of the state.
Davis ‘99: Davis, Diane. “‘Addicted to Love’; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity.” Vol. 19 No. 4. 1999
Our fix of finitude, however, reminds us that this so-called home is haunted. In fact, etymologically speaking, "what haunts is also a haunt something that doubles. . .for a familiar place. Haunting belongs to the family of Heim" (Ronell, Dictations xviii). Heim, then, is never not unheimlich; a home is never not haunted. What goes for the subject's home-base, ethos, is spooked, relentlessly, by itsown fractal interiorities, its own unditchable and unsharable alterity?its finitude, which is precisely what it shares with others.15 There never was any "internal peace" in "self-identification," as Lyotard has warned, that was not purchased at the price of what itmust exorcise: "The Volk shuts itself up in theHeim, and it identifies itself through the narratives attached to names" (Differend 151)?that is, through the identification associated with Geschlecht? exorcising its spooks so as to preserve its illusion of stasis, of sobriety. When "communication" signifies only "reasonable exchange" among subjects, you can bet that alterity already will have been barred from the conversation. This is why Nancy charges that "the conventional chatter that attempts to promote reasonable exchange" as synonymous with communication "serves only to obscure violence, betrayal, and lies" ("Exscription" 319)? serves, that is, only to cover over the finitude itought to be exposing. It may be that any theory of communication that places a speaking subject in charge of building community effaces the sharing it attempts to promote. The "subject representing," after all, is not the same as the "being-communicating" (Nancy, Inoperative 24). Communication. . .happens? it is beyond our control; it is, in fact, who we are: communication is "the predicament of being" for any ekstatic existent (24). In as much as this existent functions as "threshold," it is continuously exposed to an in-common outside and so is always already communicating finite being to finite being by virtue of that exposure, by virtue of an involuntary. . .touch. There is no escaping community or this irrepressible communication, which neither expresses a bondage nor approximates a Vulcan mind-meld but simply operates as an exposition of the finitude.. .that.. .we.. .share?an exposition, as George Bataille has put it, that "tears us together" (22). A subject's representations can aim to crank up this rustle of finitude or to tune it out, but communication will have been happening, either way.
Maybe this needs to be made explicit: this originary "communication," this sharing, does not signify "under/standing." That is,what "communication" gives us to understand, Nancy explains, is only "that there is no common understanding of or in community, that sharing does not constitute an understanding (or a concept, or an intuition, or a schema), that it does not constitute a knowledge, and that it gives no one, including community itself, mastery over being-in-common" ("Myth Interrupted" 69). Communication is no more or less than the exposition of the overflowing, inappropriable, unsharable finitude that we share. And neither speaking nor writing is a means of this communication; rather, each is "communication itself, an exposure" (Nancy, Inoperative 31). Communication as understanding, Nancy observes, "is always disappointing," it's always "the communication of a disappointment, a nonpossibility, awithdrawal of communication" ("Speaking" 314-15). One can never be sure that a communique will arrive at itsdestination, and one can be fairly certain that ifitdoes, itwon't arrive aswhat itwas when itwas sent. And yet, in all the missed connections, in all the another communication is exposed: a communication that communicates the withdrawal or understanding and/but also the opening of another kind of sharing (315).16
This is not to say that what gets said is insignificant. But it is to say that a certain irrepressible communication is not about exchanging information, arguing a point, or expressing a bond: it's only about exposing understanding's withdrawal and so exposing finitude. . .as what we share. The ethical question par excellence for the third sophistic rhetorician is not how to move an audience toward a predetermined action or attitude but rather how to crank up the "noise," the excess, the interference that must be silenced for the sake of "reasonable erits," for the sake of cutting unifying figures. The question, in other words, that finitude prompts is not how to use language to build community; it is, rather, how to amplify the communications of community that are drowned out by the processes of identification.
The failure of power structures is responsible for the rise of hate speech – it’s evidence of a failing state – the aff’s anarchy of becoming controls the internal link to defining your own place in the world.
Gilmore ‘9: Paul Gilmore (Paul Gilmore, Associate Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach – scholar critical work in dealing with the history, transatlantic dimensions, and political promises of American Romantic literature - Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism, Published 01/01/2009)
From this reading, Shelley’s idea of the poet as an unacknowledged legislator wielding a sword of lightning takes on a new light, revealing the limitations as well as the power of poetry as a political force. Eschewing the utopianism of the late Enlightenment, Shelley electrifies the human imagination, rendering it both the medium where the mental and the physical meet and the source of intellectual and physical freedom. As such, the materiality of electric poetry lies not just in its physicality—in language being registered by the senses—but in its genesis within and action upon the social world. Poetry is material because it is literally words, which are material themselves, but it is also material in a sociohistorical sense, the product of material conditions of political and economic structures. In “Defence,” for example, Shelley indicates that it is poetry’s embeddeness in what we might now call social discourse that gives it its “electric life,” as that life is “less the poets’ spirit than the spirit of the age” (7:140). Similarly, in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, in further developing the figure of lightning thought, Percy elaorates this relationship between mind and the world, gesturing to its political implications: “The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition, or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or is about to be restored” (2:173). Echoing Schlegel’s prediction about the lightning charge of poetry, Percy at once envisions political revolution and at the same time insists that the changes to come are unpredictable, are “unimagined.” Thus, in concluding his preface to Prometheus Unbound, Percy acknowledges his “‘passion for reforming the world,’” but insists that his poetry does not contain “a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence” (2:174). As Kaufman, from an Adornian-Marxist position, Paul Hamilton, from a Habermasian-Public Sphere approach, and Redfield, from a de Manian–deconstructive angle, have all differently argued, it is this refusal of political commitment that allows Shelley to provide an alternative understanding of aesthetic politics.27 Through acknowledging the material opacity of language itself and by gesturing to the radical indeterminacy of meaning, in drawing on materialist understandings of the mind and the basis of the self in the senses, and in recognizing the sociohistorical conditions and material means by which poetry is disseminated, Percy Shelley emerges as a theorist and practitioner of a kind of aesthetics imagined to engender critical thinking about one’s self and the world, a process of constantly questioning received ideas that opens the self to new experiences and new perspectives that might provide the ground for sociopolitical change but that refuses to offer a political programme.
I defend the whole resolution as a thought experiment. Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech. The resolution is negative state action, so a pre-fiat framing is justified.
Part 3 is Fiat’s Overrated
Evaluate kritikal discussion above policy-making arguments.
Reject policy arguments for 3 reasons:
1) Restricting debate to fiat undermines debate about assumptions underlying policy and teaches us to not defend the process by which we make our conclusions.
Gunder ‘9: senior planning lecturer at the Aukland University Michael. “Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning”. Pg. 11-12. AB
The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies of desired success, such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their desired enjoyment (cobblestones, chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum, this defines what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other, remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they are one and the same) is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as technical, rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "˜dominant stakeholders` can ensure the impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many whilst, of course, achieving their stakeholders’ specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469). The current post-democratic` milieu facilitates the above through avoidance of critical policy debate challenging favored orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of policy deficiencies, or alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while token institutions of liberal democracy’ are retained conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59). Consequently, the safe names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used or their work drawn upon by different stakeholders, while more critical voices are silenced by their inability to shape policy debates’ (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic development or spatial planning policy analyst thus continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying only the orthodox "successful” or "best practice” economic development or spatial planning responses. This further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo while providing "˜a cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer" isolating the political held from any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for public policy’ (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to generate similar policy responses for every competing local area or city-region, largely resulting in a zero-sum game (Blair and Kumar 1997).
2) Scholarship and ideas get co-opted if we continually believe that the state is inevitable. The only way to get out of this cycle of state oppression is to think outside the structures of the state. If it’s utopian to reject the state, then that’s what’s needed to change society. This is a stance against the traditionalist government policy-maker paradigm.
Newman ‘11: (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3); AB
At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations.
3) Authors that say the state is inevitable dogmatically view the world from the point of the dominant but flawed ontology.  These so called “intellectuals” jobs depend on them representing capital as benevolent and inevitable.  That’s an attempt to make the debate space a training ground for a new generation passive participants in the machinery of the state.
Lambie ‘10: – Ph.D., joint-editor of the International Journal of Cuban Studies, and Lecturer in Public Policy at De Montfort University (George Lambie, “The Cuban Revolution in the 21st Century”, Pluto Press, pg. 150-152) AB
It is interesting that when most academics analyse revolutions and transformative processes, they focus almost exclusively on leaders. In turn, they seek to interpret the ideas and actions of these prominent figures based on the influence of other elites. These factors are important, but must be recognised as only partial explanations for most instances of significant socio-economic change. The issue of the role of intellectuals in society, and exactly what constitutes intellectual formation, is a complex debate (Lambie 2000). However, on the specific issue of academic approaches to leaders, the difficulty lies ultimately in the ideological composition of the academics themselves, which is rooted in the dominant ontology, one that emphasises individualism, elite leadership and an immutable order of human nature. Given this perspective, it is difficult to imagine a set of ideas or a consciousness emerging out of what seems to be thin air. From the ridicule of Marx’s observations on the autonomy of workers in the Paris Commune, to contemporary views that see socialism as utopian, there is an ideological intolerance of any idea that defies the implicit ontological parameters of liberalism. When the dominant liberal interpretive framework does encounter what appears to be spontaneous action and organisation at the grassroots level, it sees this in terms of civil society freeing itself from the state, and as an expression of self-help. This view is theorised in Hernando de Soto’s work The Other Path (1989), which interprets the survival strategies of the poor in developing countries as a blossoming of individual initiative. A similar ideological perspective permeates much of the NGO philosophy, with its emphasis on micro-credit and market-orientated initiatives to resolve problems in civil society without the involvement of the state. This kind of thinking also informs much of the policy-driven theory that dominates sections of academia in Western countries. For instance, as procedural democracies such as the UK struggle to deal with the ‘democratic deficit’, and governments become concerned about political legitimacy, policies are devised to enhance ‘participation’ and ‘citizenship’ in an attempt to give substance to liberal hegemony. Lack of ‘participation’ or understanding of ‘citizenship’ is seen as an educational issue, and citizens have to be instructed and ‘enabled’ by policy makers and academics to realise their ‘democratic’ rights. At its core, this is nothing more than a thinly concealed indoctrina- tion exercise to impose the rule of the market onto the organisation of local structures. Commenting on the role of academics and intellectuals in general, Wayne (2003:23–24) points out: One way in which intellectuals have attempted to explain their social role has been to depoliticise what it means to be elaborators and disseminators of ideas. This involves uncoupling knowledge production from vested social interests, defining professionalism as rising above the social conflict between capital and labour, and instead promoting ‘objectivity’ and ‘rationality’ as the very essence of what it is that intellectuals do ... the ideology of ‘objectivity’ has, under the guise of working for all humanity, justified their role to capitalists ... This attitude concerning the role of academics and intellectuals was famously defended by the French writer Romain Roland after the First World War, in his work Au-dessus de la mêlée (‘Above the Battle’) (1915). Roland’s position may be justified if one argues that the shock and horror of war temporarily divested life of meaning in the minds of rational people, and retreat into the ivory tower became a mode of defence against this malaise. However, modern intellectuals have no such excuse, and have increasingly become apparatchiks of a knowledge-production system that is driven by money, career climbing and prestige, all of which can be attained through conformity. Ultimately, only by grasping the idea that human nature is not immutable can one transcend these intellectual limitations and imagine the unimaginable. Martí, Guevara, Castro and other Cuban leaders understood this intellectually and intuitively, both by participating in the historical process themselves, and by not losing touch with the masses. Of course, the Cuban political process has fluctuated in the emphasis it has given to leadership or to participation, but the two have interacted more fully and more continuously than has been seen in any other country.
Part 4 is the Underview
Aff gets RVIs on Theory – 2 reasons

1. Reciprocity: I have to win theory and substance but they can win on either one, which violates reciprocity. Always prefer reciprocity on fairness since it’s the filter for fairness impacts – harms don’t matter if they don’t skew the field to one person’s favor. RVIS solve this since I can consolidate to one layer.
   2. Time skew: Forcing me to invest time on theory while I can’t generate offense is really abusive since it becomes a huge time suck. The time skew always hurts me since I have to generate terminal defense on every argument but they only have to extend a few with risk-of-offense. At best my argument quality is hurt since I can’t develop on either layer as well. And I have to spend time writing theory underviews instead of increasing aff substance.

Tournament: Early Disclosure - TOC | Round: Finals | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Pt. 1 Framing
The state is inevitable but that doesn’t mean we endow it with ontological power. Define your relation to society instead of letting it define you.
Liberalism tries to seize control of the state and direct the flow of history; this fails and maintains ongoing violence against the oppressed. Reliance on the state is dangerous. Against this, affirm an anarchy of becoming – a micropolitical ideological severance of the state from the self that rejects structured ontology.
Call ‘2: (Lewis Call, Associate Professor of History at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, 2002, Postmodern Anarchism. Lexington: Lexington Books, pp. 47-56); AB
But the usual suspects have another, much more serious problem. Even if postmodern liberals can reject Nietzsche’s assaults on capitalism and the liberal state – and it is easy enough to locate passages in Nietzsche’s books where he seems to contradict these assaults – those who would use Nietzsche to shore up the eroding foundations of liberal democracy must contend with the even more powerful and radical forms of anarchy which are to be found in Nietzsche’s thought. They must contend, for example, with Nietzsche’s well-known anarchy of the subject. A number of commentators have pointed out that one of Nietzsche’s main contributions to political thought is his destruction of the conventional concepts of human subjectivity which lie at the basis of most modern political theories. Keith Ansell-Pearson suggests, for example, that the Genealogy aims “to show that one of the central ideas of moral and political theory, that of a human subject in possession of conscience and a free will, is not a natural given. William Connolly points out that after Nietzsche “the subject is not simply or unambiguously the self which establishes its unity, freedom, independence and self-transparency. And the assault on conventional (i.e., post-Enlightenment) ideas of subjectivity is not simply a metaphysical or epistemological issue. It is also a deeply political issue which has profound implications for the consruction of political theories and institutions. Those implications do not bode well for liberalism. Mark Warren summarizes the problem nicely: “Because liberals put a metaphysical placeholder in the space of the individual, they failed to theorize this space. As a result, they justified liberal forms of the state in terms of a historically conditioned effect mistaken for a universal vessence. This is why Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism in Western culture as the collapse of the individual agent also implicates the individualistic metaphysics of liberalism. Nietzsche’s assault on modern subjectivity, then, undermines the philosophical foundations of the liberal state. After Nietzsche, liberals find themselves thrown into a confusing postmodern world of multiple subject positions and decentered identities. They are forces to develop a new kind of liberal politics, one which will not rely upon epistemologically suspect categories of individuality. This is, as we have seen, a difficult task, and one which liberals rarely complete in a satisfying way. Let us now look in more detail at Nietzsche’s anarchy of the subject. Nietzsche famously regarded the free will which is central to most conventional notions of subjectivity as an egregious error. For example, he notes in Human, All Too Human that “we do not accuse nature of immorality when it sends thunderstorms and makes us wet: why do we call the harmful man immoral?” Because in the latter case we assume a voluntary commanding free will, in the former necessity. But this distinction is an error. Here Nietzsche seems to be advocating a kind of radical determinism: he views individual actions not as the product of some chimerical free will, but rather as the indirect product of the social and cultural forces which have constituted the individual who performs those actions. Of course, this has radical implications for political theory. If we understand individual actions as the product of the society and culture which produced the individual, then society is quite literally to blame for what its members do. This naturally renders conventional ideas of punishment radically incoherent. “How is it that every execution offends us more than a murder?” Nietzsche demands. “It is the coldness of the judges, the scrupulous preparation, the insight that here a human being used as a means of deterring others. For it is not guilt that is being punished, even when it exists: this lies in educators, parents, environment, in us, not in the murderer – I mean the circumstances that cause him to become one.” This is a key point for the postmodern anarchist. If we accept that humans possess no metaphysical, pre-social essence, if we accept that they are little more than nodal points where various social, economic, and cultural forces converge to produce the illusion of subjectivity, then the punishments schemes of the liberal state make no sense. Indeed, on this reading it would make more sense to execute the system itself, since it is the system that is guilty of manufacturing criminals. Revolutionaries who follow this kind of interpretation would also, perhaps, be less likely to allow their uprisings to descend into the kind of mindless terror, which was, unfortunately, to be found in abundance in France during the 1790s, in Russia during the 1920s and 1930s, or in China during the 1950s. I say this because the radical denial of free will applies to the rulers as well as the ruled. This point was made, remarkably enough, by Bakunin, who observed in 1869 that “the kings, the oppressors, exploiters of all kinds, are as guilty as the criminals who have emerged from the masses; like them, they are the evildoers who are not guilty, since they, too, are involuntary products of the present social order.” Let the guillotine be deployed, then, not against aristocratic or bourgeois tyrants but against the philosophy of subjectivity which gives such tyrants their power in the first place. Nietzsche continues his assault on traditional forms of subjectivity and consciousness in Beyond Good and Evil, questioning whether “there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘ego,’ and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking – that I know what thinking is.” An obvious assault on the old Cartesian concept of subjectivity (“I think, therefore I am”), Nietzsche’s critique of consciousness also has dramatic political meaning. These “thinking egos” – the rational, autonomous dramatic political meaning. These “thinking egos” – the rational, autonomous subjects who have dominated political discourse since the Enlightenment – are supposedly the beings who vote in liberal elections, who serve on the liberal juries which decide the fate of the supposedly autonomous criminals who stand before them, who use the media to inform themselves about issues so that they may form rational opinions, and so on. In short, a whole host of liberal theories and institutions depend upon a certain idea of subjectivity which is, after Nietzsche, extremely difficult to sustain. This anarchy of the subject makes possible another, possibly even more radical form of anarchy, an anarchy of becoming. If Nietzsche is right about the status of the subject in the late modern period – and an entire tradition of twentieth-century Continental philosophy suggests that his analysis is at least presciently persuasive with regards to the postmodern period – then we must radically rethink what it means to be human. Previous concepts of subjectivity (and thus previous political theories) focused on being: I am this autonomous person, I am this rational citizen of a liberal democracy. Nietzsche shifts our attention to becoming. If, as he argues, the subject has no firm metaphysical ground and no center, if indeed our subjectivity is in a constant state of flux, then the meaning of our lives must be constantly changing. It is, of course, somewhat alarming to think that we might have no fixed being, that our essence (if we have one) must reside in a constant stream of transformations. However, the thought of becoming can also be a very liberating thought. All radical thinking demands change, and Nietzsche’s demands more than most. To the conventional radical’s demands for social and political change, Nietzsche adds the demand for a change in our very consciousness, in the way we view our relationship to time and history. In this sense, Nietzsche’s thought stands as one of the most radical ever conceived, for it asserts nothing less than this: change is the very heart of who and what we are. And this is true, says Nietzsche, not only of ourselves but of our world. “If the world had a goal, it must have been reaches. If it were in any way capable of pausing and becoming fixed, of ‘being,’ if in the whole course of its becoming it possessed even for a moment of this capability of ‘being,’ then all becoming would long since have come to an end, along with all thinking, all ‘spirit.’ The fact of ‘spirit’ as a form of becoming proves that the world has no goal, no final state, and is incapable of being.” For Nietzsche, the world has no teleology, no destination. The forces of history do not direct us toward a Zeitgeist named Hegel. Indeed, if Hegel was the preeminent philosopher of the state, Nietzsche’s philosophy of perpetual becoming can only herald the state’s demise.
HE CONTINUES… So: Nietzsche’s thought, which explodes all manifestations of the conventional political subject – its rationality, its language, its thoughts, its theories, its states, its economics – stand at the origin of the subversive counteridea which I call postmodern anarchism. Such an anarchism represents a tactical use of Nietzsche’s thinking, not (as the usual suspects propose) to shore up the rapidly eroding theoretical foundations of liberal democracy but rather to finish off that withered remnant of subject-centered post-Enlightenment politics, in order to open up a space for something more interesting. Postmodern anarchism asserts that the problems which face us today are not the result of flaws in our political structures which can be alleviated through reform of through the seizure of state power. Rather, the problem lies in the structures themselves, and in the epistemologies which sustain those structures. Nietzsche’s anarchy of the subject makes it quite clear that our culture is to blame for the sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves. Following this guilty verdict, modern political culture in general and liberal political culture in particular may expect to receive a death sentence. The liberals warn that this way lies madness. We say: we cannot know what may lie further down this river of becoming. But at least we know that it will be radically different from the disastrous political situation in which we find ourselves presently. Perhaps the greatest appeal of postmodern Nietzschean anarchism lies in the fact that it runs little risk of falling into theoretical and political traps faced by all merely modern revolutions. Marxims and nineteenth-century anarchism criticized capital, bourgeois values, and the liberal state – but they did so using the language, the terms, and the theoretical tools of the very bourgeois order they sought to undermine. Lenin and Mao sought to reshape the state into something which could sanction genuine political and economic freedom, but they retained so many of the old forms that they ended up reproducing the old varieties of repression and exploitation. “The problem for revolutionaries today,” as Deleuze argues, is to unite within the purpose of a particular struggle without falling into the despotic and bureaucratic organization of the party or state apparatus, a nomadic unit related to the outside that will not revive an internal despotic unity. Perhaps this is what is most profound in Nietzsche’s thought and marks the extent of his break with philosophy, at least so far as it is manifested in the aphorism: he made thought into a machine of war – a battering ram – into a nomadic force. As always, it is the performative effect of Nietzsche’s thought, rather than its explicit content, which concerns us. And one crucial effect of his thinking is that it removes philosophy from the horizons of the state. And it is an event whose ramifications will continue to be felt for some time. Just as news of the death of God takes a long time reach us, so too does news of the death of the state. But the word of these deaths draws inexorably nearer. For no God and no state can hope to survive a full engagement with that thinking which detonates all fixed human identities and reveals as mere phantasms of consciousness all fixed politics, economics, and culture.
Politics that does not begin with the creation of the self is doomed to reactivity and ressentiment. This inscribes hatred into the place of power and reaffirms existing structures of domination.
Newman 2k: (Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory at the University of London at Goldsmiths, 2000, “Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment,” Theory and Event, 4:3); AB
Ressentiment is diagnosed by Nietzsche as our modern condition. In order to understand ressentiment, however, it is nec-essary to understand the relationship between master morality and slave morality in which ressentiment is generated. Nietzsche’s work On the Genealogy of Morality is a study of the origins of morality. For Nietzsche, the way we interpret and impose values on the world has a history — its origins are often brutal and far removed from the values they produce. The value of ‘good’, for instance, was invented by the noble and high-placed to apply to themselves, in contrast to common, low-placed and plebeian.3 It was the value of the master — ‘good’ — as opposed to that of the slave — ‘bad’. Thus, according to Nietzsche, it was in this pathos of distance, between the high-born and the low-born, this absolute sense of superiority, that values were created.4 However, this equation of good and aristocratic began to be undermined by a slave revolt in values. This slave revolt, according to Nietzsche, began with the Jews who instigated a revaluation of values: It was the Jews who, rejecting the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed) ventured with awe-inspiring consistency, to bring about a reversal and held it in the teeth of their unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless), saying, ‘Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble, the powerful, you are eternally wicked, cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will also be eternally wretched, cursed and damned!’…5 In this way the slave revolt in morality inverted the noble system of values and began to equate good with the lowly, the powerless — the slave. This inversion introduced the pernicious spirit of revenge and hatred into the creation of values. There- will to power. It would be, in other words, an anarchism without ressentiment. The question of community is central to radical politics, including anarchism. One cannot talk about collective action without at least posing the question of community. For Nietzsche, most modern radical aspirations towards community were a manifestation of the ‘herd’ mentality. However it may be possible to construct a ressentiment-free notion of community from Nietzsche’s own concept of power. For Nietzsche, active power is the individual’s instinctive discharge of his forces and capacities which produces in him an enhanced sensation of power, while reactive power, as we have seen, needs an external object to act on and define itself in opposition to.66 Perhaps one could imagine a form of community based on active power. For Nietzsche this enhanced feeling of power may be derived from assistance and benevolence towards others, from enhancing the feeling of power of others.67 Like the ethics of mutual aid, a community based on will to power may be composed of a series of inter-subjective relations that involve helping and caring for people without dominating them and denying difference. This openness to difference and self-transformation, and the ethic of care, may be the defining characteristics of the post-anarchist democratic community. This would be a community of active power — a community of ‘masters’ rather than ‘slaves’.68 It would be a community that sought to overcome itself — continually transforming itself and revelling in the knowledge of its power to do so. Post-anarchism may be seen, then, as a series of politicoethical strategies against domination, without essentialist guarantees and Manichean structures that condition and restrict classical anarchism. It would affirm the contingency of values and identities, including its own, and affirm, rather than deny, fore morality, as we understand it, had its roots in this vengeful will to power of the powerless over the powerful — the revolt of the slave against the master. It was from this imperceptible, subterranean hatred that grew the values subsequently associated with the good — pity, altruism, meekness, etc. Political values also grew from this poisonous root. For Nietzsche, values of equality and democracy, which form the cornerstone of radical political theory, arose out of the slave revolt in morality. They are generated by the same spirit of revenge and hatred of the powerful. Nietzsche therefore condemns political movements like liberal democracy, socialism, and indeed anarchism. He sees the democratic movement as an expression of the herd-animal morality derived from the Judeo-Christian revaluation of values.6 Anarchism is for Nietzsche the most extreme heir to democratic values — the most rabid expression of the herd instinct. It seeks to level the differences between individuals, to abolish class distinctions, to raze hierarchies to the ground, and to equalize the powerful and the powerless, the rich and the poor, the master and the slave. To Nietzsche this is bringing everything down to level of the lowest common denominator — to erase the pathos of distance between the master and slave, the sense of difference and superiority through which great values are created. Nietzsche sees this as the worst excess of European nihilism — the death of values and creativity. Slave morality is characterized by the attitude of ressentiment — the resentment and hatred of the powerless for the powerful. Nietzsche sees ressentiment as an entirely negative sentiment — the attitude of denying what is life-affirming, saying ‘no’ to what is different, what is ‘outside’ or ‘other’. Ressentiment is characterized by an orientation to the outside, rather than the focus of noble morality, which is on the self.7 While the master says ‘I am good’ and adds as an afterthought, ‘therefore he is bad’; the slave says the opposite — ‘He (the master) is bad, therefore I am good’. Thus the invention of values comes from a comparison or opposition to that which is outside, other, different. Nietzsche says: “… in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, psychologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act all, — its action is basically a reaction.”8 This reactive stance, this inability to define anything except in opposition to something else, is the attitude of ressentiment. It is the reactive stance of the weak who define themselves in opposition to the strong.
Reject ressentiment because it’s the foundation of psychology that instills a revengeful hatred that deprecates existence – outweighs all other impacts. Bracketed for gendered language.
Deleuze ‘83: Gilles, 1983, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pg. 34-36 BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE
Is this difference only psychological? A difference of mood or tone? Nietzsche's philosophy depends, in general, on the principle that ressentiment, bad conscience etc. are not psychological determinations. Nietzsche calls the enterprise of denying life and depreciating existence nihilism. He analyses the principal forms of nihilism, ressentiment, bad conscience, ascetic ideal; the whole of nihilism and its forms he calls the spirit of revenge. But, the different forms of nihilism are not at all reducible to psychological determinations, historical events or ideological currents, not even to metaphysical structures. 3 0 The spirit of revenge is undoubtedly expressed biologically, psychologically, historically and metaphysically; the spirit of revenge is a type, it is not separable from a typology, the key stone of Nietzschean philosophy. But the problem is: what is the nature of this typology? Far from being a psychological trait the spirit of revenge is the principle on which our whole psychology depends. Ressentiment is not part of psychology but the whole of our psychology, without knowing it, is a part of ressentiment. In the same way, when Nietzsche shows that Christianity is full of ressentiment and bad conscience he does not make nihilism a historical event, it is rather the element of history as such, the motor of universal history, the famous "historical meaning" or "meaning of history" which at one time found its most adequate manifestation in Christianity. And when Nietzsche undertakes the critique of nihilism he makes nihilism the presupposition of all metaphysics rather than the expression of particular metaphysics: there is no metaphysics which does not judge and depreciate life in the name of a supra-sensible world. We cannot even say that nihilism and its forms are categories of thought, for the categories of thought, of reasonable thought - identity, causality, finality - themselves presuppose an interpretation of force which is that of ressentiment. For all these reasons Nietzsche can say: "The instinct of revenge has gained such a hold on humanity over the centuries that the whole of metaphysics, psychology, history and above all morality bear its imprint. As soon as man began thinking he The Tragic 35 introduced the bacillus of revenge into things" (VP III 458). We must understand this as meaning that the instinct of revenge is the force which constitutes the essence of what we call psychology, history, metaphysics and morality. The spirit of revenge is the genealogical element of our thought, the transcendental principle of our way of thinking. Nietzsche's struggle against nihilism and the spirit of revenge will therefore mean the reversal of metaphysics, the end of history as history of man and the transformation of the sciences. And we do not really know what a man person denuded of ressentiment would be like. A man who would not accuse or depreciate existence - would he still be a man, would he think like a man? Would he not already be something other than a man, almost the Overman? To have ressentiment or not to have ressentiment - there is no greater difference, beyond psychology, beyond history, beyond metaphysics. It is the true difference or transcendental typology - the genealogical and hierarchical difference. Nietzsche presents the aim of his philosophy as the freeing of thought from nihilism and its various forms. Now, this implies a new way of thinking, an overthrow of the principle on which thought depends, a straightening out of the genealogical principle itself, a "transmutation". For a long time we have only been able to think in terms oi ressentiment and bad conscience. We have had no other ideal but the ascetic ideal. We have opposed knowledge to life in order to judge life, in order to make it something blameworthy, responsible or erroneous. We turned will into something bad, something stricken by a basic contradiction: we have said that it must be rectified, restrained, limited and even denied and suppressed. It was only any good at this price. There is no philosopher who, discovering the essence of will, has not groaned at his own discovery and, like the timid fortuneteller, has not immediately seen bad omens for the future and the source of all evils of the past. Schopenhauer pushed this old conception to its extreme limit; the penitentiary of the will, he said, and the wheel of Ixion. Nietzsche is the only one who does not groan at the discovery of the will, who does not try to exorcise it, or limit its effect. The phrase "a new way of thinking" means an affirmative thought, a thought which affirms life and the will to life, a thought which finally expels the whole of the negative; to believe in the innocence of the future and the past, to believe in the eternal return. What Nietzsche calls his glad tidings is that existence is no longer treated as blameworthy nor does the will feel guilty for existing. "Will, this is what the liberator and the messenger of joy is called" (Z II "Of Redemption"). 3 1 The glad tidings are tragic thought, for tragedy is not found in the recriminations of ressentiment, the conflicts of bad conscience or the contradictions of a will which feels guilty and responsible. The tragic does not even fight against ressentiment, bad conscience or nihilism. According to Nietzsche it has never been understood that the tragic = the joyful. This is another way of putting the great equation: to will = to create. We have not understood that the tragic is pure and multiple positivity, dynamic gaeity.
Imbuing the state with power allows it to suspend itself in a state of exception that creates zones of indistinction, where people become invisible and commodified for violence. Bracketed for gendered language.
Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
More than this inclusion by exclusion, sovereign power in the West is constituted by its ability to suspend itself in a state of exception, or ban: "The originary relation of law to life is not application but abandonment."15 The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign is at the same time inside and outside the sovereign order: the sovereign can suspend the law. What defines the rule of law is the state of exception when law is suspended. The very space in which juridical order can have validity is created and defined through the sovereign exception. However, the exception that defines the structure of sovereignty is more complex than the inclusion of what is outside by means of an interdiction.16 It is not just a question of creating a distinction between inside and outside: it is the tracing of a threshold between the two, a location where inside and outside enter into a zone of indistinction. It is this state of exception, or the zone of indistinction between inside and outside, that makes the modern juridical order of the West possible. The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provisional state of danger as a means of establishing the Nazi state it- self. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its boundaries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the normal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitutive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded exclusion from human law (killing him these people does not count as homicide) and he is excluded exclusion from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the exclusion of both the sacred and the profane.
Legal education and state-heuristic debate produce chronic mediocrity through the “YEAH THE STATE SUCKS, BUT LET’S USE IT THO” mentality – guarantees extremely violent decision-making.
Schlag ‘9: Pierre, Byron R. White Professor of Law and Former Associate Dean for Research, University of Colorado Law School, “ESSAY AND RESPONSE: Spam Jurisprudence, Air Law, and the Rank Anxiety of Nothing Happening (A Report on the State of the Art),” March, 2009, Georgetown Law Journal, 97 Geo. L.J. 803
In terms of social organization then, there may be something to be said for creating a professional corps (lawyers) whose modes of communication are widely shared and relatively standardized. Notice that if this is the objective, then the only place where that sort of standardized communication can be widely shared is somewhere close to the middle of the bell curve. Both intellectual sloth and intellectual excellence are, by definition, aberrant and thus detract from our efforts at standardization. Thus, training for mediocrity does serve a social function (within limits, of course). Mediocrity is not the only aim here. One would like this mediocrity to be the best it can be. We would like legal professionals to share a language and a mode of thought and, at the same time, for that language and mode of thought to be as perspicuous and intelligent as possible. Given the omnipresence of the bell curve, these desiderata are obviously in tension. The economists would likely talk about achieving "the optimal degree" of intelligence and mediocrity at the margin, but my sense is this will only get us so far. For law professors, the tension is bound to be somewhat frustrating. What many law professors would like--because many of them are intellectually inclined--is to bring intelligence to bear within legal discourse. This is bound to be a somewhat frustrating venture. Legal discourse is not designed to produce intelligence and, frankly, the materials and the discourse can only bear so much. Good judgment, groundedness, reasonableness--any of these virtues is often enough to snuff out real thinking. Indeed, whatever appeal good judgment, groundedness, and reasonableness may have for a judge or a lawyer (and I am prepared to say the appeal is considerable), such virtues are not particularly helpful to intellectual achievement. On the contrary, intellectual achievement requires the abandonment of received understandings. In fact, I would go so far as to say that intellectual vitality (at least in the context of a discipline like law) *829 requires some degree of defamiliarization, some reach for the exotic. The thing is, those sorts of efforts are not going to get very far if they constantly have to answer to good judgment, groundedness, reasonableness, and the like. And at this point, I would like to flip the argument made earlier in the paper. Here, I would like us to think of appeals to good judgment, groundedness, and reasonableness in legal thought as appeals to mediocrity. Making people see things involves things far different from good judgment, groundedness, or reasonableness. It involves a kind of artistry--a reorientation of the gaze, a disruption of complacency, a sabotage of habitual forms of thought, a derailing of cognitive defaults. This is part of what a really good education is about. Constant obeisance to good judgment or groundedness or reasonableness, by contrast, will systematically frustrate such efforts. n57 This is all rather vexing. Legal academics--with aspirations to intellectual excellence--are thus destined to play out the myth of Sisyphus. The main difference, of course, is that Sisyphus had a real rock to push up a real hill. The law professors' rock and hill, by contrast are symbolic--imaginative constructions of their own making. Arguably, pushing a symbolic rock up a symbolic hill is substantially easier than doing it for real. At the very least, it is easier to fake it and to claim success. At the same time, though, the symbolic nature of the exercise perhaps makes it more transparently pointless. As between these two points, there is a certain dissonance. On the one hand, we are dealing with pushing rocks up hills--and that is surely hard work. On the other hand, the rocks and hills are of our own imagination--so it should be easy. This is very confusing. n58 My best guess (and I offer this only as a preliminary hypothesis) is that the dissonance here might yield a certain degree of neurosis. n59 Still the question pops up again: "So what?" So what--so you have maybe seven thousand-something law professors in the nation and you know, maybe ninety-six percent are engaged in a kind of vaguely neurotic scholarship. So what? Maybe it's borderline tragic. Maybe, these people could have done so much better. None of this, by the way, is clearly established. But let's just assume, it's true. Who cares? Seven thousand people--that's not a lot of people. Plus, it's hard to feel for them. I know that nearly all of them would be us (but still). It's an extraordinarily privileged life. So why care about this? Here's why. The thing about legal scholarship is that it plays--through the mediation of the professorial mind--an important role in shaping the ways, the *830 forms, in which law students think with and about law. n60 If they are taught to think in essentially mediocre ways, they will reproduce those ways of thinking as they practice law and politics. If they are incurious, if they are lacking in political and legal imagination, if they are simply repeating the standard moves (even if with impressive virtuosity) they will, as a group, be wielding power in essentially mediocre ways. And the thing is: when mediocrity is endowed with power, it yields violence. And when mediocrity is endowed with great power, it yields massive violence. n61 All of which is to say that in making the negotiation between the imprinting of standard forms of legal thought and the imparting of an imaginative intelligence, we err too much on the side of the former. (Purely my subjective call here--but so is everybody else's.) Another way to put it is that while there is something to be said for the standardization point made earlier, generally, standardization is overdone. n62
And state heuristic debates are cruelly optimistic – means presumption goes aff. Liberalism is familiarity, not revolutionary.
Berlant ‘11: Lauren, George M. Pullman Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago, Cruel Optimism, Routledge: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 33-6
When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us. This cluster of promises could be embedded in a person, a thing, an institution, a text, a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea - whatever. To phrase 'the object of desire' as a cluster of promises is to allow us to encounter what's incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality but as an explanation for our sense of our endurance in the object, insofar as proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that the object promises, some of which may be clear to us while others not so much. In other words, all attachments are optimistic. That does not mean that they all feel optimistic: one might dread, for example, returning to a scene of hunger or longing or the slapstick reiteration of a lover or parent's typical misrecognition. But the surrender to the return to the scene where the object hovers in its potentialities is the operation of optimism as an affective form. In optimism, the subject leans toward promises contained within the present moment of the encounter with their object.' 'Cruel optimism' names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realisation is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic. What's cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject's sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world. This phrase points to a condition different than that of melancholia, which is enacted in the subject's desire to temporise an experience of the loss of an object/scene with which she has identified her ego continuity. Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object. One more thing: the cruelty of an optimistic attachment is, I think, usually something an analyst observes about someone's or some group's attachment to x, since usually that attachment exists without being an event, or even better, seems to lighten the load for someone/some group.^ But if the cruelty of an attachment is experienced by someone/some group, even in disavowed fashion, the fear is that the loss of the object/scene of promising itself will defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything. Often this fear of loss of a scene of optimism as such is unstated and only experienced in a sudden incapacity to manage startling situations, as we will see below. One might point out that all objects/scenes of desire are problematic, in that investments in them and projections onto them are less about them than about what cluster of desires and affects we can manage to keep magnetised to them. I have indeed wondered whether all optimism is cruel, because the experience of loss of the conditions of its reproduction can be so breathtakingly bad, just as the threat of the loss of x in the scope of one's attachment drives can feel like a threat to living on itself. But some scenes of optimism are clearly crueller than others: where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalising or animating potency of an object/ scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first place. This might point to something as banal as a scouring love, but it also opens out to obsessive appetites, working for a living, patriotism, all kinds of things. One makes affective bargains about the costliness of one's attachments, usually unconscious ones, most of which keep one in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition. This means that a poetics of attachment always involves some splitting off of the story I can tell about wanting to be near x (as though x has autonomous qualities) from the activity of the emotional habitus I have constructed by having x in my life in order to be able to project out my endurance as proximity to the complex of what x seems to offer and proffer. To understand cruel optimism, therefore, one must embark on an analysis of rhetorical indirection, as a way of thinking about the strange temporalities of projection into an enabling object that is also disabling. I learned how to do this from reading Barbara Johnson's work on apostrophe and free indirect discourse. In her poetics of indirection, each of these rhetorical modes is shaped by the ways a writing subjectivity conjures other ones so that, in a performance of fantasmatic intersubjectivity, the writer gains superhuman observational authority, enabling a performance of being made possible by the proximity of the object. Because this object is something like what I am describing in the optimism of attachment, I'll describe a bit the shape of my transference with her thought. In 'Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,' which will be my key referent bere, Johnson tracks the political consequences of apostrophe for what has become foetal personhood: a silent, affectively present but physically displaced interlocutor (a lover, a foetus) is animated in speech as distant enough for a conversation but close enough to be imaginable by the speaker in whose head the entire scene is happening.' But the condition of projected possibility, of a hearing that cannot take place in the terms of its enunciation ('you' are not here, 'you' are eternally belated to the conversation with you that I am imagining) creates a fake present moment of intersubjectivity in which, nonetheless, a performance of address can take place. The present moment is made possible by the fantasy of you, laden with the x qualities I can project onto you, given your convenient absence. Apostrophe therefore appears to be a reaching out to a you, a direct movement from place x to y, but it is actually a turning back, an animating of a receiver on behalf of the desire to make something happen now that realises something in the speaker, makes the speaker more or differently possible, because she has admitted, in a sense, the importance of speaking for, as, and to, two: but only under the condition, and illusion, that the two is really (in) one. Apostrophe is thus an indirect, unstable, physically impossible but phenomenologically vitalising movement of rhetorical animation that permits subjects to suspend themselves in the optimism of a potential occupation of the same psychic space of others, the objects of desire who make you possible (by having some promising qualities, but also by not being there).'' Later work, such as on 'Muteness Envy,' elaborates Johnson's description of the gendered rhetorical politics of this projection of voluble intersubjectivity.'^ The paradox remains that the conditions of the lush submerging of one consciousness into another require a double negation: of the speaker's boundaries, so s/he can grow bigger in rhetorical proximity to the object of desire; and of the spoken of, who is more or less a powerful mute placeholder providing an opportunity for the speaker's imagination of her/his/their flourishing. Of course psychoanalytically speaking all intersubjectivity is impossible. It is a wish, a desire, and a demand for an enduring sense of being with and in x, and is related to that big knot that marks the indeterminate relation between a feeling of recognition and misrecognition - recognition is the misrecognition you can bear, a transaction that affirms you without, again, necessarily feeling good or accurate (it might idealise, it might affirm your monstrosity, it might mirror your desire to be nothing enough to live under the radar, it might feel just right, and so on).'' Johnson's work on projection shows that scenes of impossible identity, rhetorically rendered, open up meaning and knowledge by mining the negative - projective, boundary dissolving - spaces of attachment to the object of address who must be absent in order for the desiring subject of intersubjectivity to get some traction, to stabilise her proximity to the object/scene of promise. In free indirect discourse, a cognate kind of suspension, the circulation of this kind of merged and submerged observational subjectivity, has less pernicious outcomes, at least when Johnson reads Zora Neale Hurston's practice of it.' In a narrator's part-merging with a character's consciousness, say, free indirect discourse performs the impossibility of locating an observational intelligence in one or any body, and therefore forces the reader to transact a different, more open relation of unfolding to what she is reading, judging, being, and thinking she understands. In Jobnson's work such a transformative transaction through reading/speaking 'unfolds' the subject in a good way, despite whatever desires they may have not to become significantly different." In short, Johnson's work on projection is about the optimism of attachment, and is often itself optimistic about the negations and extensions of personhood that forms of suspended intersubjectivity demand from the reader. What follows is not so buoyant: this is an essay politicising Freud's observation that 'people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them'.^ It comes from a longer project about the politics, aesthetics, and projections of political depression. Political depression persists in affective judgments of the world's intractability - evidenced in affectlessness, apathy, coolness, cynicism, and so on - modes of what might be called detachment that are really not detached at all but constitute ongoing relations of sociality.'" The politically depressed position is manifested in the problem of the difficulty of detaching from life-building modalities that can no longer be said to be doing their work, and which indeed make obstacles to the desires that animate them; my archive tracks practices of self-interruption, self-suspension, and self-abeyance that indicate people's struggles to change, but not traumatically, the terms of value in which their life-making activity has been cast." Cruel optimism is, then, like all phases, a deictic, a phrase that points to a proximate location: as an analytic lever it is an incitement to inhabit and to track the affective attachment to what we call 'the good life,' which is for so many a bad life that wears out the subjects who nonetheless, and at the same time, find their conditions of possibility within it. My assumption is that the conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world even of relative wealth, as in the US, are conditions of the attrition or the wearing out of the subject, and that the irony - that the labour of reproducing life in the contemporary world is also the activity of being worn out by it - has specific implications for thinking about the ordinariness of suffering, the violence of normativity, and the 'technologies of patience' or lag that enable a concept of the later to suspend questions of the cruelty of the now.'^ Cruel optimism is in this sense a concept pointing toward a mode of lived imminence, one that grows from a perception about the reasons people are not Bartlehy, do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to, to syncopate with it, or to be held in a relation of reciprocity, reconciliation, or resignation that does not mean defeat by it. Or perhaps they move to normative form to get numb with the consensual promise, and to misrecognise that promise as an achievement. This essay traverses three episodes of suspension - from John Ashhery, Charles Johnson, and Ceoff Ryman - of the reproduction of habituated or normative life. These suspensions open up revelations about the promises that had clustered as people's objects of desire, stage moments of exuberance in the impasse near the normal, and provide tools for suggesting why these exuberant attachments keep ticking not like the time bomb they might be but like a white noise machine that provides assurance that what seems like static really is, after all, a rhythm people can enter into while they're dithering, tottering, bargaining, testing, or otherwise being worn out by the promises that they have attached to in this world.
Pt. 2 Speech Codes
Speech codes mean unchecked state linguistic power – the state gets to define hate speech and avoid self-incrimination.
Butler ‘97: Judith Butler writes in “Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.” Judith Butler is Chancellor's Professor in the departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also the author of Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, co-author of Feminist Contentions, and co-editor! with Joan W. Scotti of Feminists Theorize the Political All are available from Routledge; AB
I consider the logic of this policy in the next chapter, and I propose to return to that figure of efficacious and offensive utterance toward the end of this one. In the interim, however, I aim to consider the construal of hate speech as offensive conduct, the effort to construe pornography as hate speech, and the concomitant effort to seek re- SOVEREIGN PERFORMATIVES course to the state to remedy the injuries allegedly caused by hate speech. What happens when we seek recourse to the state to regulate such speech? In particular, how is he regulatory power of the state enhanced through such an appeal? This is, perhaps, a familiar argument that I hope to make in a less than familiar way. My concern is not only with the protection of civil liberties against the incursion of the state, but with the peculiar discursive power given over to the state through the process of legal redress. I would like to suggest a formulation for the problem that might seem paradoxical, but which I think, even in its hyperbolic mode, might shed some light on the problem that regulating hate, speech poses. That formulation is this: the state produces hate speech, and by this I do not mean that the state is accountable for the various slurs, epithets, and forms of invective that currently circulate throughout the population. I mean only that the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of publically acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain that consequential line of demarcation. The inflated and efficacious utterance attributed to hate speech in some of the politicized contexts discussed above is itself modeled on the speech of a sovereign state, understood as a sovereign speech act, a speech act with the power to do what it says. This sovereign power is attributed to hate speech when it is said to "deprive" us of rights and liberties. The power attributed to hate speech is a power of absolute and efficacious agency, performativity and transitivity at once (it does what it says and it does what it says it will do to the one addressed by the speech). Precisely this power of legal language is that to which we refer when we call upon the state to effect the regulation of offensive speech. The problem, then, is not that the force of the sovereign performative is wrong, but when used by citizens it is wrong, and when intervened upon by the state, it is, in these contexts, right. The same kind of force, however, is attributed to the performative in both instances, and that version of performative power is never brought into question by those who pursue heightened regulation. What is this power? And how are we to account for its sustained production within hate speech discourse, as well as its continuing allure? Before venturing an answer to these questions, it seems worth noting that this invocation of the sovereign performative takes place against the background of a political situation in which power is no longer constrained within the sovereign form of the state. Diffused throughout disparate and competing domains of the state apparatus, and through civil society in diffuse forms as well, power cannot be easily or definitively traced to a single subject who is its "speaker:' to a sovereign representative of the state. To the extent that Foucault is right to describe contemporary relations of power as emanating from a number of possible sites, power is no longer constrained by the parameters of sovereignty. The difficulty of describing power as a sovereign formation, however, in no way precludes fantasizing or figuring power in precisely that way; to the contrary, the historical loss of the sovereign 78 1 organization of power appears to occasion the fantasy of its return-a return, I want to argue, . that takes place in language, in the figure of the performative. The emphasis on the performative phantasmatically resurrects the performative in language, establishing language as a displaced site of politics and specifying that displacement as driven by a wish to return to a simpler and more reassuring map of power, one in which the assumption of sovereignty remains secure.
Voting aff rejects the politics of aesthetics – speech shouldn’t be aestheticized. Words are byproducts of societal conditions.
Gilmore ‘9: Paul Gilmore (Paul Gilmore, Associate Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach – scholar critical work in dealing with the history, transatlantic dimensions, and political promises of American Romantic literature - Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism, Published 01/01/2009)
From this reading, Shelley’s idea of the poet as an unacknowledged legislator wielding a sword of lightning takes on a new light, revealing the limitations as well as the power of poetry as a political force. Eschewing the utopianism of the late Enlightenment, Shelley electrifies the human imagination, rendering it both the medium where the mental and the physical meet and the source of intellectual and physical freedom. As such, the materiality of electric poetry lies not just in its physicality—in language being registered by the senses—but in its genesis within and action upon the social world. Poetry is material because it is literally words, which are material themselves, but it is also material in a sociohistorical sense, the product of material conditions of political and economic structures. In “Defence,” for example, Shelley indicates that it is poetry’s embeddeness in what we might now call social discourse that gives it its “electric life,” as that life is “less the poets’ spirit than the spirit of the age” (7:140). Similarly, in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, in further developing the figure of lightning thought, Percy elaorates this relationship between mind and the world, gesturing to its political implications: “The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition, or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or is about to be restored” (2:173). Echoing Schlegel’s prediction about the lightning charge of poetry, Percy at once envisions political revolution and at the same time insists that the changes to come are unpredictable, are “unimagined.” Thus, in concluding his preface to Prometheus Unbound, Percy acknowledges his “‘passion for reforming the world,’” but insists that his poetry does not contain “a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence” (2:174). As Kaufman, from an Adornian-Marxist position, Paul Hamilton, from a Habermasian-Public Sphere approach, and Redfield, from a de Manian–deconstructive angle, have all differently argued, it is this refusal of political commitment that allows Shelley to provide an alternative understanding of aesthetic politics.27 Through acknowledging the material opacity of language itself and by gesturing to the radical indeterminacy of meaning, in drawing on materialist understandings of the mind and the basis of the self in the senses, and in recognizing the sociohistorical conditions and material means by which poetry is disseminated, Percy Shelley emerges as a theorist and practitioner of a kind of aesthetics imagined to engender critical thinking about one’s self and the world, a process of constantly questioning received ideas that opens the self to new experiences and new perspectives that might provide the ground for sociopolitical change but that refuses to offer a political programme.
The aff is key to creating a space beyond the law – controls the internal link to all pessimism kritiks, including cap.
Noterman and Pusey ‘12: (Elsa Noterman is Program Associate at the Community Strategies Group of the Aspen Insitute, Andre Pusey is a PhD candidate in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK, “Inside, Outside, and on the Edge of the Academy: Experiments in Radical Pedagogies” in Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Action, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, pp. 192-194); AB
So, how do we build this new kind of open and ephemeral institution? We think it is important to open up spaces in which we can both experiment with, and critically reflect upon, radical pedagogical practices. The crisis of the university is a crisis that throws up new openings and possibilities for what a university could be. These spaces can work toward pushing the boundaries of the academy by concretely asking, “what can a university do?” in praxis We need to engage in a discussion about how we can go forward as critical-radical researchers inside, outside and on the periphery of the academy. Is there any place for us within the institution as it is? Or as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2004) suggest, is the “only possible with the relationship to the university today . . . a criminal one”? This opens up the question/possibility of what Virno terms “exodus,” but which might also be described as “desertion.” This is not a territorial exodus, or a fleeing from, but rather a desertion of one’s assigned role, in this case of the “critical” yet docile body (Foucault, 2004) of the academic. As Harney and Moten (2004) put it, “to be in but not of is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.” In part, the Really Open University is an experiment in just this. The creation of spaces in which we can begin to interrogate the role of the university and of the academic, not just as theoretical exercise, but within an implicitly antagonistic, yet not wholly reactive, space of political engagement. This is a messy space that avoids any pure politics, or identitarian overcoding, neither overtly anarchist, nor Marxist, nor simply an “anticuts” group, yet neither a purely utopian reimagining. This is necessarily a “cramped space,” of (im)possibility, as Deleuze (2005) states, “creation takes place in bottlenecks.” Many elements of the edu-struggle will ultimately want to close down the categories again, in order to give more weight to their ideological underpinnings, trying to make the moment fit their politics, rather than seizing the moment in all its wealth of potentiality. The ROU views ‘crisis as possibility’ arguing that it is “up to us to decide the universities future.”17 But through what concrete actions might we actually develop a “really open university”? One way to begin may be through the occupation of the spaces where we work, play and consume, and the reappropriation of this time and space for our own (common) ends. This may help to promote new lines of questioning and open up new connectivities. One way to discuss this occupation and reappropriation, might be the literal forced reclamation of space, though direct action. This has, of course, been a tried and tested method across history, and we have seen the tactic of occupation has begun to some extent become popular again, with the recent occupations at universities across the UK, but to a much larger extent across Europe and the United States. We think there is an interesting dynamic, however, between defensive and offensive uses of occupation. We do not wish to set up a binary, but rather are interested in the qualitative shifts and activities that can occur within the occupied space itself, rather than simply the obstructive element of occupation. This problematic has been explored in the U.S. occupations movement through the often heated debate about the utility of political demands, versus occupation without demands. For example, “Occupation mandates the inversion of the standard dimensions of space. Space in an occupation is not merely the container of our bodies, it is a plane of potentiality that has been frozen by the logic of the commodity” (Inoperative Committee, 2009). Another way to discuss the occupation and reappropriation of time and space might be through the creation of new spaces that prefigure the new forms we may wish a reimagined university to take. A concrete example of this is the model of the autonomous social center, or “infoshop,” found within anarchist and autonomous activist practices (Atton, 1999). Social centers are place-based, self-managed spaces. They can be squatted, rented or cooperatively owned (Pusey, 2010). A particularly rich history of social centers can be found in Italy, but they exist all across Europe. In the United States the closest approximation to the autonomous social centers seems to be the network of radical bookstores and “infoshops” such as Red Emma’s in Baltimore and Bluestockings in New York City (Kanuga, 2010). Some academics at the University of Lincoln are attempting to develop a cooperatively run “social science center” that utilizes a social center type autonomous space, where they can practice radical pedagogical methods (Winn, 2010). The idea is that students will be able to enroll for free and staff will still be paid. We can imagine, based on our experiences and research within social centers in the UK, that this would be controversial within anarchist circles, both for its relationship with the institution of the university, and also because of its payment of academic staff. Payment for some roles performed within some spaces has been a source of much debate and contention within social centers within the UK (Chatterton, 2008). These spaces generally rely on the good will and free time of volunteers. However, many spaces cite burnout and lack of participation as major issues within social centers (UK Social Centres Network, 2008). The “dole autonomy” (Aufheben, 1999), which helped facilitate earlier cycles of struggle, has been very much weakened with successive government attacks on the welfare state, and students increasingly forced to take employment while studying means that there are far fewer people around with the “free time” to help enable projects such as these. It is, perhaps, through the establishment of self-organized alternative educational practices, and open and ephemeral institutions that we can start to value ideas for their own merit, rather than capitalist value—to create spaces and places where we can discard the price tags of commodified knowledge and instrumental learning, and instead appreciate the value of ideas and concepts themselves, while rediscovering the subversiveness of teaching.
Short-term harms are non-unique because the state will oppress us over no matter what we do, but denying the state legitimacy causes the state to implode itself from overproduction –  It’s try-or-die for the affirmative.
Baudrillard ‘83: Jean, IN THE SHADOW OF THE SILENT MAJORITIES OR THE END OF THE SOCIAL. 1983
From Resistance to Hyperconformity The emergence of silent majorities must be located within the entire cycle of historical resistance to the social. Resistance to work of course, but also resistance to medicine, resistance to schooling, resistance to security, resistance to information. Official history only records the uninterrupted progress of the social, relegating to the obscurity reserved for former cultures, as barbarous relics, everything not coinciding with this glorious advent. In fact, contrary to what one might believe (that the social has definitely won, that its movement is irreversible, that consensus upon the social is total), resistance to the social in all its forms has progressed even more rapidly than the social. It has merely taken other forms than the primitive and violent ones which were subsequently absorbed (the social is alive and well, thank you, only idiots run away from writing and vaccination and the benefits of security). Those frontal resistances still corresponded to an equally frontal and violent period of socialisation, and carne from traditional groups seeking to preserve their own culture, their original cultures. It was not the mass in them which resisted, but, on the contrary, differentiated structures, in opposition to the homogeneous and abstract model of the social. This type of resistance can still be discovered in the "two-step flow of communication" which American sociology has analysed: the mass does not at all constitute a passive receiving structure for media messages, whether they be political, cultural or advertising. Microgroups and individuals, far from taking their cue from a uniform and imposed decoding, decode messages in their own way. They intercept them (through leaders) and transpose them (second level), contrasting the dominant code with their own particular sub-codes, finally recycling everything passing into their own cycle, exactly like primitive natives recycle western money in their symbolic circulation (the Siane of New Guinea) or like the Corsicans recycle universal suffrage and elections in their clan rivalry strategies. This ruse is universal: it is a way of redirecting, of absorbing, of victoriously salvaging the material diffused by the dominant culture. It is this which also governs the "magic" usage of the doctor and medicine among the "underdeveloped" masses. Commonly reduced to an antiquated and irrational mentality, we should read in this, on the contrary, an offensive practice, a rediversion by excess, an unanalysed but conscious rejection "without knowing it" of the profound devastation wreaked by rational medicine. But this is still the feat of groups traditionally structured by identity and significance. Quite different is the refusal of socialisation which comes from the mass; from an innumerable, unnamable and anonymous group, whose strength comes from its very destructuration and inertia. Thus, in the case of the media, traditional resistance consists of reinterpreting messages according to the group's own code and for its own ends. The masses, on the contrary, accept everything and redirect everything en bloc into the spectacular, without requiring any other code, without requiring any meaning, ultimately without resistance, but making everything slide into an indeterminate sphere which is not even that of non-sense, but that of overall manipulation/ fascination. It has always been thought - this is the very ideology of the mass media - that it is the media which envelop the masses. The secret of manipulation has been sought in a frantic semiology of the mass media. But it has been overlooked, in this naive logic of communication, that the masses are a stronger medium than all the media, that it is the former who envelop and absorb the latter - or at least there is no priority of one over the other. The mass and the media are one single process. Mass(age) is the message. So it is with movies, whose inventors initially dreamed of a rational, documentary, social medium, but which very quickly and permanently swung towards the imaginary. So it is with technology, science, and knowledge. Condemned to a "magical" practice and to a "spectacular" consumption.· So it is with consumption itself. To their amazement, economists have never been able to rationalise consumption, the seriousness of their "theory of need" and the general consensus upon the discourse of utility being taken for granted. But this is because the practice of the masses very quickly had nothing (or perhaps never had anything) to do with needs. They have turned consumption into a dimension of status and prestige, of useless keeping up with the Joneses or simulation, of potlatch which surpassed use value in every way. A desperate attempt has been made from all sides (official propaganda, consumer societies, ecologues and sociologues) to instil into them sensible spending and functional calculation in matters of consumption, but it is hopeless. For it is by sign/ value and the frantic stake in sign/value (which economists, even when they try to integrate it as a variable, have always seen as upsetting economic reason), that the masses block the economy, resist the" objective" imperative of needs and the rational balancing of behaviors and ends. Sign/ value against use value, this is already a distortion of political economy. And let it not be said that all this ultimately profits exchange value, that is to say the system. For if the system does well out of this game, and even encourages it (the masses "alienated" in gadgets, etc.), this isn't the main thing, and what this slipping, this skidding initiates in the long term - already initiates - is the end of the economic, cut off from all its rational definitions by the excessive, magic, spectacular, fraudulent and nearly parodic use the masses put it to. An asocial use, resistant to all pedagogies, to all socialist education - an aberrant use whereby the masses (us, you, everybody) have already crossed over to the other side of political economy. They haven't waited for future revolutions nor theories which claim to "liberate" them by a "dialectical" movement. They know that there is no liberation, and that a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization. "You want us to consume - O.K., let's consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose." So it is with medicine: frontal resistance (which hasn't disappeared everywhere) has been replaced by a more subtle form of subversion; an excessive, uncontrollable consumption of medicine, a panicked conformity to health injunctions. A fantastic escalation in medical consumption which completely corrupts the social objectives and finalities of medicine. What better way to abolish it? At present, doctors, manipulated much more than they manipulate, no longer know what they are doing, what they are. "Give us more treatment, doctors, medication, security, health - more, ever further, keep it coming ... !" The masses alienated in medicine? Not at all: they are in the process of ruining its institution, of making Social Security explode, of putting the social itself in danger by craving always more of it, as with commodities.
I defend the whole resolution as a thought experiment.
The role of the ballot is to reject traditional forms of policy scholarship in favor of voting for the debater with the best kritikal methodology. This means rejecting roleplaying, fiat, state good or heuristic arguments. Kritikal methodology refers to pre-fiat discursive literature and scholarship. It’s a means-based role of the judge. You can link back offense with a counter methodology. The 1AC comes before theory/T.
Blind adherence to fiat has drained debate of meaning. Fiat is hegemonic marginalization to prevent institutional subversion – LINK TURNS your T/theory standards – deliberation is useless without critical literature.
Gunder ‘9: senior planning lecturer at the Aukland University Michael. “Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning”. Pg. 11-12.; AB
The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies of desired success, such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their desired enjoyment (cobblestones, chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum, this defines what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other, remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they are one and the same) is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as technical, rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "˜dominant stakeholders` can ensure the impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many whilst, of course, achieving their stakeholders’ specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469). The current post-democratic` milieu facilitates the above through avoidance of critical policy debate challenging favored orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of policy deficiencies, or alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while token institutions of liberal democracy’ are retained conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59). Consequently, the safe names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used or their work drawn upon by different stakeholders, while more critical voices are silenced by their inability to shape policy debates’ (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic development or spatial planning policy analyst thus continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying only the orthodox "successful” or "best practice” economic development or spatial planning responses. This further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo while providing "˜a cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer" isolating the political held from any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for public policy’ (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to generate similar policy responses for every competing local area or city-region, largely resulting in a zero-sum game (Blair and Kumar 1997).
Prefer in-round empowerment – voting aff creates change right now by raising the middle finger to the state. Debate spaces are key – they have transformative potential.
Vincent ‘13: Christopher J. Vincent writes in “Re-Conceptualizing our Performances: Accountability in Lincoln Douglas Debate” on October 26th, 2013 for Victory Briefs. http://www.vbriefly.com/2013/10/26/201310re-conceptualizing-our-performances-accountability-in-lincoln-douglas-debate/; AB
Until we re-conceptualize the speech and the speech act, and until judges are comfortable enough to vote down debaters for a performance that perpetuates violence in the debate space, debaters and coaches alike will remain complacent in their privilege. As educators we must begin to shift the paradigm and be comfortable doing this. As a community we should stop looking at ourselves as isolated in a vacuum and recognize that the discourse and knowledge we produce in debate has real implications for how we think when we leave this space. Our performances must be viewed as of the body instead of just by it. As long as we continue to operate in a world where our performances are merely by bodies, we will continue to foster a climate of hostility and violence towards students of color, and in turn destroy the transformative potential this community could have.
UNDERVIEW
- Varies.

Tournament: Stanford | Round: 1 | Opponent: Oakwood NB | Judge: Fred Ditzian
Part 1 is Framing
Welcome to the world of the aff where we no longer are confined to the state and let it do its own thing. This is the time for the anarchy of becoming – a ideological separation of state and person.
The specter haunting politics is power – we must transcend the current power structures of the state through the anarchy of the self.
Newman ‘10: (Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory at the University of London at Goldsmiths, 2010, “The Politics of Postanarchism,” pub. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 104-107); AB
We observe a similar silence about anarchism in more recent radical political thought, that which comes in the wake of poststructuralism. Indeed, in much contemporary continental theory we fi nd a series of themes, preoccupations and debates which bear a strong resemblance to those of anarchism. Amid the ruins of Marxism – or at least of a certain institutionalised and statist form of it – there is a desire among many thinkers today to develop new categories and directions for radical politics. There is the attempt, fi st, to find new forms of radical political subjectivity no longer based on the Marxist notion of the proletariat. There is a recognition that such a category is too narrow to express the different forms of oppression, modes of politicisation and ways of relating to one’s own work and existence that make up the contemporary world. However, there is also the recognition of the inadequacy of the ultimately liberal notion of ‘identity politics’ that characterised much new social movement theory. What is called for is new way of thinking about how, and by what processes, a subject becomes politicised – how does the subject become an egalitarian and collective subject? Secondly, there is, among many thinkers today, a rejection of authoritarian modes of political organisation – for instance, the centrally organised Marxist–Leninist vanguard party which would lead the proletariat to revolution, or the Communist and socialist parties in capitalist countries which sought to play the parliamentary game, thus abandoning any hope of emancipation from the state. There is a need, then, as Badiou would put it, for a politics without a party3 – new forms of political organisation that are no longer structured around the model of the party, as the party always has as its aim the reproduction of state power. Related to this, therefore, is the question of the state itself: the immovability of state power, despite the revolutionary programmes which promised its ‘withering away’, and, moreover, the increasingly authoritarian character of the so- called liberal democratic state, show us that the state remains perhaps the central problem in radical politics. Radical thought, therefore, sees politics increasingly as being situated beyond the state – there is a desire to find a space for politics outside the framework of state power, a space from which the hegemony of the state would be challenged. It seems to me that these themes and questions – political subjectivity beyond class, political organisation beyond the party and political action beyond the state – relate directly to anarchism. If these are the new directions that radical politics is moving in, then this would seem to suggest an increasingly anarchistic orientation. Indeed, this is a tendency that is being borne out in many radical movements and forms of resistance today. The emergence of the global anti- capitalist movement in recent times suggests a new form of politics, one that is much closer to anarchism in its aspirations and tactics, and in its decentralised, democratic modes of organisation. Also, the insurrections in Greece in December 2008 – which had an explicitly anarchist identification – are indicative of this libertarian moment in radical politics. It would seem that the prevailing form taken by radical politics today is anti- statist, anti- authoritarian and decentralised, and emphasises direct action rather than representative party politics and lobbying. Furthermore, is it not evident that there is a massive disengagement of ordinary people from normal political processes, an overwhelming scepticism – especially in the wake of the current economic crisis – about the political elites who supposedly govern in their interests? Is there not, at the same time, an obvious consternation on the part of these elites at this growing distance, signifying a crisis in their symbolic legitimacy? As a defensive or pre- emptive measure,4 the state becomes more draconian and predatory, increasingly obsessed with surveillance and control, defining itself through war and security, seeking to authorise itself through a politics of fear and exception. How should radical political thought respond to this situation, lagging behind – as it so often does – reality ‘on the ground’? My contention is that anarchism – or more precisely postanarchism – can provide some answers here. Indeed, anarchism might be seen as the hidden referent for radical political thought today: while its importance is scarcely acknowledged amongst the thinkers referred to above, anarchism can nevertheless offer critical resources for radical political theory, allowing it to transcend many of its current limitations and, indeed, providing it with a more consistent ethical and political framework.
The state’s dialectic of prohibition and legalization sustains the biopolitical state of exception.  This creates a zone of indistinction, where certain people become invisible to society. Bracketed for Gendered Language.
Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
More than this inclusion by exclusion, sovereign power in the West is constituted by its ability to suspend itself in a state of exception, or ban: "The originary relation of law to life is not application but abandonment."15 The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign is at the same time inside and outside the sovereign order: the sovereign can suspend the law. What defines the rule of law is the state of exception when law is suspended. The very space in which juridical order can have validity is created and defined through the sovereign exception. However, the exception that defines the structure of sovereignty is more complex than the inclusion of what is outside by means of an interdiction.16 It is not just a question of creating a distinction between inside and outside: it is the tracing of a threshold between the two, a location where inside and outside enter into a zone of indistinction. It is this state of exception, or the zone of indistinction between inside and outside, that makes the modern juridical order of the West possible. The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provisional state of danger as a means of establishing the Nazi state it- self. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its boundaries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the normal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitutive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded exclusion from human law (killing him these people does not count as homicide) and he is excluded exclusion from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the exclusion of both the sacred and the profane.
The state’s regulation of access to rights is a gateway for biopolitical violence – people not seen as worthy of rights by the state get oppressed.
Agamben ‘8: Giorgio Agamben writes in “Beyond Human Rights” in 2008. Giorgio Agamben (Italian: aˈɡambɛn; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, 4 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. http://jstor.reed.edu/stable/pdf/40644981.pdf; AB
The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. 3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.
Liberalism tries to seize control of the state and direct the flow of history; This fails and maintains ongoing violence against the oppressed by maintaining state control. Against this, affirm an anarchy of becoming – a micropolitical reconfiguration of the subject that severs the state from the relationship to the self.
Call ‘2: (Lewis Call, Associate Professor of History at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, 2002, Postmodern Anarchism. Lexington: Lexington Books, pp. 47-56); AB
But the usual suspects have another, much more serious problem. Even if postmodern liberals can reject Nietzsche’s assaults on capitalism and the liberal state – and it is easy enough to locate passages in Nietzsche’s books where he seems to contradict these assaults – those who would use Nietzsche to shore up the eroding foundations of liberal democracy must contend with the even more powerful and radical forms of anarchy which are to be found in Nietzsche’s thought. They must contend, for example, with Nietzsche’s well-known anarchy of the subject. A number of commentators have pointed out that one of Nietzsche’s main contributions to political thought is his destruction of the conventional concepts of human subjectivity which lie at the basis of most modern political theories. Keith Ansell-Pearson suggests, for example, that the Genealogy aims “to show that one of the central ideas of moral and political theory, that of a human subject in possession of conscience and a free will, is not a natural given. William Connolly points out that after Nietzsche “the subject is not simply or unambiguously the self which establishes its unity, freedom, independence and self-transparency. And the assault on conventional (i.e., post-Enlightenment) ideas of subjectivity is not simply a metaphysical or epistemological issue. It is also a deeply political issue which has profound implications for the consruction of political theories and institutions. Those implications do not bode well for liberalism. Mark Warren summarizes the problem nicely: “Because liberals put a metaphysical placeholder in the space of the individual, they failed to theorize this space. As a result, they justified liberal forms of the state in terms of a historically conditioned effect mistaken for a universal essence. This is why Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism in Western culture as the collapse of the individual agent also implicates the individualistic metaphysics of liberalism. Nietzsche’s assault on modern subjectivity, then, undermines the philosophical foundations of the liberal state. After Nietzsche, liberals find themselves thrown into a confusing postmodern world of multiple subject positions and decentered identities. They are forces to develop a new kind of liberal politics, one which will not rely upon epistemologically suspect categories of individuality. This is, as we have seen, a difficult task, and one which liberals rarely complete in a satisfying way. Let us now look in more detail at Nietzsche’s anarchy of the subject. Nietzsche famously regarded the free will which is central to most conventional notions of subjectivity as an egregious error. For example, he notes in Human, All Too Human that “we do not accuse nature of immorality when it sends thunderstorms and makes us wet: why do we call the harmful man immoral?” Because in the latter case we assume a voluntary commanding free will, in the former necessity. But this distinction is an error. Here Nietzsche seems to be advocating a kind of radical determinism: he views individual actions not as the product of some chimerical free will, but rather as the indirect product of the social and cultural forces which have constituted the individual who performs those actions. Of course, this has radical implications for political theory. If we understand individual actions as the product of the society and culture which produced the individual, then society is quite literally to blame for what its members do. This naturally renders conventional ideas of punishment radically incoherent. “How is it that every execution offends us more than a murder?” Nietzsche demands. “It is the coldness of the judges, the scrupulous preparation, the insight that here a human being used as a means of deterring others. For it is not guilt that is being punished, even when it exists: this lies in educators, parents, environment, in us, not in the murderer – I mean the circumstances that cause him to become one.” This is a key point for the postmodern anarchist. If we accept that humans possess no metaphysical, pre-social essence, if we accept that they are little more than nodal points where various social, economic, and cultural forces converge to produce the illusion of subjectivity, then the punishments schemes of the liberal state make no sense. Indeed, on this reading it would make more sense to execute the system itself, since it is the system that is guilty of manufacturing criminals. Revolutionaries who follow this kind of interpretation would also, perhaps, be less likely to allow their uprisings to descend into the kind of mindless terror, which was, unfortunately, to be found in abundance in France during the 1790s, in Russia during the 1920s and 1930s, or in China during the 1950s. I say this because the radical denial of free will applies to the rulers as well as the ruled. This point was made, remarkably enough, by Bakunin, who observed in 1869 that “the kings, the oppressors, exploiters of all kinds, are as guilty as the criminals who have emerged from the masses; like them, they are the evildoers who are not guilty, since they, too, are involuntary products of the present social order.” Let the guillotine be deployed, then, not against aristocratic or bourgeois tyrants but against the philosophy of subjectivity which gives such tyrants their power in the first place. Nietzsche continues his assault on traditional forms of subjectivity and consciousness in Beyond Good and Evil, questioning whether “there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘ego,’ and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking – that I know what thinking is.” An obvious assault on the old Cartesian concept of subjectivity (“I think, therefore I am”), Nietzsche’s critique of consciousness also has dramatic political meaning. These “thinking egos” – the rational, autonomous dramatic political meaning. These “thinking egos” – the rational, autonomous subjects who have dominated political discourse since the Enlightenment – are supposedly the beings who vote in liberal elections, who serve on the liberal juries which decide the fate of the supposedly autonomous criminals who stand before them, who use the media to inform themselves about issues so that they may form rational opinions, and so on. In short, a whole host of liberal theories and institutions depend upon a certain idea of subjectivity which is, after Nietzsche, extremely difficult to sustain. This anarchy of the subject makes possible another, possibly even more radical form of anarchy, an anarchy of becoming. If Nietzsche is right about the status of the subject in the late modern period – and an entire tradition of twentieth-century Continental philosophy suggests that his analysis is at least presciently persuasive with regards to the postmodern period – then we must radically rethink what it means to be human. Previous concepts of subjectivity (and thus previous political theories) focused on being: I am this autonomous person, I am this rational citizen of a liberal democracy. Nietzsche shifts our attention to becoming. If, as he argues, the subject has no firm metaphysical ground and no center, if indeed our subjectivity is in a constant state of flux, then the meaning of our lives must be constantly changing. It is, of course, somewhat alarming to think that we might have no fixed being, that our essence (if we have one) must reside in a constant stream of transformations. However, the thought of becoming can also be a very liberating thought. All radical thinking demands change, and Nietzsche’s demands more than most. To the conventional radical’s demands for social and political change, Nietzsche adds the demand for a change in our very consciousness, in the way we view our relationship to time and history. In this sense, Nietzsche’s thought stands as one of the most radical ever conceived, for it asserts nothing less than this: change is the very heart of who and what we are. And this is true, says Nietzsche, not only of ourselves but of our world. “If the world had a goal, it must have been reaches. If it were in any way capable of pausing and becoming fixed, of ‘being,’ if in the whole course of its becoming it possessed even for a moment of this capability of ‘being,’ then all becoming would long since have come to an end, along with all thinking, all ‘spirit.’ The fact of ‘spirit’ as a form of becoming proves that the world has no goal, no final state, and is incapable of being.” For Nietzsche, the world has no teleology, no destination. The forces of history do not direct us toward a Zeitgeist named Hegel. Indeed, if Hegel was the preeminent philosopher of the state, Nietzsche’s philosophy of perpetual becoming can only herald the state’s demise.
HE CONTINUES… So: Nietzsche’s thought, which explodes all manifestations of the conventional political subject – its rationality, its language, its thoughts, its theories, its states, its economics – stand at the origin of the subversive counteridea which I call postmodern anarchism. Such an anarchism represents a tactical use of Nietzsche’s thinking, not (as the usual suspects propose) to shore up the rapidly eroding theoretical foundations of liberal democracy but rather to finish off that withered remnant of subject-centered post-Enlightenment politics, in order to open up a space for something more interesting. Postmodern anarchism asserts that the problems which face us today are not the result of flaws in our political structures which can be alleviated through reform of through the seizure of state power. Rather, the problem lies in the structures themselves, and in the epistemologies which sustain those structures. Nietzsche’s anarchy of the subject makes it quite clear that our culture is to blame for the sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves. Following this guilty verdict, modern political culture in general and liberal political culture in particular may expect to receive a death sentence. The liberals warn that this way lies madness. We say: we cannot know what may lie further down this river of becoming. But at least we know that it will be radically different from the disastrous political situation in which we find ourselves presently. Perhaps the greatest appeal of postmodern Nietzschean anarchism lies in the fact that it runs little risk of falling into theoretical and political traps faced by all merely modern revolutions. Marxims and nineteenth-century anarchism criticized capital, bourgeois values, and the liberal state – but they did so using the language, the terms, and the theoretical tools of the very bourgeois order they sought to undermine. Lenin and Mao sought to reshape the state into something which could sanction genuine political and economic freedom, but they retained so many of the old forms that they ended up reproducing the old varieties of repression and exploitation. “The problem for revolutionaries today,” as Deleuze argues, is to unite within the purpose of a particular struggle without falling into the despotic and bureaucratic organization of the party or state apparatus, a nomadic unit related to the outside that will not revive an internal despotic unity. Perhaps this is what is most profound in Nietzsche’s thought and marks the extent of his break with philosophy, at least so far as it is manifested in the aphorism: he made thought into a machine of war – a battering ram – into a nomadic force. As always, it is the performative effect of Nietzsche’s thought, rather than its explicit content, which concerns us. And one crucial effect of his thinking is that it removes philosophy from the horizons of the state. And it is an event whose ramifications will continue to be felt for some time. Just as news of the death of God takes a long time reach us, so too does news of the death of the state. But the word of these deaths draws inexorably nearer. For no God and no state can hope to survive a full engagement with that thinking which detonates all fixed human identities and reveals as mere phantasms of consciousness all fixed politics, economics, and culture.
Politics that does not begin with the creation of the self is doomed to reactivity and ressentiment. This inscribes hatred into the place of power and reaffirms existing structures of domination.
Newman 2k: (Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory at the University of London at Goldsmiths, 2000, “Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment,” Theory and Event, 4:3); AB
Ressentiment is diagnosed by Nietzsche as our modern condition. In order to understand ressentiment, however, it is nec-essary to understand the relationship between master morality and slave morality in which ressentiment is generated. Nietzsche’s work On the Genealogy of Morality is a study of the origins of morality. For Nietzsche, the way we interpret and impose values on the world has a history — its origins are often brutal and far removed from the values they produce. The value of ‘good’, for instance, was invented by the noble and high-placed to apply to themselves, in contrast to common, low-placed and plebeian.3 It was the value of the master — ‘good’ — as opposed to that of the slave — ‘bad’. Thus, according to Nietzsche, it was in this pathos of distance, between the high-born and the low-born, this absolute sense of superiority, that values were created.4 However, this equation of good and aristocratic began to be undermined by a slave revolt in values. This slave revolt, according to Nietzsche, began with the Jews who instigated a revaluation of values: It was the Jews who, rejecting the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed) ventured with awe-inspiring consistency, to bring about a reversal and held it in the teeth of their unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless), saying, ‘Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble, the powerful, you are eternally wicked, cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will also be eternally wretched, cursed and damned!’…5 In this way the slave revolt in morality inverted the noble system of values and began to equate good with the lowly, the powerless — the slave. This inversion introduced the pernicious spirit of revenge and hatred into the creation of values. There- will to power. It would be, in other words, an anarchism without ressentiment. The question of community is central to radical politics, including anarchism. One cannot talk about collective action without at least posing the question of community. For Nietzsche, most modern radical aspirations towards community were a manifestation of the ‘herd’ mentality. However it may be possible to construct a ressentiment-free notion of community from Nietzsche’s own concept of power. For Nietzsche, active power is the individual’s instinctive discharge of his forces and capacities which produces in him an enhanced sensation of power, while reactive power, as we have seen, needs an external object to act on and define itself in opposition to.66 Perhaps one could imagine a form of community based on active power. For Nietzsche this enhanced feeling of power may be derived from assistance and benevolence towards others, from enhancing the feeling of power of others.67 Like the ethics of mutual aid, a community based on will to power may be composed of a series of inter-subjective relations that involve helping and caring for people without dominating them and denying difference. This openness to difference and self-transformation, and the ethic of care, may be the defining characteristics of the post-anarchist democratic community. This would be a community of active power — a community of ‘masters’ rather than ‘slaves’.68 It would be a community that sought to overcome itself — continually transforming itself and revelling in the knowledge of its power to do so. Post-anarchism may be seen, then, as a series of politicoethical strategies against domination, without essentialist guarantees and Manichean structures that condition and restrict classical anarchism. It would affirm the contingency of values and identities, including its own, and affirm, rather than deny, fore morality, as we understand it, had its roots in this vengeful will to power of the powerless over the powerful — the revolt of the slave against the master. It was from this imperceptible, subterranean hatred that grew the values subsequently associated with the good — pity, altruism, meekness, etc. Political values also grew from this poisonous root. For Nietzsche, values of equality and democracy, which form the cornerstone of radical political theory, arose out of the slave revolt in morality. They are generated by the same spirit of revenge and hatred of the powerful. Nietzsche therefore condemns political movements like liberal democracy, socialism, and indeed anarchism. He sees the democratic movement as an expression of the herd-animal morality derived from the Judeo-Christian revaluation of values.6 Anarchism is for Nietzsche the most extreme heir to democratic values — the most rabid expression of the herd instinct. It seeks to level the differences between individuals, to abolish class distinctions, to raze hierarchies to the ground, and to equalize the powerful and the powerless, the rich and the poor, the master and the slave. To Nietzsche this is bringing everything down to level of the lowest common denominator — to erase the pathos of distance between the master and slave, the sense of difference and superiority through which great values are created. Nietzsche sees this as the worst excess of European nihilism — the death of values and creativity. Slave morality is characterized by the attitude of ressentiment — the resentment and hatred of the powerless for the powerful. Nietzsche sees ressentiment as an entirely negative sentiment — the attitude of denying what is life-affirming, saying ‘no’ to what is different, what is ‘outside’ or ‘other’. Ressentiment is characterized by an orientation to the outside, rather than the focus of noble morality, which is on the self.7 While the master says ‘I am good’ and adds as an afterthought, ‘therefore he is bad’; the slave says the opposite — ‘He (the master) is bad, therefore I am good’. Thus the invention of values comes from a comparison or opposition to that which is outside, other, different. Nietzsche says: “… in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, psychologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act all, — its action is basically a reaction.”8 This reactive stance, this inability to define anything except in opposition to something else, is the attitude of ressentiment. It is the reactive stance of the weak who define themselves in opposition to the strong.
Part 2 is The Phenomenon of Speech
Speech codes are biopolitical – the state arbitrarily defines and empowers hate speech. The state shields itself from self-incrimination by punishing individuals whose speech is evidentiary of the state’s failure. This leaves the individual vulnerable and the state all-powerful.
Butler ‘97: Judith Butler writes in “Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.” Judith Butler is Chancellor's Professor in the departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also the author of Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, co-author of Feminist Contentions, and co-editor! with Joan W. Scotti of Feminists Theorize the Political All are available from Routledge; AB
I consider the logic of this policy in the next chapter, and I propose to return to that figure of efficacious and offensive utterance toward the end of this one. In the interim, however, I aim to consider the construal of hate speech as offensive conduct, the effort to construe pornography as hate speech, and the concomitant effort to seek re- SOVEREIGN PERFORMATIVES course to the state to remedy the injuries allegedly caused by hate speech. What happens when we seek recourse to the state to regulate such speech? In particular, how is he regulatory power of the state enhanced through such an appeal? This is, perhaps, a familiar argument that I hope to make in a less than familiar way. My concern is not only with the protection of civil liberties against the incursion of the state, but with the peculiar discursive power given over to the state through the process of legal redress. I would like to suggest a formulation for the problem that might seem paradoxical, but which I think, even in its hyperbolic mode, might shed some light on the problem that regulating hate, speech poses. That formulation is this: the state produces hate speech, and by this I do not mean that the state is accountable for the various slurs, epithets, and forms of invective that currently circulate throughout the population. I mean only that the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of publically acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain that consequential line of demarcation. The inflated and efficacious utterance attributed to hate speech in some of the politicized contexts discussed above is itself modeled on the speech of a sovereign state, understood as a sovereign speech act, a speech act with the power to do what it says. This sovereign power is attributed to hate speech when it is said to "deprive" us of rights and liberties. The power attributed to hate speech is a power of absolute and efficacious agency, performativity and transitivity at once (it does what it says and it does what it says it will do to the one addressed by the speech). Precisely this power of legal language is that to which we refer when we call upon the state to effect the regulation of offensive speech. The problem, then, is not that the force of the sovereign performative is wrong, but when used by citizens it is wrong, and when intervened upon by the state, it is, in these contexts, right. The same kind of force, however, is attributed to the performative in both instances, and that version of performative power is never brought into question by those who pursue heightened regulation. What is this power? And how are we to account for its sustained production within hate speech discourse, as well as its continuing allure? Before venturing an answer to these questions, it seems worth noting that this invocation of the sovereign performative takes place against the background of a political situation in which power is no longer constrained within the sovereign form of the state. Diffused throughout disparate and competing domains of the state apparatus, and through civil society in diffuse forms as well, power cannot be easily or definitively traced to a single subject who is its "speaker:' to a sovereign representative of the state. To the extent that Foucault is right to describe contemporary relations of power as emanating from a number of possible sites, power is no longer constrained by the parameters of sovereignty. The difficulty of describing power as a sovereign formation, however, in no way precludes fantasizing or figuring power in precisely that way; to the contrary, the historical loss of the sovereign 78 1 organization of power appears to occasion the fantasy of its return-a return, I want to argue, . that takes place in language, in the figure of the performative. The emphasis on the performative phantasmatically resurrects the performative in language, establishing language as a displaced site of politics and specifying that displacement as driven by a wish to return to a simpler and more reassuring map of power, one in which the assumption of sovereignty remains secure.
Vote aff to reject the politics of aesthetics – we must recognize the role of speech as simply a form of communication. By implementing speech codes, you’re identifying types of speech as “ugly” and advocating the state to conceal them. This reinforces biopolitical control.
Gilmore ‘9: Paul Gilmore (Paul Gilmore, Associate Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach – scholar critical work in dealing with the history, transatlantic dimensions, and political promises of American Romantic literature - Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism, Published 01/01/2009)
Because aesthetic experience occupies the space between individual experience and social reality, the space created by the intersection of the various materialities evoked by electricity, it is both subjective and universal. The subjective nature of this universality provides both the utopian impulse Introduction 11 in aesthetic politics and aesthetic ideology’s coercive power. Aesthetic Materialism attempts to navigate between these poles by maintaining its focus on this very experience of subjective universality. In the aesthetic experience, the self seems to recede, as individuals give themselves over to the object (or, more properly, the perception of the object), and thus are left feeling as though anyone would have the same reaction. In that moment, it is inconceivable that anyone would not recognize the beauty, the sublimity, the humor, the ugliness of the thing perceived. The perceiving subject, in other words, recognizes no basis for this judgment in his or her particular interests, investments, desires. As such, this experience seems to place the individual outside civil society, the modern arena “of uncoerced human association and also the set of relational networks—formed for the sake of family, faith, interest, and ideology—that fill this space.”21 While an aesthetic experience might occur only because of one’s place within society— one’s social background, age, education, location, or privilege in relation to particular institutions—it does not directly or immediately involve the self in the negotiations, struggles, and identifications attendant in the working of civil society. Individuals may feel moved by a Picasso painting or Eliot’s “The Waste Land” only as a result of the training and education they have received due to their class position, their own individual histories crisscrossed by relations of power involving gender, nationality, and sexuality. Others may be touched by a renaissance Pietà or be moved by the beauty of a Thomas Kinkade painting due to a similar confluence of different overdetermined reasons. Yet that does not mean that the individual’s aesthetic experience of those objects necessarily feeds back into or undermines the social structures and ideologies giving rise to those particular encounters. In its intense focus on the sensuous perception of the object itself, the aesthetic momentarily interrupts both the dominant sense of the self as interested and autonomous and an instrumentalized orientation towards the world. In this way, aesthetics leads to “putting into question the individual’s ‘ordinary’ relation to all spheres of existence, and of reconstituting them as sites of aesthetic incompletion,” “the ceaseless problematization of and withdrawal from all normative judgment itself.”22 The most compelling attempts at revitalizing aesthetics have understood aesthetics in these terms, but have tended to move, too quickly, it seems to me, towards reading aesthetics as constituting a progressive politics focused on indeterminacy.23 Even in its recognition of the contingency of experience and identity, of the a mbivalence of representation, the aesthetic experience’s political effects—or even its tendencies—remain indeterminate. That is not to say that aesthetic experience remains permanently outside 12 Introduction the political. Instead, as “subjective universality” indicates, aesthetic experience always posits a reference to other people. In the aesthetic moment, the individual feels at one with some universal humanity who must have the same reaction. Yet the subjective nature of the event reiterates the observer’s detachment both from the object as a result of language’s mediation, the nervous system, and individual experience—and from any imagined universal community. These elements come together in the almost involuntary need to share this response—“Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that horrifying?” The question is simultaneously rhetorical—of course it’s beautiful—and is in need of confirmation because the experience’s universality is already in doubt.
The aff is key to creating a space beyond the law – we must ignore the biopolitical state’s speech codes to critically re-interrogate our practices, developing our own identities in the process by allowing us as individuals to define what speech we want to express.
Noterman and Pusey ‘12: (Elsa Noterman is Program Associate at the Community Strategies Group of the Aspen Insitute, Andre Pusey is a PhD candidate in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK, “Inside, Outside, and on the Edge of the Academy: Experiments in Radical Pedagogies” in Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Action, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, pp. 192-194); AB
So, how do we build this new kind of open and ephemeral institution? We think it is important to open up spaces in which we can both experiment with, and critically reflect upon, radical pedagogical practices. The crisis of the university is a crisis that throws up new openings and possibilities for what a university could be. These spaces can work toward pushing the boundaries of the academy by concretely asking, “what can a university do?” in praxis We need to engage in a discussion about how we can go forward as critical-radical researchers inside, outside and on the periphery of the academy. Is there any place for us within the institution as it is? Or as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2004) suggest, is the “only possible with the relationship to the university today . . . a criminal one”? This opens up the question/possibility of what Virno terms “exodus,” but which might also be described as “desertion.” This is not a territorial exodus, or a fleeing from, but rather a desertion of one’s assigned role, in this case of the “critical” yet docile body (Foucault, 2004) of the academic. As Harney and Moten (2004) put it, “to be in but not of is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.” In part, the Really Open University is an experiment in just this. The creation of spaces in which we can begin to interrogate the role of the university and of the academic, not just as theoretical exercise, but within an implicitly antagonistic, yet not wholly reactive, space of political engagement. This is a messy space that avoids any pure politics, or identitarian overcoding, neither overtly anarchist, nor Marxist, nor simply an “anticuts” group, yet neither a purely utopian reimagining. This is necessarily a “cramped space,” of (im)possibility, as Deleuze (2005) states, “creation takes place in bottlenecks.” Many elements of the edu-struggle will ultimately want to close down the categories again, in order to give more weight to their ideological underpinnings, trying to make the moment fit their politics, rather than seizing the moment in all its wealth of potentiality. The ROU views ‘crisis as possibility’ arguing that it is “up to us to decide the universities future.”17 But through what concrete actions might we actually develop a “really open university”? One way to begin may be through the occupation of the spaces where we work, play and consume, and the reappropriation of this time and space for our own (common) ends. This may help to promote new lines of questioning and open up new connectivities. One way to discuss this occupation and reappropriation, might be the literal forced reclamation of space, though direct action. This has, of course, been a tried and tested method across history, and we have seen the tactic of occupation has begun to some extent become popular again, with the recent occupations at universities across the UK, but to a much larger extent across Europe and the United States. We think there is an interesting dynamic, however, between defensive and offensive uses of occupation. We do not wish to set up a binary, but rather are interested in the qualitative shifts and activities that can occur within the occupied space itself, rather than simply the obstructive element of occupation. This problematic has been explored in the U.S. occupations movement through the often heated debate about the utility of political demands, versus occupation without demands. For example, “Occupation mandates the inversion of the standard dimensions of space. Space in an occupation is not merely the container of our bodies, it is a plane of potentiality that has been frozen by the logic of the commodity” (Inoperative Committee, 2009). Another way to discuss the occupation and reappropriation of time and space might be through the creation of new spaces that prefigure the new forms we may wish a reimagined university to take. A concrete example of this is the model of the autonomous social center, or “infoshop,” found within anarchist and autonomous activist practices (Atton, 1999). Social centers are place-based, self-managed spaces. They can be squatted, rented or cooperatively owned (Pusey, 2010). A particularly rich history of social centers can be found in Italy, but they exist all across Europe. In the United States the closest approximation to the autonomous social centers seems to be the network of radical bookstores and “infoshops” such as Red Emma’s in Baltimore and Bluestockings in New York City (Kanuga, 2010). Some academics at the University of Lincoln are attempting to develop a cooperatively run “social science center” that utilizes a social center type autonomous space, where they can practice radical pedagogical methods (Winn, 2010). The idea is that students will be able to enroll for free and staff will still be paid. We can imagine, based on our experiences and research within social centers in the UK, that this would be controversial within anarchist circles, both for its relationship with the institution of the university, and also because of its payment of academic staff. Payment for some roles performed within some spaces has been a source of much debate and contention within social centers within the UK (Chatterton, 2008). These spaces generally rely on the good will and free time of volunteers. However, many spaces cite burnout and lack of participation as major issues within social centers (UK Social Centres Network, 2008). The “dole autonomy” (Aufheben, 1999), which helped facilitate earlier cycles of struggle, has been very much weakened with successive government attacks on the welfare state, and students increasingly forced to take employment while studying means that there are far fewer people around with the “free time” to help enable projects such as these. It is, perhaps, through the establishment of self-organized alternative educational practices, and open and ephemeral institutions that we can start to value ideas for their own merit, rather than capitalist value—to create spaces and places where we can discard the price tags of commodified knowledge and instrumental learning, and instead appreciate the value of ideas and concepts themselves, while rediscovering the subversiveness of teaching.
State identification restricts discourse to “acceptable speech” through speech codes, which enforce a one-sided view of speech and preclude holistic examination. This state censorship stagnates activism and transparent cooperative discourse amongst people, which obscures state violence.
Davis ‘99: Davis, Diane. “‘Addicted to Love’; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity.” Vol. 19 No. 4. 1999
Our fix of finitude, however, reminds us that this so-called home is haunted. In fact, etymologically speaking, "what haunts is also a haunt something that doubles. . .for a familiar place. Haunting belongs to the family of Heim" (Ronell, Dictations xviii). Heim, then, is never not unheimlich; a home is never not haunted. What goes for the subject's home-base, ethos, is spooked, relentlessly, by itsown fractal interiorities, its own unditchable and unsharable alterity?its finitude, which is precisely what it shares with others.15 There never was any "internal peace" in "self-identification," as Lyotard has warned, that was not purchased at the price of what itmust exorcise: "The Volk shuts itself up in theHeim, and it identifies itself through the narratives attached to names" (Differend 151)?that is, through the identification associated with Geschlecht? exorcising its spooks so as to preserve its illusion of stasis, of sobriety. When "communication" signifies only "reasonable exchange" among subjects, you can bet that alterity already will have been barred from the conversation. This is why Nancy charges that "the conventional chatter that attempts to promote reasonable exchange" as synonymous with communication "serves only to obscure violence, betrayal, and lies" ("Exscription" 319)? serves, that is, only to cover over the finitude itought to be exposing. It may be that any theory of communication that places a speaking subject in charge of building community effaces the sharing it attempts to promote. The "subject representing," after all, is not the same as the "being-communicating" (Nancy, Inoperative 24). Communication. . .happens? it is beyond our control; it is, in fact, who we are: communication is "the predicament of being" for any ekstatic existent (24). In as much as this existent functions as "threshold," it is continuously exposed to an in-common outside and so is always already communicating finite being to finite being by virtue of that exposure, by virtue of an involuntary. . .touch. There is no escaping community or this irrepressible communication, which neither expresses a bondage nor approximates a Vulcan mind-meld but simply operates as an exposition of the finitude.. .that.. .we.. .share?an exposition, as George Bataille has put it, that "tears us together" (22). A subject's representations can aim to crank up this rustle of finitude or to tune it out, but communication will have been happening, either way.
Maybe this needs to be made explicit: this originary "communication," this sharing, does not signify "under/standing." That is,what "communication" gives us to understand, Nancy explains, is only "that there is no common understanding of or in community, that sharing does not constitute an understanding (or a concept, or an intuition, or a schema), that it does not constitute a knowledge, and that it gives no one, including community itself, mastery over being-in-common" ("Myth Interrupted" 69). Communication is no more or less than the exposition of the overflowing, inappropriable, unsharable finitude that we share. And neither speaking nor writing is a means of this communication; rather, each is "communication itself, an exposure" (Nancy, Inoperative 31). Communication as understanding, Nancy observes, "is always disappointing," it's always "the communication of a disappointment, a nonpossibility, awithdrawal of communication" ("Speaking" 314-15). One can never be sure that a communique will arrive at itsdestination, and one can be fairly certain that ifitdoes, itwon't arrive aswhat itwas when itwas sent. And yet, in all the missed connections, in all the another communication is exposed: a communication that communicates the withdrawal or understanding and/but also the opening of another kind of sharing (315).16
This is not to say that what gets said is insignificant. But it is to say that a certain irrepressible communication is not about exchanging information, arguing a point, or expressing a bond: it's only about exposing understanding's withdrawal and so exposing finitude. . .as what we share. The ethical question par excellence for the third sophistic rhetorician is not how to move an audience toward a predetermined action or attitude but rather how to crank up the "noise," the excess, the interference that must be silenced for the sake of "reasonable erits," for the sake of cutting unifying figures. The question, in other words, that finitude prompts is not how to use language to build community; it is, rather, how to amplify the communications of community that are drowned out by the processes of identification.
The failure of power structures is responsible for the rise of hate speech – it’s evidence of a failing state – the aff’s anarchy of becoming controls the internal link to defining your own place in the world.
Gilmore ‘9: Paul Gilmore (Paul Gilmore, Associate Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach – scholar critical work in dealing with the history, transatlantic dimensions, and political promises of American Romantic literature - Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism, Published 01/01/2009)
From this reading, Shelley’s idea of the poet as an unacknowledged legislator wielding a sword of lightning takes on a new light, revealing the limitations as well as the power of poetry as a political force. Eschewing the utopianism of the late Enlightenment, Shelley electrifies the human imagination, rendering it both the medium where the mental and the physical meet and the source of intellectual and physical freedom. As such, the materiality of electric poetry lies not just in its physicality—in language being registered by the senses—but in its genesis within and action upon the social world. Poetry is material because it is literally words, which are material themselves, but it is also material in a sociohistorical sense, the product of material conditions of political and economic structures. In “Defence,” for example, Shelley indicates that it is poetry’s embeddeness in what we might now call social discourse that gives it its “electric life,” as that life is “less the poets’ spirit than the spirit of the age” (7:140). Similarly, in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, in further developing the figure of lightning thought, Percy elaorates this relationship between mind and the world, gesturing to its political implications: “The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition, or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or is about to be restored” (2:173). Echoing Schlegel’s prediction about the lightning charge of poetry, Percy at once envisions political revolution and at the same time insists that the changes to come are unpredictable, are “unimagined.” Thus, in concluding his preface to Prometheus Unbound, Percy acknowledges his “‘passion for reforming the world,’” but insists that his poetry does not contain “a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence” (2:174). As Kaufman, from an Adornian-Marxist position, Paul Hamilton, from a Habermasian-Public Sphere approach, and Redfield, from a de Manian–deconstructive angle, have all differently argued, it is this refusal of political commitment that allows Shelley to provide an alternative understanding of aesthetic politics.27 Through acknowledging the material opacity of language itself and by gesturing to the radical indeterminacy of meaning, in drawing on materialist understandings of the mind and the basis of the self in the senses, and in recognizing the sociohistorical conditions and material means by which poetry is disseminated, Percy Shelley emerges as a theorist and practitioner of a kind of aesthetics imagined to engender critical thinking about one’s self and the world, a process of constantly questioning received ideas that opens the self to new experiences and new perspectives that might provide the ground for sociopolitical change but that refuses to offer a political programme.
I defend the whole resolution as a thought experiment. Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech. The resolution is negative state action, so a pre-fiat framing is justified.
Part 3 is Fiat’s Overrated
Evaluate kritikal discussion above policy-making arguments.
Reject policy arguments for 3 reasons:
1) Restricting debate to fiat undermines debate about assumptions underlying policy and teaches us to not defend the process by which we make our conclusions.
Gunder ‘9: senior planning lecturer at the Aukland University Michael. “Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning”. Pg. 11-12. AB
The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies of desired success, such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their desired enjoyment (cobblestones, chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum, this defines what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other, remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they are one and the same) is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as technical, rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "˜dominant stakeholders` can ensure the impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many whilst, of course, achieving their stakeholders’ specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469). The current post-democratic` milieu facilitates the above through avoidance of critical policy debate challenging favored orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of policy deficiencies, or alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while token institutions of liberal democracy’ are retained conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59). Consequently, the safe names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used or their work drawn upon by different stakeholders, while more critical voices are silenced by their inability to shape policy debates’ (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic development or spatial planning policy analyst thus continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying only the orthodox "successful” or "best practice” economic development or spatial planning responses. This further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo while providing "˜a cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer" isolating the political held from any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for public policy’ (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to generate similar policy responses for every competing local area or city-region, largely resulting in a zero-sum game (Blair and Kumar 1997).
2) Scholarship and ideas get co-opted if we believe that the state’s “inevitableness” means we have to use it. The only way to get out of this cycle of state oppression is to think outside the structures of the state. If it’s utopian to reject the state, then that’s what’s needed to change society. This is a stance against the traditionalist government policy-maker paradigm.
Newman ‘11: (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3); AB
At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations.
3) Authors that say the state is inevitable dogmatically view the world from the point of the dominant but flawed ontology.  These so called “intellectuals” jobs depend on them representing capital as benevolent and inevitable.  That’s an attempt to make the debate space a training ground for a new generation passive participants in the machinery of the state.
Lambie ‘10: – Ph.D., joint-editor of the International Journal of Cuban Studies, and Lecturer in Public Policy at De Montfort University (George Lambie, “The Cuban Revolution in the 21st Century”, Pluto Press, pg. 150-152) AB
It is interesting that when most academics analyse revolutions and transformative processes, they focus almost exclusively on leaders. In turn, they seek to interpret the ideas and actions of these prominent figures based on the influence of other elites. These factors are important, but must be recognised as only partial explanations for most instances of significant socio-economic change. The issue of the role of intellectuals in society, and exactly what constitutes intellectual formation, is a complex debate (Lambie 2000). However, on the specific issue of academic approaches to leaders, the difficulty lies ultimately in the ideological composition of the academics themselves, which is rooted in the dominant ontology, one that emphasises individualism, elite leadership and an immutable order of human nature. Given this perspective, it is difficult to imagine a set of ideas or a consciousness emerging out of what seems to be thin air. From the ridicule of Marx’s observations on the autonomy of workers in the Paris Commune, to contemporary views that see socialism as utopian, there is an ideological intolerance of any idea that defies the implicit ontological parameters of liberalism. When the dominant liberal interpretive framework does encounter what appears to be spontaneous action and organisation at the grassroots level, it sees this in terms of civil society freeing itself from the state, and as an expression of self-help. This view is theorised in Hernando de Soto’s work The Other Path (1989), which interprets the survival strategies of the poor in developing countries as a blossoming of individual initiative. A similar ideological perspective permeates much of the NGO philosophy, with its emphasis on micro-credit and market-orientated initiatives to resolve problems in civil society without the involvement of the state. This kind of thinking also informs much of the policy-driven theory that dominates sections of academia in Western countries. For instance, as procedural democracies such as the UK struggle to deal with the ‘democratic deficit’, and governments become concerned about political legitimacy, policies are devised to enhance ‘participation’ and ‘citizenship’ in an attempt to give substance to liberal hegemony. Lack of ‘participation’ or understanding of ‘citizenship’ is seen as an educational issue, and citizens have to be instructed and ‘enabled’ by policy makers and academics to realise their ‘democratic’ rights. At its core, this is nothing more than a thinly concealed indoctrina- tion exercise to impose the rule of the market onto the organisation of local structures. Commenting on the role of academics and intellectuals in general, Wayne (2003:23–24) points out: One way in which intellectuals have attempted to explain their social role has been to depoliticise what it means to be elaborators and disseminators of ideas. This involves uncoupling knowledge production from vested social interests, defining professionalism as rising above the social conflict between capital and labour, and instead promoting ‘objectivity’ and ‘rationality’ as the very essence of what it is that intellectuals do ... the ideology of ‘objectivity’ has, under the guise of working for all humanity, justified their role to capitalists ... This attitude concerning the role of academics and intellectuals was famously defended by the French writer Romain Roland after the First World War, in his work Au-dessus de la mêlée (‘Above the Battle’) (1915). Roland’s position may be justified if one argues that the shock and horror of war temporarily divested life of meaning in the minds of rational people, and retreat into the ivory tower became a mode of defence against this malaise. However, modern intellectuals have no such excuse, and have increasingly become apparatchiks of a knowledge-production system that is driven by money, career climbing and prestige, all of which can be attained through conformity. Ultimately, only by grasping the idea that human nature is not immutable can one transcend these intellectual limitations and imagine the unimaginable. Martí, Guevara, Castro and other Cuban leaders understood this intellectually and intuitively, both by participating in the historical process themselves, and by not losing touch with the masses. Of course, the Cuban political process has fluctuated in the emphasis it has given to leadership or to participation, but the two have interacted more fully and more continuously than has been seen in any other country.

Tournament: Stanford | Round: Triples | Opponent: Nueva JT | Judge: Panel
Part 1 is Framing
Welcome to the world of the aff where we no longer are confined to the state and let it do its own thing. This is the time for the anarchy of becoming – a ideological separation of state and person.
The specter haunting politics is power – we must transcend the current power structures of the state through the anarchy of the self.
Newman ‘10: (Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory at the University of London at Goldsmiths, 2010, “The Politics of Postanarchism,” pub. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 104-107); AB
We observe a similar silence about anarchism in more recent radical political thought, that which comes in the wake of poststructuralism. Indeed, in much contemporary continental theory we fi nd a series of themes, preoccupations and debates which bear a strong resemblance to those of anarchism. Amid the ruins of Marxism – or at least of a certain institutionalised and statist form of it – there is a desire among many thinkers today to develop new categories and directions for radical politics. There is the attempt, fi st, to find new forms of radical political subjectivity no longer based on the Marxist notion of the proletariat. There is a recognition that such a category is too narrow to express the different forms of oppression, modes of politicisation and ways of relating to one’s own work and existence that make up the contemporary world. However, there is also the recognition of the inadequacy of the ultimately liberal notion of ‘identity politics’ that characterised much new social movement theory. What is called for is new way of thinking about how, and by what processes, a subject becomes politicised – how does the subject become an egalitarian and collective subject? Secondly, there is, among many thinkers today, a rejection of authoritarian modes of political organisation – for instance, the centrally organised Marxist–Leninist vanguard party which would lead the proletariat to revolution, or the Communist and socialist parties in capitalist countries which sought to play the parliamentary game, thus abandoning any hope of emancipation from the state. There is a need, then, as Badiou would put it, for a politics without a party3 – new forms of political organisation that are no longer structured around the model of the party, as the party always has as its aim the reproduction of state power. Related to this, therefore, is the question of the state itself: the immovability of state power, despite the revolutionary programmes which promised its ‘withering away’, and, moreover, the increasingly authoritarian character of the so- called liberal democratic state, show us that the state remains perhaps the central problem in radical politics. Radical thought, therefore, sees politics increasingly as being situated beyond the state – there is a desire to find a space for politics outside the framework of state power, a space from which the hegemony of the state would be challenged. It seems to me that these themes and questions – political subjectivity beyond class, political organisation beyond the party and political action beyond the state – relate directly to anarchism. If these are the new directions that radical politics is moving in, then this would seem to suggest an increasingly anarchistic orientation. Indeed, this is a tendency that is being borne out in many radical movements and forms of resistance today. The emergence of the global anti- capitalist movement in recent times suggests a new form of politics, one that is much closer to anarchism in its aspirations and tactics, and in its decentralised, democratic modes of organisation. Also, the insurrections in Greece in December 2008 – which had an explicitly anarchist identification – are indicative of this libertarian moment in radical politics. It would seem that the prevailing form taken by radical politics today is anti- statist, anti- authoritarian and decentralised, and emphasises direct action rather than representative party politics and lobbying. Furthermore, is it not evident that there is a massive disengagement of ordinary people from normal political processes, an overwhelming scepticism – especially in the wake of the current economic crisis – about the political elites who supposedly govern in their interests? Is there not, at the same time, an obvious consternation on the part of these elites at this growing distance, signifying a crisis in their symbolic legitimacy? As a defensive or pre- emptive measure,4 the state becomes more draconian and predatory, increasingly obsessed with surveillance and control, defining itself through war and security, seeking to authorise itself through a politics of fear and exception. How should radical political thought respond to this situation, lagging behind – as it so often does – reality ‘on the ground’? My contention is that anarchism – or more precisely postanarchism – can provide some answers here. Indeed, anarchism might be seen as the hidden referent for radical political thought today: while its importance is scarcely acknowledged amongst the thinkers referred to above, anarchism can nevertheless offer critical resources for radical political theory, allowing it to transcend many of its current limitations and, indeed, providing it with a more consistent ethical and political framework.
The state’s dialectic of prohibition and legalization sustains the biopolitical state of exception.  This creates a zone of indistinction, where certain people become invisible to society and oppressed. Bracketed for Gendered Language.
Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
More than this inclusion by exclusion, sovereign power in the West is constituted by its ability to suspend itself in a state of exception, or ban: "The originary relation of law to life is not application but abandonment."15 The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign is at the same time inside and outside the sovereign order: the sovereign can suspend the law. What defines the rule of law is the state of exception when law is suspended. The very space in which juridical order can have validity is created and defined through the sovereign exception. However, the exception that defines the structure of sovereignty is more complex than the inclusion of what is outside by means of an interdiction.16 It is not just a question of creating a distinction between inside and outside: it is the tracing of a threshold between the two, a location where inside and outside enter into a zone of indistinction. It is this state of exception, or the zone of indistinction between inside and outside, that makes the modern juridical order of the West possible. The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provisional state of danger as a means of establishing the Nazi state it- self. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its boundaries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the normal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitutive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded exclusion from human law (killing him these people does not count as homicide) and he is excluded exclusion from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the exclusion of both the sacred and the profane.
Liberalism tries to seize control of the state and direct the flow of history; this fails and maintains ongoing violence against the oppressed by maintaining state control. Against this, affirm an anarchy of becoming – a micropolitical reconfiguration of the subject that severs the state from the relationship to the self.
Call ‘2: (Lewis Call, Associate Professor of History at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, 2002, Postmodern Anarchism. Lexington: Lexington Books, pp. 47-56); AB
But the usual suspects have another, much more serious problem. Even if postmodern liberals can reject Nietzsche’s assaults on capitalism and the liberal state – and it is easy enough to locate passages in Nietzsche’s books where he seems to contradict these assaults – those who would use Nietzsche to shore up the eroding foundations of liberal democracy must contend with the even more powerful and radical forms of anarchy which are to be found in Nietzsche’s thought. They must contend, for example, with Nietzsche’s well-known anarchy of the subject. A number of commentators have pointed out that one of Nietzsche’s main contributions to political thought is his destruction of the conventional concepts of human subjectivity which lie at the basis of most modern political theories. Keith Ansell-Pearson suggests, for example, that the Genealogy aims “to show that one of the central ideas of moral and political theory, that of a human subject in possession of conscience and a free will, is not a natural given. William Connolly points out that after Nietzsche “the subject is not simply or unambiguously the self which establishes its unity, freedom, independence and self-transparency. And the assault on conventional (i.e., post-Enlightenment) ideas of subjectivity is not simply a metaphysical or epistemological issue. It is also a deeply political issue which has profound implications for the consruction of political theories and institutions. Those implications do not bode well for liberalism. Mark Warren summarizes the problem nicely: “Because liberals put a metaphysical placeholder in the space of the individual, they failed to theorize this space. As a result, they justified liberal forms of the state in terms of a historically conditioned effect mistaken for a universal essence. This is why Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism in Western culture as the collapse of the individual agent also implicates the individualistic metaphysics of liberalism. Nietzsche’s assault on modern subjectivity, then, undermines the philosophical foundations of the liberal state. After Nietzsche, liberals find themselves thrown into a confusing postmodern world of multiple subject positions and decentered identities. They are forces to develop a new kind of liberal politics, one which will not rely upon epistemologically suspect categories of individuality. This is, as we have seen, a difficult task, and one which liberals rarely complete in a satisfying way. Let us now look in more detail at Nietzsche’s anarchy of the subject. Nietzsche famously regarded the free will which is central to most conventional notions of subjectivity as an egregious error. For example, he notes in Human, All Too Human that “we do not accuse nature of immorality when it sends thunderstorms and makes us wet: why do we call the harmful man immoral?” Because in the latter case we assume a voluntary commanding free will, in the former necessity. But this distinction is an error. Here Nietzsche seems to be advocating a kind of radical determinism: he views individual actions not as the product of some chimerical free will, but rather as the indirect product of the social and cultural forces which have constituted the individual who performs those actions. Of course, this has radical implications for political theory. If we understand individual actions as the product of the society and culture which produced the individual, then society is quite literally to blame for what its members do. This naturally renders conventional ideas of punishment radically incoherent. “How is it that every execution offends us more than a murder?” Nietzsche demands. “It is the coldness of the judges, the scrupulous preparation, the insight that here a human being used as a means of deterring others. For it is not guilt that is being punished, even when it exists: this lies in educators, parents, environment, in us, not in the murderer – I mean the circumstances that cause him to become one.” This is a key point for the postmodern anarchist. If we accept that humans possess no metaphysical, pre-social essence, if we accept that they are little more than nodal points where various social, economic, and cultural forces converge to produce the illusion of subjectivity, then the punishments schemes of the liberal state make no sense. Indeed, on this reading it would make more sense to execute the system itself, since it is the system that is guilty of manufacturing criminals. Revolutionaries who follow this kind of interpretation would also, perhaps, be less likely to allow their uprisings to descend into the kind of mindless terror, which was, unfortunately, to be found in abundance in France during the 1790s, in Russia during the 1920s and 1930s, or in China during the 1950s. I say this because the radical denial of free will applies to the rulers as well as the ruled. This point was made, remarkably enough, by Bakunin, who observed in 1869 that “the kings, the oppressors, exploiters of all kinds, are as guilty as the criminals who have emerged from the masses; like them, they are the evildoers who are not guilty, since they, too, are involuntary products of the present social order.” Let the guillotine be deployed, then, not against aristocratic or bourgeois tyrants but against the philosophy of subjectivity which gives such tyrants their power in the first place. Nietzsche continues his assault on traditional forms of subjectivity and consciousness in Beyond Good and Evil, questioning whether “there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘ego,’ and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking – that I know what thinking is.” An obvious assault on the old Cartesian concept of subjectivity (“I think, therefore I am”), Nietzsche’s critique of consciousness also has dramatic political meaning. These “thinking egos” – the rational, autonomous dramatic political meaning. These “thinking egos” – the rational, autonomous subjects who have dominated political discourse since the Enlightenment – are supposedly the beings who vote in liberal elections, who serve on the liberal juries which decide the fate of the supposedly autonomous criminals who stand before them, who use the media to inform themselves about issues so that they may form rational opinions, and so on. In short, a whole host of liberal theories and institutions depend upon a certain idea of subjectivity which is, after Nietzsche, extremely difficult to sustain. This anarchy of the subject makes possible another, possibly even more radical form of anarchy, an anarchy of becoming. If Nietzsche is right about the status of the subject in the late modern period – and an entire tradition of twentieth-century Continental philosophy suggests that his analysis is at least presciently persuasive with regards to the postmodern period – then we must radically rethink what it means to be human. Previous concepts of subjectivity (and thus previous political theories) focused on being: I am this autonomous person, I am this rational citizen of a liberal democracy. Nietzsche shifts our attention to becoming. If, as he argues, the subject has no firm metaphysical ground and no center, if indeed our subjectivity is in a constant state of flux, then the meaning of our lives must be constantly changing. It is, of course, somewhat alarming to think that we might have no fixed being, that our essence (if we have one) must reside in a constant stream of transformations. However, the thought of becoming can also be a very liberating thought. All radical thinking demands change, and Nietzsche’s demands more than most. To the conventional radical’s demands for social and political change, Nietzsche adds the demand for a change in our very consciousness, in the way we view our relationship to time and history. In this sense, Nietzsche’s thought stands as one of the most radical ever conceived, for it asserts nothing less than this: change is the very heart of who and what we are. And this is true, says Nietzsche, not only of ourselves but of our world. “If the world had a goal, it must have been reaches. If it were in any way capable of pausing and becoming fixed, of ‘being,’ if in the whole course of its becoming it possessed even for a moment of this capability of ‘being,’ then all becoming would long since have come to an end, along with all thinking, all ‘spirit.’ The fact of ‘spirit’ as a form of becoming proves that the world has no goal, no final state, and is incapable of being.” For Nietzsche, the world has no teleology, no destination. The forces of history do not direct us toward a Zeitgeist named Hegel. Indeed, if Hegel was the preeminent philosopher of the state, Nietzsche’s philosophy of perpetual becoming can only herald the state’s demise.
HE CONTINUES… So: Nietzsche’s thought, which explodes all manifestations of the conventional political subject – its rationality, its language, its thoughts, its theories, its states, its economics – stand at the origin of the subversive counteridea which I call postmodern anarchism. Such an anarchism represents a tactical use of Nietzsche’s thinking, not (as the usual suspects propose) to shore up the rapidly eroding theoretical foundations of liberal democracy but rather to finish off that withered remnant of subject-centered post-Enlightenment politics, in order to open up a space for something more interesting. Postmodern anarchism asserts that the problems which face us today are not the result of flaws in our political structures which can be alleviated through reform of through the seizure of state power. Rather, the problem lies in the structures themselves, and in the epistemologies which sustain those structures. Nietzsche’s anarchy of the subject makes it quite clear that our culture is to blame for the sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves. Following this guilty verdict, modern political culture in general and liberal political culture in particular may expect to receive a death sentence. The liberals warn that this way lies madness. We say: we cannot know what may lie further down this river of becoming. But at least we know that it will be radically different from the disastrous political situation in which we find ourselves presently. Perhaps the greatest appeal of postmodern Nietzschean anarchism lies in the fact that it runs little risk of falling into theoretical and political traps faced by all merely modern revolutions. Marxims and nineteenth-century anarchism criticized capital, bourgeois values, and the liberal state – but they did so using the language, the terms, and the theoretical tools of the very bourgeois order they sought to undermine. Lenin and Mao sought to reshape the state into something which could sanction genuine political and economic freedom, but they retained so many of the old forms that they ended up reproducing the old varieties of repression and exploitation. “The problem for revolutionaries today,” as Deleuze argues, is to unite within the purpose of a particular struggle without falling into the despotic and bureaucratic organization of the party or state apparatus, a nomadic unit related to the outside that will not revive an internal despotic unity. Perhaps this is what is most profound in Nietzsche’s thought and marks the extent of his break with philosophy, at least so far as it is manifested in the aphorism: he made thought into a machine of war – a battering ram – into a nomadic force. As always, it is the performative effect of Nietzsche’s thought, rather than its explicit content, which concerns us. And one crucial effect of his thinking is that it removes philosophy from the horizons of the state. And it is an event whose ramifications will continue to be felt for some time. Just as news of the death of God takes a long time reach us, so too does news of the death of the state. But the word of these deaths draws inexorably nearer. For no God and no state can hope to survive a full engagement with that thinking which detonates all fixed human identities and reveals as mere phantasms of consciousness all fixed politics, economics, and culture.
Politics that does not begin with the creation of the self is doomed to reactivity and ressentiment. This inscribes hatred into the place of power and reaffirms existing structures of domination.
Newman 2k: (Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory at the University of London at Goldsmiths, 2000, “Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment,” Theory and Event, 4:3); AB
Ressentiment is diagnosed by Nietzsche as our modern condition. In order to understand ressentiment, however, it is nec-essary to understand the relationship between master morality and slave morality in which ressentiment is generated. Nietzsche’s work On the Genealogy of Morality is a study of the origins of morality. For Nietzsche, the way we interpret and impose values on the world has a history — its origins are often brutal and far removed from the values they produce. The value of ‘good’, for instance, was invented by the noble and high-placed to apply to themselves, in contrast to common, low-placed and plebeian.3 It was the value of the master — ‘good’ — as opposed to that of the slave — ‘bad’. Thus, according to Nietzsche, it was in this pathos of distance, between the high-born and the low-born, this absolute sense of superiority, that values were created.4 However, this equation of good and aristocratic began to be undermined by a slave revolt in values. This slave revolt, according to Nietzsche, began with the Jews who instigated a revaluation of values: It was the Jews who, rejecting the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed) ventured with awe-inspiring consistency, to bring about a reversal and held it in the teeth of their unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless), saying, ‘Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble, the powerful, you are eternally wicked, cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will also be eternally wretched, cursed and damned!’…5 In this way the slave revolt in morality inverted the noble system of values and began to equate good with the lowly, the powerless — the slave. This inversion introduced the pernicious spirit of revenge and hatred into the creation of values. There- will to power. It would be, in other words, an anarchism without ressentiment. The question of community is central to radical politics, including anarchism. One cannot talk about collective action without at least posing the question of community. For Nietzsche, most modern radical aspirations towards community were a manifestation of the ‘herd’ mentality. However it may be possible to construct a ressentiment-free notion of community from Nietzsche’s own concept of power. For Nietzsche, active power is the individual’s instinctive discharge of his forces and capacities which produces in him an enhanced sensation of power, while reactive power, as we have seen, needs an external object to act on and define itself in opposition to.66 Perhaps one could imagine a form of community based on active power. For Nietzsche this enhanced feeling of power may be derived from assistance and benevolence towards others, from enhancing the feeling of power of others.67 Like the ethics of mutual aid, a community based on will to power may be composed of a series of inter-subjective relations that involve helping and caring for people without dominating them and denying difference. This openness to difference and self-transformation, and the ethic of care, may be the defining characteristics of the post-anarchist democratic community. This would be a community of active power — a community of ‘masters’ rather than ‘slaves’.68 It would be a community that sought to overcome itself — continually transforming itself and revelling in the knowledge of its power to do so. Post-anarchism may be seen, then, as a series of politicoethical strategies against domination, without essentialist guarantees and Manichean structures that condition and restrict classical anarchism. It would affirm the contingency of values and identities, including its own, and affirm, rather than deny, fore morality, as we understand it, had its roots in this vengeful will to power of the powerless over the powerful — the revolt of the slave against the master. It was from this imperceptible, subterranean hatred that grew the values subsequently associated with the good — pity, altruism, meekness, etc. Political values also grew from this poisonous root. For Nietzsche, values of equality and democracy, which form the cornerstone of radical political theory, arose out of the slave revolt in morality. They are generated by the same spirit of revenge and hatred of the powerful. Nietzsche therefore condemns political movements like liberal democracy, socialism, and indeed anarchism. He sees the democratic movement as an expression of the herd-animal morality derived from the Judeo-Christian revaluation of values.6 Anarchism is for Nietzsche the most extreme heir to democratic values — the most rabid expression of the herd instinct. It seeks to level the differences between individuals, to abolish class distinctions, to raze hierarchies to the ground, and to equalize the powerful and the powerless, the rich and the poor, the master and the slave. To Nietzsche this is bringing everything down to level of the lowest common denominator — to erase the pathos of distance between the master and slave, the sense of difference and superiority through which great values are created. Nietzsche sees this as the worst excess of European nihilism — the death of values and creativity. Slave morality is characterized by the attitude of ressentiment — the resentment and hatred of the powerless for the powerful. Nietzsche sees ressentiment as an entirely negative sentiment — the attitude of denying what is life-affirming, saying ‘no’ to what is different, what is ‘outside’ or ‘other’. Ressentiment is characterized by an orientation to the outside, rather than the focus of noble morality, which is on the self.7 While the master says ‘I am good’ and adds as an afterthought, ‘therefore he is bad’; the slave says the opposite — ‘He (the master) is bad, therefore I am good’. Thus the invention of values comes from a comparison or opposition to that which is outside, other, different. Nietzsche says: “… in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, psychologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act all, — its action is basically a reaction.”8 This reactive stance, this inability to define anything except in opposition to something else, is the attitude of ressentiment. It is the reactive stance of the weak who define themselves in opposition to the strong.
Reject ressentiment cuz it really sucks – it’s a revengeful hatred of the squo – outweighs all other impacts. Bracketed for gendered language.
Deleuze ‘83: Gilles, 1983, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pg. 34-36
Is this difference only psychological? A difference of mood or tone? Nietzsche's philosophy depends, in general, on the principle that ressentiment, bad conscience etc. are not psychological determinations. Nietzsche calls the enterprise of denying life and depreciating existence nihilism. He analyses the principal forms of nihilism, ressentiment, bad conscience, ascetic ideal; the whole of nihilism and its forms he calls the spirit of revenge. But, the different forms of nihilism are not at all reducible to psychological determinations, historical events or ideological currents, not even to metaphysical structures. 3 0 The spirit of revenge is undoubtedly expressed biologically, psychologically, historically and metaphysically; the spirit of revenge is a type, it is not separable from a typology, the key stone of Nietzschean philosophy. But the problem is: what is the nature of this typology? Far from being a psychological trait the spirit of revenge is the principle on which our whole psychology depends. Ressentiment is not part of psychology but the whole of our psychology, without knowing it, is a part of ressentiment. In the same way, when Nietzsche shows that Christianity is full of ressentiment and bad conscience he does not make nihilism a historical event, it is rather the element of history as such, the motor of universal history, the famous "historical meaning" or "meaning of history" which at one time found its most adequate manifestation in Christianity. And when Nietzsche undertakes the critique of nihilism he makes nihilism the presupposition of all metaphysics rather than the expression of particular metaphysics: there is no metaphysics which does not judge and depreciate life in the name of a supra-sensible world. We cannot even say that nihilism and its forms are categories of thought, for the categories of thought, of reasonable thought - identity, causality, finality - themselves presuppose an interpretation of force which is that of ressentiment. For all these reasons Nietzsche can say: "The instinct of revenge has gained such a hold on humanity over the centuries that the whole of metaphysics, psychology, history and above all morality bear its imprint. As soon as man began thinking he The Tragic 35 introduced the bacillus of revenge into things" (VP III 458). We must understand this as meaning that the instinct of revenge is the force which constitutes the essence of what we call psychology, history, metaphysics and morality. The spirit of revenge is the genealogical element of our thought, the transcendental principle of our way of thinking. Nietzsche's struggle against nihilism and the spirit of revenge will therefore mean the reversal of metaphysics, the end of history as history of man and the transformation of the sciences. And we do not really know what a man person denuded of ressentiment would be like. A man who would not accuse or depreciate existence - would he still be a man, would he think like a man? Would he not already be something other than a man, almost the Overman? To have ressentiment or not to have ressentiment - there is no greater difference, beyond psychology, beyond history, beyond metaphysics. It is the true difference or transcendental typology - the genealogical and hierarchical difference. Nietzsche presents the aim of his philosophy as the freeing of thought from nihilism and its various forms. Now, this implies a new way of thinking, an overthrow of the principle on which thought depends, a straightening out of the genealogical principle itself, a "transmutation". For a long time we have only been able to think in terms oi ressentiment and bad conscience. We have had no other ideal but the ascetic ideal. We have opposed knowledge to life in order to judge life, in order to make it something blameworthy, responsible or erroneous. We turned will into something bad, something stricken by a basic contradiction: we have said that it must be rectified, restrained, limited and even denied and suppressed. It was only any good at this price. There is no philosopher who, discovering the essence of will, has not groaned at his own discovery and, like the timid fortuneteller, has not immediately seen bad omens for the future and the source of all evils of the past. Schopenhauer pushed this old conception to its extreme limit; the penitentiary of the will, he said, and the wheel of Ixion. Nietzsche is the only one who does not groan at the discovery of the will, who does not try to exorcise it, or limit its effect. The phrase "a new way of thinking" means an affirmative thought, a thought which affirms life and the will to life, a thought which finally expels the whole of the negative; to believe in the innocence of the future and the past, to believe in the eternal return. What Nietzsche calls his glad tidings is that existence is no longer treated as blameworthy nor does the will feel guilty for existing. "Will, this is what the liberator and the messenger of joy is called" (Z II "Of Redemption"). 3 1 The glad tidings are tragic thought, for tragedy is not found in the recriminations of ressentiment, the conflicts of bad conscience or the contradictions of a will which feels guilty and responsible. The tragic does not even fight against ressentiment, bad conscience or nihilism. According to Nietzsche it has never been understood that the tragic = the joyful. This is another way of putting the great equation: to will = to create. We have not understood that the tragic is pure and multiple positivity, dynamic gaeity.
Part 2 is The Phenomenon of Speech
Speech codes are biopolitical – the state arbitrarily defines linguistic constraints – it empowers hate speech when it wants to. The state shields itself from self-incrimination by punishing individuals whose speech is evidentiary of the state’s failure. This leaves the individual vulnerable and the state all-powerful.
Butler ‘97: Judith Butler writes in “Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.” Judith Butler is Chancellor's Professor in the departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also the author of Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, co-author of Feminist Contentions, and co-editor! with Joan W. Scotti of Feminists Theorize the Political All are available from Routledge; AB
I consider the logic of this policy in the next chapter, and I propose to return to that figure of efficacious and offensive utterance toward the end of this one. In the interim, however, I aim to consider the construal of hate speech as offensive conduct, the effort to construe pornography as hate speech, and the concomitant effort to seek re- SOVEREIGN PERFORMATIVES course to the state to remedy the injuries allegedly caused by hate speech. What happens when we seek recourse to the state to regulate such speech? In particular, how is he regulatory power of the state enhanced through such an appeal? This is, perhaps, a familiar argument that I hope to make in a less than familiar way. My concern is not only with the protection of civil liberties against the incursion of the state, but with the peculiar discursive power given over to the state through the process of legal redress. I would like to suggest a formulation for the problem that might seem paradoxical, but which I think, even in its hyperbolic mode, might shed some light on the problem that regulating hate, speech poses. That formulation is this: the state produces hate speech, and by this I do not mean that the state is accountable for the various slurs, epithets, and forms of invective that currently circulate throughout the population. I mean only that the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of publically acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain that consequential line of demarcation. The inflated and efficacious utterance attributed to hate speech in some of the politicized contexts discussed above is itself modeled on the speech of a sovereign state, understood as a sovereign speech act, a speech act with the power to do what it says. This sovereign power is attributed to hate speech when it is said to "deprive" us of rights and liberties. The power attributed to hate speech is a power of absolute and efficacious agency, performativity and transitivity at once (it does what it says and it does what it says it will do to the one addressed by the speech). Precisely this power of legal language is that to which we refer when we call upon the state to effect the regulation of offensive speech. The problem, then, is not that the force of the sovereign performative is wrong, but when used by citizens it is wrong, and when intervened upon by the state, it is, in these contexts, right. The same kind of force, however, is attributed to the performative in both instances, and that version of performative power is never brought into question by those who pursue heightened regulation. What is this power? And how are we to account for its sustained production within hate speech discourse, as well as its continuing allure? Before venturing an answer to these questions, it seems worth noting that this invocation of the sovereign performative takes place against the background of a political situation in which power is no longer constrained within the sovereign form of the state. Diffused throughout disparate and competing domains of the state apparatus, and through civil society in diffuse forms as well, power cannot be easily or definitively traced to a single subject who is its "speaker:' to a sovereign representative of the state. To the extent that Foucault is right to describe contemporary relations of power as emanating from a number of possible sites, power is no longer constrained by the parameters of sovereignty. The difficulty of describing power as a sovereign formation, however, in no way precludes fantasizing or figuring power in precisely that way; to the contrary, the historical loss of the sovereign 78 1 organization of power appears to occasion the fantasy of its return-a return, I want to argue, . that takes place in language, in the figure of the performative. The emphasis on the performative phantasmatically resurrects the performative in language, establishing language as a displaced site of politics and specifying that displacement as driven by a wish to return to a simpler and more reassuring map of power, one in which the assumption of sovereignty remains secure.
Vote aff to reject the politics of aesthetics – we must recognize the role of speech as simply a form of communication. The failure of power structures is responsible for the rise of hate speech – the aff’s anarchy of becoming controls the internal link to defining your own place in the world.
Gilmore ‘9: Paul Gilmore (Paul Gilmore, Associate Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach – scholar critical work in dealing with the history, transatlantic dimensions, and political promises of American Romantic literature - Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism, Published 01/01/2009)
From this reading, Shelley’s idea of the poet as an unacknowledged legislator wielding a sword of lightning takes on a new light, revealing the limitations as well as the power of poetry as a political force. Eschewing the utopianism of the late Enlightenment, Shelley electrifies the human imagination, rendering it both the medium where the mental and the physical meet and the source of intellectual and physical freedom. As such, the materiality of electric poetry lies not just in its physicality—in language being registered by the senses—but in its genesis within and action upon the social world. Poetry is material because it is literally words, which are material themselves, but it is also material in a sociohistorical sense, the product of material conditions of political and economic structures. In “Defence,” for example, Shelley indicates that it is poetry’s embeddeness in what we might now call social discourse that gives it its “electric life,” as that life is “less the poets’ spirit than the spirit of the age” (7:140). Similarly, in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, in further developing the figure of lightning thought, Percy elaorates this relationship between mind and the world, gesturing to its political implications: “The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition, or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or is about to be restored” (2:173). Echoing Schlegel’s prediction about the lightning charge of poetry, Percy at once envisions political revolution and at the same time insists that the changes to come are unpredictable, are “unimagined.” Thus, in concluding his preface to Prometheus Unbound, Percy acknowledges his “‘passion for reforming the world,’” but insists that his poetry does not contain “a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence” (2:174). As Kaufman, from an Adornian-Marxist position, Paul Hamilton, from a Habermasian-Public Sphere approach, and Redfield, from a de Manian–deconstructive angle, have all differently argued, it is this refusal of political commitment that allows Shelley to provide an alternative understanding of aesthetic politics.27 Through acknowledging the material opacity of language itself and by gesturing to the radical indeterminacy of meaning, in drawing on materialist understandings of the mind and the basis of the self in the senses, and in recognizing the sociohistorical conditions and material means by which poetry is disseminated, Percy Shelley emerges as a theorist and practitioner of a kind of aesthetics imagined to engender critical thinking about one’s self and the world, a process of constantly questioning received ideas that opens the self to new experiences and new perspectives that might provide the ground for sociopolitical change but that refuses to offer a political programme.
State censorship stagnates activism, which obscures state violence.
Davis ‘99: Davis, Diane. “‘Addicted to Love’; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity.” Vol. 19 No. 4. 1999
Our fix of finitude, however, reminds us that this so-called home is haunted. In fact, etymologically speaking, "what haunts is also a haunt something that doubles. . .for a familiar place. Haunting belongs to the family of Heim" (Ronell, Dictations xviii). Heim, then, is never not unheimlich; a home is never not haunted. What goes for the subject's home-base, ethos, is spooked, relentlessly, by itsown fractal interiorities, its own unditchable and unsharable alterity?its finitude, which is precisely what it shares with others.15 There never was any "internal peace" in "self-identification," as Lyotard has warned, that was not purchased at the price of what itmust exorcise: "The Volk shuts itself up in theHeim, and it identifies itself through the narratives attached to names" (Differend 151)?that is, through the identification associated with Geschlecht? exorcising its spooks so as to preserve its illusion of stasis, of sobriety. When "communication" signifies only "reasonable exchange" among subjects, you can bet that alterity already will have been barred from the conversation. This is why Nancy charges that "the conventional chatter that attempts to promote reasonable exchange" as synonymous with communication "serves only to obscure violence, betrayal, and lies" ("Exscription" 319)? serves, that is, only to cover over the finitude itought to be exposing. It may be that any theory of communication that places a speaking subject in charge of building community effaces the sharing it attempts to promote. The "subject representing," after all, is not the same as the "being-communicating" (Nancy, Inoperative 24). Communication. . .happens? it is beyond our control; it is, in fact, who we are: communication is "the predicament of being" for any ekstatic existent (24). In as much as this existent functions as "threshold," it is continuously exposed to an in-common outside and so is always already communicating finite being to finite being by virtue of that exposure, by virtue of an involuntary. . .touch. There is no escaping community or this irrepressible communication, which neither expresses a bondage nor approximates a Vulcan mind-meld but simply operates as an exposition of the finitude.. .that.. .we.. .share?an exposition, as George Bataille has put it, that "tears us together" (22). A subject's representations can aim to crank up this rustle of finitude or to tune it out, but communication will have been happening, either way.
Maybe this needs to be made explicit: this originary "communication," this sharing, does not signify "under/standing." That is,what "communication" gives us to understand, Nancy explains, is only "that there is no common understanding of or in community, that sharing does not constitute an understanding (or a concept, or an intuition, or a schema), that it does not constitute a knowledge, and that it gives no one, including community itself, mastery over being-in-common" ("Myth Interrupted" 69). Communication is no more or less than the exposition of the overflowing, inappropriable, unsharable finitude that we share. And neither speaking nor writing is a means of this communication; rather, each is "communication itself, an exposure" (Nancy, Inoperative 31). Communication as understanding, Nancy observes, "is always disappointing," it's always "the communication of a disappointment, a nonpossibility, awithdrawal of communication" ("Speaking" 314-15). One can never be sure that a communique will arrive at itsdestination, and one can be fairly certain that ifitdoes, itwon't arrive aswhat itwas when itwas sent. And yet, in all the missed connections, in all the another communication is exposed: a communication that communicates the withdrawal or understanding and/but also the opening of another kind of sharing (315).16
This is not to say that what gets said is insignificant. But it is to say that a certain irrepressible communication is not about exchanging information, arguing a point, or expressing a bond: it's only about exposing understanding's withdrawal and so exposing finitude. . .as what we share. The ethical question par excellence for the third sophistic rhetorician is not how to move an audience toward a predetermined action or attitude but rather how to crank up the "noise," the excess, the interference that must be silenced for the sake of "reasonable erits," for the sake of cutting unifying figures. The question, in other words, that finitude prompts is not how to use language to build community; it is, rather, how to amplify the communications of community that are drowned out by the processes of identification.
The aff is key to creating a space beyond the law – we must ignore the biopolitical state’s speech codes to critically re-interrogate our practices, developing our own identities in the process by allowing us to define what speech we want to express.
Noterman and Pusey ‘12: (Elsa Noterman is Program Associate at the Community Strategies Group of the Aspen Insitute, Andre Pusey is a PhD candidate in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK, “Inside, Outside, and on the Edge of the Academy: Experiments in Radical Pedagogies” in Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Action, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, pp. 192-194); AB
So, how do we build this new kind of open and ephemeral institution? We think it is important to open up spaces in which we can both experiment with, and critically reflect upon, radical pedagogical practices. The crisis of the university is a crisis that throws up new openings and possibilities for what a university could be. These spaces can work toward pushing the boundaries of the academy by concretely asking, “what can a university do?” in praxis We need to engage in a discussion about how we can go forward as critical-radical researchers inside, outside and on the periphery of the academy. Is there any place for us within the institution as it is? Or as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2004) suggest, is the “only possible with the relationship to the university today . . . a criminal one”? This opens up the question/possibility of what Virno terms “exodus,” but which might also be described as “desertion.” This is not a territorial exodus, or a fleeing from, but rather a desertion of one’s assigned role, in this case of the “critical” yet docile body (Foucault, 2004) of the academic. As Harney and Moten (2004) put it, “to be in but not of is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.” In part, the Really Open University is an experiment in just this. The creation of spaces in which we can begin to interrogate the role of the university and of the academic, not just as theoretical exercise, but within an implicitly antagonistic, yet not wholly reactive, space of political engagement. This is a messy space that avoids any pure politics, or identitarian overcoding, neither overtly anarchist, nor Marxist, nor simply an “anticuts” group, yet neither a purely utopian reimagining. This is necessarily a “cramped space,” of (im)possibility, as Deleuze (2005) states, “creation takes place in bottlenecks.” Many elements of the edu-struggle will ultimately want to close down the categories again, in order to give more weight to their ideological underpinnings, trying to make the moment fit their politics, rather than seizing the moment in all its wealth of potentiality. The ROU views ‘crisis as possibility’ arguing that it is “up to us to decide the universities future.”17 But through what concrete actions might we actually develop a “really open university”? One way to begin may be through the occupation of the spaces where we work, play and consume, and the reappropriation of this time and space for our own (common) ends. This may help to promote new lines of questioning and open up new connectivities. One way to discuss this occupation and reappropriation, might be the literal forced reclamation of space, though direct action. This has, of course, been a tried and tested method across history, and we have seen the tactic of occupation has begun to some extent become popular again, with the recent occupations at universities across the UK, but to a much larger extent across Europe and the United States. We think there is an interesting dynamic, however, between defensive and offensive uses of occupation. We do not wish to set up a binary, but rather are interested in the qualitative shifts and activities that can occur within the occupied space itself, rather than simply the obstructive element of occupation. This problematic has been explored in the U.S. occupations movement through the often heated debate about the utility of political demands, versus occupation without demands. For example, “Occupation mandates the inversion of the standard dimensions of space. Space in an occupation is not merely the container of our bodies, it is a plane of potentiality that has been frozen by the logic of the commodity” (Inoperative Committee, 2009). Another way to discuss the occupation and reappropriation of time and space might be through the creation of new spaces that prefigure the new forms we may wish a reimagined university to take. A concrete example of this is the model of the autonomous social center, or “infoshop,” found within anarchist and autonomous activist practices (Atton, 1999). Social centers are place-based, self-managed spaces. They can be squatted, rented or cooperatively owned (Pusey, 2010). A particularly rich history of social centers can be found in Italy, but they exist all across Europe. In the United States the closest approximation to the autonomous social centers seems to be the network of radical bookstores and “infoshops” such as Red Emma’s in Baltimore and Bluestockings in New York City (Kanuga, 2010). Some academics at the University of Lincoln are attempting to develop a cooperatively run “social science center” that utilizes a social center type autonomous space, where they can practice radical pedagogical methods (Winn, 2010). The idea is that students will be able to enroll for free and staff will still be paid. We can imagine, based on our experiences and research within social centers in the UK, that this would be controversial within anarchist circles, both for its relationship with the institution of the university, and also because of its payment of academic staff. Payment for some roles performed within some spaces has been a source of much debate and contention within social centers within the UK (Chatterton, 2008). These spaces generally rely on the good will and free time of volunteers. However, many spaces cite burnout and lack of participation as major issues within social centers (UK Social Centres Network, 2008). The “dole autonomy” (Aufheben, 1999), which helped facilitate earlier cycles of struggle, has been very much weakened with successive government attacks on the welfare state, and students increasingly forced to take employment while studying means that there are far fewer people around with the “free time” to help enable projects such as these. It is, perhaps, through the establishment of self-organized alternative educational practices, and open and ephemeral institutions that we can start to value ideas for their own merit, rather than capitalist value—to create spaces and places where we can discard the price tags of commodified knowledge and instrumental learning, and instead appreciate the value of ideas and concepts themselves, while rediscovering the subversiveness of teaching.
I defend the whole resolution as a thought experiment. Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech. The resolution is negative state action, so a pre-fiat framing is justified.
Part 3 is Don’t Read Policy Theory
Evaluate kritikal discussion above policy-making arguments.
Reject policy arguments for 4 reasons:
1) The 1AC takes the political system hostage. Either the 1AC is right and we must change the system, or the system silences us, shatters its liberal appearance, and gives our life contradictory value. My symbolic hostage taking is the process necessary to produce new mindsets that lead to revolutionary change. The idea of material change cannot be separated from a prior immaterial change.
Baudrillard ‘76: Jean Baudrillard (Philosopher of the upmost Swag) “Symbolic Exchange and Death” 1976.
We will not destroy the system by a direct, dialectical revolution of the economic or political infrastructure . Everything produced by contradiction, by the relation of forces, or by energy in general, will only feed back into the mechanism and give it impetus, following a circular distortion similar to a Moebius strip. We will never defeat it by following its own logic of energy, calculation, reason and revolution, history and power, or some finality or counter finality. The worst violence at this level has no purchase, and will only backfire against itself. We will never defeat the system on the plane of the real: the worst error of all our revolutionary strategies is to believe that we will put an end to the system on the plane of the real: this is their imaginary, imposed on them by the system itself, living or surviving only by always leading those who attack the system to fight amongst each other on the terrain of reality, which is always the reality of the system. This is where they throw all their energies, their imaginary violence, where an implacable logic constantly turns back into the system. We have only to do it violence or counter-violence since it thrives on symbolic violence - not in the degraded sense in which this formula has found fortune, as a violence 'of signs' , from which the system draws strength, or with which it 'masks' its material violence: symbolic violence is deduced from a logic of the symbolic (which has nothing to do with the sign or with energy): reversal , the incessant reversibility o f the counter-gift and, conversely, the seizing of power by the unilateral exercise of the gift. 25 We must therefore displace everything into the sphere of the symbolic, where challenge , reversal and overbidding are the law, so that we can respond to death only by an equal or superior death. There is no question here of real violence or force, the only question concerns the challenge and the logic of the symbolic. If domination comes from the system's retention of the exclusivity of the gift without counter-gift - the gift of work which can only be responded to by destruction or sacrifice, if not in consumption , which is only a spiral of the system of surplus-gratification without result, therefore a spiral of surplus-domination , a gift of media and messages to which , due to the monopoly of the code , nothing is allowed to retort; the gift , everywhere and at every instant, of the social , of the protection agency, security, gratification and the solicitation of the social from which nothing is any longer permitted to escape - then the only solution is to turn the principle of its power back against the system itself: the impossibility of responding or retorting. To defy the system with a gift to which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death. Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation , and it is in this trap that the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. The system turns on itself, as a scorpion does when encircled by the challenge of death. For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide. So hostages are taken. On the symbolic or sacrificial plane, from which every moral consideration of the innocence of the victims is ruled out, the hostage is the substitute, the alter-ego of the ' terrorist' - the hostage's death for the terrorist's. Hostage and terrorist may thereafter become confused in the same sacrificial act. The stakes are death without any possibility of negotiation, and therefore return to an inevitable overbidding. Of course, they attempt to deploy the whole system of negotiation, and the terrorists themselves often enter into this exchange scenario in terms of this calculated equivalence (the hostages' lives against some ransom or liberation, or indeed for the prestige of the operation alone). From this perspective, taking hostages is not original at all it simply creates an unforeseen and selective relation of forces which can be resolved either by traditional violence or by negotiation. It is a tactical action. There is something else at stake, however, as we clearly saw at The Hague over the course of ten days of incredible negotiations: no-one knew what could be negotiated, nor could they agree on terms, nor on the possible equivalences of the exchange. Or again, even if they were formulated, the 'terrorists' demands' amounted to a radical denial of negotiation. It is precisely here that everything is played out, for with the impossibility of all negotiation we pass into the symbolic order, which is ignorant of this type of calculation and exchange (the system itself lives solely by negotiation, even if this takes place in the equilibrium of violence). The system can only respond to this irruption of the symbolic (the most serious thing to befall it, basically the only ' revolution' ) by the real, physical death of the terrorists. This, however, is its defeat, since their death was their stake, so that by bringing about their deaths the system has merely impaled itself on its own violence without really responding to the challenge that was thrown to it. Because the system can easily compute every death, even war atrocities, but cannot compute the death-challenge or symbolic death , since this death has no calculable equivalent, it opens up an inexpiable overbidding by other means than a death in exchange. Nothing corresponds to death except death. Which is precisely what happens in this case: the system itself is driven to suicide in return, which suicide is manifest in its disarray and defeat. However infinitesimal in terms of relations of forces it might be, the colossal apparatus of power is eliminated in this situation where (the very excess of its) derision is turned back against itself. The police and the army, all the institutions and mobilised violence of power whether individually or massed together, can do nothing against this lowly but symbolic death. For this death draws it onto a plane where there is no longer any response possible for it (hence the sudden structural liquefaction of power in '68, not because it was less strong, but because of the simple symbolic displacement operated by the students' practices) . The system can only die in exchange, defeat itself to lift the challenge. Its death at this instant is a symbolic response, but a death which wears it out. The challenge has the efficiency of a murderer. Every society apart from ours knows that, or used to know it. Ours is in the process of rediscovering it. The routes of symbolic effectiveness are those of an alternative politics. Thus the dying ascetic challenges God ever to give him the equivalent of this death. God does all he can to give him this equivalent 'a hundred times over' , in the form of prestige , of spiritual power, indeed of global hegemony But the ascetic's secret dream is to attain such an extent of mortification that even God would be unable either to take up the challenge , or to absorb the debt . He will then have triumphed over God, and become God himself. That is why the ascetic is always close to heresy and sacrilege , and as such condemned by the Church , whose function it is merely to preserve God from this symbolic face-to-face, to protect Him from this mortal challenge where He is summoned to die, to sacrifice Himself in order to take up the challenge of the mortified ascetic. The Church will have had this role for all time, avoiding this type of catastrophic confrontation (catastrophic primarily for the Church) and substituting a rule-bound exchange of penitences and gratifications, the impressario of a system of equivalences between God and men. The same situation exists in our relation to the system of power. All these institutions, all these social, economic, political and psychological mediations, are there so that no-one ever has the opportunity to issue this symbolic challenge, this challenge to the death, the irreversible gift which, like the absolute mortification of the ascetic, brings about a victory over all power, however powerful its authority maybe. It is no longer necessary that the possibility of this direct symbolic confrontation ever takes place. And this is the source of our profound boredom. This is why taking hostages and other similar acts rekindle some fascination: they are at once an exorbitant mirror for the system of its own repressive violence, and the model of a symbolic violence which is always forbidden it, the only violence it cannot exert: its own death.
2) Restricting debate to fiat undermines debate about assumptions underlying policy and teaches us to not defend the process by which we make our conclusions.
Gunder ‘9: senior planning lecturer at the Aukland University Michael. “Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning”. Pg. 11-12. AB
The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies of desired success, such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their desired enjoyment (cobblestones, chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum, this defines what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other, remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they are one and the same) is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as technical, rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "˜dominant stakeholders` can ensure the impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many whilst, of course, achieving their stakeholders’ specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469). The current post-democratic` milieu facilitates the above through avoidance of critical policy debate challenging favored orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of policy deficiencies, or alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while token institutions of liberal democracy’ are retained conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59). Consequently, the safe names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used or their work drawn upon by different stakeholders, while more critical voices are silenced by their inability to shape policy debates’ (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic development or spatial planning policy analyst thus continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying only the orthodox "successful” or "best practice” economic development or spatial planning responses. This further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo while providing "˜a cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer" isolating the political held from any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for public policy’ (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to generate similar policy responses for every competing local area or city-region, largely resulting in a zero-sum game (Blair and Kumar 1997).
3) Scholarship and ideas get co-opted if we believe that the state’s “inevitableness” means we have to use it. The only way to get out of this cycle of state oppression is to think outside the structures of the state. If it’s utopian to reject the state, then that’s what’s needed to change society. This is a stance against the traditionalist government policy-maker paradigm.
Newman ‘11: (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3); AB
At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations.

Tournament: Early Disclosure - NDCA | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
1AC
Pt. 1 Framing
The state is inevitable but that doesn’t mean we should give it ontological jurisdiction. It’s time to define your relation to society instead of letting it define you.
Liberalism tries to seize control of the state and direct the flow of history; this fails and maintains ongoing violence against the oppressed. Reliance on the state is dangerous. Against this, affirm an anarchy of becoming – a micropolitical ideological severance of the state from the self.
Call ‘2: (Lewis Call, Associate Professor of History at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, 2002, Postmodern Anarchism. Lexington: Lexington Books, pp. 47-56); AB
But the usual suspects have another, much more serious problem. Even if postmodern liberals can reject Nietzsche’s assaults on capitalism and the liberal state – and it is easy enough to locate passages in Nietzsche’s books where he seems to contradict these assaults – those who would use Nietzsche to shore up the eroding foundations of liberal democracy must contend with the even more powerful and radical forms of anarchy which are to be found in Nietzsche’s thought. They must contend, for example, with Nietzsche’s well-known anarchy of the subject. A number of commentators have pointed out that one of Nietzsche’s main contributions to political thought is his destruction of the conventional concepts of human subjectivity which lie at the basis of most modern political theories. Keith Ansell-Pearson suggests, for example, that the Genealogy aims “to show that one of the central ideas of moral and political theory, that of a human subject in possession of conscience and a free will, is not a natural given. William Connolly points out that after Nietzsche “the subject is not simply or unambiguously the self which establishes its unity, freedom, independence and self-transparency. And the assault on conventional (i.e., post-Enlightenment) ideas of subjectivity is not simply a metaphysical or epistemological issue. It is also a deeply political issue which has profound implications for the consruction of political theories and institutions. Those implications do not bode well for liberalism. Mark Warren summarizes the problem nicely: “Because liberals put a metaphysical placeholder in the space of the individual, they failed to theorize this space. As a result, they justified liberal forms of the state in terms of a historically conditioned effect mistaken for a universal vessence. This is why Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism in Western culture as the collapse of the individual agent also implicates the individualistic metaphysics of liberalism. Nietzsche’s assault on modern subjectivity, then, undermines the philosophical foundations of the liberal state. After Nietzsche, liberals find themselves thrown into a confusing postmodern world of multiple subject positions and decentered identities. They are forces to develop a new kind of liberal politics, one which will not rely upon epistemologically suspect categories of individuality. This is, as we have seen, a difficult task, and one which liberals rarely complete in a satisfying way. Let us now look in more detail at Nietzsche’s anarchy of the subject. Nietzsche famously regarded the free will which is central to most conventional notions of subjectivity as an egregious error. For example, he notes in Human, All Too Human that “we do not accuse nature of immorality when it sends thunderstorms and makes us wet: why do we call the harmful man immoral?” Because in the latter case we assume a voluntary commanding free will, in the former necessity. But this distinction is an error. Here Nietzsche seems to be advocating a kind of radical determinism: he views individual actions not as the product of some chimerical free will, but rather as the indirect product of the social and cultural forces which have constituted the individual who performs those actions. Of course, this has radical implications for political theory. If we understand individual actions as the product of the society and culture which produced the individual, then society is quite literally to blame for what its members do. This naturally renders conventional ideas of punishment radically incoherent. “How is it that every execution offends us more than a murder?” Nietzsche demands. “It is the coldness of the judges, the scrupulous preparation, the insight that here a human being used as a means of deterring others. For it is not guilt that is being punished, even when it exists: this lies in educators, parents, environment, in us, not in the murderer – I mean the circumstances that cause him to become one.” This is a key point for the postmodern anarchist. If we accept that humans possess no metaphysical, pre-social essence, if we accept that they are little more than nodal points where various social, economic, and cultural forces converge to produce the illusion of subjectivity, then the punishments schemes of the liberal state make no sense. Indeed, on this reading it would make more sense to execute the system itself, since it is the system that is guilty of manufacturing criminals. Revolutionaries who follow this kind of interpretation would also, perhaps, be less likely to allow their uprisings to descend into the kind of mindless terror, which was, unfortunately, to be found in abundance in France during the 1790s, in Russia during the 1920s and 1930s, or in China during the 1950s. I say this because the radical denial of free will applies to the rulers as well as the ruled. This point was made, remarkably enough, by Bakunin, who observed in 1869 that “the kings, the oppressors, exploiters of all kinds, are as guilty as the criminals who have emerged from the masses; like them, they are the evildoers who are not guilty, since they, too, are involuntary products of the present social order.” Let the guillotine be deployed, then, not against aristocratic or bourgeois tyrants but against the philosophy of subjectivity which gives such tyrants their power in the first place. Nietzsche continues his assault on traditional forms of subjectivity and consciousness in Beyond Good and Evil, questioning whether “there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘ego,’ and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking – that I know what thinking is.” An obvious assault on the old Cartesian concept of subjectivity (“I think, therefore I am”), Nietzsche’s critique of consciousness also has dramatic political meaning. These “thinking egos” – the rational, autonomous dramatic political meaning. These “thinking egos” – the rational, autonomous subjects who have dominated political discourse since the Enlightenment – are supposedly the beings who vote in liberal elections, who serve on the liberal juries which decide the fate of the supposedly autonomous criminals who stand before them, who use the media to inform themselves about issues so that they may form rational opinions, and so on. In short, a whole host of liberal theories and institutions depend upon a certain idea of subjectivity which is, after Nietzsche, extremely difficult to sustain. This anarchy of the subject makes possible another, possibly even more radical form of anarchy, an anarchy of becoming. If Nietzsche is right about the status of the subject in the late modern period – and an entire tradition of twentieth-century Continental philosophy suggests that his analysis is at least presciently persuasive with regards to the postmodern period – then we must radically rethink what it means to be human. Previous concepts of subjectivity (and thus previous political theories) focused on being: I am this autonomous person, I am this rational citizen of a liberal democracy. Nietzsche shifts our attention to becoming. If, as he argues, the subject has no firm metaphysical ground and no center, if indeed our subjectivity is in a constant state of flux, then the meaning of our lives must be constantly changing. It is, of course, somewhat alarming to think that we might have no fixed being, that our essence (if we have one) must reside in a constant stream of transformations. However, the thought of becoming can also be a very liberating thought. All radical thinking demands change, and Nietzsche’s demands more than most. To the conventional radical’s demands for social and political change, Nietzsche adds the demand for a change in our very consciousness, in the way we view our relationship to time and history. In this sense, Nietzsche’s thought stands as one of the most radical ever conceived, for it asserts nothing less than this: change is the very heart of who and what we are. And this is true, says Nietzsche, not only of ourselves but of our world. “If the world had a goal, it must have been reaches. If it were in any way capable of pausing and becoming fixed, of ‘being,’ if in the whole course of its becoming it possessed even for a moment of this capability of ‘being,’ then all becoming would long since have come to an end, along with all thinking, all ‘spirit.’ The fact of ‘spirit’ as a form of becoming proves that the world has no goal, no final state, and is incapable of being.” For Nietzsche, the world has no teleology, no destination. The forces of history do not direct us toward a Zeitgeist named Hegel. Indeed, if Hegel was the preeminent philosopher of the state, Nietzsche’s philosophy of perpetual becoming can only herald the state’s demise.
HE CONTINUES… So: Nietzsche’s thought, which explodes all manifestations of the conventional political subject – its rationality, its language, its thoughts, its theories, its states, its economics – stand at the origin of the subversive counteridea which I call postmodern anarchism. Such an anarchism represents a tactical use of Nietzsche’s thinking, not (as the usual suspects propose) to shore up the rapidly eroding theoretical foundations of liberal democracy but rather to finish off that withered remnant of subject-centered post-Enlightenment politics, in order to open up a space for something more interesting. Postmodern anarchism asserts that the problems which face us today are not the result of flaws in our political structures which can be alleviated through reform of through the seizure of state power. Rather, the problem lies in the structures themselves, and in the epistemologies which sustain those structures. Nietzsche’s anarchy of the subject makes it quite clear that our culture is to blame for the sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves. Following this guilty verdict, modern political culture in general and liberal political culture in particular may expect to receive a death sentence. The liberals warn that this way lies madness. We say: we cannot know what may lie further down this river of becoming. But at least we know that it will be radically different from the disastrous political situation in which we find ourselves presently. Perhaps the greatest appeal of postmodern Nietzschean anarchism lies in the fact that it runs little risk of falling into theoretical and political traps faced by all merely modern revolutions. Marxims and nineteenth-century anarchism criticized capital, bourgeois values, and the liberal state – but they did so using the language, the terms, and the theoretical tools of the very bourgeois order they sought to undermine. Lenin and Mao sought to reshape the state into something which could sanction genuine political and economic freedom, but they retained so many of the old forms that they ended up reproducing the old varieties of repression and exploitation. “The problem for revolutionaries today,” as Deleuze argues, is to unite within the purpose of a particular struggle without falling into the despotic and bureaucratic organization of the party or state apparatus, a nomadic unit related to the outside that will not revive an internal despotic unity. Perhaps this is what is most profound in Nietzsche’s thought and marks the extent of his break with philosophy, at least so far as it is manifested in the aphorism: he made thought into a machine of war – a battering ram – into a nomadic force. As always, it is the performative effect of Nietzsche’s thought, rather than its explicit content, which concerns us. And one crucial effect of his thinking is that it removes philosophy from the horizons of the state. And it is an event whose ramifications will continue to be felt for some time. Just as news of the death of God takes a long time reach us, so too does news of the death of the state. But the word of these deaths draws inexorably nearer. For no God and no state can hope to survive a full engagement with that thinking which detonates all fixed human identities and reveals as mere phantasms of consciousness all fixed politics, economics, and culture.
Politics that does not begin with the creation of the self is doomed to reactivity and ressentiment. This inscribes hatred into the place of power and reaffirms existing structures of domination.
Newman 2k: (Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory at the University of London at Goldsmiths, 2000, “Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment,” Theory and Event, 4:3); AB
Ressentiment is diagnosed by Nietzsche as our modern condition. In order to understand ressentiment, however, it is nec-essary to understand the relationship between master morality and slave morality in which ressentiment is generated. Nietzsche’s work On the Genealogy of Morality is a study of the origins of morality. For Nietzsche, the way we interpret and impose values on the world has a history — its origins are often brutal and far removed from the values they produce. The value of ‘good’, for instance, was invented by the noble and high-placed to apply to themselves, in contrast to common, low-placed and plebeian.3 It was the value of the master — ‘good’ — as opposed to that of the slave — ‘bad’. Thus, according to Nietzsche, it was in this pathos of distance, between the high-born and the low-born, this absolute sense of superiority, that values were created.4 However, this equation of good and aristocratic began to be undermined by a slave revolt in values. This slave revolt, according to Nietzsche, began with the Jews who instigated a revaluation of values: It was the Jews who, rejecting the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed) ventured with awe-inspiring consistency, to bring about a reversal and held it in the teeth of their unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless), saying, ‘Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble, the powerful, you are eternally wicked, cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will also be eternally wretched, cursed and damned!’…5 In this way the slave revolt in morality inverted the noble system of values and began to equate good with the lowly, the powerless — the slave. This inversion introduced the pernicious spirit of revenge and hatred into the creation of values. There- will to power. It would be, in other words, an anarchism without ressentiment. The question of community is central to radical politics, including anarchism. One cannot talk about collective action without at least posing the question of community. For Nietzsche, most modern radical aspirations towards community were a manifestation of the ‘herd’ mentality. However it may be possible to construct a ressentiment-free notion of community from Nietzsche’s own concept of power. For Nietzsche, active power is the individual’s instinctive discharge of his forces and capacities which produces in him an enhanced sensation of power, while reactive power, as we have seen, needs an external object to act on and define itself in opposition to.66 Perhaps one could imagine a form of community based on active power. For Nietzsche this enhanced feeling of power may be derived from assistance and benevolence towards others, from enhancing the feeling of power of others.67 Like the ethics of mutual aid, a community based on will to power may be composed of a series of inter-subjective relations that involve helping and caring for people without dominating them and denying difference. This openness to difference and self-transformation, and the ethic of care, may be the defining characteristics of the post-anarchist democratic community. This would be a community of active power — a community of ‘masters’ rather than ‘slaves’.68 It would be a community that sought to overcome itself — continually transforming itself and revelling in the knowledge of its power to do so. Post-anarchism may be seen, then, as a series of politicoethical strategies against domination, without essentialist guarantees and Manichean structures that condition and restrict classical anarchism. It would affirm the contingency of values and identities, including its own, and affirm, rather than deny, fore morality, as we understand it, had its roots in this vengeful will to power of the powerless over the powerful — the revolt of the slave against the master. It was from this imperceptible, subterranean hatred that grew the values subsequently associated with the good — pity, altruism, meekness, etc. Political values also grew from this poisonous root. For Nietzsche, values of equality and democracy, which form the cornerstone of radical political theory, arose out of the slave revolt in morality. They are generated by the same spirit of revenge and hatred of the powerful. Nietzsche therefore condemns political movements like liberal democracy, socialism, and indeed anarchism. He sees the democratic movement as an expression of the herd-animal morality derived from the Judeo-Christian revaluation of values.6 Anarchism is for Nietzsche the most extreme heir to democratic values — the most rabid expression of the herd instinct. It seeks to level the differences between individuals, to abolish class distinctions, to raze hierarchies to the ground, and to equalize the powerful and the powerless, the rich and the poor, the master and the slave. To Nietzsche this is bringing everything down to level of the lowest common denominator — to erase the pathos of distance between the master and slave, the sense of difference and superiority through which great values are created. Nietzsche sees this as the worst excess of European nihilism — the death of values and creativity. Slave morality is characterized by the attitude of ressentiment — the resentment and hatred of the powerless for the powerful. Nietzsche sees ressentiment as an entirely negative sentiment — the attitude of denying what is life-affirming, saying ‘no’ to what is different, what is ‘outside’ or ‘other’. Ressentiment is characterized by an orientation to the outside, rather than the focus of noble morality, which is on the self.7 While the master says ‘I am good’ and adds as an afterthought, ‘therefore he is bad’; the slave says the opposite — ‘He (the master) is bad, therefore I am good’. Thus the invention of values comes from a comparison or opposition to that which is outside, other, different. Nietzsche says: “… in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, psychologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act all, — its action is basically a reaction.”8 This reactive stance, this inability to define anything except in opposition to something else, is the attitude of ressentiment. It is the reactive stance of the weak who define themselves in opposition to the strong.
Reject ressentiment because it’s the foundation of psychology that instills a revengeful hatred that deprecates existence – outweighs all other impacts. Bracketed for gendered language.
Deleuze ‘83: Gilles, 1983, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pg. 34-36 BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE
Is this difference only psychological? A difference of mood or tone? Nietzsche's philosophy depends, in general, on the principle that ressentiment, bad conscience etc. are not psychological determinations. Nietzsche calls the enterprise of denying life and depreciating existence nihilism. He analyses the principal forms of nihilism, ressentiment, bad conscience, ascetic ideal; the whole of nihilism and its forms he calls the spirit of revenge. But, the different forms of nihilism are not at all reducible to psychological determinations, historical events or ideological currents, not even to metaphysical structures. 3 0 The spirit of revenge is undoubtedly expressed biologically, psychologically, historically and metaphysically; the spirit of revenge is a type, it is not separable from a typology, the key stone of Nietzschean philosophy. But the problem is: what is the nature of this typology? Far from being a psychological trait the spirit of revenge is the principle on which our whole psychology depends. Ressentiment is not part of psychology but the whole of our psychology, without knowing it, is a part of ressentiment. In the same way, when Nietzsche shows that Christianity is full of ressentiment and bad conscience he does not make nihilism a historical event, it is rather the element of history as such, the motor of universal history, the famous "historical meaning" or "meaning of history" which at one time found its most adequate manifestation in Christianity. And when Nietzsche undertakes the critique of nihilism he makes nihilism the presupposition of all metaphysics rather than the expression of particular metaphysics: there is no metaphysics which does not judge and depreciate life in the name of a supra-sensible world. We cannot even say that nihilism and its forms are categories of thought, for the categories of thought, of reasonable thought - identity, causality, finality - themselves presuppose an interpretation of force which is that of ressentiment. For all these reasons Nietzsche can say: "The instinct of revenge has gained such a hold on humanity over the centuries that the whole of metaphysics, psychology, history and above all morality bear its imprint. As soon as man began thinking he The Tragic 35 introduced the bacillus of revenge into things" (VP III 458). We must understand this as meaning that the instinct of revenge is the force which constitutes the essence of what we call psychology, history, metaphysics and morality. The spirit of revenge is the genealogical element of our thought, the transcendental principle of our way of thinking. Nietzsche's struggle against nihilism and the spirit of revenge will therefore mean the reversal of metaphysics, the end of history as history of man and the transformation of the sciences. And we do not really know what a man person denuded of ressentiment would be like. A man who would not accuse or depreciate existence - would he still be a man, would he think like a man? Would he not already be something other than a man, almost the Overman? To have ressentiment or not to have ressentiment - there is no greater difference, beyond psychology, beyond history, beyond metaphysics. It is the true difference or transcendental typology - the genealogical and hierarchical difference. Nietzsche presents the aim of his philosophy as the freeing of thought from nihilism and its various forms. Now, this implies a new way of thinking, an overthrow of the principle on which thought depends, a straightening out of the genealogical principle itself, a "transmutation". For a long time we have only been able to think in terms oi ressentiment and bad conscience. We have had no other ideal but the ascetic ideal. We have opposed knowledge to life in order to judge life, in order to make it something blameworthy, responsible or erroneous. We turned will into something bad, something stricken by a basic contradiction: we have said that it must be rectified, restrained, limited and even denied and suppressed. It was only any good at this price. There is no philosopher who, discovering the essence of will, has not groaned at his own discovery and, like the timid fortuneteller, has not immediately seen bad omens for the future and the source of all evils of the past. Schopenhauer pushed this old conception to its extreme limit; the penitentiary of the will, he said, and the wheel of Ixion. Nietzsche is the only one who does not groan at the discovery of the will, who does not try to exorcise it, or limit its effect. The phrase "a new way of thinking" means an affirmative thought, a thought which affirms life and the will to life, a thought which finally expels the whole of the negative; to believe in the innocence of the future and the past, to believe in the eternal return. What Nietzsche calls his glad tidings is that existence is no longer treated as blameworthy nor does the will feel guilty for existing. "Will, this is what the liberator and the messenger of joy is called" (Z II "Of Redemption"). 3 1 The glad tidings are tragic thought, for tragedy is not found in the recriminations of ressentiment, the conflicts of bad conscience or the contradictions of a will which feels guilty and responsible. The tragic does not even fight against ressentiment, bad conscience or nihilism. According to Nietzsche it has never been understood that the tragic = the joyful. This is another way of putting the great equation: to will = to create. We have not understood that the tragic is pure and multiple positivity, dynamic gaeity.
Imbuing the state with power allows it to suspend itself in a state of exception that creates zones of indistinction, where people become invisible and commodified for violence. Bracketed for gendered language.
Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
More than this inclusion by exclusion, sovereign power in the West is constituted by its ability to suspend itself in a state of exception, or ban: "The originary relation of law to life is not application but abandonment."15 The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign is at the same time inside and outside the sovereign order: the sovereign can suspend the law. What defines the rule of law is the state of exception when law is suspended. The very space in which juridical order can have validity is created and defined through the sovereign exception. However, the exception that defines the structure of sovereignty is more complex than the inclusion of what is outside by means of an interdiction.16 It is not just a question of creating a distinction between inside and outside: it is the tracing of a threshold between the two, a location where inside and outside enter into a zone of indistinction. It is this state of exception, or the zone of indistinction between inside and outside, that makes the modern juridical order of the West possible. The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provisional state of danger as a means of establishing the Nazi state it- self. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its boundaries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the normal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitutive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded exclusion from human law (killing him these people does not count as homicide) and he is excluded exclusion from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the exclusion of both the sacred and the profane.
Legal education and state-heuristic debate produce chronic mediocrity through the “YEAH THE STATE SUCKS, BUT LET’S USE IT THO” mentality – guarantees extremely violent decision-making.
Schlag ‘9: Pierre, Byron R. White Professor of Law and Former Associate Dean for Research, University of Colorado Law School, “ESSAY AND RESPONSE: Spam Jurisprudence, Air Law, and the Rank Anxiety of Nothing Happening (A Report on the State of the Art),” March, 2009, Georgetown Law Journal, 97 Geo. L.J. 803
In terms of social organization then, there may be something to be said for creating a professional corps (lawyers) whose modes of communication are widely shared and relatively standardized. Notice that if this is the objective, then the only place where that sort of standardized communication can be widely shared is somewhere close to the middle of the bell curve. Both intellectual sloth and intellectual excellence are, by definition, aberrant and thus detract from our efforts at standardization. Thus, training for mediocrity does serve a social function (within limits, of course). Mediocrity is not the only aim here. One would like this mediocrity to be the best it can be. We would like legal professionals to share a language and a mode of thought and, at the same time, for that language and mode of thought to be as perspicuous and intelligent as possible. Given the omnipresence of the bell curve, these desiderata are obviously in tension. The economists would likely talk about achieving "the optimal degree" of intelligence and mediocrity at the margin, but my sense is this will only get us so far. For law professors, the tension is bound to be somewhat frustrating. What many law professors would like--because many of them are intellectually inclined--is to bring intelligence to bear within legal discourse. This is bound to be a somewhat frustrating venture. Legal discourse is not designed to produce intelligence and, frankly, the materials and the discourse can only bear so much. Good judgment, groundedness, reasonableness--any of these virtues is often enough to snuff out real thinking. Indeed, whatever appeal good judgment, groundedness, and reasonableness may have for a judge or a lawyer (and I am prepared to say the appeal is considerable), such virtues are not particularly helpful to intellectual achievement. On the contrary, intellectual achievement requires the abandonment of received understandings. In fact, I would go so far as to say that intellectual vitality (at least in the context of a discipline like law) *829 requires some degree of defamiliarization, some reach for the exotic. The thing is, those sorts of efforts are not going to get very far if they constantly have to answer to good judgment, groundedness, reasonableness, and the like. And at this point, I would like to flip the argument made earlier in the paper. Here, I would like us to think of appeals to good judgment, groundedness, and reasonableness in legal thought as appeals to mediocrity. Making people see things involves things far different from good judgment, groundedness, or reasonableness. It involves a kind of artistry--a reorientation of the gaze, a disruption of complacency, a sabotage of habitual forms of thought, a derailing of cognitive defaults. This is part of what a really good education is about. Constant obeisance to good judgment or groundedness or reasonableness, by contrast, will systematically frustrate such efforts. n57 This is all rather vexing. Legal academics--with aspirations to intellectual excellence--are thus destined to play out the myth of Sisyphus. The main difference, of course, is that Sisyphus had a real rock to push up a real hill. The law professors' rock and hill, by contrast are symbolic--imaginative constructions of their own making. Arguably, pushing a symbolic rock up a symbolic hill is substantially easier than doing it for real. At the very least, it is easier to fake it and to claim success. At the same time, though, the symbolic nature of the exercise perhaps makes it more transparently pointless. As between these two points, there is a certain dissonance. On the one hand, we are dealing with pushing rocks up hills--and that is surely hard work. On the other hand, the rocks and hills are of our own imagination--so it should be easy. This is very confusing. n58 My best guess (and I offer this only as a preliminary hypothesis) is that the dissonance here might yield a certain degree of neurosis. n59 Still the question pops up again: "So what?" So what--so you have maybe seven thousand-something law professors in the nation and you know, maybe ninety-six percent are engaged in a kind of vaguely neurotic scholarship. So what? Maybe it's borderline tragic. Maybe, these people could have done so much better. None of this, by the way, is clearly established. But let's just assume, it's true. Who cares? Seven thousand people--that's not a lot of people. Plus, it's hard to feel for them. I know that nearly all of them would be us (but still). It's an extraordinarily privileged life. So why care about this? Here's why. The thing about legal scholarship is that it plays--through the mediation of the professorial mind--an important role in shaping the ways, the *830 forms, in which law students think with and about law. n60 If they are taught to think in essentially mediocre ways, they will reproduce those ways of thinking as they practice law and politics. If they are incurious, if they are lacking in political and legal imagination, if they are simply repeating the standard moves (even if with impressive virtuosity) they will, as a group, be wielding power in essentially mediocre ways. And the thing is: when mediocrity is endowed with power, it yields violence. And when mediocrity is endowed with great power, it yields massive violence. n61 All of which is to say that in making the negotiation between the imprinting of standard forms of legal thought and the imparting of an imaginative intelligence, we err too much on the side of the former. (Purely my subjective call here--but so is everybody else's.) Another way to put it is that while there is something to be said for the standardization point made earlier, generally, standardization is overdone. n62
And state heuristic debates are cruelly optimistic – means presumption goes aff. Liberalism is familiarity, not revolutionary.
Berlant ‘11: Lauren, George M. Pullman Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago, Cruel Optimism, Routledge: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 33-6
When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us. This cluster of promises could be embedded in a person, a thing, an institution, a text, a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea - whatever. To phrase 'the object of desire' as a cluster of promises is to allow us to encounter what's incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality but as an explanation for our sense of our endurance in the object, insofar as proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that the object promises, some of which may be clear to us while others not so much. In other words, all attachments are optimistic. That does not mean that they all feel optimistic: one might dread, for example, returning to a scene of hunger or longing or the slapstick reiteration of a lover or parent's typical misrecognition. But the surrender to the return to the scene where the object hovers in its potentialities is the operation of optimism as an affective form. In optimism, the subject leans toward promises contained within the present moment of the encounter with their object.' 'Cruel optimism' names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realisation is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic. What's cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject's sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world. This phrase points to a condition different than that of melancholia, which is enacted in the subject's desire to temporise an experience of the loss of an object/scene with which she has identified her ego continuity. Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object. One more thing: the cruelty of an optimistic attachment is, I think, usually something an analyst observes about someone's or some group's attachment to x, since usually that attachment exists without being an event, or even better, seems to lighten the load for someone/some group.^ But if the cruelty of an attachment is experienced by someone/some group, even in disavowed fashion, the fear is that the loss of the object/scene of promising itself will defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything. Often this fear of loss of a scene of optimism as such is unstated and only experienced in a sudden incapacity to manage startling situations, as we will see below. One might point out that all objects/scenes of desire are problematic, in that investments in them and projections onto them are less about them than about what cluster of desires and affects we can manage to keep magnetised to them. I have indeed wondered whether all optimism is cruel, because the experience of loss of the conditions of its reproduction can be so breathtakingly bad, just as the threat of the loss of x in the scope of one's attachment drives can feel like a threat to living on itself. But some scenes of optimism are clearly crueller than others: where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalising or animating potency of an object/ scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first place. This might point to something as banal as a scouring love, but it also opens out to obsessive appetites, working for a living, patriotism, all kinds of things. One makes affective bargains about the costliness of one's attachments, usually unconscious ones, most of which keep one in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition. This means that a poetics of attachment always involves some splitting off of the story I can tell about wanting to be near x (as though x has autonomous qualities) from the activity of the emotional habitus I have constructed by having x in my life in order to be able to project out my endurance as proximity to the complex of what x seems to offer and proffer. To understand cruel optimism, therefore, one must embark on an analysis of rhetorical indirection, as a way of thinking about the strange temporalities of projection into an enabling object that is also disabling. I learned how to do this from reading Barbara Johnson's work on apostrophe and free indirect discourse. In her poetics of indirection, each of these rhetorical modes is shaped by the ways a writing subjectivity conjures other ones so that, in a performance of fantasmatic intersubjectivity, the writer gains superhuman observational authority, enabling a performance of being made possible by the proximity of the object. Because this object is something like what I am describing in the optimism of attachment, I'll describe a bit the shape of my transference with her thought. In 'Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,' which will be my key referent bere, Johnson tracks the political consequences of apostrophe for what has become foetal personhood: a silent, affectively present but physically displaced interlocutor (a lover, a foetus) is animated in speech as distant enough for a conversation but close enough to be imaginable by the speaker in whose head the entire scene is happening.' But the condition of projected possibility, of a hearing that cannot take place in the terms of its enunciation ('you' are not here, 'you' are eternally belated to the conversation with you that I am imagining) creates a fake present moment of intersubjectivity in which, nonetheless, a performance of address can take place. The present moment is made possible by the fantasy of you, laden with the x qualities I can project onto you, given your convenient absence. Apostrophe therefore appears to be a reaching out to a you, a direct movement from place x to y, but it is actually a turning back, an animating of a receiver on behalf of the desire to make something happen now that realises something in the speaker, makes the speaker more or differently possible, because she has admitted, in a sense, the importance of speaking for, as, and to, two: but only under the condition, and illusion, that the two is really (in) one. Apostrophe is thus an indirect, unstable, physically impossible but phenomenologically vitalising movement of rhetorical animation that permits subjects to suspend themselves in the optimism of a potential occupation of the same psychic space of others, the objects of desire who make you possible (by having some promising qualities, but also by not being there).'' Later work, such as on 'Muteness Envy,' elaborates Johnson's description of the gendered rhetorical politics of this projection of voluble intersubjectivity.'^ The paradox remains that the conditions of the lush submerging of one consciousness into another require a double negation: of the speaker's boundaries, so s/he can grow bigger in rhetorical proximity to the object of desire; and of the spoken of, who is more or less a powerful mute placeholder providing an opportunity for the speaker's imagination of her/his/their flourishing. Of course psychoanalytically speaking all intersubjectivity is impossible. It is a wish, a desire, and a demand for an enduring sense of being with and in x, and is related to that big knot that marks the indeterminate relation between a feeling of recognition and misrecognition - recognition is the misrecognition you can bear, a transaction that affirms you without, again, necessarily feeling good or accurate (it might idealise, it might affirm your monstrosity, it might mirror your desire to be nothing enough to live under the radar, it might feel just right, and so on).'' Johnson's work on projection shows that scenes of impossible identity, rhetorically rendered, open up meaning and knowledge by mining the negative - projective, boundary dissolving - spaces of attachment to the object of address who must be absent in order for the desiring subject of intersubjectivity to get some traction, to stabilise her proximity to the object/scene of promise. In free indirect discourse, a cognate kind of suspension, the circulation of this kind of merged and submerged observational subjectivity, has less pernicious outcomes, at least when Johnson reads Zora Neale Hurston's practice of it.' In a narrator's part-merging with a character's consciousness, say, free indirect discourse performs the impossibility of locating an observational intelligence in one or any body, and therefore forces the reader to transact a different, more open relation of unfolding to what she is reading, judging, being, and thinking she understands. In Jobnson's work such a transformative transaction through reading/speaking 'unfolds' the subject in a good way, despite whatever desires they may have not to become significantly different." In short, Johnson's work on projection is about the optimism of attachment, and is often itself optimistic about the negations and extensions of personhood that forms of suspended intersubjectivity demand from the reader. What follows is not so buoyant: this is an essay politicising Freud's observation that 'people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them'.^ It comes from a longer project about the politics, aesthetics, and projections of political depression. Political depression persists in affective judgments of the world's intractability - evidenced in affectlessness, apathy, coolness, cynicism, and so on - modes of what might be called detachment that are really not detached at all but constitute ongoing relations of sociality.'" The politically depressed position is manifested in the problem of the difficulty of detaching from life-building modalities that can no longer be said to be doing their work, and which indeed make obstacles to the desires that animate them; my archive tracks practices of self-interruption, self-suspension, and self-abeyance that indicate people's struggles to change, but not traumatically, the terms of value in which their life-making activity has been cast." Cruel optimism is, then, like all phases, a deictic, a phrase that points to a proximate location: as an analytic lever it is an incitement to inhabit and to track the affective attachment to what we call 'the good life,' which is for so many a bad life that wears out the subjects who nonetheless, and at the same time, find their conditions of possibility within it. My assumption is that the conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world even of relative wealth, as in the US, are conditions of the attrition or the wearing out of the subject, and that the irony - that the labour of reproducing life in the contemporary world is also the activity of being worn out by it - has specific implications for thinking about the ordinariness of suffering, the violence of normativity, and the 'technologies of patience' or lag that enable a concept of the later to suspend questions of the cruelty of the now.'^ Cruel optimism is in this sense a concept pointing toward a mode of lived imminence, one that grows from a perception about the reasons people are not Bartlehy, do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to, to syncopate with it, or to be held in a relation of reciprocity, reconciliation, or resignation that does not mean defeat by it. Or perhaps they move to normative form to get numb with the consensual promise, and to misrecognise that promise as an achievement. This essay traverses three episodes of suspension - from John Ashhery, Charles Johnson, and Ceoff Ryman - of the reproduction of habituated or normative life. These suspensions open up revelations about the promises that had clustered as people's objects of desire, stage moments of exuberance in the impasse near the normal, and provide tools for suggesting why these exuberant attachments keep ticking not like the time bomb they might be but like a white noise machine that provides assurance that what seems like static really is, after all, a rhythm people can enter into while they're dithering, tottering, bargaining, testing, or otherwise being worn out by the promises that they have attached to in this world.
Pt. 2 Linguistics
Speech codes let the state arbitrarily define linguistic constraints – it empowers hate speech when it wants to. The state shields itself from self-incrimination by punishing individuals whose speech is evidentiary of the state’s failure. This leaves the individual vulnerable and the state all-powerful.
Butler ‘97: Judith Butler writes in “Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.” Judith Butler is Chancellor's Professor in the departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also the author of Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, co-author of Feminist Contentions, and co-editor! with Joan W. Scotti of Feminists Theorize the Political All are available from Routledge; AB
I consider the logic of this policy in the next chapter, and I propose to return to that figure of efficacious and offensive utterance toward the end of this one. In the interim, however, I aim to consider the construal of hate speech as offensive conduct, the effort to construe pornography as hate speech, and the concomitant effort to seek re- SOVEREIGN PERFORMATIVES course to the state to remedy the injuries allegedly caused by hate speech. What happens when we seek recourse to the state to regulate such speech? In particular, how is he regulatory power of the state enhanced through such an appeal? This is, perhaps, a familiar argument that I hope to make in a less than familiar way. My concern is not only with the protection of civil liberties against the incursion of the state, but with the peculiar discursive power given over to the state through the process of legal redress. I would like to suggest a formulation for the problem that might seem paradoxical, but which I think, even in its hyperbolic mode, might shed some light on the problem that regulating hate, speech poses. That formulation is this: the state produces hate speech, and by this I do not mean that the state is accountable for the various slurs, epithets, and forms of invective that currently circulate throughout the population. I mean only that the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of publically acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain that consequential line of demarcation. The inflated and efficacious utterance attributed to hate speech in some of the politicized contexts discussed above is itself modeled on the speech of a sovereign state, understood as a sovereign speech act, a speech act with the power to do what it says. This sovereign power is attributed to hate speech when it is said to "deprive" us of rights and liberties. The power attributed to hate speech is a power of absolute and efficacious agency, performativity and transitivity at once (it does what it says and it does what it says it will do to the one addressed by the speech). Precisely this power of legal language is that to which we refer when we call upon the state to effect the regulation of offensive speech. The problem, then, is not that the force of the sovereign performative is wrong, but when used by citizens it is wrong, and when intervened upon by the state, it is, in these contexts, right. The same kind of force, however, is attributed to the performative in both instances, and that version of performative power is never brought into question by those who pursue heightened regulation. What is this power? And how are we to account for its sustained production within hate speech discourse, as well as its continuing allure? Before venturing an answer to these questions, it seems worth noting that this invocation of the sovereign performative takes place against the background of a political situation in which power is no longer constrained within the sovereign form of the state. Diffused throughout disparate and competing domains of the state apparatus, and through civil society in diffuse forms as well, power cannot be easily or definitively traced to a single subject who is its "speaker:' to a sovereign representative of the state. To the extent that Foucault is right to describe contemporary relations of power as emanating from a number of possible sites, power is no longer constrained by the parameters of sovereignty. The difficulty of describing power as a sovereign formation, however, in no way precludes fantasizing or figuring power in precisely that way; to the contrary, the historical loss of the sovereign 78 1 organization of power appears to occasion the fantasy of its return-a return, I want to argue, . that takes place in language, in the figure of the performative. The emphasis on the performative phantasmatically resurrects the performative in language, establishing language as a displaced site of politics and specifying that displacement as driven by a wish to return to a simpler and more reassuring map of power, one in which the assumption of sovereignty remains secure.
Voting aff rejects the politics of aesthetics – we must recognize the role of speech as simply a form of communication. Words are byproducts of societal conditions – the aff’s anarchy of becoming controls the internal link to defining your own place in the world.
Gilmore ‘9: Paul Gilmore (Paul Gilmore, Associate Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach – scholar critical work in dealing with the history, transatlantic dimensions, and political promises of American Romantic literature - Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism, Published 01/01/2009)
From this reading, Shelley’s idea of the poet as an unacknowledged legislator wielding a sword of lightning takes on a new light, revealing the limitations as well as the power of poetry as a political force. Eschewing the utopianism of the late Enlightenment, Shelley electrifies the human imagination, rendering it both the medium where the mental and the physical meet and the source of intellectual and physical freedom. As such, the materiality of electric poetry lies not just in its physicality—in language being registered by the senses—but in its genesis within and action upon the social world. Poetry is material because it is literally words, which are material themselves, but it is also material in a sociohistorical sense, the product of material conditions of political and economic structures. In “Defence,” for example, Shelley indicates that it is poetry’s embeddeness in what we might now call social discourse that gives it its “electric life,” as that life is “less the poets’ spirit than the spirit of the age” (7:140). Similarly, in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, in further developing the figure of lightning thought, Percy elaorates this relationship between mind and the world, gesturing to its political implications: “The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition, or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or is about to be restored” (2:173). Echoing Schlegel’s prediction about the lightning charge of poetry, Percy at once envisions political revolution and at the same time insists that the changes to come are unpredictable, are “unimagined.” Thus, in concluding his preface to Prometheus Unbound, Percy acknowledges his “‘passion for reforming the world,’” but insists that his poetry does not contain “a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence” (2:174). As Kaufman, from an Adornian-Marxist position, Paul Hamilton, from a Habermasian-Public Sphere approach, and Redfield, from a de Manian–deconstructive angle, have all differently argued, it is this refusal of political commitment that allows Shelley to provide an alternative understanding of aesthetic politics.27 Through acknowledging the material opacity of language itself and by gesturing to the radical indeterminacy of meaning, in drawing on materialist understandings of the mind and the basis of the self in the senses, and in recognizing the sociohistorical conditions and material means by which poetry is disseminated, Percy Shelley emerges as a theorist and practitioner of a kind of aesthetics imagined to engender critical thinking about one’s self and the world, a process of constantly questioning received ideas that opens the self to new experiences and new perspectives that might provide the ground for sociopolitical change but that refuses to offer a political programme.
Pigeonholing speech into categories obscures state violence and bars alterity.
Davis ‘99: Davis, Diane. “‘Addicted to Love’; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity.” Vol. 19 No. 4. 1999
Our fix of finitude, however, reminds us that this so-called home is haunted. In fact, etymologically speaking, "what haunts is also a haunt something that doubles. . .for a familiar place. Haunting belongs to the family of Heim" (Ronell, Dictations xviii). Heim, then, is never not unheimlich; a home is never not haunted. What goes for the subject's home-base, ethos, is spooked, relentlessly, by itsown fractal interiorities, its own unditchable and unsharable alterity?its finitude, which is precisely what it shares with others.15 There never was any "internal peace" in "self-identification," as Lyotard has warned, that was not purchased at the price of what itmust exorcise: "The Volk shuts itself up in theHeim, and it identifies itself through the narratives attached to names" (Differend 151)?that is, through the identification associated with Geschlecht? exorcising its spooks so as to preserve its illusion of stasis, of sobriety. When "communication" signifies only "reasonable exchange" among subjects, you can bet that alterity already will have been barred from the conversation. This is why Nancy charges that "the conventional chatter that attempts to promote reasonable exchange" as synonymous with communication "serves only to obscure violence, betrayal, and lies" ("Exscription" 319)? serves, that is, only to cover over the finitude itought to be exposing. It may be that any theory of communication that places a speaking subject in charge of building community effaces the sharing it attempts to promote. The "subject representing," after all, is not the same as the "being-communicating" (Nancy, Inoperative 24). Communication. . .happens? it is beyond our control; it is, in fact, who we are: communication is "the predicament of being" for any ekstatic existent (24). In as much as this existent functions as "threshold," it is continuously exposed to an in-common outside and so is always already communicating finite being to finite being by virtue of that exposure, by virtue of an involuntary. . .touch. There is no escaping community or this irrepressible communication, which neither expresses a bondage nor approximates a Vulcan mind-meld but simply operates as an exposition of the finitude.. .that.. .we.. .share?an exposition, as George Bataille has put it, that "tears us together" (22). A subject's representations can aim to crank up this rustle of finitude or to tune it out, but communication will have been happening, either way.
Maybe this needs to be made explicit: this originary "communication," this sharing, does not signify "under/standing." That is,what "communication" gives us to understand, Nancy explains, is only "that there is no common understanding of or in community, that sharing does not constitute an understanding (or a concept, or an intuition, or a schema), that it does not constitute a knowledge, and that it gives no one, including community itself, mastery over being-in-common" ("Myth Interrupted" 69). Communication is no more or less than the exposition of the overflowing, inappropriable, unsharable finitude that we share. And neither speaking nor writing is a means of this communication; rather, each is "communication itself, an exposure" (Nancy, Inoperative 31). Communication as understanding, Nancy observes, "is always disappointing," it's always "the communication of a disappointment, a nonpossibility, awithdrawal of communication" ("Speaking" 314-15). One can never be sure that a communique will arrive at itsdestination, and one can be fairly certain that ifitdoes, itwon't arrive aswhat itwas when itwas sent. And yet, in all the missed connections, in all the another communication is exposed: a communication that communicates the withdrawal or understanding and/but also the opening of another kind of sharing (315).16
This is not to say that what gets said is insignificant. But it is to say that a certain irrepressible communication is not about exchanging information, arguing a point, or expressing a bond: it's only about exposing understanding's withdrawal and so exposing finitude. . .as what we share. The ethical question par excellence for the third sophistic rhetorician is not how to move an audience toward a predetermined action or attitude but rather how to crank up the "noise," the excess, the interference that must be silenced for the sake of "reasonable erits," for the sake of cutting unifying figures. The question, in other words, that finitude prompts is not how to use language to build community; it is, rather, how to amplify the communications of community that are drowned out by the processes of identification.
The aff is key to creating a space beyond the law – we must ignore the state’s speech codes to critically re-interrogate our practices, developing our own identities in the process by allowing us to define what speech we want to express.
Noterman and Pusey ‘12: (Elsa Noterman is Program Associate at the Community Strategies Group of the Aspen Insitute, Andre Pusey is a PhD candidate in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK, “Inside, Outside, and on the Edge of the Academy: Experiments in Radical Pedagogies” in Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Action, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, pp. 192-194); AB
So, how do we build this new kind of open and ephemeral institution? We think it is important to open up spaces in which we can both experiment with, and critically reflect upon, radical pedagogical practices. The crisis of the university is a crisis that throws up new openings and possibilities for what a university could be. These spaces can work toward pushing the boundaries of the academy by concretely asking, “what can a university do?” in praxis We need to engage in a discussion about how we can go forward as critical-radical researchers inside, outside and on the periphery of the academy. Is there any place for us within the institution as it is? Or as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2004) suggest, is the “only possible with the relationship to the university today . . . a criminal one”? This opens up the question/possibility of what Virno terms “exodus,” but which might also be described as “desertion.” This is not a territorial exodus, or a fleeing from, but rather a desertion of one’s assigned role, in this case of the “critical” yet docile body (Foucault, 2004) of the academic. As Harney and Moten (2004) put it, “to be in but not of is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.” In part, the Really Open University is an experiment in just this. The creation of spaces in which we can begin to interrogate the role of the university and of the academic, not just as theoretical exercise, but within an implicitly antagonistic, yet not wholly reactive, space of political engagement. This is a messy space that avoids any pure politics, or identitarian overcoding, neither overtly anarchist, nor Marxist, nor simply an “anticuts” group, yet neither a purely utopian reimagining. This is necessarily a “cramped space,” of (im)possibility, as Deleuze (2005) states, “creation takes place in bottlenecks.” Many elements of the edu-struggle will ultimately want to close down the categories again, in order to give more weight to their ideological underpinnings, trying to make the moment fit their politics, rather than seizing the moment in all its wealth of potentiality. The ROU views ‘crisis as possibility’ arguing that it is “up to us to decide the universities future.”17 But through what concrete actions might we actually develop a “really open university”? One way to begin may be through the occupation of the spaces where we work, play and consume, and the reappropriation of this time and space for our own (common) ends. This may help to promote new lines of questioning and open up new connectivities. One way to discuss this occupation and reappropriation, might be the literal forced reclamation of space, though direct action. This has, of course, been a tried and tested method across history, and we have seen the tactic of occupation has begun to some extent become popular again, with the recent occupations at universities across the UK, but to a much larger extent across Europe and the United States. We think there is an interesting dynamic, however, between defensive and offensive uses of occupation. We do not wish to set up a binary, but rather are interested in the qualitative shifts and activities that can occur within the occupied space itself, rather than simply the obstructive element of occupation. This problematic has been explored in the U.S. occupations movement through the often heated debate about the utility of political demands, versus occupation without demands. For example, “Occupation mandates the inversion of the standard dimensions of space. Space in an occupation is not merely the container of our bodies, it is a plane of potentiality that has been frozen by the logic of the commodity” (Inoperative Committee, 2009). Another way to discuss the occupation and reappropriation of time and space might be through the creation of new spaces that prefigure the new forms we may wish a reimagined university to take. A concrete example of this is the model of the autonomous social center, or “infoshop,” found within anarchist and autonomous activist practices (Atton, 1999). Social centers are place-based, self-managed spaces. They can be squatted, rented or cooperatively owned (Pusey, 2010). A particularly rich history of social centers can be found in Italy, but they exist all across Europe. In the United States the closest approximation to the autonomous social centers seems to be the network of radical bookstores and “infoshops” such as Red Emma’s in Baltimore and Bluestockings in New York City (Kanuga, 2010). Some academics at the University of Lincoln are attempting to develop a cooperatively run “social science center” that utilizes a social center type autonomous space, where they can practice radical pedagogical methods (Winn, 2010). The idea is that students will be able to enroll for free and staff will still be paid. We can imagine, based on our experiences and research within social centers in the UK, that this would be controversial within anarchist circles, both for its relationship with the institution of the university, and also because of its payment of academic staff. Payment for some roles performed within some spaces has been a source of much debate and contention within social centers within the UK (Chatterton, 2008). These spaces generally rely on the good will and free time of volunteers. However, many spaces cite burnout and lack of participation as major issues within social centers (UK Social Centres Network, 2008). The “dole autonomy” (Aufheben, 1999), which helped facilitate earlier cycles of struggle, has been very much weakened with successive government attacks on the welfare state, and students increasingly forced to take employment while studying means that there are far fewer people around with the “free time” to help enable projects such as these. It is, perhaps, through the establishment of self-organized alternative educational practices, and open and ephemeral institutions that we can start to value ideas for their own merit, rather than capitalist value—to create spaces and places where we can discard the price tags of commodified knowledge and instrumental learning, and instead appreciate the value of ideas and concepts themselves, while rediscovering the subversiveness of teaching.
Denying the state the legitimacy and faith it craves causes it to implode from within – turns political engagement and material scenario-planning – DISENGAGEMENT solves.
Baudrillard ‘83: Jean, IN THE SHADOW OF THE SILENT MAJORITIES OR THE END OF THE SOCIAL. 1983
From Resistance to Hyperconformity The emergence of silent majorities must be located within the entire cycle of historical resistance to the social. Resistance to work of course, but also resistance to medicine, resistance to schooling, resistance to security, resistance to information. Official history only records the uninterrupted progress of the social, relegating to the obscurity reserved for former cultures, as barbarous relics, everything not coinciding with this glorious advent. In fact, contrary to what one might believe (that the social has definitely won, that its movement is irreversible, that consensus upon the social is total), resistance to the social in all its forms has progressed even more rapidly than the social. It has merely taken other forms than the primitive and violent ones which were subsequently absorbed (the social is alive and well, thank you, only idiots run away from writing and vaccination and the benefits of security). Those frontal resistances still corresponded to an equally frontal and violent period of socialisation, and carne from traditional groups seeking to preserve their own culture, their original cultures. It was not the mass in them which resisted, but, on the contrary, differentiated structures, in opposition to the homogeneous and abstract model of the social. This type of resistance can still be discovered in the "two-step flow of communication" which American sociology has analysed: the mass does not at all constitute a passive receiving structure for media messages, whether they be political, cultural or advertising. Microgroups and individuals, far from taking their cue from a uniform and imposed decoding, decode messages in their own way. They intercept them (through leaders) and transpose them (second level), contrasting the dominant code with their own particular sub-codes, finally recycling everything passing into their own cycle, exactly like primitive natives recycle western money in their symbolic circulation (the Siane of New Guinea) or like the Corsicans recycle universal suffrage and elections in their clan rivalry strategies. This ruse is universal: it is a way of redirecting, of absorbing, of victoriously salvaging the material diffused by the dominant culture. It is this which also governs the "magic" usage of the doctor and medicine among the "underdeveloped" masses. Commonly reduced to an antiquated and irrational mentality, we should read in this, on the contrary, an offensive practice, a rediversion by excess, an unanalysed but conscious rejection "without knowing it" of the profound devastation wreaked by rational medicine. But this is still the feat of groups traditionally structured by identity and significance. Quite different is the refusal of socialisation which comes from the mass; from an innumerable, unnamable and anonymous group, whose strength comes from its very destructuration and inertia. Thus, in the case of the media, traditional resistance consists of reinterpreting messages according to the group's own code and for its own ends. The masses, on the contrary, accept everything and redirect everything en bloc into the spectacular, without requiring any other code, without requiring any meaning, ultimately without resistance, but making everything slide into an indeterminate sphere which is not even that of non-sense, but that of overall manipulation/ fascination. It has always been thought - this is the very ideology of the mass media - that it is the media which envelop the masses. The secret of manipulation has been sought in a frantic semiology of the mass media. But it has been overlooked, in this naive logic of communication, that the masses are a stronger medium than all the media, that it is the former who envelop and absorb the latter - or at least there is no priority of one over the other. The mass and the media are one single process. Mass(age) is the message. So it is with movies, whose inventors initially dreamed of a rational, documentary, social medium, but which very quickly and permanently swung towards the imaginary. So it is with technology, science, and knowledge. Condemned to a "magical" practice and to a "spectacular" consumption.· So it is with consumption itself. To their amazement, economists have never been able to rationalise consumption, the seriousness of their "theory of need" and the general consensus upon the discourse of utility being taken for granted. But this is because the practice of the masses very quickly had nothing (or perhaps never had anything) to do with needs. They have turned consumption into a dimension of status and prestige, of useless keeping up with the Joneses or simulation, of potlatch which surpassed use value in every way. A desperate attempt has been made from all sides (official propaganda, consumer societies, ecologues and sociologues) to instil into them sensible spending and functional calculation in matters of consumption, but it is hopeless. For it is by sign/ value and the frantic stake in sign/value (which economists, even when they try to integrate it as a variable, have always seen as upsetting economic reason), that the masses block the economy, resist the" objective" imperative of needs and the rational balancing of behaviors and ends. Sign/ value against use value, this is already a distortion of political economy. And let it not be said that all this ultimately profits exchange value, that is to say the system. For if the system does well out of this game, and even encourages it (the masses "alienated" in gadgets, etc.), this isn't the main thing, and what this slipping, this skidding initiates in the long term - already initiates - is the end of the economic, cut off from all its rational definitions by the excessive, magic, spectacular, fraudulent and nearly parodic use the masses put it to. An asocial use, resistant to all pedagogies, to all socialist education - an aberrant use whereby the masses (us, you, everybody) have already crossed over to the other side of political economy. They haven't waited for future revolutions nor theories which claim to "liberate" them by a "dialectical" movement. They know that there is no liberation, and that a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization. "You want us to consume - O.K., let's consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose." So it is with medicine: frontal resistance (which hasn't disappeared everywhere) has been replaced by a more subtle form of subversion; an excessive, uncontrollable consumption of medicine, a panicked conformity to health injunctions. A fantastic escalation in medical consumption which completely corrupts the social objectives and finalities of medicine. What better way to abolish it? At present, doctors, manipulated much more than they manipulate, no longer know what they are doing, what they are. "Give us more treatment, doctors, medication, security, health - more, ever further, keep it coming ... !" The masses alienated in medicine? Not at all: they are in the process of ruining its institution, of making Social Security explode, of putting the social itself in danger by craving always more of it, as with commodities.
I defend the whole resolution as a thought experiment.
The role of the ballot is to reject traditional forms of scholarship in favor of voting for the debater with the best kritikal methodology. This means rejecting roleplaying, state-good, policy-making scholarship, and other postmodern constructs which plague modern academia. Kritikal methodology refers to pre-fiat discursive literature and scholarship. It’s a means-based role of the judge. You can link back offense with a counter methodology. The 1AC comes before theory/T.
Blind adherence to fiat has drained debate of meaning. The hegemonic structure you call fiat is a tactic of marginalization to prevent institutional subversion – LINK TURNS your T/theory standards – deliberation is useless without critical literature.
Gunder ‘9: senior planning lecturer at the Aukland University Michael. “Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning”. Pg. 11-12.; AB
The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies of desired success, such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their desired enjoyment (cobblestones, chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum, this defines what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other, remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they are one and the same) is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as technical, rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "˜dominant stakeholders` can ensure the impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many whilst, of course, achieving their stakeholders’ specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469). The current post-democratic` milieu facilitates the above through avoidance of critical policy debate challenging favored orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of policy deficiencies, or alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while token institutions of liberal democracy’ are retained conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59). Consequently, the safe names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used or their work drawn upon by different stakeholders, while more critical voices are silenced by their inability to shape policy debates’ (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic development or spatial planning policy analyst thus continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying only the orthodox "successful” or "best practice” economic development or spatial planning responses. This further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo while providing "˜a cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer" isolating the political held from any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for public policy’ (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to generate similar policy responses for every competing local area or city-region, largely resulting in a zero-sum game (Blair and Kumar 1997).
Underview
DEPENDS ON THE ROUND
IT WILL EITHER BE...
- PRE-EMPTIVE COUNTER-INTERP FOR THEORY/T
- POLICY PRE-EMPTS
- KANT PRE-EMPTS
- METHOD K PRE-EMPTS
- ANTI-BLACKNESS PRE-EMPTS
- OTHER PRE-EMPTS

Tournament: CPS | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lynbrook NS | Judge: Salim Damerdji
We begin with a metaphor for the AC from the work of Franz Kafka in his story “Before the Law.” A man tries to gain access to the law, but a gatekeeper prevents him from doing so. The man spends everything he has, "no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.”” The man’s health only deteriorates as he ages. The gatekeeper recognizes the man’s approaching death and says, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”
As creator and gatekeeper of the law, the state-sovereign wants you to believe in the futility of action in the face of law. It sets a gatekeeper for every aspect of the law to protect sovereign interests and create a facade of its own legitimacy and the futility of any action but compliance. Overcoming ONE instance of the law’s all-powerfulness would be a symbolic destruction of the entire order, the series of gatekeepers, and disrupt this façade of all-powerfulness to provoke new knowledge – a harbinger of the divesting of the sovereign’s power to the people.
Modern politics and ethics are morally hopeless - the state currently acts as the ultimate sovereign – it decides where and when rights are applied.
Agamben ‘8: Giorgio Agamben writes in “Beyond Human Rights” in 2008. Giorgio Agamben (Italian: aˈɡambɛn; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, 4 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. http://jstor.reed.edu/stable/pdf/40644981.pdf; AB
The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. 3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.
This is the distinction between qualified life and bare life – bare life lacks the protection of rights, whereas qualified life has this protection of rights. This ability to arbitrarily apply rights is the manifestation of state abuse – Qualified life is the Trojan horse that allows the state to consolidate its bio-political control.
Downey ‘9: Anthony Downey writes in “Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Bare Life’ and the Politics of Aesthetics” on March 2009. Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 2, March, 2009, 109–125. Anthony Downey is director of the Master s Program in Contemporary Art at Sotheby s Institute of Art, London, and editor of Ibraaz, a research forum for visual culture in the Middle East and North Africa. http://www.anthonydowney.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2009-zones-of-indistinction.pdf; AB
Lives lived on the margins of social, political, cultural, economic and geographical borders are lives half lived. Denied access to legal, economic and political redress, these lives exist in a limbo-like state that is largely preoccupied with acquiring and sustaining the essentials of life. The refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the dispossessed – all have been excluded, to different degrees, from the fraternity of the social sphere, appeal to the safety net of the nation-state and recourse to international law. They have been outlawed, so to speak, placed beyond recourse to law and yet still in a precarious relationship to law itself. Although there is a significant degree of familiarity to be found in these sentiments, there is an increasingly notable move both in the political sciences and in cultural studies to view such subject positions not as the exception to modernity but its exemplification. Which brings us to a far more radical proposal: what if the fact of discrimination, in all its injustice and strategic forms of exclusion, is the point at which we find not so much an imperfect modern subject – a subject existing in a ‘sub-modern’ phase that has yet to realise its potential – as we do the exemplary modern subject? What if the refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the dispossessed are not only constitutive of modernity but its emblematic subjects? It is with such points in mind that Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has developed a theory of marginalisation that goes beyond the binary distinctions to be had in dichotomies such as inside/outside, centre/margins, inclusion/exclusion. In albeit abbreviated terms for now, Agamben is interested in lives lived on the margins of social, political, juridical and biological representation, not for their exceptional qualities but for their exemplary status: the manner in which they are both representative of modernity and an admonitory warning to the ontological basis of the modern political subject. Modernity’s exceptions, he argues, predicate its social structure and political reasoning. The exemplary figure of that exceptionalism in historical terms is bare life homo sacer, an obscure figure of Roman law who, although once a citizen, is reduced to ‘bare life’ by sovereign decree and deprived of basic rights such as representation before the law.1 Homo sacer, the sacred and therefore separate person man – he who is set apart from others by law – is, for Agamben, the increasingly nascent figure of our times; a time in which we are witnessing the effective re-emergence of sovereign forms of power and the concomitant production of ‘bare life’ as a constituent element in the democratic order. It is to Agamben’s credit that he does not propose a discrete topology of victimhood in his thesis; rather, he is suggesting that the discretionary ability of the sovereign state to bring the weight of its unmediated power to bear upon the body of its subjects is an inherent part of living in a democracy. In Agamben’s eyes, in fine, we are not only all potentially homo sacer (homines sacri) and the de facto bearers of ‘bare life’ but this exceptional figure augurs a ‘coming community’ that is based not on rights as such but the suspension of rights.
Qualified life opens space for a zone of indistinction, where people fall into the grey-zone of the invisible – legitimizes a state where all societal atrocities happen through the rhetoric of a state of exception.
Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
More than this inclusion by exclusion, sovereign power in the West is constituted by its ability to suspend itself in a state of exception, or ban: "The originary relation of law to life is not application but abandonment."15 The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign is at the same time inside and outside the sovereign order: the sovereign can suspend the law. What defines the rule of law is the state of exception when law is suspended. The very space in which juridical order can have validity is created and defined through the sovereign exception. However, the exception that defines the structure of sovereignty is more complex than the inclusion of what is outside by means of an interdiction.16 It is not just a question of creating a distinction between inside and outside: it is the tracing of a threshold between the two, a location where inside and outside enter into a zone of indistinction. It is this state of exception, or the zone of indistinction between inside and outside, that makes the modern juridical order of the West possible. The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provisional state of danger as a means of establishing the Nazi state it- self. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its boundaries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the normal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitutive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded exclusion from human law (killing him these people does not count as homicide) and he is excluded exclusion from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the exclusion of both the sacred and the profane.
The role of the judge is to evaluate critical discussion above fiated policy-making analysis – Debate should focus on creating a new generation of citizens that are critical thinkers educated about social problems—that’s key to equality.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best uses counter-narratives to demystify the power of the state hierarchies—it’s the hope that we have for meaningful change that spills over this debate round. The judge as a critical educator has an obligation to question state biopolitical power.
Gündoğdu ‘11: Ayten Gündoğdu writes in “Potentialities of human rights: Agamben and the narrative of fated necessity” on 19 July 2011.  Contemporary Political Theory February 2012, Volume 11, Issue 1, pp 2–22. http://link.springer.com/article/10.10572Fcpt.2010.45; AB
In his analysis of biopolitical sovereignty, Agamben provides us with what might be called a counternarrative of Western politics with the explicitly stated goal of ‘unveiling’ or ‘unmasking’ what has become mystified, hidden, secret or invisible, particularly with the prevalence of contractarian accounts of political power (1998, p. 8; 2005, p. 88). Agamben describes this critical task in terms of ‘disenchantment’, or the ‘patient work’ of unmasking the fiction or myth that covers up and sustains the violence of sovereignty (2005, p. 88). What underlies this urge to demystify and unveils is a particular understanding of myth as a deceptive narrative naturalizing and legitimizing violence in the name of the preservation of life. I use the term ‘counternarrative’ to call attention to what Agamben's account aims to do6: This is a critical analysis, as Agamben himself insists, that does not offer ‘historiographical theses or reconstructions’ but instead treats some historical phenomena as ‘paradigms’ so as to ‘make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context;’ to do this, it proceeds at ‘a historico-philosophical level’ (1998, p. 11; 2009, p. 9). In that sense, it is not an account that claims historical accuracy or factual verifiability. This is a crucial point that is sometimes overlooked by Agamben's critics who call into question his inaccurate treatment of historical phenomena such as the concentration camps.7 In addition, ‘counternarrative’ draws our attention to the inventive dimensions of Agamben's endeavor; as one of his critics aptly (though disapprovingly) puts it, ‘Agamben does not discover a concealed biopolitical paradigm stretching back to fourth-century Athens; rather he invents one’ (Finlayson, 2010, p. 116). The invention of a counternarrative of Western politics involves literary devices (e.g. hyperbole), which aim to provoke the readers and persuade them to abandon any politics centered on modern concepts such as sovereignty, rights and citizenship (LaCapra, 2007; cf. de la Durantaye, 2009). In analyzing Agamben's account as a ‘counternarrative’, I aim to attend to the goals that it sets for itself. It is these goals – particularly the goal of freeing human potentialities from myths that render the contingent necessary and mask other possibilities – that provide the starting point for my critical engagement with Agamben. Instead of resorting to an ‘outside’ – whether this be an alternative historical account or another theoretical tradition – I aim to read Agamben on his own terms, and suggest that as he tries to free human potentialities from contractarian myths, he might be entrapping them in another myth that ends up casting the contingent as necessary. Agamben's counternarrative of Western politics aims to uncover what has become hidden or invisible with ‘our modern habit of representing the political realm in terms of citizens’ rights, free will, and social contracts’ (1998, p. 106). Its main target is the contractarian accounts of sovereign power. As he identifies the production of bare life as the originary or foundational activity grounding sovereign power (1998, pp. 6, 83), he particularly aims to question the social contractarian ‘myth’ that covers up sovereign violence (1998, p. 109). After unveiling the foundational myths of Western politics, Agamben concludes that we cannot effectively respond to ‘the bloody mystification of a new planetary order’ if we let these myths continue to obstruct our political imagination (1998, p. 12). With his counternarrative presenting a catastrophic view of the historical present – a view that emphasizes how exception has become the rule, camp has become the paradigmatic structure organizing political space, and we have all virtually become homines sacri (1998, pp. 38, 176, 111) – Agamben aims to convince his readers of the need to think of a ‘nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life’ (2000, p. 112). This new politics requires the renunciation of concepts associated with sovereignty – for example, state, rights, citizenship. The contemporary predicament cannot be remedied by a return to conventional political categories and institutions, Agamben suggests, since these are deeply involved in the creation of this catastrophe in the first place. Almost anticipating his critics who would be puzzled by his renunciation of rights and rule of law at a time when the problem of legal dispossession increasingly threatens populations around the world, he explicitly states that the response to the current permanent state of exception cannot consist in confining it within constitutional boundaries and reaffirming the primacy of legal norms and rights (2005, p. 87).8 As legal norms and rights are ultimately grounded in the originary violence of separating a bare life, legal dispossession is already inscribed in them as an inescapable condition. Neither the liberal remedy of reasserting the rule of law, nor the Derridean strategy of ‘infinite negotiations’ with a law that is in force without any significance, are viable options (2005, p. 87; 1998, p. 54). Both are futile, if not lethally dangerous, endeavors.9 The only politically tenable option, Agamben contends, is to move out of sovereignty with ‘a complicated and patient strategy’ of getting the ‘door of the Law closed forever’ (1998, pp. 54, 55).
Any attempt to make political change requires an analysis of bare life – the state always has the power to declare a state of exception, which reinforces cyclical violence against those without qualified life.
Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
At the threshold of the modern era, then, the realm of bare life begins to coincide with the political, and inclusion and exclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of indistinction. In these zones of indistinction, bare life, or homo sacer, becomes both the subject and the object of the political order: it is both the place for the organization of state power, in the forms of discipline and objectification described by Foucault, and the place for emancipation from it, through the birth of mod- ern democracy and the demand for human rights. This move of biological life to the center of the political scene in the West leads to a transformation of the political realm itself, one that effectively constitutes its depoliticization. That depoliticization takes place side by side with the politicization of bare life. Bare life is politicized and political life disappears. This irony is explained by the way the link forged in modernity between poli- tics and bare life, a link that underpins ideologies from the right and the left, has been ignored. As Agamben says, "if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because poli- tics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity. . . . Only a reflection that . . . interrogates the link between bare life and politics . . . will be able to bring the political out of its con- cealment."20 Any attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with an awareness of the impossibility of the classical distinction between private life and political existence and exam- ine the zones of indistinction into which the oppositions that produced modern politics in the West - inside/outside, right/left, public/private - have dissolved. Agamben proposes that "it is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, these difficult zones of indistinction, that the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought."21 In the zone of indistinction, a claim to a po- litically qualified life can no longer be effective as such.
And biopolitical discourse come first.
Campbell and Sitze ‘15: Timothy Campbell is a Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University and together with Adam Sitze, a professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social thought at the Amherst College he recently edited a new collection of essays on the topic of biopolitics. Campbell translated Roberto Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minnesota, 2008) and Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford, 2009). He is the author of Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (Minnesota, 2006), winner of the Media Ecology Association’s 2007 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics and and Improper Life: Biopolitics and Technology from Heidegger to Agamben (Minnesota, 2011). He also edits the series “Commonalities" for Fordham University Press and is currently completing his study of cinema and biopower titled Grace Notes: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life. http://biononymous.me/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/full_interview.pdf; AB
What is biopolitics? Clearly, it's a moment, as Arendt, Agamben, and Esposito among others argue, when what the Ancient Greeks called bìos, or life, encounters the political, which is how they referred to life in the city or polis. This is important only because of the separation of life as bìos from life as life in the polis: bìos was domestic life, food, health, the household’s budget. In short, it is the moment when life encounters the political, which is what Arendt sketches so profoundly and at length in The Human Condition, portions of which we include in the reader. Let’s also remember that politikos did not include slaves nor women. I want to insist on the word encounter when describing the meeting of life and politics because encounter highlights a relation that isn’t — yet — a fusion. I continue to think it’s important to distinguish between life and politics; that finding an interval to hold open between them may provide us with an opportunity for thought that might otherwise go missing if we immediately assume we know the meaning of biopolitics or biopower. 

Part 2 is the Advocacy

Thus, the advocacy: The United State ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech in public colleges and universities. I specifically defend the pre-fiat discursive impacts. This rez is the starting point of discussion, where we discuss this specific policy’s pre-fiat desirability.

Additionally, fiated policy-making academia is not as accessible to disadvantaged populations as pre-fiat ethics discourse is. You as the judge should prioritize pre-fiat discourse as the first layer of the substantive debate.
Our responsibility is to offer analyses that expose harmful powers and expose them to light, this is an a priori for kritikal analysis – the 1AC is a crucial investigation of modern power structures.
Jones ‘99: Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, ‘99 (Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)
The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction that make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the “philosophy of praxis” to political practice, Gramsci claims: It the theory does not tend to leave the “simple” in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and “simple” it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332-333). According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative “intellectual-moral bloc” should take place under the auspices of the Communist Party – a body he described as the “modern prince.” Just as Niccolo Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign barbarians, and create a virtu-ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern price could lead the working class on its journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125-205). Gramsci’s relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of domination – for example, in the case of gender – to class relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict.1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the “infallible party” has obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the enemies of emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous. History furnishes examples of progressive developments that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside the bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the particularly intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered as “resources of hope” for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They illustrate that ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical interaction of ideas and material reality. One clear security-related example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s. At that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals (the “alternative defense” school) encouraged and drew strength from peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on short-term policy but on the dominant discourses of strategy and security, a far more important result in the long run. The synergy between critical security intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both working in tandem can be witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of common security. As Thomas Risse-Kappen points out, the term “common security” originated in the contribution of peace researchers to the German security debate of the 1970s (Risse-Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). Initially, mainstream defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However, notions of common security were taken up by a number of different intellectuals communities, including the liberal arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in the center-left political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet “institutchiks” – members of the influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau 1996: 52-54; Risse-Kappen 1994: 196-200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995). These communities were subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, “in response to social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD” (Risse-Kappen 1994: 207). Similar pressures even had an effect on the Reagan administration. As Risse-Kappen notes: When the Reagan administration brought hard-liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the “freeze campaign” that revived the arms control process together with pressure from the European allies. (Risse-Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90-110). Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least have a substantial impact on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected impact of alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union. Through various East-West links, which included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such attendant notions as “nonoffensive defense” (these links are detailed in Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin , and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse-Kappen 1994: 203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in East-West relations in order to facilitate much-needed domestic reforms (“the interaction of ideas and material reality”). But what is significant is that the Soviets’ commitment to common security led to significant changes in force sizes and postures. These in turn aided in the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the territory of the former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As concepts such as common security, and collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223-260), are adopted by governments and military services, they inevitably become somewhat debased. The hope is that enough of the residual meaning can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the adoption of the concept of common security by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently) critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonsrates in relation to NATO expansion). The example of common security is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and play a role – a significant one at that – in making the world a better and safer place. Second, it points to potential future addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical security studies in particular. Third, it also underlines the role of ideas in the evolution in society. CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND THE THEORY-PRACTICE NEXUS Although most proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical intellectuals “are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless” (Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies, this means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making suffering humanity rather than raison d’etat the prism through which problems are viewed. Here the project stands full-square within the critical theory tradition. If “all theory is for someone and for some purpose,” then critical security studies is for “the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless,” and its purpose is their emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a fundamental reconceptualization of security with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But the question remains at the conceptual level of how these alternative types of theorizing – even if they are self-consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures – can become “a force for the direction of action.” Again, Gramsci’s work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramsci’s terminology, “historic blocs” (Gramsci 1971: 323-377). Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s view of power as a centaur, ahlf man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway through civil society and takes on the status of common sense; it becomes subconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions that were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marx’s well-worn phrase, “All that is solid melts into the air.” Gramsci’s intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a “war of position” (Gramsci 1971: 229-239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies, any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by helping to undermine the “natural,” “commonsense,” internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs created. I contend that Gramsci’s strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. THE TASKS OF CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES If the project of critical security studies is conceived in terms of war of position, then the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse. This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the prevailing security regimes, that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes. When this is attempted in the security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals, traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order. This challenge entails teasing out the often subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist façade. In this sense, proponents of critical security studies approximate to Foucault’s notion of “specific intellectuals” who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980: 132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of “speaking truth to power” (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod lines of speaking “truth against the world.” Of course, traditional strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that “strategists must be prepared to ‘speak truth to power’” (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that, whereas the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their power, the latter aim at a thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, critical theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that “the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth” (cited in Jameson 1990: 66). The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116-121). Thus, by criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously playing apart in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc and contributing to the development of a counterhegemonic position. There are a number of avenues of avenues open to critical security specialists in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds to other possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant pundistry to forward alternative views onto a broader stage. Nancy Fraser argues: “As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture …. As critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to” (Fraser 1989: 11). Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic Adorno, who argues: In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what lay at the root of the delusion. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such “unobtrusive yet insistent work” does not in itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes. The conceptual and the practical dangers of collapsing practice into theory must be guarded against. Rather, through their educational activities, proponent of critical security studies should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements. That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his account of New Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the country’s political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989: 108; see also COrtright 1993: 5-13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and strategy drew strength and succor from each other’s efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of the a “message in a bottle,” but in this case, contra Adorno’s expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be naïve to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing “professionalisation” of academic life (Said 1994: 49-62). Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability that they are extremely risk-averse. It pays – in all senses – to stick with the crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for “new targets for old weapons”). And, of course, the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking can connect with the practices of social movements and become a “force for the direction of action.” The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to challenge
Instead of eliminating the law, you should adopt a politics of playing with the law — switch it from a sacred entity to a childish toy — we control the internal link to every epistemology in resisting sovereign violence.
Mills ‘8: Catherine Mills writes in “Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridicial Justice.” South Atlantic Quarterly 107:1, Winter 2008 DOI 10.1215/00382876-2007-053 © 2007 Duke University Press. Pg 23 – 24 need college person’s credentials for pdf; AB
To return to my starting point, more can now be said of the idea of playing with law as if it were a disused object, that is, a toy. It is now possible to better appreciate the perceived revolutionary potential of play and of the toy. As we have seen, the toy brings to light the “temporality of history in its pure differential and qualitative value.” That is, in making present “human temporality in itself, the pure differential margin between the ‘once’ and the ‘no longer’” (IH, 72), the toy permits a release from continuous and linear time and the realization of and return to history, understood as the true homeland of humanity (IH, 104–5). In relation to law, we can now say that as a disused object the law has lost its use value in the realm of the politicoeconomic and has instead been relegated to the profane use that can be made of it by children. The characterization of its being in force without significance appears to locate the law within the diachronic element of the “‘once’ . . . ‘no longer,’” rather than within the synchrony of miniaturization. This is significant because it highlights the ritualistic dimension of law, which compensates for the disjuncture of past and present, Agamben argues, by reabsorbing diachrony into synchrony. Play, however, transforms synchrony into diachrony by breaking the tie between past and present. This production of a differential margin in the dialectic of rite and play is the condition of history; it is that which allows for the now. As a toy and only as a toy, as an object of play, the rite of law contributes to the revelation of the essential historicity of the human. The ritualistic dimension of law is important for another reason as well. Agamben insists on the impossibility of the elimination of either diachronic or synchronic signification: in all games and rites, the one remains a stumbling block for the other, thereby preventing the attainment of a pure state of diachrony or synchrony. Thus, he writes, “at the end of the game,” the toy—the privileged signifier of absolute diachrony—“turns around into its opposite and is presented as the synchronic residue that the game can no longer eliminate” (IH, 79). This implies that playing with law does not mean eliminating the law, for there is actually a sense in which the law is rescued from its own obsolescence in play. Rather than being maintained solely in a state of decay characterized by the simple lack of practicoeconomic value as law, it is given a new use. But this does not take the form of a resacralization of the law and restoration of transcendental meaning or force. Instead, the new use of law takes the form of its deactivation or deposition. Before saying more of this, it is worth cautioning against the phrase “at the end of the game” used above, for in what sense would the game in which humanity plays with law have an end? To construe the game of playing with law as having an end would in fact push Agamben’s conception of the messianic toward an identification with the eschatological, a conflation that he explicitly resists in The Time That Remains.16 Thus, within his own characterization, it would be more accurate to insist on the endlessness of play. As with the activity of study with which it is intimately related in the paragraph in question, play is interminable; it has no end beyond pleasure. As Agamben writes in Idea of Prose, “Not only can study have no rightful end, it does not even desire one.”17
And we solve negative kritiks, we view the law as more than just ends — it is part of an unraveling of the functioning of normative legality to develop a new vocabulary and mode of thought in addressing sovereign abuse – not a resacralized or canonical use of the law.
Agamben ‘5: Giorgio Agamben writes in “State of Exception” – A translation by Kevin Attell. Giorgio Agamben is professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona. He is the author of ten previous books, including the prequel to this one, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, published in English by Stanford University Press. Kevin Attell is a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department at the University of California, Davis. He is the translator of Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal. https://books.google.com/books?id=9slkvuV3VS4Candprintsec=frontcover#v=onepageandq=in20the20kafkaandf=false; AB
The stakes in the debate between Benjamin and Schmitt on the state of exception can now be defined more clearly. The dispute takes place in a zone of anomie that, on the one hand, must be maintained in relation to the law at all costs and, on the other, must be just as implacably released and freed from this relation. That is to say, at issue in the anomic zone is the relation between violence and law – in the last analysis, the status of violence as a cipher for human action. While Schmitt attempts every time to reinscribe violence within a juridical context, Benjamin responds to this gesture by seeking every time to assure it – as pure violence – and existence outside of the law. For reasons that we must try to clarify, this struggle for anomie seems to be as decisive for Western politics as the gigantomachia peri tes ousias, the “battle of giants concerning being,” that defines Western metaphysics. Here, pure violence as the extreme political object, as the “thing” of politics, is the counterpart to pure being, to pure existence as the ultimate metaphysical stakes; the strategy of the exception, which Benjamin seeks to answer with his reading of the “new attorney.” Obviously, it is not a question here of a transitional phase that never achieves its end, nor a process of infinite deconstruction that, in maintaining the law in a spectral life, can no longer get to the bottom of it. The decisive point here is that the law – no longer practiced but studied – is not justice, but only the gate that leads to it. What opens a passage toward justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivity inoperosita – that is, another use of the law. This precisely what the force-of-law (which keeps the law working in opera beyond its formal suspension seeks to prevent. Kafka’s characters – and this is why they interest us – have to do with this spectral figure of the law in the state of exception; they seek, each one following his or her own strategy, to “study” and deactivate it, to “play” with it. One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at the justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical (Benjamin 1992, 41).

Part 3 is the State’s Iron Grasp
Free discourse is currently non-existent – looks like state authoritarianism than state protection – college campuses are uniquely key for discourse as they are the academic hubs of the United States.
Maloney Jr. ‘16: Cliff Maloney Jr. writes in “Colleges Have No Right to Limit Students’ Free Speech” on October 13th, 2016 for TIMES. Maloney is the Executive Director at Young Americans for Liberty. http://time.com/4530197/college-free-speech-zone/; AB
In grade school, I learned that debate is defined as “a discussion between people in which they express different opinions about something.” Such open discourse was historically encouraged on our college campuses. Universities exemplified intellectual discussion and debate in America. No one voiced their opinions louder than students, professors and administrators. They pushed society’s limits by admitting women and people of color, and by encouraging diversity of thought amongst the college community. Historically, young people flocked to universities to learn more about the world around them, to encounter people from different backgrounds, to expand their minds and to form their own opinions. Unfortunately, things have changed. Recently on college campuses, our open discourse has been threatened, particularly when discussing politics. While the current presidential election represents polarizing wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties, we should be able to openly debate their policies and the direction in which they plan to take our country if elected. We should be able to discuss the abuse of power within our government and the consistent violations of our Bill of Rights. We should be able to participate in the free market of ideas. But our students are being silenced. University campuses are now home to a plethora of speech restrictions. From sidewalk-sized “free-speech zones” to the criminalization of microaggressions, America’s college campuses look and feel a lot more like an authoritarian dictatorship than they do the academic hubs of the modern free world. When rolling an inflated free-speech ball around campus, students at the University of Delaware were halted by campus police for their activities. A Young Americans for Liberty leader at Fairmont State University in West Virginia was confronted by security when he was attempting to speak with other students about the ideas he believes in. A man at Clemson University was barred from praying on campus because he was outside of the free-speech zone. And a student at Blinn College in Texas abolished her campus’ free-speech zone in a lawsuit after administrators demanded she seek special permission to advocate for self-defense. How have we let this happen in America, the land of the free? It’s because of what our universities have taught a generation of Americans: If you don’t agree with someone, are uncomfortable with an idea, or don’t find a joke funny, then their speech must be suppressed. Especially if they don’t politically agree with you. Instead of actually debating ideas that span topics from the conventional to the taboo, a generation of American students don’t engage, they just get enraged. In doing so, many students believe that they have a right to literally shut other people up. This is not only a threat to the First Amendment, but also to American democracy. In their manifestation, safe spaces and free-speech zones at public universities enable prejudice against unfavorable ideologies. Guised as progressive measures to ensure inclusion, these often unconstitutional policies exclude new and competing ideas, and are antithetical to a free academia. In excluding different ideologies, supposedly progressive campus speech codes do one thing: prevent the progression of ideas. Restrictive campus speech codes are, in fact, regressive. With over 750 chapters nationwide at Young Americans for Liberty, we are fighting against public universities that stifle free speech. We’ve launched the national Fight for Free Speech campaign to reform unconstitutional speech codes and abolish these so-called free-speech zones on college campuses. By hosting events such as large free speech balls, YAL chapters across the country are petitioning their campuses to adopt the University of Chicago’s principles on freedom of expression—the hallmark of campus speech policies. Our members have geared up with First Amendment organizations to ensure that their free speech rights on campus are protected. America is a land rooted in the ideas of a free society: the freedom to be who you are, to speak your mind and to innovate. By silencing our students and young people, we have started down a slippery slope. It is up to us to fight back to ensure that our First Amendment rights remain protected—not just on college campuses, but everywhere in America.
Lack of free speech re-create the majority/minority divide that means that alternative views are systematically excluded from discourse and lose out on having voices heard. The state’s biopolitical meddling needs to stop – the 1AC is key to investigate oppressive power structures.
Lipson ‘16: (Charles, real clear politics writer, “Social Justice Warriors Against Free Speech,” August 29, 2016, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/08/29/social_justice_warriors_against_free_speech_131628.html//LADI)
Well, that didn't take long. The Social Justice Warriors have emerged from their safe spaces and begun attacking the University of Chicago's statement supporting free speech and opposing trigger warnings and safe spaces. They are complaining for a good reason: They don’t want free speech to spread to other campuses. What are the main arguments against the Chicago letter? One of my former graduate students sent me this report from a group website for her liberal arts college (a very fine school). What do her fellow alums say? Well, for one, they are surprised they even need to make arguments for their side. For years, they haven't had to. Administrators, like those at the University of Missouri, simply rolled over and played dead rather than confront them. But that was political cowardice, not real intellectual engagement. Now that the Social Justice Warriors must defend their position, what do they say? The arguments against Chicago's free-speech letter They object to "no trigger warnings" because it is insensitive to people who have experienced trauma and might need a "heads-up" if they are going to encounter triggering content in class. They object to "no safe spaces" because those are the only places where marginalized groups will feel completely free to voice their opinions. They say safe spaces are not about banning dissenting viewpoints but about banning hateful, bigoted speech that is truly harmful. They reject the idea that colleges should be places where ideas are freely exchanged because “not all ideas are equal and some are too offensive to have a place in the community.” The common theme is "we must all be more sensitive. Otherwise people will be harmed psychologically." What's right with those arguments, and what's wrong? First, let's consider trigger warnings. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a professor or teaching assistant saying, "We are going to discuss Greek myths and some of you might find them troubling." But it’s also perfectly fine if, all of a sudden in a class on Greek myths, the professor discusses one. The students at Columbia University actually wanted warnings before all myths. Their demand was not about helping one or two students in a large class. It was simply bullying under the cloak of "sensitivity." Anyway, universities are all about discussing sensitive subjects and raising troubling questions. If a university is really vigorous, then the whole place should be wrapped in a gigantic trigger warning. Finally, as a teacher, how can I possibly anticipate all the things that might trigger students in my class on "Big Wars From Ancient Greece to Early Modern Europe" (a lecture course I am teaching next year)? When I mention the Roman war with German tribes on the Rhine, how can I know that your grandfather died fighting on the Rhine in World War II? Of course, if your grandfather did die fighting on the Rhine, or if your mother was named Jocasta and you accidentally slept with her, you might be triggered by the class discussions. What then? Well, that is why universities have mental-health professionals to help you deal with your anxieties, fears, and depression. Again, it is fine if professors want to give students a heads-up, but it is a mistake to demand it of everyone. It is a much bigger mistake to stifle class discussion for fear of offending. That's not hypothetical. That is exactly what happens in classrooms now. (So does ideologically rigid teaching that demands students repeat the professor's views. But that's another topic for another day.) Safe spaces are another ruse. Are they really the only places where marginalized groups will feel completely free to voice their opinions, as these fashionable liberal-arts students say? We need to distinguish among three kinds of places on campus: classrooms, public spaces, and private (or semi-private) places like sororities or campus houses for co-religionists. If classrooms do not invite free expression, then something is badly wrong with the university. Actually, some classrooms do not. They are almost always the classrooms run by the ideological comrades of the students demanding safe spaces. If you think diverse viewpoints are welcome in classes for race and gender studies, you are living in a dream world. In public spaces, like dining halls, people do sometimes group themselves voluntarily by race, sports, or dormitories. Nothing wrong with that, although persistent segregation by race, ethnicity, or religion would be a setback for the students' college experience. Finally, it is perfectly fine for people to find their cozy spaces privately, at Hillel House (for Jewish students) or Calvert House (for Catholics) or a fraternity, sorority, or club. Who invades those private spaces? Normally, it's the Social Justice Warriors from the Dean's Office who object to students wearing sombreros to a party featuring Mexican food. What about the argument that "safe spaces aren't about banning dissenting viewpoints but about banning hateful, bigoted speech that is truly harmful"? The obvious problem is this: Who decides? You think your march is to support women's reproductive rights. Your roommate thinks it is about killing unborn babies. Which position is hateful or bigoted? Again, who decides? Which of these is so hateful that it has no place in an academic community? But let's take the clear-cut example of racial epithets, which are hate speech and add nothing to academic debate or learning. They do cause emotional harm, or at least they can. The difficulty here is "Where do we draw the line?" and, again, "Who draws it?" Is it hate speech to say, "He hates to spend money. What a Jew"? Most Jews would say yes, that's hateful. What if I said, "He hates to spend money. What a Scotsman"? Most Scots would say that recognizes their financial prudence. It is precisely because drawing these distinctions is so hard that our First Amendment, as interpreted by the courts, gives very wide latitude to speech and draws the line at specific threats to individuals and other palpable dangers. Canada, by contrast, has laws barring insults to minorities. (So do most European countries.) That's why a book arguing that Canadian Muslims were not assimilating and some were becoming radicals was prohibited and its authors harshly fined. The author and publisher spent years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, trying to reverse that ruling. In the U.S., the book sold well, though you probably never heard about it. Muslim-Americans seemed to survive it. There is real hate speech, of course, but you and I might not agree on what it is. And we might not agree on who gets to decide. I don't want some mid-level bureaucrat in the campus housing-and-dining office telling me what I cannot say or wear to a party. Get over it. By the way, the Yale professors who told students exactly that -- try not to be bothered by Halloween costumes you don't like -- were vilified, screamed at, taunted, and ultimately run out of their jobs in the housing system. Irony alert: They were brutally harassed by the sensitivity police.
Free speech on college campuses is key to challenge U.S. imperialism and racism.
Khan ‘16: Khan, Tariq. "Masking Oppression As “Free Speech”: An Anarchist Take." Agency. October 28, 2015. Web. December 08, 2016. http://www.anarchistagency.com/commentary/masking-oppression-as-free-speech-ananarchist-take/.
In the present-day United States, a shallow idea of “free speech” is often wielded by the privileged as a way to direct attention away from critiques of existing conditions and systems; particularly critiques of capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. For example, two years ago when UC Berkeley students organized to keep comedian Bill Maher from speaking on their campus, leading media outlets framed it as a controversy about free speech rather than engaging with the much deeper critiques the students had about Maher’s perpetuation of US imperialist, Orientalist discourse which fuels militarism abroad and racist violence at home. Yet, while students who protest imperialist discourse are characterized as a threat to free speech, the actual threat to free speech in academia goes unchallenged by leading media outlets. October 8, 2015, at the Community College of Philadelphia, English professor Divya Nair spoke at a rally organized by students in protest of police recruiters on campus. The students and Professor Nair drew connections between colonialism and modern US policing; particularly the police tactic of recruiting poor people of color to act as the capitalist state’s footsoldiers to control poor Black and Brown communities. Later that day, school authorities suspended Professor Nair without pay, and they have since suspended three student group members who are facing disciplinary hearings. In the past few years there has been a noticeable campus crackdown on anti-colonialist expression.
Open discourse and critical pedagogy are key to growing progressive social movements and counter-narratives against the oppressive structures of the state.
Hudson ‘16: Mark Hudson writes in “Education for Change: Henry Giroux and Transformative Critical Pedagogy.” https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/1734; AB
THESE ARE DIFFICULT times for teachers in U.S. public schools. The increasing size of schools, chronic underfunding of schools serving working-class students (especially students of color), work overload, school violence, professional isolation and the deskilling and devaluing of teachers' work have led to rising rates of teacher burnout in recent decades. The average career trajectory of a teacher in the United States is about five years.1 Meanwhile, the corporate-controlled media give voice to a conservative chorus calling for “school reform.” The “reforms” demanded include voucher plans and tax credits to force public schools to compete with private schools in the “free-market” economy, “raising standards” and “mandating competencies” through statewide and national standardized testing, and calls for public schools to abandon multicultural and secular humanist curricula in favor of “traditional values” and a back-to-basics “core curriculum.” These calls in reality amount to an attack on the public education system itself, and on public school teachers in particular. As education theorist Michael Apple has argued, (T)he political Right in the United States has been very successful in mobilizing support against the educational system and its employees, often exporting the crisis in the economy to the schools. Thus, one of its major achievements has been to shift the blame for unemployment and underemployment, for the loss of economic competitiveness, and for the supposed breakdown of “traditional” values and standards in the family, education, and paid and unpaid workplaces, from the economic, cultural, and social policies and effects of dominant groups to the school and other public agencies.2 This implies that legitimate questions of how to improve the U.S. public education system cannot be seriously addressed without simultaneously addressing the issues of economic exploitation, racist oppression and patriarchal gender relations that form the socio-economic context in which public schools operate. In other words, schools are not, as the right claims, the problem; rather, the very real problems of schools and those who work and learn in them cannot and will not be solved without a mass-based political movement from below against the injustices of capitalism, sexism and racism. Thus liberals and other moderates who oppose all or parts of the conservative education agenda but are silent about the essentially repressive nature of U.S. society have no real alternative to offer. At best, they can provide isolated examples of “enlightened” educational practices that perhaps benefit small groups of students and teachers but have little if any impact on the public education system as a whole.3 It follows that what is required to change schools is a critical, unambiguously left theory and practice of education which recognizes that schools cannot be analyzed and changed separately from the struggle to create a nonexploitative, nonracist and gender-egalitarian society. There is a history of efforts to create an oppositional theory and practice of education in the United States which goes back as least as far as the 1920s and 1930s, to the discussions of the Columbia Teachers College group, the best-known members of which are the social reconstructionists George Counts and Harold Rugg. Counts, author of the famous 1932 pamphlet Dare the School Build a New Social Order?, argued that the child-centered progressive education of his time in effect endorsed existing class relations, and that progressive educators should emancipate themselves from the influence of the “upper middle class” and become active agents of social change. Rugg was the author of a series of social studies textbooks which addressed issues of class conflict and racism, and which were very popular in the 1930s but driven off the market by right-wing political action groups in the 1940s.4 Little significant work was done in the 1940s and 1950s to further develop left theories of education, with U.S. leftists on the defensive in the education field as elsewhere. But out of the political and intellectual ferment of the 1960s and 1970s there have emerged a number of left education theorists, the most prolific and influential of whom is probably Henry Giroux. For the past twenty years Giroux has been in the forefront of efforts to develop a critical theory and practice of education applicable to conditions in the contemporary United States.5 The goal of this essay is to outline some key themes in Giroux's work and to encourage readers, especially teachers and future teachers, to familiarize themselves with his work in its entirety. I will also offer some constructive criticisms. Henry Giroux's first book Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling (1981) elaborated the philosophical foundations for a theory and practice of education that would be not only critical of established institutions and practices but also capable of transforming those institutions and practices, with the ultimate goal of transforming society itself. Giroux argues that earlier left approaches to schooling, such as Samuel Bowles' and Herbert Gintis'Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), focused too one-sidedly on the way schools reproduce the hierarchical division of labor in capitalist society and failed to account for the ways students and teachers resist this process. These approaches, by making class a central category of analysis, have provided important insights, such as the notion that schools cannot be analyzed outside the socio-economic context in which they operate, and have “helped to expose schools as sorting and tracking institutions that treat and teach working-class students and students of color in ways vastly different from their middle- and upper-class counterparts.” Yet they also have propagated “a monolithic view of domination and an unduly passive view of human beings” and have generally ignored the content of school curricula: Emphasizing the form of classroom encounters that replicate the social relations of the workplace, they do not consider how the dominant culture is mediated in schools through textbooks, through the assumptions that teachers use to guide their work, through the meanings that students use to negotiate their classroom experiences, and through the form and content of school subjects themselves.6 Thus Giroux argues that for the struggle for educational alternatives to move forward, we must move beyond reproductive approaches “by recognizing that reproduction is a complex phenomenon that not only serves the interest of domination but also contains the seeds of conflict and transformation.”7 Giroux's critique of the reproduction theorists rests on his reading of the critical Marxist concepts of ideology, hegemony and culture. Drawing on the early work of Lukacs and that of the Czech Marxist Karel Kosik, Giroux argues for “a dialectical conception of ideology that strips it of its narrow definition as simply false consciousness” and that “provides an analysis of how schools sustain and produce ideologies as well as how individuals and groups in concrete relationships negotiate, resist, or accept them.” This conception of ideology is closely related to Gramsci's notion of hegemony, which includes not only hegemonic ideologies (i.e. discourses that legitimate class rule) but also, just as important, the material practices that form the structure of daily experience. In schools, hegemony functions not only “through the significations embedded in school texts, films, and `official' teacher discourse” but also “in those practical experiences that need no discourse, the message of which lingers beneath a structured silence.” In the Gramscian conception, hegemony is not simply the imposition of the ideology of a dominant class upon subordinate classes; rather, it is “a mode of control that has to be fought for constantly in order to be maintained” in changing historical circumstances.8 Thus, in Giroux's view, Gramsci's notion that hegemony represents a pedagogical relationship through which the legitimacy of meaning and practice is struggled over makes it imperative that a theory of radical pedagogy take as its central task an analysis of both how hegemony functions in schools and how various forms of resistance and opposition either challenge or help to sustain it. 9 Giroux also argues for a politicized notion of culture, in which “culture would be defined in terms of its functional relationship to the dominant social formations and power relations in society.” This implies the notion of class-specific cultures, rather than culture, although it is important to remember that “Issues regarding gender and ethnicity, as well as the dynamics of nature, cannot be framed exclusively within class definitions.” But although “the link between power and culture cannot be reduced to a simple reflex of the logic of capital,” this link does lead directly to the concept of resistance as it relates to modes of radical pedagogy.10 Giroux contends that radical educators must begin by asking questions about the forms of resistance already employed by students in order to develop effective pedagogical strategies. As a starting point, he suggests asking: First, in what way do specific forms of resistance manifest themselves and what is their relationship to determinants in the wider social order? Second, how do these forms of resistance often end up supporting the modes of domination they attack? Put another way, how do the oppositional elements used by students to wrest some power from the authority of the school do the work in bringing about `the future that others have mapped for them'?11
These questions are critically important because “symbolic power if not translated into political power simply ends up reinforcing dominant social relationships.” Giroux cites Paul Willis' study of a working-class “countercultural” group in an urban London high school as an example of the contradictory forms of student resistance. The students in Willis' study celebrated masculinity and physical labor, but at the cost of rejecting mental labor and a deep-seated sexism and racism.
Part 4 is the Underview

Aff gets RVIs on Theory – 6 reasons

1.  Reciprocity: I have to win theory and substance but they can win on either one, which violates reciprocity. Always prefer reciprocity on fairness since it’s the filter for fairness impacts – harms don’t matter if they don’t skew the field to one person’s favor. RVS solve this since I can consolidate to one layer.
   2.  A lack of RVI’s creates a no-risk issue for debaters and makes them run theory all the time – creating a norm that encourages frivolous theory is worse for debate since it takes away from substantive debate – there’s always an incentive to run theory since it comes before all substance. This means there is no substantive engagement, proven by theory prolif. on the circuit. This also destroys fairness since the better theory debater always wins, which means at best debate becomes a spreading contest where the neg wins since they read more.
   3.  RVI stops future abuse. IF they get punished for reading theory they wont read it when there is no abuse in the first place.
   4. Time skew: Forcing me to invest time on theory while I can’t generate offense is really abusive since it becomes a huge time suck. The time skew always hurts me since I have to generate terminal defense on every argument but they only have to extend a few with risk-of-offense. At best my argument quality is hurt since I can’t develop on either layer as well.
   5. Strat skew: Forcing me to cover two things skews my strategy since I can’t collapse to one layer and have less offensive outs in the last speech. Strategy is key to fairness since we need to execute strategies in round to get the ballot.
   6.  Clash: since they have a 2-1 advantage where they can go for substance or theory, they’re incentivized to collapse to the layer with least coverage. This incentivizes no clash, which is key to education since the unique value to debate is engagement, which RVI’s uniquely solve by forcing them to defend their arguments

Tournament: UPS | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Part 1 is Framing

We begin with a metaphor for the AC from the work of Franz Kafka in his story “Before the Law.” A man tries to gain access to the law, but a gatekeeper prevents him from doing so. The man spends everything he has, "no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.”” The man’s health only deteriorates as he ages. The gatekeeper recognizes the man’s approaching death and says, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”
As creator and gatekeeper of the law, the state-sovereign wants you to believe in the futility of action in the face of law. It sets a gatekeeper for every aspect of the law to protect sovereign interests and create a facade of its own legitimacy and the futility of any action but compliance. Overcoming ONE instance of the law’s all-powerfulness would be a symbolic destruction of the entire order, the series of gatekeepers, and disrupt this façade of all-powerfulness to provoke new knowledge – a harbinger of the divesting of the sovereign’s power to the people.
Modern politics and ethics are morally hopeless - the state currently acts as the ultimate sovereign – it decides where and when rights are applied.
Agamben ‘8: Giorgio Agamben writes in “Beyond Human Rights” in 2008. Giorgio Agamben (Italian: aˈɡambɛn; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, 4 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. http://jstor.reed.edu/stable/pdf/40644981.pdf; AB
The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. 3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.
This is the distinction between qualified life and bare life – bare life lacks the protection of rights, whereas qualified life has this protection of rights. This ability to arbitrarily apply rights is the manifestation of state abuse – Qualified life is the Trojan horse that allows the state to consolidate its bio-political control.
Downey ‘9: Anthony Downey writes in “Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Bare Life’ and the Politics of Aesthetics” on March 2009. Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 2, March, 2009, 109–125. Anthony Downey is director of the Master s Program in Contemporary Art at Sotheby s Institute of Art, London, and editor of Ibraaz, a research forum for visual culture in the Middle East and North Africa. http://www.anthonydowney.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2009-zones-of-indistinction.pdf; AB
Lives lived on the margins of social, political, cultural, economic and geographical borders are lives half lived. Denied access to legal, economic and political redress, these lives exist in a limbo-like state that is largely preoccupied with acquiring and sustaining the essentials of life. The refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the dispossessed – all have been excluded, to different degrees, from the fraternity of the social sphere, appeal to the safety net of the nation-state and recourse to international law. They have been outlawed, so to speak, placed beyond recourse to law and yet still in a precarious relationship to law itself. Although there is a significant degree of familiarity to be found in these sentiments, there is an increasingly notable move both in the political sciences and in cultural studies to view such subject positions not as the exception to modernity but its exemplification. Which brings us to a far more radical proposal: what if the fact of discrimination, in all its injustice and strategic forms of exclusion, is the point at which we find not so much an imperfect modern subject – a subject existing in a ‘sub-modern’ phase that has yet to realise its potential – as we do the exemplary modern subject? What if the refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the dispossessed are not only constitutive of modernity but its emblematic subjects? It is with such points in mind that Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has developed a theory of marginalisation that goes beyond the binary distinctions to be had in dichotomies such as inside/outside, centre/margins, inclusion/exclusion. In albeit abbreviated terms for now, Agamben is interested in lives lived on the margins of social, political, juridical and biological representation, not for their exceptional qualities but for their exemplary status: the manner in which they are both representative of modernity and an admonitory warning to the ontological basis of the modern political subject. Modernity’s exceptions, he argues, predicate its social structure and political reasoning. The exemplary figure of that exceptionalism in historical terms is bare life homo sacer, an obscure figure of Roman law who, although once a citizen, is reduced to ‘bare life’ by sovereign decree and deprived of basic rights such as representation before the law.1 Homo sacer, the sacred and therefore separate person man – he who is set apart from others by law – is, for Agamben, the increasingly nascent figure of our times; a time in which we are witnessing the effective re-emergence of sovereign forms of power and the concomitant production of ‘bare life’ as a constituent element in the democratic order. It is to Agamben’s credit that he does not propose a discrete topology of victimhood in his thesis; rather, he is suggesting that the discretionary ability of the sovereign state to bring the weight of its unmediated power to bear upon the body of its subjects is an inherent part of living in a democracy. In Agamben’s eyes, in fine, we are not only all potentially homo sacer (homines sacri) and the de facto bearers of ‘bare life’ but this exceptional figure augurs a ‘coming community’ that is based not on rights as such but the suspension of rights.
Qualified life opens space for a zone of indistinction, where people fall into the grey-zone of the invisible – legitimizes a state where all societal atrocities happen through the rhetoric of a state of exception.
Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
More than this inclusion by exclusion, sovereign power in the West is constituted by its ability to suspend itself in a state of exception, or ban: "The originary relation of law to life is not application but abandonment."15 The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign is at the same time inside and outside the sovereign order: the sovereign can suspend the law. What defines the rule of law is the state of exception when law is suspended. The very space in which juridical order can have validity is created and defined through the sovereign exception. However, the exception that defines the structure of sovereignty is more complex than the inclusion of what is outside by means of an interdiction.16 It is not just a question of creating a distinction between inside and outside: it is the tracing of a threshold between the two, a location where inside and outside enter into a zone of indistinction. It is this state of exception, or the zone of indistinction between inside and outside, that makes the modern juridical order of the West possible. The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provisional state of danger as a means of establishing the Nazi state it- self. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its boundaries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the normal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitutive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded exclusion from human law (killing him these people does not count as homicide) and he is excluded exclusion from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the exclusion of both the sacred and the profane.
The role of the judge is to evaluate critical discussion above fiated policy-making analysis – Debate should focus on creating a new generation of citizens that are critical thinkers educated about social problems—that’s key to equality.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best uses counter-narratives to demystify the power of the state hierarchies—it’s the hope that we have for meaningful change that spills over this debate round. The judge as a critical educator has an obligation to question state biopolitical power.
Gündoğdu ‘11: Ayten Gündoğdu writes in “Potentialities of human rights: Agamben and the narrative of fated necessity” on 19 July 2011.  Contemporary Political Theory February 2012, Volume 11, Issue 1, pp 2–22. http://link.springer.com/article/10.10572Fcpt.2010.45; AB
In his analysis of biopolitical sovereignty, Agamben provides us with what might be called a counternarrative of Western politics with the explicitly stated goal of ‘unveiling’ or ‘unmasking’ what has become mystified, hidden, secret or invisible, particularly with the prevalence of contractarian accounts of political power (1998, p. 8; 2005, p. 88). Agamben describes this critical task in terms of ‘disenchantment’, or the ‘patient work’ of unmasking the fiction or myth that covers up and sustains the violence of sovereignty (2005, p. 88). What underlies this urge to demystify and unveils is a particular understanding of myth as a deceptive narrative naturalizing and legitimizing violence in the name of the preservation of life. I use the term ‘counternarrative’ to call attention to what Agamben's account aims to do6: This is a critical analysis, as Agamben himself insists, that does not offer ‘historiographical theses or reconstructions’ but instead treats some historical phenomena as ‘paradigms’ so as to ‘make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context;’ to do this, it proceeds at ‘a historico-philosophical level’ (1998, p. 11; 2009, p. 9). In that sense, it is not an account that claims historical accuracy or factual verifiability. This is a crucial point that is sometimes overlooked by Agamben's critics who call into question his inaccurate treatment of historical phenomena such as the concentration camps.7 In addition, ‘counternarrative’ draws our attention to the inventive dimensions of Agamben's endeavor; as one of his critics aptly (though disapprovingly) puts it, ‘Agamben does not discover a concealed biopolitical paradigm stretching back to fourth-century Athens; rather he invents one’ (Finlayson, 2010, p. 116). The invention of a counternarrative of Western politics involves literary devices (e.g. hyperbole), which aim to provoke the readers and persuade them to abandon any politics centered on modern concepts such as sovereignty, rights and citizenship (LaCapra, 2007; cf. de la Durantaye, 2009). In analyzing Agamben's account as a ‘counternarrative’, I aim to attend to the goals that it sets for itself. It is these goals – particularly the goal of freeing human potentialities from myths that render the contingent necessary and mask other possibilities – that provide the starting point for my critical engagement with Agamben. Instead of resorting to an ‘outside’ – whether this be an alternative historical account or another theoretical tradition – I aim to read Agamben on his own terms, and suggest that as he tries to free human potentialities from contractarian myths, he might be entrapping them in another myth that ends up casting the contingent as necessary. Agamben's counternarrative of Western politics aims to uncover what has become hidden or invisible with ‘our modern habit of representing the political realm in terms of citizens’ rights, free will, and social contracts’ (1998, p. 106). Its main target is the contractarian accounts of sovereign power. As he identifies the production of bare life as the originary or foundational activity grounding sovereign power (1998, pp. 6, 83), he particularly aims to question the social contractarian ‘myth’ that covers up sovereign violence (1998, p. 109). After unveiling the foundational myths of Western politics, Agamben concludes that we cannot effectively respond to ‘the bloody mystification of a new planetary order’ if we let these myths continue to obstruct our political imagination (1998, p. 12). With his counternarrative presenting a catastrophic view of the historical present – a view that emphasizes how exception has become the rule, camp has become the paradigmatic structure organizing political space, and we have all virtually become homines sacri (1998, pp. 38, 176, 111) – Agamben aims to convince his readers of the need to think of a ‘nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life’ (2000, p. 112). This new politics requires the renunciation of concepts associated with sovereignty – for example, state, rights, citizenship. The contemporary predicament cannot be remedied by a return to conventional political categories and institutions, Agamben suggests, since these are deeply involved in the creation of this catastrophe in the first place. Almost anticipating his critics who would be puzzled by his renunciation of rights and rule of law at a time when the problem of legal dispossession increasingly threatens populations around the world, he explicitly states that the response to the current permanent state of exception cannot consist in confining it within constitutional boundaries and reaffirming the primacy of legal norms and rights (2005, p. 87).8 As legal norms and rights are ultimately grounded in the originary violence of separating a bare life, legal dispossession is already inscribed in them as an inescapable condition. Neither the liberal remedy of reasserting the rule of law, nor the Derridean strategy of ‘infinite negotiations’ with a law that is in force without any significance, are viable options (2005, p. 87; 1998, p. 54). Both are futile, if not lethally dangerous, endeavors.9 The only politically tenable option, Agamben contends, is to move out of sovereignty with ‘a complicated and patient strategy’ of getting the ‘door of the Law closed forever’ (1998, pp. 54, 55).
Any attempt to make political change requires an analysis of bare life – the state always has the power to declare a state of exception, which reinforces cyclical violence against those without qualified life.
Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
At the threshold of the modern era, then, the realm of bare life begins to coincide with the political, and inclusion and exclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of indistinction. In these zones of indistinction, bare life, or homo sacer, becomes both the subject and the object of the political order: it is both the place for the organization of state power, in the forms of discipline and objectification described by Foucault, and the place for emancipation from it, through the birth of mod- ern democracy and the demand for human rights. This move of biological life to the center of the political scene in the West leads to a transformation of the political realm itself, one that effectively constitutes its depoliticization. That depoliticization takes place side by side with the politicization of bare life. Bare life is politicized and political life disappears. This irony is explained by the way the link forged in modernity between poli- tics and bare life, a link that underpins ideologies from the right and the left, has been ignored. As Agamben says, "if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because poli- tics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity. . . . Only a reflection that . . . interrogates the link between bare life and politics . . . will be able to bring the political out of its con- cealment."20 Any attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with an awareness of the impossibility of the classical distinction between private life and political existence and exam- ine the zones of indistinction into which the oppositions that produced modern politics in the West - inside/outside, right/left, public/private - have dissolved. Agamben proposes that "it is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, these difficult zones of indistinction, that the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought."21 In the zone of indistinction, a claim to a po- litically qualified life can no longer be effective as such.
And biopolitical discourse come first.
Campbell and Sitze ‘15: Timothy Campbell is a Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University and together with Adam Sitze, a professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social thought at the Amherst College he recently edited a new collection of essays on the topic of biopolitics. Campbell translated Roberto Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minnesota, 2008) and Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford, 2009). He is the author of Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (Minnesota, 2006), winner of the Media Ecology Association’s 2007 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics and and Improper Life: Biopolitics and Technology from Heidegger to Agamben (Minnesota, 2011). He also edits the series “Commonalities" for Fordham University Press and is currently completing his study of cinema and biopower titled Grace Notes: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life. http://biononymous.me/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/full_interview.pdf; AB
What is biopolitics? Clearly, it's a moment, as Arendt, Agamben, and Esposito among others argue, when what the Ancient Greeks called bìos, or life, encounters the political, which is how they referred to life in the city or polis. This is important only because of the separation of life as bìos from life as life in the polis: bìos was domestic life, food, health, the household’s budget. In short, it is the moment when life encounters the political, which is what Arendt sketches so profoundly and at length in The Human Condition, portions of which we include in the reader. Let’s also remember that politikos did not include slaves nor women. I want to insist on the word encounter when describing the meeting of life and politics because encounter highlights a relation that isn’t — yet — a fusion. I continue to think it’s important to distinguish between life and politics; that finding an interval to hold open between them may provide us with an opportunity for thought that might otherwise go missing if we immediately assume we know the meaning of biopolitics or biopower. 

Part 2 is the Advocacy

Thus, I defend whole resolution. I reserve the right to clarify in CX.
There’s no advocacy-shift, the method of implementation is irrelevant – you can still read CPs, DAs, Ks, and turns. Obviously, the framing constrains what impacts matter, but that’s your obligation to contest. If I read policy-making first framing, it would also constrain what impacts matter – frameworks are meant to focus on specific discussions.
Our responsibility is to offer analyses that expose harmful powers and expose them to light, this a discursive analysis pre-requisite – the 1AC is a crucial investigation of modern power structures.
Jones ‘99: Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, ‘99 (Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)
The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction that make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the “philosophy of praxis” to political practice, Gramsci claims: It the theory does not tend to leave the “simple” in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and “simple” it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332-333). According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative “intellectual-moral bloc” should take place under the auspices of the Communist Party – a body he described as the “modern prince.” Just as Niccolo Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign barbarians, and create a virtu-ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern price could lead the working class on its journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125-205). Gramsci’s relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of domination – for example, in the case of gender – to class relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict.1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the “infallible party” has obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the enemies of emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous. History furnishes examples of progressive developments that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside the bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the particularly intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered as “resources of hope” for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They illustrate that ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical interaction of ideas and material reality. One clear security-related example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s. At that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals (the “alternative defense” school) encouraged and drew strength from peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on short-term policy but on the dominant discourses of strategy and security, a far more important result in the long run. The synergy between critical security intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both working in tandem can be witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of common security. As Thomas Risse-Kappen points out, the term “common security” originated in the contribution of peace researchers to the German security debate of the 1970s (Risse-Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). Initially, mainstream defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However, notions of common security were taken up by a number of different intellectuals communities, including the liberal arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in the center-left political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet “institutchiks” – members of the influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau 1996: 52-54; Risse-Kappen 1994: 196-200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995). These communities were subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, “in response to social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD” (Risse-Kappen 1994: 207). Similar pressures even had an effect on the Reagan administration. As Risse-Kappen notes: When the Reagan administration brought hard-liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the “freeze campaign” that revived the arms control process together with pressure from the European allies. (Risse-Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90-110). Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least have a substantial impact on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected impact of alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union. Through various East-West links, which included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such attendant notions as “nonoffensive defense” (these links are detailed in Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin , and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse-Kappen 1994: 203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in East-West relations in order to facilitate much-needed domestic reforms (“the interaction of ideas and material reality”). But what is significant is that the Soviets’ commitment to common security led to significant changes in force sizes and postures. These in turn aided in the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the territory of the former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As concepts such as common security, and collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223-260), are adopted by governments and military services, they inevitably become somewhat debased. The hope is that enough of the residual meaning can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the adoption of the concept of common security by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently) critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonsrates in relation to NATO expansion). The example of common security is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and play a role – a significant one at that – in making the world a better and safer place. Second, it points to potential future addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical security studies in particular. Third, it also underlines the role of ideas in the evolution in society. CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND THE THEORY-PRACTICE NEXUS Although most proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical intellectuals “are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless” (Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies, this means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making suffering humanity rather than raison d’etat the prism through which problems are viewed. Here the project stands full-square within the critical theory tradition. If “all theory is for someone and for some purpose,” then critical security studies is for “the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless,” and its purpose is their emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a fundamental reconceptualization of security with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But the question remains at the conceptual level of how these alternative types of theorizing – even if they are self-consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures – can become “a force for the direction of action.” Again, Gramsci’s work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramsci’s terminology, “historic blocs” (Gramsci 1971: 323-377). Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s view of power as a centaur, ahlf man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway through civil society and takes on the status of common sense; it becomes subconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions that were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marx’s well-worn phrase, “All that is solid melts into the air.” Gramsci’s intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a “war of position” (Gramsci 1971: 229-239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies, any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by helping to undermine the “natural,” “commonsense,” internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs created. I contend that Gramsci’s strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. THE TASKS OF CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES If the project of critical security studies is conceived in terms of war of position, then the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse. This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the prevailing security regimes, that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes. When this is attempted in the security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals, traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order. This challenge entails teasing out the often subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist façade. In this sense, proponents of critical security studies approximate to Foucault’s notion of “specific intellectuals” who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980: 132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of “speaking truth to power” (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod lines of speaking “truth against the world.” Of course, traditional strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that “strategists must be prepared to ‘speak truth to power’” (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that, whereas the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their power, the latter aim at a thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, critical theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that “the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth” (cited in Jameson 1990: 66). The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116-121). Thus, by criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously playing apart in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc and contributing to the development of a counterhegemonic position. There are a number of avenues of avenues open to critical security specialists in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds to other possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant pundistry to forward alternative views onto a broader stage. Nancy Fraser argues: “As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture …. As critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to” (Fraser 1989: 11). Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic Adorno, who argues: In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what lay at the root of the delusion. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such “unobtrusive yet insistent work” does not in itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes. The conceptual and the practical dangers of collapsing practice into theory must be guarded against. Rather, through their educational activities, proponent of critical security studies should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements. That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his account of New Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the country’s political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989: 108; see also COrtright 1993: 5-13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and strategy drew strength and succor from each other’s efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of the a “message in a bottle,” but in this case, contra Adorno’s expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be naïve to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing “professionalisation” of academic life (Said 1994: 49-62). Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability that they are extremely risk-averse. It pays – in all senses – to stick with the crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for “new targets for old weapons”). And, of course, the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking can connect with the practices of social movements and become a “force for the direction of action.” The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to challenge
And we solve negative kritiks, we view the law as more than just ends — it is part of an unraveling of the functioning of normative legality to develop a new vocabulary and mode of thought in addressing sovereign abuse – not a re-sacralized or canonical use of the law.
Agamben ‘5: Giorgio Agamben writes in “State of Exception” – A translation by Kevin Attell. Giorgio Agamben is professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona. He is the author of ten previous books, including the prequel to this one, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, published in English by Stanford University Press. Kevin Attell is a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department at the University of California, Davis. He is the translator of Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal. https://books.google.com/books?id=9slkvuV3VS4Candprintsec=frontcover#v=onepageandq=in20the20kafkaandf=false; AB
The stakes in the debate between Benjamin and Schmitt on the state of exception can now be defined more clearly. The dispute takes place in a zone of anomie that, on the one hand, must be maintained in relation to the law at all costs and, on the other, must be just as implacably released and freed from this relation. That is to say, at issue in the anomic zone is the relation between violence and law – in the last analysis, the status of violence as a cipher for human action. While Schmitt attempts every time to reinscribe violence within a juridical context, Benjamin responds to this gesture by seeking every time to assure it – as pure violence – and existence outside of the law. For reasons that we must try to clarify, this struggle for anomie seems to be as decisive for Western politics as the gigantomachia peri tes ousias, the “battle of giants concerning being,” that defines Western metaphysics. Here, pure violence as the extreme political object, as the “thing” of politics, is the counterpart to pure being, to pure existence as the ultimate metaphysical stakes; the strategy of the exception, which Benjamin seeks to answer with his reading of the “new attorney.” Obviously, it is not a question here of a transitional phase that never achieves its end, nor a process of infinite deconstruction that, in maintaining the law in a spectral life, can no longer get to the bottom of it. The decisive point here is that the law – no longer practiced but studied – is not justice, but only the gate that leads to it. What opens a passage toward justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivity inoperosita – that is, another use of the law. This precisely what the force-of-law (which keeps the law working in opera beyond its formal suspension seeks to prevent. Kafka’s characters – and this is why they interest us – have to do with this spectral figure of the law in the state of exception; they seek, each one following his or her own strategy, to “study” and deactivate it, to “play” with it. One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at the justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical (Benjamin 1992, 41).
Here’s how you weigh under the aff framing – 5-planks:

1. Discourse doesn’t mean no consequences – it just means that the impacts have to link back to framing with a discourse precedent – for example, I link back to biopolitics.
   2. To be more specific, I link back to biopolitics by reducing the qualified/bare life dichotomy through the advocacy – the neg can contest with an alternative discourse if they think biopolitics doesn’t come first.
   3. Linking back to my ROB means using strategies to delegitimize the state. You can use whatever strategy you want. ROB is meant to be general to be fair for both sides.
   4. I weigh ROB through state minimization of qualified/bare life dichotomy.
   5. Discourse being the highest layer is warranted by the resolution – free speech is a human rights question free speech is literally free discourse.

Part 3 is the Offense
Free discourse is currently non-existent – state intervention has become authoritarianism instead of protection – college campuses are uniquely key for discourse as they are the academic hubs of the country.
Maloney Jr. ‘16: Cliff Maloney Jr. writes in “Colleges Have No Right to Limit Students’ Free Speech” on October 13th, 2016 for TIMES. Maloney is the Executive Director at Young Americans for Liberty. http://time.com/4530197/college-free-speech-zone/; AB
In grade school, I learned that debate is defined as “a discussion between people in which they express different opinions about something.” Such open discourse was historically encouraged on our college campuses. Universities exemplified intellectual discussion and debate in America. No one voiced their opinions louder than students, professors and administrators. They pushed society’s limits by admitting women and people of color, and by encouraging diversity of thought amongst the college community. Historically, young people flocked to universities to learn more about the world around them, to encounter people from different backgrounds, to expand their minds and to form their own opinions. Unfortunately, things have changed. Recently on college campuses, our open discourse has been threatened, particularly when discussing politics. While the current presidential election represents polarizing wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties, we should be able to openly debate their policies and the direction in which they plan to take our country if elected. We should be able to discuss the abuse of power within our government and the consistent violations of our Bill of Rights. We should be able to participate in the free market of ideas. But our students are being silenced. University campuses are now home to a plethora of speech restrictions. From sidewalk-sized “free-speech zones” to the criminalization of microaggressions, America’s college campuses look and feel a lot more like an authoritarian dictatorship than they do the academic hubs of the modern free world. When rolling an inflated free-speech ball around campus, students at the University of Delaware were halted by campus police for their activities. A Young Americans for Liberty leader at Fairmont State University in West Virginia was confronted by security when he was attempting to speak with other students about the ideas he believes in. A man at Clemson University was barred from praying on campus because he was outside of the free-speech zone. And a student at Blinn College in Texas abolished her campus’ free-speech zone in a lawsuit after administrators demanded she seek special permission to advocate for self-defense. How have we let this happen in America, the land of the free? It’s because of what our universities have taught a generation of Americans: If you don’t agree with someone, are uncomfortable with an idea, or don’t find a joke funny, then their speech must be suppressed. Especially if they don’t politically agree with you. Instead of actually debating ideas that span topics from the conventional to the taboo, a generation of American students don’t engage, they just get enraged. In doing so, many students believe that they have a right to literally shut other people up. This is not only a threat to the First Amendment, but also to American democracy. In their manifestation, safe spaces and free-speech zones at public universities enable prejudice against unfavorable ideologies. Guised as progressive measures to ensure inclusion, these often unconstitutional policies exclude new and competing ideas, and are antithetical to a free academia. In excluding different ideologies, supposedly progressive campus speech codes do one thing: prevent the progression of ideas. Restrictive campus speech codes are, in fact, regressive. With over 750 chapters nationwide at Young Americans for Liberty, we are fighting against public universities that stifle free speech. We’ve launched the national Fight for Free Speech campaign to reform unconstitutional speech codes and abolish these so-called free-speech zones on college campuses. By hosting events such as large free speech balls, YAL chapters across the country are petitioning their campuses to adopt the University of Chicago’s principles on freedom of expression—the hallmark of campus speech policies. Our members have geared up with First Amendment organizations to ensure that their free speech rights on campus are protected. America is a land rooted in the ideas of a free society: the freedom to be who you are, to speak your mind and to innovate. By silencing our students and young people, we have started down a slippery slope. It is up to us to fight back to ensure that our First Amendment rights remain protected—not just on college campuses, but everywhere in America.
Silencing hate speech causes hate speech to be reaffirmed in a more dangerous way – state silencing is an act of hate speech affirmation, which reifies the prejudiced hierarchies of the state – the remediation is more speech to counter-act bad speech.
Haiman ‘91: Franklyn Haiman. The Remedy is More Speech. (1991). The American Prospect. Retrieved 13 December 2016, from http://prospect.org/article/remedy-more-speech. Franklyn Haiman is John Evans Professor Emeritus of Communications Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of Speech and Law in a Free Society and "Speech Acts" and the First Amendment.
Even if one were persuaded that banning racist speech is desirable to reduce harm, numerous practical consequences should give pause. Placing limitations on the verbal expression of group hatred does not make those attitudes disappear. More likely they will go underground to fester, and perhaps later erupt in more violent form. In the absence of their overt expression, society may grow complacent, thinking it has solved a problem that actually persists. The hidden enemy is more dangerous than one that is seen. Those who are clever enough, instead of going underground, will express their hatred in more indirect and sophisticated ways, evading the prohibitions of the law while increasing the persuasiveness of their racist message by phrasing it in less repugnant terms. This is precisely what happened in Great Britain with a racist journal after passage of the Racial Relations Act of 1965. The law made it an offense to publish or distribute any matter that is "threatening, abusive, or insulting" aimed at fomenting "hatred against any section of the public in Great Britain distinguished by color, race, ethnic or national origins." The journal cleaned up its language and increased its circulation. Prohibitions also turn censored material into "forbidden fruit" and the advocates of racism into martyrs. If speech or writing is banned, many will suppose there must be something important that those in power are afraid of. Curiosity, if nothing else, will lead some to find out for themselves what is being withheld or regulated. How many people who would not otherwise have done so went to see the movie 'The Last Temptation of Christ" or the Mapplethorpe art exhibit, because of the efforts made to suppress them? In France, National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen's success in garnering up to fifteen percent of the vote in recent elections may well have been due in part to the role of martyr he has played to the hilt as a result of the various legal actions brought against him for "inciting racial hatred." Prohibitions on group libel may also perpetuate a sense of helplessness among the targets of racist speech. Instead of learning to defend themselves verbally, people who come to regard themselves as victims may depend upon authorities to protect them from verbal abuse. Children who respond to a schoolyard taunt by chanting, "Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but names will never hurt me" may not be truthfully revealing all their inner feelings. But they are at least expressing a bravado that may be useful in deterring further abuse. A final practical shortcoming of restrictions on racially, religiously, or sexually derogatory speech is that no matter how broadly they sweep in defining what is prohibited, they cannot, without entirely shredding the First Amendment, reach some of the insidious forms of racism and sexism that have been built into our very language. Are we going to outlaw such expressions as "black sheep," "blacklist," "blackball," "blackening someone's reputation," and "as different as black and white"? Are we going to decree that God may no longer be referred to as "He"? And make no mistake about it: it is an insidious influence on our ways of thinking for black to be so often associated with the bad and for "he" to serve as our generic pronoun. To oppose restrictions on group libel is not to be insensitive to the problems of prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory conduct. On the contrary, it is to refocus our attention and energies away from superficial and counterproductive remedies to grapple with the underlying causes of group hatreds. Insofar as the verbal expression of those hatreds is concerned, our institutions of higher education, more than any other institutions in our society, have a responsibility and the resources to act on the advice of Justice Brandeis and answer evil speech with more and better speech. They should be sponsoring activities and setting examples, aimed at educating students for living harmoniously in a pluralistic society. If intergroup understanding is to be developed, our college and university administrators, faculty, and student leaders must play an active and vocal role in helping to make it happen. But the roots of group hatreds stretch far beyond the reach of our educational institutions. They have entangled the world forever and plague us today, from Northern Ireland to the Middle East, from Ethiopia to South Africa. They are interwoven with problems of economic wealth and poverty, of political power and powerlessness, of psychological insecurity and fear. They will not be solved by writing laws and rules against racist speech.
Free speech on college campuses is key to challenge U.S. imperialism and racism.
Khan ‘16: Khan, Tariq. "Masking Oppression As “Free Speech”: An Anarchist Take." Agency. October 28, 2015. Web. December 08, 2016. http://www.anarchistagency.com/commentary/masking-oppression-as-free-speech-ananarchist-take/.
In the present-day United States, a shallow idea of “free speech” is often wielded by the privileged as a way to direct attention away from critiques of existing conditions and systems; particularly critiques of capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. For example, two years ago when UC Berkeley students organized to keep comedian Bill Maher from speaking on their campus, leading media outlets framed it as a controversy about free speech rather than engaging with the much deeper critiques the students had about Maher’s perpetuation of US imperialist, Orientalist discourse which fuels militarism abroad and racist violence at home. Yet, while students who protest imperialist discourse are characterized as a threat to free speech, the actual threat to free speech in academia goes unchallenged by leading media outlets. October 8, 2015, at the Community College of Philadelphia, English professor Divya Nair spoke at a rally organized by students in protest of police recruiters on campus. The students and Professor Nair drew connections between colonialism and modern US policing; particularly the police tactic of recruiting poor people of color to act as the capitalist state’s footsoldiers to control poor Black and Brown communities. Later that day, school authorities suspended Professor Nair without pay, and they have since suspended three student group members who are facing disciplinary hearings. In the past few years there has been a noticeable campus crackdown on anti-colonialist expression.
Limiting free speech is terrible – it’s a biopolitical double-bind:
Either A) The state reduces certain groups to bare life by not allowing them to express their views and problems and festers the racist rhetoric and hatred from that group, which causes biopolitical violence against the oppressed, who are bare life under state jurisdiction either way.
Or B) The state twists speech restrictions to stop oppressed populations from speaking out – especially under the new Trump conservative government. Do you really think they would put restrictions on conservative discourse or liberal discourse if they had the power to put restrictions?

Part 4 is the Underview

Aff gets RVIs on Theory – 2 reasons

1. Reciprocity: I have to win theory and substance but they can win on either one, which violates reciprocity. Always prefer reciprocity on fairness since it’s the filter for fairness impacts – harms don’t matter if they don’t skew the field to one person’s favor. RVIS solve this since I can consolidate to one layer.
   2. Time skew: Forcing me to invest time on theory while I can’t generate offense is really abusive since it becomes a huge time suck. The time skew always hurts me since I have to generate terminal defense on every argument but they only have to extend a few with risk-of-offense. At best my argument quality is hurt since I can’t develop on either layer as well. And I have to spend time writing theory underviews instead of increasing aff substance.

And no PICs against whole rez affs – it’s a voting issue.

1. Turn ground: I lose turn ground when my opponent reads a PIC because the neg can advocate something very similar to the AC. This difference can be extremely small, and the smaller it gets, the less turn ground I have to generate offense from the NC. Turn ground is key to fairness because the only ability to generate offense off someone else’s case is turns, and limiting that makes it much easier for the other debater.
   2. Reciprocity: PICs are not reciprocal because I have to prove the entirely of the aff advocacy true, whereas the neg can exploit the smallest flaw of the AC, in which case the neg only has to prove a tiny bit of offense to win. Reciprocity is key to fairness because it ensures that debaters enter the round with equal opportunities to win.
   3. Pre-round predictability: The aff’s advocacy, when defending whole res, includes a lot of small details. The NC can exploit this in an infinite number of ways by excluding any random part of the affirmative advocacy. This means I can’t predict a strategy I will use in the 1AR because of the possibilities the neg has. This is key to fairness because debaters should at least have a general idea of what the opposition is reading, otherwise, there is always a structural disadvantage.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
I affirm the resolution. Resolved: The United States Federal Government ought to limit qualified immunity for police officers. Some evidence is bracketed for gender and clarity. 

Observation 1. Qualified immunity is only an applicable defense for suits over constitutional torts — federal employees are given absolute protections for all other tort violations. US Department of Justice:
"33. Immunity of Government Officers Sued as Individuals for Official Acts." Office of the United States Attorneys, US Department of Justice, 2016, www.justice.gov/usam/civil-resource-manual-33-immunity-government-officers-sued-individuals.

The general rule at common law was that in order for a government official to be protected by absolute immunity for common law torts, not only did the official have to be acting within the outer perimeter of his/her official duties, but the conduct at issue also had to be discretionary in nature. Westfall v. Irwin, 484 U.S. 292, 297-298 (1988). In enacting the Federal Employees Liability Reform and Tort Compensation Act of 1988 (FELRTCA), Congress abrogated this common law rule and extended absolute immunity for common law torts to all federal employees regardless of whether the conduct at issue was discretionary. See United States v. Smith, 499 U.S. 160 (1991). FELRTCA confers such immunity by making the Federal Tort Claims Act the exclusive remedy for all common law torts committed by federal employees while acting within the scope of their office or employment. 28 U.S.C. § 2679(b)(1). However, the immunity conferred by FELRTCA does not extend or apply to suits against federal employees for violation of the Constitution or federal statutes. Thus, government officials sued for constitutional torts continue to be protected only by qualified immunity. 28 U.S.C. § 2679(b)(2). See Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 807 (1982); Butz v. Economou, 438 U.S. 478 (1978). Where applicable, qualified immunity protects an official from trial and the burdens of litigation. See Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 526 (1985).

I adhere to the legal definition of qualified immunity, or “government employees’ immunity from trial, as long as a) the official did not break a Constitutional right or federal statute that was clearly established at the time of violation, and b) the officer could not have reasonably believed their conduct to be lawful under that right or statute. 

Observation 2. The United States Federal Government is and should be considered a moral actor — 3 reasons:
a) Moral education; because ethical judgments lie at the root of constructive decisionmaking, we should first try to educate ourselves in philosophy rather than sheer policymaking. Philosophy fuels policy, not the other way around.
b) Functionality; we should hold governments responsible for their actions, as frequently those actions carry even greater weight than those of individuals, and only agents can carry responsibility.
c) Agency; if a being is capable of rationalizing their decisions, it stands to reason that the act of carrying out that decision should be considered agency.  Governments have reasons for what they do; even if they do not think in the same way an individual does, governments still reason, and are agents. 

I define “limit” as “to restrict or confine, as to area, extent, time, etc.”  To clarify: I do not defend the complete abolishment of qualified immunity, but rather, restricting it to the extent that it no longer impedes justice.
Dictionary, F. (2016). Retrieved from Free Dictionary Website : thefreedictionary.com
 
Framework

Part I is framework.

‘Ought’ implies obligation, so I value morality.
"Ought." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 16 Dec. 2014. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ought. “used to express obligation”
First — the mere concept of agency demands we assign importance to the idea of moral accountability. Barrett 04:
Will Barrett, “Responsibility, Accountability and Corporate Activity,” Online Opinion: Australia’s E-journal of Social and Political Debate, August 25, 2004, http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=2480#.
Moral responsibility assumes a capacity for making rational decisions, which in turn justifies holding moral agents accountable for their actions. Morality gives reasons for action, and moral agents must in principle be capable of choosing to act morally, and of acting on the basis of a moral reason. People who lack a capacity for rational decision-making cannot be held morally responsible for their actions. In case this requirement strikes you as too stringent, ask yourself why adults are held responsible for the welfare (and sometimes the actions) of children. Adults have moral responsibility for children because children lack a developed capacity for rational decision-making, and adults, other things being equal, are taken to have such a capacity.
Given that moral agency entails responsibility, in that autonomous rational agents are in principle capable of responding to moral reasons, accountability is a necessary feature of morality. Moral agents have negative responsibilities at least, and can be held to account for violating these. A thicker sense of accountability derives from the roles we occupy. Responsibilities attach to roles, for example professional responsibilities, and roles sometimes are defined in terms of responsibilities. I can be held to account for my fulfilment of my role-given responsibilities.

The value of autonomy is inextricably linked to the principle of accountability. We cannot have one without valuing the other. Bivins 06:
Bivins, Thomas. "Responsibility and Accountability, Chapter 2." Ethics in Public Relations: Responsible Advocacy, SAGE Books, 2006, sk.sagepub.com/books/ethics-in-public-relations.

There are several ways to look at autonomy as it relates to responsibility and accountability. Philosopher and ethicist Mitchell Haney suggests that the moral community is composed of two kinds of actors: responsible actors and accountable actors. Responsibility is viewed within this model as having a higher level of autonomy by nature in that it implies the actor is able to “self-oversee, self-regulate, and self-motivate responsive adjustments to maintain adherence with appropriate moral standards of action.”6
“Responsible actors need not depend on external or mediated motivational pressure for responsive adjustment. They are expected to be motivated to correct harms and reduce future risk of harms without external or mediated pressure to do so.”7
Under this formulation, the actor (moral agent) has the capacity to impose moral law on herself, thus achieving a level of “moral autonomy” we would hope to associate normally with professional status. This somewhat Kantian model supposes that we understand ourselves as free, reasoning individuals—invoking a mandate of both self-respect and respect for others (but not control by others).
Furthermore, promoting accountability is the most important concern for ethical conduct.  5 warrants:
1) Innateness — to the concept of justice is that we hold people and agents accountable for their actions — if we assume the obligation to a justice system at all we accept the importance of accountability and punishment;
2)  Definitional — Oxford defines “accountable” as “required to explain actions or decisions to someone”; key to the notion of morality is the idea that we demand explanation and thorough thinking;
3) Reasoning — accountability rejects of arbitrary defense, meaning it rests of the very principle of justification — and regardless of what my opponent’s framework it is, it relies on justification, which means it values the principle of accountability;
4) Fairness — accountability defends against unfair treatment because its very principle is to only assign blame and punishment to those who deserve it;
5) Functionality — we can’t operate a moral framework which evaluates individual actions without assigning some importance to the participation of the individual, meaning that any framework we choose in this round will value accountability.

Contention 1
Part II is offense.
Contention 1 is officer accountability.
a) In the status quo, qualified immunity functions alleviates officers of punishment for their crimes, discouraging a sense of responsibility for rights protections. Chemerinksy 14:
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, “How the Supreme Court Protects Bad Cops,” New York Times, 26 August 2014.

The court has also weakened accountability by ruling that a local government can be held liable only if it is proved that the city’s or county’s own policy violated the Constitution. In almost every other area of law, an employer can be held liable if its employees, in the scope of their duties, injure others, even negligently. This encourages employers to control the conduct of their employees and ensures that those injured will be compensated. A 2011 case, Connick v. Thompson, illustrates how difficult the Supreme Court has made it to prove municipal liability. John Thompson was convicted of an armed robbery and a murder and spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row, because of prosecutorial misconduct. Two days before Mr. Thompson’s trial began in New Orleans, the assistant district attorney received the crime lab’s report, which stated that the perpetrator of the armed robbery had a blood type that did not match Mr. Thompson’s. The defense was not told this crucial information.

The Supreme Court has used this doctrine in recent years to deny damages to an eighth-grade girl who was strip-searched by school officials on suspicion that she had prescription-strength ibuprofen. It has also used it to deny damages to a man who, under a material-witness warrant, was held in a maximum-security prison for 16 days and on supervised release for 14 months, even though the government had no intention of using him as a material witness or even probable cause to arrest him. In each instance, the court stressed that the government officer could not be held liable, even though the Constitution had clearly been violated. Taken together, these rulings have a powerful effect. They mean that the officer who shot Michael Brown and the City of Ferguson will most likely never be held accountable in court. How many more deaths and how many more riots will it take before the Supreme Court changes course?

b) A restriction on qualified immunity would hold more officers accountable for their wrongs. Stephan 2k16:
Lindsey De Stefan. “‘No Man Is Above the Law and No Man Is Below It:’ How Qualified Immunity Reform Could Create Accountability and Curb Widespread Police Misconduct.” The article claims it’s from 2017 but let’s just go 2016 to be safe. Seton Hall University. http://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1861andcontext=student_scholarship.
Altering the qualified immunity doctrine is an excellent way to begin the path to restoring trust by establishing a much-needed sense of accountability. Civil remedies are a good jumping off point because, as repeated failures to indict officers—even in the face of video footage—have demonstrated, accountability via the criminal law is a far-off possibility, if it is possible at all. Prosecutors are generally disinclined to bring charges against law enforcement officers, 140 and grand juries are equally as hesitant to indict them.141 Independent investigations, as suggested by the Task Force, are an excellent idea, but establishing a feasible system nationwide would take time. On the other hand, Supreme Court amendment of the stringent immunity afforded to police officers could take effect relatively quickly. Of course, this is easier said than done. The Court has increasingly enlarged the immunity afforded to police officers in its recent decisions, and any 180-degree turnaround would likely require a change in Court composition. But the current Court can nevertheless begin to firm up qualified immunity doctrine by simply providing more guidance and clarification, thereby enhancing accountability and reaffirming trust between law enforcement and their respective communities. The concept of a clearly established right is, in many ways, a problem that requires solving. A substantial number of cases are disposed of on the premise that a right was not “clearly established”—yet lower courts have struggled for years with what those words actually mean. Arguably, then, at least some officers are escaping liability simply because of the Court’s repeated failures to establish consistency in its qualified immunity jurisprudence. But if the Court used qualified immunity opinions to demonstrate what qualifies as a clearly established right by meticulously outlining its reasoning in answering whether a set of facts implicates such a right, the Court could alleviate some confusion. In other words, rather than taking cases simply to overturn the lower courts’ denial of immunity, it could take cases to affirm those denials or, alternatively, to reverse lower courts’ grant of immunity. By so doing, the Court can give examples of what constitutes a right that is “sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that what he is doing violates that right,”142 and can give lower courts somewhat of a guide to follow. By elucidating the contours of the clearly established right, the Court would alleviate some of the confusion of lower courts and ensure that they are in fact applying that part of the test properly. Proper application of this prong directly promotes accountability, as the public can rest assured that, at least in that regard, cases are not being disposed of based merely on perplexity and uncertainty. Moreover, increased confidence about the clearly established prong could foster a willingness to take on the second part of the test and, in so doing, advance the development of constitutional law and clarify further constitutional rights. The Court could also accept that its attempts at a general standard for all classes of officials that are not otherwise entitled to absolute immunity has been problematic and hugely unsuccessful. Though the Court apparently fears “complicating” qualified immunity, the doctrine is quite complicated as is, and adopting more particularized classes of officials with different standards of immunity would not only assist lower courts in properly analyzing immunity, but would promote justice in constitutional tort litigation. For example, the Court could classify officials based on the approximate number of people with whom they come in contact, so to speak, and that might therefore bring civil suits against them. A governor, for example, could theoretically face a lawsuit from any resident of the state, and would thus be afforded more stringent protection—much like the standard afforded to all officials now. But law enforcement officers, who come in contact with only the residents of one town, city, or perhaps county, risk possible suits from a much smaller pool of people. The threat of litigation would therefore be much less crippling on governmental function, and immunity protection need not be so rigorous. In the case of allegations of Fourth Amendment violations, in light of the already-existing reasonableness standard, immunity may be inappropriate altogether. In addition, the Court could do its proverbial homework and take notice of the widespread indemnification of officers that often results in a complete absence of financial or employment related consequences for law enforcement. If the Court stopped relying on its own intuition, and instead came to grip with the facts, it would likely realize that it has been overzealous in protecting low-level officers, and be inclined to alter course somewhat. By beginning to mend the qualified immunity doctrine in these ways, the Court will allow more civil suits for the vindication of constitutional rights to succeed. This will help to reduce the public mentality—strengthened by recent events—that cops get away with everything, in every regard. Civil suits avoid subjecting law enforcement to any criminal liability that, because of recent events, many laypersons believe is warranted. While this may be true in select circumstances, reality demonstrates that criminal charges are highly unlikely to stick against a police officer. But allowing more civil suits to go forward will serve as an important reminder to both civilians and law enforcement that the police are not above the law, and that they are held accountable for their wrongdoings. In turn, this accountability will begin to heal the relationship between law enforcement and communities by serving as the first step on what will surely be a long path to rebuilding the trust that is so crucial. By adopting different immunity standards for high-level and low-level officials, clarifying the vagueness surrounding the definition of a “clearly established” right, and acknowledging the real-world effects of indemnification, the Court can begin to repair some of the substantial flaws in its qualified immunity jurisprudence. As it does, it will permit more constitutional tort suits to succeed, thereby fostering law enforcement accountability. Because criminal liability is nearly impossible as a practical matter, and because strategies like improving police training and recruiting tactics will likely take years to effectively implement, civil suits are the (relatively) fastest way to demonstrate to the country that our officers are our guardians and that they are accountable to us. It is thus the most immediate way to rebuild trust and begin healing the citizenpolice relationship. 
Contention 2

Contention 2 is courts’ accountability.
a) The first function of the courts in a Constitutional suit is to determine a Constitutional right — the question of immunity should come second to the question of justice. This is an obligation derived from the authority of the courts granted by the people. The Supreme Court, 2016:
The Supreme Court. "The Court and Constitutional Interpretation." The Supreme Court of the United States, 22 Oct. 2016, www.supremecourt.gov/about/constitutional.aspx.

The complex role of the Supreme Court in this system derives from its authority to invalidate legislation or executive actions which, in the Court's considered judgment, conflict with the Constitution. This power of "judicial review" has given the Court a crucial responsibility in assuring individual rights, as well as in maintaining a "living Constitution" whose broad provisions are continually applied to complicated new situations.
While the function of judicial review is not explicitly provided in the Constitution, it had been anticipated before the adoption of that document. Prior to 1789, state courts had already overturned legislative acts which conflicted with state constitutions. Moreover, many of the Founding Fathers expected the Supreme Court to assume this role in regard to the Constitution; Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, for example, had underlined the importance of judicial review in the Federalist Papers, which urged adoption of the Constitution.
Hamilton had written that through the practice of judicial review the Court ensured that the will of the whole people, as expressed in their Constitution, would be supreme over the will of a legislature, whose statutes might express only the temporary will of part of the people. And Madison had written that constitutional interpretation must be left to the reasoned judgment of independent judges, rather than to the tumult and conflict of the political process. If every constitutional question were to be decided by public political bargaining, Madison argued, the Constitution would be reduced to a battleground of competing factions, political passion and partisan spirit.
Despite this background the Court's power of judicial review was not confirmed until 1803, when it was invoked by Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison. In this decision, the Chief Justice asserted that the Supreme Court's responsibility to overturn unconstitutional legislation was a necessary consequence of its sworn duty to uphold the Constitution. That oath could not be fulfilled any other way. "It is emphatically the province of the judicial department to say what the law is," he declared.
In retrospect, it is evident that constitutional interpretation and application were made necessary by the very nature of the Constitution. The Founding Fathers had wisely worded that document in rather general terms leaving it open to future elaboration to meet changing conditions. As Chief Justice Marshall noted in McCulloch v. Maryland, a constitution that attempted to detail every aspect of its own application "would partake of the prolixity of a legal code, and could scarcely be embraced by the human mind. . . . Its nature, therefore, requires that only its great outlines should be marked, its important objects designated, and the minor ingredients which compose those objects be deduced from the nature of the objects themselves."
b) In the status quo, courts consider police immunity first, and Constitutional rights second. It perverts the rightful order of courts’ duties. Chen 15:
Alan K. Chen, professor of law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, “Qualified Immunity Limiting Access to Justice and Impeding Development of the Law,” Human Rights Magazine Vol. 41, 2015.

Critics of qualified immunity point out that the breadth of the doctrine’s protection means that people like Savana Redding whose rights have been violated will go without compensation. Contrary to Marbury’s admonition, their rights can be violated, but they will receive no remedy. But there are broader social costs associated with qualified immunity as well. Because of the way the doctrine is structured, courts can decide an official is entitled to qualified immunity by concluding that they  he or she have not violated a “clearly established” right without ever answering the question of whether their  his or her conduct did, in fact, violated the Constitution. This means that courts can dismiss constitutional rights claims without precisely clarifying the scope of the law. Constitutional doctrine, like the common law, evolves and is refined through series of court decisions. But qualified immunity interferes with this law-pronouncing function of the federal courts and reduces the amount of guidance about the meaning of the Constitution for both government officials and the public at large. John C. Jeffries Jr., The Right-Remedy Gap in Constitutional Law, 109 Yale L.J. 87, 99–100 (1999).

Thus, we ought to restrict the breadth of qualified immunity in order to a) force the courts to consider Constitutional rights first, and b) demand better conduct of officers — ensuring more accountability in multiple levels of government.

Tournament: Central Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: idk | Judge: Jeffrey Richards
First is the definition of limit
San Fellipo 92 (John, “OREGON'S TELEPHONE INFORMATION DELIVERY SERVICE LAW: A CONSUMER PROTECTION STEP TOO FAR” 28 Willamette L. Rev. 455 1991-1992, Hein Online)
131. The author understands "limit" as used in OR. ADMIN. R. 860-21-505(8) (1991) to mean cancel, as opposed to the word "curtail" used in section (7), meaning only a partial restriction.
Oxford Dictionary adds another definition of limit which is… http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/limit_2
To restrict the amount of something you can use.
Part 1 is Framing
I value morality.
Modern politics and ethics are morally hopeless - the state is the ultimate sovereign – it controls itself and decides where and when rules are applied.
Agamben ‘8: Giorgio Agamben writes in “Beyond Human Rights” in 2008. Giorgio Agamben (Italian: aˈɡambɛn; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, 4 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. http://jstor.reed.edu/stable/pdf/40644981.pdf; AB
The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. 3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.
This is the distinction between qualified life and bare life – bare life lacks the protection of rights, whereas qualified life has this protection of rights. This ability to arbitrarily apply rights is the manifestation of state abuse – Qualified life is the Trojan horse that allows the state to consolidate its bio-political control.
Downey ‘9: Anthony Downey writes in “Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Bare Life’ and the Politics of Aesthetics” on March 2009. Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 2, March, 2009, 109–125. Anthony Downey is director of the Master s Program in Contemporary Art at Sotheby s Institute of Art, London, and editor of Ibraaz, a research forum for visual culture in the Middle East and North Africa. http://www.anthonydowney.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2009-zones-of-indistinction.pdf; AB
Lives lived on the margins of social, political, cultural, economic and geographical borders are lives half lived. Denied access to legal, economic and political redress, these lives exist in a limbo-like state that is largely preoccupied with acquiring and sustaining the essentials of life. The refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the dispossessed – all have been excluded, to different degrees, from the fraternity of the social sphere, appeal to the safety net of the nation-state and recourse to international law. They have been outlawed, so to speak, placed beyond recourse to law and yet still in a precarious relationship to law itself. Although there is a significant degree of familiarity to be found in these sentiments, there is an increasingly notable move both in the political sciences and in cultural studies to view such subject positions not as the exception to modernity but its exemplification. Which brings us to a far more radical proposal: what if the fact of discrimination, in all its injustice and strategic forms of exclusion, is the point at which we find not so much an imperfect modern subject – a subject existing in a ‘sub-modern’ phase that has yet to realise its potential – as we do the exemplary modern subject? What if the refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the dispossessed are not only constitutive of modernity but its emblematic subjects? It is with such points in mind that Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has developed a theory of marginalisation that goes beyond the binary distinctions to be had in dichotomies such as inside/outside, centre/margins, inclusion/exclusion. In albeit abbreviated terms for now, Agamben is interested in lives lived on the margins of social, political, juridical and biological representation, not for their exceptional qualities but for their exemplary status: the manner in which they are both representative of modernity and an admonitory warning to the ontological basis of the modern political subject. Modernity’s exceptions, he argues, predicate its social structure and political reasoning. The exemplary figure of that exceptionalism in historical terms is bare life homo sacer, an obscure figure of Roman law who, although once a citizen, is reduced to ‘bare life’ by sovereign decree and deprived of basic rights such as representation before the law.1 Homo sacer, the sacred and therefore separate person man – he who is set apart from others by law – is, for Agamben, the increasingly nascent figure of our times; a time in which we are witnessing the effective re-emergence of sovereign forms of power and the concomitant production of ‘bare life’ as a constituent element in the democratic order. It is to Agamben’s credit that he does not propose a discrete topology of victimhood in his thesis; rather, he is suggesting that the discretionary ability of the sovereign state to bring the weight of its unmediated power to bear upon the body of its subjects is an inherent part of living in a democracy. In Agamben’s eyes, in fine, we are not only all potentially homo sacer (homines sacri) and the de facto bearers of ‘bare life’ but this exceptional figure augurs a ‘coming community’ that is based not on rights as such but the suspension of rights.
Qualified life opens up space for a zone of indistinction, where people fall into the grey-zone of the invisible – legitimizes a state where all societal atrocities happen through the rhetoric of state of exception.
Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
More than this inclusion by exclusion, sovereign power in the West is constituted by its ability to suspend itself in a state of exception, or ban: "The originary relation of law to life is not application but abandonment."15 The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign is at the same time inside and outside the sovereign order: the sovereign can suspend the law. What defines the rule of law is the state of exception when law is suspended. The very space in which juridical order can have validity is created and defined through the sovereign exception. However, the exception that defines the structure of sovereignty is more complex than the inclusion of what is outside by means of an interdiction.16 It is not just a question of creating a distinction between inside and outside: it is the tracing of a threshold between the two, a location where inside and outside enter into a zone of indistinction. It is this state of exception, or the zone of indistinction between inside and outside, that makes the modern juridical order of the West possible. The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provisional state of danger as a means of establishing the Nazi state it- self. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its boundaries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the normal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitutive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded exclusion from human law (killing him these people does not count as homicide) and he is excluded exclusion from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the exclusion of both the sacred and the profane.
The police is an extension of the state - the law is a complex interaction between all modes of the state to legitimize the privileged and the ongoing ignorance of systemic violence – the “police need to protect people” rhetoric legitimizes violence by instilling fear in people – the real protection starts with eliminating the hierarchies that favor the privileged and reduce all others to bare life.
Thatcher ‘16: Leslie Thatcher writes in “Henry Giroux on State Terrorism and the Ideological Weapons of Neoliberalism” on Sunday, 28 February 2016 00:00. University of Utah. News Director of KPCW 91.9 FM. This is her report of her interpretations and discussions with Henry Giroux, who is a prominent author on politics and discourse. http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/35007-henry-giroux-on-state-terrorism-and-the-ideological-weapons-of-neoliberalism; AB
Fear and violence serve as a mode of control in our schools, social services and, in a more obvious sense, in the through repressive state apparatuses such as the courts, police and politics itself. Violence becomes a kind of depoliticizing drug for the larger public - those who are the victims of a savage neoliberal economic order. And you have to remember: Addiction often takes place behind our backs. We often don't realize that it's happened. It often seems to operate seamlessly and powerfully through forms of affective and ideological management that mirror a cruel and normalized market-based society that divorces actions from social costs, elevates self-interests over social needs, sells off public goods, produces a massive and death-dealing machinery of social inequality and kills the imagination, if not the spirit itself, by erasing the conditions that promote dialogue and thoughtfulness. The "war on terrorism" has further undermined historical memory, erased traces of the welfare state and filled the present with a poisonous ideology of privatization, unchecked individualism and rampant consumerism. The elites are hooked on a poisonous lifestyle, economy and culture in which they're the high priests. Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein's claim, "We do God's work," is the best example. Many elites screw people over in the name of God, so ignorant are they about the carnage they produce. For them, market principles take on the form of a kind of religious fundamentalism and the neoliberal economy becomes their church and pulpit. A growing body of social science research suggests that among the ultra-rich, there are widespread signs of sociopathic traits - a lack of empathy, suffocating narcissism, an inclination to cheat, a willingness to disconnect actions from any sense of ethical consideration and a propensity to engage in lawlessness. We've returned to the ancient philosophy of fixed social hierarchies without the religion. We call it economic insight. We now live in a society produced, as Bill Black says, in the criminogenic elite institutions of higher education. Remember it was the elites reared at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and at other elite schools that brought us Vietnam, Iraq, state-sanctioned torture and a host of other warlike and violent policies.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best uses counter-narratives to demystify the power of the state hierarchies—it’s the hope that we have for meaningful change that spills over this debate round. The judge as critical educator has an obligation to question this power.
Gündoğdu ‘11: Ayten Gündoğdu writes in “Potentialities of human rights: Agamben and the narrative of fated necessity” on 19 July 2011.  Contemporary Political Theory February 2012, Volume 11, Issue 1, pp 2–22. http://link.springer.com/article/10.10572Fcpt.2010.45; AB
In his analysis of biopolitical sovereignty, Agamben provides us with what might be called a counternarrative of Western politics with the explicitly stated goal of ‘unveiling’ or ‘unmasking’ what has become mystified, hidden, secret or invisible, particularly with the prevalence of contractarian accounts of political power (1998, p. 8; 2005, p. 88). Agamben describes this critical task in terms of ‘disenchantment’, or the ‘patient work’ of unmasking the fiction or myth that covers up and sustains the violence of sovereignty (2005, p. 88). What underlies this urge to demystify and unveils is a particular understanding of myth as a deceptive narrative naturalizing and legitimizing violence in the name of the preservation of life. I use the term ‘counternarrative’ to call attention to what Agamben's account aims to do6: This is a critical analysis, as Agamben himself insists, that does not offer ‘historiographical theses or reconstructions’ but instead treats some historical phenomena as ‘paradigms’ so as to ‘make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context;’ to do this, it proceeds at ‘a historico-philosophical level’ (1998, p. 11; 2009, p. 9). In that sense, it is not an account that claims historical accuracy or factual verifiability. This is a crucial point that is sometimes overlooked by Agamben's critics who call into question his inaccurate treatment of historical phenomena such as the concentration camps.7 In addition, ‘counternarrative’ draws our attention to the inventive dimensions of Agamben's endeavor; as one of his critics aptly (though disapprovingly) puts it, ‘Agamben does not discover a concealed biopolitical paradigm stretching back to fourth-century Athens; rather he invents one’ (Finlayson, 2010, p. 116). The invention of a counternarrative of Western politics involves literary devices (e.g. hyperbole), which aim to provoke the readers and persuade them to abandon any politics centered on modern concepts such as sovereignty, rights and citizenship (LaCapra, 2007; cf. de la Durantaye, 2009). In analyzing Agamben's account as a ‘counternarrative’, I aim to attend to the goals that it sets for itself. It is these goals – particularly the goal of freeing human potentialities from myths that render the contingent necessary and mask other possibilities – that provide the starting point for my critical engagement with Agamben. Instead of resorting to an ‘outside’ – whether this be an alternative historical account or another theoretical tradition – I aim to read Agamben on his own terms, and suggest that as he tries to free human potentialities from contractarian myths, he might be entrapping them in another myth that ends up casting the contingent as necessary. Agamben's counternarrative of Western politics aims to uncover what has become hidden or invisible with ‘our modern habit of representing the political realm in terms of citizens’ rights, free will, and social contracts’ (1998, p. 106). Its main target is the contractarian accounts of sovereign power. As he identifies the production of bare life as the originary or foundational activity grounding sovereign power (1998, pp. 6, 83), he particularly aims to question the social contractarian ‘myth’ that covers up sovereign violence (1998, p. 109). After unveiling the foundational myths of Western politics, Agamben concludes that we cannot effectively respond to ‘the bloody mystification of a new planetary order’ if we let these myths continue to obstruct our political imagination (1998, p. 12). With his counternarrative presenting a catastrophic view of the historical present – a view that emphasizes how exception has become the rule, camp has become the paradigmatic structure organizing political space, and we have all virtually become homines sacri (1998, pp. 38, 176, 111) – Agamben aims to convince his readers of the need to think of a ‘nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life’ (2000, p. 112). This new politics requires the renunciation of concepts associated with sovereignty – for example, state, rights, citizenship. The contemporary predicament cannot be remedied by a return to conventional political categories and institutions, Agamben suggests, since these are deeply involved in the creation of this catastrophe in the first place. Almost anticipating his critics who would be puzzled by his renunciation of rights and rule of law at a time when the problem of legal dispossession increasingly threatens populations around the world, he explicitly states that the response to the current permanent state of exception cannot consist in confining it within constitutional boundaries and reaffirming the primacy of legal norms and rights (2005, p. 87).8 As legal norms and rights are ultimately grounded in the originary violence of separating a bare life, legal dispossession is already inscribed in them as an inescapable condition. Neither the liberal remedy of reasserting the rule of law, nor the Derridean strategy of ‘infinite negotiations’ with a law that is in force without any significance, are viable options (2005, p. 87; 1998, p. 54). Both are futile, if not lethally dangerous, endeavors.9 The only politically tenable option, Agamben contends, is to move out of sovereignty with ‘a complicated and patient strategy’ of getting the ‘door of the Law closed forever’ (1998, pp. 54, 55).
Any attempt to make political change requires an analysis of bare life – the state always has the power to declare a state of exception, which reinforces cyclical violence against those without qualified life.
Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
At the threshold of the modern era, then, the realm of bare life begins to coincide with the political, and inclusion and exclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of indistinction. In these zones of indistinction, bare life, or homo sacer, becomes both the subject and the object of the political order: it is both the place for the organization of state power, in the forms of discipline and objectification described by Foucault, and the place for emancipation from it, through the birth of mod- ern democracy and the demand for human rights. This move of biological life to the center of the political scene in the West leads to a transformation of the political realm itself, one that effectively constitutes its depoliticization. That depoliticization takes place side by side with the politicization of bare life. Bare life is politicized and political life disappears. This irony is explained by the way the link forged in modernity between poli- tics and bare life, a link that underpins ideologies from the right and the left, has been ignored. As Agamben says, "if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because poli- tics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity. . . . Only a reflection that . . . interrogates the link between bare life and politics . . . will be able to bring the political out of its con- cealment."20 Any attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with an awareness of the impossibility of the classical distinction between private life and political existence and exam- ine the zones of indistinction into which the oppositions that produced modern politics in the West - inside/outside, right/left, public/private - have dissolved. Agamben proposes that "it is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, these difficult zones of indistinction, that the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought."21 In the zone of indistinction, a claim to a po- litically qualified life can no longer be effective as such.
Part 2 is the Advocacy
I defend the pre-fiat implication and examination of limiting qualified immunity in the United States. I do not defend fiat. Pre-fiat analysis is a pre-requisite to policy-making through discourse and LD is primarily based around theoretical discourse anyway. The neg has the obligation to do a CX check if they want me to defend a different interpretation to avoid frivolous theory or T debates. If T or theory is read without a CX check, drop the debater for deliberately skewing the round since the aff is advocacy based, rather than plan-based.

Our role as intellectuals is not to offer prescriptive solutions, rather it is to offer analyses that expose harmful powers and expose them to light, this is a pre-req to policy making
Jones ‘99: Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, ‘99 (Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)
The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction that make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the “philosophy of praxis” to political practice, Gramsci claims: It the theory does not tend to leave the “simple” in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and “simple” it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332-333). According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative “intellectual-moral bloc” should take place under the auspices of the Communist Party – a body he described as the “modern prince.” Just as Niccolo Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign barbarians, and create a virtu-ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern price could lead the working class on its journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125-205). Gramsci’s relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of domination – for example, in the case of gender – to class relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict.1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the “infallible party” has obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the enemies of emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous. History furnishes examples of progressive developments that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside the bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the particularly intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered as “resources of hope” for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They illustrate that ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical interaction of ideas and material reality. One clear security-related example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s. At that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals (the “alternative defense” school) encouraged and drew strength from peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on short-term policy but on the dominant discourses of strategy and security, a far more important result in the long run. The synergy between critical security intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both working in tandem can be witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of common security. As Thomas Risse-Kappen points out, the term “common security” originated in the contribution of peace researchers to the German security debate of the 1970s (Risse-Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). Initially, mainstream defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However, notions of common security were taken up by a number of different intellectuals communities, including the liberal arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in the center-left political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet “institutchiks” – members of the influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau 1996: 52-54; Risse-Kappen 1994: 196-200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995). These communities were subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, “in response to social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD” (Risse-Kappen 1994: 207). Similar pressures even had an effect on the Reagan administration. As Risse-Kappen notes: When the Reagan administration brought hard-liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the “freeze campaign” that revived the arms control process together with pressure from the European allies. (Risse-Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90-110). Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least have a substantial impact on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected impact of alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union. Through various East-West links, which included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such attendant notions as “nonoffensive defense” (these links are detailed in Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin , and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse-Kappen 1994: 203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in East-West relations in order to facilitate much-needed domestic reforms (“the interaction of ideas and material reality”). But what is significant is that the Soviets’ commitment to common security led to significant changes in force sizes and postures. These in turn aided in the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the territory of the former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As concepts such as common security, and collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223-260), are adopted by governments and military services, they inevitably become somewhat debased. The hope is that enough of the residual meaning can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the adoption of the concept of common security by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently) critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonsrates in relation to NATO expansion). The example of common security is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and play a role – a significant one at that – in making the world a better and safer place. Second, it points to potential future addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical security studies in particular. Third, it also underlines the role of ideas in the evolution in society. CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND THE THEORY-PRACTICE NEXUS Although most proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical intellectuals “are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless” (Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies, this means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making suffering humanity rather than raison d’etat the prism through which problems are viewed. Here the project stands full-square within the critical theory tradition. If “all theory is for someone and for some purpose,” then critical security studies is for “the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless,” and its purpose is their emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a fundamental reconceptualization of security with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But the question remains at the conceptual level of how these alternative types of theorizing – even if they are self-consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures – can become “a force for the direction of action.” Again, Gramsci’s work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramsci’s terminology, “historic blocs” (Gramsci 1971: 323-377). Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s view of power as a centaur, ahlf man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway through civil society and takes on the status of common sense; it becomes subconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions that were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marx’s well-worn phrase, “All that is solid melts into the air.” Gramsci’s intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a “war of position” (Gramsci 1971: 229-239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies, any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by helping to undermine the “natural,” “commonsense,” internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs created. I contend that Gramsci’s strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. THE TASKS OF CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES If the project of critical security studies is conceived in terms of war of position, then the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse. This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the prevailing security regimes, that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes. When this is attempted in the security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals, traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order. This challenge entails teasing out the often subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist façade. In this sense, proponents of critical security studies approximate to Foucault’s notion of “specific intellectuals” who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980: 132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of “speaking truth to power” (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod lines of speaking “truth against the world.” Of course, traditional strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that “strategists must be prepared to ‘speak truth to power’” (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that, whereas the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their power, the latter aim at a thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, critical theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that “the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth” (cited in Jameson 1990: 66). The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116-121). Thus, by criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously playing apart in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc and contributing to the development of a counterhegemonic position. There are a number of avenues of avenues open to critical security specialists in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds to other possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant pundistry to forward alternative views onto a broader stage. Nancy Fraser argues: “As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture …. As critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to” (Fraser 1989: 11). Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic Adorno, who argues: In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what lay at the root of the delusion. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such “unobtrusive yet insistent work” does not in itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes. The conceptual and the practical dangers of collapsing practice into theory must be guarded against. Rather, through their educational activities, proponent of critical security studies should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements. That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his account of New Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the country’s political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989: 108; see also COrtright 1993: 5-13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and strategy drew strength and succor from each other’s efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of the a “message in a bottle,” but in this case, contra Adorno’s expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be naïve to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing “professionalisation” of academic life (Said 1994: 49-62). Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability that they are extremely risk-averse. It pays – in all senses – to stick with the crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for “new targets for old weapons”). And, of course, the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking can connect with the practices of social movements and become a “force for the direction of action.” The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to challenge
Part 3 is the State of Exception
The state has been acting as the judge, jury, and DEFENDER in the case of police violations. Before cases even go to court, the case is dismissed on the premise of a lack of “poor intention” by the police officer. Intention cannot be the basis of judgment within the legal system. This is clear state abuse – intention cannot be determined by any actor except for each individual violator themselves AKA the police. The court determining intention of another actor leads to interpretations which benefit the police and manifest the state’s own interests.
These state interpretations that police are inherently innocent is a false truth – the idea becomes normalized into the ideas of society. Intention is not dichotomous – intention is complicated and vague and not an objective way to measure the rule of law.
Studebaker 12: Benjamin Studebaker writes in “Moral Absolutism: The Detriments of Deontology” on August 27th, 2012. Benjamin Studebaker is an American doing a PhD in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on economic inequality and democratic theory. AB
Deontological ethics result in black-white paradigms in which actions are either right or wrong in themselves because of the edicts of some book, organisation, leader, set of laws, and so on. They are comfortable and easy to believe in because they do not require critical thinking or scepticism. The consequences of these acts do not matter, mitigating circumstances do not matter, even the definition or meaning of what it is to do “good” does not matter, since that definition is received wisdom from the authority. No one does any thinking, one simply obeys. It is like a perpetual childhood, in which, whenever the child inquires as to why something must or must not be done, the answer is always “because I said so”. Millions of people all over the world freely submit themselves to deontological mindsets, they freely choose perpetual ethical childhood, because it is easy and it makes their lives simple. I believe these kinds of absolutist morals based on fixed rules create narrow-minded people, people who mindlessly carry on the traditional beliefs of parents, leaders, and other community authority figures without question, irrespective of changing circumstances, irrespective of whether or not said beliefs promote any “good” that they understand or agree with independently of the authority figure’s commands.  It is an ethical system for primitive, uneducated man, in need of outside moral guidance lest he become some kind of violent, marauding barbarian. It is not an ethical system for well-educated people in 21st century society, and it is certainly not an ethical system upon which our society should be structured.
AND, qualified immunity has no legal basis, which leads to inconsistent application of laws and furthers the dichotomy between qualified life and bare life – throw out your rule of law DA, the rule of law should be made a joke and played around with to expose the real processing of the government. QI is NOT constitutionally protected – courts made up rules to favor the extension of the state’s power – if the state makes up more laws after limiting QI, then it would be greater exposed for corruption.
Burney ‘16: Nathaniel Burney (Lawyer, former assistant to chief justice Warren Burger). “A Tiny Bit More on Qualified Immunity.” The Criminal Lawyer. 11 February 2016. http://burneylawfirm.com/blog/2016/02/11/a-tiny-bit-more-on-qualified-immunity/ Premier
The problem was, the Supreme Court made up Qualified Immunity out of whole cloth. They tried to find an existing legal principle to justify it, but when the law was enacted in 1871 there really wasn’t one. So they invented it. Instead of basing it on legal principles, they based it on “policy” principles, which translates to “what we think is best.” That’s a problem. When the Court replaces what the law is with what it thinks the law ought to do, things get really messy. Cases get decided based on the desired outcome, rather than on the application of a consistent and predictable legal standard. When you see confusing, inconsistent, or irreconcilable lines of cases, this is often the explanation. The rulings meander because they’re rudderless.
In fact, the rule of law is undermined by the existence of qualified immunity, not the latter. Qualified immunity encourages constitutional stagnation and serves as a veil to hide the processes of law —rights never become “clearly established.” Violations go unchecked and examination of the law never happens
Beerman ‘9: Jack Michael Beerman (Professor of Law and Harry Elwood Warren Scholar, Boston University School of Law). “Qualified Immunity And Constitutional Avoidance.” Boston University School of Law Working Paper No. 09-51 (December 2, 2009). http://www.bu.edu/law/workingpapers-archive/documents/beermannj120209.pdf Premier
Pearson is another entry in the Court’s struggle to resolve a serious problem created by the standard for determining whether qualified immunity protects an official from damages liability in a constitutional tort case. Under current law, the qualified immunity is overcome only if the defendant violated a clearly established constitutional right of which a reasonable official in the defendant’s position should have known. In some circumstances, repeated immunity findings can cause the law to stagnate. With regard to constitutional claims that are likely to be litigated only in the constitutional tort context, officials might repeatedly engage in the same conduct and successfully defend damages suits with qualified immunity, leaving the scope of constitutional rights undetermined. Some lower courts recognized this and decided to address the merits of the constitutional claims before determining whether any right violated was clearly established at the time of the violation.10 Not only did the Supreme Court come to approve of this practice, in Saucier it held that federal courts were required to reach the constitutional merits before deciding on immunity.
Thus, this lack of examination of the state and its judicial processes sanctions indiscriminate police violence – police are allowed to kill with impunity and this sets a dangerous precedent for police action. Accountability is apparently a thing of the past.
Carter ‘15: (Tom Carter, World Socialist Website) US Supreme Court expands immunity for killer cops, International Committee of the Fourth International International Committee of the Fourth International 11-12-2015 LADI
With the death toll from police brutality continuing to mount, the US Supreme Court on Monday issued a decision expanding the authoritarian doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which shields police officers from legal accountability. When a civil rights case is summarily dismissed by a judge on the grounds of “qualified immunity,” the case is legally terminated. It never goes to trial before a jury and is never decided on its constitutional merits. In March of 2010, Texas Department of Public Safety Trooper Chadrin Mullenix climbed onto an overpass with a rifle and, disobeying a direct order from his supervisor, fired six shots at a vehicle that the police were pursuing. Mullenix was not in any danger, and his supervisor had told him to wait until other officers tried to stop the car using spike strips. Four shots struck Israel Leija, Jr., killing him and causing the car, which was going 85 miles per hour, to crash. After the shooting, Mullenix boasted to his supervisor, “How’s that for proactive?” The Luna v. Mullenix case was filed by Leija’s family members, who claimed that Mullenix used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights. The district court that originally heard the case, together with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, denied immunity to Mullenix on the grounds that his conduct violated clearly established law. The Supreme Court intervened to uphold Mullenix’s entitlement to immunity—a decision that it will set a precedent for the summary dismissal of civil rights lawsuits against police brutality around the country. This is the Supreme Court’s response to the ongoing wave of police mayhem and murder. The message is clear: The killings will continue. Do not question the police. If you disobey the police, you forfeit your life. So far this year, more than 1,000 people have been killed by the police in America. Almost every day, there are new videos posted online showing police shootings, intrusions into homes and cars, asphyxiations, beatings and taserings. Last week, two police officers in Louisiana opened fire on Jeremy Mardis, a six-year-old autistic boy, and his father Chris Few. The boy’s father had his hands up during the shooting and is currently hospitalized with serious injuries. His son succumbed to the police bullets while still buckled into the front seat of the car. The Supreme Court’s decision reflects the fact that in the face of rising popular anger over police killings, the entire political apparatus—including all of the branches of government—is closing ranks behind the police. This includes the establishment media, which has largely remained silent about Monday’s pro-police Supreme Court decision. The police operate with almost total impunity, confident that no matter what they do, they will have the backing of the state. Two weeks ago, a South Carolina grand jury refused to return an indictment against the officer who was caught on video killing 19-year-old Zachary Hammond. This follows the exoneration of the police who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in New York City and Tamir Rice in Cleveland. The Obama administration’s position regarding the surge of police violence was most clearly and simply articulated by FBI director James Comey in a speech on October 23. “May God protect our cops,” Comey declared. He went on to accuse those who film the police of promoting violent crime. Meanwhile, in virtually every police brutality case that has come before the federal courts, the Obama administration has taken the side of the police. On Monday, the Supreme Court went out of its way to cite approvingly an amicus curiae (friend of court) brief filed by the National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO), which defended Mullenix. With this citation, notwithstanding its ostensible role as a neutral arbiter and guarantor of the Constitution, the Supreme Court sent a clear signal as to which side it is on. During the imposition of de facto martial law in Ferguson last year, NAPO issued statements vociferously defending Michael Brown’s killer, labeling demonstrators as “violent outsiders,” and denouncing “the violent idiots on the street chanting ‘time to kill a cop!’”
And this augments tension divide between minorities and police. Tension divide between police and minorities turns police legitimacy and deterrence arguments – police can’t do their job effectively if there is a constant dichotomous divide between qualified and bare life.
OJP ‘16: Office of Justice Programs (Agency of the Department of Justice). “Race, Trust and Police Legitimacy.” National Institute of Justice. 14 July 2016. http://www.nij.gov/topics/law-enforcement/legitimacy/pages/welcome.aspx Premier
Research consistently shows that minorities are more likely than whites to view law enforcement with suspicion and distrust. Minorities frequently report that the police disproportionately single them out because of their race or ethnicity. The public's perceptions about the lawfulness and legitimacy of law enforcement are an important criterion for judging policing in a democratic society. Lawfulness means that police comply with constitutional, statutory and professional norms. Legitimacy is linked to the public's belief about the police and its willingness to recognize police authority. Racial and ethnic minority perceptions that the police lack lawfulness and legitimacy, based largely on their interactions with the police, can lead to distrust of the police. Distrust of police has serious consequences. It undermines the legitimacy of law enforcement, and without legitimacy police lose their ability and authority to function effectively. Many law enforcement agencies have allowed researchers to study efforts to improve the lawfulness and legitimacy of their policing activities. They do so because they want to raise the level of trust and confidence of the people they serve while controlling crime effectively.

Tournament: Alta | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
First is the definition of limit
San Fellipo 92 defines…
(John, “OREGON'S TELEPHONE INFORMATION DELIVERY SERVICE LAW: A CONSUMER PROTECTION STEP TOO FAR” 28 Willamette L. Rev. 455 1991-1992, Hein Online)
131. The author understands "limit" as used in OR. ADMIN. R. 860-21-505(8) (1991) to mean cancel, as opposed to the word "curtail" used in section (7), meaning only a partial restriction.
Oxford Dictionary defines limit as…
http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/limit_2
To restrict the amount of something you can use.
Part 1 is Framing

We begin with a metaphor for the AC from the work of Franz Kafka in his story “Before the Law.” A man tries to gain access to the law, but a gatekeeper prevents him from doing so. The man spends everything he has, "no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.”” The man’s health only deteriorates as he ages. The gatekeeper recognizes the man’s approaching death and says, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”
As creator and gatekeeper of the law, the state-sovereign wants you to believe in the futility of action in the face of law. It sets a gatekeeper for every aspect of the law to protect sovereign interests and create a facade of its own legitimacy and the futility of any action but compliance. Overcoming ONE instance of the law’s all-powerfulness would be a symbolic destruction of the entire order, the series of gatekeepers, and disrupt this façade of all-powerfulness to provoke new knowledge – a harbinger of the divesting of the sovereign’s power to the people.
Modern politics and ethics are morally hopeless - the state currently acts as the ultimate sovereign – it decides where and when rights are applied.
Agamben ‘8: Giorgio Agamben writes in “Beyond Human Rights” in 2008. Giorgio Agamben (Italian: aˈɡambɛn; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, 4 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. http://jstor.reed.edu/stable/pdf/40644981.pdf; AB
The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. 3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.
This is the distinction between qualified life and bare life – bare life lacks the protection of rights, whereas qualified life has this protection of rights. This ability to arbitrarily apply rights is the manifestation of state abuse – Qualified life is the Trojan horse that allows the state to consolidate its bio-political control.
Downey ‘9: Anthony Downey writes in “Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Bare Life’ and the Politics of Aesthetics” on March 2009. Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 2, March, 2009, 109–125. Anthony Downey is director of the Master s Program in Contemporary Art at Sotheby s Institute of Art, London, and editor of Ibraaz, a research forum for visual culture in the Middle East and North Africa. http://www.anthonydowney.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2009-zones-of-indistinction.pdf; AB
Lives lived on the margins of social, political, cultural, economic and geographical borders are lives half lived. Denied access to legal, economic and political redress, these lives exist in a limbo-like state that is largely preoccupied with acquiring and sustaining the essentials of life. The refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the dispossessed – all have been excluded, to different degrees, from the fraternity of the social sphere, appeal to the safety net of the nation-state and recourse to international law. They have been outlawed, so to speak, placed beyond recourse to law and yet still in a precarious relationship to law itself. Although there is a significant degree of familiarity to be found in these sentiments, there is an increasingly notable move both in the political sciences and in cultural studies to view such subject positions not as the exception to modernity but its exemplification. Which brings us to a far more radical proposal: what if the fact of discrimination, in all its injustice and strategic forms of exclusion, is the point at which we find not so much an imperfect modern subject – a subject existing in a ‘sub-modern’ phase that has yet to realise its potential – as we do the exemplary modern subject? What if the refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the dispossessed are not only constitutive of modernity but its emblematic subjects? It is with such points in mind that Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has developed a theory of marginalisation that goes beyond the binary distinctions to be had in dichotomies such as inside/outside, centre/margins, inclusion/exclusion. In albeit abbreviated terms for now, Agamben is interested in lives lived on the margins of social, political, juridical and biological representation, not for their exceptional qualities but for their exemplary status: the manner in which they are both representative of modernity and an admonitory warning to the ontological basis of the modern political subject. Modernity’s exceptions, he argues, predicate its social structure and political reasoning. The exemplary figure of that exceptionalism in historical terms is bare life homo sacer, an obscure figure of Roman law who, although once a citizen, is reduced to ‘bare life’ by sovereign decree and deprived of basic rights such as representation before the law.1 Homo sacer, the sacred and therefore separate person man – he who is set apart from others by law – is, for Agamben, the increasingly nascent figure of our times; a time in which we are witnessing the effective re-emergence of sovereign forms of power and the concomitant production of ‘bare life’ as a constituent element in the democratic order. It is to Agamben’s credit that he does not propose a discrete topology of victimhood in his thesis; rather, he is suggesting that the discretionary ability of the sovereign state to bring the weight of its unmediated power to bear upon the body of its subjects is an inherent part of living in a democracy. In Agamben’s eyes, in fine, we are not only all potentially homo sacer (homines sacri) and the de facto bearers of ‘bare life’ but this exceptional figure augurs a ‘coming community’ that is based not on rights as such but the suspension of rights.
Qualified life opens space for a zone of indistinction, where people fall into the grey-zone of the invisible – legitimizes a state where all societal atrocities happen through the rhetoric of a state of exception.
Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
More than this inclusion by exclusion, sovereign power in the West is constituted by its ability to suspend itself in a state of exception, or ban: "The originary relation of law to life is not application but abandonment."15 The paradox of sovereignty is that the sovereign is at the same time inside and outside the sovereign order: the sovereign can suspend the law. What defines the rule of law is the state of exception when law is suspended. The very space in which juridical order can have validity is created and defined through the sovereign exception. However, the exception that defines the structure of sovereignty is more complex than the inclusion of what is outside by means of an interdiction.16 It is not just a question of creating a distinction between inside and outside: it is the tracing of a threshold between the two, a location where inside and outside enter into a zone of indistinction. It is this state of exception, or the zone of indistinction between inside and outside, that makes the modern juridical order of the West possible. The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provisional state of danger as a means of establishing the Nazi state it- self. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its boundaries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the normal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitutive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded exclusion from human law (killing him these people does not count as homicide) and he is excluded exclusion from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the exclusion of both the sacred and the profane.
The police is an extension of the state - the law is a complex interaction between all modes of the state to legitimize the privileged and the ongoing ignorance of systemic violence – the “police need to protect people” rhetoric legitimizes violence by instilling fear in people – the real protection starts with eliminating the hierarchies that favor the privileged and reduce all others to bare life.
Thatcher ‘16: Leslie Thatcher writes in “Henry Giroux on State Terrorism and the Ideological Weapons of Neoliberalism” on Sunday, 28 February 2016 00:00. University of Utah. News Director of KPCW 91.9 FM. This is her report of her interpretations and discussions with Henry Giroux, who is a prominent author on politics and discourse. http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/35007-henry-giroux-on-state-terrorism-and-the-ideological-weapons-of-neoliberalism; AB
Fear and violence serve as a mode of control in our schools, social services and, in a more obvious sense, in the through repressive state apparatuses such as the courts, police and politics itself. Violence becomes a kind of depoliticizing drug for the larger public - those who are the victims of a savage neoliberal economic order. And you have to remember: Addiction often takes place behind our backs. We often don't realize that it's happened. It often seems to operate seamlessly and powerfully through forms of affective and ideological management that mirror a cruel and normalized market-based society that divorces actions from social costs, elevates self-interests over social needs, sells off public goods, produces a massive and death-dealing machinery of social inequality and kills the imagination, if not the spirit itself, by erasing the conditions that promote dialogue and thoughtfulness. The "war on terrorism" has further undermined historical memory, erased traces of the welfare state and filled the present with a poisonous ideology of privatization, unchecked individualism and rampant consumerism. The elites are hooked on a poisonous lifestyle, economy and culture in which they're the high priests. Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein's claim, "We do God's work," is the best example. Many elites screw people over in the name of God, so ignorant are they about the carnage they produce. For them, market principles take on the form of a kind of religious fundamentalism and the neoliberal economy becomes their church and pulpit. A growing body of social science research suggests that among the ultra-rich, there are widespread signs of sociopathic traits - a lack of empathy, suffocating narcissism, an inclination to cheat, a willingness to disconnect actions from any sense of ethical consideration and a propensity to engage in lawlessness. We've returned to the ancient philosophy of fixed social hierarchies without the religion. We call it economic insight. We now live in a society produced, as Bill Black says, in the criminogenic elite institutions of higher education. Remember it was the elites reared at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and at other elite schools that brought us Vietnam, Iraq, state-sanctioned torture and a host of other warlike and violent policies.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best uses counter-narratives to demystify the power of the state hierarchies—it’s the hope that we have for meaningful change that spills over this debate round. The judge as a critical educator has an obligation to question state biopolitical power.
Gündoğdu ‘11: Ayten Gündoğdu writes in “Potentialities of human rights: Agamben and the narrative of fated necessity” on 19 July 2011.  Contemporary Political Theory February 2012, Volume 11, Issue 1, pp 2–22. http://link.springer.com/article/10.10572Fcpt.2010.45; AB
In his analysis of biopolitical sovereignty, Agamben provides us with what might be called a counternarrative of Western politics with the explicitly stated goal of ‘unveiling’ or ‘unmasking’ what has become mystified, hidden, secret or invisible, particularly with the prevalence of contractarian accounts of political power (1998, p. 8; 2005, p. 88). Agamben describes this critical task in terms of ‘disenchantment’, or the ‘patient work’ of unmasking the fiction or myth that covers up and sustains the violence of sovereignty (2005, p. 88). What underlies this urge to demystify and unveils is a particular understanding of myth as a deceptive narrative naturalizing and legitimizing violence in the name of the preservation of life. I use the term ‘counternarrative’ to call attention to what Agamben's account aims to do6: This is a critical analysis, as Agamben himself insists, that does not offer ‘historiographical theses or reconstructions’ but instead treats some historical phenomena as ‘paradigms’ so as to ‘make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context;’ to do this, it proceeds at ‘a historico-philosophical level’ (1998, p. 11; 2009, p. 9). In that sense, it is not an account that claims historical accuracy or factual verifiability. This is a crucial point that is sometimes overlooked by Agamben's critics who call into question his inaccurate treatment of historical phenomena such as the concentration camps.7 In addition, ‘counternarrative’ draws our attention to the inventive dimensions of Agamben's endeavor; as one of his critics aptly (though disapprovingly) puts it, ‘Agamben does not discover a concealed biopolitical paradigm stretching back to fourth-century Athens; rather he invents one’ (Finlayson, 2010, p. 116). The invention of a counternarrative of Western politics involves literary devices (e.g. hyperbole), which aim to provoke the readers and persuade them to abandon any politics centered on modern concepts such as sovereignty, rights and citizenship (LaCapra, 2007; cf. de la Durantaye, 2009). In analyzing Agamben's account as a ‘counternarrative’, I aim to attend to the goals that it sets for itself. It is these goals – particularly the goal of freeing human potentialities from myths that render the contingent necessary and mask other possibilities – that provide the starting point for my critical engagement with Agamben. Instead of resorting to an ‘outside’ – whether this be an alternative historical account or another theoretical tradition – I aim to read Agamben on his own terms, and suggest that as he tries to free human potentialities from contractarian myths, he might be entrapping them in another myth that ends up casting the contingent as necessary. Agamben's counternarrative of Western politics aims to uncover what has become hidden or invisible with ‘our modern habit of representing the political realm in terms of citizens’ rights, free will, and social contracts’ (1998, p. 106). Its main target is the contractarian accounts of sovereign power. As he identifies the production of bare life as the originary or foundational activity grounding sovereign power (1998, pp. 6, 83), he particularly aims to question the social contractarian ‘myth’ that covers up sovereign violence (1998, p. 109). After unveiling the foundational myths of Western politics, Agamben concludes that we cannot effectively respond to ‘the bloody mystification of a new planetary order’ if we let these myths continue to obstruct our political imagination (1998, p. 12). With his counternarrative presenting a catastrophic view of the historical present – a view that emphasizes how exception has become the rule, camp has become the paradigmatic structure organizing political space, and we have all virtually become homines sacri (1998, pp. 38, 176, 111) – Agamben aims to convince his readers of the need to think of a ‘nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life’ (2000, p. 112). This new politics requires the renunciation of concepts associated with sovereignty – for example, state, rights, citizenship. The contemporary predicament cannot be remedied by a return to conventional political categories and institutions, Agamben suggests, since these are deeply involved in the creation of this catastrophe in the first place. Almost anticipating his critics who would be puzzled by his renunciation of rights and rule of law at a time when the problem of legal dispossession increasingly threatens populations around the world, he explicitly states that the response to the current permanent state of exception cannot consist in confining it within constitutional boundaries and reaffirming the primacy of legal norms and rights (2005, p. 87).8 As legal norms and rights are ultimately grounded in the originary violence of separating a bare life, legal dispossession is already inscribed in them as an inescapable condition. Neither the liberal remedy of reasserting the rule of law, nor the Derridean strategy of ‘infinite negotiations’ with a law that is in force without any significance, are viable options (2005, p. 87; 1998, p. 54). Both are futile, if not lethally dangerous, endeavors.9 The only politically tenable option, Agamben contends, is to move out of sovereignty with ‘a complicated and patient strategy’ of getting the ‘door of the Law closed forever’ (1998, pp. 54, 55).
Any attempt to make political change requires an analysis of bare life – the state always has the power to declare a state of exception, which reinforces cyclical violence against those without qualified life.
Edkins 2k: Jenny Edkins writes in “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp” Jan – Mar. 2000, pp. 3-25, Sage Publications Inc. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, No. 1, Zones of Indistinction: Territories, Bodies, Politics. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644981; AB
At the threshold of the modern era, then, the realm of bare life begins to coincide with the political, and inclusion and exclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of indistinction. In these zones of indistinction, bare life, or homo sacer, becomes both the subject and the object of the political order: it is both the place for the organization of state power, in the forms of discipline and objectification described by Foucault, and the place for emancipation from it, through the birth of mod- ern democracy and the demand for human rights. This move of biological life to the center of the political scene in the West leads to a transformation of the political realm itself, one that effectively constitutes its depoliticization. That depoliticization takes place side by side with the politicization of bare life. Bare life is politicized and political life disappears. This irony is explained by the way the link forged in modernity between poli- tics and bare life, a link that underpins ideologies from the right and the left, has been ignored. As Agamben says, "if politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse, this is because poli- tics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity. . . . Only a reflection that . . . interrogates the link between bare life and politics . . . will be able to bring the political out of its con- cealment."20 Any attempt to rethink the political space of the West must begin with an awareness of the impossibility of the classical distinction between private life and political existence and exam- ine the zones of indistinction into which the oppositions that produced modern politics in the West - inside/outside, right/left, public/private - have dissolved. Agamben proposes that "it is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, these difficult zones of indistinction, that the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought."21 In the zone of indistinction, a claim to a po- litically qualified life can no longer be effective as such.
And biopolitical discourse come first.
Campbell and Sitze ‘15: Timothy Campbell is a Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University and together with Adam Sitze, a professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social thought at the Amherst College he recently edited a new collection of essays on the topic of biopolitics. Campbell translated Roberto Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minnesota, 2008) and Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford, 2009). He is the author of Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (Minnesota, 2006), winner of the Media Ecology Association’s 2007 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics and and Improper Life: Biopolitics and Technology from Heidegger to Agamben (Minnesota, 2011). He also edits the series “Commonalities" for Fordham University Press and is currently completing his study of cinema and biopower titled Grace Notes: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life. http://biononymous.me/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/full_interview.pdf; AB
What is biopolitics? Clearly, it's a moment, as Arendt, Agamben, and Esposito among others argue, when what the Ancient Greeks called bìos, or life, encounters the political, which is how they referred to life in the city or polis. This is important only because of the separation of life as bìos from life as life in the polis: bìos was domestic life, food, health, the household’s budget. In short, it is the moment when life encounters the political, which is what Arendt sketches so profoundly and at length in The Human Condition, portions of which we include in the reader. Let’s also remember that politikos did not include slaves nor women. I want to insist on the word encounter when describing the meeting of life and politics because encounter highlights a relation that isn’t — yet — a fusion. I continue to think it’s important to distinguish between life and politics; that finding an interval to hold open between them may provide us with an opportunity for thought that might otherwise go missing if we immediately assume we know the meaning of biopolitics or biopower. 

Part 2 is the Advocacy

I defend the pre-fiat discursive implementation of the United States limiting qualified immunity for police officers through abolition – impacts and solvency are derived from how qualified immunity interacts with the framing and how its limitation fulfills the nature of the advocacy. Discourse is a pre-requisite to policy-making; the extent of limitation is irrelevant, but I will default to abolition as per the definitions at the top of the AC.
Discourse comes first. Our responsibility is to offer analyses that expose harmful powers and expose them to light, this is a pre-req to fiating policy making – the 1AC is a crucial investigation of modern power structures.
Jones ‘99: Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, ‘99 (Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)
The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction that make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the “philosophy of praxis” to political practice, Gramsci claims: It the theory does not tend to leave the “simple” in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and “simple” it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332-333). According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative “intellectual-moral bloc” should take place under the auspices of the Communist Party – a body he described as the “modern prince.” Just as Niccolo Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign barbarians, and create a virtu-ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern price could lead the working class on its journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125-205). Gramsci’s relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of domination – for example, in the case of gender – to class relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict.1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the “infallible party” has obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the enemies of emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous. History furnishes examples of progressive developments that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside the bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the particularly intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered as “resources of hope” for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They illustrate that ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical interaction of ideas and material reality. One clear security-related example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s. At that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals (the “alternative defense” school) encouraged and drew strength from peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on short-term policy but on the dominant discourses of strategy and security, a far more important result in the long run. The synergy between critical security intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both working in tandem can be witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of common security. As Thomas Risse-Kappen points out, the term “common security” originated in the contribution of peace researchers to the German security debate of the 1970s (Risse-Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). Initially, mainstream defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However, notions of common security were taken up by a number of different intellectuals communities, including the liberal arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in the center-left political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet “institutchiks” – members of the influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau 1996: 52-54; Risse-Kappen 1994: 196-200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995). These communities were subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, “in response to social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD” (Risse-Kappen 1994: 207). Similar pressures even had an effect on the Reagan administration. As Risse-Kappen notes: When the Reagan administration brought hard-liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the “freeze campaign” that revived the arms control process together with pressure from the European allies. (Risse-Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90-110). Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least have a substantial impact on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected impact of alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union. Through various East-West links, which included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such attendant notions as “nonoffensive defense” (these links are detailed in Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin , and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse-Kappen 1994: 203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in East-West relations in order to facilitate much-needed domestic reforms (“the interaction of ideas and material reality”). But what is significant is that the Soviets’ commitment to common security led to significant changes in force sizes and postures. These in turn aided in the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the territory of the former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As concepts such as common security, and collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223-260), are adopted by governments and military services, they inevitably become somewhat debased. The hope is that enough of the residual meaning can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the adoption of the concept of common security by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently) critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonsrates in relation to NATO expansion). The example of common security is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and play a role – a significant one at that – in making the world a better and safer place. Second, it points to potential future addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical security studies in particular. Third, it also underlines the role of ideas in the evolution in society. CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND THE THEORY-PRACTICE NEXUS Although most proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical intellectuals “are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless” (Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies, this means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making suffering humanity rather than raison d’etat the prism through which problems are viewed. Here the project stands full-square within the critical theory tradition. If “all theory is for someone and for some purpose,” then critical security studies is for “the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless,” and its purpose is their emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a fundamental reconceptualization of security with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But the question remains at the conceptual level of how these alternative types of theorizing – even if they are self-consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures – can become “a force for the direction of action.” Again, Gramsci’s work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramsci’s terminology, “historic blocs” (Gramsci 1971: 323-377). Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s view of power as a centaur, ahlf man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway through civil society and takes on the status of common sense; it becomes subconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions that were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marx’s well-worn phrase, “All that is solid melts into the air.” Gramsci’s intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a “war of position” (Gramsci 1971: 229-239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies, any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by helping to undermine the “natural,” “commonsense,” internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs created. I contend that Gramsci’s strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. THE TASKS OF CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES If the project of critical security studies is conceived in terms of war of position, then the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse. This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the prevailing security regimes, that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes. When this is attempted in the security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals, traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order. This challenge entails teasing out the often subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist façade. In this sense, proponents of critical security studies approximate to Foucault’s notion of “specific intellectuals” who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980: 132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of “speaking truth to power” (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod lines of speaking “truth against the world.” Of course, traditional strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that “strategists must be prepared to ‘speak truth to power’” (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that, whereas the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their power, the latter aim at a thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, critical theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that “the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth” (cited in Jameson 1990: 66). The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116-121). Thus, by criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously playing apart in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc and contributing to the development of a counterhegemonic position. There are a number of avenues of avenues open to critical security specialists in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds to other possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant pundistry to forward alternative views onto a broader stage. Nancy Fraser argues: “As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture …. As critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to” (Fraser 1989: 11). Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic Adorno, who argues: In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what lay at the root of the delusion. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such “unobtrusive yet insistent work” does not in itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes. The conceptual and the practical dangers of collapsing practice into theory must be guarded against. Rather, through their educational activities, proponent of critical security studies should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements. That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his account of New Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the country’s political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989: 108; see also COrtright 1993: 5-13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and strategy drew strength and succor from each other’s efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of the a “message in a bottle,” but in this case, contra Adorno’s expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be naïve to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing “professionalisation” of academic life (Said 1994: 49-62). Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability that they are extremely risk-averse. It pays – in all senses – to stick with the crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for “new targets for old weapons”). And, of course, the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking can connect with the practices of social movements and become a “force for the direction of action.” The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to challenge
Instead of eliminating the law, you should adopt a politics of playing with the law — switch it from a sacred entity to a childish toy — we control the internal link to every epistemology in resisting sovereign violence.
Mills ‘8: Catherine Mills writes in “Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridicial Justice.” South Atlantic Quarterly 107:1, Winter 2008 DOI 10.1215/00382876-2007-053 © 2007 Duke University Press. Pg 23 – 24 need college person’s credentials for pdf; AB
To return to my starting point, more can now be said of the idea of playing with law as if it were a disused object, that is, a toy. It is now possible to better appreciate the perceived revolutionary potential of play and of the toy. As we have seen, the toy brings to light the “temporality of history in its pure differential and qualitative value.” That is, in making present “human temporality in itself, the pure differential margin between the ‘once’ and the ‘no longer’” (IH, 72), the toy permits a release from continuous and linear time and the realization of and return to history, understood as the true homeland of humanity (IH, 104–5). In relation to law, we can now say that as a disused object the law has lost its use value in the realm of the politicoeconomic and has instead been relegated to the profane use that can be made of it by children. The characterization of its being in force without significance appears to locate the law within the diachronic element of the “‘once’ . . . ‘no longer,’” rather than within the synchrony of miniaturization. This is significant because it highlights the ritualistic dimension of law, which compensates for the disjuncture of past and present, Agamben argues, by reabsorbing diachrony into synchrony. Play, however, transforms synchrony into diachrony by breaking the tie between past and present. This production of a differential margin in the dialectic of rite and play is the condition of history; it is that which allows for the now. As a toy and only as a toy, as an object of play, the rite of law contributes to the revelation of the essential historicity of the human. The ritualistic dimension of law is important for another reason as well. Agamben insists on the impossibility of the elimination of either diachronic or synchronic signification: in all games and rites, the one remains a stumbling block for the other, thereby preventing the attainment of a pure state of diachrony or synchrony. Thus, he writes, “at the end of the game,” the toy—the privileged signifier of absolute diachrony—“turns around into its opposite and is presented as the synchronic residue that the game can no longer eliminate” (IH, 79). This implies that playing with law does not mean eliminating the law, for there is actually a sense in which the law is rescued from its own obsolescence in play. Rather than being maintained solely in a state of decay characterized by the simple lack of practicoeconomic value as law, it is given a new use. But this does not take the form of a resacralization of the law and restoration of transcendental meaning or force. Instead, the new use of law takes the form of its deactivation or deposition. Before saying more of this, it is worth cautioning against the phrase “at the end of the game” used above, for in what sense would the game in which humanity plays with law have an end? To construe the game of playing with law as having an end would in fact push Agamben’s conception of the messianic toward an identification with the eschatological, a conflation that he explicitly resists in The Time That Remains.16 Thus, within his own characterization, it would be more accurate to insist on the endlessness of play. As with the activity of study with which it is intimately related in the paragraph in question, play is interminable; it has no end beyond pleasure. As Agamben writes in Idea of Prose, “Not only can study have no rightful end, it does not even desire one.”17
And we solve negative kritiks, we view the law as more than just ends — it is part of an unraveling of the functioning of normative legality to develop a new vocabulary and mode of thought in addressing sovereign abuse – not a resacralization or canonical use of the law.
Agamben ‘5: Giorgio Agamben writes in “State of Exception” – A translation by Kevin Attell. Giorgio Agamben is professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona. He is the author of ten previous books, including the prequel to this one, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, published in English by Stanford University Press. Kevin Attell is a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department at the University of California, Davis. He is the translator of Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal. https://books.google.com/books?id=9slkvuV3VS4Candprintsec=frontcover#v=onepageandq=in20the20kafkaandf=false; AB
The stakes in the debate between Benjamin and Schmitt on the state of exception can now be defined more clearly. The dispute takes place in a zone of anomie that, on the one hand, must be maintained in relation to the law at all costs and, on the other, must be just as implacably released and freed from this relation. That is to say, at issue in the anomic zone is the relation between violence and law – in the last analysis, the status of violence as a cipher for human action. While Schmitt attempts every time to reinscribe violence within a juridical context, Benjamin responds to this gesture by seeking every time to assure it – as pure violence – and existence outside of the law. For reasons that we must try to clarify, this struggle for anomie seems to be as decisive for Western politics as the gigantomachia peri tes ousias, the “battle of giants concerning being,” that defines Western metaphysics. Here, pure violence as the extreme political object, as the “thing” of politics, is the counterpart to pure being, to pure existence as the ultimate metaphysical stakes; the strategy of the exception, which Benjamin seeks to answer with his reading of the “new attorney.” Obviously, it is not a question here of a transitional phase that never achieves its end, nor a process of infinite deconstruction that, in maintaining the law in a spectral life, can no longer get to the bottom of it. The decisive point here is that the law – no longer practiced but studied – is not justice, but only the gate that leads to it. What opens a passage toward justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivity inoperosita – that is, another use of the law. This precisely what the force-of-law (which keeps the law working in opera beyond its formal suspension seeks to prevent. Kafka’s characters – and this is why they interest us – have to do with this spectral figure of the law in the state of exception; they seek, each one following his or her own strategy, to “study” and deactivate it, to “play” with it. One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at the justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical (Benjamin 1992, 41).

Part 3 is the State of Exception

The state has been acting as the judge, jury, and DEFENDER in the case of police violations. Before cases even go to court, the case is dismissed on the premise of a lack of “poor intention” by the police officer. This is clear state abuse – intention cannot be determined by any actor except for each individual violator themselves AKA the police. The court determining intention of another actor leads to interpretations which benefit the police and manifest the state’s own interests.
These state interpretations that police are inherently innocent is a false truth – the idea that police are ontologically innocent becomes normalized into the ideas of society, which reinforces the qualified/bare life dichotomy.
Intention is not dichotomous or definitive – it is complicated and vague and not an objective way to evaluate actions.
Studebaker 12: Benjamin Studebaker writes in “Moral Absolutism: The Detriments of Deontology” on August 27th, 2012. Benjamin Studebaker is an American doing a PhD in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on economic inequality and democratic theory. AB
Deontological ethics result in black-white paradigms in which actions are either right or wrong in themselves because of the edicts of some book, organisation, leader, set of laws, and so on. They are comfortable and easy to believe in because they do not require critical thinking or scepticism. The consequences of these acts do not matter, mitigating circumstances do not matter, even the definition or meaning of what it is to do “good” does not matter, since that definition is received wisdom from the authority. No one does any thinking, one simply obeys. It is like a perpetual childhood, in which, whenever the child inquires as to why something must or must not be done, the answer is always “because I said so”. Millions of people all over the world freely submit themselves to deontological mindsets, they freely choose perpetual ethical childhood, because it is easy and it makes their lives simple. I believe these kinds of absolutist morals based on fixed rules create narrow-minded people, people who mindlessly carry on the traditional beliefs of parents, leaders, and other community authority figures without question, irrespective of changing circumstances, irrespective of whether or not said beliefs promote any “good” that they understand or agree with independently of the authority figure’s commands.  It is an ethical system for primitive, uneducated man, in need of outside moral guidance lest he become some kind of violent, marauding barbarian. It is not an ethical system for well-educated people in 21st century society, and it is certainly not an ethical system upon which our society should be structured.
AND, qualified immunity has no legal basis which proves state abuse and its role in creating the dichotomy between qualified and bare life – the rule of law should be toyed with to expose the real processing of the government.
QI is NOT constitutionally protected – The Supreme Court made it up. If the state makes up more laws after limiting QI, then it would be greater exposed for corruption.
Burney ‘16: Nathaniel Burney (Lawyer, former assistant to chief justice Warren Burger). “A Tiny Bit More on Qualified Immunity.” The Criminal Lawyer. 11 February 2016. http://burneylawfirm.com/blog/2016/02/11/a-tiny-bit-more-on-qualified-immunity/ Premier
The problem was, the Supreme Court made up Qualified Immunity out of whole cloth. They tried to find an existing legal principle to justify it, but when the law was enacted in 1871 there really wasn’t one. So they invented it. Instead of basing it on legal principles, they based it on “policy” principles, which translates to “what we think is best.” That’s a problem. When the Court replaces what the law is with what it thinks the law ought to do, things get really messy. Cases get decided based on the desired outcome, rather than on the application of a consistent and predictable legal standard. When you see confusing, inconsistent, or irreconcilable lines of cases, this is often the explanation. The rulings meander because they’re rudderless.
In fact, qualified immunity serves as a veil to conceal the process of law through constitutional stagnation and arbitrary state jurisdiction becomes the law. Violations go unchecked and examination of the law never happens.
Beerman ‘9: Jack Michael Beerman (Professor of Law and Harry Elwood Warren Scholar, Boston University School of Law). “Qualified Immunity And Constitutional Avoidance.” Boston University School of Law Working Paper No. 09-51 (December 2, 2009). http://www.bu.edu/law/workingpapers-archive/documents/beermannj120209.pdf Premier
Pearson is another entry in the Court’s struggle to resolve a serious problem created by the standard for determining whether qualified immunity protects an official from damages liability in a constitutional tort case. Under current law, the qualified immunity is overcome only if the defendant violated a clearly established constitutional right of which a reasonable official in the defendant’s position should have known. In some circumstances, repeated immunity findings can cause the law to stagnate. With regard to constitutional claims that are likely to be litigated only in the constitutional tort context, officials might repeatedly engage in the same conduct and successfully defend damages suits with qualified immunity, leaving the scope of constitutional rights undetermined. Some lower courts recognized this and decided to address the merits of the constitutional claims before determining whether any right violated was clearly established at the time of the violation.10 Not only did the Supreme Court come to approve of this practice, in Saucier it held that federal courts were required to reach the constitutional merits before deciding on immunity.
Thus, this lack of examination of the state and its judicial processes sanctions indiscriminate police violence – the state reinforces itself as the sovereign and demands unconditional subject obedience.
Carter ‘15: Tom Carter writes in “US Supreme Court expands immunity for killer cops” on 12 November 2015. http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/11/12/pers-n12.html; AB
With the death toll from police brutality continuing to mount, the US Supreme Court on Monday issued a decision expanding the authoritarian doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which shields police officers from legal accountability. When a civil rights case is summarily dismissed by a judge on the grounds of “qualified immunity,” the case is legally terminated. It never goes to trial before a jury and is never decided on its constitutional merits. In March of 2010, Texas Department of Public Safety Trooper Chadrin Mullenix climbed onto an overpass with a rifle and, disobeying a direct order from his supervisor, fired six shots at a vehicle that the police were pursuing. Mullenix was not in any danger, and his supervisor had told him to wait until other officers tried to stop the car using spike strips. Four shots struck Israel Leija, Jr., killing him and causing the car, which was going 85 miles per hour, to crash. After the shooting, Mullenix boasted to his supervisor, “How’s that for proactive?” The Luna v. Mullenix case was filed by Leija’s family members, who claimed that Mullenix used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights. The district court that originally heard the case, together with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, denied immunity to Mullenix on the grounds that his conduct violated clearly established law. The Supreme Court intervened to uphold Mullenix’s entitlement to immunity—a decision that it will set a precedent for the summary dismissal of civil rights lawsuits against police brutality around the country. This is the Supreme Court’s response to the ongoing wave of police mayhem and murder. The message is clear: The killings will continue. Do not question the police. If you disobey the police, you forfeit your life. So far this year, more than 1,000 people have been killed by the police in America. Almost every day, there are new videos posted online showing police shootings, intrusions into homes and cars, asphyxiations, beatings and taserings. Last week, two police officers in Louisiana opened fire on Jeremy Mardis, a six-year-old autistic boy, and his father Chris Few. The boy’s father had his hands up during the shooting and is currently hospitalized with serious injuries. His son succumbed to the police bullets while still buckled into the front seat of the car. The Supreme Court’s decision reflects the fact that in the face of rising popular anger over police killings, the entire political apparatus—including all of the branches of government—is closing ranks behind the police. This includes the establishment media, which has largely remained silent about Monday’s pro-police Supreme Court decision. The police operate with almost total impunity, confident that no matter what they do, they will have the backing of the state. Two weeks ago, a South Carolina grand jury refused to return an indictment against the officer who was caught on video killing 19-year-old Zachary Hammond. This follows the exoneration of the police who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in New York City and Tamir Rice in Cleveland. The Obama administration’s position regarding the surge of police violence was most clearly and simply articulated by FBI director James Comey in a speech on October 23. “May God protect our cops,” Comey declared. He went on to accuse those who film the police of promoting violent crime. Meanwhile, in virtually every police brutality case that has come before the federal courts, the Obama administration has taken the side of the police. On Monday, the Supreme Court went out of its way to cite approvingly an amicus curiae (friend of court) brief filed by the National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO), which defended Mullenix. With this citation, notwithstanding its ostensible role as a neutral arbiter and guarantor of the Constitution, the Supreme Court sent a clear signal as to which side it is on.
Underview
Re-orienting our discourse around the law is not only necessary but often marginalized in policy debates. Fiated policy framing is an acceptance of the current ontological state and a tactic of marginalization.
Gunder ‘9: senior planning lecturer at the Aukland University Michael. “Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning”. Pg. 11-12. AB
The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies of desired success, such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their desired enjoyment (cobblestones, chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum, this defines what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other, remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they are one and the same) is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as technical, rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "˜dominant stakeholders` can ensure the impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many whilst, of course, achieving their stakeholders’ specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469). The current post-democratic` milieu facilitates the above through avoidance of critical policy debate challenging favored orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of policy deficiencies, or alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while token institutions of liberal democracy’ are retained conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59). Consequently, the safe names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used or their work drawn upon by different stakeholders, while more critical voices are silenced by their inability to shape policy debates’ (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic development or spatial planning policy analyst thus continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying only the orthodox "successful” or "best practice” economic development or spatial planning responses. This further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo while providing "˜a cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer" isolating the political held from any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for public policy’ (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to generate similar policy responses for every competing local area or city-region, largely resulting in a zero-sum game (Blair and Kumar 1997).

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
I affirm the resolution. Resolved: The United States Federal Government ought to limit qualified immunity for police officers. Some evidence is bracketed for gender and clarity.
I adhere to the legal definition of qualified immunity, or “government employees’ immunity from trial, as long as a) the official did not break a Constitutional right or federal statute that was clearly established at the time of violation, and b) the officer could not have reasonably believed their conduct to be lawful under that right or statute.
I define “limit” as “to restrict or confine, as to area, extent, time, etc.”  To clarify: I do not defend the complete abolishment of qualified immunity, but rather, restricting it to the extent that it no longer impedes justice.
Dictionary, F. (2016). Retrieved from Free Dictionary Website : thefreedictionary.com
Framework
Part I is framework.
‘Ought’ implies obligation, so I value morality.
"Ought." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 16 Dec. 2014. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ought. “used to express obligation”

Part I is framework.

‘Ought’ implies obligation, so I value morality.
"Ought." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 16 Dec. 2014. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ought. “used to express obligation”
First — the mere concept of agency demands we assign importance to the idea of moral accountability. Barrett 04:
Will Barrett, “Responsibility, Accountability and Corporate Activity,” Online Opinion: Australia’s E-journal of Social and Political Debate, August 25, 2004, http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=2480#.
Moral responsibility assumes a capacity for making rational decisions, which in turn justifies holding moral agents accountable for their actions. Morality gives reasons for action, and moral agents must in principle be capable of choosing to act morally, and of acting on the basis of a moral reason. People who lack a capacity for rational decision-making cannot be held morally responsible for their actions. In case this requirement strikes you as too stringent, ask yourself why adults are held responsible for the welfare (and sometimes the actions) of children. Adults have moral responsibility for children because children lack a developed capacity for rational decision-making, and adults, other things being equal, are taken to have such a capacity.
Given that moral agency entails responsibility, in that autonomous rational agents are in principle capable of responding to moral reasons, accountability is a necessary feature of morality. Moral agents have negative responsibilities at least, and can be held to account for violating these. A thicker sense of accountability derives from the roles we occupy. Responsibilities attach to roles, for example professional responsibilities, and roles sometimes are defined in terms of responsibilities. I can be held to account for my fulfilment of my role-given responsibilities.

The value of autonomy is inextricably linked to the principle of accountability. We cannot have one without valuing the other. Bivins 06:
Bivins, Thomas. "Responsibility and Accountability, Chapter 2." Ethics in Public Relations: Responsible Advocacy, SAGE Books, 2006, sk.sagepub.com/books/ethics-in-public-relations.

There are several ways to look at autonomy as it relates to responsibility and accountability. Philosopher and ethicist Mitchell Haney suggests that the moral community is composed of two kinds of actors: responsible actors and accountable actors. Responsibility is viewed within this model as having a higher level of autonomy by nature in that it implies the actor is able to “self-oversee, self-regulate, and self-motivate responsive adjustments to maintain adherence with appropriate moral standards of action.”6
“Responsible actors need not depend on external or mediated motivational pressure for responsive adjustment. They are expected to be motivated to correct harms and reduce future risk of harms without external or mediated pressure to do so.”7
Under this formulation, the actor (moral agent) has the capacity to impose moral law on herself, thus achieving a level of “moral autonomy” we would hope to associate normally with professional status. This somewhat Kantian model supposes that we understand ourselves as free, reasoning individuals—invoking a mandate of both self-respect and respect for others (but not control by others).
Furthermore, promoting accountability is the most important concern for ethical conduct.  5 warrants:
1) Innateness — to the concept of justice is that we hold people and agents accountable for their actions — if we assume the obligation to a justice system at all we accept the importance of accountability and punishment;
2)  Definitional — Oxford defines “accountable” as “required to explain actions or decisions to someone”; key to the notion of morality is the idea that we demand explanation and thorough thinking;
3) Reasoning — accountability rejects of arbitrary defense, meaning it rests of the very principle of justification — and regardless of what my opponent’s framework it is, it relies on justification, which means it values the principle of accountability;
4) Fairness — accountability defends against unfair treatment because its very principle is to only assign blame and punishment to those who deserve it;
5) Functionality — we can’t operate a moral framework which evaluates individual actions without assigning some importance to the participation of the individual, meaning that any framework we choose in this round will value accountability.  
Offense
Part II is the plan.
Plantext: the United States Federal Government will eliminate the “clearly established” qualifier of the Qualified Immunity doctrine, pertaining to whether the right was “reasonably established” at the time of violation. I am willing to clarify any part of the plan in cross-x.

Contention 1 is officer accountability.
 a) In the status quo, qualified immunity functions alleviates officers of punishment for their crimes, discouraging a sense of responsibility for rights protections. Chemerinksy 14:
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, “How the Supreme Court Protects Bad Cops,” New York Times, 26 August 2014.

The court has also weakened accountability by ruling that a local government can be held liable only if it is proved that the city’s or county’s own policy violated the Constitution. In almost every other area of law, an employer can be held liable if its employees, in the scope of their duties, injure others, even negligently. This encourages employers to control the conduct of their employees and ensures that those injured will be compensated. A 2011 case, Connick v. Thompson, illustrates how difficult the Supreme Court has made it to prove municipal liability. John Thompson was convicted of an armed robbery and a murder and spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row, because of prosecutorial misconduct. Two days before Mr. Thompson’s trial began in New Orleans, the assistant district attorney received the crime lab’s report, which stated that the perpetrator of the armed robbery had a blood type that did not match Mr. Thompson’s. The defense was not told this crucial information.

The Supreme Court has used this doctrine in recent years to deny damages to an eighth-grade girl who was strip-searched by school officials on suspicion that she had prescription-strength ibuprofen. It has also used it to deny damages to a man who, under a material-witness warrant, was held in a maximum-security prison for 16 days and on supervised release for 14 months, even though the government had no intention of using him as a material witness or even probable cause to arrest him. In each instance, the court stressed that the government officer could not be held liable, even though the Constitution had clearly been violated. Taken together, these rulings have a powerful effect. They mean that the officer who shot Michael Brown and the City of Ferguson will most likely never be held accountable in court. How many more deaths and how many more riots will it take before the Supreme Court changes course?

b) A restriction on qualified immunity would hold more officers accountable for their wrongs. Stephan 2k16:
Lindsey De Stefan. “‘No Man Is Above the Law and No Man Is Below It:’ How Qualified Immunity Reform Could Create Accountability and Curb Widespread Police Misconduct.” The article claims it’s from 2017 but let’s just go 2016 to be safe. Seton Hall University. http://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1861andcontext=student_scholarship.
Altering the qualified immunity doctrine is an excellent way to begin the path to restoring trust by establishing a much-needed sense of accountability. Civil remedies are a good jumping off point because, as repeated failures to indict officers—even in the face of video footage—have demonstrated, accountability via the criminal law is a far-off possibility, if it is possible at all. Prosecutors are generally disinclined to bring charges against law enforcement officers, 140 and grand juries are equally as hesitant to indict them.141 Independent investigations, as suggested by the Task Force, are an excellent idea, but establishing a feasible system nationwide would take time. On the other hand, Supreme Court amendment of the stringent immunity afforded to police officers could take effect relatively quickly. Of course, this is easier said than done. The Court has increasingly enlarged the immunity afforded to police officers in its recent decisions, and any 180-degree turnaround would likely require a change in Court composition. But the current Court can nevertheless begin to firm up qualified immunity doctrine by simply providing more guidance and clarification, thereby enhancing accountability and reaffirming trust between law enforcement and their respective communities. The concept of a clearly established right is, in many ways, a problem that requires solving. A substantial number of cases are disposed of on the premise that a right was not “clearly established”—yet lower courts have struggled for years with what those words actually mean. Arguably, then, at least some officers are escaping liability simply because of the Court’s repeated failures to establish consistency in its qualified immunity jurisprudence. But if the Court used qualified immunity opinions to demonstrate what qualifies as a clearly established right by meticulously outlining its reasoning in answering whether a set of facts implicates such a right, the Court could alleviate some confusion. In other words, rather than taking cases simply to overturn the lower courts’ denial of immunity, it could take cases to affirm those denials or, alternatively, to reverse lower courts’ grant of immunity. By so doing, the Court can give examples of what constitutes a right that is “sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that what he is doing violates that right,”142 and can give lower courts somewhat of a guide to follow. By elucidating the contours of the clearly established right, the Court would alleviate some of the confusion of lower courts and ensure that they are in fact applying that part of the test properly. Proper application of this prong directly promotes accountability, as the public can rest assured that, at least in that regard, cases are not being disposed of based merely on perplexity and uncertainty. Moreover, increased confidence about the clearly established prong could foster a willingness to take on the second part of the test and, in so doing, advance the development of constitutional law and clarify further constitutional rights. The Court could also accept that its attempts at a general standard for all classes of officials that are not otherwise entitled to absolute immunity has been problematic and hugely unsuccessful. Though the Court apparently fears “complicating” qualified immunity, the doctrine is quite complicated as is, and adopting more particularized classes of officials with different standards of immunity would not only assist lower courts in properly analyzing immunity, but would promote justice in constitutional tort litigation. For example, the Court could classify officials based on the approximate number of people with whom they come in contact, so to speak, and that might therefore bring civil suits against them. A governor, for example, could theoretically face a lawsuit from any resident of the state, and would thus be afforded more stringent protection—much like the standard afforded to all officials now. But law enforcement officers, who come in contact with only the residents of one town, city, or perhaps county, risk possible suits from a much smaller pool of people. The threat of litigation would therefore be much less crippling on governmental function, and immunity protection need not be so rigorous. In the case of allegations of Fourth Amendment violations, in light of the already-existing reasonableness standard, immunity may be inappropriate altogether. In addition, the Court could do its proverbial homework and take notice of the widespread indemnification of officers that often results in a complete absence of financial or employment related consequences for law enforcement. If the Court stopped relying on its own intuition, and instead came to grip with the facts, it would likely realize that it has been overzealous in protecting low-level officers, and be inclined to alter course somewhat. By beginning to mend the qualified immunity doctrine in these ways, the Court will allow more civil suits for the vindication of constitutional rights to succeed. This will help to reduce the public mentality—strengthened by recent events—that cops get away with everything, in every regard. Civil suits avoid subjecting law enforcement to any criminal liability that, because of recent events, many laypersons believe is warranted. While this may be true in select circumstances, reality demonstrates that criminal charges are highly unlikely to stick against a police officer. But allowing more civil suits to go forward will serve as an important reminder to both civilians and law enforcement that the police are not above the law, and that they are held accountable for their wrongdoings. In turn, this accountability will begin to heal the relationship between law enforcement and communities by serving as the first step on what will surely be a long path to rebuilding the trust that is so crucial. By adopting different immunity standards for high-level and low-level officials, clarifying the vagueness surrounding the definition of a “clearly established” right, and acknowledging the real-world effects of indemnification, the Court can begin to repair some of the substantial flaws in its qualified immunity jurisprudence. As it does, it will permit more constitutional tort suits to succeed, thereby fostering law enforcement accountability. Because criminal liability is nearly impossible as a practical matter, and because strategies like improving police training and recruiting tactics will likely take years to effectively implement, civil suits are the (relatively) fastest way to demonstrate to the country that our officers are our guardians and that they are accountable to us. It is thus the most immediate way to rebuild trust and begin healing the citizenpolice relationship.

Contention 2
Contention 2 is courts’ accountability.
a) The first function of the courts in a Constitutional suit is to determine a Constitutional right — the question of immunity should come second to the question of justice. This is an obligation derived from the authority of the courts granted by the people. The Supreme Court, 2016:
The Supreme Court. "The Court and Constitutional Interpretation." The Supreme Court of the United States, 22 Oct. 2016, www.supremecourt.gov/about/constitutional.aspx.

The complex role of the Supreme Court in this system derives from its authority to invalidate legislation or executive actions which, in the Court's considered judgment, conflict with the Constitution. This power of "judicial review" has given the Court a crucial responsibility in assuring individual rights, as well as in maintaining a "living Constitution" whose broad provisions are continually applied to complicated new situations.
While the function of judicial review is not explicitly provided in the Constitution, it had been anticipated before the adoption of that document. Prior to 1789, state courts had already overturned legislative acts which conflicted with state constitutions. Moreover, many of the Founding Fathers expected the Supreme Court to assume this role in regard to the Constitution; Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, for example, had underlined the importance of judicial review in the Federalist Papers, which urged adoption of the Constitution.
Hamilton had written that through the practice of judicial review the Court ensured that the will of the whole people, as expressed in their Constitution, would be supreme over the will of a legislature, whose statutes might express only the temporary will of part of the people. And Madison had written that constitutional interpretation must be left to the reasoned judgment of independent judges, rather than to the tumult and conflict of the political process. If every constitutional question were to be decided by public political bargaining, Madison argued, the Constitution would be reduced to a battleground of competing factions, political passion and partisan spirit.
Despite this background the Court's power of judicial review was not confirmed until 1803, when it was invoked by Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison. In this decision, the Chief Justice asserted that the Supreme Court's responsibility to overturn unconstitutional legislation was a necessary consequence of its sworn duty to uphold the Constitution. That oath could not be fulfilled any other way. "It is emphatically the province of the judicial department to say what the law is," he declared.
In retrospect, it is evident that constitutional interpretation and application were made necessary by the very nature of the Constitution. The Founding Fathers had wisely worded that document in rather general terms leaving it open to future elaboration to meet changing conditions. As Chief Justice Marshall noted in McCulloch v. Maryland, a constitution that attempted to detail every aspect of its own application "would partake of the prolixity of a legal code, and could scarcely be embraced by the human mind. . . . Its nature, therefore, requires that only its great outlines should be marked, its important objects designated, and the minor ingredients which compose those objects be deduced from the nature of the objects themselves."
b) In the status quo, courts consider police immunity first, and Constitutional rights second. It perverts the rightful order of courts’ duties. Chen 15:
Alan K. Chen, professor of law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, “Qualified Immunity Limiting Access to Justice and Impeding Development of the Law,” Human Rights Magazine Vol. 41, 2015.

Critics of qualified immunity point out that the breadth of the doctrine’s protection means that people like Savana Redding whose rights have been violated will go without compensation. Contrary to Marbury’s admonition, their rights can be violated, but they will receive no remedy. But there are broader social costs associated with qualified immunity as well. Because of the way the doctrine is structured, courts can decide an official is entitled to qualified immunity by concluding that they  he or she have not violated a “clearly established” right without ever answering the question of whether their  his or her conduct did, in fact, violated the Constitution. This means that courts can dismiss constitutional rights claims without precisely clarifying the scope of the law. Constitutional doctrine, like the common law, evolves and is refined through series of court decisions. But qualified immunity interferes with this law-pronouncing function of the federal courts and reduces the amount of guidance about the meaning of the Constitution for both government officials and the public at large. John C. Jeffries Jr., The Right-Remedy Gap in Constitutional Law, 109 Yale L.J. 87, 99–100 (1999).

To hold officers accountable for their actions and demand equal justice in cases of law enforcement, we ought to focus on the question of whether the right is legitimate — it is the only definite way to end the courts’ leniency.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
I affirm and value morality due to word ‘ought’ in the resolution which implies obligation. 

The standard is minimizing structural oppression defined as promoting the material conditions necessary for inclusion. Prefer this standard for 3 reasons: 

1. omitted
   2. omitted
   3. omitted
   The aff methodology for confronting structural violation is reforming the prison industrial complex. This allows for inclusion. Loyd 2k11:
   Faculty Fellow in the Humanities @ Syracuse University Dr. Jenna M. Loyd, (PhD in Geography from UC Berkeley. Has held postdoctoral positions with the Island Detention project in the Department of Geography @ Syracuse University, the Center for Place, Culture and Politics @ CUNY Graduate Center, and in the Humanities Center @ Syracuse University) “American Exceptionalism, Abolition and the Possibilities for Nonkilling Futures,” Nonkilling Geography, Edited by: James Tyner and Joshua Inwood (2011)
   The relative invisibility of domestic state violence vis-à-vis war constrains the imagination and imperative for building just, free, and peaceful futures, internationally and domestically. Domestic practices of state violence (namely policing and imprisonment) are frequently treated as inherently more legitimate than war-making because these practices are founded in popular sovereignty. Yet, these institutions reproduce racial, gender, class, and sexual relations of hierarchy and domination that contribute to family separation, community fragmentation, labor exploitation and premature death. Building a nonkilling future, thus, means challenging the state’s organization for violence that are practiced domestically in the form of defense (military-industrial complex) and in the form of prisons and policing as the “answer” to social and economic problems ranging from poverty, to boisterous youth, to human migration, and drug use (Braz, 2008; Gilmore and Gilmore, 2008). It takes sustained ideological work to contain “war” as the only form of state violence and to contain the good sense that war’s harms cannot be confined to weapons, neatly demarcated battlefields, and declarations of wars’ conclusions. Building critiques of and movements against state violence means confronting hegemonic frames that understand state violence as exceptional, rather than as normal practices structuring both international relations and domestic governance. It means asking why denunciations of the “war at home” sound hyperbolic to some Americans. It means asking in what ways domestic practices of state violence are practiced elsewhere and international practices are imported. Such cross-boundary traffic in practices (and personnel) of policing, and imprisonment and war-making are important for showing that the lines between foreign and domestic, war and peace, civilian and military are constantly blurred. This in turn highlights the tremendous ideological work that goes into maintaining these boundaries, and the material consequences such geographical imaginations have on people’s lives and the places in which they live. This is not to say that the war at home and war abroad are the same or necessarily have the same intensity. Rather it is to trace the frame of exceptionalism that structures the relations between these places in ways that facilitate violence in both places. As we have seen, the invisibility and naturalization of state violence in the form of the prison is one of the most overlooked sites of American exceptionalism, critiques of US state violence, and of antiwar efforts. For precisely this reason, attentions should be placed on challenging the prison regime as one aspect of building nonkilling futures. For this historical moment, Dylan Rodríguez argues that undoing the naturalization of such commonplace violence, centers squarely on an abolitionist pedagogy that works “against the assumptive necessity, integrity, and taken-for-grantedness of prisons, policing, and the normalized state violence they reproduce” (2010: 9). Dismantling prisons is about dismantling relations of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy and economic exploitation that undermine the possibilities for freedom and human flourishing. Prison abolition has an expansive antiviolence imperative that necessarily demands an end to connected practices of war, colonial dispossession, and imperial rule.
   Part 2 is the plan – Resolved: The United States Supreme Court will limit qualified immunity for police officers who work in prisons. I am willing to clarify any part of the plan in cross-x. 

Contention 1 is cruel and unusual punishment.
Prison officials get away with torture against prisoners because of current qualified immunity loopholes. Sheng 2k12:
Sheng, Philip. "An "Objectively Reasonable" Criticism of the Doctrine of Qualified Immunity in Excessive Force Cases Brought Under 42 U.S.C. § 1983." Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law, 1 Mar. 2012. Web. 4 Nov. 2016. http://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1459andcontext=jpl.
Apart from the concerns that (I) the Court is affording law enforcement officers too much protection from liability and (2) the Court is splitting hairs to distinguish Graham's fact-based protection from Harlow's law-based protection, 5 4 this paper's main criticism of Saucier is that the Court offered no clear guidance concerning the "appropriate level of specificity" needed for a law to be clearly established. Subsequent cases have only made it less clear. For instance, in f!ope v. Pelzer, a prisoner brought a civil rights lawsuit against three prison guards for cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. 55 After getting into a fight with one of the guards, the prisoner was chained to a hitching post at both arms. 5 r' The guards removed the prisoner's shirt and let him bake under the sun for seven hours. He was given no bathroom breaks, only two drinks of water, and was taunted by the guards throughout the ordeal. 5 x The Eleventh Circuit held that although the prisoner's Eighth Amendment rights were clearly violated, the guards were entitled to qualified immunity because the law concerning the use of the hitching post was not clearly established. Although it could be "inferred" from "analogous" case law that the guards' conduct was illegal, the Eleventh Circuit held that the case law needed to have "materially similar" facts in order to be considered clearly established law. In other words, to overcome qualified immunity, the prisoner would have had to cite case law that prohibited a prison guard from chaining a prisoner to a hitching post for seven hours, without a shirt, without bathroom breaks, without water, and while taunting him. 62 This was how many circuit courts interpreted Saucierrll but the Supreme Court rejected such a narrow approach. M The Court adopted a "fair warning" standard in Hope, and held that prior case law did not need to have materially similar f1cts to serve as the basis for clearly established law.1 ' 5 In fact, no factual similarity was needed at all-"officials can still be on notice that their conduct violates clearly established law even in novel factual circumstances."66 As long as the current "state of the law" gave the officer "fair warning" that the conduct was unlawful, the officer is was not entitled to qualified immunity.67 This holding greatly relaxed the standard that was purportedly announced in Saucier, making it "much easier for civil rights plaintiffs" to overcome qualified immunity. 68 Up until the time Hope was decided, cases were routinely being dismissed due to the lack of materially similar cascs.m Though Hope was an Eighth Amendment case and not a Fourth Amendment case, one would expect Hope to apply fully to excessive force cases; after all, cruel and unusual punishment is not too far removed from the use of excessive force. 70 Interestingly however, in the only excessive force case to be heard since Hope where clearly established was at issue, the Court seemed to completely ignore Hope.
And, inmates are coerced to the point of suicide. Gilna 2k15:
Gilna, Derek. “Supreme Court Rules Qualified Immunity Shields Prison Officials from Suicide Claim.” Prison Legal News – Human Rights. July 31, 2015. https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2015/jul/31/supreme-court-rules-qualified-immunity-shields-prison-officials-suicide-claim/
In what can only be considered a step backward for holding corrections officials accountable for the preventable suicide of prisoners in their custody, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the doctrine of qualified immunity shields officials from liability in a case involving a prisoner who killed himself. As a result, a federal lawsuit filed by the family of Christopher Barkes, who allegedly committed suicide due to an inadequate intake screening, was dismissed. According to the Supreme Court, there was no question that Barkes was “a troubled man with a long history of mental health and substance abuse problems.” Following his arrest for probation violations in 2004, he was confined at the Howard R. Young Correctional Institution in Delaware, where an intake evaluation was performed that included a brief mental health screening. The nurse performing the screening, who was employed by a private contractor, used a form approved by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC). The form covered 17 suicide risk factors and required immediate suicide countermeasures if 8 or more factors were reported. The nurse found only two indicators of suicidal tendencies, and thus failed to alert prison staff to the possibility of Barkes harming himself. Shortly after his arrival at the facility, Barkes called his wife and told her he was going to commit suicide; she did not notify anyone at the prison. The next day he hanged himself in his cell. The lawsuit filed by Barkes’ family raised claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and alleged that the correctional institution and its employees had violated Barkes’ civil rights; the suit further alleged that prison officials were not following updated NCCHC suicide prevention standards, as the intake screening form they used had been developed in 1997. The defendants’ motions to dismiss were denied and a divided panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed, holding that in light of the many facts in dispute, summary judgment was inappropriate and qualified immunity did not protect the defendants from liability, as there was a clearly established right to “the proper implementation of adequate suicide prevention protocols.” The Supreme Court granted cert and reversed on June 1, 2015, finding that qualified immunity applied in this case and the clearly established right relied upon by the Third Circuit did not exist: “To be clearly established, a right must be sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that what he is doing violates that right.” The Court continued, “When properly applied qualified immunity protects all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.” The Court was not persuaded that Third Circuit precedent had put the defendants on notice of a requirement for proper suicide screening protocols. “In short, even if the Institution’s suicide screening and prevention measures contained the shortcomings that respondents allege, no precedent on the books in November 2004 when Barkes died would have made clear to petitioners that they were overseeing a system that violated the Constitution. Because, at the very least, petitioners were not contravening clearly established law, they are entitled to qualified immunity.”
Only court reform like the aff can solve – it usurps the legitimacy of legal constructs and spurs reform. Bell 99:
Cheryl Bell. Martha Coven. John P. Cronan. Christian A. Garza. Janet Guggemos. “Rape and Sexual Misconduct in the Prison System: Analyzing America 's Most "Open" Secret.” Yale Law and Policy Review. 1999 http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1385andcontext=ylpr
Another seemingly impervious barrier that inmates face when bringing claims of cruel and unusual punishment is the one presented by the modern interpretation of the qualified immunity defense. Historically in prisoners' rights cases, the qualified immunity standard effectively balanced government's administrative interests in keeping the "fear of being sued ... from unduly hampering official decisionmaking"' 8 against an individual's interests in protecting her/his constitutional rights. However, the recent decision by the Carrigan court has severely compromised this balance by placing placed an arguably unrealistic burden upon inmates to prove that there is established law invalidating a prison official's qualified immunity protections. 189 Before Carrigan, the Court in Scheuer v. Rhodes'9° declared that if an official has no "reasonable grounds for the belief formed at the time and in light of all the circumstances, coupled with good-faith belief," her/his claim to a qualified-immunity defense would fail.' 91 Further, in Wood v. Strickland,'92 the Court tweaked its reasoning to establish that qualified immunity depended on whether an official knew or reasonably should have known that s/he violated a constitutional right. 93 After Wood, a series of cases seemed to reiterate the Court's commitment to balancing the scale equitably by giving as much weight to individual inmates' rights as to government officials' rights. Procunier v. Navarette 94 extended Wood's high standards, helping define a legitimate qualified immunity defense for prison S • 195officials being sued under section 1983 by inmates. Knell v. Bensinger imposed personal liability upon those prison officials who disregarded the constitutional rights of inmates and the clearly established legal developments in inmates' rights. During this period (the late 1960s through the early 1980s), individual inmates won a fair number of judicial victories. They made several successful section 1983 claims against prison officials,'96 and the courts began setting limits on how far claims of ignorance by prison officials could go unchallenged.'9 The debilitating impact of Carrigan on inmates' claims of rape and sexual misconduct is clear. Before Carrigan, individual inmates could make viable Eighth Amendment and section 1983 claims based largely on meeting the first "objectively inhumane conditions" prong set forth in Farmer v. Brennan, because the Court had already outlined some circumstances under which the subjective "state of mind" prong would necessarily fail. Also, simple legislative reforms9 ' could have worked to buttress an inmate's claims against a qualified immunity defense. However, the Court has all but upset the equity it had been trying to establish in its previous prisoners' rights cases, by creating a qualified immunity defense that functions like absolute immunity. Even if an inmate can decisively prove the first prong of the Farmer test, without law that limits a prison official's qualified immunity defense, an inmate can never successfully meet the second prong of the Farmer test. In the interest of justice, the Court would do well to reassess its current Carrigan standard and bring it more in line with the precedent it set in its earlier cases-thus bringing individual inmates' rights back in balance with those of government officials.
And, the plan prevents lower court confusion which helps with rights claims on a larger basis. Stephan 2k16:
Lindsey De Stefan. “‘No Man Is Above the Law and No Man Is Below It:’ How Qualified Immunity Reform Could Create Accountability and Curb Widespread Police Misconduct.” The article claims it’s from 2017 but let’s just go 2016 to be safe. Seton Hall University. http://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1861andcontext=student_scholarship.
Altering the qualified immunity doctrine is an excellent way to begin the path to restoring trust by establishing a much-needed sense of accountability. Civil remedies are a good jumping off point because, as repeated failures to indict officers—even in the face of video footage—have demonstrated, accountability via the criminal law is a far-off possibility, if it is possible at all. Prosecutors are generally disinclined to bring charges against law enforcement officers, 140 and grand juries are equally as hesitant to indict them.141 Independent investigations, as suggested by the Task Force, are an excellent idea, but establishing a feasible system nationwide would take time. On the other hand, Supreme Court amendment of the stringent immunity afforded to police officers could take effect relatively quickly. Of course, this is easier said than done. The Court has increasingly enlarged the immunity afforded to police officers in its recent decisions, and any 180-degree turnaround would likely require a change in Court composition. But the current Court can nevertheless begin to firm up qualified immunity doctrine by simply providing more guidance and clarification, thereby enhancing accountability and reaffirming trust between law enforcement and their respective communities. The concept of a clearly established right is, in many ways, a problem that requires solving. A substantial number of cases are disposed of on the premise that a right was not “clearly established”—yet lower courts have struggled for years with what those words actually mean. Arguably, then, at least some officers are escaping liability simply because of the Court’s repeated failures to establish consistency in its qualified immunity jurisprudence. But if the Court used qualified immunity opinions to demonstrate what qualifies as a clearly established right by meticulously outlining its reasoning in answering whether a set of facts implicates such a right, the Court could alleviate some confusion. In other words, rather than taking cases simply to overturn the lower courts’ denial of immunity, it could take cases to affirm those denials or, alternatively, to reverse lower courts’ grant of immunity. By so doing, the Court can give examples of what constitutes a right that is “sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that what he is doing violates that right,”142 and can give lower courts somewhat of a guide to follow. By elucidating the contours of the clearly established right, the Court would alleviate some of the confusion of lower courts and ensure that they are in fact applying that part of the test properly. Proper application of this prong directly promotes accountability, as the public can rest assured that, at least in that regard, cases are not being disposed of based merely on perplexity and uncertainty. Moreover, increased confidence about the clearly established prong could foster a willingness to take on the second part of the test and, in so doing, advance the development of constitutional law and clarify further constitutional rights. The Court could also accept that its attempts at a general standard for all classes of officials that are not otherwise entitled to absolute immunity has been problematic and hugely unsuccessful. Though the Court apparently fears “complicating” qualified immunity, the doctrine is quite complicated as is, and adopting more particularized classes of officials with different standards of immunity would not only assist lower courts in properly analyzing immunity, but would promote justice in constitutional tort litigation. For example, the Court could classify officials based on the approximate number of people with whom they come in contact, so to speak, and that might therefore bring civil suits against them. A governor, for example, could theoretically face a lawsuit from any resident of the state, and would thus be afforded more stringent protection—much like the standard afforded to all officials now. But law enforcement officers, who come in contact with only the residents of one town, city, or perhaps county, risk possible suits from a much smaller pool of people. The threat of litigation would therefore be much less crippling on governmental function, and immunity protection need not be so rigorous. In the case of allegations of Fourth Amendment violations, in light of the already-existing reasonableness standard, immunity may be inappropriate altogether. In addition, the Court could do its proverbial homework and take notice of the widespread indemnification of officers that often results in a complete absence of financial or employment related consequences for law enforcement. If the Court stopped relying on its own intuition, and instead came to grip with the facts, it would likely realize that it has been overzealous in protecting low-level officers, and be inclined to alter course somewhat. By beginning to mend the qualified immunity doctrine in these ways, the Court will allow more civil suits for the vindication of constitutional rights to succeed. This will help to reduce the public mentality—strengthened by recent events—that cops get away with everything, in every regard. Civil suits avoid subjecting law enforcement to any criminal liability that, because of recent events, many laypersons believe is warranted. While this may be true in select circumstances, reality demonstrates that criminal charges are highly unlikely to stick against a police officer. But allowing more civil suits to go forward will serve as an important reminder to both civilians and law enforcement that the police are not above the law, and that they are held accountable for their wrongdoings. In turn, this accountability will begin to heal the relationship between law enforcement and communities by serving as the first step on what will surely be a long path to rebuilding the trust that is so crucial. By adopting different immunity standards for high-level and low-level officials, clarifying the vagueness surrounding the definition of a “clearly established” right, and acknowledging the real-world effects of indemnification, the Court can begin to repair some of the substantial flaws in its qualified immunity jurisprudence. As it does, it will permit more constitutional tort suits to succeed, thereby fostering law enforcement accountability. Because criminal liability is nearly impossible as a practical matter, and because strategies like improving police training and recruiting tactics will likely take years to effectively implement, civil suits are the (relatively) fastest way to demonstrate to the country that our officers are our guardians and that they are accountable to us. It is thus the most immediate way to rebuild trust and begin healing the citizenpolice relationship.
Contention 2 is sexual abuse.
The right from sexual abuse isn’t ‘clearly established’ which causes it to perpetuate in prisons. The plan solves. Buchanan 2k7:
Buchanan, Kim Shayo. “Impunity: Sexual Abuse in Women’s Prisons.” Harvard University. 2007
Prison guards and institutions also enjoy qualified immunity for conduct that is not clearly unlawful:253 prison guards and oficials cannot be held liable for torts committed in the course of their employment unless their conduct violates “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known” under the law of that time.254 Unfortunately, the law does not clearly prohibit all forms of custodial sexual abuse. Although the illegality of forcible rape is suficiently clear to overcome qualified immunity, it is not ªrmly established that other forms of sexual abuse, such as sexual harassment and sexual threats, are clearly unlawful.256 Courts have held that many forms of sexual abuse short of rape, such as sexual harassment without touching257 and sexual activity to which the guard alleges the prisoner consented,258 are not clearly unlawful. In states that have not criminalized all sexual contact between guards and prisoners, even sexual touching and quid pro quo sexual exploitation short of rape may not be clearly unlawful. Qualified immunity may particularly impede allegations of institutional failure to investigate sexual abuse, as it is not clear how cursory an investigation must be before it will be found clearly unlawful.259 The usual justifications for the application of qualified immunity to government actors do not ªt the context of civil claims for custodial sexual abuse. First, an important justification for the qualified immunity rule is to avoid “unwarranted timidity,”260 or the fear that “government oficials who are exposed to money damages for the full costs of their constitutional violations will become overly cautious or quiescent, reducing their activity to suboptimal levels and shying away from socially beneficial risks.”261 This concern is irrelevant within the context of sexual contact between prisoners and guards, as there is no optimal level of custodial sex which the threat of liability might overdeter.
The impact of sexual assault cannot be isolated by singular causal claims, they transcend throughout ontology. STARS No date:
Sexual Assault and Assault Response Services (STARS). “Effects of Sexual Assault.” No Date http://www.stars-elpaso.org/get/effects-of-sexual-assault
Sexual assault is a personal and destructive crime. Its effects on you and your loved ones can be psychological, emotional, and/or physical. They can be brief in duration or last a very long time. It is important to remember that there is not one "normal" reaction to sexual assault. Therefore your individual response will be different depending on your personal circumstances. In this section, we explain some of the more common effects that sexual assault victims may experience. Depression: There are many emotional and psychological reactions that victims of rape and sexual assault can experience. One of the most common of these is depression. The term "depression" can be confusing since many of the symptoms are experienced by people as normal reactions to events. At some point or another, everyone feels sad or "blue." This also means that recognizing depression can be difficult since the symptoms can easily be attributed to other causes. These feelings are perfectly normal, especially during difficult times. Depression becomes something more than just normal feelings of sadness when the symptoms last for more than two weeks. Therefore, if you experience five or more of the symptoms of depression over the course of two weeks you should consider talking to your doctor about what you are experiencing. The symptoms of depression may include: Prolonged sadness or unexplained crying spells Significant change in weight or appetite Loss of energy or persistent fatigue Significant change in sleep patterns (insomnia, sleeping too much, fitful sleep, etc.) Loss of interest and pleasure in activities previously enjoyed; social withdrawal Feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness or guilt Pessimism or indifference Unexplained aches and pains (headaches, stomachaches) Inability to concentrate, indecisiveness Irritability, worry, anger, agitation, or anxiety Thoughts of death or suicide If you are having suicidal thoughts, don't wait to get help. Call us or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) at any time. Depression can affect people of any age, gender, race, ethnicity, or religion. Depression is not a sign of weakness, and it is not something that someone can make him/herself "snap out of." Rate your risk for depression Flashbacks: when memories of past traumas feel as if they are taking place in the current moment. These memories can take many forms: dreams, sounds, smells, images, body sensations, or overwhelming emotions. This re-experience of the trauma often seems to come from nowhere, and therefore blurs the lines between past and present, leaving the individual feeling anxious, scared, and/or powerless. It can also trigger any other emotions that were felt at the time of the trauma. Some flashbacks are mild and brief, a passing moment, while others may be powerful and last a long time. Many times you may not even realize that you are having a flashback and may feel faint and/or dissociate (a mental process in which your thoughts and feelings may be separated from your immediate reality). If you realize you are in the middle of a flashback: First, Get Grounded: The first thing to do is sit up straight and put both feet on the floor. This will help you to feel grounded. Be In the Present: It can be helpful to remind yourself that the event you are reliving happened in the past and you are now in the present. The actual event is over, and you survived. Breathing: Try focusing on your breathing. One way to do that is to count to four as you breathe in. Count to four as you hold that breath and then count to four as you exhale. If you do this and keep repeating it, you may find that you can become calmer and can be in the present. Pay Attention to Surroundings: Another way to help yourself feel like you are in the present is to pay attention to your surroundings. What is the light in the room like right now? Touch something around you that is grounded like a table or a chair. What does it feel like? Can you smell anything? Do you hear any sounds? Self-Soothing: Are there things that normally make you feel safe and secure like wrapping a blanket around yourself or making some tea? Normal: Also, remember that it can take time to recover. You are not crazy. This is a normal reaction. Take care of yourself: Give yourself time to recover after a flashback. Reach out to loved ones or counselors who will be supportive. Rape Trauma: a common reaction to rape or sexual assault. It is a normal human reaction to an unnatural or extreme event. There are three phases to rape trauma: Acute Phase: occurs immediately after the assault and usually lasts a few days to several weeks. In this phase, you can have many reactions but they typically fall into three different categories: Expressed: when you are openly emotional Controlled: when you appear to be without emotion, and act as if "nothing happened" and "everything is fine" Shocked disbelief: when you react with a strong sense of disorientation Outward Adjustment Phase: resume what appears to be your "normal" life, but inside you are still suffering from considerable turmoil. This phase has five primary coping techniques: Minimization: pretending that everything is fine or convincing yourself that "it could have been worse" Dramatization: you cannot stop talking about the assault and it dominates your life and identity Suppression: you refuse to discuss the event and act as if it did not happen Explanation: you analyze what happened, what you did and what the rapist was thinking/feeling Flight: you try to escape the pain (moving, changing jobs, changing appearance, changing relationships, etc.) Resolution Phase: the assault is no longer the central focus of your life. While you may recognize that you will never forget the assault, the pain and negative outcomes lessen over time. Often you will begin to accept the rape as part of your life and choose to move on. NOTE: This model assumes that you will take steps forward and backwards in your healing process and that while there are phases it is not a linear progression and will be different for every person. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: a normal human reaction to an extreme or abnormal situation. Each person has a different threshold for what is perceived as a traumatic event. PTSD is not a rare or unusual occurrence, in fact, many people experience PTSD as a result of a traumatic experience such as rape or sexual assault. You may be experiencing PTSD if you have experienced the following symptoms for at least a month: Shown symptoms of intense horror, helplessness, or fear Experienced distressing memories of the event Regularly avoided things or triggers that remind you of the event Shown significant impairment or distress due to the event Shown at least two symptoms of increased arousal (sleep difficulties, difficulty concentrating, hyper vigilance, an exaggerated startle response, or irritability or outbursts of anger/rage) Pregnancy: Because rape, just like consensual sex, can lead to pregnancy, it is important for female victims to be tested after an assault. If you need additional information visit Medline Plus Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs): Victims of sexual violence are at risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections. If you went to the emergency room for a rape exam, you should have been offered preventive treatment (antibiotics) for sexually transmitted infections and given information about where to go for follow-up testing. If you need more information about this, or did not receive preventive care, call us and we can help you figure out what resources are available. If you did not get medical care after your attack, it's still important to get tested for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. The Centers for Disease Control recommend follow-up testing two weeks after a sexual assault and blood tests to rule out HIV infection 6 weeks, 3 months and 6 months after an assault. If left untreated, STIs and HIV can cause major medical problems, so it's very important to get tested (and treated, if necessary) as soon as possible. Suicide Some survivors of sexual assault may get so depressed that they think about ending their own life. Suicidal thoughts should be taken very seriously. If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please get help immediately. If you have already taken steps, or feel that you can't avoid harming yourself, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline for help 24 hours a day at 800-273-TALK (8255). If you are having suicidal thoughts or you know someone who is, they can listen and help. If you are worried that a loved one is contemplating suicide, it's okay to ask them about it directly. Suicide experts say that asking someone about suicidal thoughts will not lead them to consider suicide if they're not already contemplating it. Effects for Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Assault: There are many reactions that survivors of rape and sexual assault can have. But for adult survivors of childhood sexual assault there are reactions that may either be different or stronger than for other survivors. These include: Setting limits/boundaries: because your personal boundaries were invaded at a young age by someone that was trusted and depended on, you may have trouble understanding that you have the right to control what happens to you. Memories/flashbacks. Anger: as a child, your anger was powerless and had little to no effect on the actions of your abuser. For this reason, you may not feel confident that your anger will be useful or helpful. Grieving/mourning: being abused as a child means the loss of many things: childhood experiences, trust, perceived innocence, and a normal relationship with family members (especially if the abuser was a family member). You must be allowed to name those losses, grieve them, and then move forward. Guilt/shame/blame: you may carry a lot of guilt because you may have experienced pleasure or because you did not try to stop the abuse. There may have been silence surrounding the abuse that led to feelings of shame. It is important to understand that it was the adult who abused his/her position of authority and should be held accountable, not you Trust: learning to trust again may be very difficult for you. Coping skills: as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, you may have developed skills in order to cope with the trauma. Some of these are healthy (possibly separating yourself from certain family members, seeking out counseling, etc.); some are not (drinking or drug abuse, promiscuous sexual activity, etc.). Self-esteem/isolation: low self-esteem is a result of all the negative messages you received and internalized from your abusers. And because entering into an intimate relationship involves trust, respect, love, and the ability to share, you may flee from intimacy or hold on too tightly for fear of losing the relationship. Sexuality: many survivors have to deal with the fact that their first sexual experience came as a result of sexual abuse. You may experience the return of body memories while engaging in a sexual activity with another person. Body Memories: when the memories of the abuse you experienced take the form of physical problems that cannot be explained by the usual means (medical examinations, etc.). These maladies are often called "psychosomatic symptoms" which does not, as many people think, mean that it is "in your head." Rather, it means that the symptoms are due to the connection between the mind and the body. Physical problems that can come of these somatic memories include:
Underview

1. CX- Checks

2. Neg abuse outweighs aff abuse - the 4 minute 1AR puts me at a strategic disadvantage since the neg can craft a perfect strategy to the aff-supercharged by 6 minute 2nr which allows them to collapse to any issue and crush me on it.

3. The state is inevitable – refusal to engage it cedes the political to authoritarian elites and abdicates social responsibility – that makes all crises inevitable and turns K alts.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
I affirm the resolution. Resolved: The United States Federal Government ought to limit qualified immunity for police officers. Some evidence is bracketed for gender and clarity. 

Observation 1. Qualified immunity is only an applicable defense for suits over constitutional torts — federal employees are given absolute protections for all other tort violations. US Department of Justice:
"33. Immunity of Government Officers Sued as Individuals for Official Acts." Office of the United States Attorneys, US Department of Justice, 2016, www.justice.gov/usam/civil-resource-manual-33-immunity-government-officers-sued-individuals.

The general rule at common law was that in order for a government official to be protected by absolute immunity for common law torts, not only did the official have to be acting within the outer perimeter of his/her official duties, but the conduct at issue also had to be discretionary in nature. Westfall v. Irwin, 484 U.S. 292, 297-298 (1988). In enacting the Federal Employees Liability Reform and Tort Compensation Act of 1988 (FELRTCA), Congress abrogated this common law rule and extended absolute immunity for common law torts to all federal employees regardless of whether the conduct at issue was discretionary. See United States v. Smith, 499 U.S. 160 (1991). FELRTCA confers such immunity by making the Federal Tort Claims Act the exclusive remedy for all common law torts committed by federal employees while acting within the scope of their office or employment. 28 U.S.C. § 2679(b)(1). However, the immunity conferred by FELRTCA does not extend or apply to suits against federal employees for violation of the Constitution or federal statutes. Thus, government officials sued for constitutional torts continue to be protected only by qualified immunity. 28 U.S.C. § 2679(b)(2). See Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 807 (1982); Butz v. Economou, 438 U.S. 478 (1978). Where applicable, qualified immunity protects an official from trial and the burdens of litigation. See Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 526 (1985).

I adhere to the legal definition of qualified immunity, or “government employees’ immunity from trial, as long as a) the official did not break a Constitutional right or federal statute that was clearly established at the time of violation, and b) the officer could not have reasonably believed their conduct to be lawful under that right or statute. 

I define “limit” as “to restrict or confine, as to area, extent, time, etc.”  To clarify: I do not defend the complete abolishment of qualified immunity, but rather, restricting it to the extent that it no longer impedes justice.
Dictionary, F. (2016). Retrieved from Free Dictionary Website : thefreedictionary.com
 
Framework

Part I is framework.

‘Ought’ implies obligation, so I value morality.
"Ought." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 16 Dec. 2014. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ought. “used to express obligation”

First — all people have a conception of morality and value; regardless of how it is conceptualized, the idea of obligations and systems of motivation for action is universal. Rawls 71:
John Rawls. Professor at Harvard: A Theory of Justice, 1971    
Existing societies are of course seldom well-ordered in this sense, for what is just and unjust is usually in dispute. Men  People  disagree about which principles should define the basic terms of their association. Yet we may still say, despite this disagreement, that they each have a conception of justice. That is, they understand the need for, and they are prepared to affirm, a characteristic set of principles for assigning basic rights and duties and for determining what they take to be the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. Thus it seems natural to think of the concept of justice as distinct from the various conceptions of justice and as being specified by the role which these different sets of principle, these different conceptions, have in common. Those who hold different conceptions of justice can, then, still agree that institutions are just when no arbitrary distinctions are made between persons in the assigning of basic rights and duties and when the rules determine a proper balance between competing claims to the advantages of social life. Men can agree to this description of just institutions since the notions of an arbitrary distinction and of a proper balance, which are included in the concept of justice, are left open for each to interpret according to the principles of justice that he accepts. these principles single out which similarities and differences among persons are relevant in determining rights and duties and they specify which division of advantages is appropriate. clearly this distinction between the concept and the various conceptions of justice settles no important questions. It simply helps to identity the role of the principles of social justice.

Furthermore, to make prescriptive moral demands in a social context, we need a collective notion of morality — a kind of public reason. This concept is deeply rooted in our identity as social creatures.  Quong 13:
Quong, Jonathan, "Public Reason", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/public-reason/.

Others, most notably Gaus, argue that the idea of public reason follows from certain basic features of our everyday moral practices and reactive attitudes, along with certain claims about the nature of reasons (Gaus 2011). On this view, social morality involves a particular kind of interpersonal relationship; one where we claim the standing to make demands of others, and where, under the right conditions, we acknowledge the standing of others to make demands on us (Gaus 2011, 184). But for this sort of relationship to exist, we must believe that when we make moral demands of others, those others have sufficient reasons to comply with our demands—if they did not have sufficient reasons to comply, then the reactive attitudes that form an essential part of the interpersonal relationship of social morality would cease to make sense (Gaus 2011, 205–232). If, as Gaus maintains, different people have different reasons depending on their differing epistemic positions and sets of justified beliefs, the practice of making moral demands of others must involve public reason: the moral demands we make on others must be justifiable to those others by appeal to reasons they have, and not simply by appeal to the truth as we see it.
Although it differs from discourse ethics in important respects, this account also promises to grounds public reason in a broader account of the nature of social morality and epistemology. It will thus also be vulnerable to similar worries about whether public reason ought to be embedded in a comprehensive and controversial philosophical theory of morality and epistemology.

Note that this means my criterion is a prerequisite to our ability to make morally prescriptive statements at all — we must understand that there is a basic grounds for moral thinking for all citizens of a society.
Thus, the criterion for this round ought to be improving public reason. 

I define public reason as “the generally acceptable code of ethics for the public in a given society.”  
For example, in our society, most regard murder without mitigating circumstances as bad. When in conversation with another member of this society, we don’t have to explain why murder is bad every time we reference it — the “badness” of it is assumed by public reason. 

And, seeking to improve public reason is of utmost importance. Six warrants:

1) Moral discussion — public reason is crucial to the development of discourse, which is especially important to prioritize in a forum like debate; Quong 2:
Some philosophers present the idea of public reason, or the public use of reason, as an essential and central part of the nature of rational discourse about moral norms. Habermas's influential account of discourse ethics (Habermas 1990; Habermas 1996) has been presented by some as grounding a conception of public reason in this way. On this view, the validity of moral and political norms can only be established by an intersubjective and idealized practice of argumentation. Only through an inclusive and noncoercive discursive process where all participants are equally situated can genuinely intersubjectively valid norms emerge. Habermas thus proposes a dialogical principle of universalization, (U), stating that a moral norm “is valid just in case the foreseeable consequences and side-effects of its general observance for the interests and value-orientations of each individual could be jointly accepted by all concerned without coercion” (Habermas 1998, 42). For Habermas, this principle follows from the presuppositions of rational moral discourse, and so—at least on one interpretation—to engage in reasoned moral or political argument with others is to commit oneself to something like the idea of public reason—to commit oneself to finding norms that could be jointly accepted by all concerned without coercion. On this account, public reason is grounded in the nature of reasoned moral argument: one cannot, without contradiction, avoid the idea of public reason insofar as one wants to engage in reasoned moral or political argument with others.
Although Habermas's account of discourse ethics has been influential amongst those who favor some version of discursive or deliberative democracy (Bohman 1996; Dryzek 1990; Dryzek 2000), its capacity to serve as the basis for public reason is the subject of a number of criticisms. Perhaps most importantly, by grounding public reason in a broader account of truth, validity, and rational argument, public reason becomes tied to a specific and controversial philosophical doctrine. But some proponents of public reason believe its role is to serve as a mechanism of justification amongst persons who reasonably disagree about philosophical and other issues typically embedded in what Rawls calls comprehensive doctrines (Rawls 1996, 13). If one believes the idea of public reason should stand apart from any particular comprehensive doctrine or philosophical theory of truth and rationality, the appeal to the presuppositions of rational discourse will be a problematic basis for public reason (see Rawls 1996, 376–381).

2) Public reason resolves its own issues — prioritization of improving public reason results in a constantly improving status quo. Although problematic norms do exist in public reason, public reason is the most effective tool to removing those norms, too.
3) Bounds — acknowledging the public perspective rather than prioritizing the perspectives of just a few allows for a greater range of moral thought. Norms of a collective are less likely to hold the ingrained biases of an individual or subgroup.
4) Public reason, if effectively cultivated, promotes democratic thought and advocacy, resulting in a more representative government.  Madigan 02:
James P. Madigan, The Idea of Public Reason Resuscitated, 10 Wm. and Mary Bill Rts. J. 719 (2002), http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj/vol10/iss3/5
The ideal of public reason, if realized, then, is a dynamic social force that cultivates democratic citizenship by "taking people as a just and well-ordered society would encourage them to be."3 Essential to deliberative democracy, Rawls claims, is a "knowledge and desire on the part of citizens generally to follow public reason and to realize its ideal in their political conduct."3' Though essential, citizens have only a moral (not a legal) duty of civility toward one another to follow its dictates. 2 That moral obligation pushes citizens to advocate and vote - and to explain their positions and votes - using the political values of public reason at least for matters of constitutional import. Civility also involves a willingness to listen to others.3 Before focusing on Rawls's evolving notion of the limits of citizens' public reason (or the degree to which comprehensive views may infiltrate), it is useful to see how it applies to government actors.

5) Public reason is the foundation for the social contract, and/or any justifications for a representative system of government. The United States, which is the country specified in the resolution, relies on public reason as a justification for law; the higher the standards for public reason, the higher the standards for law. Rossi 10:
Rossi, Enzo. "Modus Vivendi, Consensus, and (Realist) Liberal Legitimacy." Public Reason Journal of Political and Moral Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 2, Dec. 2010, pp. 21-39. file:///Users/LindseyWilliams/Downloads/vol-2-no-2-december-2010.pdf.

The basic idea is that a well-grounded political framework need not just embody liberal values; for political power to be properly exercised we also need a freely developed consensus. That consensus is established through the ideas of public reason and public justification: publicly justified principles are acceptable to reasonable citizens (on an adequate characterization of reasonableness), and thus can be presented as enjoying the free hypothetical consent of the citizenry, which in turns confers legitimacy upon liberal political arrangements.3 That is the sort of (hypothetical) consent relation I discuss here.
Finally, by “free consent” – as opposed to consent simpliciter – I understand a form of consent that is based on the exercise of the consenting individuals’ personal autonomy. “Personal autonomy” should be understood as an umbrella term here: rather than in its original Kantian sense,4  I use the term as a placeholder for all the typical foundational commitments of contemporary liberalism (a conception of persons as free and equal, a notion of human flourishing, etc.). Those commitments explain how a consensus can carry normative force, and are thus used by different theorists to motivate their adherence to the consensus view of liberal legitimacy. 

Thus, we ought to seek to improve public reason.

 
Offense

Part II is offense.

Contention 1: Orientation of value

a. The codification of rights under law inspires an orientation of value in the populace. Haase 11:
Haase, Marco. Deputy Programme Director of the Sino-German Legal Cooperation Programme; area of expertise in Constitutional law, specifically law relating to the organisation of the state; private law; criminal law; administrative law, constitution of the courts; corporate law, competition law, and legal methodology  "What Does it Mean to Codify Law? ." 25 Sept. 2011, file:///Users/LindseyWilliams/Downloads/Haase20-20What20does20it20mean20to20codify20law.pdf.

Consequently, it might not be a coincidence that the holistic concept of law is particularly attractive to countries where the state has a strong role as a legislator. The state is supposed to not only respect and protect the individual rights of its citizens but also realize a legal order according to a substantial idea of humanity . The French civil code not only wrote down the existing legal rules of the French society but in the wake of the French revolution also established a new social order according to the new revolutionary idea of humanity . And the German Federal Constitutional Court considers the fundamental rights of the German constitution not only as individual rights but also as set of values or principles that extend to the legal order in its entirety.9 German law has thus always been based on a distinct idea of man; it is the task of the state to create the conditions that enable the citizens to pursue this idea.
Codifying the law is not just a value-free technique but implies a holistic concept of law with a particular idea of humanity , and a state which tries to allow its citizens to live up to this idea. One can doubt whether, in a pluralistic society, it is still possible or at least legitimate for the state and its legal order to embrace such an idea of man.10 However, without a substantial principle of a legal order one has to give up the idea of law as a legal system and thus the very idea of legal codification. 

b.  Current qualified immunity impedes the clarification of legal civil rights, including especially relevant ones in today’s political climate. Chen 15:
Alan K. Chen, professor of law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, “Qualified Immunity Limiting Access to Justice and Impeding Development of the Law,” Human Rights Magazine Vol. 41, 2015.

Critics of qualified immunity point out that the breadth of the doctrine’s protection means that people like Savana Redding whose rights have been violated will go without compensation. Contrary to Marbury’s admonition, their rights can be violated, but they will receive no remedy. But there are broader social costs associated with qualified immunity as well. Because of the way the doctrine is structured, courts can decide an official is entitled to qualified immunity by concluding that they  he or she have not violated a “clearly established” right without ever answering the question of whether their  his or her conduct did, in fact, violated the Constitution. This means that courts can dismiss constitutional rights claims without precisely clarifying the scope of the law. Constitutional doctrine, like the common law, evolves and is refined through series of court decisions. But qualified immunity interferes with this law-pronouncing function of the federal courts and reduces the amount of guidance about the meaning of the Constitution for both government officials and the public at large. John C. Jeffries Jr., The Right-Remedy Gap in Constitutional Law, 109 Yale L.J. 87, 99–100 (1999).

c) Finally, improving the public virtue can result in a feedback loop that creates, in turn, more just law, greater protections for citizens, and consequently, more virtue. Rawls 97:
Rawls, John. “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited.” The University of Chicago Law Review. Vol. 64, no. 3, 1997, pp. 765-807, www.hartsem.edu/academic/courses/summer2009/Idea20of20Public20Reason20Revisted20(Rawls).pdf.

1. The idea of public reason specifies at the deepest level the basic moral and political values that are to determine a constitutional democratic government’s relation to its citizens and their relation to one another. In short, it concerns how the political relation is to be understood. Those who reject constitutional democracy with its criterion of reciprocity will of course reject the very idea of public reason. For them the political relation may be that of friend or foe, to those of a particular religious or secular community or those who are not; or it may be a relentless struggle to win the world for the whole truth. Political liberalism does not engage those who think this way. The zeal to embody the whole truth in politics is incompatible with an idea of public reason that belongs with democratic citizenship.

Tournament: St Marks | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Part 1 is the Framework
1 Rejecting oppression must be prioritized – everyday oppression is the largest proximate cause of psychological and physical warfare against the excluded.
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois ‘4: (Nancy and Philippe, Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkeley; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22)
This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39 Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close attention to the “little” violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides” (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of “genocide” into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the “small wars and invisible genocides” to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieu’s partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of “normal” social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of “peacetime crimes” - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematic- ally and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on “illegal aliens” versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability” is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied “strangle-holds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the “normative” socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hyper vigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonalization, pseudo speciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyper arousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a chronic “state of emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other “total institutions.” Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to “pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremarkable peacetimes that precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.” Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies “rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization).
2 Theory absent real solutions is as useless as action divorced from theory – concrete solutions backed by theory are key.
Giroux ‘14: Henry A. Giroux American scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, “Neoliberalism’s War on Democracy”, Truthout, 26 Apr 2014 AB
In this instance, understanding must be linked to the practice of social responsibility and the willingness to fashion a politics that addresses real problems and enacts concrete solutions. As Heather Gautney points out, ¶ We need to start thinking seriously about what kind of political system we really want. And we need to start pressing for things that our politicians did NOT discuss at the conventions. Real solutions—like universal education, debt forgiveness, wealth redistribution, and participatory political structures—that would empower us to decide together what’s best. Not who’s best.75¶ Critical thinking divorced from action is often as sterile as action divorced from critical theory. Given the urgency of the historical moment, we need a politics and a public pedagogy that make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative. Or, as Stuart Hall argues, we need to produce modes of analysis and knowledge in which "people can invest something of themselves . . . something that they recognize is of them or speaks to their condition."76 A notion of higher education as a democratic public sphere is crucial to this project, especially at a time in which the apostles of neoliberalism and other forms of political and religious fundamentalism are ushering in a new age of conformity, cruelty, and disposability. But as public intellectuals, academics can do more.
3 Use the state as a heuristic - provides a means of understanding the state to break it down and articulate power as a changeable system.
Zanotti ‘14: Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech.  Her research and teaching include critical political theory as well as international organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and the role of NGOs in post-conflict governance. “Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World” – Alternatives: Global, Local, Political – vol 38(4):p. 288-304 – The Stated “Version of Record” is Feb 20, 2014, but was originally published online on December 30th, 2013. Obtained via Sage Database.
By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to ‘‘rejection,’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or ‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of governmental rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them. This approach questions oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems. International power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than overarching demonizations of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations on ‘‘what ought to be.’’83 Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine ‘‘freedom’’ to be regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences of political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.’’84
4 Critical analysis of modern energy systems requires a social understanding to mitigate technocratic corruption and oppression – reject extinction and tech-based rhetoric because they mask internal problems.
Byrne et al ‘6: John Byrne, Noah Toly, and Leigh Glover write in “Transforming Power: Energy, Environment, and Society in Conflict.” John Byrne is distinguished professor of energy and climate policy and director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy (CEEP) at the University of Delaware. He is also chairman of the board of the Foundation for Renewable Energy and Environment. He has contributed since 1992 to Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the panel’s authors. He is editor of Transaction’s book series Energy and Environmental Policy. Noah Toly is a research associate and Ph.D. candidate in the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Delaware. Leigh Glover is policy fellow and assistant professor in the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Delaware. https://books.google.com/books?id=d_8ij4SGQxMCandpg=PA1andlpg=PA1anddq=From+climate+change+to+acid+rain,+contaminated+landscapes,+mercury+pollution,+and+biodiversityandsource=blandots=JPEQRX6CyQandsig=gc--F_f0ujG981Fu1yyz6ThCPUandhl=enandsa=Xandved=0ahUKEwjY6Nmw8qnPAhUW32MKHYidAP8Q6AEIHjAA#v=onepageandq=sustainable20energy20futuresandf=false; AB
From climate change to acid rain, contaminated landscapes, mercury pollution, and biodiversity loss, the origins of many of our least tractable environmental problems can be trace to the operations of the modern energy system. A scan of nightfall across the planet reveals a social dilemma that also accompanies this system’s operations: invented over a century ago, electric light remains an experience only for the socially privileged. Two billon human beings – almost one-third of the planet’s population – experience evening light by candle, oil lamp, or open fire, reminding us that energy modernization has left intact – and sometimes exacerbated – social inequalities that its architects promised would be banished (Smil, 2003: 370 – 373). And there is the disturbing link between modern energy and war. Whether as a mineral whose control is fought over by the powerful (for a recent history of conflict over oil, see Klare, 200b, 2004, 2006), or as the enablement of an atomic war of extinction, modern energy makes modern life possible and threatens its future. With environmental crisis, social inequality, and military conflict among the significant problems of contemporary energy-society relations, the importance of a social analysis of the modern energy system appears easy to establish. One might, therefore, expect a lively and fulsome debate of the sector’s performance, including critical inquiries into the politics, sociology, and political economy of modern energy. Yet, contemporary discourse on the subject is disappointing: instead of a social analysis of energy regimes, the field seems to be a captive of euphoric technological visions and associated studies of “energy futures” that imagine the pleasing consequences of new energy sources and devices. One stream of euphoria has sprung from advocates  of conventional energy, perhaps best represented by the unflappable optimist of nuclear power, who, early on, promised to invent a “magical fire” (Weinberg, 1972) capable of meeting any level of energy demand inexhaustibly in a manner “too cheap to meter” (Lewis Strauss, cited in the New York Times 1954, 1955). In reply to those who fear catastrophic accidents from the “magical fire” or the proliferation of nuclear  weapons, a new promise is made to realize the “inherently safe reactors” (Weinberg, 1985) that risk neither serious accident nor intentionally harmful use of high-energy physics. Less grandiose, but no less optimistic, forecasts can be heard from fossil fuel enthusiasts who, likewise, project more energy, at lower cost, and with little ecological harm (see e.g., Yergin and Stoppard, 2003). Skeptics of conventional energy, eschewing involvement with dangerously scaled technologies and their ecological consequences, find solace in “sustainable energy alternatives” that constitute a second euphoric stream. Preferring to redirect attention to smaller, and supposedly more democratic options, “green” energy advocates conceive devices and systems that prefigure a revival of human scale development, local self-determination, and a commitment to ecological balance. Among supporters are those who believe that greening the energy system embodies universal social ideals, and, as a result, can overcome current conflicts between energy “haves” and “have-nots.” In a recent contribution to this perspective, Vaitheeswaran suggests (2003: 327, 291), “today’s nascent energy revolution will truly deliver power to the people” as “micropower meets village power.” Hermann Scheer echoes the idea of an alternative energy-led transformation: the shift to a “solar global economy… can satisfy the material needs of all mankind and grant us the freedom to guarantee truly universal and equal human rights to safeguard the world’s cultural diversity” (Scheer, 2002: 34). The euphoria of contemporary energy studies is noteworthy for its historical consistency with a nearly unbroken social narrative of wonderment extending from the advent of steam power through the spread of electricity (Nye 1999). The modern energy regime that now powers nuclear weaponry and risks disruption of the planet’s climate is a product of promises pursued without sustained public examination of the political, social, economic, and ecological record of the regime’s operations. However, the discursive landscape has occasionally included thoughtful exploration of the broader contours of energy-environment-society relations. As early as 1934, Lewis Mumford (see also his two-volume Myth of the Machine, 1966; 1970) critiqued the industrial energy system for being a key source of social and ecological alienation (1934: 196): The changes that were manifested in every department of Technics rested for the most part on one central fact: the increase of energy. Size, speed, quantity, the multiplication of machines, were all reflections of the new means of utilizing fuel and the enlargement of the available stock of fuel itself Power was disassociated from its natural human and geographic limitations: from the caprices of the weather, from the irregularities that definitely restrict the output of men and animals. By 1961, Mumford despaired that modernity had retrogressed into a life-harming dead end (1961: 263, 248): …an orgy of uncontrolled production and equally uncontrolled reproduction: machine fodder and cannon fodder surplus values and surplus populations… The dirty crowded houses, the dank airless courts and valleys, the bleak pavements, the sulphurous atmosphere; the over-routinized and dehumanized factory, the drill schools, the second-hand experiences, the starvation of the senses, the remoteness from nature and animal activity – here are the enemies. The living organism demands a life-sustaining environment. Modernity’s formula for two centuries had been to increase energy in order to produce overwhelming economic growth. While diagnosing the inevitable failures of this logic, Mumford nevertheless warned that modernity’s supporters would seek to derail present-tense evaluations of the era’s social and ecological performance with forecasts of a bountiful future in which, finally, the perennial social conflicts over resources would end. Contrary to traditional notions of democratic governance, Mumford observed that the modern ideal actually issues from a pseudomorph that he named the “democratic-authoritarian bargain” (1964: 6) in which the modern energy regime and capitalist political economy join in a promise to produce “every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus one may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority” on the condition that society demands only what the regime is capable and willing to offer. An authoritarian energy order thereby constructs an aspirational democracy while facilitating the abstraction of production and consumption from non-economic social values. The premises of the current energy paradigms are in need of a critical study in the manner of Mumford’s work if a world measurably different from the present order is to be organized. Interrogating modern assumptions, this chapter examines the social projects of both conventional and sustainable energy as a beginning effort in this direction. The critique explores the neglected issue of the political economy of modern energy, and considers the discursive continuities between the premises of conventional and sustainable energy futures.
The standard is to materially mitigate oppression.
Part 2 is the Colonialist Nuclear State
First, corporate-state propaganda depicts nuclear power as the silver bullet solution to global warming to exclude democratic discourse about alternative energy futures in order to fuel dependence on a centralized corporate grid.
Wasserman ‘16: Harvey Wasserman writes in “NY Times Pushes Nukes While Claiming Renewables Fail to Fight Climate Change” for Counterpoint on July 29th, 2016. Harvey Franklin Wasserman (born December 31, 1945) is an American journalist, author, democracy activist, and advocate for renewable energy. He has been a strategist and organizer in the anti-nuclear movement in the United States for over 30 years. He has been a featured speaker on Today, Nightline, National Public Radio, CNN Lou Dobbs Tonight and other major media outlets. Wasserman is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, 1 an investigative reporter, and senior editor of The Columbus Free Press where his coverage, with Bob Fitrakis, has prompted Rev. Jesse Jackson to call them "the Woodward and Bernstein of the 2004 election."2 He lives with his family in the Columbus, Ohio, area. http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/29/ny-times-pushes-nukes-while-claiming-renewables-fail-to-fight-climate-change/; AB
When nuclear power and its apologists defend continued operations at dangerously deteriorated reactors, they are more broadly defending the power and profits of huge corporations that are completely invested in a centralized grid. When they argue that renewables “can’t do the job,” they’re in fact working to prolong the lives of the large generators that are the “base load” basis of a corporate grid-based supply system. 3. But that grid is now obsolete. What strikes the ultimate terror in utility boardrooms is the revolutionary reality of a decentralized power supply, free of large generators, comprised instead of millions of small photovoltaic (PV) panels owned by individuals. Industry sources have widely confirmed that this decentralized, post-grid model means the end of big utilities. Thus when they fight against PV and for nuclear power, they are fighting not for the life of the planet, but for the survival of their own corporate profits. 4. Some utilities do support some renewables, but primarily in the form of large centralized grid-based solar and wind turbine farms. Pacific Gas and Electric said it will replace the power from the Diablo Canyon nuke plant with solar energy. But PGandE is simultaneously fighting rooftop solar, which will allow individual homeowners to disconnect from the grid. Germany’s transition from fossil-nukes to renewables has also been marked by conflict between large grid-based wind farms versus small community-based renewables. 5. PGandE and other major utilities are fighting against net metering and other programs that promote small-scale renewables. The Koch Brothers’ American Legislature Exchange Council (ALEC) has spread a wide range of taxes and disincentives passed by the states to make it ever-harder to go solar. All this is being done to preserve the grid-based monopolies that own large fossil/nuclear facilities. The idea that nuclear power might fight climate change, and that environmentalists might support it, is a recent concoction, a disgraceful, desperate load of utility hype meant to defend the status quo. Fukushima, unsolved waste problems and the plummeting price of renewables have solidified the environmental community’s opposition to nuke power. These reactors are dirty and dangerous. They are not carbon-free and do emit huge quantities of heated water and steam into the ecosphere. The utility industry can’t get private liability insurance for them, and relies on the1957 Price-Anderson Act to protect them from liability in a major catastrophe. The industry continually complains about subsidies to renewable energy but never mentions this government protection program without which all reactors would close. 7. Not just nuke power but the entire centralized fossil/nuke-based grid system is now being undermined by the massive drops in the price of renewable energy, and massive rises in its efficiency and reliability. The critical missing link is battery technology. Because the sun and wind are intermittent, there needs to be energy storage to smooth out supply. Elon Musk‘s billion-dollar Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada and many other industrial ventures indicate major battery breakthroughs in storage is here today. 8. Porter’s NY Times piece correctly says that the massive amounts of cheap, clean renewables flooding the grid in Europe and parts of the U.S. are driving nuclear power plants into bankruptcy. At least a dozen reactor shut downs have been announced in the U.S. since 2012 and many more are on their way. In Japan 52 of the 54 reactors online before the Fukushima disaster are now closed. And, Germany has pledged to shut all its reactors by 2022. But Porter attacks this by complaining that those nukes were supplying base load power that must be otherwise—according to him—shored up with fossil burners. Here’s his key line: “Renewable sources are producing temporary power gluts from Australia to California, driving out other energy sources that are still necessary to maintain a stable supply of power.” But as all serious environmentalists understand, the choice has never been between nukes versus fossil fuels. It’s between centralized fossil/nukes versus decentralized renewables. Porter’s article never mentions the word “battery” or the term “rooftop solar.” But these are the two key parts in the green transition already very much in progress. So here is what the Times obviously can’t bring itself to say: “Cheap solar panels on rooftops are now making the grid obsolete.” The key bridging element of battery back-up capability is on its way. Meanwhile there is absolutely no need for nuclear power plants, which at any rate have long since become far too expensive to operate. Spending billions to prop up dying nuke reactors for “base load” generation is pure corporate theft at the public expense, both in straight financial terms and in the risk of running badly deteriorated reactors deep into the future until they inevitably melt down or blow up. Those billions instead should go to accelerating battery production and distribution, and making it easier, rather than harder, to gain energy independence using the wind and the sun. All this has serious real-world impacts. In Ohio, for example, a well-organized shift to wind and solar was derailed by the Koch-run legislature. Some $2 billion in wind-power investments and a $500 million solar farm were derailed. There are also serious legal barriers now in place to stop homeowners from putting solar shingles and panels on their rooftops. Meanwhile, FirstEnergy strong-armed the Ohio Public Utilities Commission into approving a huge bailout to keep the seriously deteriorated Davis-Besse nuke operating, even though it cannot compete and is losing huge sums of money. Federal regulators have since put that bailout on hold. Arizona and other Koch-owned legislatures have moved to tax solar panels, ban solar shingles and make it illegal to leave the grid without still paying tribute to the utilities who own it. Indeed, throughout the U.S. and much of the western world, corporate-owned governments are doing their best to slow the ability of people to use renewables to rid themselves of the corporate grid. For an environmental movement serious about saving the Earth from climate change, this is a temporary barrier. The Times and its pro-nuke allies in the corporate media will continue to twist reality. But the Solartopian revolution is proceeding ahead of schedule and under budget. A renewable, decentralized energy system is very much in sight. The only question is how long corporate nonsense like this latest NY Times screed can delay this vital transition. Our planet is burning up from fossil fuels and being irradiated by decrepit money-losing reactors that blow up. Blaming renewable energy for all that is like blaming the peace movement for causing wars. The centralized King CONG grid and its obsolete owners are at the core of the problem. So are the corporate media outlets like the New York Times that try to hide that obvious reality.
Second, the nuclear-state falsifies data due to state interest in nuclear power– err on the side of aff evidence to reject the state-sponsored corruption of nuclear – the centralized grid feeds corruption.
Shrader-Frechette ‘11: Kristin Shrader-Frechette writes in “What Will Work: Fighting Climate Change with Renewable Energy, Not Nuclear Power” Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199794638 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199794638.001.0001, University of Notre Dame Kristin Shrader-Frechette teaches biological sciences and philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Her latest book, Taking Action, Saving Lives: Our Duties to Protect Environmental and Public Health (Oxford University Press, 2007), has been nominated for a National Book Award. https://books.google.com/books id=bbZoAgAAQBAJandpg=PA70andlpg=PA70anddq=nuclear+industry+science+falsificationandsource=blandots=43r38bkSYRandsig=OM9ndw0TL5YYkIjdQBLtNJ_gIzkandhl=enandsa=Xandved=0ahUKEwjRxOf21JXPAhVr74MKHTnvCoQQ6AEIRTAI#v=onepageandq=nuclear20industry20science20falsificationandf=false; AB
Merck Pharmaceuticals suppressed data on harmful effects of it drug Vioxx. As a result, many people died. Guidant Corporation suppressed data on electrical flaws in one of its heart-defibrillator models, and it too caused many patient deaths. Many similar examples reveal how financial conflicts of interest (COI) can skew biomedical research – especially when companies suppress data that could jeopardize their pharmaceutical profits. As a result, scientists and ethicists have long recognized the harm done by such COI. An Annals of Internal Medicine study showed that 98 percent of papers based on industry-sponsored studies reflected favorably on the industry’s products; a Journal of the American Medical Association article likewise concluded that industry-funded studies were 8 times less likely to reach conclusions unfavorable to their drugs than were non-profit studies. Does something similar happen in energy studies done by electric utilities? Both coal and nuclear utilities appear to massively underestimate the costs of their activities. For instance, an association of coal utilities and producers, the World Institute, said in 2009 that coal is “cheaper per energy unit than other fuels,” but as chapter 1 documented, the US National Academy of Sciences says that annual costs of coal-generated electricity often exceed their benefits, especially for older, dirtier coal plants. The academy noted that annual US health-related and CC damages from US coal plants are more than $120 billion annually, including tens of thousands of coal-induced deaths per year. Even in market terms, coal-benefits often do not pay for its costs. A recent report of the Mountain Association of Community Economic Development showed that, for a typical coal-producing state, like Kentucky, annual state revenues from coal are $528 million, but they cost $643 in state expenditures – and these figures do not include any health damages. Nuclear-industry cost estimates are just as misleading. Jonathan Porritt, chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission and adviser to Gordon Brown, says, “Cost estimates from the nuclear industry have been the subject to massive underestimates – inaccuracy of an astonishing kind consistently over a 40-, 50-year period.” A UK government commission agrees, claiming that these “massive underestimates” have arisen because virtually all nuclear-cost data can be “traced back to industry sources”; the main US oversight agency, the Government Accountability Office, says something similar, repeatedly faulting the nuclear industry for greatly underestimating the full costs of its activities. Why do these flawed nuclear-fission cost estimates occur? The preceding chapter gave some of the historical reasons, namely the military legacy of secrecy and data falsification. It also noted that typically only the industry is privy to full nuclear-cost data. University of Greenwich business professor Stephen Thomas says the same thing: because the nuclear industry controls virtually all the economic data, it is difficult for others to check it or even obtain it; fission companies “are notoriously secretive about the costs they are incurring.” If these government and university charges are correct, they suggest the need to scrutinize nuclear-industry claims that, to address climate change (CC), fission is “the most cost-effective power source.” Is it?
Third, the military industrial complex clouds state judgment – nuclear power is lobbied and alternatives are excluded from discussion to maintain a technocratic Cold War security state.
Shrader-Frechette ‘8: Kristin Shrader-Frechette writes in “Five Myths About Nuclear Energy” for America magazine on June 23rd, 2008. Kristin Shrader-Frechette teaches biological sciences and philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Her latest book, Taking Action, Saving Lives: Our Duties to Protect Environmental and Public Health (Oxford University Press, 2007), has been nominated for a National Book Award. BRACKETED FOR GRAMMAR http://americamagazine.org/issue/660/article/five-myths-about-nuclear-energy; AB
If atomic energy is really so risky and expensive, why did the United States begin it and heavily subsidize it? As U.S. Atomic Energy Agency documents reveal, the United States began to develop nuclear power for the same reason many and other nations have done so. It wanted weapons-grade nuclear materials for its military program. But the United States now has more than enough weapons materials. What explains the continuing subsidies? Certainly not the market. The Economist (7/7/05) recently noted that for decades, bankers in New York and London have refused loans to nuclear industries. Warning that nuclear costs, dangers and waste storage make atomic power “extremely risky,” The Economist claimed that the industry is now asking taxpayers to do what the market will not do: invest in nuclear energy. How did The Economist explain the uneconomical $20 billion U.S. nuclear subsidies for 2005-7? It pointed to campaign contributions from the nuclear industry. Despite the problems with atomic power, society needs around-the-clock electricity. Can we rely on intermittent wind until solar power is cost-effective in 2015? Even the Department of Energy says yes. Wind now can supply up to 20 percent of electricity, using the current electricity grid as backup, just as nuclear plants do when they are shut down for refueling, maintenance and leaks. Wind can supply up to 100 percent of electricity needs by using “distributed” turbines spread over a wide geographic region—because the wind always blows somewhere, especially offshore. Many renewable energy sources are safe and inexpensive, and they inflict almost no damage on people or the environment. Why is the current U.S. administration instead giving virtually all of its support to a riskier, more costly nuclear alternative? In the United States and elsewhere, periodic renewals in the hopes for nuclear power have been aided by active state support; indeed nuclear power was managed as a state-building exercise by many states, such as India and Pakistan, but also states such as Canada and France. The recent United States energy plan (the so-called Bush-Cheney plan) provides direct state assistance to the nuclear industry, and has once again raised hopes that it will play a larger role in future electricity supplies. Ultimately, however, nuclear power faces severe challenges to its legitimacy, especially in terms of global nuclear commerce; and, though the global warming debate offers some promise, nuclear power cannot present itself as a neutral power source free of massive capital consolidation and state assistance. If one accepts the benefits of nuclear power and overlooks its safety and political implications, there is no need to question the latest period of rhetorical renewal. However, analysts concerned with these questions must confront the ideational power wielded by this industry and its cohorts, and critically examine the role nuclear power could play in delaying the progression towards a more sustainable global energy path. Arguably, concerns with the terrorist threat make nuclear installations an even greater concern, and yet we have seen relatively little public debate over the wisdom of directing fiscal resources to the nuclear industry in the United States after September 11, 2001. After a brief history of the evolution of global nuclear commerce, and the development of a pro-nuclear power export regime, we will examine the current situation, with emphasis on the global warming argument and the problematic securitization issue in the post-September 11 context. The nuclear industry is global in scope, but the following discussion will necessarily make frequent reference to the United States and the United Kingdom. Though other states, notably Japan and France, have increased their reliance on nuclear power, and smaller states, most notably Canada, have pursued aggressively subsidized export policies, large American and British firms remain the most important players. Their linkages with the oil and gas industries, and their influence on the general American economy and the White House, are significant causal factors when explaining the worldwide persistence of an industry that has been largely discredited at home. Recent efforts to revive the nuclear industry, under the guise of global warming and national energy security concerns, and at the expense of investment in the larger social good of developing renewable energies such as solar, wind, and hydro power, suggest the industry maintains considerable influence in Washington and abroad. Though some states, such as Germany and Sweden, have made pledges (unrealized to date) to phase out nuclear power use altogether, it is increasing in Asia and an active campaign continues to recruit and intensify African participation in the global nuclear commerce fuel cycle through uranium exploration and mining. Wherever one finds nuclear power, from India to Romania, it is heavily invested with state support, often part of a broader campaign to promote nationalism. Canada subsidizes its industry by financing and insuring sales abroad, most controversially to China. And the Bush-Cheney plan makes End Page 100 it perfectly clear that nuclear energy has both a domestic and export future, despite the current concerns with nuclear terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. However it can also be argued that the political foundations of the industry's fragile legitimacy are under fire from continued concern over environmental impacts (in particular, the storage of nuclear waste), and the national and international security concerns raised by the development of nuclear power. As such the stage is set for an intensification of the continued propaganda war between the industry and its opponents, with the state most often playing the role of supporting actor to the former. Though its proponents argue nuclear power is the victim of exaggerated dangers, few would deny its significance from an environmental security perspective. And yet, since it supplies electricity on a national basis (though there are partial exceptions to this, since electricity is a viable export product for many states), it is rarely treated as an issue for the domain of global environmental politics. I would argue, however, that it should be, because the industry is clearly global in scope, reliant on trade, intersecting with the more traditional IR area of proliferation studies, and impacted by international debates and arrangements concerning global warming. As such, this article is based upon the "ecological approach to the study of global political economy" developed by Dennis Pirages. This approach "stresses the impact of population, resource and technology variables on economic, political and social institutions as well as on ideologies and beliefs which guide human behaviour." 1 But it is also founded in the task of uncovering power relations shrouded by strategically oriented discourse and, in the broader sense, contributing to what Richard Falk terms the demystification of interstate (and state) power by way of the "critical realist tradition," as well as the Foucauldian emphasis on the generative power of ideas. 2 Beyond normative concerns, however, it may also be suggested that one empirical way to approach the question of legitimacy is to recognize a political space where a contest of image will take place, and monitor it for actors, methods, and outcomes. This article is intended largely to provide the necessary background for such a research project. Global Nuclear Commerce The nuclear industry, and its state protectors and promoters, offers an illustrative example of how an industry which has obtained a global reach, is constantly in the process of further consolidation, and is challenged by fundamental discrepancies between its output and the physical and environmental security of citizens, has managed to survive through self-reinvention, aided by the technocratic strivings of the age of modernity. Energy and related resource use planning takes place at every level of the global economy. This includes family End Page 101 or household decision-making, such as womens' use of fuel wood in rural African areas, or western middle-class consumers' decisions to use oil or electric heating. But the level of decision-making responsible for the need for energy paths involving large-scale infrastructure development has been the technocratic, state, and capital one. And, as is the case historically in international energy markets, we witness a great deal of collusion between the state and private concerns, as the international history of oil production and consumption, for example, makes clear, and the symbiotic relationship between the nuclear energy industry and the Cold War security state made even clearer.
This appeal to nationalism and militarism through the construction of illusory threats to justify nuclearism reinforces a colonial nuclear-state.
Endres ‘9: Danielle Endres writes in “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision” on 17 Feb 2009. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14791420802632103; AB
Considering the use of American Indian resources and lands in support of the nuclear production process, the discourse of nuclearism intersects with the discourse of colonialism to create the discourse of nuclear colonialism. Nuclearism is the assumption that nuclear weapons and nuclear power are crucial to the national interest and national security, serving to normalize and justify all aspects of the nuclear production process.37 Nuclearism is an ideology and a discursive system that is ‘‘intertextually configured by present discourses such as militarism, nationalism, bureaucracy, and technical-rationality.’’38 Even with the end of the Cold War, we still see nuclearism present in contemporary US policy such as the call to license new nuclear reactors for the first time in over twenty years and research into new nuclear weapons technology (e.g., bunker busters). Resistance to nuclearism comes in many forms, one of which is the body of scholarship called nuclear communication criticism. Within this corpus, Bryan Taylor and William Kinsella advocate the study of ‘‘nuclear legacies’’ of the nuclear production process.39 The material legacies of the nuclear production process include the deaths of Navajo uranium miners, the left-over uranium tailings on Navajo land, and Western Shoshone downwinders. However, nuclear waste is in need of more examination; as Taylor writes, ‘‘nuclear waste represents one of the most complex and highly charged controversies created by the postwar society. Perhaps daunted by its technical, legal and political complexities, communication scholars have not widely engaged this topic.’’40 One of the reasons that nuclear waste is such a complex controversy is its connection with nuclear colonialism. Nuclear communication criticism has focused on examination of the ‘‘practices and processes of communication’’ related to the nuclear production process and the legacies of this process.41 At least two themes in nuclear discourse are relevant to nuclear colonialism: 1) invocation of national interest; and 2) constraints to public debate. First, nuclear discourse is married to the professed national interest, calling for the sacrifices among the communities affected by the legacies of the nuclear production process.42 According to Kuletz, the American West has been constructed as a ‘‘national sacrifice zone’’ because of its connection to the nuclear production process.43 Nuclearism is tautological in its basic assumption that nuclear production serves the national interest and national security and its use of national security and national interest to justify nuclearism. The federal government justifies nuclear production, which disproportionately takes place on American Indian land, as serving the national security. This justification works with the strategy of colonialism that defines American Indian people as part of the nation and not as separate, Nuclear Colonialism 45 Downloaded by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) at 21:46 08 August 2016 inherently sovereign entities whose national interest may not include storing nuclear waste on their land. A second theme in nuclear discourse is its ability to constrain public debate through invoking the national interest, defining opponents as unpatriotic and employing discursive containment.44 For instance, ‘‘discursive containment often operates on the premise that public participation is a potential hazard to official interests and should be minimized and controlled.’’45 The strategies of nuclear discourse that constrain public debate work in concert with strategies of rhetorical colonialism that exclude and constrain the participation of American Indians in decisions affecting their land and resources. Taken together, the intersection of the discourses of colonialism and nuclearism create a powerful discourse aimed at perpetuating the nuclear production process for the benefit of the colonizer at the expense of their colonial targets.
AND the technocratic nuclear-state is environmentally racist in order to push this colonialist nuclear agenda – results in cultural genocide
Ryser et. al ‘16: Rudolph C. Ryser, Yvonne Sherwood, and Janna Lafferty write in “The Indigenous World Under a Nuclear Cloud” for Truthout on 27 March 2016. Rudolph Ryser is descendant from Oneida and Cree relatives and lived his early life in Taidnapum culture. He is Chairperson of the Center for World Indigenous Studies (CWIS), a research, education and public policy institution and he is a Fulbright Research Scholar. He has served as Senior Advisor to the President George Manuel of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, as former Acting Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians (USA), and a former staff member of the American Indian Policy Review Commission - a Joint US Congressional Commission. He holds a doctorate in international relations, teaches Fourth World Geopolitics, Public Service Leadership, and Consciousness Studies at the CWIS Masters Certificate Program (www.cwis.org). He is the author of numerous essays including "Observations On Self and Knowing" in TRIBAL EPISTEMOLOGIES (Aldershot, UK), "Indigenous and Traditional Knowledge" (Berkshire) and four books including INDIGENOUS NATIONS AND MODERN STATES published by Routledge (2012). He is the Principal Investigator for the CWIS Radiation Exposure Risk Assessment Action Research Project. (Contact: Chair@cwis.org). Janna Lafferty is descendant from the Irish and Northumbrians. She holds a Master's degree in Religions from Duke University. She is a doctoral student in the Department for Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University with concentrations in critical food studies and cultural geography. Lafferty served as co-editor of the Anthropology and Environment Society's Blog, which features first-hand accounts by social scientists engaged in environmental issues. Her work has centered on social and environmental change, social justice, food and environmental justice, nature-culture relationships, and the ongoing legacies of colonialism. Ms. Lafferty is a research intern on the Center for World Indigenous Studies Radioactive Exposure Risk Assessment Action Research Project. Yvonne Sherwood is a member of the Yakama Nation. She is a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Department of Sociology (with an emphasis in feminist studies). She is a UCSC Dean's Diversity Fellow from 2011 to 2016 and was advanced to candidacy for her doctoral degree in the fall of 2015. Prior to graduate school, Sherwood was an active student leader who served as an officer for Indigenous Resistance Organizers, M.E.Ch.A. _{and Yakima Valley Community College Tiin- Ma. She also allied with EWU Pride, EWU Black Student Union, and Spokane’s Peace and Justice League. Sherwood is currently a research intern at the Center of World Indigenous Studies where she is Co-researcher on the Radiation Risk Assessment Action Project with Rudolph Rÿser, PhD. During her time with CWIS her focus is on social analysis and community organizing. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35381-the-indigenous-world-under-a-nuclear-cloud; AB
Millions of indigenous peoples living in Fourth World territories around the world have been and continue to be exposed to nuclear radiation and toxic chemicals. The United States of America, France, Britain, Russia, China, Israel, Britain, Pakistan, India, and North Korea produce these toxic materials. Other countries with electricity-producing nuclear reactors also contribute to radioactive waste. Nuclear bomb detonations, radioactive waste storage sites and toxic chemical dumps have contaminated the soils, water, air, plants, animals and people for more than 70 years. In their wake they leave intergenerational health and cultural damage to Fourth World peoples rarely noticed by the public eye. The story of this generational disaster begins with the US government's secret Manhattan Project when in 1943-45 the first nuclear bomb code-named Trinity was developed and tested in Mescalero Apache territory at Alamogordo, New Mexico. After dropping a bomb on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in 1945 the United States constructed what became the most radioactively contaminated site in the world at Hanford, Washington. Hanford plutonium reactors were constructed in the Confederated Tribes of the Yakama territory. In 1950 the Midnite Uranium Mine was opened on the Spokane Indian Reservation; the neighboring Fourth World nations (Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Nez Perce, Umatilla and Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Reservation) bound to them by the mining project's radioactive reach. The First Nuclear Cloud The United States did not seek public opinions or debate about government plans to create the world's first nuclear weapons. The secretive Manhattan Project was launched to develop an atomic bomb. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, (a Republican serving under President Harry S. Truman) commissioned Hanford in 1943 to produce the extremely radioactive plutonium for the US government. Classified government research projects were first located at three public universities (Columbia University, University of Chicago, and University of California at Berkeley). Three custom-built facilities were constructed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Los Alamos, New Mexico and Hanford, Washington. In total, over 2 billion dollars ($17.7 billion in 2015 USD) was spent on nuclear war research and development. The estimated cost to the current and intergenerational health of peoples, lands, culture and waterways, however, is still unknown. Human industry has many good and important qualities. Most human industry helps the quality of life. But, almost any and all human activity produces a byproduct -- waste -- that can damage the livability of human society. Human industrial waste does not generally concern communities when there is a working waste disposal program. Organized disposal takes unwanted leftovers to a disposal site and safely buries or incinerates it. But, what if the waste created in one place is then taken to your backyard and buried without anyone asking for your consent? And, what if that buried waste becomes lethal to life? What if it contaminates soil, plants, animals and people? Contaminating waste becomes a big problem. That is precisely what happened to the Yakama Nation along with 1.9 million non-tribal people in the Columbia River region. Since the US began uranium mining on the Spokane Reservation and bomb making in Yakama ceded territory it has created the most radioactively contaminated region in the world. With the construction and later decommissioning of nuclear power plants the disposal of spent radioactive fuel rods has added to the radioactive waste. The Hanford Nuclear waste site that receives radioactive materials from around the US and from some countries stores waste near the banks of the Columbia River. This places the peoples of Yakama and those living on the Yakama and Columbia Rivers in a state of indefinite danger. The Spokane Indian Tribe has the 350-acre Midnite Uranium Mine located inside its territory. The mine was originally opened in 1950 and is now closed See Columbia River Basin Radiation Sites above. The Midnite Mine was opened to support the U.S. nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. It is now the site of 35 million tons of radioactive waste rock and uranium ore. According to Spokesman Review reporter Becky Kramer the dormant Midnite Mine will require at least a decade to "clean up." The managing company Newmont and its subsidiary Dawn Mining have the contract to perform the clean up at a cost of $193 million. Wastewater (monitored for radioactivity) is being discharged into the Spokane River that in turn, feeds into the Columbia River. The Yakama nation reserved territory and ceded territory hugs the middle of the Columbia River. This is where Hanford's engineers dumped 400,000 gallons of radioactive water and buried radioactive waste underground. Yakama's governing Council is concerned with the effects of Hanford on its reserved 2,031 square mile territory as well as the ceded territory. The Yakama government regards locating the contaminated Hanford site in their territory as a violation of the Yakama/US Treaty of 1855. The Yakama has 10,851 members and another 20,000 residents. Its territory is larger than the states of Rhode Island or Delaware and half the size of Connecticut. The United States government without the consent of Yakama's government created the Hanford plutonium reactor in an atmosphere of intense secrecy. And then the US made the site a radioactive dump. Risks of Radioactive and Chemical Exposures Faced by Fourth World Peoples Medical, genetic and social researchers have attempted to understand the complex public health effects of exposure to radioactive elements. Researchers conducting human subjects experiments repeatedly conclude that radioactive exposures cause many serious health problems. Various types of cancers, tumors, genetic mutations, congenital malformations, heart failure, gastrointestinal disorders, immunological dysfunction, and infertility are the common results. For Fourth World peoples, these risks overlap the destruction of culture and heritage, natural resources and denial of their human rights. Contaminated plants, water, animals, and soil in the world's nuclear "hot spots" are also the foods, medicines, and sacred places. As with any human society these are central to indigenous religions, cultures, identities, societies, economies, and knowledge bases -- life. Thus, the burden of nuclear contamination essentially destroys these life-supporting resources and amounts to cultural genocide, or culturcide. These consequences are particularly acute on the Spokane Indian Reservation, parts of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and the Yakama. Health Consequences Radioactive substances carry uniquely dangerous characteristics compared to other toxins made by human industry. When nuclear technology was first being developed, researchers quickly discovered that radioactive isotopes had a "super-poisonous" quality. They destroy cells, damage the immune and digestive system, and accelerate aging and death. Radioactive isotopes accumulate in different organs of the body, including the lungs, thyroid, or kidneys. There, they trigger growth of cancerous cells. Worse, the consequences are far-reaching: they cause trans-generational harm through genetic alteration. Anyone exposed to the fallout of nuclear accidents, waste disposal or tests may experience any number of consequences including increased cancer rates, birth defects, severe cognitive disabilities, premature aging and death. Thyroid cancer and leukemia are among the most common cancers associated with radiation exposure. It is also an established cause of cardiovascular disease and solid tumors. However, It is not just high-levels of radiation exposure that are dangerous. As early as 1956, a report commissioned by the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) found that even low-levels of radiation could cause harmful genetic changes in individuals and in entire populations with significant trans-generational results. In a recent major World Health Organization study, scientists pointed to the emissions from nuclear power plants as a specific source of potential increased cancer risk -- particularly from disposed spent radioactive fuel rods. Ecological Consequences Nuclear weapons, electrical power reactors and radioactive materials waste disposal results in the contamination of surface and subsurface water and soil with substances such as radioactive plutonium, uranium, strontium and cesium. These materials increase mutations, and they remain harmfully toxic for thousands or even millions of years. Accidents at nuclear power facilities have resulted in decreases in regional animal and plant populations and damaging food sources, water sources and entire ecosystems. Studies conducted around Hanford, Washington revealed that even small concentrations of nuclear waste damaged plants, contaminated soil, and rendered edible crops dangerous to eat. To date, the only containment "solution" is to bury the waste. However, burial is neither safe nor predictable, since there are no successful ways to dispose of waste or remediate contaminated sites. Various amounts of radioactive materials continue to be found in animals, soils, plants, and water near storage and production facilities. Studies suggest that protracted exposure to nuclear waste has resulted in genetic and epigenetic mutations in wildlife. Cultural Consequences The continuity of cultures in nuclear zones is an unstudied topic. The dynamic relationship between a people, earth and the cosmos is dramatically interrupted when the catastrophic introduction of nuclear radiation and toxic chemicals lays waste on a society. Fourth World nations across the globe repeatedly insist that the states responsible for the contamination of their territories have failed to clean up contaminated sites or to prevent further damage. Even where state's government bodies have tried to manage the health risks of radioactive contamination, they have done so in ways that neglect harmful consequences to cultures. Some state's governments use risk avoidance strategies to reduce or prevent damage to people's health. In northwest United States, for example, the US Department of Ecology uses fish consumptions rates to prevent people from eating irradiated fish -- telling the public not to eat high levels of fish to avoid cancer risks. Instead of cleaning up the waste, or preventing its storage in the first place, avoidance warnings ask Fourth World peoples to stop using foods and medicines, even though they are core aspects of their cultures and community. Peoples in the Nuclear Bull's Eye The US government selected lands in the Yakama Nation's territory characterized as "barren." It was an ideal site for the nuclear reactors that would provide easy access to the Columbia River's fresh water. Hanford reactors were built on and used the surrounding land and a 50-mile stretch of the Columbia River to produce war grade materials. In most cases the 50,000 workers at the site did not know they were working to build three nuclear reactors. Just 18 months after breaking ground for the plutonium reactor the US military dropped an atomic bomb on Japan's Nagasaki. The 1985 Nobel Prize for Peace recipient Physicians for Social Responsibility reported that radioactive wastes were buried in the soil and dumped into the Columbia River. High-level waste was stored in single-shell storage tanks while the plutonium reactor was constructed. Hanford reactors refined 60 percent of the plutonium produced by the United States government and eventually closed the reactors down retaining the site for depositing more nuclear waste. The United States continues to add to this deadly mix of radioactive materials and toxic chemicals to this day. The Yakama Nation and her neighboring nations (Spokane, Confederated Tribes of the Colville Indian Reservation, Nez Perce, Umatilla and the Confederated Tribes of the Warms Springs Reservation) are in the reach of the Hanford Nuclear Waste Site and the Midnite Uranium Mine. There are six other highly radioactively contaminated sites in Fourth World nation territories worldwide and many more storing spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants as well as radioactive hospital waste. An estimated total of twenty additional Fourth World territories in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, North America and the Pacific Islands similar to the Yakama, Navajo and Shoshone territories in the US function as sites for the detonation of nuclear bombs, and as storage sites for nuclear waste, and toxic chemicals. The United States government and contracted waste management companies have located up to six hundred radiation and toxic chemical waste sites on Indian reservations leasing their land for that purpose. Locating waste disposal sites in these ways easily resulted from legal loopholes Fourth World territories provide -- as spaces where state and international laws regarding environmental health and nuclear waste can be circumvented or laws are non-existent. The nuclear states (United States, Russia, France, Britain, China, Israel, and India) avoid testing weapons or storing radioactive and toxic waste on their own lands. They rather favor territories with relatively low-density populations and limited internal governmental regulation while generally avoiding obtaining informed consent or authorization from the affected communities. Significantly none of the bomb making and waste producing states considered in advance of developing plutonium reactors for bombs and electrical generation how to dispose of the waste safely. Despite all of the technological capabilities making radioactive materials no similar effort was early on developed to control the adverse effects of waste products on life. Burying radioactive waste with the probability of unanticipated emissions and leaks remains the method for disposing of the deadly materials. Some of the toxic sites resulting from more than 2150 nuclear bomb detonations and radioactive dump sites in Fourth World Territories and the responsible governments depicted on the map above include: The French government detonated thirteen nuclear bombs in Tuareg territory (Algeria) in the 1960s. They released radioactive gases into the atmosphere and spread radioactive molten rocks across the land. These events exposed Tuaregs to high levels of radiation. No study to date has been conducted to determine the effects these exposures may have on the health and intergenerational lives of the Tuareg. Kazakh territory on the steppe in northeastern Kazakhstan was the place for hundreds of atmospheric and underground nuclear tests conducted by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Russian Federation is the successor) in the 1940s. Studies conducted years later determined that more than 200,000 Kazakh's and other local residents were exposed to intense radiation. These exposures resulted in high rates of cancers. No follow-up epidemiological studies have been conducted to assess the intergenerational consequences of radioactive exposures. The Uyghurs, Hui and Tadjiks in China's northwestern Xinjiang province were exposed to atomic radiation in 1964 and thermonuclear detonations in 1968. The People's Republic of China established Uyghur territory as its prime nuclear test site. At least two generations of Uyghurs, Hui and Tadjiks (a population of 10.95 million) may continue to experience the effects of radioactive and toxic waste exposures. The Pakistani government conducted nuclear detonations in 1998 in Baluchi territory at Ras Koh Hills. The Baloch Society of North America and Friends of Balochistan organized protests at the Pakistani Embassy during the detonations to call attention to the "heinous crime committed against our people." The Indian government conducted its first nuclear detonation in 1974 and continued nuclear test in 1998 in Rajastan the territory of Bhil. Britain conducted atmospheric tests in the 1950s in the Maralinga home of the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara. Studies on these peoples were truncated. They did not result in any conclusions about exposure effects on health and genetic changes. The United States of America conducted more than 1100 nuclear detonations in the atmosphere, underground and aboveground (1944-1998) and nuclear waste dumps solely in Fourth World Territories. Marshal Islanders, Paiutes, Shoshone, Kiribati, Yakama, Spokane, Navajo, Mescalero Apache, and Aleutes are among the peoples directly affected by US radiation releases from 1943 to the present. The Taiwan government through the Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) stores 100,000 barrels of high level nuclear waste from the island country's three nuclear power plants. Storage was located at the Lanyu nuclear waste storage facility built in 1982 on the territory of the Tao (also known by the Japanese name as Yami). The Tao are a fishing people who have occupied their island (Ponso no Tao meaning "island of the people" Orchid Island) for at least a thousand years. In 2002 and 2012, there were major protests by the Tao, calling on Taipower to remove the nuclear waste from the island. The Yakama Nation and the Spokane Indian Tribe along the Columbia River host the most radioactively toxic region in the world. The Mescalero Apache are the first Fourth World nation to experience an atomic bomb detonated in their territory. Now many Fourth World nations live in irradiated territories under the nuclear cloud. In the name of "national security" all of the nuclear governments have maintained a policy of deliberately not informing residents of Fourth World territories in advance of nuclear tests. Human subjects experimentation using radioactive materials on native peoples, and siting of nuclear waste dumps go on without consent. No epidemiologic studies been concluded to determine exposure effects on health or cultures. Indeed the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) records predating 1974 documenting tests, human subject experimentations and radiation exposures have mysteriously disappeared. All records from 1974 remain top secret and not available for scrutiny outside the AEC or its successor the US Department of Energy.
AND nuclear environmental racism operates through direct economic racism - entrenches poverty.
Lopez ‘4: Bayley Lopez writes in “Radioactive Reservation: The Uphill Battle to Keep Nuclear Waste off Native American Land,” on Sept 1st, 2004. From the nuclear age peace foundation. https://www.wagingpeace.org/radioactive-reservation-the-uphill-battle-to-keep-nuclear-waste-off-native-american-land/); AB
In the late 1980s, the United States government seemed to make a complete 180 degree turn when it began to support the idea of Native American sovereignty, but the goal was still the same: to place nuclear waste storage sites on Native American lands. The Department of Energy appealed to native tribes to host temporary nuclear storage sites on their land, mostly based on the fact that restrictions placed on such sites are not as strict on reservations because of their sovereign status. In the words of the Grace Thorpe, an activist against the dumping of nuclear waste on native reservations and a member of the Sac and Fox tribe, “The real irony is that after years of trying to destroy it, the United States is promoting Indian national sovereignty — just so they can dump their waste on Native land.” The broken treaties and the confusion injected into the issue of Native American sovereignty are disturbing to be sure. However, the most disturbing aspect of United States nuclear waste policy is the blatant economic racism this policy exhibits. As a whole, Native Americans are the most poverty stricken ethnic group in the United States. On average, 23 percent of Native American families live in poverty, which is almost double that of the national poverty rate of families at 12 percent. Nuclear utility companies and the United States government take advantage of the overwhelming level of poverty on native reservations by offering them millions of dollars to host nuclear NEsites. No matter how pretty a picture the government paints about their “benevolent” efforts to improve the economic development of the reservations, this policy is virtually a bribe to try to coerce Native tribes into taking nuclear waste out of the hands of the government. An example of this occurred in 1989; Waste Tech Incorporated approached a small Navajo community with an offer to provide 175 jobs, a hospital, and a minimum of $100,000. In exchange, the community would allow Waste Tech to put a toxic waste incinerator and a dump to bury the dangerous toxic ash on their land. At the time, the tribe had a 72 percent unemployment rate. The tribe was targeted by this company because of their poor economic condition. The government itself has almost exactly copied this tactic and solicited Native American tribes with a reservation to host a waste site. Yucca Mountain is just one more example to add to the list of the United States government’s existing nuclear waste policies that are transparently racist, violate long-standing Native American treaty rights and disregard Native American sovereignty or use it for their own ends. Millions of dollars are being spent to bribe a minority portion of the population to take stewardship of the majority’s nuclear waste. Is this the best method the United States government can devise to deal with the issue of nuclear waste? Or is it just the simplest option available to the government with the least public visibility? With the billions of dollars spent each year on nuclear weapons and power plants, wouldn’t a more feasible option be to, first and foremost, stop producing new nuclear waste and redirect some of this money to solving the ever growing problem of nuclear waste? Since its formation, the United States government has subjugated and subdued Native Americans, and it is time to reverse this trend, beginning with the government’s policies on nuclear waste.
AND it’s not just Natives - the nuclear industry exploits the labor of poor communities and workers – uses false safety data and no compensation to trick them into life-threatening nuclear work the privileged would not take themselves.
Alldred and Shrader-Frechette ‘9: Mary Alldred and Kristin Shrader-Frechette write in “Environmental Injustice in Siting Nuclear Plants, Volume 2, Number 2, 2009. Kristin Shrader-Frechette writes in “Five Myths About Nuclear Energy” for America magazine on June 23rd, 2008. Kristin Shrader-Frechette teaches biological sciences and philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Her latest book, Taking Action, Saving Lives: Our Duties to Protect Environmental and Public Health (Oxford University Press, 2007), has been nominated for a National Book Award. Mary Alldred: Education Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY PhD Program, Department of Ecology and Evolution, August 2008-Current Advisor: Dr. Stephen Baines, sbaines@ms.cc.sunysb.edu University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN Magna Cum Laude, Bachelor of Sciences, Biology, August 2004-May 2008 Publications and Reports Alldred, Mary. 2011. “Effects of Wetland Plants on Denitrification Rates: A Meta-Analysis.” (In prep). Alldred, Mary and Stephen Baines. 2011. “Interactions between Invasive Species Removal and Nitrogen-Removal Ecosystem Services in Freshwater Tidal Marshes.” Final Reports of the Tibor T. Polgar Fellowship Program, 2010. Hudson River Foundation. New York, NY. (In press). Alldred, Mary and Kristin Shrader-Frechette. 2009. “Environmental Injustice in Siting Nuclear Plants.” Environmental Justice 2 (2): 85-96. Alldred, Mary. October 2007. “Alligator Management Policies in Temple Terrace, FL: A Preliminary Analysis.” Report Prepared for Temple Terrace, FL City Council. Presentations Stony Brook University Department of Ecology and Evolution Retreat, 26 March 2011 Oral Presentation, “Effects of Wetland Plant Communities on Denitrification Rates: A Meta-Analysis.” Brookhaven National Laboratory, 19 November 2010 Oral Presentation, “Using Plant Traits to Predict Denitrification in Wetland Ecosystems.” Final Report to the Hudson River Foundation, 27 August 2010 Oral Presentation, “Interactions between Invasive Species Removal and Nitrogen Removal Ecosystem Services in Freshwater Tidal Marshes.” American Society of Limnology and Oceanography Meeting, 6 June 2010 Oral Presentation, “Effects of Wetland Plant Communities on Denitrification Rates: A Meta-Analysis.” Undergraduate Research Symposium, 4 October 2007 Oral Presentation, “The Effects of Agricultural Run-Off on Macroinvertebrate Communities in Irrigation Ditch and Natural Stream Ecosystems.”http:www3.nd.edu/kshrader/pubs/final-pdf-ej-nuke-siting-wi-Alldred_08-0544.pdf; AB
These damages include inadequate compensation for radiation-induced disease among native miners, no permanent closure/decontamination of hundreds of uranium-mining/ processing sites that continue to expose native peoples, and no ongoing medical studies of the health status of Native Americans affected by uranium mining.15 In stages (2)–(5) of the nuclear fuel cycle, tens of millions of radiation workers, including nearly two million in the United States, 16 also have faced EIJ. US nuclear-facility owners legally may expose workers to annual radiation doses up to 50 times higher than those allowed for members of the public,17 although there is no safe dose of ionizing radiation.7 Yet radiation workers typically receive no hazard pay or compensating wage differential.3 Often they also do not voluntarily accept dangerous nuclear jobs but take them because of economic necessity,3 because government falsification of worker radiation doses has mislead them,18,19 or because flawed radiation standards, flawed risk disclosure, and flawed workplace-radiation monitoring cause them to underestimate risks.20 Yet the risks are substantial. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) shows roughly 1 additional fatal cancer each time 60 people are exposed to the maximum-allowable, annual occupational-radiation dose of 50 mSv.20,21
Nuclear colonialism has evolved into a global neoliberal agenda – feeds the nuclear-state’s lust for nuclear resources
Wittman ‘11: Nora Wittman writes in “The Scramble for Africa’s Nuclear Resources: With the Current Nuclear Pollution in Japan and the Cost Involved in Controlling It, Africa Must Refuse to Tread the Road That Powerful Forces Want It to Take regarding Nuclear Resources and Energy. This Path Would Not Only Lead to Pollution of the Continent, but Also Create Huge Long-Term Financial Costs, Reports Nora Wittman” on June 2011 for the New African. https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-259792276/the-scramble-for-africa-s-nuclear-resources-with; AB
THE CURRENT NUCLEAR POLLUTION in Japan and the reactions of politicians and governments throughout Europe, the USA and Asia, even in the eye of disaster, indicate that they will never stop using nuclear power for military means and domestic energy generation and supply. ILLUSTRATION OMITTED As Japan was battling to control pollution from its Fukushima nuclear plant, destroyed by the massive earthquake that hit the region on II March, French President Nicolas Sarkozy was firmly pronouncing that a withdrawal from nuclear energy was totally out of question for France and will not happen--80 of domestic energy in France comes from nuclear plants. A few hours later, EU ministers deemed it sufficient to submit European nuclear power reactors to a so-called "stress test", and even then only on a voluntary basis. Apparently, the nuclear industry and their party allies throughout the political spectrum have been for a long time in a tight marriage that is far too beneficial for them to split. Africa is currently the continent where nuclear power plants are least present. Only one such plant is present in South Africa, imposed by the apartheid regime in the 1970s. It is located in Koeberg, 30km north of Cape Town, yet surrounded by the city's ever-spreading suburbs, and was built by a French company. Like most nuclear power plants, it has experienced serious problems and its reactors have had to be shut down several times, especially since 2005. Of course, the idea is not totally unconceivable that there could have been more severe incidents before, and that in apartheid times the white supremacist regime would not have made it a top priority to inform and protect the surrounding African people. In 2010, 91 members of staff were contaminated with Cobalt-58 dust in an incident that was said to be confined to the plant only. In view of these facts and the recent developments, it should be clearer than ever that Africa must not follow the path to ultimate and lasting nuclear destruction that European, North American and Asian leaders seem to be determined to continue to take. Indeed, Africa may not only have the responsibility to save itself from this fate, but may also ultimately have the power to save the world from some of this otherwise pre-programmed nuclear disaster. How? By refusing to let its vast nuclear resources be exploited. South Africa's only nuclear power plant, In Koeberg, 30km north of Cape Town, was imposed by the apartheid regime in the 70s ILLUSTRATION OMITTED The nuclear powers are increasingly experiencing and preparing for problems of supply with the necessary crude nuclear materials such as uranium and plutonium. Even though it is said that countries such as the USA, Russia and China have or rather had vast uranium resources themselves, all of these countries are now very eager to identify, secure and exploit mines for nuclear materials throughout Africa. Africa, the continent endowed with the richest natural resources, has vast nuclear materials in its soil. Almost every African country is currently being mined or examined and prepared for nuclear exploitation. According to a recent report updated in February 2011 by the World Information Service on Energy (WISE), an environmental activist amalgamation based in Amsterdam, China National Nuclear Group, being that country's biggest nuclear power plant builder, signed a deal with the China-Africa Development Fund, a Chinese state-run institution, in 2010 to examine and exploit uranium resources throughout Africa. French, Canadian, British, Swiss, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Australian and other companies are mining uranium, or have signed contracts to do so very soon with Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, DRCongo, Gabon, Malawi, Mali, Chad, South Africa, Tanzania, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Zambia and other African countries. …
Part 3 is Solvency
Plan Text: Countries ought to prohibit the production of nuclear power through the model of phase-out.
WNN ‘16: WNN (World Nuclear News) writes in “Proposal for financing German nuclear phase-out” on 28 April 2016. http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-Proposal-for-financing-German-nuclear-phase-out-2804164.html; AB  
Following the Fukushima accident in March 2011, the government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced the withdrawal of the operating licences of eight German nuclear power plants and revived plans to phase out nuclear power by 2022. The independent commission - the Kommission zur Überprüfung des Kernenergieausstiegs (KFK) - was set up in October 2015 by the German government. Its mandate is to develop recommendations for action, such as ensuring the financing of the decommissioning of the country's reactors and the disposal of radioactive waste can be secured so that the utilities involved are financially able in the long term to fulfill their obligations in the nuclear area. The commission yesterday presented its recommendations to the Ministry of Economics and Energy. The KFK suggests, "The tasks of storing and final disposal of radioactive waste and the necessary funds are transferred to the state as security. For the remaining tasks - in particular the decommissioning and dismantling of the nuclear power plants and the packaging of waste - they and the financial security remain with the company." The commission says the utilities involved - EnBW, EOn, RWE and Vattenfall - should pay EUR4.7 billion to the state to secure the financing of interim storage, the production of repository containers for waste from reprocessing and the transport from the interim storage facility to the final repository. The companies will become entirely liable for carrying out these tasks. The commission also recommends the utilities pay EUR12.4 billion to the state fund to finance the selection, construction, operation and decommissioning of a radioactive waste repository. The companies should also pay a "risk premium" of around 35 to close the gap between provisions and costs, the KFK said. This brings the total amount expected from the utilities to EUR23.3 billion. It says the payments could be made in stages over the next few years. The commission also recommended that shut down reactors are dismantled as soon as possible, rather than sealed for several years to allow the radioactivity to reduce naturally. It called for the government to make the process for obtaining decommissioning permits faster and more efficient. Presenting its recommendations, the commission said, "The proposed combination of securing action and financial obligations establishes the basis for a new disposal consensus. This consensus represents a gain of security for the companies and society. It represents an opportunity to end the dispute over the use of nuclear energy for good." The Ministry of Economics and Energy said it will now examine the KFK's recommendations and consult with other government departments on actions that should be taken to implement the recommendations. Industry response "We welcome that there has been an open and constructive dialogue with the nuclear commission and the companies concerned about the commercial and regulatory framework for the German nuclear phase-out," said Vattenfall senior vice president for markets Stefan Dohler. "The proposals of the KFK appear to the four affected energy companies - and thus also in our view - in principle to be a feasible way to organize and finance the nuclear power phase-out." He said, however, the so-called risk premium is "disproportionate to the economic strength of the affected utilities".
Existence of nuclear motivations and energy directly inhibits the development of renewable; movement away from nuclear power causes a paradigm shift in policymakers and the energy industry toward renewables.
Diesendorf ‘16: Mark Diesendorf writes in “Renewable energy versus nuclear: dispelling the myths” on May 31st 2016 for EnergyPost UK. Mark Diesendorf is an Australian academic and environmentalist, known for his work in sustainable development and renewable energy. He currently teaches environmental studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Education: University of Sydney, University of New South Wales. http://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothing-renewables-cant-better/; AB
Don’t believe the spurious claims of nuclear shills constantly putting down renewables, writes Mark Diesendorf, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at UNSW Australia. Clean, safe renewable energy technologies have the potential to supply 100 of the world’s electricity demand – but the first hurdle is to refute the deliberately misleading myths designed to promote the politically powerful but ultimately doomed nuclear industry. Courtesy The Ecologist. Nuclear energy and renewable energy are the principal competitors for low-carbon electricity in many countries. As renewable energy technologies have grown in volume and investment, and become much cheaper, nuclear proponents and deniers of climate science have become deniers of renewable energy. The strategies and tactics of renewable energy deniers are very similar to those of climate science deniers. To create uncertainty about the ability of renewable energy to power an industrial society, they bombard decision-makers and the media with negative myths about renewable energy and positive myths about nuclear energy, attempting to turn these myths into conventional wisdom. In responding to the climate crisis, few countries have the economic resources to expand investment substantially in both nuclear and renewable energy. This is demonstrated in 2016 by the UK government, which is offering huge long-term subsidies to nuclear while severely cutting existing short-term subsidies to renewable energy. This article, a sequel to one busting the myth that we need base-load power stations such as nuclear or coal, examines critically some of the other myths about nuclear energy and renewable energy. It offers a resource for those who wish to question these myths. The myths discussed here have been drawn from comments by nuclear proponents and renewable energy opponents in the media, articles, blogs and on-line comments.
Renewable growth is HUGE – nuclear is left in the dust
Romm ‘16: Dr. Joseph J. Romm writes in “Nuclear Power Advocates Claim Cheap Renewable Energy is a Bad Thing” on July 28th 2016. Romm holds a Ph.D. in physics from M.I.T. and researched his thesis on physical oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. More information on him can be found in his Wikipedia entry. Dr. Joe Romm is Founding Editor of Climate Progress, “the indispensable blog,” as NY Times columnist Tom Friedman describes it. In March 2009, Rolling Stone also named him one of “The 100 People Who Are Changing America.” BRACKETED FOR GRAMMAR https://thinkprogress.org/nuclear-power-advocates-claim-cheap-renewable-energy-is-a-bad-thing-a20e065d99e6#.h6xh60sfv; AB
The transition to a carbon-free grid has begun and is unstoppable Most people, including most opinion-makers and journalists covering energy and the environment, are not up-to-date on the “miraculous” and game-changing revolutions that have occurred just in the last couple of years with such core enabling climate solutions as solar power, wind power, LED lighting, and batteries, and electric vehicles. That’s why I launched my ongoing series “Almost Everything You Know About Climate Change Solutions Is Outdated.” As I wrote last week: If it surprises you that U.S. solar has jumped 100-fold in the last decade — and prices are now under 4 cents per kilowatt-hour — you should read this post. I’m not going to repeat everything I’ve already written on this, especially since Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) has repeatedly made the same point, as has the International Energy Agency (IEA), as has Goldman Sachs. But I haven’t written much about Goldman Sachs’ findings yet, so here’s their core conclusion from their new July 20 report, “The Low Carbon Economy: Our Thesis In 60 CHARTS” (emphasis in original): In a debate that is often dominated by strong views on what should or could happen in the future, we let the numbers speak for themselves. In our eyes, a relatively clear picture is emerging from the data: Select low carbon technologies are rapidly taking market share in a number of sectors and are changing the way that energy is generated, stored and consumed across the global economy. These technologies are now at a scale and growing at a pace that they deliver carbon emission savings at the gigatonne scale, but they are also transforming the competitive dynamics in industries like lighting, power generation and autos. Renewables, efficiency, and electrification of transport have emerged as the big winners in the race to find the most affordable, scalable, carbon-free sources for power generation and travel. Many core technologies are growing exponentially while cost and performance steadily improve. Here is what Goldman Sachs expects to happen just over the next decade: The result of this revolution, they conclude, is that “On our wind and solar numbers, emissions in IEA scenarios could peak as early as c.2020, rather than 2030.” Again, you’d never know any of this big picture once-in-a-century transformation from reading the New York Times, which just continues to write article after article that misses the forest for the trees. Yes, it is true that this revolution is happening so fast that it is “transforming the competitive dynamics in industries like lighting, power generation and autos,” as Goldman Sachs noted. And that means there will be dislocations. For instance, the clean energy revolution means other low-carbon or zero-carbon technologies that haven’t reached the point of exponential growth — and that are not experiencing learning curve improvements in cost and performance — are very likely to fall further and further behind. That is where nuclear power finds itself. As do hydrogen fuel cell cars. It also means that the electric grid in particular will go through some growing pains as it starts to integrate renewables at a faster pace than anybody thought possible just a few years ago. The Times, bizarrely, has chosen to publish article after article over-emphasizing and indeed exaggerating those growing pains, while projecting a future for nuclear power that currently doesn’t exist.
AND renewables provide a form of energy which empowers Native culture
Burger ‘13: Andrew Burger writes in “Native Americans, Renewable Energy and Environmental Injustice” for Triplepundit on Monday Aug 19th 2013. “An independent journalist, researcher and writer, my work roams across the nexus where ecology, technology, political economy and sociology intersect and overlap. The lifelong quest for knowledge of the world and self -- not to mention gainful employment -- has led me near and far afield, from Europe, across the Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa and back home to the Americas. LinkedIn: andrew burger Google+: Andrew B Email: huginn.muggin@gmail.com” http://www.triplepundit.com/special/skeo-environmental-justice/native-americans-renewable-energy-environmental-justice/; AB
Renewable energy – low-tech or high, large-scale or small – harnesses the natural forces upon which much of traditional Native American culture revolves, Henry Red Cloud, a pioneering Native American renewable energy advocate and entrepreneur, points out. Akin to solar, wind, hydro, biomass and geothermal energy, “Our language, our song, our cultural traditions are based on the Sun, the winds, the Earth and its waters,” Red Cloud, a descendant of Lakota-Northern Cheyenne chiefs and founder of Lakota Solar Enterprises, told 3p in an interview. The recent history of energy, economic and social development on indigenous American tribal lands is a checkered one, however. Booming urban and suburban development and population growth across the American West, not to mention agricultural production and economic expansion, wouldn’t have been possible without the water, energy and mineral resources that have been developed on Native American lands. Too often, what’s been left behind for tribal communities to deal with have been unfulfilled promises of equitably distributed income, wealth, community development and employment opportunities, along with the necessity of shouldering long-term, unaccounted for social and environmental costs: polluted air, diminished and degraded water resources, and contaminated lands.
Underview: Kritiks
Kritiks that don’t engage in concrete policy further entrench oppression.
Bryant ‘12: (Levi Bryant, professor of philosophy at Collins college, Critique of the Academic Left, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/); AB
The problem as I see it is that this is the worst sort of abstraction (in the Marxist sense) and wishful thinking. Within a Marxo-Hegelian context, a thought is abstract when it ignores all of the mediations in which a thing is embedded. For example, I understand a robust tree abstractly when I attribute its robustness, say, to its genetics alone, ignoring the complex relations to its soil, the air, sunshine, rainfall, etc., that also allowed it to grow robustly in this way. This is the sort of critique we’re always leveling against the neoliberals. They are abstract thinkers. In their doxa that individuals are entirely responsible for themselves and that they completely make themselves by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, neoliberals ignore all the mediations belonging to the social and material context in which human beings develop that play a role in determining the vectors of their life. They ignore, for example, that George W. Bush grew up in a family that was highly connected to the world of business and government and that this gave him opportunities that someone living in a remote region of Alaska in a very different material infrastructure and set of family relations does not have. To think concretely is to engage in a cartography of these mediations, a mapping of these networks, from circumstance to circumstance (what I call an “onto-cartography”). It is to map assemblages, networks, or ecologies in the constitution of entities. Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park: The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work: Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows: Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing? But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done! But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures  and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc. What are your proposals? How will you meet these problems? How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization. Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri and Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement). At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists. We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical paradigm, Laruelle. I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound. How would he provide for the energy needs of that school? How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound way? How would she provide food for the students? What would be her plan for waste disposal? And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature, the federal government, and all the families of these students? What is your plan? What is your alternative? I think there are alternatives. I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam. If you want to make a truly revolutionary contribution, this is where you should start. Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you aren’t proposing real plans? But we haven’t even gotten to that point. Instead we’re like underpants gnomes, saying “revolution is the answer!” without addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would concretely go about building those alternatives. Masturbation. “Underpants gnome” deserves to be a category in critical theory; a sort of synonym for self-congratulatory masturbation. We need less critique not because critique isn’t important or necessary– it is –but because we know the critiques, we know the problems. We’re intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe. We best every opponent with critique. We occupy a position of moral superiority with critique. But do we really do anything with critique? What we need today, more than ever, is composition or carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong. Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them. Even the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory. None of us, however, are proposing alternatives. Instead we prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that.
Particularism is key – root-cause claims ignore specific instances of oppression, which generalizes oppression and destroys our understanding of it – yes the state sucks but the question is where and when and how do we solve it.
Pappas ‘16: Gregory Fernando Pappas writes in “The Pragmatists’ Approach to Injustice.” From the Pluralist Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2016. Ph.D., Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin, 1990 Research Interests: Pragmatism (Dewey, James), Ethics, Latin American Philosophy, Philosophy of Technology, Socio-Political Theory Current Course Schedule PHIL 205-500. Tech and Human Values. TR 9:35-10:50. YMCA 109. PHIL 415-500. American Philosophy. TR 12:45-2:00. YMCA 115. Office Hours: TR 12:00-1:00 and by appointment Pappas works within the American Pragmatist and Latin American traditions in ethics and social-political philosophy. He is the author of numerous articles on the philosophy of William James and John Dewey. His most recent publication is the book with Fordham University Press titled Pragmatism in the Americas, a work on the philosophical connections between American Pragmatism and Latin American Philosophy. He is the author of "John Dewey's Ethics: Democracy as Experience", the first comprehensive interpretation of Dewey's ethics. He has been the recipient of a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, the William James and the Latin American Thought prizes by the American Philosophical Association, and the Mellow Prize by the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. Dr. Pappas is the editor-in-chief of The Inter-American Journal of Philosophy, the first online journal devoted to inter-American philosophy with an inter-American editorial board that includes prominent philosophers from the Americas. He is a Fulbright scholar '12-'13 in Argentina. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/612551; AB
The pragmatists’ approach should be distinguished from nonideal theories whose starting point seems to be the injustices of society at large that have a history and persist through time, where the task of political philosophy is to detect and diagnose the presence of these historical injustices in particular situations of injustice. For example, critical theory today has inherited an approach to social philosophy characteristic of the European tradition that goes back to Rousseau, Marx, Weber, Freud, Marcuse, and others. Accord- ing to Roberto Frega, this tradition takes society to be “intrinsically sick” with a malaise that requires adopting a critical historical stance in order to understand how the systematic sickness affects present social situations. In other words, this approach assumes that¶ a philosophical critique of specific social situations can be accomplished only under the assumption of a broader and full blown critique of soci- ety in its entirety: as a critique of capitalism, of modernity, of western civilization, of rationality itself. The idea of social pathology becomes intelligible only against the background of a philosophy of history or of an anthropology of decline, according to which the distortions of actual social life are but the inevitable consequence of longstanding historical processes. (“Between Pragmatism and Critical Theory” 63)¶ However, this particular approach to injustice is not limited to critical theory. It is present in those Latin American and African American political philosophies that have used and transformed the critical intellectual tools of ¶ critical theory to deal with the problems of injustice in the Americas. For instance, Charles W. Mills claims that the starting point and alternative to the abstractions of ideal theory that masked injustices is to diagnose and rectify a history of an illness—the legacy of white supremacy in our actual society.11 The critical task of revealing this illness is achieved by adopting a historical perspective where the injustices of today are part of a larger historical narrative about the development of modern societies that goes back to how Europeans have progressively dehumanized or subordinated others. Similary, radical feminists as well as Third World scholars, as reaction to the hege- monic Eurocentric paradigms that disguise injustices under the assumption of a universal or objective point of view, have stressed how our knowledge is always situated. This may seem congenial with pragmatism except the locus of the knower and of injustices is often described as power structures located in “global hierarchies” and a “world-system” and not situations.12¶ Pragmatism only questions that we live in History or a “World-System” (as a totality or abstract context) but not that we are in history (lowercase): in a present situation continuous with others where the past weighs heavily in our memories, bodies, habits, structures, and communities. It also does not deny the importance of power structures and seeing the connections be- tween injustices through time, but there is a difference between (a) inquiring into present situations of injustice in order to detect, diagnose, and cure an injustice (a social pathology) across history, and (b) inquiring into the his- tory of a systematic injustice in order to facilitate inquiry into the present unique, context-bound injustice. To capture the legacy of the past on present injustices, we must study history but also seek present evidence of the weight of the past on the present injustice.¶ If injustice is an illness, then the pragmatists’ approach takes as its main focus diagnosing and treating the particular present illness, that is, the particular situation-bound injustice and not a global “social pathology” or some single transhistorical source of injustice. The diagnosis of a particular injustice is not always dependent on adopting a broader critical standpoint of society in its entirety, but even when it is, we must be careful to not forget that such standpoints are useful only for understanding the present evil. The concepts and categories “white supremacy” and “colonialism” can be great tools that can be of planetary significance. One could even argue that they pick out much larger areas of people’s lives and injustices than the categories of class and gender, but in spite of their reach and explanatory theoretical value, they are nothing more than tools to make reference to and ameliorate particular injustices experienced (suffered) in the midst of a particular and unique re- lationship in a situation. No doubt many, but not all, problems of injustice are a consequence of being a member of a group in history, but even in these cases, we cannot a priori assume that injustices are homogeneously equal for all members of that group. Why is this important? The possible pluralism and therefore complexity of a problem of injustice does not always stop at the level of being a member of a historical group or even a member of many groups, as insisted on by intersectional analysis. There may be unique cir- cumstances to particular countries, towns, neighborhoods, institutions, and ultimately situations that we must be open to in a context-sensitive inquiry. If an empirical inquiry is committed to capturing and ameliorating all of the harms in situations of injustice in their raw pretheoretical complexity, then this requires that we try to begin with and return to the concrete, particular, and unique experiences of injustice.¶ Pragmatism agrees with Sally Haslanger’s concern about Charles Mills’s view. She writes: “The goal is not just a theory that is historical (v. ahistori- cal), but is sensitive to historical particularity, i.e., that resists grand causal narratives purporting to give an account of how domination has come about and is perpetuated everywhere and at all times” (1). For “the forces that cause and sustain domination vary tremendously context by context, and there isn’t necessarily a single causal explanation; a theoretical framework that is useful as a basis for political intervention must be highly sensitive to the details of the particular social context” (1).13¶ Although each situation is unique, there are commonalities among the cases that permit inquiry about common causes. We can “formulate tentative general principles from investigation of similar individual cases, and then . . . check the generalizations by applying them to still further cases” (Dewey, Lectures in China 53). But Dewey insists that the focus should be on the indi- vidual case, and was critical of how so many sociopolitical theories are prone to starting and remaining at the level of “sweeping generalizations.” He states that they “fail to focus on the concrete problems which arise in experience, allowing such problems to be buried under their sweeping generalizations” (Lectures in China 53).¶ The lesson pragmatism provides for nonideal theory today is that it must be careful to not reify any injustice as some single historical force for which particular injustice problems are its manifestation or evidence for its exis- tence. Pragmatism welcomes the wisdom and resources of nonideal theories that are historically grounded on actual injustices, but it issues a warning about how they should be understood and implemented. It is, for example, sympathetic to the critical resources found in critical race theory, but with an important qualification. It understands Derrick Bell’s valuable criticism as context-specific to patterns in the practice of American law. Through his inquiry into particular cases and civil rights policies at a particular time and place, Bell learned and proposed certain general principles such as the one of “interest convergence,” that is, “whites will promote racial advantages for blacks only when they also promote white self-interest.”14 But, for pragma- tism, these principles are nothing more than historically grounded tools to use in present problematic situations that call for our analysis, such as deliberation in establishing public policies or making sense of some concrete injustice. The principles are falsifiable and open to revision as we face situation-specific injustices. In testing their adequacy, we need to consider their function in making us see aspects of injustices we would not otherwise appreciate.15}

The only way to reject oppression is through BOTH ideological and material action in specific instances – inaction or theoretical objection alone legitimizes oppression.
Pappas ‘16: Gregory Fernando Pappas writes in “The Pragmatists’ Approach to Injustice.” From the Pluralist Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2016. Ph.D., Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin, 1990 Research Interests: Pragmatism (Dewey, James), Ethics, Latin American Philosophy, Philosophy of Technology, Socio-Political Theory Current Course Schedule PHIL 205-500. Tech and Human Values. TR 9:35-10:50. YMCA 109. PHIL 415-500. American Philosophy. TR 12:45-2:00. YMCA 115. Office Hours: TR 12:00-1:00 and by appointment Pappas works within the American Pragmatist and Latin American traditions in ethics and social-political philosophy. He is the author of numerous articles on the philosophy of William James and John Dewey. His most recent publication is the book with Fordham University Press titled Pragmatism in the Americas, a work on the philosophical connections between American Pragmatism and Latin American Philosophy. He is the author of "John Dewey's Ethics: Democracy as Experience", the first comprehensive interpretation of Dewey's ethics. He has been the recipient of a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, the William James and the Latin American Thought prizes by the American Philosophical Association, and the Mellow Prize by the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. Dr. Pappas is the editor-in-chief of The Inter-American Journal of Philosophy, the first online journal devoted to inter-American philosophy with an inter-American editorial board that includes prominent philosophers from the Americas. He is a Fulbright scholar '12-'13 in Argentina. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/612551; AB
In Experience and Nature, Dewey names the empirical way of doing philosophy the “denotative method” (LW 1:371).18 What Dewey means by “denotation” is simply the phase of an empirical inquiry where we are con- cerned with designating, as free from theoretical presuppositions as possible, the concrete problem (subject matter) for which we can provide different and even competing descriptions and theories. Thus an empirical inquiry about an injustice must begin with a rough and tentative designation of where the injustices from within the broader context of our everyday life and activities are. Once we designate the subject matter, we then engage in the inquiry itself, including diagnosis, possibly even constructing theories and developing concepts. Of course, that is not the end of the inquiry. We must then take the results of that inquiry “as a path pointing and leading back to something in primary experience” (LW 1:17). This looping back is essential, and it neverends as long as there are new experiences of injustice that may require a revi- sion of our theories.¶ Injustices are events suffered by concrete people at a particular time and in a situation. We need to start by pointing out and describing these prob- lematic experiences instead of starting with a theoretical account or diagnosis of them. Dewey is concerned with the consequences of not following the methodological advice to distinguish designation from diagnosis. Definitions, theoretical criteria, and diagnosis can be useful; they have their proper place and function once inquiry is on its way, but if stressed too much at the start of inquiry, they can blind us to aspects of concrete problems that escape our theoretical lenses. We must attempt to pretheoretically designate the subject matter, that is, to “point” in a certain direction, even with a vague or crude description of the problem. But, for philosophers, this task is not easy because, for instance, we are often too prone to interpret the particular problem in a way that verifies our most cherished theories of injustice. One must be careful to designate the subject matter in such a way as not to slant the question in favor of one’s theory or theoretical preconceptions. A philosopher must make an honest effort to designate the injustices based on what is experienced as such because a concrete social problem (e.g., injustice) is independent and neutral with respect to the different possible competing diagnoses or theories about its causes. Otherwise, there is no way to test or adjudicate between competing accounts.¶ That designation precedes diagnosis is true of any inquiry that claims to be empirical. To start with the diagnosis is to not start with the problem. The problem is pretheoretical or preinquiry, not in any mysterious sense but in that it is first suffered by someone in a particular context. Otherwise, the diagnosis about the causes of the problem has nothing to be about, and the inquiry cannot even be initiated. In his Logic, Dewey lays out the pattern of all empirical inquiries (LW 12). All inquiries start with what he calls an “indeterminate situation,” prior even to a “problematic situation.” Here is a sketch of the process:¶ Indeterminate situation → problematic situation → diagnosis: What is the problem? What is the solution? (operations of analysis, ideas, observations, clarification, formulating and testing hypothesis, reasoning, etc.) → final judgment (resolution: determinate situation)¶ To make more clear or vivid the difference of the starting point between Anderson and Dewey, we can use the example (or analogy) of medical prac- tice, one that they both use to make their points.19 The doctor’s starting point is the experience of a particular illness of a particular patient, that is, the concrete and unique embodied patient experiencing a disruption or prob- lematic change in his life. “The patient having something the matter with him is antecedent; but being ill (having the experience of illness) is not the same as being an object of knowledge.”20 The problem becomes an object of knowledge once the doctor engages in a certain interaction with the patient, analysis, and testing that leads to a diagnosis. For Dewey, “diagnosis” occurs when the doctor is already engaged in operations of experimental observation in which he is already narrowing the field of relevant evidence, concerned with the correlation between the nature of the problem and possible solu- tions. Dewey explains the process: “A physician . . . is called by a patient. His original material of experience is thereby provided. This experienced object sets the problem of inquiry. . . . He calls upon his store of knowledge to sug- gest ideas that may aid him in reaching a judgment as to the nature of the trouble and its proper treatment.”21¶ Just as with the doctor, empirical inquirers about injustice must return to the concrete problem for testing, and should never forget that their con- ceptual abstractions and general knowledge are just means to ameliorate what is particular, context-bound, and unique. In reaching a diagnosis, the doc- tor, of course, relies on all of his background knowledge about diseases and evidence, but a good doctor never forgets the individuality of the particular problem (patient and illness).¶ The physician in diagnosing a case of disease deals with something in- dividualized. He draws upon a store of general principles of physiology, etc., already at his command. Without this store of conceptual material he is helpless. But he does not attempt to reduce the case to an exact specimen of certain laws of physiology and pathology, or do away with its unique individuality. Rather he uses general statements as aids to direct his observation of the particular case, so as to discover what it is like. They function as intellectual tools or instrumentalities. (LW 4:166)¶ Dewey uses the example of the doctor to emphasize the radical contex- tualism and particularism of his view. The good doctor never forgets that this patient and “this ill is just the specific ill that it is. It never is an exact duplicate of anything else.”22 Similarly, the empirical philosopher in her in- quiry about an injustice brings forth general knowledge or expertise to an inquiry into the causes of an injustice. She relies on sociology and history as well as knowledge of different forms of injustice, but it is all in the service of inquiry about the singularity of each injustice suffered in a situation.¶ The correction or refinement that I am making to Anderson’s character- ization of the pragmatists’ approach is not a minor terminological or scholarly point; it has methodological and practical consequences in how we approach an injustice. The distinction between the diagnosis and the problem (the ill- ness, the injustice) is an important functional distinction that must be kept in inquiry because it keeps us alert to the provisional and hypothetical aspect of any diagnosis. To rectify or improve any diagnosis, we must return to the concrete problem; as with the patient, this may require attending as much as possible to the uniqueness of the problem. This is in the same spirit as Anderson’s preference for an empirical inquiry that tries to “capture all of the expressive harms” in situations of injustice. But this requires that we begin with and return to concrete experiences of injustice and not by starting with a diagnosis of the causes of injustice provided by studies in the social sciences, as in (5) above. For instance, a diagnosis of causes that are due to systematic, structural features of society or the world disregards aspects of the concrete experiences of injustice that are not systematic and structural.¶ Making problematic situations of injustice our explicit methodological commitment as a starting point rather than a diagnosis of the problem is an important and useful imperative for nonideal theories. It functions as a directive to inquirers toward the problem, to locate it, and designate it before venturing into descriptions, diagnosis, analysis, clarifications, hypotheses, and reasoning about the problem. These operations are instrumental to its ame- lioration and must ultimately return (be tested) by the problem that sparked the inquiry. The directive can make inquirers more attentive to the complex ways in which such differences as race, culture, class, or gender intersect in a problem of injustice. Sensitivity to complexity and difference in matters of injustice is not easy; it is a very demanding methodological prescription because it means that no matter how confident we may feel about applying solutions designed to ameliorate systematic evil, our cures should try to address as much as possible the unique circumstances of each injustice. The analogy with medical inquiry and practice is useful in making this point, since the hope is that someday we will improve our tools of inquiry to prac- tice a much more personalized medicine than we do today, that is, provide a diagnosis and a solution specific to each patient.

No act-omission distinction for states – inaction despite awareness of the problem is a deliberate choice
Sunstein and Vermuele ‘5: Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermuele. The University of Chicago Law School. “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life‐Life Tradeoffs.” JOHN M. OLIN LAW and ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER NO. 239. The Chicago Working Paper Series. March 2005
In our view, both the argument from causation and the argument from intention go wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. Whatever the general status of the act-omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy,38 the distinction is least impressive when applied to government.39 The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything, or refusing to act.40 Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action—for example, private killing—becomes obscure when the government formally forbids private action, but chooses a set of policy instruments that do not adequately or fully discourage it.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x

Part 1 is the Framework

The standard is util.

First, the constitutive obligation of the state is to protect citizen interest – individual obligations are not applicable in the public sphere.

Goodin '95: Robert E. Goodin. Philosopher of Political Theory, Public Policy, and Applied Ethics. Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 1995. p. 26-27 LINK TO THE BOOK: http://www.cambridge.org/lr/academic/subjects/philosophy/political-philosophy/utilitarianism-public-philosophy?format=PB; AB
The great adventure of utilitarianism as a guide to public conduct is that it avoids
AND
thus understood is, I would argue, a uniquely defensible public philosophy.

Second, kritiks that don't engage in concrete policy further entrench oppression.

Bryant '12: (Levi Bryant, professor of philosophy at Collins college, Critique of the Academic Left, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/); AB
The problem as I see it is that this is the worst sort of abstraction
AND
. Instead we prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that.

Third, respect for human dignity justifies util – deont devolves to util.

Cummiskey '90: Cummiskey, David. Associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. "Kantian Consequentiaism." Ethics 100 (April 1990), University of Chicago. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810**
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice
AND
may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others.

Fourth, prioritize existential risks – extinction is irreversible and destroys future value.

Bostrom '12: ~Nick Bostrom. Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School University of Oxford. "Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority." Global Policy (2012)~
These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at existential
AND
than the positive value of the direct benefit of such an action.10

Fifth, death is ontologically the worst evil since it destroys the subject itself.

Paterson '3: Department of Philosophy, Providence College, Rhode Island (Craig, "A Life Not Worth Living?" Studies in Christian Ethics, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1029225)**
Contrary to those accounts, I would argue that it is death per se that
AND
the person, the very source and condition of all human possibility.82 

Part 2 is the Plan.

Text: Countries ought to prohibit the production of nuclear power in Space through phase-out.

Zhang '15: Sarah Zhang writes in "For 50 Years Now, the U.S. has had a Nuclear Reactor Orbiting in Space" for Gizmodo Journalism ~http://gizmodo.com/for-50-years-now-the-u-s-has-had-a-nuclear-reactor-or-1695601513~~; AB
SNAP 10-A was different. SNAP 10-A was actually a functioning
AND
reason why sending nuclear reactors into space is not such a great idea.

And, plan defends whole res – banning nuclear power-plants in space equates to an infinite realm.

Temming '14: Maria Temming writes in "Is the Universe Infinite?" on August 7th, 2014 http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-resources/universe-infinite-big-universe/; AB
We know that the universe is expanding because, with some nearby exceptions, almost
AND
large volume now, it will reach infinite volume in the infinite future.

Part 3 is the Contentions

Contention 1 is Amplified Nuclear Accidents

====A) Stand-alone risks:====

First, countries are increasing their use of nuclear power for space missions.

WNA '16: (World Nuclear Association writes in "Nuclear Reactors and Radioisotopes for Space" on February of 2016; ~http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nuclear-applications/transport/nuclear-reactors-for-space.aspx~~; AB)
After a gap of several years, there is a revival of interest in the
AND
for non-propulsive purposes," including both radioisotope systems and fission reactors.

Second, the production of space-borne nuclear reactors increase nuclear debris congestion– which cause devastating accidents

Viikari '8: Lotta Viikari wrote in "The Environmental Element in Space Law: Assessing the Present and Charting the Future," Title The Environmental Element in Space Law: Assessing the Present and Charting the Future Volume 3 of Studies in Space Law Volume 3 of Studies in space law, 1871-7659 Contributor Lotta Viikari Edition illustrated Publisher Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2008 ISBN 9004167447, 9789004167445 Length 396 pages Subjects Law › Environmental; AB
A problem closely connected with that of space debris is the threat of nuclear contamination
AND
manned space flights. At worst it can even affect the terrestrial environment.

Third, radiation has strong negative health effects.

Warry '11: Richard Warry writes in "QandA: Health effects of radiation exposure" for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on 21 July 2011 in the health section, http://www.bbc.com/news/health-12722435; AB
Exposure to high levels of radiation - above one gray (the standard measure of
AND
at levels far below those that would significantly raise health risks.
 

AND, the natural environment risk of solar flares constantly pose a natural risk to nuclear meltdowns – space is especially vulnerable.

Stein '12: Matthew Stein writes in, "Four Hundred Chernobyls: Solar Flares, Electromagnetic Pulses and Nuclear Armageddon" on Saturday, 24th March 2012 for Truthout in a News Analysis, Matthew Stein is a design engineer, green builder and author of two bestselling books, "When Disaster Strikes: A Comprehensive Guide to Emergency Planning and Crisis Survival" (Chelsea Green 2011), and "When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency" (Chelsea Green 2008). Stein is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he majored in mechanical engineering. Stein has appeared on numerous radio and television programs and is a repeat guest on Fox News, Lionel, Coast-to-Coast AM and the Thom Hartmann Show. He is an active mountain climber, serves as a guide and instructor for blind skiers, has written several articles on the subject of sustainable living and is a guest columnist for The Huffington Post. ~http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/7301-400-chernobyls-solar-flares-electromagnetic-pulses-and-nuclear-armageddon~~; AB 
In the past 152 years, Earth has been struck by roughly 100 solar storms
AND
planet's outer atmosphere and magnetosphere, the result is a significant geomagnetic disturbance.

Contention 2 is Space Infrastructure.

First, nuclear power is running out – the AFF is a smooth transition into alternatives before it's too late.

Mosher '13: Dave Mosher writes in "NASA's Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration" on September 19th, 2013 at 6:30 AM for Wired News Outlet in the Science section. Dave Mosher is a Wired.com contributor and freelance journalist obsessed with space, physics, biology, technology and more. He lives in New York City. ~http://www.wired.com/2013/09/plutonium-238-problem/~~; AB
"We've got enough to last to the end of this decade. That's it
AND
, and any hiccup in a future supply chain could undermine future missions.

Next, satellite space tech is key to space ex.

NASA '14: NASA blog writes in "What is a Satellite?" on February 12th, 2014. NASA is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA Official: Brian Dunbar, Page updated on Sept. 16, 2015 ~http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/nasa-knows/what-is-the-hubble-space-telecope-58.html~~ I DIDN'T BRACKET THE INFORMATION; THAT WAS IN THE TEXT ITSELF; AB
The bird's-eye view that satellites have allows them to see large areas of
AND
can send ~information~ them back down to different locations on Earth.

====But, nuclear terrorism risks are high – it's more real now than ever====
Cirincione '16: Joe Cirincione writes in "Nuclear terrorist threat bigger than you think" on April 1st, 2016 at 5:53 PM ET, Fri, for CNN news outlet ~http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/01/opinions/nuclear-terrorism-threat-cirincione/~~; AB
Nuclear policy experts can seem like Cassandra, constantly prophesizing apocalyptic futures. In case
AND
. And by reducing and better protecting nuclear reactors and spent nuclear fuel.

And, high altitude nuclear plants are EMP terrorism targets – crushes the grid key to Earth life.

Kelly-Detwiler '14: Peter Kelly-Detwiler writes in "Failure to Protect U.S. Against Electromagnetic Pulse Threat Could Make 9/11 Look Trivial Someday" for Forbes news outlet on July 31st, 2014 @9:14 AM; ~http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdetwiler/2014/07/31/protecting-the-u-s-against-the-electromagnetic-pulse-threat-a-continued-failure-of-leadership-could-make-911-look-trivial-someday/~~#52c8d2d87fcd~~; AB
The electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generated by a high altitude nuclear explosion is one
AND
the basic elements necessary to sustain life in dense urban and suburban communities.

Furthermore, the harms are multi-faceted – nuclear EMPs destroy the grid and information tech.

EIS '9: Electric Infrastructural Society writes in "The Catastrophic Effect of an EMP Attack or Severe Solar Storm: Our alarming and needless vulnerability to subcontinent-scale disaster," ~https://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Catastrophic-Effect-of-an-EMP-Attack-or-Severe-Solar-Storm-5-13.pdf~~; AB
Since the first atmospheric nuclear tests fifty years ago, it has been known that
AND
exchange. It was never used because of the threat of massive retaliation. 

Thus, space-borne nuclear EMP shocks would crush space ex efforts.

Viikari '8: Lotta Viikari wrote in "The Environmental Element in Space Law: Assessing the Present and Charting the Future," Title The Environmental Element in Space Law: Assessing the Present and Charting the Future Volume 3 of Studies in Space Law Volume 3 of Studies in space law, 1871-7659 Contributor Lotta Viikari Edition illustrated Publisher Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2008 ISBN 9004167447, 9789004167445 Length 396 pages Subjects Law › Environmental; AB
The threat of nuclear explosions in outer space is particularly serious because with no atmosphere
AND
large tract of land. Some of the refuse found was lethally radioactive. 

Space ex is key to avoid extinction.

Huang '5: Michael Huang writes in "Spaceflight or Extinction," cites Carl Sagan was professor of astronomy and space sciences at Cornell University, cites J. Richard Gott III who is a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University, cites Martin Rees who is a professor of cosmology and astrophysics and Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE ~http://www.spaext.com/~~; AB
Their eventual choice, as ours, is spaceflight or extinction.   Carl Sagan…
AND
that humanity is more at risk than at any earlier phase in history.

Part 4 is Solvency

Without nuclear power, space missions will inevitably turn to solar power satellites– which solves nuclear harms and facilitates space ex.

Billings '15: Lee Billings on writes in "NASA Struggles over Deep-Space Plutonium Power" on September 10th, 2015 for Scientific American ~http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/within-nasa-a-plutonium-power-struggle/~~; AB
Sluggish production of nuclear fuel could make solar power the preferred choice for the agency's
AND
running out of plutonium-238. Because we've stopped making nuclear weapons.

Solar Power Satellites Solves Energy and it can be transmitted anywhere on earth

Betancourt '10: Kiantar Betancourt, '10, August 28, 2010, Space Energy, Space Based Solar Power: Worth the effort? ~http://www.spaceenergy.com/AnnouncementRetrieve.aspx?ID=56407~~; AB
One solar power satellite could provide 1 gigawatt of continuous power, enough to power
AND
SBSP, but no new breakthrough discovery or invention is necessary.~34~ 

Solar satellites boost international space cooperation – facilitates space ex

NSSO '7: ~National Security Space Office, "Space-Based Solar Power as an Opportunity for Strategic Security; Phase 0 Architecture Feasibility Study", http://www.nss.org/settlement/ssp/library/final-sbsp-interim-assessment-release-01.pdf~~; AB
The interim review did not uncover any hard show‐stoppers in the international legal
AND
be given to beginning work on the construction of such a framework immediately. 

AND solar satellites are key to space colonization – deters extinction

Hsu '10: Dr. Feng Hsu, 10, Sr. Vice President Systems Engineering and Risk Management Space Energy Group, Winter 2010, (Online Journal of Space Communication, Harnessing the Sun: Embarking on Humanity's Next Giant Leap, http://spacejournal.ohio.edu/issue16/hsu.html); AB
SPS component technologies will also enable human economic expansion and settlement into space, which
AND
into a sustainable and clean world economy that is solar-electric powered.

Part 5 is the Underview

AFF gets RVIs.

AFF flex – NEG has the ability to collapse to either layer so AFF needs the same ability for the 2AR – this outweighs.
2NR collapse – time skew becomes 6-1 since I cover multiple layers,
AND
they need the RVI to compensate for NEG's unique avenue to the ballot.

Space discussion is constantly excluded from policy discourse.

Hsu and Cox '11: Feng Hsu, Ph.D. NASA GSFC, Sr. Fellow, Aerospace Technology Working Group and Ken Cox, Ph.D. Founder and Director, Aerospace Technology Working Group, March 29, 2009 (An Aerospace Technology Working Group White Paper, Version 2.1.1, Sustainable Space Exploration and Space Development: A Unified Strategic Vision, http://www.spacerenaissance.org/papers/A-UnifiedSpaceVision-Hsu-Cox.pdf; AB 
The Need for a New Vision to Transform America into Spacefaring Nation. There have
AND
with the war in Iraq, raises questions about possible political motives involved.