Tournament: UCLA | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lynbrook YZ | Judge: Eliza Haas
The University is a machine- ruthlessly designed to reproduce relations of social death under the guise of liberation and safe spaces. We’re encoded, fit in to the inscribed notions of being to continue producing symbols and perpetuate capitalism.
Anonymous student 10 (Student protesting in solidarity with UC Berkeley protestors, “The University, Social Death and the Inside Joke” http://anarchistnews.org/content/university-social-death-and-inside-joke) Mana-T
“The university is a machine” the Berkeley kids remind us from behind their fortifications. It “wants to grow, to accumulate, to expand, to absorb more and more of the living into its peculiar and perverse machinery: high-tech research centers, new stadiums and office complexes.”29 It is not limited by design to produce material goods (as a factory is), nor is it defined by those who inhabit it (as a city is). The function of the university was once to produce meaning, to explain and interpret the world. “Today, everything has changed,” Baudrillard writes; “no longer is meaning in short supply, it is produced everywhere, in ever increasing quantities – it is demand which is weakening.”30 Yet the University has accommodated its new function well; to provide a space for the dissemination and valorization of this purpose. “It is the production of the demand for meaning which has become crucial for the system,” the philosopher explains. “Without this demand for, without this susceptibility to, without this minimal participation in meaning, power is nothing but an empty simulacrum and an isolated effect of perspective.”31 One recalls the Anti-Capital Project’s assertion that students “spend money and energy trying to convince ourselves we’re brighter than everyone else.”32 In doing so, they reinforce the hegemony of objective knowledge and all that comes from it. From literature and the humanities, one derives mediated social relations. From mathematics and science, one gets destructive forms of economics and rationality. Most threatening are the social sciences, which reinforce the tyranny of politics; the study, creation and segregation, of ‘the other’. “We are convinced, owned and broken,” say the kids in Berkeley. “We know their values better than they do…”33 We are not just given meaning, we are taught to seek, even demand it. Existential crises once posed a threat to the system. Now, it could not live without them. Obsolescence provides the dynamo for fashion, for the rapid degradation of relationships, the jumps between jobs and homes. We consume more; what was cool five minutes ago now isn’t. We form loose relationships with friends and lovers, based not on any mutual desire but on shared enjoyment of mediated entertainment. We don’t communicate, but we like the same movies or clubs. We somehow ended up fighting for precarious existence, for the right to work a series of entry-level jobs with no benefits and sublet an equally banal series of apartments or homes. Maybe we’ll eventually meet one of our neighbors. Maybe we’ll someday receive a pension. Even as students, we begin to feel the pain of precarity: “the university steals and homogenizes our time yes, our bank accounts also, but it also steals and homogenizes meaning.”34 The University is becoming universalized, because “every moment of student life is the management of our consent to social death.”35 As Baudrillard writes, “it can no longer be said that the social is dying, since it is already the accumulation of death.”36 Elsewhere, he tells us that “the social exists to take care of the useless consumption of remainders so that individuals can be assigned to the useful management of their lives.”37 The University is the ideal social environment, a space for adolescents to encounter each other and develop a passion for knowledge. Yet it also serves as a space for the proliferation of values and meanings, for the facilitation of semiotic consumption that Baudrillard views as being so important to the perpetuation of postmodern capitalism. A city is relatively concentrated space, allowing for bombardment by advertising, culture, media and structured normalcy. Yet it pales in comparison to the intense concentration of bodies facilitated in a University setting. The intense consumption of media and literature, social interactions and entertainment that students undergo means that meaning can easily be diffused. The Berkeley radicals claim the values distributed by their university: “create popular images and ideals while they mean in practice the selling of commodified identities, the state’s monopoly on violence, the expansion of markets and capital accumulation, the rule of property, the rule of exclusions based on race, gender, class and domination and humiliation in general.”38 The University is also the perfect focal point for an economy based on simulation. There, we are taught to question everything; this allows for the constant entropy and reabsorption of signs, ideal for living in what Autonomist theorist Franco Berardi calls ‘semiocapitalism’. In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard tells us that our new economy "conforms to the global usage we have of the surrounding world of reading and selective decoding - we live less as users than as readers and selectors, reading cells.”39 Yet he adds that “by the same token you are yourself constantly selected and tested by the medium itself.” The subject of the hyperreal economy is increasingly analogous to the student; constantly undergoing evaluation, constantly producing and reproducing value. Berardi explains in his work Precarious Rhapsody that “the worker does not exist any more as a person. He is just the interchangeable producer of microfragments of recombinant semiosis which enters into the continuous flux of the network.”40 A precarious worker may have several jobs in a day. They may be paid by performance, graded like a student might be. Increasingly, a society dependent on affective labor is turning every job interview into an audition, an evaluation not just of the education and experience, but also of the social capital of the candidate. Many in the field of cultural studies have commented on the increasing dependence of corporations on the internet, on social networking sites and viral marketing. Others have talked of participatory management schemes, of the conflation between work and play, or on the growing importance of fan and venture labor. Yet a vital conclusion remains to be drawn, in that all these modulations are analogous to emulating ‘the poverty of student life’. Baudrillard tells us that “the school no longer exists because every strand of social process is shot through with discipline and pedagogical training.” 41Modern capitalist enterprise seeks to reappropriate the University as the new model of the semiotic economy. To chart all the processes of indoctrination and exploitation taking place in the modern University would be a mammoth undertaking; Beyond Zombie Politics makes a positive attempt before concluding that “the UC has actively aided and at times even instigated in bringing about social, economic and ecological transformations that far from improving life for the majority, have actually made life more difficult and uncertain. The unsustainable-ness of the UC isn’t an unfortunate and correctable set of shortcomings, no, it is the UC’s single most important contribution to the world.”42 Universities may serve as progressive sites of inquiry in some cases, yet this does not detract from the great deal of military and corporate research, economic planning and, perhaps most importantly, social conditioning occurring within their walls. Furthermore, they serve as intense machines for the concentration of privilege; each university is increasingly staffed by overworked professors and adjuncts, poorly treated maintenance and service staff. This remains only the top of the pyramid, since a hyper educated, stable society along Western lines can only exist by the intense exploitation of labor and resources in the third world. Students are taught to be oblivious to this fact; liberal seminars only serve to obfuscate the fact that they are themselves complicit in the death and destruction waged on a daily basis. They sing the college fight song and wear hooded sweatshirts (in the case of hip liberal arts colleges, flannel serves the same purpose). As the Berkeley rebels observe, “Social death is our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our own lack of meaning.”43 Our conception of the social is as the death of everything sociality entails; it is the failure of communication, the refusal of empathy, the abandonment of autonomy. Baudrillard writes that “The cemetery no longer exists because modern cities have entirely taken over their function: they are ghost towns, cities of death. If the great operational metropolis is the final form of an entire culture, then, quite simply, ours is a culture of death.”44 By attempting to excel in a university setting, we are resigning ourselves to enrolling in what Mark Yudoff so proudly calls a cemetery, a necropolis to rival no other. Yet herein lies the punch line. We are studying in the cemeteries of a nation which has a cultural fetish for things that refuse to stay dead; an absolute fixation with zombies. So perhaps the goal should not be to go “Beyond Zombie Politics” at all. Writes Baudrillard: “The event itself is counter-offensive and comes from a strange source: in every system at its apex, at its point of perfection, it reintroduces negativity and death.”45 The University, by totalizing itself and perfecting its critiques, has spontaneously generated its own antithesis. Some element of sociality refuses to stay within the discourse of the social, the dead; it becomes undead, radically potent. According to Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body, “zombies mark the dead end or zero degree of capitalism’s logic of endless consumption and ever expanding accumulation, precisely because they embody this logic so literally and to such excess.”46 In that sense, they are almost identical to the mass, the silent majorities that Baudrillard describe as the ideal form of resistance to the social: “they know that there is no liberation, and that a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization.”47 Zombies do not constitute a threat at first, they shamble about their environments in an almost comic manner and are easily dispatched by a shotgun blast to the face. Similarly, students emerge from the university in which they have been buried, engaging in random acts of symbolic hyperconsumption and overproduction; perhaps an overly enthusiastic usage of a classroom or cafeteria here and there, or a particularly moving piece of theatrical composition that is easily suppressed. “Disaster is consumed as cheesy spectacle, complete with incompetent reporting, useless information bulletins, and inane attempts at commentary:”48 Shaviro is talking about Night of the Living Dead, but he might as well be referring to the press coverage of the first California occupations. Other students respond with horror to the encroachment of dissidents: “the living characters are concerned less about the prospect of being killed than they are about being swept away by mimesis – of returning to existence, after death, transformed into zombies themselves.”49 Liberal student activists fear the incursions the most, as they are in many ways the most invested in the fate of the contemporary university; in many ways their role is similar to that of the survivalists in Night of the Living Dead, or the military officers in Day. Beyond Zombie Politics claims that defenders of the UC system are promoting a “Zombie Politics”; yet this is difficult to fathom. For they are insistent on saving the University, on staying ‘alive’, even when their version of life has been stripped of all that makes life worth living, when it is as good as social death. Shaviro notes that in many scenes in zombie films, our conceptions of protagonist and antagonist are reversed; in many scenes, human survivors act so repugnantly that we celebrate their infection or demise.50 In reality, “Zombie Politics are something to be championed, because they are the politics of a multitude, an inclusive mass of political subjects, seeking to consume brains. Yet brains must be seen as a metaphor for what Marx calls “the General Intellect”; in his Fragment on Machines, he describes it as “the power of knowledge, objectified.”51 Students and faculty have been alienated from their labor, and, angry and zombie-like, they seek to destroy the means of their alienation. Yet, for Shaviro, “the hardest thing to acknowledge is that the living dead are not radically Other so much as they serve to awaken a passion for otherness and for vertiginous disidentification that is already latent within our own selves.”52 In other words, we have a widespread problem with aspiring to be this other, this powerless mass. We seek a clear protagonist, we cannot avoid associating with those we perceive as ‘still alive’. Yet for Baudrillard, this constitutes a fundamental flaw: "at the very core of the 'rationality' of our culture, however, is an exclusion that precedes every other, more radical than the exclusion of madmen, children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and serving as their model: the exclusion of the dead and of death."53 In Forget Foucault, we learn the sad reality about biopower: that power itself is fundamentally based on the separation and alienation of death from the reality of our existence. If we are to continue to use this conception, we risk failing to see that our very lives have been turned into a mechanism for perpetuation of social death: the banal simulation of existence. Whereas socialized death is a starting point for Foucault, in Baudrillard and in recent actions from California, we see a return to a reevaluation of society and of death; a possible return to zombie politics. Baudrillard distinguishes himself as a connoisseur of graffiti; in Forget Foucault, he quotes a piece that said “When Jesus arose from the dead, he became a zombie.”54 Perhaps the reevaluation of zombie politics will serve as the messianic shift that blasts open the gates of hell, the cemetery-university. According to the Berkeley kids, “when we move without return to their tired meaning, to their tired configurations of the material, we are engaging in war.”55 Baudrillard’s words about semiotic insurrectionaries might suffice: "They blasted their way out however, so as to burst into reality like a scream, an interjection, an anti-discourse, as the waste of all syntatic, poetic and political development, as the smallest radical element that cannot be caught by any organized discourse. Invincible due to their own poverty, they resist every interpretation and every connotation, no longer denoting anyone or anything."56 It seems reasonable to note in closing that, this week at Berkeley is finals week, a period in which semiotic economy is peaking: hundreds of thousands of books will be read, meanings digested and regurgitated. Millions of pages will be typed, each one a modicum of biopolitical reproduction, containing codes that are complicit in, if they do not directly facilitate, both exploitation and the stagnancy of the social environment. For years, this week has been colloquially known as ‘death week’; fitting, considering it is a culmination of a systematic social death.57 Yet at Berkeley, something else is occurring. “For an end to the values of social death we need ruptures and self-propelled, unmanaged movements of wild bodies. We need, we desire occupations.”58 As of Monday, another building has been taken over; hundreds of students are participating in a maneuver that has at its goal the disruption of capitalist normalcy.59 “We are an antagonistic dead,” they say.60 It has at its title ‘Live Week’, yet we know the inside joke of the matter: they are simply undead.
The system prioritizes free speech, not the other way around, the aff sees itself as a resistance to oppression, facilitating the expansion of the semiocapital economy. – turns the aff.
Baudrillard 2000 /http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations-viii-the-implosion-of-meaning-in-the-media/
The media carry meaning and countermeaning, they manipulate in all directions at once, nothing can control this process, they are the vehicle for the simulation internal to the system and the simulation that destroys the system, according to an absolutely Mobian and circular logic and it is exactly like this. There is no alternative to this, no logical resolution. Only a logical exacerbation and a catastrophic resolution. With one caution. We are face to face with this system in a double situation and insoluble double bind exactly like children faced with the demands of the adult world. Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects. The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he responds with a double strategy. To the demand of being an object, he opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, a total claim to subjecthood. To the demand of being a subject he opposes, just as obstinately and efficaciously, an object's resistance, that is to say, exactly the opposite: childishness, hyperconformism, total dependence, passivity, idiocy. Neither strategy has more objective value than the other. The subject-resistance is today unilaterally valorized and viewed as positive just as in the political sphere only the practices of freedom, emancipation, expression, and the constitution of a political subject are seen as valuable and subversive. But this is to ignore the equal, and without a doubt superior, impact of all the object practices, of the renunciation of the subject position and of meaning precisely the practices of the masses that we bury under the derisory terms of alienation and passivity. The liberating practices respond to one of the aspects of the system, to the constant ultimatum we are given to constitute ourselves as pure objects, but they do not respond at all to the other demand, that of constituting ourselves as subjects, of liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost, of voting, producing, deciding, speaking, participating, playing the game a form of blackmail and ultimatum just as serious as the other, even more serious today. To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood. But this strategy is more reflective of the earlier phase of the system, and even if we are still confronted with it, it is no longer the strategic terrain: the current argument of the system is to maximize speech, the maximum production of meaning. Thus the strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and of the spoken word or of the hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of non-reception. It is the strategy of the masses: it is equivalent to returning to the system its own logic by doubling it, to reflecting meaning, like a mirror, without absorbing it. This strategy (if one can still speak of strategy) prevails today, because it was ushered in by that phase of the system which prevails. To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on "consciousness raising," indeed a "raising of the unconscious" of subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.
The aff was never separate from the cogs in the machine, the biopolitical is obsolete, replaced by death of the social, the university becomes a site of diffusion, masquerading as resistance to support an expanding economy of symbols. Vote neg to embrace zombie politics- we are liberation strategy, a rupture in the system, to abolish the hyperreal, refusing the exchange of signs.
Anonymous student 10 (Student protesting in solidarity with UC Berkeley protestors, “The University, Social Death and the Inside Joke” http://anarchistnews.org/content/university-social-death-and-inside-joke) Mana-T
An unfortunate slip of the tongue found University of California president comparing his position to that of a cemetery: "There are many people under you, but no one is listening."3 This quote was rapidly relayed around the State's campuses, which have recently seen themselves become the first major battleground in the contemporary fight over Higher Education in the United States. It was used as an excuse for artistic parody by hundreds of students, who engaged in die-ins, zombie marches and other tired activist strategies. More recently, however, it has become a catalyst for a much more serious discussion about the relationship between death, the University and modern capitalism. Beyond Zombie Politics, an article published online on October 22nd, claimed that the University system is dying and that it should be the responsibility of modern dissidents to let it die. "It is not possible to save the UC or defend its major contours. It is a dying institution,” they assert.4 “We must accept this and recognize it as a reason to forward our own radical visions of reconstructed institutions of educational and knowledge production in relation to wilder crises confronting us."5 Yet, while this article offers an interesting revisiting of the conflicts that forged the modern research institution, it ends with a pessimistic nihilism that fails to provide any real alternatives, or motivation for any sort of struggle. For this reason, one must find the Necrosocial, a piece written by students barricaded in Wheeler hall at UC Berkeley on November 18th, a far more suitable point of departure. "Totally managed death. A machine for administering death, for the proliferation of technologies of death," they announce of the University they have occupied.6 "As elsewhere, things rule. Dead objects rule."7 The concept of social death is arguably one of the key concepts of Biopolitics; a major point of contestation. The traditional definition provided by Foucault, developed in the fifth chapter of Foucault's History of Sexuality "Right of Death and Power over Life", holds that the Sovereign initially held power through complete control over life and death; that power was exercis8ed through the Sovereign's ability to kill whoever displeased him. As Foucault writes, "The right which was formulated as the ‘power of life and death’ was in reality the right to take life or let live."6 Yet for the project of modernity, a new mode of control was necessary; the old forms of social control were too limited. "The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life." 9 Foucault's social death is a socialized death, a managed discourse around sexuality and reproduction to replace the discourse around death. "The new procedures of power that were devised during the classical age and employed in the nineteenth century were what caused our society to go from a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality."10 Foucault's analysis pushes us to reinterpret the motivations behind the movement for sexual liberation, to wonder if the expansion of the discourse around sexuality was not part of the original strategy of capitalism. Yet it seems as if it may be too soon to discard thanato-politics in favor of an analysis of bio-power that privileges sexuality and the maintenance of life. It almost seems, in fact, that this form of analysis feeds into the very discourse around sexuality that Foucault was attempting to avoid. It is precisely this criticism that proves so unsettling; delivered in 1977 at the hands of Jean Baudrillard, it called into question the very fundamental utility of Foucault's thought. "Foucault's discourse is a mirror of the powers it describes," he asserts in Forget Foucault. 11 Furthermore, "something tells us that if it is possible at last to talk with such definitive understanding about power, sexuality, the body, and discipline, even down to their most delicate metamorphoses, it is because at some point all this is here and now over with."12 Baudrillard says it; it is impossible to talk of Biopower, because power no longer exists. It is a spectral residue, a thread that the system has allowed us that will lead us deeper into the maze. We can talk of infinitesimal concatenations of power, or forge a complete systematic analysis; neither will change the fact that the social dynamic we are attempting to describe is now long obsolete. The very critique we are so proud to be championing has been accommodated into the system itself: "there is no exception to the logic of liberation: any force or any liberated form of speech constitutes one more turn in the spiral of power."13 The hip kids at Berkeley realize this when they exclaim: "and so we attend lecture after lecture about how 'discourse' produces 'subjects,' ignoring the most obvious fact that we ourselves are produced by this discourse which leaves us believing that it is only words which matter, words about words which matter. The University gladly permits precautionary lectures on biopower..."14 It becomes apparent that the very concept of the university itself and the chains of power which circle it are a systemic construct. The Berkeley kids are laughing at conceptions of biopower that do not recognize the ideas of life and power as fundamentally artificial. It is tempting to ignore their provocation, but one finds oneself curious about the punch line. For this, we need to develop an understanding of death and sociality, of how they are inexplicably linked. In Symbolic Exchange and Death, written in the same year as Foucault's supposed masterpiece, Baudrillard succeeds in taking down a much bigger target; namely, Marxism. Baudrillard's thesis is that the End of Production has effectively occurred. Political Economy is not a metaphysical framework, rather, it is a structural framework only relevant at a certain point in time. "Now we have passed from the commodity law of value to the structural law of value, and this coincides with the obliteration of the social form known as production."15 For Jean Baudrillard, 'Labor Power' is not a power at all, rather, "it is a definition, an axiom, and its 'real' operation in the labor process, its 'use-value', is only the reduplication of this definition in the operation of the code."16 Marxism and Capitalism alike seek to reproduce this status of worker; therefore both must be discarded as reactionary. Luddism, which understands the frailty of the very linear concept of production, is exalted. Yet there is more to this than a simple desire to abort the manufacture of senseless commodities; there is a very real malevolence to "a machinery which manufactures both the force of production and labor power."17 15 Baudrillard has tapped into Marx's Fragment on the Machines from the Grundisse, and his underdeveloped theories of the General Intellect. Marx admits that "Production for unproductive consumption is quite as productive as that for productive consumption; always assuming that it produces or reproduces capital."18 Production has become automated (or at the very least completely marginalized); the machinery, both literal and figurative, of the system, holds us in its grasp. Our goal as workers is now not the production of material goods. Though the reproduction of the status of work was increasingly important during late Fordism, as the factory became a totality and society was increasingly automated along productive lines, even the reproduction of social relations is now taken for granted. Rather, our primary responsibility is to assert the primacy of the code, to assent to rationality and business as usual.
