[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 1
case responses
[khirn]
pg. 1
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 2
cyborgs bad
[khirn]
pg. 2
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 3
1nc cyborgs bad frontline
Cyborgs imagery has been coopted by white posthumanism --- the aff forecloses the
establishment and spread of existing counter-narratives otherwise capable of transforming
cultural mythos
Dinerstein 6 [Joel Dinerstein is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University, where he also teaches
in the American studies program, “Technology and Its Discontents: On the Verge of the Posthuman,” American
Quarterly 58.3 (2006) 569-595] //khirn
Judgment Day: The End of Progress
I will conclude with Sturken and Thomas's most important question of all: "How is it possible to think about technologies outside of these frameworks?"
59
Nearly a generation ago, Haraway recognized the need for a more "imaginative relation to technoscience that
propound[ed] human limits and dislocations—the fact that we die, rather than Faustian . . . evasions." Yet as popular culture and wellfunded GNR enthusiasts have more influence than academic theorists, they have commandeered cyborg iconography ; the
necessary corrective of conceding the "human limits" of biological processes has yet to occur. Haraway has
since called for new metaphors—such as trickster figures (e.g., Coyote)—to "refigur[e] possible worlds" by thinking
outside of techno-science; this hasn't happened even within the humanities. Instead, we have seen the rise of
the posthuman Adamic. 60 [End Page 589]
For Nye, the "technological creation story has long remained dominant" because questioning it required a reassessment of history, social justice, and
ethics—as well as the demystification (and demythification) of every keyword in the techno-cultural matrix. Here's Nye's assessment of why the
nineteenth-century "second creation" narrative remained dominant until the 1960s:
Rejecting the foundation story . . . meant recognizing historical injustices to the first inhabitants, accepting environmental limits, and acknowledging the
ideological nature of the free market. Rejecting the foundation story implied the loss of white entitlement to the continent. Discarding second-creation
stories required acknowledging cultural conflicts and listening to counter-narratives. 61
Such counternarratives of the frontier now exist: Nye points to ecofeminism and Native American accounts, the
works of wilderness advocates and borderlands scholars. Perhaps there is long-term potential for the trickledown of such counternarratives to transform the national mythos , but the techno-cultural matrix
remains strong.
To become conscious of the underlying mythology guiding their utopianism, GNR enthusiasts would need to acknowledge the
cyborg's white body, their ideal of white progress, and the historical conflation of technology and religion . Many
scholars have traced the social construction of the white body as the normative, ideal human body (e.g., Richard
Dyer's White), but only recently have nonwhites begun to answer back from an empowered cultural position. In White
Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity (2004), religious scholar James W. Perkinson claims that if Euro-Americans aspire to maturity, "the white
body must be returned somehow to its history, [and] white identity reincarnated in local community and global
cosmology." To do so, Perkins claims, Euro-Americans must specifically leave black bodies alone: "blackness can no longer be erected
as a buffer against the demands of maturity, a screen against which to play out fear and fantasy, despair and
desire." 62 An interesting claim, but such a separation is impossible due to hybridity at every level: cultural, social, genetic, artistic, intellectual,
philosophical.
Otherwise, that mythos of technological domination ensures the perpetuation Euro-American
superiority and whiteness
Dinerstein 6 [Joel Dinerstein is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University, where he also teaches
in the American studies program, “Technology and Its Discontents: On the Verge of the Posthuman,” American
Quarterly 58.3 (2006) 569-595] //khirn
Immediately after 9/11, a Middle East correspondent for The Nation summarized the coming war on terrorism as "[their] theology versus [our]
technology, the suicide bomber against the nuclear power." 1 His statement missed the point: technology is the American theology. For Americans, it is
not the Christian God but technology that structures the American sense of power and revenge, the nation's abstract sense of well-being, its arrogant
sense of superiority, and its righteous justification for global dominance. In the introduction to Technological Visions, Marita Sturken and Douglas
Thomas declare that "in the popular imagination, technology is often synonymous with the future," but it is more
accurate to say that technology is synonymous with faith in the future—both in the future as a better world and
as one in which the United States bestrides the globe as a colossus . 2
Technology has long been the unacknowledged source of European and Euro-American superiority
within modernity , and its underlying mythos always traffics in what James W. Carey once called "secular
[khirn]
pg. 3
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 4
religiosity." 3 Lewis Mumford called the American belief system "mechano-idolatry" as early as 1934; a few years later he deemed it our "mechano-
centric religion." David F. Noble calls this ideology "the religion of technology" in a work of the same name that traces its European roots to a doctrine
that combines millenarianism, rationalism, and Christian redemption in the writings of monks, explorers, inventors, and NASA scientists. If we take into
account the functions of religion and not its rituals, it is not a deity who insures the American future but new technologies: smart bombs in the Gulf War,
Viagra and Prozac in the pharmacy, satellite TV at home. It is not social justice or equitable economic distribution that will reduce hunger, greed, and
poverty, but fables of abundance and the rhetoric of technological utopianism. The United States is in thrall to "techno-fundamentalism," in Siva
Vaidhyanathan's apt phrase; to Thomas P. Hughes, "a god named technology has possessed Americans." Or, as public policy scholar Edward Wenk Jr.
sums it up, "we are . . . inclined to equate technology with civilization [itself]." 4 [End Page 569]
Technology as an abstract concept functions as a white mythology. Yet scholars of whiteness rarely engage
technology as a site of dominant white cultural practices (except in popular culture), and scholars of technology often
sidestep the subtext of whiteness within this mythos. The underlying ideology and cultural practices of technology were
central to American studies scholarship in its second and third generations, but the field has marginalized this critical framework; it is as if these works
of (mostly) white men are now irrelevant to the field's central concerns of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnic identity on the one hand, and power,
empire, and nation on the other. In this essay I will integrate some older works into the field's current concerns to situate the current posthuman
discourse within an unmarked white tradition of technological utopianism that also functions as a form of social evasion. By the conclusion, I hope to
have shown that the posthuman is an escape from the panhuman .
This is an important moment to grapple with the relationship of technology and whiteness since many scientists, inventors, and cognitive philosophers
currently hail the arrival of the "posthuman." This emergent term represents the imminent transformation of the human body through GNR
technologies—G for genetic engineering or biotechnology, N for nanotechnology, and R for robotics. "The posthuman," as N. Katherine Hayles defined it
in How We Became Posthuman (2000), "implies not only a coupling with intelligent machines but a coupling so intense and multifaceted that it is no
longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed." To be
reductive, the posthuman envisions the near future as one in which humans are cyborgs—in which the human organism is, for all practical purposes, a
networked being composed of multiple human-machine interfaces. Underlying cultural beliefs in technological determinism matched with the
inalienable right of consumer desire will soon produce what even cautious critics call "a social transformation" at the level of the individual body, as
consumers purchase genetic enhancements (to take one example). In other words, steroids, cloning, gene mapping, and surgical implants are just the tip
of an iceberg that, when it melts, will rebaptize human beings as cyborgs. 5
William J. Mitchell calls this new self-concept "Me++"—a pun on the computer language C++—and claims this future is already present. When Mitchell
claims to "routinely exist in the condition . . . [of] 'man-computer symbiosis,'" or that he "now interact[s] with sensate, intelligent, interconnected devices
scattered throughout my environment," who can argue with him? An eminent design theorist and urban planner at MIT, Mitchell breezily [End Page
570] describes a near future of "high-tech 'wearables'" with implanted computers (e.g., clothes, eyeglasses, shoes) that extend our sense of self over an
increasingly permeable body surface. If each person is "jacked in" to dozens of computers within a "few millimeters" of the human shell, will that
transform human nature (as many GNR enthusiasts claim)? As Mitchell declares, "increasingly I just don't think of this as computer interaction," but as
something like an expansive self. "Me++" is a consumer gold rush: the evolution of the fragile human body into a silicon-based cyborg with superhuman
capacities. Here's a complementary—and unexceptional—claim from Rodney A. Brooks, the chair of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT: "We are about
to become our machines . . . [we] will morph into machines." Brooks admits this process may bring short-term metaphysical confusion, but he assures
readers in Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us that GNR technologies will bring long-term progress. 6
What do claims for "man-computer symbiosis" have to do with whiteness and religion? Brooks and Mitchell are technological determinists for whom the
blithe morphing of the human organism into cyborgs recapitulates the Western tendency to universalize its own perspective. Their works consider the
coming of GNR technologies as inevitable, progressive, and beneficial, and their rhetoric assumes universal, equitable distribution of such changes.
Moreover, their disregard of social realities perpetuates an unspoken racialized (white) narrative of exclusion that treats technology as an "autonomous"
aspect of cultural production illuminating the road to a utopian future that will not require social or political change.7
Technological progress has long structured Euro-American identity, and it functions as a prop for a muted
form of social Darwinism—either "might makes right," or "survival of the fittest." Here is the techno-cultural matrix: progress,
religion, whiteness, modernity, masculinity, the future. This matrix reproduces an assumed superiority over
societies perceived as static, primitive, passive, Communist, terrorist, or fundamentalist (depending on the era). The historian of
technology Carroll Pursell points out that "the most significant engine and marker" of modernity is "technology ([which is] almost always seen as
masculine in our society)," and that only the West invokes modernity as "a signal characteristic of its self-definition." 8 In Machines as the Measure of
Man: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance, Michael Adas traced the rhetoric of technology as it became the primary measure of
intelligence, rationality, and the good society, supplanting Christianity for nineteenth-century colonial powers. Weapons, mass production,
and communication networks became the fetishes of colonial dominance and racial superiority, which were
[End Page 571] disseminated (for example) in numerous British best sellers through binary opposites of
dominance/passivity: "machine versus human or animal power; science versus superstition and myth;
synthetic versus organic; progressive versus stagnant." 9 Such oppositions still inform contemporary theories of
Western superiority (e.g., "the clash of civilizations," "the end of history"). Casting preindustrial (or premodern) peoples as riskaverse and enslaved to obsolescent ideologies—that is, as not progressing—sentences them to second-class
status with regard to the future.
Sturken and Thomas ask two crucial questions about the role of technology in the American cultural imagination: "Why are emergent and new
technologies the screens onto which our culture projects such a broad array of social concerns and desires?," and consequently, "Why is technology the
object of such unrealistic expectations?" I extrapolate the following two answers from the field's critical framework, by way of Leo Marx, Kasson, Nye,
Carey, and Noble (among many others). New technologies help maintain two crucial Euro-American myths: (1) the myth of progress and (2) the myth of
white, Western superiority. 10
In a given society, a myth functions as "a play of past paradigm and future possibility," according to Laurence Coupe's study, an
act of "remembering and re-creating the sacred narratives of the past." Progress secularized the idea of Christian redemption by inventing (and
instantiating) a near-sacred temporal zone—the future—to contain its man-made utopian dreams. A myth cannot be declared in rational terms; it
"resist[s] completion" in order to keep up its "dialectic . . . of memory and desire, of ideology and utopia." For a myth to have cultural force,
[khirn]
pg. 4
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 5
it must be unarticulated; it works as "a disclosure rather than . . . a dogma," an opening into unspoken systems
of belief. 11
Technological progress is the telos of American culture, the herald of the future, the mythic proof in the nation's selfrighteous pudding. "Nowhere . . . can we find a master narrative so deeply entrenched in popular imagination and
popular language as the mythic idea of progress," notes the historian of technology John Staudenmeier, "particularly technological
progress." Yet at the intellectual level, historians Carl Becker and J. B. Bury deconstructed the myth nearly a century ago. Becker even identified progress
as a covalent religion at the 1935 Stanford lectures: "the word Progress, like the Cross or the Crescent, is a symbol that stands for a social doctrine, a
philosophy of human destiny." For both Bury and Becker, the myth of social progress emerged from the Enlightenment idea of the perfectibility of man
through the application of reason. That man-made future would be "a more just, more peaceful, and less hierarchical republican society based on the
consent of the governed." Instead, over two centuries, technology has piggybacked onto social progress by creating the rush of
change without social improvement. 12
Cyborg imagery reinforces hegemonic depictions of masculinity
Walton 4 [Heather, “The Gender of the Cyborg” Theology Sexuality 2004 10: 33] //khirn
Cyborgs appear in many forms today. Their ubiquitous presence is felt whenever the boundaries that separate the human from the
machine are breached and the conventions of ’ontological hygiene’ (Graham 2002: 3335) are compromised. Many feminists would claim that
these cyborgs are not only present everywhere but active and working to sustain the representational practices
through which gender is enduringly inscribed within our culture. Anne Balsamo argues that cyborgs are in fact the
’postmodern icon’, produced within a culture which is saturated by a technological male imaginary and that
’the dominant representation of cyborgs reinserts us into the dominant ideology by reaffirming bourgeois
notions of human, machine and femininity’ (1999:154). There are many arguments that can be made to support this argument. On the
most basic level it is clear that our most mundane experiences of cyborg practice, when we reach beyond our flesh
through the computer keyboard, are gendered. Research indicates that boys enjoy losing themselves in the
world of virtual reality and see the machine as a quasi living entity with which they can form a passionate
relation. Girls are more likely to see their computers as tools aiding them in better interpersonal
communication. Perhaps more worrying than this differentiated experience is the fact that the virtual worlds to which our
computers provide access have become yet other sites of violence against women. In the ubiquitous availability of
pornography on the internet the ’real time’ violation of girls and women is transformed into a virtual commodity. This can be purchased, swapped or
secretly traded in an unholy exploitation of an elision between human flesh and screen image. There is also a growing awareness of the
sexual harassment that is routinely experienced by women in online discussions, fantasy games and via e-mail.
The chatroom can be as much a ’male space’ as the boardroom and the dangers this presents to girls and women are becoming increasingly apparent. If
we begin to look beyond the interface with the computer and turn to popular cultural representations of the cyborg, we find that many of these also
extend into our imagined futures the dominant gendered forms of today. From the comic book to the screen mediums, we are all
familiar with representations of cyborgs that exaggerate and heighten, pleasurably and creatively or crudely
and violently, the representations of gender already in circulation. From Metropolis to James Bond, from Stepford Wives to The
Terminator gender representation are the means through which the significance of human identity in a technological future is experimented with, tested
out and retransmitted. Male and female figures play familiar roles in these productions. To be sure, as Jenny Wolmark has argued, feminist science
fiction has created cyborg images that ’reorder boundaries and demolish polarities’ (1999b: 237). And yes, as she has argued further, the strong women
characters in some cyberpunk fictions and film owe much to these feminist interventions (1999a: 142). We might even concede that male cyborgs
through their hypermasculinity do queer themselves - or as Lois McNay would have it ’fetishised images of masculinity bear within themselves traces of
the feminised man transvestite and thus point towards their own constitutive instability and displacement’ (2000: 55). It is nevertheless the case that
gender stereotypes are more likely to be reaffirmed than challenged by the majority of cultural depictions of the
post/human. As Mary Doane writes: Although it is certainly true that in the case of some contemporary science
fiction writers - particularly feminist authors - technology makes possible a destabilisation of sexual identity as
a category, there has also been a curious but fairly insistent history of representations of technology which
work to fortify sometimes desperately conventional understandings of the feminine (in Balsamo 1999 : 148).
Turns case – replacing human flesh with machines allows for the elimination of those who have
not assimilated enough
Dinello 5 [Dan, “Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology”
http://shockproductions.com/technophobia/technophobia.html] //khirn
Chapter Five: Rampaging Cyborgs extends the science fiction argument against techno-obsession to the bionic fusion of cybernetic device and biological
organism which may produce a new and improved cyborg body but may also produce a weapon. The replacement of our flesh and blood
with mechanical augmentation subtly blurs the definition of what constitutes a human body and encourages
[khirn]
pg. 5
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 6
a dream of immortality. While technoscience projects a bionic vision of posthuman perfection, the cyborg was born as an astronaut and a
weapon. The earliest imagining of the cyborg, in the 1960s, involved a never-implemented military plan to
surgically and pharmaceutically modify the bodies of astronauts for space travel. At the same time, the military
evolved the cyborg in the development of man-machine interfaces, such as between pilot and jet, that structure modern weapon
systems. This helped set the stage for the cyborg’s earliest fictional incarnation in the novel Cyborg (1972) by Martin Caidin - which centers on a crashed
test pilot whose damaged body gets machine replacement parts.
By the 1980s, the science fiction cyborg had become a ubiquitous icon of pop culture, reflecting its increasing importance. These machine people ranged
from the scarcely organic Terminator and the castrated, mostly mechanical Robocop to the tough virile Bionic Man and sexy gal pal Bionic Woman; from
the alien/human/machine cross-breed Ripley in Alien Resurrection to the human-hating Borg of Star Trek; and from the plugged-into-virtual reality
savior of humanity in The Matrix to the genetically enhanced Valids of Gattaca. The melding of the organic and the mechanical, the
organic and the alien or the engineering of a union between separate species, cyborgs also include American Iraq-War pilots integrated into a cybernetic
weapon systems as well as suicidal terrorists who merge with technology to transform themselves into human bombs.
Science fiction cyborg stories dramatize our fears as we become targets in the world of cyborg weapons, while
anticipating the demise of the flesh and blood body and the gradual extinction of humanity. "There is,
underlying these works, an uneasy but consistent sense of human obsolescence," writes Scott Bukatman in Terminal
Identity (1993), "and at stake is the very definition of the human."While the machinic replacement of lost body
parts enhances the lives of disabled people, the sheer number of monstrous cyborgs reflects a pervasive anxiety
that our technological lust will propagate grotesquely deformed, superhuman techno-creatures that will
ultimately extinguish us.
[khirn]
pg. 6
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 7
2nc cyborgs bad – race
Cyberfeminism is essentialist and fails to analyze the intersection of race and gender
Daniel 9’ [Jessie, Writer on race, sexism “Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment” Women's
Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1/2, Technologies (spring - Summer, 2009),
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27655141 .LM]
Yet it is exceedingly rare within both cyberfeminist practices and critiques of them to see any reference to the intersection of gender and race (Fernandez,
the critiques suggest that "gender" is a unified category
and, by implication, that digital technologies mean the same thing to all women across differences of race,
class, sexuality. In her book Zeroes and Ones, Sadie Plant is exuberant about the potential of Internet technologies to transform the lives of women.
Plant conceptualizes cyberspace as a liberating place for women because, as she sees it, the inherently textual
nature of the Internet lends itself to "the female" (1997, 23). Her title refers to the binary code of zeroes and ones
that constitutes the basic programming language that computers use. Plant symbolically ren ders zeroes as
"female" and ones as phallic and "male," predicting that the digital future is feminine, distributed, nonlinear, a world in
Wilding, and Wright 2003, 21); instead both the practices and
which "zeroes" are displacing the phallic order of the "ones" (Gill 2005, 99). Plant is perhaps the leading figure in popularizing the ideas of
cyberfeminism beyond the academy While Plant has been justifiably criticized for reinscribing essen tialist notions of gender (Wilding 1998),Wajcman
(2004) writes that Plant's optimism about the potential of gender equality in cyberspace must be understood as a reaction against previous
conceptualizations of technology as inherently masculine. In addition to essentializing gender, Plant's binary of
"zeroes" and "ones" leaves no conceptual room for understanding how gender intersects with
"race ." In this way, Plant's writing is characteristic of the field, as there is relatively little discussion of the intersections of gender
with "race," except in cases where "race" is included in a long list of additional variables to be added on to "gender." Thus,
when cyberfeminists explicitly engage both gender and race it is both conspicuous and instructive. In their edited volume,
Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices, Fernandez, Wilding, and Wright highlight cyberfeminist practices
that eschew the exclusionary aspects of earlier forms of feminism , and they remind us "the lives of
white women and women of color are mutually reliant" (2003, 25). Yet, as Fernandez and Wilding point out,
cyberfeminist writing often assumes an "educated, white, upper-middle-class, English-speaking, culturally sophisti cated
readership," which ironically ends up replicating the "damaging uni versalism of'old-style feminism'" (Fernandez and
Wilding 2003, 21). Given the "damaging universalism" of some forms of cyberfeminism, what, then, do we make of claims
for the subversive potential of the Internet?
The 1AC speaks in a positon of power and fails to recognize it- creates whiteness and silences
women of color
Schuller 9’ [Malini Johar, PhD from Purdue University “Analogy and (White) Feminist Theory: Thinking
Race and the Color of the Cyborg Body”, University of Chicago Pres,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/431372 LM]
I have focused at length on the deployment of the category women of color because Haraway’s attempt to articulate an oppositional ontology and
politically effective strategy for feminism that includes women of color is to be lauded. Yet if the practice entails a disregard for
situatedness and locatedness, it avails itself of the universalizing and unmarked privileges of whiteness discussed
earlier. As Abby Wilkerson suggestively points out, it might be worth asking “whether many white feminists have
enthusiastically taken up the cyborg myth precisely because of what it does not say about race”
(1997, 170). Wilkerson argues that taking up the hybrid identity of the cyborg might well be a way of not assuming responsibility for whiteness while
appropriating the identity politics of women of color (1997, 170–71). The same might be said of similar universalizing gestures animating
poststructuralist theorists’ use of the East, as I discuss above. We are now in a position to understand the relationship between the cyborg
and women of color. At one level there is no relationship, only oneness. Since in the informatics of domination we all cannot
help being cyborgs, women of color are cyborgs. But the ultimate relationship is again analogical. Just as the cyborg is a fusion of human and machine, a
monstrous and illegitimate fusion, so, the argument goes, is the constituency of women of color, forged as it is without identity. Thus is it not surprising
that race sometimes figures in Haraway’s essay in a similar fashion as it does in Rubin’s: “race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and
parts” (Haraway 1991, 181); “the causes of various women‐headed households are a function of race, class, or sexuality” (167); and “some of the
rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high‐tech‐facilitated social relations can make socialist‐feminism more relevant to effective progressive
politics” (165). Cyborg identities, mediated through the politics of women of color, help defuse—or to use
Wilkerson’s terminology, deny the responsibility of working with—whiteness and white feminist social location.
Haraway’s stated reasons for turning to women of color make this clear. Haraway writes: “For me—and for many who share a
similar historical location in white, professional middle‐class, female, radical, North American, mid‐adult bodies—the sources of a crisis in political
identity are legion. The recent history for much of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches
for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalition—affinity, not identity” (1991, 155). I argued
earlier that analogy functions like a colonial fetish enabling the white feminist theorist to displace racial difference onto a safer
[khirn]
pg. 7
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 8
notion of similarity. We can now add the following: racial analogy within (white) feminist theory helps
whiteness retain its privilege by being uninterrogated.
[khirn]
pg. 8
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 9
2nc cyborgs bad – gender
Cyberfeminism creates female subjectivity
Wildling 98’ [Faith, the political condition of cyberfeminism” Critical Art Ensemble. Art Journal57.2, 1998,
http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/223313079?pq-origsite=summon&accountid=14667
LM]
Cyberfeminism is currently at that unfortunate point where it has to decide who gets to be a separatist
cyberfeminist and who does not. The haunting question, "What is a woman?" once again returns. In theory,
this problem is graspable, but first, what is the problem? Looking back on any feminist movement, there have
always been tremendous problems among women's groups and organizations brought on by attempts to define
feminine subjectivity (and, thereby, "us" and "them"). In the second wave, the feminine was defined in a
manner that seemed largely to reflect the subjectivity of white, middle-class, straight women. The third wave
had to debate whether or not transvestites, transsexuals, and other "males" who claimed to be female-identified
should be accepted into activist organizations (and at the same time, women of color, working-class women,
and lesbians all still had grounds for complaints). In addition, it was never decided how to separate the
feminine from other primary social variables that construct a woman's identity. For example, part of the
problem in many feminist organizations, and in WAC in particular, was that the middle-class professional
women had the greatest economic and cultural resources. They therefore had greater opportunity for
leadership and policy making. The women outside this class felt that the professionals had unfair advantages
and that their agenda was the primary one, which in turn brought about a destructive form of separation.
Cyborgs are gendered and perpetuate gender stereotypes
Smith 9 [Nicole R, “Wangechi Mutu: Feminist Collage and the Cyborg”, Georgia State University, 12/1/2009
http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=art_design_theses LM]
Though Haraway’s ironic political myth of the cyborg remains a powerful metaphor in feminist studies, critical assessments of it provide further
suggestions on the most productive ways to consider feminist cyborg figurations. In one of the better-known critical assessments of the cyborg, Anne
Balsamo offers an ironic ethnographic reading. Balsamo follows Haraway’s lead in reading the cyborg as a figure that can potentially disrupt concepts of
the “other” in terms of human/machine and natural/artificial binaries. However, Balsamo finds that the cyborg of popular culture does not completely
follow through on this disruptive promise in terms of gender binaries. She points out that popularized versions of cyborgs in literature
and film do not exist in a post-gendered or utopian world but are instead highly gendered entities. On the one
hand, female-gendered cyborgs, as fusions of the female with machines and technology, challenge traditional
gender assumptions due to the way femininity has historically been associated with the emotional or sexual, as
masculinity has with the rational, scientific, and technological. Yet according to Balsamo, “female cyborgs, while
challenging the relationship between femaleness and technology, actually perpetuate oppressive gender stereotypes.” Balsamo singles
out Rachel in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Helva in Anne McCaffrey’s science-fiction novel The Ship that Sang as examples of how popular images of
cyborgs reinforce the feminine as emotional, nurturing, or sexually objectified. Sara Cohen Shabot adds William Gibson’s cyfwwweberpunk novels and
the films Robocop, The Terminator, and Total Recall as examples that further entrench normative views on male and female gendered identities.
Ultimately, both Balsamo and Shabot argue that the cyborg of popular culture falls short of Haraway’s vision of the cyborg as
a figure capable of subverting patriarchal power structures and essentializing views on gender. In similar
fashion, Shabot also finds problematic the hyper-sexualized body found in popular versions of female cyborgs.
This body is configured as an ideal body type in its hyperreality.
Cyborg imagery reinforces hegemonic depictions of masculinity
Walton 4 [Heather, “The Gender of the Cyborg” Theology Sexuality 2004 10: 33]
Cyborgs appear in many forms today. Their ubiquitous presence is felt whenever the boundaries that separate the human from the
machine are breached and the conventions of ’ontological hygiene’ (Graham 2002: 3335) are compromised. Many feminists would claim that
these cyborgs are not only present everywhere but active and working to sustain the representational practices
through which gender is enduringly inscribed within our culture. Anne Balsamo argues that cyborgs are in fact the
’postmodern icon’, produced within a culture which is saturated by a technological male imaginary and that
’the dominant representation of cyborgs reinserts us into the dominant ideology by reaffirming bourgeois
notions of human, machine and femininity’ (1999:154). There are many arguments that can be made to support this argument. On the
[khirn]
pg. 9
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 10
most basic level it is clear that our
most mundane experiences of cyborg practice, when we reach beyond our flesh
through the computer keyboard, are gendered. Research indicates that boys enjoy losing themselves in the
world of virtual reality and see the machine as a quasi living entity with which they can form a passionate
relation. Girls are more likely to see their computers as tools aiding them in better interpersonal
communication. Perhaps more worrying than this differentiated experience is the fact that the virtual worlds to which our
computers provide access have become yet other sites of violence against women. In the ubiquitous availability of
pornography on the internet the ’real time’ violation of girls and women is transformed into a virtual commodity. This can be purchased, swapped or
secretly traded in an unholy exploitation of an elision between human flesh and screen image. There is also a growing awareness of the
sexual harassment that is routinely experienced by women in online discussions, fantasy games and via e-mail.
The chatroom can be as much a ’male space’ as the boardroom and the dangers this presents to girls and women are becoming increasingly apparent. If
we begin to look beyond the interface with the computer and turn to popular cultural representations of the cyborg, we find that many of these also
extend into our imagined futures the dominant gendered forms of today. From the comic book to the screen mediums, we are all
familiar with representations of cyborgs that exaggerate and heighten, pleasurably and creatively or crudely
and violently, the representations of gender already in circulation. From Metropolis to James Bond, from Stepford Wives to The
Terminator gender representation are the means through which the significance of human identity in a technological future is experimented with, tested
out and retransmitted. Male and female figures play familiar roles in these productions. To be sure, as Jenny Wolmark has argued, feminist science
fiction has created cyborg images that ’reorder boundaries and demolish polarities’ (1999b: 237). And yes, as she has argued further, the strong women
characters in some cyberpunk fictions and film owe much to these feminist interventions (1999a: 142). We might even concede that male cyborgs
through their hypermasculinity do queer themselves - or as Lois McNay would have it ’fetishised images of masculinity bear within themselves traces of
the feminised man transvestite and thus point towards their own constitutive instability and displacement’ (2000: 55). It is nevertheless the case that
gender stereotypes are more likely to be reaffirmed than challenged by the majority of cultural depictions of the
post/human. As Mary Doane writes: Although it is certainly true that in the case of some contemporary science
fiction writers - particularly feminist authors - technology makes possible a destabilisation of sexual identity as
a category, there has also been a curious but fairly insistent history of representations of technology which
work to fortify sometimes desperately conventional understandings of the feminine (in Balsamo 1999 : 148).
Cyborgs sustain and reify traditional gender categories
Walton 4 [Heather, “The Gender of the Cyborg” Theology Sexuality 2004 10: 33]
It is not remarkable that cyborg images have become part of the desperate work to sustain conventional gender
categories. Popular cultural icons are not only compelling because of their novelty but precisely because they return us via modern vehicles, to classic
sites of cultural tension and anxiety. This is made very clear in Graham’s writing on monsters, the golem and the cultural prehistory of the cyborg. These
sites of stress are where, what Julia Kristeva (1982) has termed, ’the powers of horror’ and the mechanisms of female abjection are most clearly discerned
and reproduced. This reminds us, contra to much of the more optimistic literature on cyborgs, that the boundary
territory or border where identity is contested is not always a happy place of delightful confusion. It is also the
site where stands a ’victimising machine at the cost of which become the subject of the symbolic as well as the
other of the abject’ (Kristeva 1982: 112). This victimizing mechanism is the means through which social anxieties are
resolved through the reproduction of subjectivities in conformity with a phallogocentric symbolic order that
cannot tolerate the disruptive indeterminacy of the feminine.1 Many of our most enduring cultural anxieties are
related to the need to achieve mastery over the threat to social order posed by the baleful forces of the feminine sphere. These
primal fears and the mechanisms for their overcoming are rehearsed again for us in cyborg dramas. Many of these
are concerned with the ambivalence of maternal power and the necessity to achieve discreet subjectivity through relinquishing the maternal connection.
Kristeva has a vivid metaphor for the abjection of the maternal by the subject who seeks individuation through repudiation of identity with the mother.
She describes it as vomiting milk (1982: 3-4). This is enacted in The Matrix where the one who is to come is detached from his cyborg continuity with the
maternal nexus that feeds him, nurtures him and incorporates his identity and vital force. He spews white fluid. Overlapping anxieties to
those concerning maternal power are articulated around issues concerning human reproduction. This is an
area where many deep fears are situated concerning personal origins individuation, continuity, familial and
sexual authority, ethnicity, the dispersion of property and the continuation of the species - to name but a few!
The cyborg bears these concerns into the popular imagination for, as Bladerunner famously illustrates, no cyborg has a
mummy but they do possess the potential for endless replication. Once again the threats cyborgs present to our discrete
humanity (ontological hygiene) are frequently feminized. The cyborg temptress may seduce the real man or the frail woman
may be a less vigilant defender of ontological hygiene than her male partner. This is the case in Stephen Spielburg’s truly
awful film, AI, in which the mother character is presented as a source of weakness that may lead to the adulteration of the species. She is more amenable
to loving the replicant, the ’mecha’ child, whereas the father’s concerns are for his own damaged but authentic, ’human’ son. It is not only in the popular
representation of cyborg characters that gender signifiers alert us to deep social unease. The cyborg sphere of existence, this real-
becoming-virtual world, is also commonly portrayed as a feminine space. It is imaged as a place of fascination,
illusion, pleasure, loss of self. Here we lose our human freedom, and are confined in a docile servitude. Nicola
[khirn]
pg. 10
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 11
Nixon, writing on cyber punk, speaks of a feminized universe inhabited by ghosts (1999:199). In the film The Matrix this
imagery is striking as human creatures are plugged into their nurturing but destructive captivity. And in Kronenburg’s Existenz we are captivated by
Allegra, the dangerous queen of gaming and her organic, fleshly game pod (which Graham has likened to breasts but which I see as placental) that leads
us innocents into a place of foul flesh and abasement.
No link turn – widespread opposition – only a risk of the link
Walton 4 [Heather, “The Gender of the Cyborg” Theology Sexuality 2004 10: 33]
However, it
is also plain why this post/human figure is an anathema to other women activists. Feminist politics
are marked by what Curti has described as a nostalgic ’preoccupation with the abandonment of the real,
particularly the political real’ (1998: 1). The reality check of this nostalgic feminism is the figure of the flesh and
blood woman in living relation with others and suffering material oppression. It is against the representations
of this figure (who is also a cultural fabulation) that all feminist interventions are judged. What is to be feared is that her needs will
be neglected by those who are supposed to be dedicated to her emancipation as they are seduced by other, more trivial but superficially engaging,
concerns. It
is not going to be easy to persuade feminists (particularly religious feminists and feminist theologians) to
relinquish this icon and embrace silicon skin . And perhaps the nostalgia Curti correctly identifies
within contemporary feminism for the real struggles of real women should be viewed as a legitimate defensive
reaction to the illusion that transformed political futures are easily achieved through processes of cultural
change and resymbolization. Surely the mechanisms of power which have regulated sexual relations in the past so effectively are not so easily
transformed?
[khirn]
pg. 11
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 12
impact answers / cede the political
[khirn]
pg. 12
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 13
1nc case frontline
They cede politics to the right and reinscribe gender roles
McCluskey 8 [Martha, Professor of Law and William J. Magavern Faculty Scholar @ SUNY Buffalo Law,
“How Queer Theory Makes Neoliberalism Sexy”, Buffalo Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2008-15]
Queer theory's anti-moralism works together with its anti-statism to advance not simply "politics," but a specific
vision of good "politics" seemingly defined in opposition to progressive law and morality. This anti-statist focus
distinguishes queer theory from other critical legal theories that bring questions of power to bear on moral ideals of justice. Kendall Thomas (2002), for
example, articulates a critical political model that sees justice as a problem of "power, antagonism, and interest," (p. 86)
involving questions of how to constitute and support individuals as citizens with interests and actions that count as alternative visions of the public.
Thomas contrasts this political model of justice with a moral justice aimed at discovering principles of fairness or institutional processes based in
rational consensus and on personal feelings of respect and dignity. Rather than evaluating the moral costs and benefits of a particular policy by analyzing
its impact in terms of harm or pleasure, Thomas suggests that a political vision of justice would focus on analyzing how policies produce and enhance the
collective power of particular "publics" and "counterpublics" (pp. 91—5). From this political perspective of justice, neoliberal
economic ideology is distinctly moral, even though it appears to be anti-moralist and to reduce moral principles to competition between
self-interested power. Free-market economics rejects a political vision of justice, in this sense, in part because of its
expressed anti-statism: it turns contested normative questions of public power into objective rational
calculations of private individual sensibilities. Queer theory's similar tendency to romanticize power as
the pursuit of individualistic pleasure free from public control risks disengaging from and
disdaining the collective efforts to build and advance normative visions of the state that
arguably define effective politics. Brown and Halley (2002), for instance, cite the Montgomery bus boycott as a
classic example of the left's problematic march into legalistic and moralistic identity politics. In contrast, Thomas (2002)
analyzes the Montgomery bus boycott as a positive example of a political effort to constitute a black civic public, even though the boycott campaign relied
on moral language to advance its cause, because it also emphasized and challenged normative ideas of citizenship (p. 100, note 14). By glorifying
rather than deconstructing the neoliberal dichotomy between public and private, between individual interest
and group identity, and between demands for power and demands for protection, queer theory's anti-statism
and anti-moralism plays into a right-wing double bind . In the current conservative political context, the left
appears weak both because its efforts to use state power get constructed as excessively moralistic (the feminist thought
police, or the naively paternalistic welfare state) and also because its efforts to resist state power get constructed as excessively
relativist (promoting elitism and materialism instead of family values and community well-being). The right, on
the other hand, has it both ways, asserting its moralism as inherent private authority transcending human
subjectivity (as efficient market forces, the sacred family, or divine will) and defending its cultivation of selfinterested power as the ideally virtuous state and market (bringing freedom, democracy, equality to the world by
exercising economic and military authoritarianism). From Egalitarian Politics to Renewed Conservative Identity Queer theory's
anti-statism and anti-moralism risks not only reinforcing right-wing ideology, but also infusing that
ideology with energy from renewed identity politics . Susan Fraiman (2003) analyzes how queer theory (along with
other prominent developments in left academics and culture) tends to construct left resistance as a radical individualism
modeled on the male "teen rebel, defined above all by his strenuous alienation from the maternal" (p. xii). Fraiman observes that this left
vision relies on "a posture of flamboyant unconventionality [that] coexists with highly conventional views
of gender [and] is , indeed, articulated through them " (p. xiii). Fraiman links recent left contempt for
feminism to a romantic vision of "coolness ... epitomized by the modem adolescent boy in his anxious, self-conscious and
theatricalized will to separate from the mother" who is by definition uncool—controlling, moralistic,
sentimental and not sexy. (p. xii). Even though queer theory distinguishes itself from feminism by repudiating
dualistic ideas of gender, its anti-foundationalism covertly promotes an essentialist "binary that puts
femininity, reproduction, and normativity on the one hand, and masculinity, sexuality, and
queer resistance on the other" (p. 147). This binary permeates queer theory's condemnation of "governance
feminism." (Brown and Halley, 2002; Wiegman, 2004) a vague category mobilizing images of the frumpy, overbearing, unexciting,
unfunny, and not-so-smart "schoolmarm" (Halley, 2002) whose authority will naturally be undermined when real
"men" appear on the scene. Suggesting the importance of gender conventions to the term's power, similar phrases do not seem to have gained
comparable academic currency as a way to deride the complex regulatory impact of other specific uses of state authority -for instance postmodernists do
not seem to widely denounce "governance anti-racism," "governance socialism," "governance populism," "governance environmentalism" or "governance
[khirn]
pg. 13
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 14
masculinism" (though Brown and Halley do criticize progressive law reform more generally with the term "governance legalism" (p. 11)). Queer
attraction to an adolescent masculinist idea of the "cool' dovetails smoothly with the identity politics of the
right. Right-wing politics and culture similarly condemn progressive and feminist policies with the term "nanny
state" (McCluskey, 2000; 2005a). The "nanny state" epithet enlists femaleness or femininity as shorthand to make some government authority
feel bad to those comfortable with or excited by a masculinist moral order, it adds to this sentimental power by coding the maternal authority to be
resisted as a "nanny" (rather than simply a "mommy"), enlisting identities of class, age—and perhaps race and nationality—to enhance uncritical
suspicions of disorder and illegitimacy. The "nanny state" slur tells us that a rougher and tougher neoliberal state, market,
and family will bring the grown-up pleasures, freedom, and power that are the mark and privilege of ideal
manhood. The "nanny state" is not an isolated example of the use of gender identity to disparage progressive or even
centrist policies that are not explicitly identified as feminist or gender-related. For example, "girlie-man" gained currency in
the 2004 presidential election to disparage opposition to George W. Bush's right-wing economic and national security policies (Grossman and McClain,
2004), and and in 2008 critics of presidential candidate Barack Obama similarly linked him to disparaging images of femininity (Campanile 2008;
Faludi 2008). These terms open a window into the connections between economic libertarianism and moral
fundamentalism. Libertarianism's anti-statism and anti-moralism requires sharp distinctions between public and private, morality and power,
individual freedom and social coercion. The problem, if we assume these distinctions are not self-evident facts, is that libertarianism must refer covertly
to some external value system to draw its lines. Identity conventions have long helped to do this work, albeit in complex and
sometimes contradictory ways. Power appears weak, deceptive, illegitimate, manipulative, controlling, undisciplined, oppressive, exceptional, or naive if
it is feminized; but strong, self-satisfying, public-serving, protective, orderly, rational, and a normal exercise of individual freedom if it is masculinized.
Conventional political theory and culture identifies legitimate authority with an idea of a masculine power
aimed at policing supposedly weaker or subordinate others. A state that publicly depends on and promotes such power
enhances rather than usurps private freedom and security in citizenship, market, and family, according to the
traditional theory of the patriarchal household as model for the state (see Dubber, 2005). Queer theory updates this
pre-modern political ideology into smart postmodernism and transgressive politics by re-casting its
idealized masculine power in the image of a youthful and sexy disdain for feminized concerns
about social, bodily, or material limits and support . In her challenge to this queer romanticization of "coolness," Fraiman
(2003) instead urges a feminism that will "question a masculinity overinvested in youth, fearful of the mutable flesh, and on the run from intimacy ... [to]
claim, in its place, the jouissance of a body that is aging, pulpy, no longer intact... a subject who is tender-hearted ... who is neither too hard nor too fluid
for attachment; who does the banal, scarcely narratable, but helpful things that moms' do" (p. 158). Feminist legal theory concerned with economic
politics adds to this alternative vision an ideal that advances and rewards the pleasure, power, and public value of the things done by some of those
moms' nannies (McCluskey, 2005a)—or by the many others engaged in the work (both paid and unpaid) that sustains and enhances others' pleasure and
power in and out of the home (McCluskey, 2003a; Young, 2001). One means toward that end would be to make the domestic work (and its play and
pleasure) conventionally treated as both banal or spiritual (see Roberts, 1997b) deserving of a greater share of state and market material rewards and
resources on a more egalitarian basis, as Fineman's (2004) vision would do.
That means the aff lapses into new-age individualistic therapy, in which suburban white kids
get to pretend they’re pirates, which demolishes collective political action
Myers 13 [Ella, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies at the University of Utah, 2013,
Wordly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World, p. 44-45]
Unfortunately, Connolly is inconsistent in this regard, for he also positions Foucauldian self-
artistry as an “essential preliminary
to,” and even the necessary “condition of,” change at the macropolitical level.104 That is, although Connolly claims
that micropolitics and political movements work “in tandem,” each producing effects on the other,105 he sometimes
privileges “action by the self on itself” as a starting point and necessary prelude to macropolitical change.
This approach not only avoids the question of the genesis of such reflexive action and its possible harmful
effects but also indicates that collective efforts to alter social conditions actually await proper techniques
of the self . For example, in a rich discussion of criminal punishment in the United States, Connolly contends that “today the
micropolitics of desire in the domain of criminal violence has become a condition for a macropolitics that
reconfigures existing relations between class, race, crime and punishment.”106 Here and elsewhere in Connolly’s writing
the sequencing renders these activities primary and secondary rather than mutually inspiring and
reinforcing.107 It is a mistake to grant chronological primacy to ethical self-intervention , however.
How, after all, is such intervention, credited with producing salient effects at the macropolitical level, going to
get off the ground , so to speak, or assuredly move in the direction of democratic engagement (rather than
withdrawal , for example) if it is not tethered, from the beginning, to public claims that direct attention
to a specific problem, defined as publicly significant and changeable ? How and why would an
individual take up reflexive work on the desire to punish if she were not already attuned, at least partially, to
[khirn]
pg. 14
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 15
problems afflicting current criminal punishment practices ? And that attunement is fostered, crucially, by
the macropolitical efforts of democratic actors who define a public matter of concern and elicit the attention of other
citizens.108 For reflexive self- care to be democratically significant, it must be inspired by and continually
connected to larger political mobilizations . Connolly sometimes acknowledges that the arts of the self he
celebrates are not themselves the starting point of collaborative action but instead exist in a dynamic,
reciprocal relation with cooperative and antagonistic efforts to shape collective arrangements. Yet the self’s
relation with itself is also treated as a privileged site , the very source of democratic spirit and action. This tendency
to prioritize the self’s reflexive relationship over other modes of relation defines the therapeutic ethics that
ultimately emerges out of Foucault’s and, to a lesser degree, Connolly’s work. This ethics not only elides differences between
caring for oneself and caring for conditions but also celebrates the former as primary or, as Foucault
says, “ ontologically prior .” An ethics centered on the self’s engagement with itself may have value, but it is not an
ethics fit for democracy .
Ascribing violence to metaphysical concepts like the liberal subject is essentialist and wrong--ontology does not determine politics
Schwartz 8 [Joseph M., professor of political science at Temple, The Future of Democratic Equality, p 59-60,
google books]
To contend that only an anti-foundationalist, anti-realist epistemology can sustain democracy is to argue precisely for
a foundational metaphysical grounding for the democratic project. It is to contend that one’s
epistemology determines one’s politics. Hence, Brown and Butler both spoke at a spring 1998 academic conference at the
University of California at Santa Cruz where some attributed “reactionary” and “left cultural conservatism” to belief in “reactionary” “foundationalist
humanism”42 Post-structuralism cannot escape its own essentialist conception of identity. For example, Butler contends in Feminist Contentions that
democratic feminists must embrace the post-structuralist “non-definability of woman” as best suited to open democratic constitution of what it is to be a
“woman.”43 But this is itself a “closed” position and runs counter to the practices of many democratic feminist activists who have tried to develop a
pluralist, yet collective identity around the shared experiences of being a woman in a patriarchal society (of course, realizing that working-class women
and women of color experience patriarchy in some ways that are distinct from the patriarchy experienced by middle-class white women). One query that
post-structuralist theorists might ask themselves: has there ever existed a mass social movement that defined its primary
“ethical” values as being those of “instability and flux”? Certainly many sexual politics activists are cognizant of the fluid nature
of sexuality and sexual and gender identity. But only a small (disproportionately university educated) segment of the women’s and gay
and lesbian movement would subscribe to (or even be aware of) the core principles of post-structuralist “antiessentialist epistemology.” Nor would they be agnostic as to whether the state should protect their
rights to express their sexuality. Post-structuralist theorists cannot avoid justificatory arguments for why some identities should be
considered open and democratic and others exclusionary and anti-democratic. That is, how could post-structuralist political theorists argue that Nazi or
Klan “ethics” are antithetical to a democratic society—and that a democratic society can rightfully ban certain forms of “agonal” (e.g. harassing forms of
behavior against minorities) struggle on the part of such anti-democratic groups. A
politics of radical democratic pluralism cannot
be securely grounded by a whole-hearted epistemological critique of “enlightenment rationality.”
For implicit to any radical democratic project is a belief in the equal moral worth of persons ; to embrace such
a position renders one at least a “critical defender” of enlightenment values of equality and justice, even if one rejects
“enlightenment metaphysics” and believes that such values are often embraced by non-Western cultures. Of course, democratic norms are
developed by political practice and struggle rather than by abstract philosophical argument. But this is a
sociological and historical reality rather than a trumping philosophical proof. Liberal democratic publics rarely ground their politics
in coherent ontologies and epistemologies; and even among trained philosophers there is no necessary
connection between one’s metaphysics and one’s politics. There have, are, and will be Kantian
conservatives (Nozick), liberals (Rawls), and radicals (Joshua Cohen; Sosuan Okin); teleologists, left, center, and right
(Michael Sandel, Alasdair McIntyre, or Leo Strauss); anti-universalist feminists (Judith Butler, Wendy Brown) and quasi-universalist,
Habermasian feminists (Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser). Post-structuralists try to read off from an epistemology or
ontology a politics; such attempts simply replace enlightenment meta-narratives with postmodern
(allegedly anti-) meta-narratives. Such efforts represent an idealist version of the materialist effort—which post-structuralists explicitly
condemn—to read social consciousness off the structural position of “the agent.” A democratic political theory must offer both
a theory of social structure and of the social agents capable of building such a society. In exchanging the gods of Weber and Marx for Nietzsche and
[khirn]
pg. 15
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 16
Heidegger (or their epigones Foucault and Derrida), post-structuralist
theory has abandoned the institutional analysis
of social theory for the idealism of abstract philosophy .
The aff fails---deriding all attempts at action as “freezing becoming” no way to deal with
difficult political choices---we also control terminal uniqueness because they can’t convince
others to abandon liberal subjectivity
Schwartz 8 [Joseph, Professor of Political Science at Temple University, “The Future of Democratic Equality,”
56-61]
A politics
of radical democratic pluralism cannot be securely grounded by a whole-hearted epistemological critique
of “enlightenment rationality.” For implicit to any radical democratic project is a belief in the equal moral
worth of persons; to embrace such a position renders one at least a “critical defender” of enlightenment values
of equality and justice, even if one rejects “enlightenment metaphysics” and believes that such values are often embraced by
non-Western cultures. Of course, democratic norms are developed by political practice and 60 struggle
rather than by abstract philosophical argument . But this is a sociological and historical reality rather than a trumping
philosophical proof. Liberal democratic publics rarely ground their politics in coherent ontologies and
epistemologies; and even among trained philosophers there is no necessary connection between one’s
metaphysics and one’s politics. There have, are, and will be Kantian conservatives (Nozick), liberals (Rawls), and radicals (Joshua Cohen;
Susan Okin); teleologists, left, center, and right (Michael Sandel, Alasdair McIntyre, or Leo Strauss); anti-universalist feminists (Judith Butler, Wendy
Brown) and quasi-universalist, Habermasian feminists (Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser). Post-structuralists try to read off from an epistemology or
ontology a politics; such attempts simply replace enlightenment meta-narratives with postmodern (allegedly anti) meta-narratives. Such efforts
represent an idealist version of the materialist effort—which post-structuralists explicitly condemn—to read social consciousness off of the structural
position of “the agent.” A democratic political theory must offer both a theory of social structure and of the social agents
capable of building such a society. In exchanging the gods of Weber and Marx for Nietzsche and Heidegger (or their epigones Foucault and
Derrida), poststructuralist theory has abandoned the institutional analysis of social theory for the idealism of abstract
philosophy. Connolly, Brown, and Butler reject explicit moral deliberation as a bad faith Nietzschean attempt at “ressentiment.” Instead, they
celebrate the amoral, yet ethical strivings of a Machiavellian or Gramscian realist “war of position.”44 Sheldon Wolin, however, has written convincingly
of how Machiavelli can be read as an ethical realist, a theorist of moral utilitarianism.45 Even a Machiavellian or Gramscian political “realist” must
depend upon moral argument to justify the social utility of hard political choices. That is, if one reads both as ethical utilitarians who believe that, at
times, one must “dirty” one’s hands in order to act ethically in politics, then they embrace a utilitarian, “just war” theory of ethical choice. According to
this consequentialist moral logic, “bad means” are only justifiable if they are the only, unavoidable way to achieve a greater ethical good—and if the use of
such “bad means” are absolutely minimized. Such “ hard”
political choices yield social policies and political
outcomes that fix identities as well as transform them . Not only in regard to epistemological questions has poststructuralist theory created a new political “metaphysics” which misconstrues the nature of democratic political practice; the post-structuralist
analysis of “the death of man” and “the death of the subject” also radically preclude meaningful political
agency . As with Michel Foucault, Butler conceives of “subjects” as “produced” by powerknowledge discourses. In Butler’s view, the modernist
concept of an autonomous subject is a “fictive construct”; and the very act of adhering to a belief in autonomous human choice is
to engage in “exclusion and differentiations, perhaps a repression, that is subsequently concealed, covered over, by the effect of
autonomy.”46 That is, the power of discourse, of language and the unconscious, “produces subjects.” If those “subjects” conceive of
themselves as having the capacity for conscious choice, they are guilty of “repressing” the manner in which
their own “subjectivity” is itself produced by discursive 61 exclusion: “if we agree that politics and a power exist already at the level at
which the subject and its agency are articulated and made possible, then agency can be presumed only at the cost of refusing to inquire into its
construction.”47 Susan Bickford pithily summarizes the post-structuralist rejection of the modernist subject: “power is not wielded by autonomous
subjects; rather through power, subjectivity is crafted.”48 Bickford grants that post-structuralism provides some insight into how group and individual
identity is “culturally constructed.” But Bickford goes on to contend that after post-structuralism exposes the “lie of the natural”
(that there are no natural human identities), “socially constructed” modern individuals still wish to act in
consort with others and to use human communication to influence others: “people generally
understand themselves as culturally constituted and capable of agency.”49 For if there is no “doer
behind the deed,” but only “performative” acts that constitute the subject, how can the theorist (or activist) assign agency or moral
responsibility to actors who are “constituted by discursive practices.” (“Discursive practices” engaged in by whom, the observer
may ask?) Butler insists that not only is the subject “socially constituted” by power/knowledge discourses, but so too is the “ontologically reflexive self” of
the enlightenment. Now if this claim is simply that all social critics are socially-situated, then this view of agency is no more radical a claim than that
made by Michael Walzer in his conception of the social critic (or agent). Walzer argues that even the most radical dissident must rely upon the critical
resources embedded within his own culture (often in the almost-hidden interstices of that culture). Effective critical agency cannot depend on some
abstract universal, external logic.50 Asserting that critical capacities are themselves socially constructed provides the
reader with no means by which to judge whether forms of “resistance” are democratic and which are not. That is,
[khirn]
pg. 16
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 17
no matter how hard one tries to substitute an aesthetic, “ironic,” “amoral ethical sensibility” for morality, the social critic and
political activist cannot escape engaging in moral argument and justification with fellow citizens. Butler astutely
notes that “resistance” often mirrors the very powerknowledge discourses it rejects—resisting hegemonic norms without offering alternative conceptions
of a common political life. But Butler seems to affirm the possibility (by whom?) of effective rejection of such “norming” by “performative
resignification.” But the “resignification” of “performative” discursive constructions provides no criteria by which to
judge whether a given “resignification” is emancipatory or repressive.51 And just who (if not a relatively coherent, choosing
human subject) is “performing” the resignification. Furthermore, if all forms of identity and social meaning are predicated upon
“exclusion,” then the democratic theorist needs to distinguish among those identities which “exclude” in a
democratic way and those which exclude in an anti-humanist, racist, and sexist manner. Some social
“identities” are democratic and pluralist, such as those created by voluntary affiliations. But other “identities,”
such as structural, involuntary class differences and racial and sexual hierarchies, must be transformed, even
eliminated, if democracy is to be furthered. And how we behave—or “perform”—can subvert (or reinforce) such undemocratic social
structures. But if these social structures are immutably inscribed by62 “performative practices,” then there can be no democratic resistance. In her call
for an ironic politics of “performative resistance,” Butler seems to imply that human beings have the capacity to choose which “performative practices” to
engage in—and from which to abstain. If this is the case, then a modernist conception of agency and moral responsibility has covertly snuck its way back
into Butler’s political strategy.52
[khirn]
pg. 17
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 18
2nc cede the political
Queer rejection of the state absent a commitment to actual political change results in nothing
Kerl 10 [Eric, Contemporary anarchism, http://isreview.org/issue/72/contemporary-anarchism]
By the end of the decade, anarchism
had established itself as a provocative, radical opposition to the hegemony of pop culture
and the suburban conservatism of Reagan and Thatcher’s worldview. At the same time, anarchist ideas were reduced to a tiny cultural
milieu, stripped of virtually all class politics. In this context, anarchism emphasized the politics of the personal; veganism, interpersonal relations, and
lifestyle choices, rather than revolutionary class politics.¶ The
failure of anarchism to convincingly offer a coherent
strategy for fighting oppression meant that many turned to variants of identity politics. Rather than a
unified movement, this resulted in an increasingly disjointed residue of identity-based anarchisms; green
anarchism, anarcha-feminism, anarchist people of color, queer anarchism , etc. Just as the new global justice
movement was chalking up some early victories, anarchist organizations were disappearing.¶ A new global struggle—a
new anarchism?¶ In 1994, the Zapatista uprising marked the beginning of a worldwide fight against the excesses of global capitalism. The growth of
neoliberalism and global resistance had a profound effect on anarchism internationally. In the United States, where the few workplace fightbacks were
largely isolated and beaten, the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization offered a militant, dynamic way of fighting and immediately
became a touchstone for a revived anarchist movement. In this new context, the central discussion within anarchism was no longer about the nature of
oppression. Instead, protest tactics became the immediate focus—how to recreate the success of Seattle during other meetings of world capitalist elites.¶ ¶
This new emphasis on street tactics marked a significant turn from debates on the roots of oppression. In fact, much
of the global justice movement fostered an atmosphere hostile to political debate . Under the guise of building
consensus, minority perspectives were systematically buried. While much of the movement was preoccupied with a
“diversity of tactics,” little room was left to discuss the very real diversity of politics and ideas that
existed in the movement. “The new movement did arrive, first in the pentecostal appearance of the Zapatistas in 1994, then in 1999 and after at
Seattle, Quebec, Genoa, and Cancún,” explains Staughton Lynd in Wobblies and Zapatistas. ¶ ¶ Moreover, mirabile dictu, it arrived not exactly with a
theory, but at least with a rhetoric: the vocabulary of anarchism. Far be it from me...to tell these splendid and heroic young people that they need more
those who protest in the streets today
may turn out to be sprinters rather than long-distance runners .9¶I will just say that I am worried that in the
absence of theory, many of those who protest in the streets today may turn out to be sprinters rather than
long-distance runners . ¶ This evolving emphasis on practice over theory—and in some cases the elevation of
tactics to the level of principle—exposes two problems for contemporary anarchism. First, the anarchist method
was transformed into its raison d’être. The tactic itself became the goal. ¶ ¶ Second, this represented a retreat
from any goals-based, long-term strategy. As a result, anarchism was chiefly expressed in the concept of prefigurative politics,
where anarchism’s method sought to prefigure an anarchist ideal of social relations.¶ ¶ In this scenario, the classic anarchist goal of
destroying the state receded into the background. Instead, as Lynd describes the approach, the anarchist project “should be to nurture
and better theory. I will just say that I am worried that in the absence of theory, many of
a horizontal network of self-governing institutions down below, to which whoever holds state power will learn they have to be obedient and
accountable.”10¶ ¶ Prefigurative politics, of course, have always been part of the anarchist creed. “No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation
unless the means used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the purposes to be achieved,” wrote Emma Goldman.11 What is
different about the new anarchism is that it ignores rather than challenges state power ; instead of the
means prefiguring the ends, the means have become the ends .
The aff is anti-subversive and gets coopted
Halperin, ’03 (David, PhD, W. H. Auden Distinguished University Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality at the University of Michigan,
where he is also Professor of English, women’s studies, comparative literature, and classical studies, “The Normalization of Queer Theory,”
https://www.academia.edu/4924445/The_Normalization_of_Queer_Theory, bgm)
But with the institutionalization of queer theory, and its acceptance by the academy (and by straight
academics), have come new problems and new challenges. There is something odd, suspiciously odd, about the
rapidity with which queer theory–whose claim to radical politics derived from its anti-assimilationist posture,
from its shocking embrace of the abnormal and the marginal–has been embraced by, canonized by, and
absorbed into our (largely heterosexual) institutions of knowledge, as lesbian and gay studies never were. Despite its implicit
(and false) portrayal of lesbian and gay studies as liberal, assimilationist, and accommodating of the status quo, queer theory has proven to be
much more congenial to established institutions of the liberal academy. The first step was for the “theory” in
queer theory to prevail over the “queer,” for “queer” to become a harmless qualifier of “theory”: if it’s theory,
progressive academics seem to have reasoned, then it’s merely an extension of what important people have
[khirn]
pg. 18
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 19
already been doing all along. It can be folded back into the standard practice of literary and cultural studies, without impeding academic
business as usual. The next step was to despecify the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or transgressive content of
queerness, thereby abstracting “queer” and turning it into a generic badge of subversiveness, a more
trendy version of “liberal”: if it’s queer, it’s politically oppositional, so everyone who claims to be progressive
has a vested interest in owning a share of it. Finally, queer theory, being a theory instead of a discipline, posed
no threat to the monopoly of the established disciplines: on the contrary, queer theory could be incorporated
into each of them, and it could then be applied to topics in already established fields. Those working in English,
history, classics, anthropology, sociology, or religion would now have the option of using queer theory, as they had previously
used Deconstruction, to advance the practice of their disciplines–by “queering” them. The outcome of those
three moves was to make queer theory a game the whole family could play. This has resulted in a paradoxical
situation: as queer theory becomes more widely diffused throughout the disciplines, it becomes harder to figure
out what’s so very queer about it, while lesbian and gay studies, which by contrast would seem to pertain only to lesbians and gay men, looks
increasingly backward, identitarian, and outdated.
[khirn]
pg. 19
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 20
2nc becoming/subjectivity fails
Openness to flux and constant becoming destroys the foundations for political institutions
necessary to sustain radical democratic life---some universal, “fixed” guarantees of equality are
crucial to politics
Schwartz 8 [Joseph M., professor of political science at Temple, The Future of Democratic Equality, p 56-57,
google books]
Butler, Brown, and Connolly reject the essentialism of “narrow” identity politics as an inverted “ressentiment” of the Enlightenment desire for a
universal, homogenized identity. They judge identity politics to be a politics of “wounding, resentment, and victimization” that only can yield bad-faith
moralization Wendy Brown takes to task identity politics for “essentializing” conceptions of group identity. For example, she critiques the work of
Catherine MacKinnon as epitomizing “identity” political theory, accusing MacKinnon of denying women agency by depicting them purely as victims.38
Brown also remains wary of the patriarchal, conformist nature of traditional left conceptions of solidarity and citizenship. Brown’s implicit concept of
radical democratic citizenship rests upon the recognition that political identity is continually in flux and is socially constituted through “agonal” political
struggle. Brown celebrates an Arendtian conception of a polity in which both shared and particular identities are continually open to reconstruction. In
this “left Nietzschean” view of an “everyperson’s” will to power, there can be no cultural certainties or political givens, as such “givens” would repress
difference and fluidity.39 But, if the human condition is a world of permanent flux, then we must postulate a human
capability of living with constant insecurity, for in this world there can be no stable political institutions or
political identities.40 An ability to calculate the probabilities of political actions or public policies would
disappear in this world of infinite liminality. By assuming that the pre-eminent democratic value is that of
leaving all issues as permanently open to question, post-structuralist “democratic theory” eschews the
theoretical and political struggle over what established institutions and consensual values are needed
to underpin a democratic society . Post-structuralist analysis has contributed to a healthy suspicion of narrow and “essentializing”
identity politics. But a self-identified feminist, African- American, or lesbian activist is likely to value the shared historical narratives that partly
constitute such group identities. Of course, if one is a democrat and a pluralist, one would reject the oppressive
homogenization and potentially authoritarian aspects of ethnic or racial chauvinism and of “essentializing” types of identity politics. The
democratic political home should be open, fluid, and self-reflective; but if participation is to be open to all, then
such a society also needs to reproduce a shared democratic culture and the institutional guarantee of democratic
rights. That is, contrary to post-structuralist analysis, not all issues can be open to “agonal struggle” in a democratic society. The
traditional radical democratic critique of democratic capitalism remains valid; the equal worth of the individual is devalued by
rampant social inequality within and between groups. Thus, a radical democrat, whether post-structuralist or
not, must not only be committed to institutional protections of political and civil rights, but also to social
rights—the equal access to the basic goods of citizenship (education, health care, housing, child care). Of
course, the precise nature and extent of these rights will be politically contested and constructed. But a democratic society
cannot leave as totally “open” the minimal institutional basis of democracy— a democratic society cannot be agnostic as to
the value of freedom of speech, association, and universal suffrage. Social movements fighting for an expansion of civil, political, and social rights, rarely,
if ever, rest their arguments on appeals to epistemological truths— whether “foundational” or “anti-foundational.” To remain democratic, their policy
goals cannot be so specific that they preclude political argument about both their worth and how best to institutionalize them. If social movements in a
58 democratic society deemed that every policy defeat meant a betrayal of basic democratic principles, there would be no give-and-take or winners and
losers within democratic politics. But if a government were to abolish freedom of speech and competitive elections, or deny a social group basic rights, it
would be reasonable for an observer to judge that democratic principles had been violated. Democratic political movements and coalitions
struggle to construct shared meanings about those political, civil, and social rights that should be guaranteed to
all citizens—and they often work to expand the types of persons to be recognized as citizens (such as excluded immigrants). Such
arguments are inevitably grounded in normative arguments that go beyond merely asserting
the import of “flux,” “difference,” and “anti-essentialism.” The civil rights movement did not demand equal rights for all solely as an
“agonal” assertion of the will of the excluded; they desired to gain for persons of color an established set of civil and political rights that had been granted
to some citizens and denied to others. The movement correctly assumed that the exclusion of citizens from full political and civil rights violated the basic
norms of a democratic society. Thus, postmodern epistemological commitments to “flux” and “openness” cannot in-and-ofthemselves sustain the “fixed” moral positions needed to sustain a radical democracy. Post-structuralist theorists openly
proclaim their hostility to all philosophical “meta-narratives.” They reject comprehensive conceptions of how society operates and the type of society that
would best instantiate human freedom. But post-structuralists go beyond rejecting “meta-narratives”; they insist that only an “anti-foundational”
epistemology can ground a politics of emancipation. For Butler, Brown, and Connolly, not only do “meta-discourses” invariably fail in their efforts to
ground moral positions in a theory of human nature or human reason. They also assert that an agonal politics of democratic “we” formation can alone
sustain democratic society. This agonal politics, they claim, can only be sustained by a recognition of the inconstant signification
of discourse and the ineluctable flux of personal and group identity.41 Rejecting the authoritarian, celebration of the “ubermensch” by
Nietzsche, they offer a post-Nietzschean, “amoral” conception of democracy as an open-ended project of defining a self and community that is constantly
[khirn]
pg. 20
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 21
open to the desires of “others.” These theorists constantly reiterate the definitiveness (dare we say “foundational truth”) of this grounding of democracy,
despite the historical reality that social movements often contest dominant narratives in the
name of a stable alternative narrative of a democratic and pluralist community. One might well contend
that the post-structuralist political stance is guilty of a new meta-narrative of “bad faith,” that of “antifoundationalism.” According to this anti-foundational politics, a true democrat must reject any and all a priori truths allegedly grounded upon the
nature of human reason or human nature. A committed democrat may well be skeptical of such neo-Kantian or neo-Hegelian conceptions of freedom;
but, many committed democrats justify their moral commitments using these philosophical methods. A democrat might also reject (or accept) the
arguments of a Jurgen Habermas or Hans Georg Gadamer that the structure of human linguistic communication contains within it the potential for a
society based on reasoned argument rather than manipulation and domination. But there are numerous other philosophically “pragmatic” ways to justify
democracy, even utilitarian ones. Political democrats may well disagree about the best philosophical defense of democracy. But, invariably, “practicing
democrats” will defend the belief (however philosophically “proved” or “justified”) that democratic regimes best fulfill the moral commitment to the
equal worth of persons and to the equal potential of human beings to freely develop and pursue their life plans. To contend that only an antifoundationalist, anti-realist epistemology can sustain democracy is to argue precisely for a foundational metaphysical grounding for the democratic
project. It is to contend that one’s epistemology determines one’s politics. Hence, Brown and Butler both spoke at a spring 1998 academic
conference at the University of California at Santa Cruz where some attributed “reactionary” and “left cultural conservatism” to belief in
“reactionary”
“foundationalist humanism.”42 Post-structuralism cannot escape its own essentialist
conception of identity. For example, Butler contends in Feminist Contentions that democratic feminists must embrace
the post-structuralist “nondefinability of woman” as best suited to open democratic constitution of what it is to be a “woman.”43 But
this is itself a “closed” position and runs counter to the practices of many democratic feminist activists who
have tried to develop a pluralist, yet collective identity around the shared experiences of being a woman in a
patriarchal society (of course, realizing that working-class women and women of color experience patriarchy in some ways that are distinct from
the patriarchy experienced by middle-class white women). One query that post-structuralist theorists might ask themselves:
has there ever existed a mass social movement that defined its primary “ethical” values as
being those of “instability and flux”? Certainly many sexual politics activists are cognizant of the fluid nature of sexuality and
sexual and gender identity. But only a small (disproportionately university educated) segment of the women’s and gay and lesbian movement would
subscribe to (or even be aware of) the core principles of post-structuralist “anti-essentialist epistemology.” Nor would they be agnostic as to whether the
state should protect their rights to express their sexuality. Post-structuralist theorists cannot avoid justificatory arguments for
why some identities should be considered open and democratic and others exclusionary and anti-democratic.
That is, how could post-structuralist political theorists argue that Nazi or Klan “ethics” are antithetical to a democratic society—and that a democratic
society can rightfully ban certain forms of “agonal” (e.g. harassing forms of behavior against minorities) struggle on the part of such anti-democratic
groups.
The aff’s focus on becoming forever suspends political engagement in favor of self-therapy –
accepting some axioms of commonality are necessary to achieve emancipation
Ojeili 3 [Chamsy, Senior Lecturer School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of Wellington,
Post-modernism, the Return to Ethics, and the Crisis of Socialist Values,
www.democracynature.org/vol8/ojeili_ethics.htm#_edn9]
Notably, anarchists have often been charged with this failing by Marxian thinkers.[157] Anarchism does include those suspicious of the demands of
association, those who fear the tyranny of the majority and who emphasise instead the uniqueness and liberty of the individual. Here, the freedom of the
creative individual, unhindered by the limitations of sociality, is essential. This second strand shows clearly the influence of liberal ideas. It is also, in its
bohemian and nihilistic incarnation, a child to the malevolent trio of De Sade, Stirner, Nietzsche, that is, those who reject coercive community mores and
who recoil from herdish, conformist pressures. The free individual must create his or her own guiding set of values, exploring the hitherto untapped and
perhaps darker aspects of him or herself through an art which chaffs against the standards of beauty and taste of the ordinary mortal. Given that freedom
cannot endure limitations and that all idols have been driven from the world and the mind, for these revolutionaries, “all is permitted”.[158] This
emphasis on individual sovereignty is clear in Godwin and Stirner,[159] but also in Goldman’s suspicion of collective life, in her elevation of the role of
heroic individuals in history, and in the work of situationist Raoul Vaneigem.[160] This accent within non-orthodox socialism has been much criticised.
For instance, Murray Bookchin has contrasted “social” with “lifestyle” anarchism, rejecting the elevation the self-rule of the individual in the latter to the
highest goal of anarchist thinking.[161] One might consider, here, the consequences, in the case of Emma Goldman, of the substitution
of collective revolutionary change for boheme and for an intellectualist contempt for the masses. Goldman turned
more and more to purely self-expressive activity and increasingly appealed to intellectuals and middle class audiences, who felt amused
and flattered by her individualism and exotic iconoclasm.[162] This egoistic and personalistic turn ignores the essential
social anarchist aspiration to freedom, the commitment to an end to domination in society , the comprehension
of the social premises of the individualist urge itself, and the necessity of moving beyond a purely negative conception of liberty to a thicker, positive
conception of freedom.[163] Perhaps, as Bookchin has rather trenchantly asserted, the recent individualist and neo-situationist
concern with subjectivity, expression, and desire is all too much like middle class narcissism and the selfcentred therapeutics of New Age culture. Perhaps also, as Barrot has said, the kind of revolutionary life advocated by Vaneigem
cannot be lived.[164] Further, total freedom for any one individual necessarily means diminished freedom for others. As La Banquise argue, “Repression
and sublimation prevent people from sliding into a refusal of otherness”.[165] For socialists, freedom must be an ineradicably social as well as an
[khirn]
pg. 21
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 22
individual matter. The whole thrust
of libertarian politics is towards a collective project that reconstructs those
freedom-limiting structures of economy, power, and ideology.[166] It seems unlikely that such ambitions could be achieved by
those motivated solely by a Sadean ambition to seek satisfaction of their own improperly understood desires. On this question, Castoriadis is again
useful – accenting autonomy as a property of the collective and of each individual within society, and rejecting
the opposition between community and humanity, between the “inner man [sic] and the public man [sic]”.[167] Castoriadis
ridiculed abstract individualism: “We are not ‘individuals’, freely floating above society and history, who are
capable of deciding sovereignly and in the absolute about what we shall do, about how we shall do it, and about the meaning our
doing will have once it is done … Above all, qua individuals, we choose neither the questions to which we will have to respond nor the terms in which they
will be posed, nor, especially, the ultimate meaning of our response, once given”.[168] Rejecting the contemporary tendency to posit others
as limitations on our freedom, Castoriadis argued that others were in fact premises of liberty, “possibilities of action”,
and “sources of facilitation”.[169] Freedom is the most vital object of politics, and this freedom – always a process
and never an achieved state – is equated with the “effective, humanly feasible, lucid and reflective positing of the
rules of individual and collective activity”.[170] An autonomous society – one without alienation – explicitly and democratically creates
and recreates the institutions of its own world, formulating and reformulating its own rules, rather than simply accepting them as given from above and
outside. The resulting institutions, Castoriadis hoped, would facilitate high levels of responsibility and activity among all people in respect of all
questions about society.[171] Castoriadis’ notion of social transformation holds to the goals of integrated human communities, the unification of people’s
lives and culture, and the collective domination of people over their own lives.[172] He was also committed to the free deployment of the
person’s creative forces. Just as Castoriadis enthused over the capacity of human collectivities for immense works of creativity and
responsibility,[173] so he insisted on the radical creativity of the individual and the importance of individual freedom. Congruent with the notion of
social autonomy, Castoriadis posited the autonomous individual as, most essentially, one who legislates for and thus regulates him or herself.[174]
Turning to psychoanalysis, he designated this autonomy as the emergence of a more balanced and productive relationship between the ego and the
these goals were not guaranteed by anything outside of the collective activity
of people towards such goals , and he insisted that individual autonomy could only arise “under
heavily instituted conditions … through the instauration of a regime that is genuinely …
democratic”.[175] Such an outcome could not be solved in theory but only by a re-awakening of
politics. Only in the clash of opinions – dependent on a restructured social formation – not determined in
advance by naturalistic or religious postulates, could a true ethics emerge.[176] This, I believe, is the highpoint of libertarian thinking about
unconscious. For Castoriadis,
ethics and politics. Conclusion I have argued that socialist orthodoxy has been eclipsed as a programme for the good life. On the one hand, it devolves
into a project of pragmatic expediency bereft of a political and ethical dimension, where statist administration submerges both individual freedom and
democratic decision-making. On the other hand, as social democracy the orthodox tradition coalesces into a variety of more or less straightforward
liberalism. Liberalism tends to overstate the conception of humans as choosers, under-theorising and under-valuing the necessity of political community
and the social dimension of individuality and the necessity of a positive conception of freedom. The communitarian critique, however, too readily
diminishes the freedoms of the individual, subordinating people entirely to the horizons of community life and reducing politics to something like a
“general will”. Possessed of both liberal and communitarian features, post-modernism has been skeptical about the idea of a unitary human essence. It
has jettisoned the notion of humans as unencumbered choosers, and it has underscored the constructedness of all our values. In so doing, post-
modernism signals a renewed interest in ethics, in questions of responsibility, evaluation, and difference, within contemporary social
thinking. Post-modernism offers a valuable critique of the tendency of socialist orthodoxy to bury the socialist insight as to the sociality and historicity of
values. Nevertheless, advancing as it does on orthodox socialism, post-modernism’s radical constructivism and its horror at the disasters
of confident and unreflective modernity
can issue in an ironic hesitancy, indicated in particular by an uncritical
emphasis on pluralism and incommensurability that threatens to forever suspend
evaluation .[177] One signal of this is the cautious and depoliticised obsession with Otherness and the
subject as victim of the return to ethics.[178] Further, post-modernism all too often withdraws from universals and
emancipation towards particularist – either individualist or community-based – answers to questions of justice and the
content of the valuable life. In contrast, those seeking a radical, inclusive democracy must remain engaged
and universalist in orientation . A number of libertarians have not hesitated in committing themselves, most importantly, to the
emancipation of humanity without exception.[179] In fact, politics and ethics seem unthinkable without such
universalistic aspirations . Post-modernists themselves have often had to submit to this truth, smuggling into
their analyses universally-binding ethico-political principles and attempting to theorise the potential
linkages between progressive political struggles. However, such linkages do not amount to a coherent
anti-systemic movement that addresses the power of state and capital . In contrast, the universalist
commitments of the ethics of emancipation held to by many libertarians accents both freedom and equality, and the
establishment of a true political community , against the dominations and distortions of state and capital.
Against the contemporary obsession with ethics, which is so often sloganistic, depoliticised , defensive, privatised,
and trivial, we should, with Castoriadis, accent politics as primary and as the condition of proper ethical
[khirn]
pg. 22
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 23
engagement. I have argued that, in line with Castoriadis’ strictures, such a political community and the aspiration to truly ethical and political
deliberation, can only be attained when socialists free themselves from belief in the possibility of extra social guarantees “other than the free play of
passions and needs”,[180] and from the expectation of an end to tensions and dilemmas around questions of social ordering. On these terms, libertarian
goals are not – contra liberal strictures – the negation of aspirations for freedom and democracy but are rather a collective pressing of these aspirations
to the very far limits of popular sovereignty. It is for this reason that the stubborn durability of these goals may, against all expectations, be an auspicious
sign for libertarian utopianism.
[khirn]
pg. 23
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 24
at: global war impact
No war impact
Chandler 9 [David, Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and International
Relations, University of Westminster, War Without End(s): Grounding the Discourse of `Global War', Security
Dialogue 2009; 40; 243] //khirn
For many critical post-structuralist theorists, the
‘global war on terror’ reveals the essence of liberal modernity and fully
reveals the limits of its universalist ontology of peace and progress, where the reality of Kant’s ‘perpetual peace’ is revealed to be
perpetual war (Reid, 2006: 18). Perhaps the most radical abstract framing of global war is that of Giorgio Agamben. In his seminal
work Homo Sacer, he reframed Foucault’s understanding of biopower in terms of the totalizing control over bare life, arguing that the ‘exemplary places
of modern biopolitics [were] the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century’ (Agamben, 1998: 4; see
also Chandler, 2009a). Agamben’s view of liberal power is that of the concentration camp writ globally, where we are all merely objects of power, ‘we are
all virtually homines sacri’ (Agamben, 1998: 115). ¶ In focusing on biopower as a means of critiquing universalist policy discourses of global security,
critical theorists of global war from diverse fields such as security studies (Jabri, 2007), development (Duffield,
2007) or
critical legal theory (Douzinas, 2007) are in danger of reducing their critique of war to abstract
statements instrumentalizing war as a technique of global power. These are abstract critiques
because the political stakes are never in question : instrumentality and the desire for regulation and
control are assumed from the outset. In effect, the critical aspect is merely in the reproduction of the framework of Foucault – that liberal
discourses can be deconstructed as an exercise of regulatory power. Without deconstructing the dominant framings of global security threats, critical
theorists are in danger of reproducing Foucault’s framework of biopower as an ahistorical abstraction. Foucault (2007: 1) himself stated that his analysis
of biopower was ‘not in any way a general theory of what power is. It is not a part or even the start of such a theory’, merely the study of the effects of
liberal governance practices, which posit as their goal the interests of society – the population – rather than government.¶ In his recent attempt at a
ground-clearing critique of Foucauldian international relations theorizing, Jan Selby (2007) poses the question of the problem of the translation of
Foucault from a domestic to an international context. He argues that recasting the international sphere in terms of global liberal regimes of regulation is
an accidental product of this move. This fails to appreciate the fact that many critical theorists appear to be drawn to Foucault precisely because drawing
on his work enables them to critique the international order in these terms. Ironically, this ‘Foucauldian’ critique of ‘global wars’ has little to do with
Foucault’s understanding or concerns, which revolved around extending Marx’s critique of the ‘freedoms’ of liberal modernity. In effect, the postFoucauldians have a different goal: they desire to understand and to critique war and military intervention as a product of the regulatory coercive nature
of liberalism. This project owes much to the work of Agamben and his focus on the regulation of ‘bare life’, where the concentration camp, the totalitarian
state and (by extension) Guantánamo Bay are held to constitute a moral and political indictment of liberalism (Agamben, 1998: 4). ¶ In these critical
frameworks, global war is understood as the exercise of global aspirations for control, no longer mediated by the
interstate competition that was central to traditional ‘realist’ framings of international relations. This less-mediated framework
understands the interests and instrumental techniques of power in global terms. As power becomes understood
in globalized terms, it becomes increasingly abstracted from any analysis of contemporary social
relations : viewed in terms of neoliberal governance, liberal power or biopolitical domination. In this context,
global war becomes little more than a metaphor for the operation of power. This war is a global one
because, without clearly demarcated political subjects, the unmediated operation of regulatory power is held to construct a
world that becomes, literally, one large concentration camp (Agamben, 1998: 171) where instrumental techniques of power can
be exercised regardless of frameworks of rights or international law (Agamben, 2005: 87). For Julian Reid (2006: 124), the ‘global war on
terror’ can be understood as an inevitable response to any forms of life that exist outside – and are therefore
threatening to – liberal modernity, revealing liberal modernity itself to be ultimately a ‘terrorising project’
arraigned against the vitality of life itself. For Jabri, and other Foucauldian critics, the liberal peace can only mean
‘unending war’ to pacify, discipline and reconstruct the liberal subject:
[khirn]
pg. 24
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 25
at: puar impact
Homonationalism provides a simplistic account of relationship between tolerance and
violence---specific analysis of material structures and institutions is necessary to solve
Ritchie 14 [Jason, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Florida International University, “Pinkwashing,
Homonationalism, and Israel–Palestine: The Conceits of Queer Theory and the Politics of the Ordinary,”
Antipode, 3 Jun 2014] //khirn
My argument is not, of course, that racism does not exist in many contemporary contexts—including Israel–
Palestine—nor I am arguing that “tolerance” of homosexuals has not, in many of those contexts, been marshaled to
provide cover for the imposition of violence against racialized others (eg the Israeli occupation). My argument, instead , is
that the popularity of the concept of homonationalism owes much to its oversimplifications. Power, in this
framework, is reducible to racism, and racism is understood in a universalizing manner that allows the critic to
avoid the messy work of “[locating] the meanings of race and racism … within particular fields of discourse
[and articulating their meanings] to the social relations” in concrete socio-historical contexts (Solomos and
Back 1995:415). I have utilized the metaphor of the checkpoint to demonstrate what I believe to be a more empirically
convincing and politically engaged account of the everyday violence queer Palestinians face. Focusing on the
checkpoint requires one to locate the racist violence of the Israeli state in a specific time and place,
structured by identifiable social and political processes and inhabited by actual human beings who
embody multiple subject positions that differently inflect the ways in which they encounter those processes and one another. Such a strategy
will do little to challenge the monopolization of queer spaces in North American and European cities by racist neocons like Michael Lucas, nor will it
provide a convenient mechanism for radical activists—or theoretically sophisticated academics—to validate their queer credentials. But if queers who live
in other places have some value beyond serving as grist for North American and European queers to consolidate a properly radical subjectivity and
mitigate their privilege, homonationalism's activist critics—and its theorists—might
consider resisting the impulse to
homogenize this or that queer as the victim or the victor and work instead to develop a nuanced framework
for building coalitions to fight—rather than platforms on which to fight about—the complex and
unpredictable ways space is organized, difference is enforced, and some bodies in some places are allowed to move more freely than
others.
[khirn]
pg. 25
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 26
at: ressentiment impacts
Acting to change the world generates meaning – their deterministic account of ressentiment
leads to social Darwinism that causes their impacts
Ure 12 [Michael, date inferred, political and social theory prof at Monash University,
Resentment/Ressentiment, http://www.academia.edu/2434176/Resentment_Ressentiment]
Nietzsche's slave revolt against the aristocratic order of rank larger/ fits the bill of socio-political resentment: it primarily derives from impotent distress
about what its agents claim are global or systematic injustices directed at their social group, rather than individual distress over agent specific acts of
malice. Nietzsche simply clouds the issue when he explains this socio-political resentment solely in
terms of ressentiment against life, which he conceives as a symptom of physiological degeneracy. If we follow
Nietzsche we must agree in effect that slave protest against aristocratic privilege does not derive from socio-political resentment, but from ressentiment
against the fundamental conditions of life, or what we might call ontological ressentiment. As
an aristocratic radical he assumes that a
systematically uneven distribution of power, goods and opportunities can be just as long as it reflects a
natural hierarchy of excellence. He also seems to assume that pagan antiquities' noble-slave divide properly
reflected a natural order of rank between flourishing (ascending) and degenerate (descending) types. He
applauds the classical world's unequal distribution of power and goods on the grounds that it facilitated the
flourishing of the highest human types. Since Nietzsche claims the biologically impotent can never achieve personal excellence or cultural
greatness he argues that their attempts to morally proscribe aggressive, combative drives and to equalize opportunities for all only serve to eliminate the
necessary conditions of existence for the highest human types. Nietzsche believes, then, that we should reverse the slave revolt,
not merely in order to a restore aristocratic privilege, but because
to do so is to protect life itself from degeneration. Nietzsche
misconceives socio-political resentment of unjust aristocratic privilege with ressentiment or an attack on the
fundamental conditions of existence. Nietzsche wants to convince us that in attacking the aristocratic order of rank these 'slaves' are attacking 'life' or
Slaves are the enemies of 'life', not aristocratic privilege. He transforms the political drama of
class conflict and resentment into an apocalyptic conflict between the forces of life affirmation and the
forces of life-denial or ressentiment. If we suspend Nietzsche's aristocratic prejudice, underpinned
by the neo-Darwinian spectre of biological degeneracy, we might argue instead that the unequal
distribution of power, goods and opportunities imposes rather than expresses an order of rank. If we
grant this point, we can then conceive 'slave' revolt as legitimate socio-political resentment against political and
material inequities, a protest that should aim to establish conditions that enable the socially and political
disadvantaged group the same opportunities to maximise their capabilities. " What Nietzsche ignores " as
Solomon explains "partly because of his own sense of biological determinism ... is the legitimacy of the felt
need to change the world . The sentiment of resentment may often be a legitimate sense of
oppression. It is not the voice of mediocrity or incompetence but the passion for justice denied ".65
'existence'.
What then of Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment? If his account of the master-slave dynamic is better understood primarily as a case of socio-political
resentment, does the concept of ressentiment have any moral or political significance? Clearly in the modern speculative philosophical tradition what I
am calling ontological ressentiment has taken root as a meaningful concept. However, while we grant ressentiment status as a peculiar,
perhaps even uniquely modern psychological pathology,
interpret or explain
it remains an open question whether, as Nietzsche assumed, it can help
moral or political phenomena.66
No impact to ressentiment and we can use it productively
Dolgert 10 [Stefan, Prof @ Brock U, In Praise of Ressentiment: OR, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love Glen Beck, APSA 2010 Annual Meeting Paper,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1642232]
Ressentiment is not jealous: It is not necessary to maintain consistency of political message across time and context.
Ressentiment can be cultivated via the assignment of blame to political enemies while simultaneous speaking of a politics of reconciliation,
bipartisanship, and aisle-crossing. Ronald Reagan coupled an insouciant optimism and personal charm with deft demonization of evil empires, welfare
queens, and their fellow travelers. Left politicians misunderstand the Rightist criticism of “flip-flopping” because they
take the critic to literally mean what he or she says. The Rightists do not mean this, and they know it. The flip-flopping of one’s
political allies is as meaningless as the flip- flopping of one’s foes is evidence of hypocrisy, weakness, indecisiveness, etc. Thus one sees plenty of
politicians who play to opposite registers (resentment now, reconciliation later) and who are not punished; the ones who
[khirn]
pg. 26
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 27
are, like John Kerry, are punished not for 25 flip-flopping but for being too dull-witted to understand the nature of
the game they are playing. Ressentiment should be cultivated at the most general level possible, though without ruling out the use
of specifics: Personalized narratives of woe are crucial to the refinement of ressentiment, but this should not be taken as license to “go specific” at all
costs. In particular, examples of particular people should be used carefully, as the most important element of the exemplar is that a general audience be
able to their own story mirrored in the spectacle of misery being displayed before them. While there are numerous possible foci for such a generalized
ressentiment, the corporation and the government agencies beholden to corporate capitalism still seems the most
likely and most fruitful targets of opportunity. It is crucial, however, to maintain the rhetoric of equality of opportunity and the defense
of the small businessman amidst the critique of the corporation. If this seems like an impossible feat, consider that it is no more inherently difficult than
Reagan’s rhetorical evisceration of “Big Government” while simultaneously creating the creating the largest American federal government in history. Of
course there was a contradiction at the heart of his program – but does identifying this as a debating point have any real effect? Ressentiment is
inevitable as long as consumer capitalism holds sway, according to the theorists most prized by the Left, so we
had better make our peace with her: This is not to reify ressentiment, as I have stated before, but it is to say that the Left more so than
the Right has reason to utilize ressentiment with a good conscience. It is from the Left that 26 we hear the
narrative of capitalism as a ressentiment-producing engine of amazing power (Connolly 1988; Brown 1993), and unless capitalism
is about to pass from the scene, which seems wishful thinking of the most extreme nature, the Left should be harnessing the energy of
this current rather than simply criticizing it. There are many filaments that comprise the fiber of the American Left, but whether
indebted to the theories of Marx, Nietzsche, or Rawls, most of these strands implicitly link their political programs to the
ressentiment-producing apparatuses of contemporary society. Indeed, Wendy Brown implies that ressentiment is responsible for
“welfare-state liberalism” as such in the form of “attenuations of the unmitigated license of the rich and powerful on behalf of the ‘disadvantaged’”
(Brown 1993, 400). Perhaps I am being unfair here to Brown, but it sounds as if the welfare state is a rather tawdry achievement. While I have
no
interest in further propping up the status quo, it seems worth noting that ressentiment’s acknowledged role in
the creation of liberal democracy, here scoffed at by Brown, is no small thing. Ressentiment is patient, but not infinitely so.
If, as Melissa Lane observes in her study of Plato’s Statesman, a sense of timing is the sine qua non of the political ruler (Lane 1998), then we must
be sensitive to the kairos, the right moment for the deployment of a ressentiment-filled rhetoric. It would be difficult to
imagine a more opportune moment than the present recession for cultivating a sense of working-class victimage, yet, oddly
enough, it is the Right rather than the Left which has been carrying the banner of anti- finance capital. How is this possible? When one is the party in
power in the United States it is difficult to govern without the consent of the barons of Wall Street, and the 27 Democrats must be particularly solicitous
of the favor of the financial elites since a collapsing Dow Jones, ever skittish of “statist” Democratic interference, is prone to regard even the mildest
brand of Democratic populism as the equivalent of the October Revolution. Democratic elites have felt it necessary to go the extra mile around a horse as
shy as this one, and coupled with the particular friendships and connections between Obama and his economic advisors, who read like a who’s who of
Goldman Sachs alums, and it is easy to understand why it is Glenn Beck rather than Barack Obama who has taken up the populist mantle. That said,
opportunities like this do not come along often, and pivotal electoral moments can reshape the political
landscape for decades. The crucial question to ask is how the needs of the resentful many can be squared with
the need to placate corporate power (i.e. to prevent stock markets from crashing, capital fleeing overseas,
international economic sanctions, etc.). Populists from South America to Europe have found multiple answers to this question, so the
dilemma is not an insoluble one. But in order to address this tension the Left must first give up its utopian hope
that the Beloved Community is around the corner, and that all that is needed to get there is one final
psychological purge. The resentful are going to be here for a long time to come, as Brown and Connolly ably demonstrate,
so Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and their successors must begin to think more creatively about how to combine the
politics of hope with the politics of blame. After Ressentiment In closing I would suggest that my praise of ressentiment is also in line with
the more deliberatively conceived multiculturalism of the Left than is the current puritanical disdain. As Monique Deveaux argues, it is a failure of
political imagination when we 28 fixate on liberal principles as preconditions to multicultural dialogue, and in particular it is necessary to move toward a
deeper level of intercultural respect rather than mere toleration (Deveaux 2000).10 But if it is appropriate to go beyond simply tolerating non- liberal
peoples abroad and in immigrant communities, if we must go beyond toleration to do justice to the rich tradition of cultural pluralism, then perhaps we
can also open our hearts and minds to the possibility that the ressentiment-suffused need to be heard out as well. Perhaps rather than
demonizing ressentiment as a toxin to politics, as the worst of the worst for subjects whom we purport to free,
we must accept that ressentiment is for many inseparable from their conception of their own freedom . Perhaps
rather than pitying these poor fools, in ways that we would never pity a plural wife in the global South, we
should ponder whether ressentiment as a precondition of subjectivity is as much a gift as a curse. And are we so sure,
after all, we late Nietzscheans, that our crusade against ressentiment is not itself suffused with ressentiment? Is not itself fully in the grips of it? How
would we know if it were or weren’t? Perhaps we are, in our own way, as spiteful, vain, petty, weak, subjected, enraged
against the past, capitalized, consumerized, unfree, as those we purport to want to free from the chains of slave
morality. Perhaps it is ourselves that we need to give a break to, that we need to get over, when we first look to
purge the other of ressentiment. Perhaps we all swim in this current, perhaps we are all Ressentiment’s
children, and perhaps that is OK – even to the extreme of the using ressentiment unconsciously in the effort to
rid the world of ressentiment. Though just in saying so I wouldn’t expect that to do much to overturn Ressentiment’s reign. No, she is far too
puissant for that. But we do not need to rage against the weakness in others because we fear the dependence and
weakness in ourselves. As Vetlesen puts it, defending Amery: “Against Nietzsche, who despised victims because he saw
[khirn]
pg. 27
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 28
them as weak, as losers in life’s struggles, Amery upholds the dignity of having been forced by circumstances
beyond one’s control into that position, thus reminding Nietzsche that as humans we are essentially relational
beings, dependent, not self-sufficient. In hailing the strong and despising the weak, in denying that
vulnerability is a basic ineluctably given human condition, a condition from which not only the role of victim
springs but that of the morally responsible agent too, Nietzsche fails to be the provocateur he loves to believe he
is: He sides with the complacent majority and so helps reinforce the existential and moral loneliness felt by Amery,
the individual victim who speaks up precisely in that capacity” (Vetlesen 2006, 43). Perhaps we can begin to see how we have been using the
weak, the viewers of Glenn Beck and others, as the targets for our need to find blameworthy agents. And that too is fine.
The trouble comes when we think we’ve gone beyond Ressentiment when in fact we’re just listening to her
whisperings without realizing it. We think that we can well and truly look down on the Rush Limbaughs, these destroyers of civilization,
because they are possessed by something that we are above. And far be it from me to suggest that we should not resent, should
not blame; I merely suggest we direct our blame toward more useful ends than where it is currently located.
[khirn]
pg. 28
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 29
solvency
[khirn]
pg. 29
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 30
1nc solvency
Debate can’t solve --- voting for particular bodies reifies subjectivity
Jones 9 [Angela, “Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness,” interalia: a journal of
queer studies, 2009 – 4, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Farmingdale State College,
http://www.interalia.org.pl/en/artykuly/2009_4/13_queer_heterotopias_homonormativity_and_the_future
_of_queerness.htm] //khirn
Queer heterotopias are a radical post-human vision where nothing is fixed and there are no boundaries, and no hierarchies. These
are spaces
with no ordered categories that qualify and rank bodies. This will require the radical transformation of bodies,
subversive performances, and transforming our minds, our souls, and our thoughts. It seems that queer theorists and queer
utopian hopefuls have pinned their hopes on subjectification. While, I too find the manipulation of the body
through a "confused mimesis" (Scheie: 1994) alluring, ultimately, I must wonder if these performances only reify
subjectification . The focal point of queer politics cannot just be the body; queer bodies do not just look queer; these bodies behave queerly.
While our bodies are sites of possibilities, we must be careful about naming these performances and reifying
the performances into identities. If all queer performances en masse despite their differences constitute queerness then no exclusion
is possible.
The aff’s attempt to use subjectivity break free of binaries reinscribes the each metaphysical
hierarchy they criticize by valorizing the subject while precluding the possibility of seduction by
the object --- vote negative to revert the subject/object dialectic endorsed through the 1ac
Grace 8 [“Baudrillard’s Illusions: The Seduction of Feminism”, 2008, VICTORIA GRACE, University of
Canterbury, New Zealand, French Cultural Studies 19(3): 347–361] //khirn
In feminist discourse, action and theorising since the mid-twentieth century, the woman who does not revolt,
analyse or go beyond, but who rather employs her position to entrap and seduce the world into her own domain of
limitation, is a particularly galling figure. She is the butt of the patriarchy as much as the scorn of feminism: she is the joke of the music
hall, she is the demonic angel who knows her place and uses it to diminish others in her own narcissistic grandstanding. By making herself ‘prey’,
according to Beauvoir, ‘she arouses and entraps men through submissively making herself into a thing’ (Beauvoir, 1953 [1949]: 727). This passive
position of entrapment invariably incites the declaration that woman desires her position – witness her delight, her cunning and her satisfaction. As I
discuss below, the perception of such a desire can lead to her being a victim of sacrifice. Although feminist theory has been transformed
since Beauvoir and the second wave through a poststructuralist critique and its aftermath, even though the object of feminist concern is now the phallocentrism of the binary structure itself and not solely the position of women within it, I think it is reasonable to suggest that feminist
theorising still wants to steer a course that is well clear of the figure of the feminine depicted above. This archetypal
feminine (of the fall) cannot be revisited in any incarnation.
This is where the ideas and provocations of Jean Baudrillard appear to contain their danger, their
conservatism, indeed their anti-feminism, and are therefore discouraging of feminist interest. The very word ‘seduction’ (used
frequently by Baudrillard, and the title of one of his early books) acts as a formidable deterrent. I want to argue that consideration of what
Baudrillard is doing with seduction and similar concepts reveals why feminists should not reject them; my
intention is to suggest they are not only ‘useful’ but central to a feminist critique. And simultaneously the argument
must be made for where Baudrillard’s elaboration of these conceptual foundations of his work needs to be critically reviewed for what is possibly its
departure from its own terms.
Baudrillard for illusion
At the ‘Baudrillard West of the Dateline’ conference in Auckland, New Zealand in 2001, Jean Baudrillard concluded his response to a question from
Nicholas Zurbrugg in a roundtable discussion with the statement that ‘Look, I am not above reality, but I am not for hyperreality. I am for illusion’
(Baudrillard, 2003: 183). Baudrillard is for illusion, seduction, reversion, singularity, challenge. He seeks a world in which a radical
otherness, an exquisite alterity, flourishes. This vigorously critical ontology of absence and the nothing is pitted against
the positivity of production, identity, power and the universal – a logic of positivity I argue elsewhere is that of
phallo-centrism (Grace, 2000). A philosophy of the object as illusion is one that refuses a valorising of identity and
authority; it cannot abide a politics of yearning for the position of subject in a subject/object dialectic
(or in accordance with Beauvoir a world in which all humans are subjects ). To produce, is to make visible; to seduce is to
remove from the visible order. To produce, within a code of language and economic exchange is to make, or perform,
reality as the thingness of things, to accumulate reality, to have more and more of it. To seduce is the
[khirn]
pg. 30
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 31
movement, or principle, that ensures that ‘things’ circulate, and in their circulation they cancel each other out.
They do not remain, they do not accumulate, they circulate; they appear and disappear .
This appearance and disappearance is sometimes referred to by Baudrillard as reversion – the inevitable reversibility of the world. In the early
years of his work, Baudrillard’s unique and profoundly important theorisations circled around the fundamental problem of the social constitution of
forms of generalised exchange. Any form of generalised exchange attempts (it can never succeed) to obliterate the singular
and incorporate it into a system whereby a generalised standard of exchange becomes the benchmark against
which value or identity is determined. As soon as the value of an object is determined relative to another for the purpose of an economic
exchange, it takes on its identity within that relation of value: one hen is equal in value to a sack of manure.
How do we know this? By reference to a generalised scale of value that creates abstract quantities as units that can be added together.
The meaning
of words in linguistic exchange can be ascertained through a system of signification that generalises a method
to establish that a word means this and not that. The systemisation of generalised exchange in the domains of
value and meaning liberates all exchange into the realm of the possible: only possible because the ontology of
objects and language is locatable within that broader system. It is here relative to there; it has this value
relative to that; it means this relative to (not) that. Such an order of economic and semiological exchange
attempts to reduce the singularity of the illusion of things and beings into the order of reality on a
universal scale of difference and comparability . As soon as such a scale is instituted, the binary
constitution of the world is established, the universal is possible, singularity no longer features. Since this early work
Baudrillard has theorised a shift in the political economy of the sign and its parallel economic form, a shift from the universal to the global as the
There is
frequent confusion with Baudrillard’s reference to the significance of duality. With irreducible otherness,
with the impossible exchange 351 of singularities, we confront the dual relation. As Baudrillard said at the roundtable discussion in 2001:
Duality, duel, dopplegänger. All that is beyond the individuality [sic], the other. Duality doesn’t at all mean two, two things, two
beings. There may be multiple ones but with duality there is a sort of symbolic challenge, and for challenging
you must be opposite, you must be antagonistic, you must not be in a dialectical relation between subjects and
objects, between individual and other, the social. That is our system of values but we must break with it ... We
must restore the secret of duality, of the dualistic, in the core of our situation, of our actual system. (Baudrillard,
2003: 187) Following Nietzsche, this intervention of Baudrillard’s (only very briefly sketched here) represents, I think, the most radical
critique of the structure of identity/difference and its ontological commitments that we (in our occidental philosophy)
have. Its seduction not only reverses the universal and its truth, but also the investments in generalised
economic and semiological exchange on which this structure relies. Through this critique, identity/difference as a
system of equivalence/non-equivalence confronts the alterity of duality; its terms become that of the duel, a
relation of the agon, and they cannot be exchanged. This has to be consistent with a feminist project to
transform specifically the phallo-centric investments in this very structure of identity/difference.
hyperreal morphs into the integral reality of the virtual. Before explaining this in more detail, a word on Baudrillard’s notion of duality.
[khirn]
pg. 31
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 32
at: mimesis
Their mimesis is mere repetition, in which they imagine some subversive remainder exudes
from their speeches – this doesn’t do anything but guarantee us a link, because that remainder
does not exist after getting swallowed whole by a very hungry phallagocentric economy
Grace 2k [Victoria, Canterbury sociology professor, Baudrillard's Challenge: A Feminist Reading, p. 53-4]
//khirn
Baudrillard is clear in his support for feminism when feminist critique and activism are aimed at the code, at
the fundamental problem of the dichotomous logic that creates the split of male/female and makes the female
the unmarked term (see MOP: 134–5). In the opening to this chapter I indicated that Baudrillard’s objection to
feminism stems from his critique of a movement of those on the ‘other’ side of the bar who articulate their
desire to instantiate a subjectivity, a positive identity. Such a desire fails to oppose the binary logic instituting
an essentialist and phallocentric ontology. In Irigaray’s work we have seen an ambiguity with respect to this
desire, but certainly the desire is articulated: a desire for women’s subjecthood, and relatedly, a desire for the
representation of women’s desire. This is particularly evident in her insistence to carve out a positive (+) space
for women, for the feminine, in the face of Lacan’s assertion that ‘woman does not exist’ and that she, ‘woman’, cannot know or speak of her
desire (see Irigaray 1977, trans. 1985: 86–105). This seems to arouse a degree of ressentiment; a form of indignation that
compels opposition. However, to reiterate, the attempt to demand a subjecthood, to insist on a subjectivity as presence, fully positivised without a
concept of reversion, will only succeed in reasserting an essentialist premise, in semiologically reducing the symbolic, and Lacan would probably still
only see himself reflected back in the mirror.
The limitation of Irigaray’s engagement with the concept of reversion, or reversibility, is possibly evident in her
discussion of the work of Merleau-Ponty (1984, trans. 1993). Merleau-Ponty’s
use of the concept of reversibility is developed
differently from that of Baudrillard, but aspects of Irigaray’s commentary reveal a predisposition to this concept. Her comment on Merleau-Ponty’s
reversibility of the seer and the seen seems to indicate a two-field vision on her part, with individuation into the logos of subjecthood on the one hand,
and the death drive, or immersion in a non-differentiated state, on the other. She writes: This reversibility of the world and the I (which
Merleau-Ponty refuses to dissociate, to separate into two) suggests
some repetition of a prenatal sojourn where the universe
and I form a closed economy, which is partly reversible (but only in the opposite direction, if reversibility can
have meaning: the in utero providing it, the hypokeimenon, is more on the side of the maternal-feminine, the future ‘subject’ or seer on the side of
the world or of things), or some anticipation of a heavenly sojourn, unless it is a love pact between the world and
things. [And later] I might say that Merleau-Ponty’s seer remains in an incestuous prenatal situation with the whole. (Irigaray 1984, trans. 1993: 173)
The point about reversibility in Baudrillard’s formulation is that both of these alternatives are inevitably linked,
and both result from a non-reversible, essentialist ontology. Reversibility of the seer and that which is seen
cannot be mapped on to a ‘reversibility’ conceptualised in terms of the incest or death drive without missing the point.8 In
conclusion to her discussion, Irigaray states that ‘it is impossible to have relations of reversibility without remainder’
(1984, trans. 1993: 184). Irigaray’s concept of ‘remainder’ refers to the symbolic excess that cannot be confined within the
phallogocentric system of representation; that which is unsayable in a logic of identity/difference. In
Baudrillard’s terms, and at least to some extent in Merleau- Ponty’s, relations of reversibility are precisely those which
symbolically exchange all terms so there is no ‘remainder’ ; in this sense, relations of reversibility are indeed
possible, but certainly unthinkable from an essentialist frame.
[khirn]
pg. 32
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 33
at: irony
Irony isn’t key- ironically, it causes confusion and serves as a distraction from critical
discussion
Paasonen 2011 (Susanna Paasonen, professor of media studies at the University of Turku, Revisiting Cyber
Feminism, Communications Volume: 36 Issue: 3 published 22 August 2011, page 344, Yung Jung)
However, since irony involves interpretation,
the act of recognizing something as ironic, there is little guarantee that
the views of people producing and reading the texts necessarily meet. Literary scholar Linda
Hutcheon (1994, p. 14) notes that as a practice of saying one thing and meaning another, irony involves both
misunderstanding and messy meaning . Irony is a means of joining contradictory views, but it may well
function as a kind of boomerang if ironic distance is erased and things are read in a more
literal fashion. As its referent, point and location is left unclear, irony becomes a problematic or at least a heavily
limited strategy. In cyberfeminist texts, irony has been used to create distance towards both “cyberculture” and
“feminism” in ways that may obstruct, rather than facilitate, critical dialogue. Perhaps ironically, cyberfeminist
articulations emphasizing diversity and irony have not always been easy to combine with analyses of power and
inequality (as they link to diversity and new media alike). Plant’s (1997) narrative of feminization, for example, connects Lady Lovelace, switchboard
operators and South-East Asian women working in silicon chip factories as female networkers and manufacturers of technology without paying attention
to the in this case, rather glaring differences and inequalities between the societies, professions and agencies. Similarly, while the 100 anti-
theses of cyberfeminism highlight the differences among and between women, and individual women are
invited to outline their personal cyberfeminisms, these are not necessarily followed by reflections on power,
location and difference as they operate between individual cyberfeminists and within cyberfeminist networks
(see Fernandez, 2001, 2003; Fernandez and Wilding, 2003). We may “all know” that “all women are different”. However,
without analysis of how locations, positions and networks of privilege function in and through these differences
be this online or offline this amounts to little else than a truism (also Paterson, 1992). A discourse on difference
needs to be self-reflexive so as not to produce a “doubletalk” in which diversity and multiplicity
are emphasized without questioning the normative position of white (perhaps middle-class, perhaps
heterosexual) Western women as the key agents of (cyber)feminism.
[khirn]
pg. 33
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 34
offcase
[khirn]
pg. 34
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 35
irigaray
[khirn]
pg. 35
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 36
1nc irigaray
Embracing the cyborg detaches our analysis from the material reality of phallocentrism and
ensures that new cybernetic identities will just be assimilated into the larger structure of
patriarchy
Cook 4 [Peta S., Centre for Social Change Research, Queensland University of Technology, “The Modernistic
Posthuman Prophecy of Donna Haraway,” paper presented to the Social Change in the 21st Century
Conference, 2004, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/646/1/cook_peta.pdf]
Similarly to Firestone’s utopian social vision of a techno-based post-gender reality that is free from biologically-based oppression (Braidotti, 2002;
Firestone, 1970), Haraway (1991) presents the cyborg as (another) liberating source to escape gender stereotypes (Dixon, 2003; Balsamo, 1988). In this
way, desire for gender reconstruction through dichotomist transgression is nothing more than a utopian dream, where the future reality will be more
desirable than the present (Horner, 2001). Hence, such cyborg concepts are an escapist futuristic solution from the
dissatisfaction with “the inadequacies and injustices of [contemporary] human life” (Springer, 1994: 163), which
reconciles the self/other in a Lacanian Imaginary realm (Springer, 1994). In this fashion, the blurring of
reality/imagination (Haraway, 1991) is a repetition of old feminist stories that reduces the depths of the: materiality
of the concrete and embodied lived experience; structural embedded nature of gender; and the rhizomatous
role of technology, which is creating ‘real’ oppression. Thus, as “the body is our general medium for having a world” (Merleau-Ponty
1962: 146), our ‘real’ embodied experiences are cyborg ‘facts’, that should remain to be potently significant for cyborg anthropology. The powerful
lived experience of the body and its intentionality is seen in the phantom-limb syndrome, where the absent
limb of an amputee can be ambivalently (omni)present in a dual ontology of presence/absence (Merleau-Ponty 1962).
Consequently, our understandings of the body should not only be conceived as transcending the flesh, but also dependent on our familiar lived
experiences of the body. In other words, the embodiment of being-in-the-world is vital for the development and
understanding of agency as experienced in ‘reality’. As a result, the concrete (cyborg) body continues to be a
site of oppression; “an interface … a field of intersecting material and symbolic forces; it is a surface were multiple codes … are inscribed”
(Braidotti, 2002: 25). In this fashion, cyborgs are not simply the new ontology or new embodied ‘flesh’ envisioned by Haraway (in Kunzru 1997), as
sexualised markings on the (cyborg) body (Foster 1996) increase, rather than decrease, the gender divide.
Furthermore, the immediate and everyday experience of the lived physical body (Leib) within a common lifeworld (Lebenswelt) (Merleau-Ponty 1962), continues to reassert the need to be aware, and to respect, the present social
construction of human ontology as gendered3. In turn, the interrelation between materiality and discourse are important in the
production of ‘reality’. Therefore, while Haraway acknowledges the social influences on material-semiotic actors, she focuses on cyborg post-gender
‘fiction’ at the expense of cyborg-gendered realities. Thus, it is important to consider what this ‘reality’ actually means for the
lived experiences of cyborg bodies. An example of this ‘real’ cyborg experience is the dominant transition of the
androgynous human body to an enhanced masculine male cyborg body. This reassertion of gender differences
and dualisms occurs through the technoscientific knowledges of military warfare, biomedicine (cyborg sex), and
the popular icons of action figure toys and science fiction stories (Gray, 2000). By repeating the fantasies of
modernity, this means women have become (or are again) the main losers (Braidotti, 1996) in a cyborgian ‘hypermasculinity’. In
this vein, “cyborg images reproduce limiting, not liberating, gender stereotypes” (Balsamo, 1988: 341). As a result, the futuristic and untroubled
embracement of cyborg technologies is a technologically-based idealistic and whimsical reconciliation of dualisms (Horner, 2001), which does not erase
sexual difference and otherness (Braidotti, 2002). Thus, gender dissolution requires more than acknowledging and figuratively
reconstructing dualistic social constructions through machines, as “the question is not cyborg possibilities in
and of themselves, but how the cyborg has been constructed by patriarchal discourse” (Rose in Dery, 1994: 217). These
understandings reveal that technoscience and the material-semiotic cyborg continue to: uphold modernism’s
patriarchal stories and desires of domination, control, and progress; (re)create oppressive dualistic categories;
and/or uphold the precious sanctity of humanity and Christian Cartesian philosophy. This suggests that while it is
permissible to dissolve some dualistic assumptions (such as human/machine), other dichotomies are guarded ferociously and/or subtly (re)produced
(such as man/woman). Therefore, while cyborgs can create new possibilities, the structural inequalities and dualisms of patriarchy can also be intensified
(Braidotti, 1996). Significantly, in her utopian post-gender cyborg fantasy, Haraway’s cyborg connects to and intensifies the linear and paradisaical vision
of modernism and Cartesianism. This can be explicitly demonstrated through the connection of Haraway’s cyborg to the transhumanist and posthuman
prophecies of the Extropians.
[khirn]
pg. 36
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 37
The narrative of the ‘cyborg’ is a profoundly non gendered definition of identity --- that
engenders a technostrategic understanding of bodies as things one has, rather than things one
performs
Paasonen 2 [Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland “Thinking
Through the Cybernetic Body: Popular Cybernetics and Feminism”
http://www.rhizomes.net/issue4/paasonen.html]
Although Ben-Tov's reading can be criticized for being too literal and not giving full credit to the
cyborg as figuration--its strategic nature in
negotiating ground for articulations of feminist subjectivity--it should be noted that the cyberdiscourse which Haraway
employs in the manifesto has force that feminist appropriation may not be able to subvert. Cyborg imageries figure
embodiment in ways similar than Shulamith Firestone, as a rationalized system that can be known, controlled and
improved as to liberate people from biology. Once the body becomes construed in such a mechanical vein, it is
quite difficult to reverse this logic for outlining alternative forms of human-machine connections. Such friction
between cyberdiscourse and the project of "thinking through the body" has become more explicit in the later
appropriations of the cyborg figuration than it was in the speculative manifesto. [30] In cyberfeminist texts of the 1990s,
the appeal of cyberdiscourse, enthusiastic towards the possibilities of computer technology, often anti-political in its articulations of
cyberspace as alternative realm and tied into ideas of transcending the body (Adam 1997, 20-21) tended to override
feminist concerns for anti-Cartesian reasoning and body politics. As information networks became articulated as a cyberspace, a
parallel reality "on the other side of the screen" where old identifications and subjectivities were said to collapse (Plant 1995, 54; Plant 1997, 213), or as
spaces of transformation and identity factories (Stone 1996, 180-181)--only to quote some of the best known authors identified with cyberfeminism-identity and embodiment became conceptually separated, and, in many cases, the previous was simply left behind.
[31] The figure of cyberspace
owes equally to popular cybernetics and the inter-connected fantasies of space,
exploration, and freedom. As Constance Penley (1997, 22) points out, "'space' remains one of the major sites for utopian
thinking" in the U.S., and "'going to space' is still one of the most important ways we represent our relation to
science, technology, and the future." To paraphrase Penley (1997, 15-16), fictions such as Cyborg and Bionic Woman
represent a similar utopian stance towards the possibilities of technological progress. As texts of popular cybernetics, they both humanize high
technology and provide a vocabulary for discussing it. In bionic fictions, progress through technology is tied with
NASA in the shape of a male astronaut protagonist, yet in them, the act of "going into space" (technological
progress, humanized science, future of man) takes place on the surface of the earth, and the human body
becomes the space to explore and modify. Spaces of progress and adventure, then, open up on various level
with references to cybernetics: as the outer space of astronautics, the inner spaces of bodies and minds, and the
terrain of cyberspace. [32] Freedom from bodily constraints, various means of transcending material conditions,
have been a recurrent theme in cyberdiscourse since the 1950s: bodies have been subject to manipulation, their
automatic functions have been simulated with machines, bodies have been replicated and replaced by machine
ones, and finally the body, as "meat," has been left behind in cyberspace fantasies. Furthermore, while gender, along with other
embodied differences and the materiality of bodies, tends to disappear in abstracted cybernetic models, the
varying representations of virtual embodiments in cyberspace tend to be clearly gendered and heterosexualized
(Springer 1996; Balsamo 1996; Braidotti 1996). There is something of an obsession towards embodiment in cyberdiscourse--embodiment constantly
becomes "an other" that needs to be controlled and objectified, rendered open to manipulation and altering. The tendency to think of bodies
as something that one has, rather than something one is and does, leaves unnoticed that bodies are not
capsules that "we" inhabit, but our very beings. Identity categories are inscribed in our bodies, read and
performed: thus bodies are "the transparent enabling power and 'zero-degree' of our agency" and yet opaque,
"within our agency, yes, but certainly in excess to our volition" (Sobchack 1999, 48).
The impact is the annihilation of sexual difference – this social organization of masculine over
feminine justifies perpetual physical-psychological war
Irigaray 94 [Luce, Thinking the difference: for a peaceful revolution, p. 4-7, 1994]
What does it mean for our entire culture to be threatened with destruction? There are, of course, declared stakes connected
with threats of war. According to the types of discourse whose economy is at issue here, such threats are the sole means of maintaining international
equilibrium. I shall come back to this point. Huge amounts of capital are allocated to the development of death machines
order to ensure peace, we are told. This warlike method of organizing society is not self-evident. It has its origin in
patriarchy. It has a sex. But the age of technology has given weapons of war a power that exceeds the conflicts and
risks taken among patriarchs. Women, children, all living things, including elemental matter, are drawn into the
[khirn]
pg. 37
in
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 38
maelstorm. And death and destruction cannot be associated solely with war. They are part of the physical and mental
aggression to which we are constantly subjected. What we need is an overall cultural transformation, not just a
decision about war per se. Patriarchal culture is based on sacrifice, crime and war. It is a culture that makes it men's duty or right to fight in order
to feed themselves, to inhabit a place, and to defend their property. From time to time, patriarchy must make decision concerning war, but that is far
from what is required to ensure a cultural transformation. Mankind [le peuple des hommes] wages war everywhere all the time with a
perfectly clear conscience. Mankind is traditionally carnivorous, sometimes cannibalistic. So men must kill to eat, must increase
their domination of nature in order to live or to survive, must seek on the most distant stars what no longer exists
here, must defend by any means the small patch of land they are exploiting here or over there. Men always go further, exploit further, seize more,
without really knowing where they are going. Men seek what they think they need without considering who they are and how their identity is defined by
what they do. To overcome this ignorance, I think that mankind needs those who are persons in their own right to help them understand
themselves and find their limits. Only women can play this role. Women
are not genuinely responsible subjects in the
patriarchal community. That is why it may be possible for them to interpret this culture in which they have less involvement and fewer
interests than do men, and of which they are not themselves products to the point where they have been blinded by it. Given their relative exclusive from
society, women may, from their outside perspective, reflect back a more objective image of society than can men .
Moreover, in theory, women should not be in a hierarchical relationship to men. All other types of minorities potentially are. It is with a thoroughly
patriarchal condescension, either unconscious or cynical, that politicians and theoreticians take an interest in them, while exploiting them, with every
possible risk of the master-slave relationship being overturned. This dialectic – or absence thereof – is built into father-son relationships, and has been
since the inception of patriarchy. It is doomed to failure as a means of liberation and peace because it is based on (1) lines of descent insufficiently
counterbalanced by a horizontal relationship between the genders and (2) exclusively male lines of descent making any kind of dialectic between male
and female ancestries and masculine and feminine genders impossible. The possibility of sex-specific cultural and political ethics is our best chance
today. The world's economic and religious equilibrium is precarious. Moreover, the development of technology is subjecting our
bodies to such trials that we are threatened with physical and mental annihilation, that our living conditions leave us no time
to rest or think, whatever real leisure time we may have, and that we are continually overwhelmed, forgetful, distracted. Men's
science is less concerned with prevention or the present than with curing. For objective reasons of accumulation of property, for reasons of the subjective
economy of the male subject, it allows disorder and pollution to grow, while funding various types of curative medicine. Men's science helps destroy, then
attempts to fix things up. But a body that has suffered is no longer the same. It bears the traces of physical and moral
trauma, despair, desire for revenge, recurrent inertia. The entire male economy demonstrates a forgetting of
life, a lack of recognition of debt to the mother, of maternal ancestry, of the women who do the work of producing and
maintaining life. Tremendous vital resources are wasted for the sake of money. But what good is money if it is not used for life? Despite policies
that encourage the birth rate for economic reasons, or sometimes for religious ones, destroying life seems to be as compulsory as
giving life.
The alternative embraces the development of a female imaginary --- voting negative affirms the
potentiality of separate subjectivities beyond masculinity and its associated destructiveness --that solves the aff while maintaining the possibility of discourse outside the phallocentric order
Weedon 99 [Chris, Chair of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University, Feminism,
theory, and the politics of difference, p. 90-93, 1999]
In the order of reason which has governed Western thought since the rise of Ancient Greek philosophy,
feminine otherness is denied and reconstituted as a male-defined otherness . This results in the denial
of subjectivity to potentially non-male-defined women. A maternal feminine subjectivity, were it to be realized,
would enable women to step outside of patriarchal definitions of the feminine and become subjects in their
own right. Whereas the unconscious in Freud and Lacan lays claim to fixed universal status, for Irigaray its actual form and content is a product of
history. Thus, however patriarchal the symbolic order may be in Lacan, it is open to change. The question is how
this change might be brought about. For Irigaray, the key to change is the development of a female
imaginary. This can only be achieved under patriarchy in a fragmented way, as what she terms the excess that is
realized in margins of the dominant culture. The move towards a female imaginary would also entail the
transformation of the symbolic, since the relationship between the two is one of mutual shaping. This
would enable women to assume subjectivity in their own right. Although, for Irigaray, the imaginary and the symbolic are both
historical and changeable, this does not mean that, after thousands of years of repression and exclusion, change is easy. In a move not
unlike that of ecofeminists, Irigaray suggests that the symbolic order, men and masculinity are shaped by
patriarchy in ways which are immensely problematic not just for women but also for the future of the planet.
The apparently objective, gender-neutral discourses of science and philosophy — the discourses of a male subject —
have led to the threat of global nuclear destruction . In An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993; original 1984), Irigaray suggests
that the patriarchal male subject is himself shaped by the loss of the maternal feminine which motivates a desire
[khirn]
pg. 38
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 39
for mastery: Man's self-affect depends on the woman who has given him being and birth, who has born/e him,
enveloped him, warmed him, fed him. Love of self would seemingly take the form of a long return to and through the
other. A unique female other, who is forever lost and must be sought in many others, an infinite number of others. The
distance for this return can be conquered by the transcendence of God. The (female) other who is sought and
cherished may be assimilated to the unique god. The (female) other is mingled or confused with God or the gods. (Irigaray 1993: 60-1;
original 1984) Irigaray takes this theme further in Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution (1994; original 1989) when she suggests that the
desire for godlike mastery and transcendence has dire consequences for the world: Huge amounts of capital are
allocated to the development of death machines in order to ensure peace, we are told. This warlike method of
organising society is not self-evident. It has its m origin in patriarchy. It has a sex. But the age of technology has given weapons of war
a power that exceeds the conflicts and risks taken among patriarchs. Women, children, all living things, including elemental matter,
are drawn into the maelstrom. And death and destruction cannot be associated solely with war. They are part
of the physical and mental aggression to which we are constantly subjected. What we need is an overall cultural
transformation. Mankind [le peuple des homines] wages war everywhere all the time with a perfectly clear conscience. Mankind is
traditionally carnivorous, sometimes cannibalistic. So men must eat to kill, must increase their domination of nature in order
to live or to survive, must seek on the most distant stars what no longer exists here, must defend by any means the small patch
of land they are exploiting here or over there. Men always go further, exploit further, seize more, without really knowing
where they are going. Men seek what they think they need without considering who they are and how their identity is defined by what they do.
To overcome this ignorance, I think that mankind needs those who are persons in their own right to help them
understand and find their limits. Only women can play this role. Women are not genuinely responsible subjects in the patriarchal
community. That is why it may be possible for them to interpret this culture in which they have less involvement and fewer interests than do men, and of
which they are not themselves products to the point where they have been blinded by it. Given their relative exclusion from society, women may, from
their outside perspective, reflect back a more objective image of society than can men. (Irigaray 1994: 4—5; original 1989) The destructive force
of the patriarchal symbolic order makes all the more pressing Irigaray's project of creating a female imaginary
and symbolic, specific to women, which might in its turn transform the male-defined symbolic order in the
West, in which women figure only as lesser men. In this process, separatism becomes a strategy in the struggle
for a nonpatriarchal society in which sexual difference is both voiced and valued: Let women tacitly go on strike,
avoid men long enough to learn to defend their desire notably by their speech, let them discover the love of
other women protected from that imperious choice of men which puts them in a position of rival goods, let
them forge a social status which demands recognition, let them earn their living in order to leave behind their condition of prostitute
— these are certainly indispensable steps in their effort to escape their proletarianization on the trade market . But
if their goal is to reverse the existing order - even if that were possible - history would simply repeat itself and
return to phallocratism, where neither women's sex, their imaginary, nor their language can exist .
(1994: 106; original 1989).
[khirn]
pg. 39
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 40
link – cyborgs
Immortality link: the cyborg body is an attempt to escape imperfection – they try to create the
perfect form of existence to reject organic bodies
Cohen-Shabot 6 [Sara, Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Haifa, “Grotesque Bodies: A Response to
Disembodied Cyborgs”, Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3 November 2006, p. 223-235]
The abandonment of the altogether organic body, or the flesh and blood body, with all its imperfections, may
be seen, again, as a frequent characteristic of the popular imagery of the cyborg. It is true that a cyborg is not a
machine, and that it cannot be comprehended as a purely technological construction. The cyborg, different from the
robot, is a mixture of the organic with the technological. It represents the body that has lost its conventional limits and has intertwined
with the technological. Nevertheless, the cyborg has lost its organic features, and we should ask, then, why has it? Why
has the cyborg lost its meat, and why, rather than regretting this loss, does the cyborg feel proud of it? In her article ‘The pleasure of the interface’,
Claudia Springer (1999) refers precisely to this abandonment of the flesh when she explains how the genre of the cyberpunk8 often presents the source of
pleasure of its characters as arising from this disappearance of the meat. Losing the meat, the flesh and blood body, provides
happiness, pleasure and a sense of security. As an example of this, Springer brings the words of Topo, the protagonist from the comic
bookCyberpunk (Rockwell, 1989), when he mentally enters the ‘Playing Field’ (a kind of cyberspace): ‘it's the most beautiful thing in the human universe’
he says, ‘if I could leave my meat behind and just live here. If I could just be pure consciousness I could be happy’ (Rockwell, quoted in Springer, 1999, p.
39, my emphasis).9 This abandonment of the flesh and blood body has been interpreted as a result of anxieties
regarding the vulnerability and the fragility of the carnal body and all that is related to it – the maternal and the organic
processes in general, for instance (Doane, 1999; Springer, 1999; Sofia, 1999).10 The meaty body is indeed a perishing body, a body
that can be corrupted, that may get sick and which will ultimately die. The extreme vulnerability that bodies
confront in this post-nuclear era, an era which is plagued with threats of massive annihilation, by sicknesses or by environmental disasters,
brings with itself the desire of re-making a self that is able to escape the body and with it, the threats to its
destruction (Springer, 1999). Avoiding the maternal means avoiding a self that is born out of an organic process and
which for this reason, is absolutely weak and perishable. The individual born out of the maternal is one that is
completely dependent on a temporary structure, one that will degenerate and die. This is why the cyborg has
become a meat-hater, a technological–organic structure that relates with fear and hatred to its organic core. In
order to keep its promises of powerfulness and immortality, the cyborg must get rid of its meat and of its
maternal origin.11 In sum: the cyborg contains in itself the seeds of a liberating, disrupting figure. It is a figure that finds itself in the middle ground
between the technological and the human. Haraway (1985) tried to present it as a new way to dissolve the obsolete binary categories of Western thought
and as a promising figure to postmodern feminist postures, a figure by which it could be possible to overcome the rigid patriarchal structures of gender.
Nevertheless, as we have seen, the temptation to jump from a technological–human body, to a body that is no more
a meaty body, to a hyper-sexualized body, an omnipotent body which does not have to confront any more the
imperfections and limitations of the organic body, is certainly a big temptation – one which, in most cases, the
fictional cyborg does not appear to be able to avoid. This is the reason why I would like, next, to present the figure of the grotesque
body as an alternative to the problematic figure of the cyborg.
This turns their ethics argument—they make it impossible to exist in the world
Cohen-Shabot 6 [Sara, Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Haifa, “Grotesque Bodies: A Response to
Disembodied Cyborgs”, Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3 November 2006, p. 223-235]
Before explaining why we may regard the grotesque body as an alternative to the figuration of the cyborg, I will briefly explain why it
is of great
importance to keep the meaty body in the postmodern discourse in general, and in the postmodern feminist
discourse in particular. Losing the flesh and blood body may mean a return to the Cartesian subject, a subject
that can separate herself from her mind, and, as a consequence, maybe throw her body away (and with it,
throw her possibility of difference as well). To think about ourselves as possible disembodied creatures,
irremediably brings with itself a feeling of omnipotence that makes us forget about the most meaningful
experiences of human life, those that make us the historical, cultural and social creatures with existential
worries and questionings that we actually are. Such experiences are precisely the corporeal ones – the pleasant,
such as the enjoyment of food, moving our bodies, sex or dancing; and also the painful, such as sickness, aging,
and, finally, dying. These are all the embodied experiences that constitute our phenomenological being-in-theworld. Running away from the fleshy-body means leaving behind all the elements which conform to the
embodied existence, that is, the carnal experiences that I named and, as I sustained before, also the possibility of gendered
[khirn]
pg. 40
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 41
existence. The hyper-sexualized cyborgs, as I have shown, are mostly not real gendered subjects, but creatures that
escape all the features of the embodied existence, gender included, in order to become platonic ideals,
transcendent beings. This act of transcendence maintains many of the power structures intact, and it also
brings with itself the danger of giving legitimacy to undertake a struggle in order to achieve perfect beings, a
struggle that can be so easily associated with fascist or racist ideologies.12 Embodied existence, then, is the one
that describes our way of being in the world. We are situated in the world as embodied subjects and it is
through our bodies that we participate in the world of objects and of other subjects (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 142; De
Beauvoir, 1948, pp. 12–22). This is the reason why, if we want to propose a figuration that stands for our experience of being in the world, we must
search for figurations that successfully express our presence and our situation in this world as incarnated subjects. This means we must search
for
a figuration that describe subjectivity as conformed by the elements which can be seen as essential to the
embodied existence and its being in the world. Such an embodied subjectivity should be described, for instance, as
gendered, mutable, and perishable. Also, in order to avoid describing this subjectivity by means of old and
obsolete philosophical paradigms, which made of the subject an abstract concept, alienated from his body and
from the rest of the world (through the artificial, arbitrary binary divides mind/body and subject/object), a new
figuration should present such an incarnated being also as open to the world and, above all, as provided with an
ambiguous existence. We are in the world, our limits are blurred, our bodies are open, and that is the reason
why there is no true division between ourselves and the world. We are, then, ambiguous beings, hybrid creatures,
subjects and objects at the same time, inseparable from the different scenarios in which we act. We are also
ambiguous beings regarding ourways of existing: our gender, our looks and our thoughts, constitute an everchanging flux that can never be absolutely defined or contained by an abstract, purely conceptual, incorporeal
subjectivity. This is the reason why the figuration that will present such an ambiguous being, must try to avoid, above all, a
return to forms of being that escape the body and its imperfect features, especially when we know that such an
escape may result – even accidentally – out of a good intentioned attempt to create new, empowering
descriptions of subjects (as in some cases of the cyborg).
Military link: cyborg are not a neutral identity --- the aff whitewashes the concept from its
material consequences --- it originated in NASA’s militarist cyborg project to negate the body
and replicate the catholic division between soul and body --- means the aff is not a challenge to
modernity
Cook 4 [Peta S., Centre for Social Change Research, Queensland University of Technology, “The Modernistic
Posthuman Prophecy of Donna Haraway,” paper presented to the Social Change in the 21st Century
Conference, 2004, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/646/1/cook_peta.pdf]
The word ‘cyborg’ (cybernetic organism) was originally coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline (1960). As engineers
working for the United States’ N.A.S.A. (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) program, Clynes and Kline’s (1960) cyborg vision is a
human/machine hybrid that modifies humans for space, rather than creating extraterrestrial human-friendly
environments. Therefore, the cyborg is a liberating mechanism from human environments via a “selfregulating man-machine system” (Clynes and Kline, 1960: 30). Considered to be more flexible than human organisms alone, this hardwarebased ‘man-machine’ system is incorporated into a space suit that alters various bodily functions (Tomas, 1995; Clynes and Kline, 1960). Clynes and
Kline (1960) cyborg vision is therefore a ‘superman’ dream of ‘postbiological evolution’, which fuses space
exploration with medicine, implants, and electronic modification to create human dependence, rather than
interdependence, on machines (Gray, 2002; Tomas, 1995). These scientific-militaristic origins of the cyborg dreamed
of a future where, similarly to the Christian soul, annoying restrictions of embodiment and bodily constraint
could be overcome via technologically influenced medical developments (Kunzru, 1997). As a creation of both science and
science fiction, these militaristic applications of the cyborg as overcoming the ‘natural weaknesses’ of the body are distinctly Cartesian in viewing the
body as a manipulative and disposable mechanism of ‘meat’. Consequently, cyborg origins offer little to developing human
ontology beyond Western patriarchal and Cartesian-Christian conceptualisations of hierarchical duality.
Independently, embracing cyborg subjectivity within the framework of phallocentrism makes
extinction inevitable
Alaimo 94 [Stacy, “Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for an Environmental Feminism,”
Feminist Studies, Vol. 20, 1994]
[khirn]
pg. 41
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 42
More specifically, Haraway argues that the
cyborg, precisely by blurring human-machine boundaries, can discourage the
worship of technology and encourage a greater responsibility among humans for machines: "The machine is not an it to be
animated, worshiped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not
dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they."40 But thinking of machines as part of ourselves doesn't
necessarily mean that the machines won't be worshiped or feared. Caputi describes several amazing examples of
"phallotechnology," confirming feminist suspicions that phallus worship propels the technology of destruction. For example, an ad
featuring a huge closeup of a fighter plane's "control stick" reads: Pilot and aircraft are one. He thinks; the plane responds. . . . Systems and human
engineering . . . have coupled the pilot with the world's most advanced avionics through an anatomically designed control stick. All vital controls are
strategically positioned on the stick and throttle. . . . The competitive edge is his. Similarly, Caputi cites Ronald Reagan's scheme for the Los Angeles
Raiders: "If you would turn them over to us, we'd put them in silos and we wouldn't have to build the MX missile."
She comments: "Idealized
virility is thus gleefully fused to weaponry and to an unprecedented and earth-destroying
lethality Carol Cohn analyzes a multitude of phallic, even orgasmic, images in the "technostrategic discourse"
of nuclear weapons.42 The super bowl-like television coverage of the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf enthusiastically diagrammed, pictured, and
."41
praised missiles and other weapons. One episode showed a fighter pilot picking out a special missile, stroking it, and honoring it by signing it with a
dedication to his wife. Thus, if Haraway's argument for machine/body blurring is to make our machines less
threatening, more controllable, less Other, a phallocentric discourse has already accomplished these goals with
a destructive twist. What these examples show is perhaps obvious. In this culture the predominant ideology connected to the blurring of
machines and humans is one of masculinist force and domination, an erotics of power particularly terrifying in
a nuclear age. This seems like an insurmountable difficulty for the feminist cyborg. Feminism could benefit from an
alliance with technology's cultural power, but could such a feminism be separated from phallotechnology in order to open up the possibility of a feminist
cyborg? Are the pleasures of boundary confusion appealing enough to disengage a technophilic ideology from a phallocentric politics of domination, or
does a feminist technophilic position merely bolster the dominant ideology of technoglorification that seems so strongly sutured to phallic domination?
In other words, how can one be a cyborg in a nuclear age? This question echoes Christina Crosby's more general concern: "I wonder how a cyborg, which
has multiple points of connection, knows how to say no. How can we determine the proper (although not natural, not necessary, not essential)
limits and boundaries of coalitions? . . . I want a politics of exclusion as well as inclusion."43 I think it is important that
feminists do not simply demonize technology; on the other hand, within a culture that worships technological power, particularly in
the form of weapons, spends ghastly amounts of money fueling the military industrial complex (at the expense
of women, who constitute the majority of the poor adults in this country), and pollutes the environment in the
process, it is crucial that feminism maintain an oppositional voice against the military industrial complex.
The affirmative focuses their advocacy on what the subject is rather than who the subject is and
who comes after the subject. Their recourse to Haraway’s cyborg is the sort of fragmentation of
the subject that ignores the concrete universal of sexual difference
Perpich 2004 (Diane “Subjectivity and Sexual Difference: New figures of the feminine in Irigaray and
Cavarero” Continental Philosophy Review 36)
A similar aspiration animates the recent work of political philosopher Adriana Cavarero. Noting that “in
Western history, every
redefinition of politics is a redefinition of the very notion of the subject,” Cavarero argues for a shift away from
approaches that emphasize the what of subjectivity in favor of those that ask who the subject is.8 Cavarero belongs to
an Italian tradition of sexual difference feminism (penserio della differenza sessuale) significantly influenced by Irigaray’s thought, but she is
increasingly impatient with debates about sexual difference that either condemn it for its purported essentialism
or
save it from essentialism by aligning it with a post-modernism that leaves the subject fragmented and on the
cusp of political irrelevance. Irigaray’s thought is liable to be dismissed no matter which side of this coin one considers since if she’s not an
essentialist (strategic or otherwise) who returns feminist thought to a long-discarded metaphysical conception of “woman,” then she’s a post-modernist
in favor of multiple, fragmented, decentered subjectivities and runs up against the problem of how such subjects can also be agents in the sense that
feminist political action seems to require. As Cavarero humorously sketches the dilemma in relation to her own work: “any Italian feminist espousing the
theory of sexual difference, when participating in a meeting with English-speaking feminists, knows that if she does not pronounce the magic word
‘multiple subjectivity,’ she will probably be attacked as an across-the-board antiquated, European, essentialist, metaphysical thinker. Additionally, she
knows that she will cut the sad figure of someone not prepared for the coming third millennium. She knows, even better, that she will be tagged for who,
effectively, she is: someone to whom, guiltily, the fate of postmodernist thought is not important. Just try it and see” (WEP, p. 89). Essentialists
and post-modernists alike, on Cavarero’s view, share a commitment to asking what the subject is, and the differences
between them come only from the fact that they give opposing answers to the question. For example, even as
postmodern political projects purport to leave behind the language and the metaphysical commitments of
Cartesianism, they continue to speak the language of the abstract what. Citing the work of Butler and Haraway in this
regard, Cavarero claims that though they center their political proposals on a “strategic re-blending of identities,”
rejecting the idea of a single or universal subject, they nonetheless continue to rely exclusively on “universal
[khirn]
pg. 42
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 43
concepts, general categories and collective identities” failing to consider that these intersect in a unique and
singular being who cannot be reduced to her group memberships or cultural inheritances (WEP, p. 98).9 Drawing
inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s notion of the political subject as a distinct, singular being amidst other equally distinct, singular beings, Cavarero gives
precedence theoretically and politically to the who of subjectivity rather than to its what. Who comes after the subject? The question is
in fact crucial. Because, if it is true that the subject is dead – and we [women] are all truly happy about it! – we should not at all content
ourselves with the fragments into which it dissolved, and much less should we be happy to recycle its language
of abstraction and its “whatifying” grammar in some other way. “Who comes after the subject?” is then a crucial
question in that it suggests that, after the subject, doesn’t come something else, something, a thing; instead
someone comes. . . . In sum, who comes, then, is the embodied uniqueness of the existing being as he or she
appears to the reciprocal sight of others (WEP, p. 99).
[khirn]
pg. 43
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 44
impact – extinction
Our ethics of sexual difference must come first--the Aff would bury women alive and cut them
off from their own becoming--the lack of our ethics in epistemology guarantees extinction
Whitford 91 [Margaret, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, 1991, 149-150]
for Irigaray, epistemology without ethics
is deadly — destructive to women, destructive to men, destructive to the earth. The danger of our times is that
the subject as knower has become split off from the embodied and social subject. It is essential to think through
again the implications of the fact that the Other is constitutive of subjectivity, whether the Other is the
unconscious - that which the subject cannot master or control, or even know in himself - or whether the Other is embodied in other people who
likewise constitute that which is irreducible to the subject, or whether the Other is the Lacanian Other , whose desire is
located in the symbolic order. An ethics of sexual difference, that is, an ethics which recognizes the subjectivity of each sex,
would have to address the symbolic division which allocates the material, corporeal, sensible, 'natural' to the
feminine, and the spiritual, ideal, intelligible, transcendental to the masculine. A sensible transcendental is the
condition of an ethics of sexual difference, necessary if the fate of Antigone is not to go on repeating itself (E: 106).
If women are cut off from their own becoming, then they are 'buried alive' in our culture. Because of the split,
women, as the body, represent sexuality, which is then cut off from the ideal or spiritual, and becomes a 'lower'
function, that which is to be transcended in the pursuit of the good. To end the cultural schizophrenia (which does not
seem too strong a term in this context), and for women to be able to love themselves, and be for-themselves, women need to be
able to move freely from the most 'subterranean* and the most 'celestial', between the depths and the heights.
Similarly, if men continue to allow women to represent the carnal for them, they collude in keeping women in a
kind of pseudo-childhood, which is both 'perverse' and 'animal' (QEL: 118), i.e. pro-ethical, unsymbolized, outside
the sphere of the so-called 'higher' human activities. So the issue of the body and of sexuality is central to
ethics, not in the limited sense of a set of taboos and prohibitions, but in the sense that the symbolic division of
labour prevents women from becoming-for-themselves. However, it is not an issue that is easy to address without falling back into male parameters: 'Female
Irigaray wants to restore the link between epistemology and ethics. I don't think it would be putting it too strongly to say that,
sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters' (TS: 23; CS: 23). As Foucault has argued, though in quite different terms, the discourse of sex is the locus of the (male)
subject's subjection.1 So however we understand parter-femme, whatever it means for women to 'speak (of) their sex [parler leur sexcj' (PN: 272), it does not mean to begin simply turning the tables,
speaking of men as sex objects in a kind of imitation or revenge, or treating men as they might be for-worn en. Similarly it is not focused around the orgasm, which is a kind of technical criterion, a
quantitative measure of 'success',2 more to do with the requirements of male sexuality than with a possible different sexuality. Nor is it organized around the scopophilic imagination, the pleasure of
dominating with the look. It is not even primarily a question of the 'truth' or unarguability of sexual pleasure, since for Irigaray sexuality is not a raw, primitive, and untouched territory which is somehow
the links between sexuality,
conceptualization, 'knowledge', and social organization are intrinsic. Women are 'in exile*, or 'unhoused' in
male sexuality, male discourse, and male society.
private, 'outside' conceptualization, unconlaminated by patriarchy and unstructured by the paternal genealogy. On the contrary,
[khirn]
pg. 44
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 45
impact – genocide
Suppression of sexual difference guarantees extinction and genocide
Irigaray 91 [Luce, The Irigaray Reader, p.33]
Even a vaguely rigorous analysis of claims
to equality shows that they are justified at the level of a superficial critique of
culture, and Utopian as a means to women's liberation. The exploitation of women is based upon sexual
difference, and can only be resolved through sexual difference. Certain tendencies of the day, certain contemporary feminists, are
noisily demanding the neutralization of sex [sexe]. That neutralization, if it were possible, would correspond to the end of the
human race. The human race is divided into two genres which ensure its production and reproduction.
Trying to suppress sexual difference is to invite a genocide more radical than any destruction that has
ever existed in History. What is important, on the other hand, is defining the values of belonging to a sex-specific genre. What is
indispensable is elaborating a culture of the sexual which does not yet exist, whilst respecting both genres. Because of the historical time gaps between
the gynocratic, matriarchal, patriarchal and phallocratic eras, we are in a sexual position which is bound up with generation and not with genre as sex.
This means that, within the family, women must be mothers and men must be fathers, but that we have no positive and ethical values that allow two
sexes of the same generation to form a creative, and not simply procreative, human couple. One of the major obstacles to the creation and recognition of
such values is the more or less covert hold patriarchal and phallocratic roles have had on the whole of our civilization for centuries. It is social justice,
pure and simple, to balance out the power of one sex over the other by giving, or restoring, cultural values to female sexuality. What is at stake is clearer
today than it was when The Second Sex was written.
[khirn]
pg. 45
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 46
at: everyone’s a cyborg
The claim that everyone is always already a cyborg is a dangerous form of cultural essentialism
that universalizes the western subject and subverts any transformative potential of the 1ac.
Ben-Tov 1995 [Sharona, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and English, Bowling Green State University,
The Artificial Paradise: Science Fiction and American Reality, pg. 144-145]
Moreover, we have to be careful about using the cyborg myth appropriately across cultures. “Perhaps,” Haraway suggests
“we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logocs” (MC 92). Do the women of
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and other Asian states with high-tech industries, need to learn how not to
be the embodiment of the Western logos? The cyborg is “a myth about identities and boundaries which might inform late-twentieth
century political imaginations…[Science fiction writers] are our storytellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds” (92). Whose
late twentieth century are we talking about? Is “embodiment in high-tech worlds” a universal experience? Science fiction’s
tales of embodiment come from Western myths, express Western experience, and paint Western fantasies.
Other cultures’ interactions with high-tech machinery do not necessarily guarantee their conversion to Western
outlooks. Discussing a feminist approach to miniaturization technology, Haraway remarks that “the nimble little fingers of ‘Oriental’ women, the old
fascination of little Anglo-Saxon Victorian girls with doll houses, women’s enforced attention to the small take on quite new dimensions in this world…it
might be the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita whose constructed unities will guide effective oppositional
strategies” (71). I am concerned that the “constructed unities” here amount to imposing the cyborg myth on people who
might have oppositional strategies of their own, drawn from their own cultural resources . The dolls’ house and the cult
of domesticity remind us of a known Western cultural tradition, but “nimble little fingers” is mere rhetoric—Haraway puts the orientalist cliché in
ironical quotes, yet what, after her irony, is left of the Asian women and their cultural traditions? Nothing but
Western words. Is it really fair to subsume under the label of “cyborg” two different groups: women whose spiral
dancing, although political, is also playful mythmaking and women working in harsh conditions, whose myths we are not discussing here? Perhaps
it’s worth recalling, with critical theorist Gayatri Spivak, that the tendency to erase the cultural Other is “not a
general problem, but a European problem.” The cyborg and other science fiction mythologies may indeed be useful to cultural Others in
the technological system, but—speaking to Westerners—knowing ourselves, caution is indicated.
[khirn]
pg. 46
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 47
at: link turns
No link turns—ambiguity of cyborg identity glorifies the normative body—no guaranteed
dissolution of binaries with cyborgs
Cook 4 [Peta S., Centre for Social Change Research, Queensland University of Technology, “The Modernistic
Posthuman Prophecy of Donna Haraway,” paper presented to the Social Change in the 21st Century
Conference, 2004, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/646/1/cook_peta.pdf]
The first issue that I want to address in order to explain how the
cyborg may present a dangerous figure to postmodern-feminist
thought is the hyper-sexuality that the cyborg can be an expression of. By hyper-sexuality I mean a reinforcement and an exacerbation of the classic,
binary divisions of sexual bodies and identities. The hyper-sexualized cyborg, then, exaggerates stereotypical features of
sexualized bodies, creating figures that are easily and clearly identified with male or female entities, without
leaving a place for any kind of ambiguity or uncertainty regarding their respective sexuality. Thus, in spite of the
important attempts of influential theorists such as Haraway to present the cyborg as a possibility of liberating dissolution
of classic categories, the fact is that science-fiction literature and films, which function as the cyborg-terrain par
excellence,3 present most of the time a cyborg that can be seen mainly as a recreation of an exaggerated
masculinity or femininity. Gibson's cyberpunk trilogy – Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984), Count Zero (Gibson, 1986) and Mona Lisa
Overdrive (Gibson,1988) – together with films such as The Terminator (1984), Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990) and Blade Runner(1982)4 indeed
show us the way in which the cyborg – instead of reverting the usual categories and the normative sexualities – may
be responsible of completely the opposite outcome, namely, an exacerbation of normative sexual identities and
sexed bodies. In other words, the cyborg appears as a hyper-sexualized body, as if it was the glorification, the
supreme expression of the normative body and sexual identity.5 In a discussion about the hyper-sexuality that characterizes films
such as those mentioned above, Mary Ann Doane (1999) analyses the way in which a bridging of the classical human/technological
divide does not bring, by itself, a bridging of other classical categories such as the male/female one. Moreover,
Doane argues that in fact, the dissolution of the binary human/technological within the cyborg-literature is mostly
the cause of serious anxieties around the loss of the maternal and around the maternal body itself, which brings
a perception of the dissolution of normative categories of sex and gender as a threatening, frightful experience,
that is to be negated and erased. The anxiety caused by the menace of this dissolution, then, is solved, in psychoanalytical terms, by a
radicalization of the classic, binary features of normative sexuality.6 The cyborg, then – while being an important tool for bringing together in an
ambiguous figure the human and the technological – often presents a total reluctance to create ambiguity concerning gender
or sexuality. As cyberspace and cyborg literature are still created and controlled mainly by men, they are still dominated by anxieties around
threatened masculinity (Fuchs, 1995; Hollinger, 1999; Wolmark, 1999a). The cyborg, then, is created as a hyper-masculine or hyperfeminine figure in order to save us – so it appears – from the threat of ambiguous gender identities. It may even be argued
that the ambiguity of the cyborg regarding the human/technological divide is in a way responsible for the
reluctance to create ambiguity in the gender and sexual realm: the reinforcement of the normative gender and sexual structures is
the only way – from the point of view of the structures of power – to avoid a pervasive ambiguity that will turn everything into chaos and will strongly
shake the foundations of domination. In other words: at times when ambiguity, certain kinds of ambiguity (in this case, an ambiguity
concerning the human/technology divide), is
present, other binary structures (such as the gender structure) are reinforced
for fear oflosing everything as a consequence of a pervasive, chaotic and total blurriness. Thus, it seems that the fear of
losing the human body may be defeated, but not so the fear of the patriarchal order to lose masculinity as the center of power. This is in fact what
these hyper-sexualized figures of cyborgs show us: it is easier to give up the human body, to give up the body as flesh
and blood, than to abandon the idea of a masculine body as a basic fact and as the center of domination. Wolmark
comments on this: … these cyberpunk texts draw back from the possibilities of the interface, in which both self and other could be redefined in nonessentialist terms. Not only are the masculine identities of the console cowboys carefully preserved, even in the virtual realities of cyberspace, but
because the artificial intelligences that inhabit the matrix are also defined as masculine, the interface itself is made masculine. (Wolmark, 1999b, p. 233)
By now, the danger that the hyper-sexualized cyborgs present to postmodern-feminist conceptualizations of subjectivity (for instance, Braidotti, 1994;
Butler, 1999; Grosz, 1996; Haraway, 1985; Kristeva, 1982; Stacey, 1997) might be seen as obvious: reinforced stereotypes of masculinity and femininity
leave the essentialist myths ofmanhood and womanhood untouched, and with them, they also leave unquestioned the roles that men and women are
due to play in society (mostly technological domination and military control versus reproduction, respectively). Creating an ambiguity and uncertainty
regarding the place of the human body in the postmodern world is clearly not enough: as long as the categories of sex and gender will remain fixed (or,
even worse, be radicalized), the status of the dominant and the dominated will not change, and women will still be confined to the same conservative
roles even within the most avant-garde science fiction literature and films.
[khirn]
pg. 47
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 48
alternative – female imaginary
The alternative solves the aff: toppling phallocentrism merely replicates the existing order --but disrupting the existing order through confronting the 1ac with its very lack and inadequacy
creates the gap through which alternative subjectivities and knowledges can emerge
Grosz 89 [Elizabeth, 1989, “Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists”, p. 228-229]
opening up philosophy to its own historicity, its contingencies, its historical and sociocultural positioning, is not unrelated to Foucault's analysis of the power and desire operative in
knowledges (especially in 'The Discourse on Language', in Foucault, 1972) , where Foucault asks not what discourses say
but what they do, not as bodies of t ruth but as institutionally produced and supervised practices. Like
Derrida, L e Doeuff is also interested in what texts say, and in particular how they articulate their
positions. Yet unlike either Foucault or Derrida, she is unwilling to emphasise either a text's interior (its
discursive means) or its exterior (its place as a practice and a n event) at the expense of the other. Like
Irigaray, she is committed to revealing the elisions, repressions and disavowals of femininity within
philosophical and other discourses; and like Kristeva, she is concerned with the literary devices, sites of multiple meaning and ambiguity
Le Doeuff's project of
within texts; yet unlike either, her project is not limited to the discursive realm but is also directed to the relations between discourses and social
practices. Unlike Irigaray, she is not interested in constructing or speaking in a feminine voice; nor, like Kristeva, does she
advocate the transgressive impetus of experimental and avant-garde forms of writing as part of a struggle for women's liberation. These French
theorists may well mark out the intel- lectual space within which Le Doeuff works, but they do not cover the same issues nor share similar methods or
general goals. A more interrogative project than Irigaray's or Kristeva's, Le Doeuff's aims a t a rigorous deconstruction of
philosophy which may open it up to its own lacks and inadequacies, not as a source of weakness but as a site
for its growth and development. She confronts philosophy with its own techniques of evasion and thus
with its own concrete limits and spcificity. In doing so she forces the discipline to accept its partial access
to the real, the true and the good such tha t the discipline may be able to accept from, and give more to, other
disciplines, other knowledges, so that some sort of exchange relation becomes possible. This is an eminently feminist gesture insofar as only such a notion of philosophy will enable it to accept whatever contributions feminism may offer without pre-empting
what either may find useful in the other. An open-ended philosophy heralds a future in which the contributions of men and women may change the
discipline, reorient its funda- mental questions, inflect its paths of historical development, changing the way tha t the discipline is practised as
well as the subjects who constitute the intellectual community producing and affected by philosophy.
Be skeptical of their offense—the masculine bias inherent to philosophy protects its own selfimage and remains blind to how philosophy is dependent on the suppression of difference
Jones 11 [Rachel, lecturer in philosophy at the University of Dundee, Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate
Philosophy, Key Contemporary Thinkers, Polity, 2011, p. 21-22]
In approaching Irigaray as a 'feminist philosopher', then, what matters is the transformative effect each of these terms has on the other, both the way
Irigaray's feminist project transforms philosophy, and the way her path through philosophy inflects her feminism. This inflection is not just a result of
the conceptual resources that Irigaray manages to steal away from western philosophers to aid her feminist project. It is also a result of the position she
forges as a feminist who wants to keep doing philosophy, despite its patriarchal or masculinist history. In fact, Irigaray's negotiation of a critical yet nonoppositional relation to philosophy is indicative of the kind of feminism she espouses: one that seeks to make space for (sexual) difference without
reinscribing a reductive logic of opposition and negation. Indeed, it is this logic itself that is the problem insofar as it generates dichotomies that are
governed by only one of their terms, and thus by what Irigaray calls a logic of the Same'. Accordingly, it is this logic which defines woman in terms of her
difference from a male subject, and hence positions her as the other of the Same.? As Irigaray repeatedly insists, merely reversing the hierarchical opposition between the sexes - defining man in terms of his failure to be a woman, for example, or replacing patriarchy with matriarchy - would not be a real
solution, but merely a repetition of such oppositional structures of thought. Irigaray's position is doubly risky: on the one hand,
some feminists will be suspicious of the very act of engaging with the 'master discourse' of philosophy in
anything but a thoroughly critical way. From this perspective, Irigaray's desire to 'have a fling with the philosophers' looks suspiciously
like complicity with her oppressors (TS, 150). On the other hand, Irigaray's explicitly feminist orientation will tempt some
philosophers to claim that her own approach is 'biased' in ways that distort the philosophical texts with which
she engages. Irigaray thus runs the risk of being the doubly unduti-ful daughter: mistrusted by the
philosophers, yet regarded with suspicion by her feminist sisters because of her passion for philosophy .3 I do
not wish to deny that Irigaray's position is risky - but the stakes , as she would be the first to concede, are high : they
concern nothing less than the question of being, and thus, the nature of human being. The question, for Irigaray, is whether
we think being in terms of any kind of oneness, unified essence or identity, or whether we allow that being - and thus, human being - is two. Moreover,
we should not presume we already know what this 'being-two' means, for as I discuss in the Conclusion, Irigaray sug-
gests that it resists normal systems of calculation by being irreducible to 'two times one'. Instead, the 'being' of
[khirn]
pg. 48
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 49
'being-two' is found in-between. Rather than deny that Irigaray's thought is biased by her feminism, we should
look more closely at what is at stake in that so-called bias. Irigaray interrogates philosophy from a critical
feminist perspective because of a bias that she argues is already built in to the dominant forms philosophy has
taken in the western tradition since Plato; thus, her bias is corrective. Moreover, the pre-existing masculinist bias
she identifies is grounded on a series of blindspots and denials that protect philosophy's own self-image: thus it
is hardly surprising that some philosophers respond to Irigaray defensively. By accusing her of introducing a
biased perspective, they can continue to remain blind to the ways in which philosophy itself has been
dependent on the denial of difference, and specifically, the difference that woman embodies. However, there is
another reason why Irigaray poses a genuinely disturbing challenge to the philosophers. Her 'corrective'
feminist perspective docs not aim to cancel out a historically contingent but 'improper' masculinism in the
name of establishing a 'proper' universal neutral, or objective mode of thought. Were this the case, her position
really would be re-absorbed by a model of philosophy that is the product and symptom of the very perspective
she critiques. Rather, her aim is to challenge a masculinism that masquerades as universal, and an ideal of
universality that masks an inadequate articulation of the nature of (human) being. In response, Irigaray calls into question
the very idea that a universal or 'neutral' way of thinking could properly do justice to human beings. Instead, what is required is 'an ontology founded on
"being two"' (HEW, 101): an account of being that takes sexual difference as primary in ways that allow us to acknowledge two different (sexuate)
subjects. Thus her irreverent approach remains properly 'improper': not only does she reveal philosophy's own pre-
existing bias, but she denies that philosophy has the resources to correct that bias, unless it is prepared to
change its own nature and give up its commitment to an ideal universalism.
Alt key to solve
Tyson 12 [Sarah, “Reclamation from Absence? Luce Irigaray and Women in the History of Philosophy,”
Hypatia, 2012]
rather than concede
the impossibility of reclamation, let's look more closely at the passage, for it seems to suggest a way forward.
First, note that Irigaray speaks of "woman," not "women." We misplace hope for the reclamation of women's
writing if we put it on the idea that woman reopens paths with the exploits of her hand. Rather, by using
woman, Irigaray repeats a trope of discourse, one we can see in formulations like "The Woman Question," but she also speaks through it.
Speaking through woman has the sense both of speaking by way of woman and of woman being a concept
through which Irigaray strains to be heard: the difference between speaking through a receiver and speaking
through a wall. Woman both sustains the possibility of speaking and troubles it, which docs not yet easily lead
to any sense in which individual women's work or writing might be reclaimed. Irigaray signals with her use of "woman" that the
unparalleled interrogation and revolution of a certain sense, which still constitutes the sense of history also,
will not be achieved by enfranchising certain voices into discourse. Woman does not speak. Woman is a trope
of discourse. Words, like woman, are powerless to translate all and will always be so, but we do not have to leave
uninterrogated the sense, which is the sense of history also, with which we engage discourse. Body thus appears in quotation marks in the above passage.
Such a description docs not sound promising for reclaiming women's writing; woman appears only as blanks and not as an articulator of philosophical discourse. But
When we write "body" we no more bring that which exceeds discourse into discourse than when we write "woman." Marking off "body" in quotation marks encourages an encounter with it as a concept
that has a history in discourse of marking some sort of limit, excess, or disturbance. Irigaray invites us to see every appeal to "body" as a citation with which we engage and through which we are
Words, as Irigaray writes, are powerless to translate all that pulses, clamors, and hangs hazily in the
cryptic passages of hysterical suffering latency, but that does not lead her to abandon discourse. Instead, she
tells us to turn everything upside down, inside out, back to front. She tells us to insist, insist on the blanks of
discourse and not on the coherence they enable. This means the history of our relationship to discourse can be
changed. We can become readers who pay attention to the blanks of discourse, who read with a sense of the
history of discourse, who write with an ear for silences and the history upon which our meaning relies. That
does not mean we can master discourse. Rather, we can read with a sense that mastery is always what is at
stake in discourse. And mastery is what discourse cannot offer us. Exclusion has been both historical and
structural. The structure is changed by reading and writing differently, thereby giving us a new historical
relation to discourse. As Elizabeth Weed writes: "Consciousness has a history—perhaps, Irigaray observes, the logic of consciousness and the logic of history 'add up to the same thing in
the end, in a way'—and that history can change and be changed" (Weed 1994, 101). Consciousnesses history, the logic of consciousness, can be changed. This is
the point missed by reclamationists who dismiss Irigaray. The power of discourse will always be its power to
subordinate—to fix everything along vertical and horizontal axes to determine what is above and what is below.
But must we remain powerless in the face of this power? Must we accept the feminine as that which provides
the place of this ordering? In "The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine," Irigaray indicates a different possibility. The
[khirn]
pg. 49
constituted in discourse.
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 50
power of discourse has been the subordination of the feminine, but we can read, write, and rewrite differently.
And in practicing discourse differently, we can create the possibility of reclaiming women's work through our
practice. We can make a history in which women's writing is part of history, not as the other to discourse and
not as its alternative, but as part of a discourse we are powerful enough to read, write, and rewrite. In "Power of
Discourse," after describing philosophy's power to "reduce all others to the economy of the Same" Irigaray writes:
Whence the necessity of "reopening" the figures of philosophical discourse—idea, substance, subject, transcendental subjectivity, absolute
knowledge—in order to pry out of them what they have borrowed that is feminine, from the feminine, to make them
"render up" and give back what they owe the feminine. This may be done in various ways, along various "paths"; moreover, at minimum several of these must
be pursued. (Irigaray 1985b, 74) Irigaray does not dictate what sort of readers we must be; at minimum, we must pursue several paths. Irigaray's
work records many different attempts at prying out of discourse what it has borrowed and writing discourse
differently. Here, I focus on the path of reclamation that she presents in "Sorcerer Love."
[khirn]
pg. 50
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 51
at: permutation
The perm links --- reducing all perspectives to one neatly packaged advocacy is the foundation
of sexual indifference
Irigaray and Burke 80 [Luce and Carolyn, “When Our Lips Speak Together,” Signs, Vol. 6, No. 1, Women:
Sex and Sexuality, Part 2 (Autumn, 1980), p. 69-79]
If we continue to speak the same language to each other, we will reproduce the same story. Begin the same
stories all over again. Don't you feel it? Listen: men and women around us all sound the same. Same
arguments, same quarrels, same scenes. Same attractions and separations. Same difficulties, the impossibility
of reaching each other. Same . . . same. . . . Always the same. If we continue to speak this sameness,1 if we speak
to each other as men have spoken for centuries, as they taught us to speak, we will fail each other. Again. . . .
Words will pass through our bodies, above our heads, disappear, make us disappear. Far. Above. Absent from
ourselves, we become machines that are spoken, machines that speak. Clean skins2 envelop us, but they are not
our own. We have fled into proper names, we have been violated by them.3 Not yours, not mine. We don't have
names. We change them as men exchange us, as they use us. It's frivolous to be so changeable so long as we are
a medium of exchange. How can I touch you if you're not there? Your blood is translated into their senses. 4
They can speak to each other and about us. But "us"? Get out of their language. Go back through all the names
they gave you. I'm waiting for you, I'm waiting for myself. Come back. It's not so hard. Stay right here, and you
won't be absorbed into the old scenarios, the redundant phrases, the familiar gestures, bodies already
encoded in a system. Try to be attentive to yourself. To me. Don't be distracted by norms or habits.
Appropriation DA: the alt recognizies a place of enunciation for the feminine that cannot be
reconciled by the perm
Whitford 91 [Margaret, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, 1991, p. 30]
In an article on women and/in philosophy called 'Ethics Revisited', Rosi Braidotti points out that (male)
philosophers trying to think the
feminine, and (female) feminists do not have the same place of enunciation (1986b: 60; see also Spivak 1983). Male
philosophers situate themselves within the tradition of philosophy as speaking subjects. They diagnose the
crisis of philosophy, the decentring of the subject, the problems of legitimation. Their interlocutor is the history
of philosophy itself, and they attempt to deal with the crisis, 'their' crisis, by a kind of feminization of
philosophy, in which the text becomes the unconscious or the feminine (often seen as synonymous). It is the male
subject who is in crisis, Braidotti emphasizes, and he is dealing with it by turning towards a hitherto neglected aspect
of his self— the previously repressed feminine - but not to women, although at the same historical moment,
women are making themselves heard with unprecedented forcefulness, demanding their right to cosubjectivity. Women, on the other hand, have never had this relation to philosophy. In order to be the subject
of philosophy, women have had to alienate themselves, to take on a male part; the subject of philosophy is
male. Since they have never been by right the 'subjects' of philosophy, they are not, like male philosophers,
trying to salvage a tradition, to stay in the driving seat. Their position is much more contestatory. From a feminist point of view,
what male philosophers are at present engaged in can be seen as an attempt to continue by other means 'the
age-long metaphorisation of women by the masculine subject of enunciation' (Braidotti 1986b: 59). The philosophers
do not call into question their 'hegemonic model' (ibid.). In the feminization of philosophy, the feminine, as
sign of unrepresentability, 'is not structurally different from all the other signs to which the feminine was
confined in the classical mode (the irrational, the emotional, etc.)' (ibid.). Suzanne Moore, in a recent article, puts it even more strongly:
such philosophers are the pimps of postmodernism. It's 'the new kind of gender tourism, whereby male
theorists are able to take package trips into the world of femininity' (Moore 1988: 167).
Reject the ideological bait-and-switch of the perm – it is precisely the epistemic hijacking that
makes it impossible to create a space for the feminine in politics
Deutscher 2 [Penelope; A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray; p. 11-12]
[khirn]
pg. 51
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 52
Are women's politics satisfactory when the language and ideals of traditionally male spheres are adopted?
"When [women's] movements aim simply for a change in the distribution of power, leaving intact the power
structure itself, then they are resubjecting themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratic order. This latter gesture
must of course be denounced, and with determination, since it may constitute a more subtly concealed exploitation of
women" (Irigaray 1985c, 81). Irigaray concludes that this "explains certain difficulties encountered by the liberation
movements. If women allow themselves to be caught in the trap of power, in the game of authority, if they
allow themselves to be contaminated by the 'paranoid' operations of masculine politics, they have nothing more
to say or do as women" (166). Such passages are widely interpreted as indicating Irigaray's view that games of power, authority, and rationality
are inherently masculine and should be spurned by women. I do not consider this to be her position. It is uncontroversial that power, authority, and
rationality have historically been associated with masculinity. Eschewing a pursuit of anything that has historically been
associated with male authority would be untenable for women, and hardly a coherent political position. But it would also
be naive to think that women's exercising of varying degrees of power, authority, and rationality is immune
from their historical associations with masculinity. In this sense, women are taking up a position of symbolic "equivalence" to
masculinity.
Footnoting DA
Witt 6 [Feminist Interpretations of the Philosophical Canon Author(s): Charlotte Witt Reviewed work(s):
Source: Signs, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter 2006), p. 537-552]
However, even
if we become convinced that women philosophers really were omitted just because they were women and that therefore their
inclusion as women is a necessary adjustment of the historical record, there still remains a question of how best
to achieve this. How can they be rewoven into the history of philosophy so that they are an integral part of that history? In a recent essay, Lisa
Shapiro (2004), considering the case of women philosophers in the early modern period, argues that it is not enough simply to add a
woman philosopher or two to the reading list to rectify women’s past exclusion. Rather , according to Shapiro, we
need to find a stronger thread that provides internal reasons (rather than an external, feminist motivation on the part of the
teacher or editor) for the inclusion of women. One way to do this is to show how certain women philosophers made
significant contributions to the work of male philosophers on central philosophical issues. We could call this
the “Best Supporting Actress” approach in that the central cast remains male and the story line of
philosophy is undisturbed. It is a good strategy for several reasons: it is relatively easy to accomplish, and it provides an internal anchor for
women philosophers. On the other hand, it reinforces the secondary status of women thinkers, and if this were the only way of
integrating women philosophers, that would be an unfortunate result. The wholly inadequate interpretation of Beauvoir’s philosophical thought as a
mere application of Jean-Paul Sartre’s is a good example of the limitations of this strategy. Not only does it reinforce a secondary,
handmaiden role for Beauvoir, but
1995).
it also promotes a distorted understanding and appreciation of her thought (Simons
Total rethinking key
Irigaray 93 [Luce, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill, Cornell
University Press: Ithica, p. 6, 1996]
A revolution in thought and ethics is needed if the work of sexual difference is to take place. We need to
reinterpret everything concerning the relations between the subject and discourse, the subject and the
world, the subject and the cosmic, the microcosmic and the macrocosmic. Everything, beginning with the way
in which the subject has always been written in the masculine form, as man, even when it claimed to be
universal or neutral. Despite the fact that man—at least in French—rather than being neutral, is sexed.
[khirn]
pg. 52
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 53
at: essentialism
1. Critiques of essentialism are misguided—her theory of nature is unteleological—that means
her critique reveals the way in which the feminine is because it has already been included: the
1NC does not articulate the feminine, but postulates a relation to the intelligible that maintains
sexual indifference
Grosz 89 [Elizabeth, 1989, “Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists”, p. 111-2]
Whether male or female, the
human body is thus already coded, placed in a social network, and given meaning in and by culture, the male
are not the result of biology, but of the social and
psychical meaning of the body. It is for this reason that Irigaray carefully refers to the morphology and not to
the anatomy of the body: ;We must go back to the question not of the anatomy but of the morphology of the female sex' (1977:64). The lived
body, the experience of corporeality, is a social body: but it should not be reduced merely to a sociological
phenomenon, the consequences of socialisation and learning. In a rather more complex fashion, systems of language and representation must be
being constituted as virile or phallic, the female as passive and castrated. These
internalised, taken on as one's own, in order that speech and language are possible, and that the subject's perceptions and experiences acquire meaning
and thus value within its terms. The body is organised and structured as unified, cohesive, controllable through psychical development and is
specularisable or represent-able only through the acquisition of signification. There is, in short, a parallelism, an isomorphism between
patriarchal power relations, the structure of dominant or socially recognised discourses, and the socially
produced phallic male body. This isomorphism is not the result of male conspiracy.8 It is not based on men's psychological
need to dominate, nor is it an effect of a 'natural impulse (whether genetic, hormonal or physiological). Irigaray makes no
suggestion of a causal connection between men's bodies and dominant representations, although it is not uncommon to
see commentators assert that she directly links patriarchal domination to men's 'natures'.9 It is not the anatomy of the male body which
seeks its own image in dominant discourses. Rather, the pre-existence of patriarchal social relations relies on
the production of a specific form of male sexuality through inter-nalisation of images representations and
signifying practices. In other words, men do not form discourse in their own image(s); rather, phallocentric
discourses form male sexuality in their image(s).10 In her understanding, languages and discourses do not reflect a
pre-existing material reality; they function to actively constitute the world and human experience as
meaningful or representable11, an effect of forces and relations of power. Each relies on and implicates the other.
Power and language function not simply through coercion or ideology, but also through the active construction of a meaningful reality. Bestowing
significance on things', constructing them as things, presenting them as natural, enticing and inciting are
among the more insidious effects of the cooperation of discursive and political structures . Bodies are not
conceived by Irigaray as biologically or anatomically given, inert, brute objects, fixed by nature once and for all. She
sees them as the bearers of meanings and social values, the products of social inscriptions, always inherently
social. Speculum ... and This Sex ... need to be read in the light of this mutually defining cluster of terms. Her emphasis on morphology in
place of anatomy indicates that she has stepped from the register of nature into that of social signification.
2. Sloppy translation
Irigaray, 1994. (Luce, Interview with Elizabeth Hirsh and Gary Olson, “Je—Luce Irigaray”: A Meeting with
Luce Irigaray, Hypatia, May 1995, republished from Journal of Advanced Composition, 113-114)
Q. By way of conclusion, we have a tradition of posing the following question: Are
you aware of any misreadings or
misunderstandings of your work that you'd like to address here?
A. There are certainly errors of translation; I've given you examples. There are errors of interpretation which are tied to something I've
already indicated: the principal points of error derive from not being sufficiently attentive to my philosophical
training, and especially to my relationship to ontology and to the negative. In the same vein, errors result from
confusing a scientific with a philosophical discipline, which aren't the same thing. Obviously, I represent a snare for the
reader to the extent that I have various scientific trainings— linguistic, psychological, psychoanalytic, literary (my first studies were literary)—and at the
same time, a philosophical training. So I make use of scientific techniques; sometimes I make an analysis of discourse
using only scientific technique. Fundamentally, what 1 recur to the most in interpretation is, I think finally, a certain philosophical level. So
when I'm read simply as a psychoanalyst or as a linguist, there are some levels of thought, intention, and
interpretation in my work that are already lost.
[khirn]
pg. 53
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 54
3. Their authors misunderstand that the feminine describes subjectivity, not material bodies
van Leeuwen 10 [Anne, “Sexuate difference, ontological difference: Between Irigaray and Heidegger,” Cont
Philos Rev (2010) 43:111–126 DOI 10.1007/s11007-010-9136-7]
Given the salience of the notion of sexuate difference for Irigaray’s articulation of this phenomenological ontology, we must begin with an explication
of this idea. She invokes the neologism sexuate
difference in order reinterpret sexual difference as an irreducible
dimension of human identity. While sexual difference, in our ordinary understanding, is often treated as a biological or
morphological category, sexuate difference, while maintaining the carnal connotations of sexual difference,
insinuates this incarnate difference within the structure of subjectivity. As Irigaray tells us, ‘‘sexuate difference
means that man and woman do not belong to one and the same subjectivity, that subjectivity itself is neither
neutral nor universal.’’66 Through, the notion of sexuate difference, Irigaray wants us to see that humanity, human subjectivity is not
One but two.
Means there is no link
Bostic 2 [Heidi, Michigan Technological University, “Reading and Rethinking the Subject in Luce Irigaray’s
Recent Work,” Paragraph 25, November 2002]
Each gender has a specific relational identity, which is both natural and cultural. This difference results in part from
women’s and men’s experience with the mother as belonging either to the same or to the other gender, and is reflected in different ways of language use.
Women’s speech, for example, tends to privilege the intersubjective relation. Affirming that men and women have different
subjectivities does not mean that we reduce them to a simple ‘biological destiny’. Rather, it entails a realization
that men and women are ‘culturally different’ (Between East and West, 129).
4. Not offense—it’s inevitable without the alt
Frye 96 [The Necessity of Differences: Constructing a Positive Category of Women, Signs, Vol. 21, No. 4,
Feminist Theory and Practice (Summer, 1996), pp. 991-1010]
Schor believes that when Irigaray projects women as speaking a sexually marked language, she is "ultimately less concerned with theorizing feminine
specificity than with debunking the oppressive fiction of an universal subject" (1989,45). But Irigaray does go on and "theorize feminine
specificity" to the dismay of critics who have wanted "to sever her brilliant exposure of the specular logic of
phallocentrism from her theoriza-tion of a specifically feminine difference" (Schor 1989, 46). Schor quotes Toril Moi (1985,
139): "Having shown that so far femininity has been produced exclusively in relation to the logic of the same, [Irigaray] falls for the temptation to
produce her own positive theory of femininity. But, as we have seen, to define 'woman' is necessarily to essentialize her" I
disagree with Moi's statement at every step. First, I believe Irigaray had no alternative but to go on to some positive
construction. Until a positive category of women is historically constructed, the man/woman distinction will be
the A/not-A universal and exclusive dichotomy it has historically been in many of its deployments; it cannot be
dismantled or "deconstructed" by being folded in on itself (erase not-A). Second, I do not see that the positive
construction to which Irigaray is committed has to be understood as "defining 'woman.'"9 Third, even if it does, I do
not agree that defining "woman" necessarily commits one to any essentialism or to (what is to Moi and others the same
thing) a simple replication of A/not-A construction (with "us women" as A)—as though the only possible logic of categories is this
pseudodualistic monistic logic. Moi is saying it is philosophically and politically wrong, incorrect, to construct a positive category of women. Others have
suggested it is flat out (onto logically impossible to do so. I think that they are wrong about this and that this mistake, by reiteration among prestigious
academic feminist theorists across color and class affiliations, has generated one of the rifts between feminist theory and feminist practice.
That means we outweigh—anti-essentialism is worse for women
Whitford 91 [Margaret, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, 1991, p. 12-13]
Irigaray's work is of crucial importance, particularly if one regards the modernism/postmodernism debate as the principal intellectual
debate of our time (see some of the articles in Linda Nicholson (ed.) Feminism/Postmodernism (1990), and Susan Hekman's book Gender and
Knowledge (1990), which puts forward this argument from a feminist position). For this debate confronts feminists with a dilemma. On
the one hand, they share with postmodernist thought the radical critique of the modernist Enlightenment
inheritance; on the other hand, the emancipatory thrust of feminism is rooted in the Enlightenment. Feminist
politics, up to now, appears to be grounded in a modernize category, 'woman', with essentialist implications, while
the possibility of founding a political programme on a postmodernist base is , to say the least, still a matter for
debate. Irigaray's contribution here is to point to the dangers for women of embracing postmodernism too hastily or
too uncritically. If, as she argues, all western theory - including the theories of postmodernism - fails to recognize
[khirn]
pg. 54
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 55
sexual difference, then we have to examine postmodernism for its sexual subtext. She warns against displacing
the male/female binary before the female side has acceded to identity and subjectivity. To omit the question of
the woman-as-subject and her identity in thought and culture is to leave in place a tenacious and damaging
imaginary structure. 'Woman's time1, then, is not necessarily coincident with the chronology of the male subject.
5. The alt resolves this tension—means we have a unique link turn
Fuss 89 [Diana, "Essentially Speaking": Luce Irigaray's Language of Essence Hypatia, Vol. 3, No. 3, French
Feminist Philosophy (Winter, 1989), pp. 62-80]
Irigaray's reading of Aristotle's understanding of essence reminds me of Lacan's distinction between being and having the phallus: a woman does not
possess the phallus, she is the Phallus.16 Similarly, we can say that, in Aristotelian logic, a woman does not have an essence, she is
Essence. Therefore to give "woman" an essence is to undo Western phallomorphism and to offer women entry
into subjecthood. Moreover, because in this Western ontology existence is predicated on essence, it has been possible for
someone like Lacan to conclude, remaining fully within traditional metaphysics, that without essence, "woman does not exist." Does
this not cast a rather different light on Irigaray's theorization of a woman's essence? A woman who lays claim to
an essence of her own undoes the conventional binarisms of essence/accident, form/matter, and
actuality/potentiality. In this specific historical context, to essentialize "woman" can be a politically strategic gesture of
displacement.
To say that "woman" does not have an essence but is Essence, and at the same time to say that she has no
access herself to Essence as Form, seems blatantly contradictory. Moreover, has not Western philosophy always
posited an essence for woman—an essence based on biology and, as everyone knows, defined by the properties of weakness,
passivity, receptivity, and emotion, to name just a few? The problem, I would argue, is not with Irigaray; it is precisely Irigaray's
deployment of essentialism which clarifies for us the contradiction at the heart of Aristotelian metaphysics. In his
philosophy, we see that the figure of "woman" has become the site of this contradiction: on the one hand, woman is asserted to have an essence which
defines her as woman and yet, on the other hand, woman is relegated to the status of matter and can have no access to essence (the most she can do is to
facilitate man's actualizing of his inner potential). I would go so far as to say that the dominant line of patriarchal thought since
Aristotle is built on this central contradiction: woman has an essence and it is matter; or, put slightly differently, it is the essence
of woman to have no essence. To the extent that Irigaray reopens the question of essence and woman's access
to it, essentialism represents not a trap she falls into but rather a key strategy she puts into play, not a
dangerous oversight but rather a lever of displacement.
[khirn]
pg. 55
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 56
at: heterosexism
It’s based on a misreading—and the alt solves
Schwab 7 [Gail, professor of French at Hofstra, “Reading Irigaray (and Her Readers) in the Twenty-First
Century” in Returning to Irigaray edited by Elaine P. Miller and Maria C. Cmitile, p. 33-35]
When assessing the relationship between the early and the late writings, even for those who are prepared to accept the idea of the underlying continuity
of style and intent of Irigaray's project, a problem remains. Certain readers, like Drucilla Cornell in the interview in diacritics, have read
Irigaray's later work as a regression, an effort to reinscribe "conservatism on the deepest level of her
understanding of sexual difference."36 Cornell and Judith Butler both pinpoint the Ethics as the moment when a blatant
heterosexism comes in to vitiate Irigaray's project. Butler maintains that a certain heterosexual notion of ethical exchange emerged in An Ethics of
Sexual Difference . . . The intense overt heterosexuality of An Ethics of Sexual Difference and indeed of the sexuate rights discourse, which is all about
mom and motherhood and not at all about postfamily arrangements or alternative family arrangements, not only brought to the fore a kind of
presumptive heterosexuality, but actually made heterosexuality into the privileged locus of ethics, as if heterosexual relations, because they putatively
crossed this alterity, which is the alterity of sexual difference, were somehow more ethical, more other-directed, less narcissistic than anything else. It
was, in some sense, compelling men out of what she used to call their hom(m)osexualite into this encounter with alterity ... and what would emerge from
that exchange would be a certain kind of heterosexual love which would come to capture the domain of the ethical.37 Certain of these criticisms,
the less important ones,
are based on misreadings or incomplete readings; sexuate rights, for example, are not really about "mom and
motherhood," in the sense that Butler understands them here. Irigaray does insist that mothers (those who have chosen maternity under the sexuate
right to voluntary maternity that she demands) need special state protection for their children. This, however, in no
way reinstates the
patriarchal family, and, in fact, can be read as requiring that society recognize its responsibilities when it comes
to nurturing and educating the next generation.38 Drucilla Cornell herself points out the appropriateness of Irigaray's legal analyses to
the French legal system, claiming that she has always "read her as programmatically serious about sexuate rights, and seeing them as realizable. Such
rights are certainly inconsistent with the way the law [read here 'the American legal system') operates now, but it is not inconsistent with the concept of
the French legal system."39 Nevertheless, the charge of heterosexism is a serious one, and it has at least occurred to many readers to wonder at the new
focus on the heterosexual couple that emerges at the time of the Ethics. I was not unaware of this new focus back in 1991 when I wrote "Irigarayan
Dialogism," but did not choose to deal with it at that time and focused on more formalistic issues instead. Others have found ways of reading Irigaray
that do not limit her thought to a monolithic presumptive heterosexuality. In the diacritics interview, Cheah and Grosz themselves offer subtler
alternatives to this reading, many of which had already been articulated by Grosz in "The Hetero and the Homo: The Sexual Ethics of Luce Irigaray,"40 an
article published in Engaging with Irigaray. Although it would be inappropriate to reproduce the whole of her argument here, it is useful to recall, with
Grosz, that Irigaray was at one time seen to be the advocate of a radical "presumptive" lesbianism.° Grosz cautions readers against such
presumptions, pointing out that Irigaray maintains a critical distance from all existing types of sexual relations
under patriarchy," and insisting that all current sexualities—hetero-, homo-, or lesbian--"represent the primacy
of a sexuality conceived in phallic terms," but that "there still remains the possibility of both heterosexual and
homosexual relations based on an acceptance of women's pleasure."" In other words, the future of all sexual
relations beyond phallocentrism remains a completely open question. Far from being presumed,
heterosexuality as we currently conceive it might not even exist in a world where sexual difference had actually
emerged from the economy of the same. And this would, of course, also hold true for homosexualities as
currently conceived."
This misreading conflates ontic and ontological
Jones 11 [Emma, Speaking at The Limit, 2011, p. 30-31,
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/11542/Jones_Emma_Reed_phd2011sp.pdf]
With regard to Irigaray’s explicitly formulated ethics of sexuate difference, however, some
commentators have worried that, in
focusing on the “relation” between sexuate subjects, Irigaray’s work is only applicable to intimate or sexual
relations between men and women. This is the substance of Judith Butler’s critique of Irigaray, for instance, in the Diacritics
interview, where she even quips that Irigaray’s work should be filed under “heterosexual studies.” However, as I hope my
discussion of ontology above has already shown, when Irigaray speaks about the “relation” of sexuate subjects, she does not
only mean a specific intimate relation between men and women. Rather, the relation takes place at the
ontological level, such that the event of being is already an event of relation between-two, and the “subject”
also comes to be re-defined as two: internally limited-by and perpetually moved-toward the sexuate other. As Gail
Schwab (2007) notes (and as I explain further in Chapter V), we can thus draw a distinction between an “empirical” relation
between the sexes and an “ontological” one. Schwab quotes Irigaray in To Be Two, who writes: “Certainly, I can decide to
become woman while suspending my empirical relationship with the other gender [...] but [...] to be woman
necessarily involves [...] to be in relation with man, at least ontologically.” (TBT: 34; Schwab, 32). Schwab interprets this
[khirn]
pg. 56
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 57
quote to say that “[a]lthough
generically, to be woman requires a relation to the other man, just as to be a man requires a
relation to the other woman, becoming a woman at the level of the individual is not dependent upon a heterosexual
love choice” (32). Thus, while the ethics of relationality proposed by Irigaray would certainly be applicable to
empirical heterosexual love relations, it is certainly not limited to this sphere, and instead concerns the relation
between male and female genres (the French term translated as “genders”) as a whole—a relation that, in 31 turn, affects all of
our empirical relations. Thus, as I will discuss in Chapter V, the ethical practice of dialogue as the enactment of a relational limit is applicable to
all human relationships. Nonetheless, for Irigaray, it is critical to transform the ontological relation of sexuate difference (a transformation that, I argue,
must be pursued through dialogues with all sexuate others) first and foremost if these relationships are to thrive.
[khirn]
pg. 57
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 58
heidegger
[khirn]
pg. 58
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 59
1nc heidegger
Affirming the cyborg embraces a position of permanent wandering that forecloses the
disclosure Being and reifies technological thought --- voting aff merely results in iPhones and
Google Glasses that grease the wheels of capitalist exploitation
O’Hara 3 [Daniel T., Professor of English at Temple University, “Neither Gods nor Monsters: An Untimely
Critique of the “Post/Human’’ Imagination,” boundary 2 30:3, 2003] //khirn
An exemplary case in point, and a difficult case (for feminist political reasons), in fact, for her to take on, appears in Graham’s extended analysis of
Donna Haraway’s work. Graham discusses much of Haraway’s feminist cultural criticism, from her famous 1985 essay
‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto,’’ to her 1997 book Modest-Witness@Second-Millennium.FemaleManMeets-OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. As
Graham summarizes Haraway’s general position (taken from her 1992 book Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science),
‘‘simians, cyborgs and women all occupy the boundaries of modernity, positioned there to show forth the scientific and cultural narratives that determine
what will count as knowledge’’ (203). One, of course, can slide into the slot under the rubric of ‘‘women’’ one’s own preferred ‘‘monstrous’’ minority,
which is rather the point of both Haraway’s original position and Graham’s analytic use of it here. Haraway is a feminist cultural critic of
scientific modernity and a scientist herself. She not only argues her position announced above but attempts
to perform it in her own writing , which she dubs ‘‘cyborg writing.’’ Such writing would be, like poststructuralist
écriture, both subversively disruptive of the binary logics of modernity in matters of race, class, gender, and now
species, and celebratory of the hybridity and permeable boundaries of cultural existence because of the ever
greater possibilities for human (and beyond human) subjectivities it supposedly can now foster. Cyborg writing is to
conventional discourses what the cyborg is to the grand philosophical categories of modernity: humanity, nature, technology. That is, such cyborg
writing would make a vital mess of the rigid demarcations of class, race, gender, of life and death, of human and post/human, and so be able to promote
the liberations of new possibilities of existence on the planet. In characterizing Haraway’s position and writing in this way, however, Graham does not
intend to reduce them to the belated legacies of a romantic modernism intersecting with critical theory’s desperate hunger for ‘‘the next big thing’’ in
cultural critique. Haraway’s is no simpleminded Rousseauistic vision for Graham. Instead, if there are any inheritances, they are Byronic in manner, as
mediated by Shelley’s Frankenstein. As Graham remarks apropos Haraway’s figure of the cyborg and what it is intended to
represent: ‘‘Her cyborg has endured no fall from primordial innocence, no Oedipal crisis, but also has no need,
equally, therefore, of a narrative of restoration. Cyborgs [are without families of any kind, and so] do not crave holism nor
reunification with abandoned paradises nor maternal [or patriarchal] figures; instead, like Haraway’s other favorites,
the tricksters, cyborgs are restless nomads . . . so Haraway’s narrative of redemption is [then] about transition
and change without loss, permanent wandering and transmutation without origins or ultimate
destination’’ (206). Whatever romantic analogues or paradigms for Haraway might be appropriate, Graham demonstrates that for this feminist
cultural critic of modernity, neither narratives of progress nor visions of apocalypse are required. In fact, as Graham details for
most of an entire chapter, the ultimate expression of the modern Western binary logic Haraway wants to disarticulate
and surmount is precisely the religious logic that pits spiritual transcendence against material embodiment (213–18),
and, certainly, this ‘‘progressive’’ critical position of Haraway’s is indebted, broadly speaking, to a recognizably post-Cartesian romantic social and
cultural project that has revolutionary dimensions. As Graham underscores, Haraway was raised a Roman Catholic, which touts officially an
incarnational and sacramental religious vision. One can generally find in her work that ‘‘her opposition between human and divine, or (technolog-ized)
earth and (immaterial) heaven itself rests upon unexamined [binary] constructions of ‘religion and transcendence’ that owe their origins to the Western
Enlightenment’’ (217) and also to what I take specifically to be its secularized Protestant and politically revolutionary discourses. Consequently, Graham
concludes that while Haraway’s cyborg writing demonstratively embraces ‘‘contingency and complicity [with
irresolvable complexities], it
can only do so in a mood predominantly suffused with irony,’’ and thus it can only adopt
‘‘a postmodern veneer in its embrace of the hybridity and contingency of techno scientific culture’’ (218). In short,
despite her most influential feminist cultural essay being entitled, after Foucault, ‘‘Situated Knowledges’’ (collected in Primate Visions), Haraway
apparently is not the real thing—she’s no Foucault (as Graham understands him), who did famously prophesize the so-called ‘‘death of man.’’ In
Graham’s view, that is, Haraway’s cyborg writing permits the re-coalescence of the rigid binary structures of modern thinking that it would explode
precisely because of its not fully examined and critiqued post-Enlightenment religious underpinnings. In other words, Haraway is not enough of a social
constructivist and new historicist critic but is more of a powerfully diverting (albeit belatedly romantic) theoretical practitioner of modern irony. I have
discussed Graham’s representative critique of Haraway at some length because it is so indicative of her avowedly Foucauldian critical framework and
interpretive method, and because, from my admittedly untimely critical point of view, Graham misses the most important matter, specifically with
regard to Haraway’s would-be cyborg writing (whatever that really is supposed to be and do) and more generally concerning all the talk of the
There is no post/human—yet ! What Haraway says about the figure of the cyborg
and the kind of writing she wants to write in its name is all imaginary, it has no material reality to it— yet and
perhaps never will or can. Similarly, no monsters, mythic or otherwise, left us their ten thousand years of cultural history .
Nor, as far we know, have any godlike aliens dropped off their packets of instant worlds to mix up with a few of our spare tears. Nothing like
that has popped into existence . And nothing of the Internet and its virtual realities has subverted
anything in the real world of global capitalism; rather, all these developments have only enhanced the
[khirn]
pg. 59
post/human. What is that, you say?
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 60
spread of capitalist power into every nook and cranny of existence , proliferating and
accelerating the alienated and alienating work rhythms of our lives to such a pitch that there can
apparently be no such thing as a vacation anymore, no holidays in reality for us, no respite from an
increasingly driven will-to-will ever new value(s).
The impact is the endless nihilism and repetition of the will to will --- within this paradigm no
ethical framing or value to life is possible --- the alternative is to do nothing --- this call to think
and poetize is the only transgression possible
O’Hara 3 [Daniel T., Professor of English at Temple University, “Neither Gods nor Monsters: An Untimely
Critique of the “Post/Human’’ Imagination,” boundary 2 30:3, 2003] //khirn
I have recalled this sci-fi world from the mists of my youth not for nostalgia’s sake but because in many ways Smith’s world, chronicled in his published
work between 1950 and his untimely death (at age fifty-three) in 1966, could virtually be the model of the world several recent books claim is emerging
triumphantly or ominously (or both) right now. The latest revolutions in biotechnology (largely associated in the popular mind with the Human Genome
Project), in brain research and psychopharmacology, and in digital technologies have given rise to a variety of subcultures. Each of these has its own
‘‘worldview,’’ and almost all of these ‘‘worldviews’’ deploy in their discourses some form of the term post/human. The one meaning that the different uses
of this term generally share is an opposition to what is characterized as ‘‘modernity.’’ For modernity is portrayed in the discourses of
these subcultures that are vying for hegemonic status in the new age as the culture of already empowered white
male subjects who are just up to no good: out to dominate nature, marginalize further so-called minority groups
(however defined), and assume godlike status at the expense of all these ‘‘monstrous’’ others. That is, all these others
have been ‘‘constructed’’ as ‘‘monstrous’’ in some fashion by being represented, classified, subjected, supervised, and disciplined (by
modern culture) solely in order to determine by contrast a purified (albeit fictionalized) standard of (white male)
normality. Although Graham’s book contains a seventeen-page post/human bibliography in very tiny print, clearly the influence of only a few
theorists shines through her basically feminist critical formulation of modernity. Among the most prominent and formative of these
theorists for Graham’s argument are Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway , and Bruno Latour. I intend to focus on Graham’s representative use
of Foucault because he provides the announced critical framework and method. About Haraway more will follow from Graham herself. And about
Latour? I hope to discuss his work at length in a forthcoming essay. Broadly speaking, then, the discourses of the post/human (for Graham), as they
accompany developments in contemporary ‘‘technoscience,’’ are generally oppositional discourses critical of current conceptions and realities of Western
culture in many, often potentially conflicting, perhaps even self-contradictory, ways. This last is especially the case with technocratic futurists, who are
critical of the status quo in contemporary society but in the name of their own desired white male hegemony. However that may be, my primary concern
is not with the internal logic (or illogic) of these discourses. Rather, my primary concern with these discourses (about the sciences they invoke I will not
comment on here) arises from two interrelated issues: the alleged affinity of their antihumanistic polemics with poststructuralism in general and
Foucault specifically, and the unrecognized nihilistic attitude they perpetuate. In a real sense, the centrality of Graham’s book in this context is a
testament to the fact that it has done part of its job admirably well: it does indeed effectively survey and taxonomically place the discourses of the
post/human, and it does so better, more critically, than other recent texts. However, in its deployment of what Graham characterizes as a Foucauldian
critical framework (and the avowed method of critical genealogies) and in the incomplete analysis of its own invocations of a Heideggerian perspective
on modernity and technology, Representations of the Post/Human, already an excellent introduction to the topic, remains seemingly paralyzed on the
threshold of the very comprehensive critique it apparently aspires to mount. Before turning to the specifics of my critique of her representative work,
however, I need first to give the reader at least some sketch of Heidegger’s treatment of modernity and technology, since his vision of these phenomena
helps to define my own critical framework and represents, I believe, the fundamental step still not taken by Graham in her study. The essence of
modern technology, in fact of modernity per se, is what Heidegger calls in his various readings of Nietzsche, ‘‘the willto-will.’’ 5 This will-to-will, the reader will recall, is the underlying form of what Nietzsche could only see more
metaphysically (in Heidegger’s readings) as a universal and transhistorical ‘‘will-to-power.’’ All forms of being—atoms,
ants, and anthropoids—display, according to Nietzsche, a drive for ever more power. Whatever quantum of power is observed and
taken as a base state in relation to a configuration of other quanta of power, the entity under analysis will be seen as acting to secure an increasingly
larger quantum of power, initially at least despite the consequences for itself or other entities. ‘‘Intelligence,’’ in this context, is basically an
administrative phenomenon for directing the will-to-power in ways that, while still maximizing power, can avoid or at
least postpone for as long as possible the worst consequences of its own fundamental drive. Why such postponement?
In the case of living organisms, so that reproduction may occur, and a potentially infinite future made possible for the entity in question. What
Heidegger proposes in his readings of Nietzsche’s ‘‘will-topower’’ is that modernity’s form of this will is more
precisely depicted as ‘‘the will-to-will,’’ that is, as a will to itself in an infinite circuit of becoming through all the
levels and modes of being, as that process of self-revision is both captured in the staged spectacles of the
modern will’s self-images and housed in modernity’s various archives. In this severe light, the modern subject can be
seen as nothing more than an endlessly self-revising and self-recording dancer (or performance artist) with
shocking masks, some drawn from the archives of the past, some from the imagination, perhaps now, the
post/human imagination, of the future. That these masks may be made of reanimated dead flesh, silicon chips, and animal fur, or that they
may penetrate the skin and serve as invasive prosthetic devices matters little, analytically speaking. ‘‘Humanist,’’ ‘‘antihumanist,’’ or
[khirn]
pg. 60
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 61
‘‘posthumanist,’’ all modes of existence in modernity are manifestations of this nihilistic ‘‘will-to-will.’’ For
Heidegger, this modern condition is a historical epoch of potentially millennial expanse. But why is it ‘‘nihilistic’’? After all, nihilism means that
existence is seen as valueless, and certainly the discourses of modernity and of the post/human are awash in a sea
of values, of value assertions, of value designations, of the conflict of values, and so on. For Heidegger, following Nietzsche, once it is shown that the
highest values of the Judeo-Christian tradition have devalued themselves, then the production of new values is a project always strangling itself in its
own crib, as it were. How can this be? The highest value of the Judeo-Christian tradition is truth, according to Nietzsche and Heidegger. This tradition’s
God is the true one, and this God demands truth from all believers: truth in speaking to and loving others, and in praying and confessing to this God. For
the better part of two thousand years, this tradition bred human subjects to be seekers of the truth. With the emergence of modern science, the
quintessential method for seeking truth, however, the Judeo-Christian tradition bred its own executioner. Not only has modern science discovered the
falsity at the basis of this tradition, but it has led to the prospect that there are only lies, only appearances, only untruths. All truths, and so all
‘‘true’’ values, are necessary fabrications useful in the will-to-power’s (or the will-to-will’s) quest ever to secure more
power long enough to pass on such accumulated power to posterity. To what end? No end, only the ever
enhanced prospect of this endless process of self-revising will-to-will itself. (Heidegger stresses repeatedly that the value of
imaginary or real self-enhancement, at the expense of all else, is the nihilistic ‘‘value’’ par excellence.) It is in this nihilistic context that
Heidegger concludes that not only Nietzsche’s philosophy but any philosophy can at best now do nothing , for otherwise
it will participate in and help to perpetuate thereby such apparently endless nihilistic self-enhancement :
‘‘Philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all
purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by
thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god . . . insofar as in view of the absent
god we are in a state of decline’’ (as cited in Graham, 224). It is interesting to note, I think, that the verb to enhance and its nominal variants
appear in Graham’s book too many times to count, virtually every couple of pages or so. Admittedly, such a seemingly quietist response of
Heidegger’s, only attempting to think and to poetize so as to prepare a readiness for a god’s appearance, does
not appeal to the habitual activist impulses of the vast majority of modern intellectuals. (On another occasion, I
would argue in detail that this ‘‘only thinking and poeticizing ,’’ whether in preparation for a divine revelation or not, is perhaps
the hardest thing one can attempt to do.) What does appeal nowadays, of course, is representing one’s critical
efforts as being part of a large struggle against the powers that be, a struggle for greater justice, that is,
greater access to and distribution of the material and cultural resources of modernity, for all peoples and now,
in light of the post/human imagination, all possible beings. Each and every subject, in this best of all possible worlds that
is emerging, should form itself on the model of the nihilistic will-to-will according to the ultimate ‘‘value’’ of a
potentially infinite self-enhancement that can recognize no limits on the course of its sensational
transgressions .
[khirn]
pg. 61
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 62
2nc link wall/ov
Haraway’s understanding of being as pure affirmation forecloses the contemplative rethinking
required to reveal the eclipse of Western metaphysics
Rae 14 [Gavin, American University at Cairo, “The Philosophical Roots of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Imagery:
Descartes and Heidegger Through Latour, Derrida, and Agamben,” Human Studies, December 2014, Volume
37, Issue 4, pp 505-528] //khirn
Noting the three senses of ‘metaphysics’ in Heidegger, I will suggest that Haraway’s thinking abandons the perceived ambiguity inherent to the question
of being to focus on thinking entities in a way that is not constrained by the logic of binary oppositions. In other words, it will be my suggestion that while
Haraway is initially implicitly influenced by Heidegger’s critique of anthropocentrism, she shares Derrida’s and Latour’s rejection of
Heidegger’s conclusion that the overcoming of anthropocentrism can only occur through the re-raising of the
question of the meaning of being to look at the ways in which entities are, pace Descartes, ontologically entwined. Support for this
understanding is found in Haraway’s work, where, in one of her few explicit comments, placed in a marginal endnote to When Species Meet, on
Heidegger, she claims that “ Heidegger’s notion of the open is quite different from mine ” (2008: 367n.28), before
going on to explain that her reading of Heidegger is based on Giorgio Agamben’s reading which claims that (1) the notion of profound boredom is crucial
to Heidegger’s understanding of the open, and (2) understanding the human’s capacity for profound boredom emanates from a comparison of the
human to animal. From here, Haraway claims that her notion of the open is quite different, insofar as it is not based on
Heidegger’s negativity (human minus profound boredom leads to animal who cannot suffer boredom), but on pure
affirmation .
While Krzysztof Ziarek (2008: 189f., 196, 201) raises serious concerns over Agamben’s reading of Heidegger, claiming that Agamben forgets the role the
question of being plays in Heidegger’s analysis of the human–animal relation, Haraway’s support for Agamben’s reading reveals that she develops her
thinking from (a reading of) Heidegger’s. This appears to lend support to my claim that she is developing her thinking from a Heidegger-inspired
heritage, a relationship that, if Heidegger’s notion of trace is accurate, would ensure that a trace of Heidegger’s thinking finds expression in her thinking.
Indeed, we see this further once we recognize that Haraway develops her hybrid-ontology from Agamben’s suggestion that Heidegger develops his
notions of profound boredom, the open, humans, and animals by comparing humans to animals to reveal the abyss between them. Again, this reading of
Heidegger has been criticised by, for example, Tracy Colony (2007: 7, 10) who argues that Agamben’s and, by extension, Haraway’s reading of
Heidegger on this point fails to recognize that Heidegger not only actually aims to undermine the binary
oppositions upon which modern metaphysics depends , but does so by questioning and comparing the
‘being’ of humans to the ‘being’ of animals to show that profound boredom is a ‘possibility’ that emanates from
human being’s unique ek-static relationship to being, a relationship that the non-ek-sistence of animality cannot share. In contrast, Haraway takes
Agamben to be showing that Heidegger simply compares humans to animals to privilege the former over the latter. From here, she depends on Latour’s
privileging of empirical observation of entities over philosophical speculation into being, claims that to properly understand entities requires that we
examine the ontological entwinement of entities devoid of the ambiguity inherent to passing this re-thinking through a questioning of being, and, in so
doing, calls into question the radical division between human, animal, and machine through which Descartes (and, according to her reading, Heidegger)
thinks and privileges human being. To show this, I will now explore some aspects of Haraway’s thinking to draw out those currents that show her
Cartesian and Heideggerian heritage. Again, there is not sufficient space to engage with all aspects of her thinking and so the presentation will be rather
brief and schematic, but it will be sufficient to show that Haraway’s thinking emanates, but also departs, from Heidegger’s critique of the binary
oppositions underpinning Descartes thinking on the human–machine/animal relationship.
Cyborgs cause extinction and destroy value to life
Dinello 2k5 (Dan, “Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology”
http://shockproductions.com/technophobia/technophobia.html)
Techno-Heaven awaits you.
You will be resurrected into posthuman immortality when you discard your body, digitize
your mind and download your identiy into the artificial brain of a computer. Cyber-existing in virtual reality, you will live forever
in a perfect simulation of divine bliss. This techno-heaven is envisioned by a cult of techno-priests – scientists and their apostles - who
profess a religious faith that the god technology will eliminate the pain and suffering of humans by eliminating humans. These techno-utopians
fervently believe that technological progress will lead to perfection and immortality for the posthuman, cyborg
descendants of a flawed, inevitably extinct humanity. Is this a happy dream or a dismal nightmare? In contrast
to this bright vision of a pain-free, posthuman techno-heaven, science fiction frequently paints a dark picture of technology. From the destructive robotwitch of Metropolis (1926) to the parasitic squid-machines of The Matrix Revolutions (2003), the technologized creatures of science fiction often seek to
destroy or enslave humanity. Science fiction shows the transformation into the posthuman as the horrific harbinger of the long twilight and decline of the
human species. In its obsession with mad scientists, rampaging robots, killer clones, cut-throat cyborgs, human-hating
androids, satanic supercomputers, flesh-eating viruses and genetically mutated monsters,
science fiction expresses a technophobic fear
of losing our human identity, our freedom, our emotions, our values and our lives to machines. Like a virus, technology autonomously
[khirn]
pg. 62
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 63
insinuates itself into human life and, to insure its survival and dominance, malignantly manipulates the minds and behavior of humans. This
book
explains the dramatic conflict between the techno-utopia promised by real world scientists and the technodystopia predicted by science fiction. Such technophobic science fiction serves as a warning for the future,
countering cyber-hype and reflecting the real world of weaponized, religiously rationalized, and profit-fueled technology. The United States’
2003 invasion of Iraq offers a suggestive example of autonomous technology supported by religious, military
and corporate interests. An expansion of the American Techno-Empire, the invasion’s security rationales – Iraq’s
nuclear threat, their huge stores of chemical and biological weapons, and their ties to the September 11 terrorists – all proved wrong. Falsehood
was expressed as certainty by the Bush administration who fabricated, exaggerated and distorted the pre-War intelligence to justify the war. With the
bloody horror of its dead and wounded hidden, the invasion appeared - in the American media – as advertising hype
for U.S. military power and technology. Human costs were minimized. Battling a technologically-primitive enemy, the war was a technoslaughter test of America’s latest bombs, guns, and planes. Even more insidiously, the invasion can be seen as a war to seize control of the oil needed by
the machines. In this sense, humans have been subsumed into weaponized systems and themselves function as the
slave-like tools of technology. Technological imperatives propel war and the politics of domination. As American
warfare has become more and more technologically driven, scientific, corporate and military interests have become inseparable. Much of the research
and development of 21st century posthuman technologies, such as artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and robotics, were originated and funded by the
American military often through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Created in 1958 to avert a weapons gap with the Russians
and inspired by their launching of Sputnik, DARPA – which currently disburses nearly $2 billion annually to corporate, government and university
researchers – remains America’s most powerful force driving technological change through weapons development. Aligned with weaponized technology,
corporate profit and religious propaganda, President George Bush – an evangelical Methodist - pledged a “crusade” to “rid the world of evil-doers,” a
phrase that sounds like a call to battle against satanic forces; thankfully for the petroleum companies, Satan happens to reside on Iraq’s rich oil reserves.
The war, like the science fiction to be discussed in this book, dramatizes a disturbing aspect of technology: it is energized by a deadly alliance of military,
corporate, and religious interests. Promoting a religious vision of technology, the evangelists of techno-heaven promise the reward of everlasting life in
exchange for subjugation to the machine. Transferring human minds into death-free robots, according to artificial intelligence expert
Raymond Kurzweil, will produce the next stage of evolution –- an immortal machine/man synthesis: Robosapiens. While this sounds like
science fiction, Kurzweil - in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines- expresses it as inevitable science fact. Calling this evolutionary transformation
the result might be the “physical
extinction of the human race.” Echoing Vinge and Kurzweil, robotics pioneer Hans Moravec forecasts a utopian,
robot-dominated, postbiological future in his book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (1999). From a biotechnological angle,
Gregory Stock in Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism (1993) predicts the
genetic re-engineering of the species for posthuman perfection. Posthuman evolution –- the development of
human/machine fusion –- is clearly underway. Tiny cameras, serving as artificial eyes, wired directly
into the brain; mechanical hands and legs controlled by nerve impulses; computer networks populated by disembodied minds – all these blur
the distinction between human and machine. The mapping of the human genome bestows unprecedented,
almost-divine power on biotechnologists who want to create superhumans by re-tooling evolution and
genetically reconstituting the species. While we wait for brain implants to make us smarter, nanotechnologists will engineer intelligent
“The Singularity,” mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge believes that
molecular machines and inject them into our bodies to destroy diseases before they terminate us. Meanwhile, self-reproducing nanobots will
revolutionize the economy by providing an abundance of cheaply-made replacement organs, material goods and food. Taken collectively, 21st century
technologies –- Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Bionics, the Internet, Virtual Reality, Biotechnology and Nanotechnology - promise a new era in human
progress, the Posthuman Age. While this book is about science fiction, it includes a brief history and status report on these technologies as we explore
imaginings of their future possibilities and the risks they entail. The rapid development of posthuman technologies – according
to the requirements of war and profit - will have profoundly disturbing, perhaps revolutionary effects on our
world. If we are approaching a dangerous threshold of posthuman evolution, or Singularity – a twilight zone where “ . .
.our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules,”science fiction helps us envision that new reality. The
best science fiction extrapolates from known technology and projects a vision of the future against which we can evaluate present technology and its
direction. The main premise of this book is that science fiction matters, that the actual development of technology and our
response (or lack of response) is influenced by popular culture. Drawing a vision of the future from attitudes, moods and biases
current among its artists and their audience, science fiction not only reflects popular assumptions and values, but also gives us an appraisal of their
success in practice. Alone, cultural imagery and themes do not motivate behavior. But recurring images and themes reveal behaviors that are culturally
valued while advocating a point of view for discussion. Science fiction serves as social criticism and popular philosophy. Often taking us a step beyond
escapist entertainment, science fiction imagines the problematic consequences brought about by these new technologies and the ethical, political and
existential questions they raise. As emerging technologies shift the balance of power between human and machine, our
concept of humanity alters. Rapidly accelerating computer intelligence joins an escalating series of ego-smashing, scientific breakthroughs that
diminish human self-image. Copernicus pushed us from the center of the universe; Darwin linked us to apes, slugs and
bacteria; Freud showed us that we often do not control our own minds. Computers now threaten to surpass us in intelligence.
Cyborgs are stronger and more powerful. Clones portend an unlimited supply of duplicate selves. This reduces the value of our
own minds, bodies, individuality and consciousness. A kind of evolutionary panic ensues, giving rise to fears of being
transformed or taken over by machines. These fears are amplified by military and corporate funding of
[khirn]
pg. 63
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 64
emerging technology, insuring life-threatening and profit-making developments without regard to ethical or
human consequences. As Langdon Winner says in Autonomous Technology (1977), “Technology is a source of
domination that effectively rules all forms of modern thought and activity. Whether by an inherent
property or by an incidental set of circumstances, technology looms as an oppressive force that poses a
direct threat to human freedom.“ Science fiction taps into these existential fears while reinforcing our
concerns about the misanthropic humans who serve as technology’s collaborators in domination. In my analysis,
Winner’s concept of autonomous technology - which develops Jacques Ellul’s radical critique in The Technological Society (1964) - serves as a theoretical
touchstone. Beyond this, I will show how science fiction anticipates and reflects recent warnings about technomania. Bill Joy's widely read 2000 article
in Wired "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" splashed cold water in the face of technocrats with its incisive warning about the dangers that robotics,
genetic engineering, and nanotechnology pose to humanity’s survival. Coming from Sun Microsystems’ chief scientist, co-creator of the Unix operating
system and developer of Java software, Joy’s stinging rebuke was all the more painful to technologists who believed he shared their faith. He called
attention to technology’s “unintended consequences” while evaluating the techno-vision of everyone from the neo-Luddite Unabomber to robotics
posthumanist Hans Moravec, taking seriously the likelihood that machines will supplant humans as the dominant lifeform on the planet. He singled out
the most dangerous aspect of these technologies – self-replication, an issue explored in the oldest science fiction novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818), and in contemporary ones, like Michael Crichton’s 2003 best-seller Prey.
The aff forecloses being-in-the-world
Cook 4 [Peta S., Centre for Social Change Research, Queensland University of Technology, “The Modernistic
Posthuman Prophecy of Donna Haraway,” paper presented to the Social Change in the 21st Century
Conference, 2004, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/646/1/cook_peta.pdf] //khirn
Taking pleasure in these boundary transgressions of the cyborg, Haraway (1991: 150, emphasis added) blurs reality/fiction by asserting “the cyborg is a
creature in a postgender world”, while proposing “we are cyborgs”. In this fashion, Haraway (1991: 181) understands the importance of
the cyborg as a “utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender”, meaning the cyborg should be embraced
in “the promises of monsters” (Haraway, 1992b: 295). Nevertheless, despite Haraway’s (1991) acknowledgement of the utopian and dystopic
past, present, and future potentials of technoscience; “bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception” (Haraway, 1991: 180); she
focuses on a cyborg utopia2 “as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings” (Haraway, 1991:
153). Similarly to Firestone’s utopian social vision of a techno-based post-gender reality that is free from biologically-based oppression (Braidotti, 2002;
Firestone, 1970), Haraway (1991) presents the cyborg as (another) liberating source to escape gender stereotypes (Dixon, 2003; Balsamo, 1988). In this
way, desire for gender reconstruction through dichotomist transgression is nothing more than a utopian dream, where the future reality will be more
desirable than the present (Horner, 2001). Hence, such cyborg concepts are an escapist futuristic solution from the
dissatisfaction with “the inadequacies and injustices of [contemporary] human life” (Springer, 1994: 163), which
reconciles the self/other in a Lacanian Imaginary realm (Springer, 1994). In this fashion, the blurring of reality/imagination (Haraway, 1991) is a
repetition of old feminist stories that reduces the depths of the: materiality of the concrete and embodied lived experience; structural embedded nature
of gender; and the rhizomatous role of technology, which is creating ‘real’ oppression. Thus, as “the body is our general medium for
having a world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 146), our ‘real’ embodied experiences are cyborg ‘facts’, that should
remain to be potently significant for cyborg anthropology. The powerful lived experience of the body and
its intentionality is seen in the phantom-limb syndrome, where the absent limb of an amputee can be
ambivalently (omni)present in a dual ontology of presence/absence (Merleau-Ponty 1962). Consequently, our
understandings of the body should not only be conceived as transcending the flesh, but also dependent on our familiar lived experiences of the body. In
other words,
the embodiment of being-in-the-world is vital for the development and understanding of
agency as experienced in ‘reality’. As a result, the concrete (cyborg) body continues to be a site of oppression;
“an interface … a field of intersecting material and symbolic forces; it is a surface were multiple codes … are inscribed” (Braidotti, 2002: 25). In this
fashion, cyborgs are not simply the new ontology or new embodied ‘flesh’ envisioned by Haraway (in Kunzru 1997), as sexualised markings
on the (cyborg) body (Foster 1996) increase, rather than decrease, the gender divide. Furthermore, the immediate
and everyday experience of the lived physical body (Leib) within a common life-world (Lebenswelt) (Merleau-Ponty 1962),
continues to reassert the need to be aware, and to respect, the present social construction of human ontology as
gendered3. In turn, the interrelation between materiality and discourse are important in the production of ‘reality’. Therefore, while Haraway
acknowledges the social influences on material-semiotic actors, she focuses on cyborg post-gender ‘fiction’ at the expense of cyborg-gendered realities.
Thus, it is important to consider what this ‘reality’ actually means for the lived experiences of cyborg bodies.
[khirn]
pg. 64
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 65
That forecloses any metaphysical transformation
DeLuca 05 -- Environmental Humanities Research Professor @ University of Utah (Kevin , "Thinking with
Heidegger Rethinking Environmental Theory and Practice," Project Muse, p 67-87,
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ethics_and_the_environment/v010/10.1deluca.html)
Citing the Cartesian ontology of the world as dominant, Heidegger in Being and Time works to "demonstrate
explicitly not only that Descartes' conception of the world is ontologically defective, but that his Interpretation and the
foundations on which it is based have led him to pass over both the phenomenon of the world and the Being of those entities within-the-world which are
proximally ready-to-hand" (1962, 128). Briefly, Heidegger critiques Descartes for positing a "bare subject without a world" (1962, 192) and for relying on
mathematics, which produces the sort of Reality it can grasp, thus "the kind of Being which belongs to sensuous perception is obliterated, and so is any
possibility that the entities encountered in such perception should be grasped in their Being" (1962, 130). Descartes' ontology presumes the dynamic of
an isolated subject grasping mathematically world as object. Arguably, it is this perspective that is at the root of the environmental crisis, for the world is
reduced to an object laid out before me and I am reduced to a detached subject that has only a use-relation to a dead world.
Heidegger disdains "the Cartesian approach of positing a subject one can come across in isolatio n" (1962, 248) and
rejects the "perennial philosophical quest to prove that an 'external world' is present-at-hand" (1962, 250). Instead,
Heidegger offers a different foundational starting point: "The Interpretation of the world begins, in the first instance, with some
entity within-the-world, so that the phenomenon of the world in general no longer comes into view " (1962, 122).
Humanity is never the isolated subject that surveys and grasps the world-as-object displayed before it. Heidegger
continues: "Our investigation takes its orientation from Being-in-the-World—that basic state of Dasein by which
every mode of its being gets co-determined" (1962, 153). Heidegger concludes: "In clarifying Being-in-the-world we have
shown that a bare subject without a world never 'is' proximally, nor is it ever given"(1962, 152). Heidegger explicitly
clarifies this point in response to Descartes: "If the 'cogito sum' is to serve as the point of departure for the
existential analytic of Dasein, then it needs to be turned around, and furthermore its [End Page 73] content needs
new ontologico-phenomenal confirmation. The 'sum' is then asserted first, and indeed in the sense that "I am in a world." As such an
entity, 'I am' in the possibility of Being towards various ways of comporting myself—namely, cogitationes—as ways of Being alongside entities within the
world" (1962, 254).
Heidegger, then, is suggesting a Copernican revolution with respect to humanity's relation to the world, for it is
never a matter of "to" but "in." Humanity is never a subject over and against or above the world apart from the
world; rather, the subject is always in the world, a part of the world, and, indeed, is constituted by relations in the
world. Further, in an important point that is not so clear in Being and Time but that becomes evident in later writings, "I am in the world" on
earth, that Being-in-the-world is always already Being-in-the-world on earth. Earth is "that on which and in
which man bases his dwelling.... Upon the earth and in it, historically man grounds his dwelling in the world....
The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world" (1993, 169, 171, 172). In displacing the subject-object
dichotomy that so circumscribes environmental theory and practice, Heidegger's thought opens up a horizon of possibilities of
other ways/beginnings/trajectories for environmentalism. What would it mean to approach all environmental issues from a
fundamental understanding of Being-in-the-world on earth?
Cyber feminism is engrained in technology ignores the dangers of technological development
and increases violence towards women
Suchman 6 [ Lucy, Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology
at Lancaster University, Social Studies of Science, “ Wajcan Confronts Cyber Feminism” Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr.,
2006), pp. 321-327
April 2006, http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdf/25474445.pdf?acceptTC=truem LM]
While Wajcman endorses the
figure of the cyborg as developed by Haraway, she suggests that in the hands
of Haraway's followers the cyborg has been cut loose from its ironic, socialist feminist specificity, as
'[t]he lived technoscientific reality of cyborgs has taken second place to their treatment as fictional
discourse' (p. 94). Wajcman's primary difference with Haraway is over what she characterizes as the latter's excessive
optimism with respect to the emancipatory potential of new technologies; a position that Wajcman attributes to
a privileging of the semiotic over the material. For example, taking the mobile phone as a case in point, Wajcman emphasizes
the labours hidden in its appearance as an object: 'For a young woman in the West, her silver cell phone is experienced
as a liberating extension of her body. The social relations of production that underpin its existence are invisible
to her' (pp. 121). Those relations, she goes on to explain, include the dependence of electronics
manufacturing on the mineral Coltan, mined principally in Central Africa under semi-feudal and colonial labour conditions. A
rise in the price of Coltan in global markets exacerbates local armed conflicts, which in turn have
[khirn]
pg. 65
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 66
direct and violent consequences for women. It is conditions like these that Wajcman names
the 'material realities' of technology production, and which she defines as a central object for
technofeminism..
[khirn]
pg. 66
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 67
2nc turns case
The will-to-will’s infinite self-enhancement forecloses the questioning capable of disrupting
global capitalist and technical dominations
O’Hara 3 [Daniel T., Professor of English at Temple University, “Neither Gods nor Monsters: An Untimely
Critique of the “Post/Human’’ Imagination,” boundary 2 30:3, 2003] //khirn
What does it really matter in a truly impersonal way whether or not there is a ‘‘designer baby,’’ cyborg writing, or a spaced-out virtual reality freak who
may or may not have taken the required psychotropic medication today? What does it matter that the material and cultural resources of the emerging
post/human imagination be more (rather than less) equally distributed? And if each one of us (or our professional group) is able to play out, on a brief
break from our alienated labor, the fantasy of Dr. Frankenstein, so what? Once the last person or group on earth can become
whatever she, he, or it wants to be, what then? That insatiable modern will-to-will indeed will, no must, not
rest, cannot rest, because its only aim is an impossible infinite self-enhancement . But what if the universe
is as perfect as it can be already at every moment, and what if any change, however tiny, however carefully done, means
everything existing is abolished as it is, and so all begins to swing wildly out of kilter, like those complex
physical systems (such as our weather systems on the planet), wobbling ever more crazily toward an absolute chaos that the
madly beautiful figures of fractal geometry enshrine? What then? My point in raising such questions as these is
not to suggest that I or anyone knows their answers. Precisely the opposite is the case. No one can ever
know the answers about the whole , because no one , however enhanced by modern technology,
can ever know the whole (much less pretend to judge its value), and so no one can ever become that post/human god
that the administrative imaginary of global capitalism is busy producing simulacra of even in the harshest
discourses of its severest critics. (This dimension of critical imagination as an unintended repetition of the very thing it would overcome is
the consequence of existence in an epoch of nihilism.) All such ‘‘developments’’ compose the lesson of the unknowable
(derived in part from critical reflections on quantum physics and its theories) that few wish to recall now in this
moment of global capitalism’s apparent ascendancy.11 It is just such recollection of the unknowable when projected into an imaginary
cultural future that Smith’s science fiction stories repeatedly perform and so uncannily anticipate for us, I think, right now. Now is not the occasion for a
full discussion of his work, some preliminary work toward which I have already done elsewhere.12
The cyborg gets coopted---understanding their aff as inherently political maintains predetermined entities and reaffirms the binaries they try and eradicate
Rae 14 [Gavin, American University at Cairo, “The Philosophical Roots of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Imagery:
Descartes and Heidegger Through Latour, Derrida, and Agamben,” Human Studies, December 2014, Volume
37, Issue 4, pp 505-528] //khirn
Two points stand out from the presentation of Haraway’s position so far: first, by identifying and criticising the underlying binary oppositions of Western
thinking, Haraway can be read as taking aim at Descartes and, in so doing, sharing a similarity with Heidegger who also criticises and aims to overcome
Haraway links cyborg imagery to struggles for
political emancipation . Cyborg imagery is not to be glorified in-itself, but is meant to stimulate our thinking
in ways that overcome the binary oppositions upon which, she maintains, relations of domination are based (1991:
154). For this reason, cyborg imagery is inherently political . However, while Haraway’s use of an ironic cyborg imagery to
the binary logic upon which Descartes’ thinking operates. Second,
undermine the binary oppositions of Cartesian-inspired thinking was hugely influential, it quickly morphed into a ‘serious’ post/trans-humanist thinking
charting the ways human being and technology were influencing one another (Bostrom 2005; Gray 2002; Clark 2003; Pepperell 2009). In other words,
the purpose behind Haraway’s cyborg imagery was co-opted away from its primary purpose of
offering a critique of anthropocentric binary oppositions to a thinking that charted the various potential opportunities
and consequences of human being’s continuing cyborgisation. Of course, this re-thinking did continue to challenge anthropocentric binary oppositions,
but my suggestion is that this was no longer its primary purpose.
On the one hand, that subsequent post/trans-human thinking no longer addresses or justifies itself through this problematic but simply takes the
critique of binary oppositions as a given, shows how influential Haraway’s cyborg imagery was. On the other hand, however, and while there was the
recognition that the human and machine were changing, there was still a tendency to think the changing nature of both from the perspective of the
human. In short, cyborgisation tended to be anthropomorphized with the result that anthropocentrism was re-
admitted leading to the dominance of what has been called humanist or anthropocentric approaches to
posthumanism (Wolfe 2010: 62). Furthermore, by downplaying cyborg imagery’s challenging of anthropocentrism, and focusing on the various
ways the human and machine were melding together, post/trans-human theory often turned to science fiction to think the cyborg with the consequence
that the political intent behind Haraway’s use of cyborg imagery was downplayed. While recent posthuman theory has taken a
[khirn]
pg. 67
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 68
noticeable political turn that returns to and emphasises the political strand in Haraway’s cyborg imagery
(Campbell 2011; Cohen 2009; Eposito 2008; Fukuyama 2003; Gray 2002; Protevi 2009; Rose 2007; Thacker 2010), the initial downplaying of
the political implications of cyborg imagery contributed to an alteration in Haraway’s own thinking.
The Second Wave: Haraway’s Companion Species
While the ‘serious,’ apolitical uses of cyborg imagery, failure to overcome anthropocentrism in all its guises, and personal interest in the question of
animality all contributed to a change in Haraway’s focus (1995: 514), there was something about cyborg imagery itself that Haraway felt was inadequate.
First, focusing on the human–machine relationship downplays the other ways in which human being is entangled with the ‘other’. Second, and more
fundamentally, by unquestioningly taking over cyborg imagery to think how the male, female, human, and animal
are being mechanised, thinking failed to recognise that we need to take a more patient look at the “troubled
categories of woman and human” (2008: 17). Simply taking over these categories and showing how they are being cyborgised
does not truly entail a radical thinking of the fluid, embedded, and entangled nature of these categories, but
risks simply maintaining pre-determined entities that are complicated through their
machinisation ; a thinking that tends to simply re-affirm the binary oppositions of the
anthropocentrism Haraway questions.
Cyborg accidents cause extinction
Somerville 10 [Margaret, “Attempts to redesign our species or prolong life through avant garde science pose
a serious threat to humanity's survival.” http://www.themarknews.com/articles/2849]
Being an incurable optimist,
I do not believe the human race will end, but, if it were to, I think it would most likely
come about through human intervention in human life with avant garde technoscience. Such interventions
could either intentionally wipe out the species, as in the case of the transhumanists, or unintentionally, as could happen with
xenotransplantation. Transhumanism is a movement supporting the belief that humans, and the human experience as we know and treasure it, should
become obsolete. Transhumanists are working towards a future in which humans are redesigned through
technology, especially robotics and artificial intelligence, to become cyborgs – human machines. The physical, mental, emotional, and
even moral capacities of cyborgs, transhumanists say, will far outstrip those of “unmodified humans.”. In this techno-utopian vision – one
I, and others, see as dystopian – of a post-human future, people like us – “unmodified humans” – are obsolete models. In a
nutshell, transhumanists describe a “human, transhuman, post-human” continuum. They believe that the technological
revolutions now underway – in infotech, biotech, nanotech, robotics, and artificial intelligence – will converge to alter the fundamental nature of being
human, and with that, our concepts of what it means to be human. We – and all our most important values and beliefs – will be transformed beyond
recognition. Eventually, we will reach the nirvana of a post-human future: we won’t be human at all, transhumanists
say. For them, “human” is not the end of evolution; it is the beginning. Transhumanists want only to do good – but this is dangerous. When we have an
overwhelming desire to do good, it is much more difficult to see the risks involved. In their own words, transhumanists “seek to expand technological
opportunities for humans to live longer and healthier lives and to enhance their intellectual, physical, psychological, and emotional capacities.” Taking
them at face value, most of us would endorse those goals. But the ultimate goal of transhumanism is that superior beings will be created by redesigning
Homo sapiens with technoscience to become Techno sapiens.
[khirn]
pg. 68
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 69
2nc alt
There is no escape to nihilism: the only response is to stop and think
O’Hara 3 [Daniel T., Professor of English at Temple University, “Neither Gods nor Monsters: An Untimely
Critique of the “Post/Human’’ Imagination,” boundary 2 30:3, 2003] //khirn
This is where a certain reading of Foucault comes into play in most of the varieties of contemporary oppositional discourse, post/human or otherwise.
This is a reading of Foucault that ignores or downplays the problematic of nihilism that Foucault inherits from
Nietzsche and Heidegger, despite his repeated invocations of this inheritance in his interviews and writings. This
informed ignorance, as I like to think of it, derives from the utility of reading Foucault as making possible a positive conception of critical agency to effect
substantial change. What, more specifically, then, is this reading? It is a reading that presents Foucault as a social constructionist
and new historicist critic of modernity’s institutions and discourses who is supportive of a liberal or socially
democratic vision of all kinds of self-revising subjectivities. 6 Well, you might say, isn’t this Foucault? I do not think it is, and I
have argued for a different, darker vision of Foucault, a Foucault given to radical parodies of each and every
one of the ever emerging discourses of modernity.7 My ‘‘Foucault,’’ as it were, is a knowing instance of the
Nietzschean ‘‘will-topower’’ or the Heideggerian ‘‘will-to-will.’’ Foucault, in this sense, is preparing a readiness for
thinking and poeticizing ‘‘beyond modernity’’ (or is it ‘‘behind its back’’?) by playing out, via savage ironies, all the
discursive possibilities of modernity, even those still in the process of emerging even now, such as the post/human. Like Nietzsche’s
Socrates in The Twilight of the Idols, Foucault wills his own death as a figure or idol, so as to take as many of the
discourses of incipient nihilism with him as possible into the black hole of his radical parodies. Unfortunately, again
like the dying Socrates, Foucault has been taken with full seriousness, when he would have preferred to have
inspired demonic laughter instead. But isn’t such laughter a testament to nihilism, too? Of course, for right now (however long that is),
there simply is no escape from nihilism . This does not mean that we should all fall on our swords. What
it does mean, however, is that we should all stop and try to think . Thinking in modernity is not an easy task to
perform. As Paul A. Bové has demonstrated over the last decade or so in his many essays on various aspects of Henry Adams and his work,
thi nking is perhaps the most important thing we can do, and the thing we are least prepared to
do by modernity . In this respect, at least, I think Nietzsche, and Heidegger, certainly would have concurred with Bové’s Adams. 8 So, for
purposes of argument, let us agree that attempting to think and to poeticize a readiness for a form of being beyond an
endlessly selfrevising and nihilistic modernity is an experiment that, whether itself nihilistic or not in the final analysis, has
not generally been tried in sustained ways by modern intellectuals , and especially not by
contemporary academic critics . Why not? I think it is because such attempts could possibly lead to where
Heidegger’s did, to a contemplation of what he calls, in the previously cited passage, ‘‘the absent god,’’ who is
neither quite the gone god nor quite a here one, either. Such an absent god is clearly a stand-in for the
mode of temporality we call the future , and it is in this mode of the future per se that this absent god
paradoxically embodies best, by its very formative absence, the nonhuman dimension of existence. I say
‘‘nonhuman’’ deliberately to distinguish, terminologically at first, what I am indicating as being different from
the human or the post/human or, for that matter, the inhuman. 9
Alt solves the aff --- too hard to just transcend, gotta rethink --- solves their metaphysical
violence impacts better
Rae 14 [Gavin, American University at Cairo, “The Philosophical Roots of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Imagery:
Descartes and Heidegger Through Latour, Derrida, and Agamben,” Human Studies, December 2014, Volume
37, Issue 4, pp 505-528] //khirn
Of course, Haraway would most probably argue that she is doing something else, but, as we saw with Latour, Heidegger’s rejoinder would be that any
questioning of empirical entities depends on, and so is always brought back to, a questioning of the ‘essence’ or being of those entities. To focus on
empirical observation alone is to think from certain assumptions about the essence or being of the thing, such as the notion that entities are ontologically
relational, that empirical observation discloses what the being truly is, that a mediating aspect exists that allows entities to be simultaneously entwined
and individuated, while also assuming certain understandings of space and time that allow entities to become through one another. By showing that
Haraway’s thinking assumes a certain ontological understanding and is inspired by a long philosophical history
which she overlooks to privilege the method(s) of empirical social science, we not only show her intimate
companionship to Heidegger, but also open a space to better explore how to become with her thinking. In
[khirn]
pg. 69
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 70
particular, I want to conclude by suggesting that Haraway’s
Heideggerian heritage leads to three lines of future research: first,
Haraway’s analysis brings us to question the nature of ‘overcoming’ including whether we can, in fact, overcome
anthropocentrism and what this overcoming will look like given her recognition that to criticise
anthropocentrism is itself to perpetuate the mode of Western thinking underpinning anthropocentrism. Second,
Haraway’s thinking brings us to question the nature of ‘identity’ and the role that relationships play in the
formation of identity. While the notion of relational identity is not new to the social sciences (think of Latour’s actor-network theory) or
philosophy (think of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic), Haraway pushes us to think identity and relationships nonanthropocentrically. One of the things her analyses shows, and on this Heidegger would agree, is that this is far harder than it
initially appears . And third, to truly understand and justify her conclusions, the ontological assumptions upon which her
analysis is based need to be brought to the fore and questioned. This does not entail the slavish replication of Heidegger’s
thinking on being, but the recognition that the ontological question he brought to the fore continues to offer
possibilities that can deepen Haraway’s analyses .
[khirn]
pg. 70
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 71
impacts – tech thought bad
Technocratic approaches to technology jeopardizes the essence of human freedom: embracing
the cyborg simply makes us cogs in the collective machine – this outweighs extinction
Rojcewicz 6 --- professor of philosophy at Point Park University (Richard, “The Gods and Technology: A Reading of
Heidegger”, SUNY, pg 140-142)
The danger Heidegger now launches an extended discussion of the danger inherent in modern technology. It
needs to be underlined that for Heidegger the threat is not simply to human existence. The prime danger is not that high-tech devices might get out of
hand and wreck havoc on their creators by way of a radioactive spill or an all-encompassing nuclear holocaust. The danger is not that by disposing of so
many disposables we will defile the planet and make it uninhabitable. For Heidegger the danger – the prime danger – does not lie
in technological things but in the essence of technology .
Technological things are indeed dangerous; the rampant exploitation
of natural resources is deplorable; the contamination of the environment is tragic. We need to conserve and to keep high-tech things from disposing of
us. Yes, for Heidegger, conservation,
itself , is not the answer . Conservation alone is not radical enough .
Conservation is aimed at things, technological things and natural things , but it does not touch the outlook
or basic attitude that is the essence of modern technology, and it is there that the danger lies. It may well be that
conservation will succeed and that technology will solve its own problems by producing things that are safe and nonpolluting;
nevertheless, the prime danger, which lies deeper down, will remain. For the danger is not primarily to the
existence of humans but to their essence : “The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal effects of the
machines and devices of technology. The genuine threat has already affected humans – in their essence” (FT, 29/28). In a sense, the threat inherent in
modern technology has already been made good. Though we have thus far averted a nuclear disaster, that does not mean the
genuine threat has been obviated. Humans still exist; they are not yet on the endangered species list. It would of course be tragic if
humans made that list. Yet, for Heidegger, there could be something more tragic, namely for humans to go on living but to
lose their human dignity , which stems from from their essence. Here lies the prime danger, the one posed not by technological things but by
the disclosive looking that constitutes the essence of modern technology. The prime danger is that humans could become (and in
fact are already becoming) enslaved to this way of disclosive looking. Thus what is primarily in danger is
human freedom; if humans went on living but allowed themselves to be turned into slaves – that would be the
genuine tragedy. The danger in modern technology is that humans may fail to see themselves as free followers,
fail to see the challenges directed at their freedom by the current guise of Being, and fail to see the genuine possibilities open to them
to work out their destiny. Then, not seeing their freedom, humans will not protect it. They will let it slip away
and will become mere followers, passively imposed on by modern technology, i.e., slaves to it, mere cogs in the machine. For
Heidegger, there is an essential connection between seeing and freedom. The way out of slavery begins with seeing, insight. But it
is the right thing that must be seen, namely, one’s own condition. The danger is that humans may perfect
their powers of scientific seeing and yet be blind to that wherein their dignity and freedom lie, namely the entire
domain of disclosedness and their role in it. Humans would then pose as “masters of the earth,” and yet their selfblindness would make them slaves.
Endless management renders the world a standing reserve to be controlled – only a new
reflection of technological thought can rethink our relationship to the earth - the impact is
extinction and endless devaluing of life
McWhorter ’92 – assistant professor of philosophy at Northeast Missouri State University (Ladelle, “Guilt As
Management Technology”, Heidegger & The Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy)
Our ceaseless
interventions seem only to make things worse, to perpetuate a cycle of human activity followed by
ecological disaster followed by human intervention followed by a new disaster of another kind. In fact, it would
appear that our trying to do things, change things, fix things cannot be the solution, because it is part of the
problem itself. But, if we cannot act to solve our problems, what should we do? Heidegger’s work is a call to reflect, to think in
some way other than calculatively, technologically, pragmatically. Once we begin to move with and into Heidegger’s call and
begin to see our trying to seize control and solve problems as itself a problematic approach, if we still believe that thinking’s only real purpose is to
function as a prelude to action, we who attempt to think will twist within the agonizing grip of paradox, feeling nothing but frustration, unable to
conceive of ourselves as anything but paralyzed. However, as so many peoples before us have known, paradox is not only a trap; it is also a
scattering point and passageway. Paradox invites examination of its own constitution (hence of the patterns of thinking
[khirn]
pg. 71
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 72
within which it occurs) and thereby breaks a way of thinking open, revealing the configurations of power that propel it and hold it on track. And thus it
makes possible the dissipation of that power and the deflection of thinking into new paths and new possibilities. Heidegger frustrates us.
At a time
when the stakes are so very high and decisive action is so loudly and urgently called for,
Heidegger apparently calls us to do — nothing. If we get beyond the revulsion and anger that such a call initially inspires and
actually examine the feasibility of response, we begin to undergo the frustration attendant upon paradox; how is it possible, we ask, to choose, to will, to
do nothing? The call itself places in question the bimodal logic of activity and passivity; it points up the
paradoxical nature of our passion for action, of our passion for maintaining control. The call itself suggests that our drive
for acting decisively and forcefully is part of what must be thought through, that the narrow option of will versus surrender is one of the power
configurations of current thinking that must be allowed to dissipate. But of course, those drives and those conceptual dichotomies
are
part of the very structure of our self-understanding both as individuals and as a tradition and a civilization.
Hence, Heidegger’s call is a threatening one, requiring great courage , “the courage to make the truth of our own
presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question.”‘ Heidegger’s work pushes
thinking to think through the assumptions that underlie both our ecological vandalism and our love of
scientific solutions, assumptions that also ground the most basic patterns of our current ways of being human.
What is most illustrative is often also what is most common. Today, on all sides of ecological debate we hear, with greater and greater fuency, the word
management. On the one hand, business people want to manage natural resources so as to keep up profits. On the other hand, conservationists want to
manage natural resources so that there will be plenty of coal and oil and recreational facilities for future generations. These groups and factions within
them debate vociferously over which management policies are the best, that is, the most efficient and manageable. Radical envi¬ronmentalists damn
both groups and claim it is human population growth and rising expectations that are in need of management. But wherever we look, wherever we listen,
we see and hear the term management. We are living in a veritable age of management. Before a middle class child graduates from high school she or he
is already preliminarily trained in the arts of weight management, stress management, and time management, to name just a few. As we approach
middle age we continue to practice these essential arts, refining and adapting our regulatory regimes as the pressures of life increase and the body begins
to break down. We have become a society of managers - of our homes, careers, portfolios, estates, even of our own
bodies - so is it surprising that we set ourselves up as the managers of the earth itself? And yet, as thoughtful earth-
dwellers we must ask, what does this signify? In numerous essays - in particular the beautiful 1953 essay, "The Question Concerning Technology" Heidegger speaks of what he sees as the danger of dangers in this, our age. This danger is a kind of forgetfulness, a forgetfulness
that Heidegger thought could result not only in nuclear disaster or environmental catastrophe, but in the loss
of what makes us the kind of beings we are, beings who can think and who can stand in thoughtful relationship
to things. This forgetfulness is not a forgetting of facts and their relationships; it is a forgetfulness of something far more
important and far more fundamental than that. He called it forgetfulness of 'the mystery'. It would be easy to imagine
that by ‘the mystery’ Heidegger means some sort of entity, some thing, temporarily hidden or permanently ineffable. But ‘the mystery’ is not the name of
some thing; it is the event of the occurring together of revealing and concealing. Every academic discipline, whether it be biology or
history, anthropology or mathematics, is interested in discovery, in the relevation of new truths. Knowledge, at
least as it is institutionalized in the modern world, is concerned, then, with what Heidegger would call revealing, the bringing
to light, or the coming to presence of things. However, in order for any of this revealing to occur, Heidegger says, concealing must also
occur. Revealing and concealing belong together. Now, what does this mean? We know that in order to pay attention to one thing, we must stop paying
close attention to something else. In order to read philosophy we must stop reading cereal boxes. In order to attend to the needs of students we must
sacrifice some of our research time. Allowing for one thing to reveal itself means allowing for the concealing of something else. All revealing comes at the
price of concomitant concealment. But this is more than just a kind of Kantian acknowledgment of human limitation. Heidegger is not simply dressing
up the obvious, that is, the fact that no individual can undergo two different experiences simultaneously. His is not a point about human subjectivity at
all. Rather, it is a point about revealing itself. When revealing reveals itself as temporally linear and causally ordered, for example, it cannot
simultaneously reveal itself as ordered by song and unfolding in dream. Furthermore, in revealing, revealing itself is concealed in order for what is
revealed to come forth. Thus, when revealing occurs concealing occurs as well. The two events are one and cannot be separated.4 Too often we forget.
The radiance of revelation blinds us both to its own event and to the shadows that it casts, so that revealing conceals itself and its self-concealing conceals
itself, and we fall prey to that strange power of vision to consign to oblivion whatever cannot be seen. Even our forgetting is forgotten, and all traces of
absence absent themselves from our world. The noted physicist Stephen Hawking, in his popular book A Brief History of Time, writes, “The eventual
goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe.”‘ Such a theory,
many people would assert,
would be a systematic arrangement of all knowledge both already acquired and theoretically possible. It would be a theory to end all theories, outside of
which no information, no revelation could, or would need to, occur. And the advent of such a theory would be as the shining of a light into every corner of
being. Nothing would remain concealed. This dream of Hawking’s is a dream of power; in fact, it is a dream of absolute
power, absolute control. It is a dream of the ultimate managerial utopia. This, Heidegger would contend, is the dream
of technological thought in the modern age. We dream of knowing, grasping everything, for then we can
control, then we can manage, everything. But it is only a dream, itself predicated, ironically enough, upon concealment, the self-
concealing of the mystery. We can never control the mystery, the belonging together of revealing and concealing. In order to approach the world in a
manner exclusively technological, calculative, mathematical, scientific, we must already have given up (or lost, or been expelled by, or perhaps ways of
being such as we are even impossible within) other approaches or modes of revealing that would unfold into knowledges of other sorts. Those other
approaches or paths of thinking must already have been obliterated; those other knowledges must already have concealed themselves in order for
technological or scientific revelation to occur. The danger of a managerial approach to the world lies not, then, in what it knows — not in its penetration
into the secrets of galactic emergence or nuclear fission — but in what it forgets, what it itself conceals. It forgets that any other truths are possible, and it
We can never have, or
know, it all; we can never manage everything. What is now especially dangerous about this sense of our
[khirn]
pg. 72
forgets that the belonging together of revealing with concealing is forever beyond the power of human management.
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 73
own managerial power, born of forgetfulness, is that it results in our viewing the world as mere resources to be
stored or consumed. Managerial or technological thinkers, Heidegger says, view the earth, the
world, all things as mere Bestand, standing-reserve. All is here simply for human use. No plant, no
animal, no ecosystem has a life of its own, has any significance, apart from human desire and need. Nothing, we
say, other than human beings, has any intrinsic value. All things are instruments for the working out of human will. Whether we
believe that God gave Man dominion or simply that human might (sometimes called intelligence or rationality) in the face of ecological fragility makes us
always right, we managerial, technological thinkers tend to believe that the earth is only a stockpile or a set of commodities to be managed, bought, and
The forest is timber; the river, a power source. Even people have become resources, human
resources, personnel to be managed, or populations to be controlled. This managerial, technological mode of
sold.
revealing, Heidegger says, is embedded in and constitutive of Western culture and has been gathering strength for centuries. Now it is well on its way to
extinguishing all other modes of revealing, all other ways of being human and being earth. It will take tremendous effort to think through this danger, to
think past it and beyond, tremendous courage and resolve to allow thought of the mystery to come forth; thought of the inevitability, along with
revealing, of concealment, of loss, of ignorance; thought of the occurring of things and their passage as events not ultimately under human control. And
of course even the call to allow this thinking — couched as it so often must be in a grammatical imperative appealing to an agent — is
itself a paradox, the first that must be faced and allowed to speak to us and to shatter us as it scatters thinking
in new directions, directions of which we have not yet dreamed, directions of which we may never dream. And
shattered we may be, for our self-understanding is at stake; in fact, our very selves — selves engineered by the technologies of
power that shaped, that are, modernity — are at stake. Any thinking that threatens the notion of human being
as modernity has posited it — as rationally self- interested individual, as self-possessed bearer of rights and
obligations, as active mental and moral agent — is thinking that threatens our very being, the configurations of
subjective existence in our age. Those configurations of forces will resist this thinking. Their resistance will occur in many forms. However,
one of the most common ways that modern calculative selfhood will attempt to reinstate itself in the face of Heidegger’s paradoxical call to think the
earth is by employing a strategy that has worked so well so many times before: it will feel guilty. Those of us who are white know this strategy very well.
Confronted with our racism, we respond not by working to dismantle the structures that perpetuate racism but rather by feeling guilty. Our energy goes
into self-rebuke, and the problems pointed out to us become so painful for us to contemplate that we keep our distance from them. Through guilt we
paralyze ourselves. Thus guilt is a marvelous strategy for maintaining the white racist self. Those of us who are women have sometimes watched this
strategy employed by the caring, liberal-minded men in our lives. When we have exposed sexism, pressed our criticisms and our claims, we have seen
such men — the ‘good’ men, by far the most responsive men — deflate, apologize, and ask us to forgive. But seldom have we seen honest attempts at
change. Instead we have seen guilt deployed as a cry for mercy or pity on the status quo; and when pity is not forthcoming we have seen guilt turn to
rage, and we have heard men ask, “Why are you punishing us?” The primary issue then becomes the need to attend to the feelings of those criticized
rather than to their oppressive institutions and behaviors. Guilt thus protects the guilty. Guilt is a facet of power; it is not a reordering of power or a
signal of oppression’s end. Guilt is one of the modern managerial self’s maneuvers of self-defense. Of course guilt does not feel that way. It feels like
something unchosen, something we undergo. It feels much more like self-abuse than self-defense. But we are shaped, informed, produced in our very
selves by the same forces of history that have created calculative, technological revealing. Inevitably, whenever we are confronted with the
unacceptability of what is foundational for our lives, those foundations exert force to protect themselves. The exertion, which occurs as and in the midst
of very real pain, is not a conscious choice; but that does not lessen — in fact it strengthens — its power as a strategy of self-defense. Calculative,
technological thinking struggles to defend and maintain itself through us and as us. Some men feel guilty about sexism; many white people feel guilty
about racism; most of us feel guilty about all sorts of habits and idiosyncracies that we tell ourselves we firmly believe should be changed. For many of us
guilt is a constant constraint upon our lives, a seemingly permanent state. As a result, guilt is familiar, and, though somewhat uncomfortable at times, it
comes to feel almost safe. It is no surprise, then, that whenever caring people think hard about how to live with/in/on the earth, we find ourselves
growing anxious and, usually, feeling guilty about the way we conduct ourselves in relation to the natural world. Guilt is a standard defense against the
call for change as it takes root within us. But, if we are to think with Heidegger, if we are to heed his call to reflect, we must not respond to it simply by
deploring our decadent life-styles and indulging ourselves in a fit of remorse. Heidegger’s call is not a moral condemnation, nor is it a call to take up
some politically correct position or some privileged ethical stance. When we respond to Heidegger’s call as if it were a moral
condemnation, we reinstate a discourse in which active agency and its projects and responsibilities take
precedence over any other way of being with the earth. In other words, we insist on remaining within the discourses, the power
configurations, of the modern managerial self. Guilt is a concept whose heritage and meaning occur within the ethical tradition of the Western world. But
the history of ethical theory in the West (and it could be argued that ethical theory only occurs in the West) is one with the history of technological
thought. The revelation of things as to-be-managed and the imperative to be in control work themselves out in the history of ethics just as surely as they
work themselves out in the history of the natural and human sciences. It is probably quite true that in many different cultures, times, and places human
beings have asked the question: How shall I best live my life? But in the West, and in relatively modern times, we have reformulated that question so as
to ask: How shall I conduct myself? How shall I behave? How shall I manage my actions, my relationships, my desires? And how shall I make sure my
neighbors do the same? Alongside technologies of the earth have grown up technologies of the soul, theories of human behavioral control of which
current ethical theories are a significant subset. Ethics in the modern world at least very frequently functions as just another
field of scientific study yielding just another set of engineering goals. Therefore, when we react to problems like
ecological crises by retreating into the familiar discomfort of our Western sense of guilt, we are not placing
ourselves in opposition to technological thinking and its ugly consequences. On the contrary, we are simply
reasserting our technological dream of perfect managerial control. How so? Our guilt professes our enduring
faith in the managerial dream by insisting that problems — problems like oil spills, acid rain, groundwater
pollution, the extinction of whales, the destruction of the ozone, the rain forests, the wetlands — lie simply in
mismanagement or in a failure to manage (to manage ourselves in this case) and by reaffirming to ourselves
that if we had used our power to manage our behavior better in the first place we could have avoided this mess .
[khirn]
pg. 73
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 74
In other words, when we respond to Heidegger’s call by indulging in feelings of guilt about how we have been treating the object earth, we are really just
telling ourselves how truly powerful we, as agents, are. We are telling ourselves that we really could have done differently; we had the power to make
things work, if only we had stuck closer to the principles of good management. And in so saying we are in yet a new and more stubborn way refusing to
hear the real message, the message that human beings are not, never have been, and never can be in complete control, that the dream of that sort of
managerial omnipotence is itself the very danger of which Heidegger warns. Thus guilt — as affirmation of human agential power over against passive
matter — is just another way of covering over the mystery. Thus guilt is just another way of refusing to face the fact that we human beings are finite and
that we must begin to live with the earth instead of trying to maintain total control. Guilt is part and parcel of a managerial approach to the world.
Thinking along Heidegger’s paths means resisting the power of guilt, resisting the desire to close ourselves off
from the possibility of being with our own finitude. It means finding “the courage to make the truth of our own
presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question.” It
means holding ourselves resolutely open for the shattering power of the event of thinking, even if what is
shattered eventually is ourselves.
[khirn]
pg. 74
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 75
at: alt destroys all tech
The alternative ethically interrogates everyday assumptions – this is crucial to avoid total
enframement and eternal human enslavement, but it doesn’t preclude technology which means
the alt can solve the aff
Morris, 2013 - Visiting Faculty Member in Philosophy at Bennington College (Theresa, Hans Jonas’s Ethic of
Responsibility: From Ontology to Ecology, Project Muse)
Technology itself is not a danger; it is the way in which we act in response to the scientific way of
revealing the world. Thus for Heidegger, as for Jonas and Arendt, the greatest danger we face arises from the
lack of thought, reflection, and deliberation about technology and the effect our practices have, as a result of
this thoughtlessness, on humans and nature. Yet neither is technology neutral because “the rule of enframing
threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and
hence to experience a more primal truth” (ibid., 333). In other words, the way nature reveals itself to us
through physics directs us to certain attitudes toward it. When science reveals nature as enframed as resources
for our use, as “calculable and instrumental,” then we are destined to interact with it as something to be shaped
by technology, and this slanting of our intentional horizon toward utility is not a neutral property of
technology.19
Another danger Heidegger sees is in the effect of this thinking on human beings, and this is something Jonas
shares with him as well. With modern technology nature is revealed as standing reserve ready-to-hand for our
use, but so is the human being. Humans become resources as human beings are caught up in the
industry of extraction and produc- tion (Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 323). Jonas
observes, “[M]an is involved in all the other objects of technology, as these singly and jointly remake the
worldly frame of his life, in both the narrower and wider of its sense: that of the artificial frame of civilization in
which social man leads his life proximately, and that of the natural terrestrial environment in which this
artifact is embedded and on which it ultimately depends” (“Toward a Philosophy of Technology,” 41). For
Jonas, the worry is that human freedom is endangered as technologies that can engineer and enhance human
beings develop and creep into accepted use.20 Predetermined human beings, learning of their engineered
origin, will regard themselves as not free. For Heidegger, the danger is also a threat to human freedom,
but freedom here is the freedom to perceive what is true through an openness to what is revealed to human
questioning and thinking (Heidegger, ibid., 330). With enframing there is a narrowing of what is revealed, and
“so long as we represent technol- ogy as an instrument, we remain transfixed in the will to master it,” a
mastery that is an illusion (ibid., 336). Thus, enframing that comes with scientific thought and its
technologies lures us into a closed understand- ing and fosters illusion. As well, it threatens the “highest
dignity” of the essence of the human being. Heidegger says,
This dignity lies in keeping watch over the unconcealment— and with it, from the first, the concealment—of all
essential unfolding on this earth. It is precisely in enframing, which threatens to sweep man away into ordering
as the ostensibly sole way of revealing, and so thrusts man into the danger of the surrender of his free essence—
it is precisely in this extreme danger that the innermost indestructible belonging- ness of man within granting
may come to light, provided that we, for our part, begin to pay heed to the essence of technology. (Ibid., 337)
How are we to approach these dangers? According to Heidegger, we must turn to poiesis to “foster the growth
of the saving power” and “awaken and renew our vision of, and trust in, that which grants” (ibid., 340). For
Jonas, however, a turn to poetic vision is not sufficient as a way to address the dangers we face with the
advance of modern technologies.
What is needed is a deeply ethical questioning and challenging of the drive toward seeing and using nature
as a resource for the increase of human power and the satisfaction of human will. Thus, while Heidegger opens
the question of technology and its dangers, it remains for his stu- dent Jonas to develop an ethical argument for
a thoughtful relation to technology in practical and political action. Perhaps neither poetry nor gods can save
us, but we may be able to awaken to the responsibility we have for the Earth, and we may become inspired to
care enough to take that responsibility. Through questioning the unthought underlying assumptions pervading
our everyday relation to technology; the myths of progress, efficiency, and innovation as goods in themselves,
[khirn]
pg. 75
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 76
Jonas opens the way toward the thinking that is needed if we are to accept responsibil- ity for the effects of our
technological actions on the Earth and its beings.
The alternative does not preclude technological development—we must reorient ourselves
against the way we view nature as something to be exploited and our perception that technology
is the solution to all problems caused by technology—only then will we be able to solve for the
affirmative’s environmental impacts
Sabatino 7— was a professor at Daeman College, Amherst, PhD in Religious Studies from the
University of Chicago (Charles J., Trivium Publications, Amherst, NY, Daeman College, 2007, “A
Heideggerian Reflection on the Prospects of Technology,” p 72-74, http://www.janushead.org/101/sabatino.pdf)//
Heidegger says there is hope for the world if and as the danger is perceived precisely as the danger. Somehow,
the all-encompassing man- ner in which everything is now open and accessible, that there may be no limits to
what we can do, and that all lies vulnerable might suddenly act as a lightning strike to shake us out of the
slumbers of the everyday business. It might dawn on us that everything, including world itself is at risk; and
thus we ourselves are at risk. Then we might understand that we ourselves are the danger. 9 The point of
seeing the danger is not that we then retreat from the enterprise of technology. Quite to the
contrary, the danger haunting the technological era is that there is no retreat. However, it is precisely this
realization that can turn our heads around and bring us to go forward in a manner Heidegger refers to as
releasement. Releasement represents a form of letting go, but not in the sense of surrendering to the inevitable,
or dismantling it; or merely leaving things alone.10 Releasement is similar to the Buddhist notion of
detachment. To detach (de-tache: unstake, let loose from being tied down) is to set something free.
Detachment does not leave things alone, for so long as we dwell within the world and its network of
relatedness, there is nothing alone. However, it represents a way of relating and thus a way of handling things
that no longer clings, possesses, holds on, and claims as one’s own. To detach and release represents a reversal
that learns to let things be what they are. It does so by handling what is in a way that respects that though
everything is available and accessible, though it is all laid forth before us, nevertheless, it is not ours to possess
and do with as we will simply because we can. Things are what they are and not simply what we
demand them to be. This is no small matter in a world where everything has become a resource to fuel the
machinery that produces what we want, where nothing is respected except for what it can be taken up and used
for, where there is little meaning or value to anything except as material, energy, even information that can be
mobilized and put to work to suit our purposes. Even people, in so many instances, are caught up and swept up
into the routines of usefulness, only to be marginalized with no place to belong when no longer useful.
Heidegger did not spell out with any clarity the specific kinds of technology an attitude of releasement would
have us develop or how we would use it differently. Nevertheless, it would have to be consistent with our
belonging within the world; and so we could speculate that we would proceed in a way that works with, not
against nature, works with and not against one another, works with and not against the interdependencies that
find us all connected and thus vulnerable within a shared world. Releasement need not abandon what is
possible with the genome, the stem cell; but it would have us approach such areas of research with a hand that
remains open: not in the manner of taking, but as receiving and thus grateful before all that is granted and all
that becomes possible. It would proceed as the steadied and care-ful hands of the micro-biologist who is
astounded, thus humbled, by the world that opens before him [or her]. It would proceed, seeking to bring hope
where there is suffering and pain, yet thankful for the miracle of those healing energies of life itself that make it
all possible. It would proceed with the diligence and care of the parent, proud yet humbled, frightened yet
ready to care. The difference would play a basic role not only in the kinds of technol- ogy we develop, but also
in the purposes to which we put that technology. Do we see ourselves at the center of a world that is
increasingly at our disposal, in which nothing else matters but what we will to do, becoming ever more
powerful and able to extend what we can control, what we can produce and consume without limits, as though
entitled to do so? Do we continue to develop and use technology to enhance the advantage of some regardless
of the expense to others? Do we proceed with technology blindly believing that every problem can be fixed with
technology itself? Or, do we see ourselves as uniquely destined to a level of responsibility and care toward one
another and the earth that is frightening precisely in the power that has been given over to us? And therefore,
[khirn]
pg. 76
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 77
do we see ourselves as needing to consider how what we do with technology impacts one another as well as the
earth that births and sustains us as all belonging together within the shared gift of world? It is not easy to
imagine what could be different should we heed such reflections. Everything seems so locked into the world as
it is. And yet, perhaps Heidegger is correct when he says that precisely there, where such dangers lurk, hope
can arise. It would be not just overly simplistic, but also mistaken, simply to identify this hope with nostalgia
for some former or pristine manner of living closer to nature. Such is not likely to be; and likely never was what
nostalgia imagines, at least for most upon the earth. Instead, the possibilities for hope must arise precisely
from within the technological society, even as it becomes global in scope, from those willing to question what is
becoming of our world and what is becoming of ourselves. There is evidence of such questioning. For example,
even as our medical technologies become increasingingly capable of controling life and death processes, we
hear questions raised concerning the kind of care that is generally available, or perhaps not available, especially
in the end stages of life where we apparently view death mostly as failure and defeat. Learning to accept the
living—dying process as an essential aspect of our lives is certainly humbling; but it offers a good example of
acknowledging limits to how much we can control and manuplate, how much we can use technology to distance
ourselves from who we are as human (humus: of the earth, thus mortal). Along the same lines, with regard
to energy policies and uses, we can find hope from those who note the destructive nature of our
lifestyles; those who recognize the impact of global warming, depleted resources, waste, etc; those who warn
us of the unsustainability of it all. Even as the problems brought with technology are becoming global in nature,
we are being asked more than ever to attend to what we are doing to the environment, and therefore to one
another. We hear calls for greater reli- ance on renewable resources that find us accepting the natural limits
within which we live rather than become dependent on other technologies such as nuclear, that demand
control for thousands of years, increasing risk factors at many levels. Further, with respect to genomic and
stem cell research, there is the differentiation being made between techniques that are therapeutic, and thus
consistent with the healing energies that sustain life versus those that are strictly reproductive and serve mostly
what we see as a right and prerogative to do what we will.
[khirn]
pg. 77
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 78
at: new tech good/different
Not redeemable
Hamilton, 2013 - Professor of Public Ethics at CAPPE and holds the Vice-Chancellor's Chair at Charles Sturt
University (Clive, “What Would Heidegger Say About Geoengineering?” 9/11/2013,
http://clivehamilton.com/what-would-heidegger-say-about-geoengineering/ )
IV. Models and systems thinking Some
authors have attempted to ‘update’ Heidegger’s analysis by arguing that
technology has changed in some fundamental way since his death in the 1970s.38 The results have been
unconvincing because they slip back into thinking about technology as an instrument for affecting human
welfare. They forget Heidegger’s injunction: ‘All that is merely technical never arrives at the essence of technology.’39 Yet
if information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology and so on do not represent anything fundamental,
more recent developments in the conception of the world-as-picture do call for further thinking about the
evolution of Enframing. Today we would call Heidegger’s fixed ground plan a model. All models, which may take a form more or less
mathematical, simplify ‘reality’, with the simplification justified by the usefulness of the model. But what is overlooked is the way in which ‘reality’ is
pictured before it is modeled. Selection of those aspects of reality to be captured in a model presupposes a type of world that can be so captured. While
scientists make judgments about which models are more or less useful (for understanding ‘reality’) they cannot stand outside the mode of representation.
A model is a picture, a mental image of 15 an otherwise impenetrable complexity that comes into clearer view as a set of well- defined relationships. This
is not the world as it is but a representation formed by humans. It defines what is, not in the sense that it emphasises some relations and ignores others,
but in the act of representing in picture-model form. From that point on, any anomaly is understood as a failure in the picture itself and not in the failure
of picturing. This applies with equal force to models of the Earth’s climate and the Earth-as-system thinking that grounds geoengineering. The Earth
itself is first represented as a system of physical components, at the broadest level comprising the atmosphere, the biosphere, the hydrosphere, the
cryosphere (the frozen parts of the Earth), and the lithosphere (the Earth’s crust). These components are linked and set in motion by various processes,
such as the water cycle that takes moisture from oceans to the atmosphere to land and back again, and the carbon cycle that describes the circulation of
carbon through the various components of the system. Before the model can be constructed the Earth must first be conceived as a system, after which
‘anomalies’ can be made to conform to the system being modeled.40 This systematization must itself presuppose that what is available for study consists
of objects governed in their relation to other objects in ways definable by mathematical rules. This does not mean that climate models are ‘wrong’; on the
contrary, they are all-too- revealing. But if one can step outside of technological understanding, they reveal more than the
functioning of the technological world they set out to study; they reveal the limits to that understanding, and
the partiality of picture-thinking, which is to say, technological thinking. 16 So model-thinking systematizes nature, and the
system defines the legitimate object of study. The system’s boundaries can be expanded, and the elements within elaborated, but in doing so every event
is made subject to the process of model-building. The essence of a system is representation, definability and calculability,
and these features impose constraints on being itself. Heidegger referred to this totalising process, an
encompassing quantitativeness, as the ‘gigantic’, and it is the ‘quality’ of the gigantic that gives the modern
epoch its greatness,41 although the incalculable remains an ‘invisible shadow’ cast around all things.42 Through the picture character of the
world ‘whatever is comes to a stand as object and in that way alone receives the seal of Being’.43 All of this flows out of Descartes’ original positing of the
modern subject; man as subject becomes the ‘relational center of that which is as such.’44 Climate models are developed out of the
emerging discipline of Earth system science, which draws together various fields of scientific study within a conception of the Earth as a
total system (comprised of the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere). ‘Earth system science’, runs a typical definition,
‘embraces chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics and applied sciences in transcending disciplinary boundaries to treat the Earth as an integrated
system …’.45
[khirn]
pg. 78
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 79
at: nihilism
The affirmative embraces nihilism by forgetting being—the alternative is the only way to
overcome this
Beistegui, 98— Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick (Miguel de Beistegui, 1998,
London and New York, “Heidegger and the Political (Dystopias),” pg 66)
*This evidence has been gender modified
In a way, as far as the question of nihilism goes, Heidegger will not say anything more that what is expressed in this passage from Introduction to
Metaphysics. Yet it will take him some twenty years to unpack and fully thematize his brief opening statements. From the start, "nihilism" appears
as a notion with multiple entries and almost contradictory meanings, which Heidegger will nonetheless try to hold together.
Three such meanings are here emphasized. First, in the mouth of those who are absorbed in the thickness of beings to the point of philosophical
blindness (and, no doubt, this blindness includes most of what is presented as "philosophy"), "nihilism" serves to designate that which
impedes their gesticulating busyness and upsets the secured world of their values, that which, in other words,
leads "nowhere" (that is, leads to no secured ground or absolute certainties). From the perspective of such men, the question
concerning being is the empty, pointless and nihilistic problem par excellence. The word "nihilism" is here worth a condemnation, and presupposes
values on the basis of which something can be dismissed as nihilistic. Yet true nihilism consists precisely in acting and thinking
in
the way of such men humans, that is, as if being were nothing - or rather, since being is indeed no-thing (no particular being), to act as if it is
not (as if it did not rule or unfold),4 and thus as if its questioning made no difference (when difference as such always dwells within its reign). In that
respect, true nihilism is nothing but the forgetfulness of being. Third, there is also of course Nietzsche's concept of
nihilism, which Heidegger only alludes to here, insisting that it can only be understood on the basis of the truer sense of nihilism. In addition to all three
senses sketched out in this passage, Heidegger raises the difficult question concerning the overcoming of nihilism by
suggesting that a "first and fruitful step" toward such overcoming lies precisely in thinking being with the
nothing. This concern regarding the possibility of an overcoming of nihilism will remain at the very heart of
Heidegger's thought well into the 1950s, without ever reaching the point of an unequivocal opinion.
[khirn]
pg. 79
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 80
at: permutation
The permutation can’t solve --- questioning must come prior to engagement with technology
and occur for its own sake, not to justify a technocratic plan --- ensures an endless spiral of
technological control which devastates the alternative
Pistone 10 --- Faculty, Writing Program, Rutgers University (Renee, “A Critical Examination of Heidegger’s Thoughts:
Technology Places Humanity in Shackles Hindering Our Natural Thinking Process and Our Connection to Being”,
http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/cis/article/view/5182/4782)
3.2 World: How We Experience Technology Heidegger does provide an explanation for what he means by world (Feenberg, 2005). Basically, world
is
not meant to denote every living thing, seen and unseen, as most people tend to think of it. Heidegger discusses the
concept of world in terms of a “meaningful structure of experience” and this experience leads to a platform
whereby Being can be known (Fennberg, 2005). Hence, when we question things, seeking truth and knowledge for
its own sake, we move closer to Being. We move closer to the point whereby Being reveals itself to us. This is an important point for
Heidegger who is chiefly concerned with thoughtful questions and not just simple questions in order to find an answer. For this reason, Heidegger
teaches us how to think and to properly study a given topic. Heidegger describes Being as something beyond the most trivial
descriptions, “in so far as Being constitutes what is asked about, and Being means the Being of entities, then entities themselves turn out to be what is
interrogated (Heidegger, 1962). We begin to understand that these entities exist and have some special relation to Being. For Heidegger, Being can
take the form of a series of questions, as we ascertain the meaning of Being. Technology relates to Being in that
it reveals facts about our modern technological age. We can determine the meaning of entities, especially
technological entities, by questioning which entities are useful to us. 3.3 Implications for the Atomic Age In
Discourse on Thinking: The Memorial Address featured in Part I describes some of the implications for the Atomic Age (Heidegger, 1966). Consider the
answers that he gives regarding how this technology came about. This is due to a revolution in leading concepts which has been going on for the past
several centuries, and by which man is placed in a different world. This radical revolution in outlook has come about in modern
philosophy. From this arises a completely new relation of man to the world and his place in it. The world now appears
as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks that nothing is believed able any longer to resist. Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline
station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. This relation of man to the world as such, in principle a technical one, developed in the
seventeenth century first and only in Europe...the power concealed in modern technology determines the relation of man to that which exists. It rules
the whole earth (Heidegger, 1966). 4. Formulating a Theoretical Model for the Intersection between World and Technology Here, we see another
example of the philosopher’s view, as there seems to be a circumvention of humanity’s chance to understand Being in the
world. Technology is a mixed blessing, since we need it to fuel our lifestyle, but it often places an intolerable burden on Nature. Moreover,
technology may lead us, not to ask the right questions, and to rush into conclusions, valuing the conclusions reached
above the questions posed. This is a weakness, in any methodology, whether it be a scientific or a philosophical
study. It is a form of technological thinking which has limited consequences and Heidegger calls this Enframing which leads to erosion of resources
and the elaborate compilation of things imaginable in our consciousness (Heidegger, 1977). We have to continue to keep questioning and investigating
because, as humans, we are Dasein, the actual facilitators for the self-revelation of Being in our world (Rojcewicz, 2006). For Heidegger, the essence of
technology can distort truth and lessen our freedom to live as Dasein, as noted in the following: the question concerning the essence of freedom is the
fundamental problem of philosophy, even if the leading question thereof consists of Being (Heidegger, 2002). We properly function as Dasein, when as
we are seeking the revelation of Being. When we act as Dasein, we recognize and we seek the revelation of Being, in accordance with the perceptions from
our body. Our body and senses, more specifically, allow for us to gain knowledge, and to understand what these perceptions mean. This is a rather
complicated process as we take these actions in order to seek out the revelation of Being. 5. Implications Interestingly, the idea that Nature, a precious
thing, becomes a gas station is surely relevant today, due to our quest for greater consumption of energy. In fact, the possibility certainly does exist that
the future consists of Nature versus technology. This notion or theory does not seem to be supported by Heidegger’s ideas. We do know that the natural
world suffers and our relationship to Nature is corrupt and exploitative. There used to be little to no reflection, at all, about what humans were doing to
these natural environments and more importantly, how this strains our dignity to be Dasein. Hence, our natural thinking processes are eroding and our
natural world is also degrading. This occurs largely, in part, because technology tends to facilitate technological thinking (that seeks to advance
technology-artificial processes). It seems that the primary purpose of the advancement of technology is not to protect the environment. Also,
pursuing an advancement in technology may not really lead to the revelation of Being since it helps machines
gain greater control. We decide that we need more technology and more inventions (that do complicated thinking,
such as mathematical computations for us). Therefore, technology breeds more technology and our thirst for different varieties, in order to make our
lives more convenient leads us to think less, about our lives in relation to Being. Heidegger articulates the following: Only to the extent that man for his
part is already Challenged to exploit the energies of nature can this revealing that orders happen…yet, precisely because man is challenged more
originally than are the energies of nature, i.e., into the process of ordering, he never is transformed into mere standing-reserve. Since man drives
technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing (Heidegger, 1977). Here, he explains to the readers about
what drives humanity, as we attempt to order our world. He is not saying that we are in complete control over our world. It is not entirely clear
whether or not technology gives us more or less control over this ordering process.
[khirn]
pg. 80
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 81
other k links
[khirn]
pg. 81
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 82
link – anthro
The cyborg image is anthropocentric – the way it is framed always brings the HUMAN
in relation to technology and transcendence, the metaphor is incapable of overcoming
or interrogating a relation to nature and the non-human
Lulka 2k9 (David “The residual humanism of hybridity: retaining a sense of the earth” Trans Inst Br Geogr
NS 34 378–393)
To begin this analysis, I assert, given current parlance, what appears to be a contradiction: that ‘hybridity’, as it is known and practised in the geographic
discipline, is humanist at its core. This seems counterintuitive for the notion of hybridity is predicated upon the mixing, exchange or inherent
inseparability of different domains. Yet, far from thinking that the concept has been fully dissected and adequately explained, I contend the concept is in
further need of dissection and redistribution. This is admittedly an odd statement – to dissect (the ultimate act of separation) for the goal of expanding
the scope of hybridity. Nonetheless, this conclusion can be drawn by teasing out the origins of the hybrid approach within social scientific writings.
Alternately, this finding can be based upon the distinct use of hybridity in the social sciences as compared with the biological sciences. Indeed, I suggest
that ‘hybridity’ in the social sciences has stopped short, failing to fully account for the agencies that exist in the world, the agencies, ironically, that such
research attempts to explicate. Hybridity, as it is propounded, is a zone of licentiousness, but it has not been taken far
enough. It should not be characterised as a zone or liminal region of interaction between humans and
nonhumans, even one that is wave-like in formation, but rather as a spatially pervasive phenomenon. As such, I
want to reformulate hybridity in order to adequately acknowledge the wide scope of agency on earth. For
those of us who study nonhuman animals, the current register proves hardly satisfactory. The origins of a
hybrid approach precede the widespread use of the term in the social sciences. Like most good ideas, the notion
emerged before it was fully codified in thought. For explanatory reasons, I will begin by considering Haraway’s
(1985) cyborg, though it was by no means the original explication of material ⁄ cognitive heterogeneity. Indeed,
Franklin (2006) sees the embryonic presence of the cyborg in one of Haraway’s earlier texts written in the mid1970s. Despite its fantastic character, Haraway’s cyborg was unmistakably human. This is not to say that the
cyborg looked human, for the details of its articulation were left unspecified, left appropriately to the
imagination of the reader and the unpredictable trajectory of future developments. The cyborg is
fundamentally impure, comprised of assorted bits of uncommon ancestry. The cyborg is permeated by
prostheses that will look inhuman to any contemporary eye. To the degree that the cyborg is perceived as a
form of empowerment, technics and normative ethics are linked together in a functional manner that enables
capabilities. Yet to say that these attributes and capacities are fully incorporated into the body ⁄ psyche of the
cyborg seems incorrect, for the cyborg appears alien (probably even unto itself). It is clumsy, at least in its
conformation, having emanated from different affordances. Be this as it may, these incongruities (which may
be of benefit to the cyborg that possesses them) are not the problem here. Rather, the greater difficulty, one
which I believe is ultimately debilitating for its ability to contend with environmental issues, is that the cyborg
could not be mistaken for any other animal. For such reasons, I believe, Halliwell and Mousley (2003) have
classified Haraway’s work as ‘technological humanism’. It is human, all too human. Thus, Kull states,
somewhat paradoxically, that ‘Haraway is looking for a figure of humanity outside the narratives of humanism’
(2002, 285). This in part relates to the feminist agenda behind the cyborg, which cannot be understood
properly without reference to human historical developments. The non-essential character of the cyborg was
partly in response to the oppressions and inequalities emerging from historical categorical formations. From
these inessential properties, several issues emerge. A language of ‘monsters’ has developed that speaks of these
impurities, although often with a more negative connotation (Davies 2003; Graham 2004). Haraway is generally more positive in
this regard, and while she is aware of the potential pitfalls, it is far from clear as to whether such mindfulness is perpetuated in subsequent theorising. As
Field notes: I agree with Haraway that we cannot simply ignore the extent to which our embodiment is technologised in modern Western societies.
However, I remain sceptical about the consequences of formulating this into a new ‘cyborg feminism’. I suspect that in the current climate of
technological fervour it may be just a little too easy to drop the self-reflexivity that Haraway intends to accompany such a formulation. (2000, 46) In this
regard, liberating impurities may simply be channelled into pre-existing hierarchies. I am driven to note here that ‘hybrid’ shares the
same etymological root with ‘hubris’ (Shipley 1984, 423), both terms suggesting a certain profligacy that
intimates excessiveness, transgression and impropriety. What is critical to the present discussion, however, is
that humanity, whatever that may be, is ever-present in the midst of these developments. Can it be that rather
than diluting the prominence of humanity through the articulation of impurities, the cyborg simply distributes
humanity further abroad much like technology (and the societies that ‘possess’ it) has had a penchant to do? In
this sense, a cyborgian philosophy is humanist, albeit bastardised in a sense.
[khirn]
pg. 82
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 83
Putting cyborgs in relation to the nonhuman is better
Lulka 2k9 (David “The residual humanism of hybridity: retaining a sense of the earth” Trans Inst Br Geogr
NS 34 378–393)
I do not want to delve into technophobia here, however, as this has been done and it does not strike at the heart of the present argument. More
relevantly, though, this argumentation about cyborgs can be oriented in another direction, regressively, one might say, toward the technology of the past.
Inglis and Bone have reasonably questioned when the cyborg might have emerged, stating that: Moreover, we might ask: where do we define the
historical and epistemological points where more banal forms of human tool-use and environmental manipulation turn into the status of the fully
fledged cyborg – is it with the weapon-wielding early human, the medieval scribe, the modern typist or the contemporary computer geek? In the same
vein, but this time in terms of descriptions of genetically-modified animals – such as Haraway’s (1997) favoured figure of the geneticallymodified
‘OncoMouse’ which she understands as a particular sort of cyborg figure – the sceptic might plausibly ask as to the extent to which these represent
fundamental departures from ‘traditional’ practices to do with the selective breeding of livestock. (2006, 278–9) I, too, would like to take the
cyborg backward, but not towards humanity, but to the banal and traditional practices of nonhumans. This
glance is not intended to regain nature per se. Rather, I want to ask in what sense, in their relations with other
objects, other bodies, are nonhumans cyborgian (and thus hybrid) in their own right? I will return to this critical question later in the
paper, but for now it is sufficient to note that the indefinite origin of the cyborg leaves this matter seriously in question. To be fair, though Haraway has
studied relations between humans and other animals (1989 1997 2003 2008), the image of the cyborg was not developed for such purposes. It developed
more concisely out of a feminist agenda, one that had serious concerns of its own to address (see Gane’s (2006) interview with Haraway). Nonetheless,
this state of affairs cannot be used as an excuse either, for its limitations are significant even if it has been
dragged into a whole host of other affairs against its will. Geographers are not obligated to uphold its integrity
when it has been thrown into spaces where it does not belong. The cyborg, for all of its hybridity, cannot
address the issue of nature – in the more pervasive manifestations of that word that intimate other species
and other inorganics. It does not speak of natures other than the inessential nature of the human and its
prostheses. Nonetheless, despite these limits, the underlying philosophy of the cyborg has been incorporated into discussions of nature and animal
others, if not directly, then indirectly, by those who have been partially inspired by Haraway’s writing of this creature.
[khirn]
pg. 83
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 84
link – capitalism/neolib
Cyberfeminism coincides with the capitalist regime to commodify and fetishize gender
Reyes 2014 (Raniel S.M. Reyes, Department of Philosophy U of Santo Tomas, Cybersex, Bodies, and,
Domination: An imminent critique of Cyber-Technology and the Possibility of Emancipation,
Filocracia Volume: 1 Issue: 2, August 2014 pages 34-35, Yung Jung)
Contemporary man should not be oblivious on the confounding irregularities revolving around cybersex phenomenon. The
cyber transcendence
and gratification concocted in the web are not blameless in inducing detrimental issues akin to person’s bodyself and gender relations, as well as, inter-personal communication. In a virtual encounter, the mere focus is on the eroticgenital attribute of the person―a fragmented way of dealing with human sexuality. Users’ transactions are premised not on the
holistic dialogue with the individual, but on a specific object in mind―the breast, penis, or vagina of the partner. It
is analogous to casual relations mediated by technology. A serious ethical concern should not be overlooked here. The
fragmentation engendered by the cybersex encounter devalues the person, since his/her sexuality is solely
reduced to utter eroticism. Integrative values constituting the whole individual, such as his genealogy and feelings, are neglected, thereby,
conditioning personhood debasement. By reducing the individual to mere symbolic eroticism, he/she is degraded and
objectified into a profitable item of commodity. From perceiving existence as a totality, cybersex averts our
attention to merely perceive reproductive organs as a narcissistic sexual apparatus. The person’s sexuality is
commodified and is manipulated by the capitalist industry for the purpose of production, fetishization and
domination.14 The extensively vile sexual preoccupations in the cyberspace really demean the unified reality of the individual as constitutive
and basis of higher values.15 It perniciously violates the material integrity of the human body and critically assails the
philosophical anthropology conception that the person is an embodied subjectivity. In the advanced capitalist
society, modifications in consumption and production have commodified the old social patterns of human
interaction into a thing-like relation. Upon the advent of cyber-technology and capitalism’s parasitic infiltration into its fluid corpus, modes
of conformity and dominion fortify and the individual becomes increasingly assimilated within the rationally-administered system. Advanced
capitalism has successfully commodified cultural values in a systemically subtle way. This is made possible by
the collaboration of capitalism, mass media and technology. According to the critical theorist Theodor Adorno, “the culture
industry generates a world of false specificity in which the advertised uniqueness of the individual product―the distinctive individual voice of a new poet,
the inimitable style of a star conductor, of the sheer personality of a chat-show host―needs to be foregrounded by the relentless sameness of a whole
range of the product’s other qualities, from diction to typeface.”16
The aff props up a cybereconomy that creates narratives of treating each other as commodity
Reyes 2014 (Raniel S.M. Reyes, Department of Philosophy U of Santo Tomas, Cybersex, Bodies, and,
Domination: An imminent critique of Cyber-Technology and the Possibility of Emancipation,
Filocracia Volume: 1 Issue: 2, August 2014 pages 34-35, Yung Jung)
In the Marxist tradition, fetishization
is viewed as a kind of ideological false consciousness that conceals capitalist
domination. Fetishism of commodities hence “replaces the false conception of this ‘economy’ as a relation
between things by its true definition as a system of social relations.’17 In this context, fetishism for the genital organ of your
partner translates into fetishism for commodities. In the macro-level, this forms part of the larger structural scheme of the whole
capitalist system that concomitantly serves as its blood-line. The real object of consumption in the age of
advanced capitalist society for Adorno18 is the labor or product’s exchange-value, and not its use-value.
Cybersexual satisfaction is gauged against cost and that homo sexualis has become homo consumeris.19 The
new cyber-economy creates a narrative composing of actors treating each other as commodity and as objects of
desire. In this manner, the commodification of sexuality discards its value in the person’s totality. The aptitude of
innumerable pleasures without immeasurably thinking of the risks and responsibility involved engenders the moral economy’s demise on one hand, and
the strengthening of techno-capitalism, on the other. “Culture Industry,” advanced capitalism’s contemporary face, is the term used by Adorno to refer to
the wreckage of high culture to shallow spectacle and consumerism, as well as the corresponding manipulation of consumer preferences by advertising or
the market economy expectations. In his words: The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both, it
forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years. The seriousness of high art is destroyed in speculation about its
efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it as long as social
control was not yet total. Thus, although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards
which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not
king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.20 This novel machinery addles down its products and the possibility of a
meaningful response from its consumer-victims. Undeniably, its only aim is to foster a titillating fetishized end in the consumer’s part, rather than to
convey meaning. Its disseminated products promote passivity and regression embedded in pre-fabricated responses. The reified delight
propounded by the industry is seriously aberrant for instigating subtle yet brazen exploitation to the individual,
[khirn]
pg. 84
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 85
especially akin to his/her critical consciousness. For David Ingram, the culture industry is the site whereby the individual is invited to
experience, however, vicariously, the excitement, adventure, and glamour desired in everyday life.21 Nevertheless, engaging into cybersex or going to the
movie house, only let us realize what we do not have. To compound the pain further, the merchandise comes with a price that must be paid via longer
hours of labor.22
Cyberfeminism reinforces the capitalist system and furthers oppression of women of color in
the work force
Daniel 9’ [Jessie, Writer on race, sexism “Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment” Women's
Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1/2, Technologies (spring - Summer, 2009),
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27655141 .LM]
A central debate within cyberfeminism has to do with the tension between the political economy required to
mass produce the infrastructure of the Internet and its reliance on the exploited labor, on the one hand, and, on
the other, claims for the subversive potential of those same technologies. Easily the most influential figure in
cyberfeminism is Donna Haraway. Her conceptualization of the cyborg, part human and part machine (1985),
and the subversive potential of a cyborg future, are of particular interest to a number of scholars who come to
gender and technology through poststruc turalism and cyberpunk fiction (Balsamo 1996; Flanagan and Booth
2002; DeVoss 2000; Flanagan 2002; Sunden 2001;Wolmark 1999). In contrast to this promised future, critics
have pointed to the problematic construction of women of color working in technology manufacturing as
quintessential cyborgs (Flanagan and Booth 2002; 12).The low-skilled work in microchip production and
global call centers has not eased "the oppression of Third World women, . . . [it] has merely perpetuated their
oppression in a new workplace" (Flanagan and Booth 2002,13; see also Eisenstein 1998). Ra dhika Gajjala
raises the central question about the possibility of "subaltern cyberfeminism from below," given this economic
context: "If cyberspace is produced at the expense of millions of men and women all over the world who are not
even able to enjoy its conveniences, how can we make claims that [these technologies] are changing the world
for the better?" (2003, 49). This juxtaposition of subversive Internet technologies, on the one hand, and global
economic inequality, on the other, is one that few scholars writ ing about cyberculture acknowledge. Yet, in
rethinking cyberfeminism, it is crucial to examine both. In the following section, I take up the empirical
evidence about political economy, gender, and race.
Cyber-feminism reinforces capitalism
Suchman 6 [ Lucy, Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology
at Lancaster University, Social Studies of Science, “ Wajcan Confronts Cyber Feminism” Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr.,
2006), pp. 321-327
April 2006, http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdf/25474445.pdf?acceptTC=truem LM]
Wajcman names 'technofeminism' refers to efforts on the part of feminist scholars of science and technology to retool STS so as to bring issues absent from mainstream
accounts of technoscientific practice into focus. Chapter 1, 'Male Designs on Technology', reviews the past 20 years of feminist
scholarship, which has
aimed at restoring women's presence to technology histories. This includes accounts of the processes by which, in the late 19th century,
technology came to be equated with engineering, and engineering with (new forms) of masculinity. In this
process, Wajcman reminds us, the term 'technology' acquired its modern meaning, shifting from a broad and
heterogeneous range of 'useful arts' to the more narrowly gendered frame of'applied science'. Here Wajcman
also describes what she characterizes as an 'early second-wave' feminist empha sis on technology as neutral,
the defining issue being women's access to and inclusion in its production and use. Set against this liberal stance throughout the
late 1960s and early 1970s was the radical science movement's Marxist-inspired analysis of the class character of
science and its links to capitalist modes of production. This analysis in turn informed the 1970s 'science is social relations' stance of the women's
health movement, along with socialist and eco-feminist debates over the role of technologies - particularly reproductive technologies, and the impending
automation of domestic and service work in women's liberation or oppression. The writings of Oldenziel (1999), Cockburn (1983)
and Schwartz Cowan (1983) figure centrally here; for example, Cockburn's analyses of the relations between labour process struggles and gendered anxieties, specifi cally
about the 'feminization' of traditionally masculine-encoded trade skills, and Schwartz Cowan's analysis of the failures of 'labor-saving devices' in the home, which she traced
less to the devices than to the configuration of the private, nuclear family and its associated social relations and cultural imaginaries. Perhaps most significantly for the
developments that Wajcman names here technofeminism, the 1980s saw a shift from preoccupations with the question of women in science to what Sandra Harding called 'the
science question in feminism', and a more radical and thoroughgoing analysis of the gendering of technology (Harding, 1986).1 Against the background of this history,
Wajcman introduces the central project of the book: to develop understandings that advance theorizing and action in relation to technology, and to do so in ways informed by,
rather than simply positioned as superseding, previous feminist analyses. Her
aim is to retain the critical concerns of earlier debates, while
looking for new spaces of action and possibility; 'to offer a way between Utopian optimism and pessimistic fatalism for
technofeminism, and between cultural con tingency and social determinism in social theory' . While Wajcman ends her review
with what, on my reading, is a somewhat reductionist charge that Haraway 'veers between an over-deter mined view of
[khirn]
pg. 85
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 86
patriarchal capitalist reproduction and a fantasist vanguard ism based on a fixation with cutting-edge
technology' (
The 1AC ignores the power relations caused by neoliberalism – it’s the root cause of the
dichotomy
Eisenstein 98 - Professor of Politics at Ithaca College in New York and focuses on the rise of neoliberalism
(Zillah R., 1998, Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Lure of Cyberfantasy, pg. 93-95, Google
Books) /AMarb
Power relations structure the real/virtual divide. “Freedom comes out of the wire of a modem,”'”3 and
this freedom is not equally distributed. Yet, digital technology has the potential to undermine existing relations
of power. The flow of information cannot be contained. The internet creates new lines of com- munication and
challenges older constructions of private/pub- lic dialogue. This remains of great concern to governments
across the globe. Pakistan and iran limit net availability; china rejects “ab- solute freedom of information”;
many middle east nations con- trol political and religious discussion; vietnam and saudi arabia control internet
service through a single government-c0n- trolled gateway; exorbitant rates are charged for net use in india; and
the Clinton administration supported the Commu- nications Decency Act.‘°‘ In an ‘information’ society the
tension between equality and freedom can be seen with new clarity. The info society and its cybertech promise
of freedom embrace an individualism premised on privatization and consumerism. In contrast, equality—in
terms of economic class, sexual orientation, and gender and/or racial fairness—challenges hierarchical relations based on these schemata. Equality remains potentially subversive as a ‘really’ democratic discourse
demanding access to labor, information, and technology. Equality discourse chal- lenges the
media/corporate control of cybertechnology. Cyberdiscourse applauds the neoliberal commitment to
freedom: of the market, of the superhighway, of information routes themselves. But individual
freedom must reckon with the structured limitations of actualizing freedom. As I have said before, one may
have the freedom to receive electronic informa- tion, but one must have equality to do so: a computer, the
soft- ware, the training, and a telephone line. One may have the freedom to electronically communicate with
anyone across the globe, but one must first secure an e-mail address. The more public funds are cut—for
schools, libraries, and the computers for them—the less access exists for those with- out individual equipment.
Spending on local libraries fell to about $100 million in 1996, compared to several billion dollars for prison
construction.'°5 The problem is one of public access for individuals without private means. There is a harmful
cycle already in place. The less access, the less equality. The less the equality, the less access. This is why public
access to informa- tion and the skills needed for finding, understanding, and using it is so critical.'°6 Freedom,
however, remains a proposi- tion of self-sufficiency. Global telecommunications networks are not the
originators of the tension between individual freedom and access within the social/political/economic
structure. But new layers of tech- nological elitism have been created, along with new forms of obfuscation to
justify the inequality.
Capitalism creates a racialized patriarchy – turns the aff
Eisenstein 98 - Professor of Politics at Ithaca College in New York and focuses on the rise of neoliberalism
(Zillah R., 1998, Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Lure of Cyberfantasy, pg. 103, Google
Books) /AMarb
While high-tech goes global, economic class divisions- often expressed racially and sexually—are reconstituted
across and in geographical nations. Women and girls of color be- come/remain the poorest of the poor across
the globe. This racialized patriarchy is as universal as capitalism itself. Universal does not mean homogeneous
or singular.” Capital defines itself in plural forms through the racial and gender structuring of different
cultures. Families and nations are rene- gotiated in the process: capitalism, nationalism, and racialized
patriarchy displace and replace each other as public and pri- vate terrains are exploited by consumer
capitalism. Transnational corporations restructure nation-states; the traditional patriarchal nuclear family, no
matter how un-‘real,’ remains a constant imaginary; a few women enter management and government office, to
little avail; and racialized patriarchy is reconstituted along with the nation-state for global capital. I will explore
[khirn]
pg. 86
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 87
these processes in order to reveal the power nexus of the global information age. fissures and rumblings from
these sites just might instigate a challenge to the dominance of global capital and its cyber-media complex.
[khirn]
pg. 87
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 88
topicality/framework
[khirn]
pg. 88
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 89
2nc topical version
T version of aff: Supreme Court strike down bulk metadata collection on grounds that would
overturn third-party doctrine
Wittes and Chong 14 [Benjamin, senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, cofounded and is the editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog, and Jane, 2014 graduate of Yale Law School, where she
was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, “Our Cyborg Future: Law and Policy Implications,” September 2014,
Brookings Institution, http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2014/09/cyborg-future-law-policyimplications] //khirn
Thus the
most immediate impact of cyborgization on the law of surveillance will likely be to put additional
pressure on the so-called third-party doctrine, which underlies a great deal of government collection of transactional
data and business records. Under the third-party doctrine, an individual does not have a reasonable expectation
of privacy with respect to information he voluntarily discloses to a third party, like a bank or a telecommunications carrier,
and the Fourth Amendment therefore does not regulate the acquisition of such transactional data from those third parties by government investigators.
The Supreme Court declined to extend constitutional protections to bank records in United States v. Miller78 based on the theory that “the Fourth
Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party and conveyed by [the third party] to Government authorities, even if
the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be
betrayed.”79 The third-party doctrine underlies a huge array of collection, everything from the basic building
blocks of routine criminal investigations to the NSA’s bulk telephony metadata program . The third-party
doctrine has long been controversial, even among humans. It has attracted particular criticism as backward in an era in which
third-party service providers hold increasing amounts of what was previously considered personal information. Commentators have urged everything
from overruling the doctrine entirely80 to adapting the doctrine to extend constitutional protections to Internet searches.81 But the doctrine
seems particularly ill-suited to cyborgs . A world of humans can, after all, indulge the fiction that we each
have a meaningful choice about whether to engage the modern banking system or the telephone infrastructure.
It can adopt the position—however unrealistic in practice—that we have the option of not using telephones if we prefer
not to give our metadata to telephone companies, and that we can pay cash for everything if we do not like the idea of the FBI getting
our credit card records without a warrant. But the cyborg does not meaningfully have choice. Digital machines produce data as an
inherent feature of their existence. The more we come to see the machine as an extension of the
person —first by the pervasiveness of its use, then by its physical integration with its user, and ultimately through cybernetic integration with the
user—the less plausible will seem the notion that these are simply tools which we choose to use and whose data
we thus voluntarily turn over to service providers. The more like cyborgs we become, the more that data will
seem like the inevitable byproduct of our lives, and thus entitled to heightened legal protection.
[khirn]
pg. 89
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 90
2nc policy good
State engagement key to solve the aff
Wilding 98 (Faith, 1998, n.paradoxa, vol. 2, Where is Feminism in Cyberfeminism?,
http://www.obn.org/reading_room/writings/html/where.html) /AMarb
If cyberfeminists have the desire to research, theorize, work practically, and make visible how women (and
others) worldwide are affected by new communications technologies, technoscience, and the capitalist
dominations of the global communications networks, they must begin by clearly formulating cyberfeminisms
political goals and positions. Cyberfeminists have the chance to create new formulations of feminist theory and
practice that address the complex new social, cultural, and economic conditions created by global technologies.
Strategic and politically savvy uses of these technologies can facilitate the work of a transnational movement
that aims to infiltrate and assault the networks of power and communication through activist-feminist projects
of solidarity, education, freedom, vision, and resistance. To be effective in creating a politicized feminist
environment on the Net that challenges its present gender, race, age, and class structures, cyberfeminists need
to draw on the researches and strategies of avant garde feminist history and its critique of institutionalized
patriarchy. While affirming new possibilities for women in cyberspace, cyberfeminists must critique utopic and
mythic constructions of the Net, and strive to work with other resistant netgroups in activist coalitions.
Cyberfeminists need to declare solidarity with transnational feminist and postcolonial initiatives, and work to
use their access to communications technologies and electronic networks to support such initiatives.
[khirn]
pg. 90
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 91
virus pic
[khirn]
pg. 91
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 92
1nc virus word pic
The alternative is to embrace the virus – the cyborg metaphor is ultimately constrained and
limited by its own presupositions – however the language of the virus can break the boundary
between self and other in a more effective way
Thomas 2 [Anne-Marie, “IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE: THE VIRUS, CULTURAL ANXIETY, AND
SPECULATIVE FICTION” Disertation from the English department @ LSU] //khirn
As in non-fiction, traditional binaries tend to stay in place in most fictional representations of the virus, except perhaps in the case of speculative fiction,
in which the virus takes on characteristics not (yet) possible according to the convention of realism that naturalistic fictions employs. Speculative fiction
also tends to engage more directly with the complexity of the virus itself, elevating it to the status of a character instead of employing it as a mere plot
device. Indeed, the very “nature” of the virus is itself speculative, so it is particularly susceptible to theorization, as I have illustrated. And as Heather
Schell observes, “Virologists not only support the creation of epidemic science fiction, they also indulge in it themselves as a brainstorming tool” (100).
What some science fiction writers “speculate” about the virus is the possibility that infection can enliven the subject rather than debilitate it.
Transformation of the human subject through viral infection in these texts often leads not to death or
debilitation, but to a different kind of humanity, which we might call, for lack of a better term, posthumanity.15
This may represent not only an answer to the very real and debilitating phenomenon of a disease like AIDS, but
it could also represent an offshoot of the scientific viewpoint–which, compared to virus-as-malevolent-force,
gets very little press–that viruses may in some way be beneficial to the body . I refer here not to gene therapy,
which utilizes genetically engineered viruses in order to deliver much-needed genes, but rather to the notion that the virus’s natural cutting and pasting
of genes may in fact be beneficial to the body and may even stimulate evolution. Certainly the representation of viruses that I
examine in a number of the speculative fiction texts suggest that the new posthuman is an evolutionary
improvement upon homo sapiens. I focus on this exchange between science and popular culture, both of which suggest a more
utopian vision of the virus than the “killer virus” narratives would seem to indicate. My plan is not to rescue the
virus entirely from its bad press, but simply to emphasize that as a theoretical category, the virus can in fact
help us to negotiate “the problematic multiplicities of postmodern selves,” as it is itself invested with
multiplicity and inscribed with competing discourses. The virus, then, is a mirror of our own postmodern
moment. Both as a metaphor and as a liminal agent, it can lead us to deconstruct the central binary of self
and other in ways that other “speculative” postmodern metaphors, such as Haraway’s cyborg,
cannot . And that is primarily due, I would argue, to its ubiquitousness. The cyborg is indeed perhaps the most
significant construct, or “ironic political myth,” of the late twentieth century, serving as a key to navigate the
contradictions between self and other. But the cyborg imagery that Haraway calls for has not yet delivered us from
our “maze of dualisms.” Offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, the cyborg is a hybrid of machine
and organism that a number of critics have embraced as a figure that promises utopian possibilities, in part
because of its ability to pick up the tools that have marked it as Other and mark the world in its turn. The cyborg is
also capable of erasing disparities between gender, or even re-gendering, as it has no “essential” origins. Haraway’s myth is a celebration of
contradictions; she warns against the totalizing resolution of contradiction and notes that the “partial” and the “monstrous” are both necessary to the
new identities which are to be found in (for the most part) late twentieth century writing. The cyborg is a being that is structured
around contradictions, and those contradictions allow for “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and
dangerous possibilities.” And yet apart from professional academics in the field of cultural studies, the cyborg has yet to catch on as a powerful
metaphor for our times. The virus, on the other hand, as both a material object and a construction, is already more
widely recognizable as a locus for a dizzying array of metaphorical attachments and connotations. The virus is
also, in our contemporary moment, a uniquely “postmodern” agent, one that embodies contradictions of self
and other within its own structure, and one which inhabits a liminality that enables us, like Haraway’s cyborg,
to imagine potent fusions and dangerous possibilities. The task at hand, however, is to seize these possibilities; aside from a few
representations, which I will examine in this study, the virus has not been appropriated in ways that allow for the traditional collapse of binaries. It is still
far more likely for the virus to be cast as the typical other. We should recognize, too, that our “othering” is a projection of what is dangerous and
unpleasant about ourselves. Our depiction of the virus as foreign is a typical strategy in order to deal with our deeply entrenched fears of the other,
which, despite the shrinking of the global stage, remain very much in evidence. We might take a cue from Julia Kristeva, who writes in “Strangers to
Ourselves” that it is necessary to acknowledge that we are all in some sense “foreigners”: The foreigner is within us. And when we flee from or struggle
against the foreigner, we are fighting our unconscious . . . . To discover our disturbing otherness, for that indeed is what bursts in to confront that
“demon,” that threat, that apprehension generated by the projective apparition of the other at the heart of what we persist in maintaining as a proper,
solid “us.” By recognizing our uncanny strangeness we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside.
The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners. (290).
[khirn]
pg. 92
[File Title]
Michigan Debate 2015-2016
[khirn]
Page 93
2nc virus word pic
Virus metaphor breaks down boundaries in a comparatively better way than the cyborg
Thomas 2 [Anne-Marie, “IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE: THE VIRUS, CULTURAL ANXIETY, AND
SPECULATIVE FICTION” Disertation from the English department @ LSU] //khirn
It is the virus’s permeability as a signifier that makes it an ideal candidate for a whole host of metaphorical
attachments, but it is that same permeability and mutability that allows for “extreme possibilities.” In Synners and
Snow Crash, for example, the virus not only to erases the very distinction between the computational and biological
virus, but it also blurs all boundaries between the organic and the artificial; these texts effect a naturalization of
computer viruses and render humans and their viruses as artificial. The virus serve as a locus by which the
novels interrogate and compromise the binary of self and non-self, which in these texts is not only described in
terms of human and virus, but also human and machine. It is, as I have argued, a uniquely “postmodern”
agent/construct, one that embodies contradictions of self and other within its own structure, and one which
inhabits a liminality that enables us, like Haraway’s cyborg, to imagine potent fusions and dangerous
possibilities. We see some of these possibilities represented in many of the fictional texts I have examined in this study, some of which, like The XFiles, attempt a collapse of the central binary of self and other, but which at the same time cast the virus in the role of the typical other. It will take time
to discard the old image of the body at war, with armies defending against (foreign) marauding invaders. Even more current images of the body and
immune system response employ, as I illustrated in Chapter One, a variety of war metaphors. The body is no longer simply a fortress; it
is instead “conceived as a strategic system, highly militarized in key arenas of imagery and practice” in which
disease may be seen as “a subspecies of information malfunction or communications pathology . . . a process of
misrecognition or transgression of the boundaries of a strategic assemblage called self” (Haraway 211-213). Here the
distinction of self and non-self remains the same, even as the imagery evolves. For potent fusions, we might do well to turn to Bear’s Darwin’s Radio, who
describes an integration between human and virus that is beneficial–and which is not a science fictional device. His delineation of phage therapy, which
the day of viewing the virus as a positive force and
transformative agent may be at hand, a notion that science fiction has anticipated. If such a day
arrives, the very tenor of “viral discourse” (and viral metaphors) will change . It will also, by
necessity, be the day that the traditional self/non-self model of immunology finally collapses, allowing us to
transcend depictions of the immune system that employ metaphors of war . At long last, we may find
ourselves in line with the theories of immunologist Ludwig Fleck, who wrote the following in 1935: An organism can no longer be
construed as a self-contained, independent unit with fixed boundaries . . . . In the light of this concept [the
harmonious life unit], man appears as a complex to whose harmonious well-being many bacteria, for instance,
are absolutely essential . . . . It is very doubtful whether an invasion in the old sense is possible, involving as it
does an interference by completely foreign organisms in natural conditions. (Martin 109). In this view, the
virus–gendered, historicized, and nationalized in texts ranging from popular fiction to science writings–is
inseparable from who we are as human beings. It is us. And knowing this, we may use it to negotiate “the
problematic multiplicities of postmodern selves,” as it is itself invested with multiplicity and inscribed with
competing discourses. It is a touchstone, a mirror of our postmodern moment, and just as our postmodern
moment continually shifts and reforms, revealing itself as a construct, so does our mirror. If the virus
changes, it is only because we ourselves have consented to change–it is up to us to seize its
utopian potential .
serves as our introduction to viruses in the novel, suggests that
[khirn]
pg. 93