***Potlatch Neg***
***Gift K***
1nc Shell
The affirmatives efforts at authentic gift giving are a clever ruse of the majority – this form
of narcissistic hegemony guarantees the continuation of discrimination- problematizing the
very notion of the gift is key
IEP 2 (Jack Reynolds, Professor at La Trobe University, “The Gift” http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/#SH7a , Josh Nabors)
The aporia that surrounds the gift revolves around the paradoxical thought that a genuine gift cannot actually be understood to be a gift. In his
text, Given Time, Derrida
suggests that the notion of the gift contains an implicit demand that the
genuine gift must reside outside of the oppositional demands of giving and taking, and
beyond any mere self-interest or calculative reasoning (GT 30). According to him, however, a gift is
also something that cannot appear as such (GD 29), as it is destroyed by anything that proposes
equivalence or recompense, as well as by anything that even proposes to know of, or
acknowledge it. This may sound counter-intuitive, but even a simple ‘thank-you’ for instance, which both
acknowledges the presence of a gift and also proposes some form of equivalence with that
gift, can be seen to annul the gift (cf. MDM 149). By politely responding with a ‘thank-you’,
there is often, and perhaps even always, a presumption that because of this
acknowledgement one is no longer indebted to the other who has given, and that nothing
more can be expected of an individual who has so responded. Significantly, the gift is hence
drawn into the cycle of giving and taking, where a good deed must be accompanied by a
suitably just response. As the gift is associated with a command to respond, it becomes an imposition for the
receiver, and it even becomes an opportunity to take for the ‘giver’, who might give just to
receive the acknowledgement from the other that they have in fact given. There are
undoubtedly many other examples of how the ‘gift’ can be deployed, and not necessarily
deliberately , to gain advantage. Of course, it might be objected that even if it is psychologically
difficult to give without also receiving (and in a manner that is tantamount to taking) this does not in-itself
constitute a refutation of the logic of genuine giving. According to Derrida, however, his discussion does not
amount merely to an empirical or psychological claim about the difficulty of transcending an immature and egocentric conception of giving. On
the contrary,
he wants to problematise the very possibility of a giving that can be unequivocally
disassociated from receiving and taking.¶ The important point is that, for Derrida, a genuine gift requires
an anonymity of the giver, such that there is no accrued benefit in giving. The giver cannot
even recognise that they are giving, for that would be to reabsorb their gift to the other
person as some kind of testimony to the worth of the self – ie. the kind of self-congratulatory
logic that rhetorically poses the question “how wonderful I am to give this person that
which they have always desired, and without even letting them know that I am
responsible?”. This is an extreme example, but Derrida claims that such a predicament afflicts all giving in more or less obvious ways.
For him, the logic of a genuine gift actually requires that self and other be radically disparate,
and have no obligations or claims upon each other of any kind. He argues that a genuine
gift must involve neither an apprehension of a good deed done, nor the recognition by the
other party that they have received, and this seems to render the actuality of any gift an
impossibility. Significantly, however, according to Derrida, the existential force of this demand for an
absolute altruism can never be assuaged, and yet equally clearly it can also never be
fulfilled, and this ensures that the condition of the possibility of the gift is inextricably
associated with its impossibility. For Derrida, there is no solution to this type of problem, and no hint
of a dialectic that might unify the apparent incommensurability in which possibility implies impossibility and vice versa. At the same time,
however, he does not intend simply to vacillate in hyperbolic and self-referential paradoxes. There
is a sense in which
deconstruction actually seeks genuine giving, hospitality, forgiving and mourning, even
where it acknowledges that these concepts are forever elusive and can never actually be
fulfilled.
The affirmatives attempt at selfless gift-giving is bankrupt. Self- interest is
embedded within the human psyche. Don’t let them convince you otherwise.
Williams and Arrigo 2k (CHRISTOPHER R. WILLIAMS and BRUCE A. ARRIGO, “THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GIFT AND
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADVOCACY: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON FORENSIC MENTAL HEALTH INTERVENTION,”
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CC8QFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Flink.springer.com%
2Fcontent%2Fpdf%2F10.1023%252FA%253A1008992415163.pdf&ei=Dl_OUcu0Aoa50QGZiYCIDg&usg=AFQjCNHKWaLIV0MKfG0AFvaE3NE1iY6vw&bvm=bv.48572450,d.dmQ)
We note, however, that our rather liberal and metaphoric use of the gift thus far must be positioned
within relevant philosophical and psycholog- ical contexts.7 Space limitations permit us to
canvass but of few of the more salient features of the gift construct as developed by a select number
of social theorists. This notwithstanding, the explorations that follow are intended to create the necessary
conceptual and ethical backdrop against which our subsequent deconstructive semiotic and
psychoanalytic semiotic analyses will be set. We note further that in some cases the gift, as a notion
important to social practice, is only implicitly identified in the context of what might be called
the psychological and epistemological underpinnings of gift-giving, assistance, altruism, and
the like.8 Perhaps the best way to understand the ethico-philosophical dimensions of the gift
underscoring our present inquiry is through a cursory assessment of psychological egoism.
There is an important distinction to be made between psychological egoism and ethical egoism. The latter
is a norma- tive stance concerning how we ought to live,9 rather than how we do live. The former is an
intra-psychic stance reflecting an inherent inevitability wherein one expresses or enacts
one’s egoistic concerns. Whether one ought to behave egoistically is not the proper subject
for our critique of (mental health) advocacy. Rather, in the interest of examining the unconscious dynamics underpinning human action we briefly examine some of the earlier
conceptions of human motivation which proposed an inherent egoistic nature. The
psychological egoist questions the possibility of acting altruisti- cally; that is, of acting
purely with regard for the interests of another. That is to ask, can our actions at times be
motivated purely by a concern for the welfare of others without some manifestation of primary selfinterest in our actions? Though questions of self-interest factored significantly into the classical era of
philosophical speculation, the establishment of egoism as psychologically predetermined and,
consequently, inescapable received its first detailed and philosophically animated treatment in the work of
Thomas Hobbes.10 Hobbes’s theory rests on one core assumption: human beings, when acting
voluntarily, will be egoistically motivated. In other words, all human actions are rooted in selfinterest, and the very possi- bility of being motivated otherwise is forbidden by the structure of our
fundamental psychological make-up.
Bataille’s concept of the gift as sacrifice reinforces existing relations of authority of
those who are empowered to commission a sacrifice- turns case
Wolin 6 (Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center, (Richard, “Left Fascism: Georges
Bataille and the German Ideology”, http://courses.ucsd.edu/nbryson/Graduate%20Readings/BatailleLeftFascism.pdf Constellations vol. 2 issue 3,
pp. 397-428 Josh Nabors)
Yet, in his celebratory discussions of sacrifice, potlach, and so forth, Bataille fundamentally
misconstrues the historical and contextual parameters of such ritual practices. One could
even go so far as to say that, in a certain measure, Bataille’s understanding of these phenomena
succumbs to a type of “primitivism”: he decontextualizes the cultural practices he analyzes
in order the better to incorporate them within his own theoretical agenda of his own
critique of modernity. Here, Bataille seeks nothing less than “an anthropology that will itself provide a
living – and orgiastic – myth to overturn, through its experience on a collective level, ‘modern’ sterile
bourgeois society.”51 Bataille chooses to view sacrifice and gift-giving in the first instance as
gratuitous, non-utilitarian, or, as he puts it, “having no ends beyond themselves” – but this
is far from the case. While he is correct in characterizing such practices as related to the production of
wealth, they are very much oriented toward the reproduction of existing relations of power. The act of
human sacrifice as practiced among the Aztecs redounds to the credit of the sacrificer(s): it
reinforces existing relations of authority, viz., the authority of those who are empowered to
commission a sacrifice (in this case, the priests and aristocracy). It provides those in authority
with a quasi-divine power to preside over life and death. In this sense, it is misleading to
claim that sacrifice has no end beyond itself.
Refuse to partake in the 1ac’s act of gift giving- we must go beyond this imaginable,
knowable act of the potlatch and affirm a world of enigmatic exchange
Arrigo and Williams 2000 (Bruce and Christopher, professor of criminology andforensic psychology and the
director of the Institute of Psychology, Law, and Public Policy at the California School of Professional Psy¬chology
in Fresno and doctoral degree from the California School of Professional Psychology in Fresno where he specialized
in law and policy, “The Impossibility of Democratic Justice and the “Gift” of the Majority: On Derrida,
Deconstruction, and the Search for Equality,” August, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice,
http://ccj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/3/321, Josh Nabors)
This is the relationship between the gift and justice. Justice cannot appear as such; it cannot be
calculated as in the law or other tangible commodities (Derrida, 1997). Although Derrida
acknowledges that we must attempt to calculate, there is a point beyond which calculation must
fail and we must recognize that no amount of estimation can adequately assign justice
(Derrida, 1997). For equality (like the "gift beyond exchange and distribution"; Der- rida, 1992, p. 7) to
be possible, we must go beyond any imaginable, knowable notion . This is why the gift and
justice are conceptually (im)possible (Desilva Wijeyeratne, 1998). They serve a necessary
purpose in society; however, they represent something to always strive for, something that
mobilizes our desire. If the impossible was possible, we would stop trying and desire would
die. Justice, and thus democracy, is an appeal for the gift. As Derrida (1992) notes, "this 'idea of justice'
seems to be irreducible in its affirmative charac- ter, in its demand of gift without exchange, without
circulation, without rec- ognition of gratitude, without economic circularity, without calculation and
without rules, without reason and without rationality" (p. 25). The gift (of equality), like justice and
democracy, is an aporia, an (im)possibility. Thus, the use of the gift as a transaction in the name
of equality, and equality in the name of justice and democracy, is truly (un)just,
(un)democratic, and (in)equitable. The gift is a calculated, majoritarian endeavor toward
illusive equality. Equality beyond such a conscious effort (i.e., where the illusion is displaced) is openended and absent of any obligatory reciprocation. As Caputo (1997) notes, '1ustice is the welcome given
to the other in which I do not ... have anything up my sleeve" (p. 149).With this formula of equality and
justice in mind, one may still speculate on the law's relationship to the gift. But again, the law as a
commodity, as a thing to be transacted, eliminates its prospects as something to be given.
The law as law, on the other hand, is no gift, and hence no guarantee of jus- tice ... the law is a calculated
balance of payments, of crime and punish- ment, of offense and retribution, a closed circle of paying off
and paying back. When things are merely legal, no more than legal, then they contract into narrowly
contractual relationships with no "give:' no gifts. (Caputo, 1997,p. 149)
The gift has no idiosyncratic or artful definition that needs to be addressed. Derrida's concept of the gift
is simply as it sounds: Something that is given to someone by someone else. Gift, however, is a
misleading term. Once an award is given to someone, that someone assumes a debt (of gratitude
or a reciprocation of the gift). The giver of the gift, in return, is "consciously and explicitly" pleased with
him- or herself for the show of generosity (Caputo, 1997, p. 141). This narcissistic, self-eudemonical
exchange is in fact in- creased if the receiver is ungrateful or is unable, through the
anonymity of the gift, to show gratitude. Thus, the offering that is made without
expectation of explicit gratitude simply nourishes the narcissism of the giver. This is the
par- adoxical dimension of the gift. The sender of the gift, instead of giving, receives; and
the receiver of the gift, instead of receiving something, is in debt (Caputo, 1997). To avoid
mobilizing the circular economy of the gift (the circle of ex- change, of reciprocation, and of
reappropriation), the gift must not appear as such. Thus, the giver must not be aware that he
or she is giving, and the receiver must not be aware that he or she is receiving. Only under
those cir- cumstances would the giver not fuel the fire of narcissistic generosity, and the receiver not
assume a debt. As Caputo (1997) notes, the pure gift "could take place only if everything happened below
the level of conscious intentionality, where no one intends to give anything to anyone and no one is
intentionally conscious of receiving anything" (p. 147).
***Links***
Link- Emerson
A failure to repay or reciprocate creates a tension between the one who gives and the one
who receives, leaving the former disposed to feelings of inferiority and vengeance, while the
latter endures a threat to one’s own independence-turns case
Emerson no date (Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated
his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States, “Gifts”,
http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Best/EmersonGifts.htm , Josh Nabors)
A failure to repay or reciprocate creates a tension between the one who gives and the one
who receives, leaving the former disposed to feelings of inferiority and vengeance, while the
latter endures a threat to one’s own independence-turns case
Emerson no date (Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated
his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States, “Gifts”,
http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Best/EmersonGifts.htm , Josh Nabors)
The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which requires careful sailing, or rude boats. It is
not the office of a man to receive gifts. How dare you give them ? We wish to be selfsustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive
anything from love, for that is a way of receiving A from ourselves; but not from any one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat
which we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living by it. ¶ Brother, if Jove to thee a present make, Be
sure that from his hands thou nothing take.¶ We ask the whole. Nothing less will content us. We arraign
society if it do not give us-besides earth, and fire, and water, -- opportunity, love, reverence, and objects
of veneration.¶ He is a good man who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift,
and both emotions are unbecoming. Some violence, I think, is done, some degradation borne,
when I rejoice or grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my independence is invaded, or when a gift comes
from such as do not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported; and if the gift pleases me
overmuch, then I should be ashamed that the donor should read my heart, and see that I
love his commodity, and not him. The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto
me, correspondent to my flowing unto him. When the waters. are at level, then my goods
pass to him, and his to me. All his are mine, all mine his. I say to him, How can you give me
this pot of oil, or this flagon of wine, when all your oil and wine is mine, which belief of
mine this gift seems to deny? Hence the fitness of beautiful, not useful things for gifts. This giving
is flat usurpation, and therefore when the beneficiary is ungrateful, as all beneficiaries hate all Timons,
not at all considering the value of the gift, but looking back to the greater store it was taken from, I rather
sympathize with the beneficiary than with the anger of my lord Timon. For, the expectation of
gratitude is mean, and is continually punished by the total insensibility of the obliged
person. It is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning, from one who has had the illluck to be served by you. It is a very onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor naturally
wishes to give you a slap. A golden text for these gentlemen is that which I so admire in the Buddhist,
who never thanks, and who says, 'Do not flatter your benefactors.'¶ The reason of these discords I
conceive to be that there is no commensurability between a man and any gift. You cannot
give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served him he at once puts you in
debt by his magnanimity. The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with
the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his
friend, and now also. Compared with that goodwill I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to
render him seems small. Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at
random, that we can seldom hear the acknowledgements of any person who would thank us for a benefit,
without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an
oblique one; we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly received. But
rectitude scatters favours on every side without knowing it, and receives with wonder the thanks of all
people.¶
Link- Pity
Altruism=pity- turns case
Williams and Arrigo 2k (CHRISTOPHER R. WILLIAMS and BRUCE A. ARRIGO, “THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GIFT AND
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADVOCACY: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON FORENSIC MENTAL HEALTH INTERVENTION,”
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CC8QFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Flink.springer.com%
2Fcontent%2Fpdf%2F10.1023%252FA%253A1008992415163.pdf&ei=Dl_OUcu0Aoa50QGZiYCIDg&usg=AFQjCNHKWaLIV0MKfG0AFvaE3NE1iY6vw&bvm=bv.48572450,d.dmQ, Josh Nabors)
The tension Nietzsche creates around the topic of pity or, alternately, assistance and altruism, is
felt strongly in Daybreak, Zarathustra, as well as in his Genealogy of Morals.27 Indeed, Nietzsche advances several
important arguments that challenge the logic of altruism; that is, of giving in reaction to
pity.28 The first and most frequently occurring of these objec- tions to pity recognizes the psychic ascription of human weakness to the one
who receives pity. “To offer pity,” writes Nietzsche, “is as good as to offer contempt ...”29 Offering pity, then, is an
acknowledgment of the insufficiency or inadequacy of those who receive such “charitable” senti- ments. The danger lies in the possibility that
“the pupil whose nose is too often wiped will not wipe her own nose, the child whose parents’ love is too smothering will not become a mature
adult ...”30 When
we pity or intervene on behalf of others, a Nietzschean assessment would
require that we consider whether there are unconscious restrictions on the quality of our
assistance. Indeed, following Nietzsche’s position on pity, we might ask ourselves whether our altruistic endeavors are affected (motivated)
by a reluctance to undermine the self-sufficiency of the recipient of our gift or not?Another tension that Nietzsche reveals concerning pity is more
akin to that developed by Hobbes. In this argument, Nietzsche identifies the
egoistic nature of pity and, in so doing,
repudiates the possibility of altruistic pity. Nietzsche provides an ethical or moral objection
to altru- istic assistance, one premised on the recognition that no act is free from selfinterest or self-concern. As he describes it:¶ Let us reflect seriously upon this question: why do we leap after
someone who has fallen into the water in front of us, even though we feel no kind of
affection for him? Out of pity: at that moment we are thinking only of the other person –
thus says thoughtlessness ...The truth is: in the feeling of pity – I mean that which is usually
and misleadingly called pity – we are, to be sure, not consciously thinking of ourselves but
are doing so very strongly unconsciously ...anaccidentwhichhappenstoanotheroffendsus:itwouldmakeusaware
ofourimpotence...Oranaccidentandsufferingincurredbyanotherconstitutesasignpost tosomedangertous...(emphasisadded)31 ¶ Nietzsche makes two
important points here: (1) that an
act engaged out of pity is motivated by our contemplation of similar
danger to ourselves rather than from pure compassion; and (2) that this and other egoistic
concerns motivate largely from the level of the unconscious or, at least, from beneath or
beyond the motives we are capable of experiencing on a conscious level. When we observe
such suffering, we are reminded of the fragility of the human condition. To “repel” this
kind of pain – this realization – we compensate through an act of pity, which “may contain
a subtle self-defence;”32 namely, an affirmation of our own well-being, of the strength of
our own capacity in light of the person we assist. Nietzsche indicates that we avoid sights of human
suffering unless, we can “present ourselves as the more powerful and as a helper ...if we
want to feel how fortunate we are in contrast.”33 Following Nietzsche, then, in the act of intervening,
in addition to freeing ourselves from suffering, we act as well from the sense of pleasure we
receive by giving. This pleasure (i.e., the gratification one derives in performing altruistic acts) comes
from several sources. As Nietzsche explains:¶ ...pleasure arises at the sight of a contrast to the condition we ourselves are in; at the notion that we
can help if only we want to; at the thought of the praise and recognition we shall receive if we do help ...All of this, and other, much more subtle
things in addition, constitute ‘pity’ ...34¶ 31 F. Nietzsche, Daybreak, supra note 27, at 84. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid.¶ 226 CHRISTOPHER R.
WILLIAMS AND BRUCE A. ARRIGO¶ There is one last feature of Nietzsche’s theoretical speculations on gift- giving warranting some
attention. This point, raised by Gary Shapiro,35 invites a consideration of Nietzsche’s philosophy of masks. As Shapiro describes, gift-
giving¶ risks undermining the masks ...that are necessary for our protection. In giving a gift
one undertakes the hermeneutical project of discovering what is appropriate to the true
character of the recipient. If I fail to interpret him properly, he will feel that some violence
or degradation has been done....36
Link- Action
Action=egotism
Williams and Arrigo 2k (CHRISTOPHER R. WILLIAMS and BRUCE A. ARRIGO, “THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GIFT AND
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADVOCACY: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON FORENSIC MENTAL HEALTH INTERVENTION,”
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CC8QFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Flink.springer.com%
2Fcontent%2Fpdf%2F10.1023%252FA%253A1008992415163.pdf&ei=Dl_OUcu0Aoa50QGZiYCIDg&usg=AFQjCNHKWaLIV0MKfG0AFvaE3NE1iY6vw&bvm=bv.48572450,d.dmQ, Josh Nabors)
In the first instance, once
the gift is conferred the receiver is grateful and contracts a debt of
gratitude. Indeed, instead of being the recipient of a gift, s/he is now obliged to the giver.42 At the same time
and, more importantly for our critique of advocacy, the assigner is consciously contented with his or her
behavior, recognizing it as “altruistic” giving. This form of self- interested assistance is
even more pronounced – even more profound in its effect – if the recipient of the gift is
either ungrateful or if the giver remains anonymous. In these instances, the giver is remarkably
self-assured and congratulatory because the assigner’s generosity is so unselfish it does not
warrant any acknowledgment.43 As a result, the giver has actually received rather than
given, and the receiver, instead of being the recipient of generosity and altruistic sentiment,
is now indebted.44 This is precisely why Derrida presents the gift as an aporia: it annuls itself as an award as soon
as it is given. Indeed, the altruism becomes egoism as soon as one’s intentions turn to actions . The
impossibility embedded in the very possibility of the gift is what neutralizes or undoes its
benefit. The gift, as an act of giving, assisting, intervening, is self-limiting. Its intrinsic
nature, as an altruistic act, limits the degree to which it can be selfless or free of selfabsorbed ego desires. The true or pure gift cannot appear as a gratuity; it “...could take place only if
everything happened below the level of conscious intentionality, where no one intends to
give anything and no one is intentionally conscious of receiving anything”.45 As Aristotle reminds us,
however, there is always some degree of intentionality inherent in any act.46 The agent always acts for one’s own good or, at least, with some
conscious and/or unconscious attention to it. According to Derrida, this
attention places the gift and the gift-giving
virtue (i.e., altruism) in some jeopardy. The latter becomes less an act of giving and more an act of receiving. Thus, we are led to
question the value of any award, for its inherent quality is largely endangered by non-reflective, pre-thematic self-interest.
***Impacts***
Impact- Domination
When most give elaborate gifts and expect nothing in return, it's a sign of
dominance over the other person because the donor's gift was bigger and better
making them feel as though they are superior to the other person.
McGonegal 7 (Julie McGonegal, Professor at the University of Tasmania, "The Tyranny of Gift Giving:
The Politics of Generosity,”
Ellison."<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/eighteenth_century_fiction/v019/19.3mcgonegal.html Josh Nabors)
Central to Miss Alton's narrative is the contention that gift giving is a means for the donor to draw
attention to discrepancies in social status: the sheer plenitude of Mrs Mayer's presents and their
impracticality function to highlight class difference. Scott shows here what Bourdieu theorizes elsewhere:
when gifts exclude the possibility of an equivalent return, they become a means of
exercising domination. Mrs Mayer's presents inflict humiliation on Miss Alton. They are also a
manipulation tactic, a way of eliciting feelings of obligation towards her benefactress: "She
would reproach me with ingratitude, and enumerate the favours I had received from her. She would even
cast oblique reflexions on me as being mercenary in accepting obligations, which she did not leave me the
liberty of refusing. I now found, what I before had no idea of, that a giving hand, and a generous heart, are
distinct things" (SGE, 113). To the extent that her strategy is transparent to Miss Alton, who eventually
refuses to endure the humiliation it is intended to produce, Mrs Mayer does, in the end, fail at gift giving.
Nevertheless, her devices corroborate Bourdieu's observation that when the gift emerges out of the
social divide that separates people, it consolidates that divide: that is, when established in
conditions of asymmetry that prevent the possibility of a quid pro quo, reciprocation in the
form of concern, consideration, and submission is likely to form relations of dependence.12
Impact- Hegemonic Empowerment
Their critical strategy leaves in place a process of recognition, affirmation, and assimilation in
the form of juridical control. Ultimately, the gift of equality and liberation from ones physical
body reinscribes into power relationships that created the need for the plan in the first place.
Arrigo and Williams 2000 (Bruce and Christopher, professor of criminology andforensic psychology and the
director of the Institute of Psychology, Law, and Public Policy at the California School of Professional Psy¬chology
in Fresno and doctoral degree from the California School of Professional Psychology in Fresno where he specialized
in law and policy, “The Impossibility of Democratic Justice and the “Gift” of the Majority: On Derrida,
Deconstruction, and the Search for Equality,” August, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice,
http://ccj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/3/321)
Reciprocation on your part is impossible. Even if one day you are able to return our monetary
favor twofold, we will always know that it was us who first hosted you; extended to and
entrusted in you an opportunity given your time of need. As the initiators of such a charity,
we are always in a position of power, and you are always indebted to us. This is where the notion of
egoism or conceit assumes a hegemonic role. By giving to you, a supposed act of gen- erosity in the
name of furthering your cause, we have not empowered you. Rather, we have empowered
ourselves. We have less than subtlety let you know that we have more than you. We have so
much more, in fact, that we can afford to give you some. Our giving becomes, not an act of
beneficence, but a show of power, that is, narcissistic hegemony! Thus, we see that the majority
gift is a ruse: a simulacrum of movement toward aporetic equality and a simulation of
democratic justice. By relying on the legislature (representing the majority) when economic and social opportunities are availed to
minority or underrepresented collectives, the process takes on exactly the form ofDerrida's gift. The majority controls the
political, economic, legal, and social arenas; that is, it is (and always has been) in control of such communities as the
employment sector and the edu- cational system. The mandated opportunities that under- or nonrepresented citizens receive as a result of this
falsely eudemonic endeavor are gifts and, thus, ultimately constitute an effort to make minority populations feel better. There is a sense of
movement toward equality in the name of democratic jus- tice, albeit false Iy manufactured.18 In return for this effort ,
the majority
shows off its long-standing authority (this provides a stark realization to minority
***Alt***
Alt- Floating Pik
The alternative is to go beyond normal conceptualizations of the gift and affirm the
inherent impossibility of gift giving- acknowledging this is critical to a form of exchange
where the framing of the gift is absent in our social and political decisions
Arrigo and Williams 2000 (Bruce and Christopher, professor of criminology andforensic psychology and the
director of the Institute of Psychology, Law, and Public Policy at the California School of Professional Psy¬chology
in Fresno and doctoral degree from the California School of Professional Psychology in Fresno where he specialized
in law and policy, “The Impossibility of Democratic Justice and the “Gift” of the Majority: On Derrida,
Deconstruction, and the Search for Equality,” August, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice,
http://ccj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/3/321, Josh Nabors)
This is the relationship between the gift and justice. Justice cannot appear as such; it cannot be
calculated as in the law or other tangible commodities (Derrida, 1997). Although Derrida
acknowledges that we must attempt to calculate, there is a point beyond which calculation must
fail and we must recognize that no amount of estimation can adequately assign justice
(Derrida, 1997). For equality (like the "gift beyond exchange and distribution"; Der- rida, 1992, p. 7) to
be possible, we must go beyond any imaginable, knowable notion . This is why the gift and
justice are conceptually (im)possible (Desilva Wijeyeratne, 1998). They serve a necessary
purpose in society; however, they represent something to always strive for, something that
mobilizes our desire. If the impossible was possible, we would stop trying and desire would
die. Justice, and thus democracy, is an appeal for the gift. As Derrida (1992) notes, "this 'idea of justice'
seems to be irreducible in its affirmative charac- ter, in its demand of gift without exchange, without
circulation, without rec- ognition of gratitude, without economic circularity, without calculation and
without rules, without reason and without rationality" (p. 25). The gift (of equality), like justice and
democracy, is an aporia, an (im)possibility. Thus, the use of the gift as a transaction in the name
of equality, and equality in the name of justice and democracy, is truly (un)just,
(un)democratic, and (in)equitable. The gift is a calculated, majoritarian endeavor toward
illusive equality. Equality beyond such a conscious effort (i.e., where the illusion is displaced) is openended and absent of any obligatory reciprocation. As Caputo (1997) notes, '1ustice is the welcome given
to the other in which I do not ... have anything up my sleeve" (p. 149).With this formula of equality and
justice in mind, one may still speculate on the law's relationship to the gift. But again, the law as a
commodity, as a thing to be transacted, eliminates its prospects as something to be given.
The law as law, on the other hand, is no gift, and hence no guarantee of jus- tice ... the law is a calculated
balance of payments, of crime and punish- ment, of offense and retribution, a closed circle of paying off
and paying back. When things are merely legal, no more than legal, then they contract into narrowly
contractual relationships with no "give:' no gifts. (Caputo, 1997,p. 149)
The gift has no idiosyncratic or artful definition that needs to be addressed. Derrida's concept of the gift
is simply as it sounds: Something that is given to someone by someone else. Gift, however, is a
misleading term. Once an award is given to someone, that someone assumes a debt (of gratitude
or a reciprocation of the gift). The giver of the gift, in return, is "consciously and explicitly" pleased with
him- or herself for the show of generosity (Caputo, 1997, p. 141). This narcissistic, self-eudemonical
exchange is in fact in- creased if the receiver is ungrateful or is unable, through the
anonymity of the gift, to show gratitude. Thus, the offering that is made without
expectation of explicit gratitude simply nourishes the narcissism of the giver. This is the
par- adoxical dimension of the gift. The sender of the gift, instead of giving, receives; and
the receiver of the gift, instead of receiving something, is in debt (Caputo, 1997). To avoid
mobilizing the circular economy of the gift (the circle of ex- change, of reciprocation, and of
reappropriation), the gift must not appear as such. Thus, the giver must not be aware that he
or she is giving, and the receiver must not be aware that he or she is receiving. Only under
those cir- cumstances would the giver not fuel the fire of narcissistic generosity, and the receiver not
assume a debt. As Caputo (1997) notes, the pure gift "could take place only if everything happened below
the level of conscious intentionality, where no one intends to give anything to anyone and no one is
intentionally conscious of receiving anything" (p. 147).
***Framework***
Epist. 1st
Unconscious dynamics matter- overrule conscious decisions- reason to prefer the
alternative
Williams and Arrigo 2k (CHRISTOPHER R. WILLIAMS and BRUCE A. ARRIGO, “THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GIFT AND
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADVOCACY: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON FORENSIC MENTAL HEALTH INTERVENTION,”
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CC8QFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Flink.springer.com%
2Fcontent%2Fpdf%2F10.1023%252FA%253A1008992415163.pdf&ei=Dl_OUcu0Aoa50QGZiYCIDg&usg=AFQjCNHKWaLIV0MKfG0AFvaE3NE1iY6vw&bvm=bv.48572450,d.dmQ, Josh Nabors)
The concept of the gift, and the related practices of giving and receiving (i.e. the economy of the gift exchange), are not sufficiently identifiable
outside the context of these subtleties. Indeed, the meaning of the gratuity is situated in its economy, in its logic. That is to say, a
gift fails
to be an offering absent the motivational forces underlying its exchange, the unspoken
cultural norms that govern the interaction, and the implications the gift has, both
deliberate and incidental, for ongoing social practices.6 We are primarily concerned with
the conscious and unconscious dynamics, impacting the economy of exchange in
relationship to the gift of advocacy.
***2NC BLOCKS***
A2 Aff=Altruistic
Humans=inherently selfish
Williams and Arrigo 2k (CHRISTOPHER R. WILLIAMS and BRUCE A. ARRIGO, “THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GIFT AND
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADVOCACY: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON FORENSIC MENTAL HEALTH INTERVENTION,”
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CC8QFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Flink.springer.com%
2Fcontent%2Fpdf%2F10.1023%252FA%253A1008992415163.pdf&ei=Dl_OUcu0Aoa50QGZiYCIDg&usg=AFQjCNHKWaLIV0MKfG0AFvaE3NE1iY6vw&bvm=bv.48572450,d.dmQ, Josh Nabors)
There is another important aspect of the charitable person, relevant more specifically to the
psychological underpinnings of such self- interested displays of benevolence. This is the
notion of conscious self- interest versus self-interest that motivates from behind or, in Freud’s topology,
underneath the level of conscious awareness.13 This point will become clearer when we discuss selfinterest in the context of a Lacanian psychoanalytic critique. For now, we note that even Hobbes
recognized that persons motivated by self-interest might not be consciously aware that their
seemingly selfless acts were, in fact, blemished by concerns for the self. What is more
characteristic of such behavior in terms of human psychology is that we consciously regard
our actions as altruistic; an inter- pretation most beneficial to our psychic life. In other words,
we want to believe that our actions are unselfish and, consequently, we interpret them in
such a fashion. In fact, following psychological egoists, this inter- pretation obtains only
superficially; that is, we delude ourselves absent a careful investigation of the unconscious dynamics
that give rise to the logic of charitable, altruistic, intervening behavior. From this perspective, conduct
motivated by self-interest might be inevitable, and our inter- pretation of actions as selfless
merely the result of “self-deception and rationalization”.14
Greed is part of human nature – rejecting greed means you reject life
Taflinger ‘96(Taflinger, Richard, associate clinical professor at Washington State University, May 28,
1996)
"Greed is good." Wall Street The above quote is from the popular movie, WALL STREET,
starring Michael Douglas. When it was spoken in the movie, it was used as an ironic
counterpoint: the character who said it was very successful following the credo, but
ultimately it was his downfall. The audience may have though it was poetic justice. The credo,
however, is merely a statement of biological necessity. Greed has an extremely negative
connotation for most people. It conjures up images of Ebenezer Scrooge and Shylock, chortling over
their gold and ignoring the plights and miseries of others. However, it is actually the gathering of
resources, the more the better. Biologically, for any organism that is successful greed is good.
Any form of life must gather resources that allow it to survive and reproduce. The resources
may be food, water, sunlight, minerals, vitamins, shelter. Without these things, the organism
dies. Since the two most basic purposes of life are to live and to reproduce, it should do
everything it can to avoid dying through a lack of resources. Greed is one organism getting a
larger piece of the pie, more of the necessary resources, than other organisms . For example, in
the Amazonian rain forest, an occasional tree dies and falls. This leaves an opening to the sun in the
continuous canopy of foliage. Plants and trees race each other to grow into that opening. The winners in
the race fill the hole; the losers die through lack of sunlight. (Attenborough, 1990) The greed for
sunlight means life. Again, as for self-preservation and sex, greed is an instinctive reaction.
When presented with resources, the instinct is to grab them, use them, take advantage of
them. This isn't a conscious decision. An animal, when starving, wants more food; when
thirsty, more water. If it means taking it from another animal, that's what it does if it can . You
may ask, what about those animals who feed their offspring, though they're starving themselves?
Remember that the second purpose of life is to reproduce. This requires not only producing the young.
Once it's born it must be kept alive until it's self-sufficient. If it dies, then all the time, effort and energy
to produce it must be repeated to produce another one. However, once it reaches self-sufficiency the
parent's genes will, most likely, be passed on to another generation. Keeping the offspring alive, even at
the expense of the parent dying, is of paramount importance. Thus, a parent caring for its young at
its own expense is not an act of selflessness; it's an act of genetic selfishness. You may also
point out that humans avoid being greedy. In fact, being greedy is something that is scorned, something
to be ashamed of. Once again, as for self-preservation and reproduction, it's because humans are
unique -- we have a conscious mind that influences their biological instincts. How that works is the topic
of the next chapter.
***Bifo K***
1nc Shell
The affirmative breaks down the distinction between social/cognitive and economic
labor - the knowledge they produce is introduced into a knowledge economy of
representation that inevitable erupts into unpredictable politics- that stops cognition.
Bifo 2007 (Franco Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Academia di belle Arti in Milan, and Founder of
A/traverse, Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination, SubStance #112, Vol. 36 no. 1, trans. Giuseppina Mecchia, pp. 68-72)
When we talk about the mental nature of the productive process we mean that the functions
assigned by governments to the productive processes are subsumed and internalized by
them. There is no longer any distinction between processes of social labor and the general
governance of society. Of course, there remains the fiction of a political decision, of a political representation, but the actual ability to
govern the social processes on the part of the political will can only play an extremely marginal role. It isn’t politics (with all its
complicated mechanisms of representation, decision, and sanction) that decides on the fundamental questions arising in the spheres of technology
and finance or in the creation of an interface connecting technology, finance, society, languages, and the imaginary.
Government is
integrated into the circulation of information, if we consider information in its fullest sense,
as an algorithm of processes that can be activated by techno-social automatisms. Programming,
understood as the elaboration of a software able to analyze, simplify, systematize, and mechanize entire sequences of human work, is at the core of government action,
we see the
configuration of alternatives which have completely disappeared from the scene of political
representation and of ideology. According to the user interfaces realized by the programmer, technology can function either as an element of
if we call government a function of decision and regulation. Within the process of techno-social elaboration, of software development,
control or as an agent of liberation from work. The political problem is entirely absorbed within the activity of the mental worker, and of the programmer in particular.
The problem of the alternative, of a different social use of certain activities, can no longer be detached from the very forms of this activity. The person who works in a
machine shop, or on the assembly line, has to separate herself from her workplace if she wants to rediscover the conditions for a political transformation, if she wants
to upset the political and technological modes of oppression. This is why, during the proto- industrial era, it was necessary to build a political organization external to
the factory and to the working knowledge of the worker. But this is no longer the case when work becomes an activity of coordination, invention, understanding, and
In the age of mental labor, the problem of organization and of political action can no
longer be separated from the one concerning the paradigms of the productive operation .
programming.
Software programming reveals the close relation between dependent labor and creative activity; in this case, we observe how the mental work of the programmer
acquires a political function of transformation within his very way of operating, and not only a productive function of valorization. The two functions can be
The consequence of the
increasingly mental nature of social labor is that politics is replaced by an internalized
function of social production and becomes a specific and decisive choice between the
alternative uses of a certain knowledge, an invention of interfaces situated between
crystallized information and social use, between cognitive architecture and an ecology of communication. Obviously, this
doesn’t prevent politics from continuing to celebrate its ever more excessive rituals. But these rituals have lost their
efficacy; their only consequences are internal to politics itself . But if this is what is happening to politics, what about
distinguished in the sphere of project-oriented consciousness, but they live on the same operational plane.
economics, both as a discipline and as a field defining human activity? Is economics still a science when the determining factors in the economic field are becoming
unstable and immaterial, when they seem to elude the quantifying rules which are at the core of economics as a conceptualizing system? Keynes,
the postKeynesians and the neo-classicists alike cast the economy in a model in which a few constants drive
the entire machinery. The model we now need would have to see the economy as “ecology,”
“environment,” “configuration,” and as composed of several integrative spheres: a
“microeconomy” of individuals and firms, especially transnational ones; a “macroeconomy”
of national governments; and a world economy. Every earlier economic theory postulated that one such economy totally controls;
all others are dependent and “functions.” […] But economic reality now is one of three such economies. […]. None totally controls the other three;
none is totally controlled by the others. Yet none is fully independent from the others, either. Such complexity can barely be described. It
cannot be analyzed since it allows of no prediction. To give us a functioning economic theory, we thus need a new synthesis that simplifies
– but so far there is no sign of it. And if no such synthesis emerges, we might be at the end of economic theory.25 Economics became a
science when, with the expansion of capitalism, rules were established as general principles for productive activity and exchange. But if we want
these rules to function we must be able to quantify the basic productive act. The time-atom described by Marx is the keystone of modern
The ability to quantify the time necessary for the production of a commodity makes
possible the regulation of the entire set of economic relations. But when the main element in
economics.
the global productive cycle is the unforeseeable work of the mind, the unforeseeable work of
language,when self-reproducing information becomes the universal commodity, it is no
longer possible to reduce the totality of exchanges and relations to an economic rule. In any
system as complex as the economy of a developed country, the statistically insignificant events, the events at the margin, are likely to be the
decisive events, short range at least. By definition they can neither be anticipated nor prevented. Indeed, they cannot always be identified even
after they have had their impact.26 Economic science doesn’t seem able to understand the current transition because it is founded on a
quantitative and mechanistic paradigm that could comprehend and regulate industrial production, the physical manipulation of mechanical
matter,
but is unable to explain and regulate the process of immaterial production based on
an activity that can’t easily be reduced to quantitative measurements and the repetition of
constants: mental activity. Information and communication technologies are disrupting the social and economical mechanisms of
the developed countries. The current indicators of traditional macroeconomics are becoming obsolete and of little significance; moreover, the
place and function of economics itself as we still see it are put into question. The phenomenon of growth without job creation devalues a
whole series of concepts. This is how even the concept of productivity fails to resist the challenge raised by the new realities. With the new
technologies, the majority of production costs are determined by research and equipment expenses that actually precede the productive process. Little by little, in
digitalized and automated enterprises, production is no longer subjected to the variations concerning the quantity of operational factors. Marginal cost, marginal
profits: these bases of neoclassical economic calculations have lost a good part of their meaning. The traditional elements of salary and price calculation are crumbling
down.27 Robin’s analysis shows that economic categories can’t explain the majority of the processes that are truly meaningful in our time, and the reason clearly
Therefore, the determination of
value – the keystone of classical economy both as a science and as daily economic practice –
becomes aleatory and indefinable. In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard wrote: The reality principle corresponded to a certain
consists in the fact that mental work is not quantifiable like the work performed by an industrial worker.
stage of the law of value. Today the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code
and simulation. The principle of simulation governs us now, rather than the outdated reality principle. Finalities have disappeared, the models
generate us now. […] Capital no longer belongs to the order of political economy: it operates with political economy as its simulated
model. With the digitalizing of production, the abstraction of capital makes a qualitative leap. Not only is production an abstract production of
value, but the economic indicators are autonomous from the system of production, and are constituted as a synchronic, structural, selfreferential, and autonomous system, independent from the real world. The increasingly financial nature of our economy means exactly
this. The stock markets are the places where obsessions, psychological expectations, fears, play, and apocalyptic ideologies regulate the
game. Realist economies were governed by their goals, the naïve goal of producing use value for the satisfaction of specific needs, or the subtler
it is impossible to explain our economies on the
basis of their goals, whether we identify them with the intentions of certain individuals or
certain groups or with the goals of an entire society. The economy is governed by a code, not
by its goals: Finality is there in advance, inscribed in the code. We can see that nothing has changed – the order of goals has simply
ceded its place to a molecular play, as the order of signifieds has yielded to the play of
infinitesimal signifiers, reduced to their aleatory commutation. 29 The economy therefore
appears as a hyper-reality, a simulated, double, and artificial world that cannot be translated in terms of real production. The
goal of valorization as the increase of invested capital. Now, instead,
mental nature of today’s economy is not only expressed by the technological transformation of the productive process, but by the global code in
charge of interpreting the process constituting our entire world. Consequently, the science of economics can no longer explain the
fundamental dynamics governing humanity’s productive activities; nor can it explain their crisis. Economics has to be replaced by a global
science whose characteristics and field of inquiry are still unknown: a science that would be able to study the processes of formation of
Cyberspace, understood as the global network of signs-commodities. In an interview published in 1993 by the Californian magazine Wired, Peter
Drucker develops once again the theme of the inadequacy of economic categories associated with the digitalization of productive processes: International economic
The traditional factors of production – land, labor, and capital – are becoming
restraints rather than driving forces.Knowledge is becoming the one critical factor of production. It has two incarnations: knowledge
theory is obsolete.
applied to existing processes, services, and products is productivity; knowledge applied to the new is innovation. […] Knowledge has become the central, key resource
that knows no geography. It underlies the most significant and unprecedented social phenomenon of this century. No class in history has ever risen as fast as the bluecollar worker and no class has fallen as fast. All within less than a century. Furthermore, Drucker remarks that the concept of intellectual property, which is the
juridical concept that was at the basis of classical economy and of the capitalist system, no longer has any meaning in an age when the circulating commodity is
We have to rethink the whole concept of intellectual property
information and the market is the info-sphere:
, which
was focused on the printed word. Perhaps within a few decades, the distinction between electronic transmissions and the printed word will have disappeared. The only
solution may be a universal licensing system. Where you basically become a subscriber, and where it is taken for granted that everything that is published is
The system of property regarding the
products of intellectual labor no longer works in the age of the reproducibility of information .
reproduced. In other words, if you don’t want everybody to know, don’t talk about it.
As a conclusion to these observations on the obsolescence of economics as a generalized interpretive code, I would like to quote André Gorz, who writes in his
Métamorphoses du travail: Discipline by means of money is a hetero-regulation that interrupts the communicational infrastructure ensuring the
symbolic reproduction of the experiential world. This means that all the activities that transmit or reproduce cultural acquisitions, knowledge,
taste, manners, language, mores […], and that allow us to find our bearings in the world as givens, certitudes, values, and self-explanatory norms;
all these activities cannot be regulated by money or by the state without causing serious pathologies in our world of experience. Money (i.e. economics) and the
State (i.e. politics) are no longer able to govern or to discipline the world of production, now that its center is no longer a de-brained force, a uniform and quantifiable
That center is now occupied by mind flows, by the ethereal substance of
intelligence, which eludes every measurement and cannot be subjected to any rule without
inducing enormous pathologies and causing a truly maddening paralysis of cognition and
affectivity.
time of manual work.
This focus on rational economic science has created a bloodthirsty form of capitalism
that erases affective engagements with desire and makes violence inevitable neoliberalism constantly produces crisis to rationalize its capacity for control - this
makes the destruction of all life the very impulse of the economy
James Wiltgen 2005 (Professor of History and Critical Theory at CalArts, "Sado-Moneatrism or Saint Fond – Saint Ford", in Consumption
in the Age of Information, ed. Cohen and Rutsky, BERG, New York, p. 107-10 6 [NN])
How does digital capitalism intertwine with the concept of uncertainty? What key changes have taken
place in the structuring of the world, via the digital and the biotechnological, what forces have emerged or
coalesced, and finally, how do they affect the realm of subjectivity and consumption? Here, Arthur Kroker has transposed
McLuhan into the twenty-first century, performing an interrogation of what he calls the “digital nerve,” basically the exteriorization of the human sensorium into the
This (in)formation, “streamed capitalism,” rests not exclusively
on exchange value, nor material goods, but something much more immaterial, – a post market, post
biological, post image society where the driving force, the “will to will,” has ushered in a world
measured by probability. In other words, this variant of capitalism seeks to bind chaos by everincreasing strictures, utilizing an axiomatic based on capture and control, with vast circuits of
circulation as the primary digital architecture. This system runs on a densely articulated composition, similar to the
earlier addressed concept of sado-monetarism, based upon extensive feedback loops running between exchange value and abuse
value. This assemblage, however, has multiple levels, and not all are connected to the grid at the same speeds; a number of different times exist within this
digital circuitry of contemporary capitalism (Kroker, 2004: 81).
formation, including digital time, urban time, quotidian time, transversal time, etc. Spatially, the structure relies not on geography but “strategic digital nodes” for the
core of the system, and connectivity radiates out from these nodal points (Kroker, 2004: 125). For example, a key site for these points would be the Net corporation,
a self-regulating, self- reflexive platform of software intelligence providing a privileged portal into the digital universe” (Kroker, 2004: 140).
digital capitalism has clear parallels with the shifts Katherine Hayles analyzes, in particular the underlying,
driving mechanism whereby information severs itself from embodiment. Boredom and acquisitiveness become the
defined as “as
Indeed, his mapping of
principle markers of this new form of capitalism, which provides a rationale, or a new value set for the perpetual oscillation between the two poles, producing an
insatiable desire for both objects and a continuing stream of fresh and intense experience. Perhaps the most densely argued assessment of capitalism, whose obvious
parallel would be Marx’s Capital, is the two volumes by Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. With all the concern over the theoretical
it remains extremely important to understand the analysis as possessing a
fundamental focus on the question of political economy. Capitalism forms, via its structural and
affective matrix, a system capable of unparalleled cruelty and terror, and even though certain
indices of well being have increased, “exploitation grows constantly harsher, (and) lack is
arranged in the most scientific ways” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983: 373). Their framework for analysis targets the global, where the deepest
law of capitalism sets limits and then repels those limits, a process well known as the concept of deterrorialization. Capitalism functions, then, by
incessantly increasing the portion of constant capital, a deceptively concise formulation that has
tremendous resonance for the organization of the planet – resources continually pour into the
technological and machinic apparatus of capture and control, to the increased exclusion of the
human component (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 466–7). In other words, it not only thrives on crisis but one of the
principle definitions of capitalism would be to continually induce crisis; nostalgia for a “lost SadoMonetarism or Saint Fond-Saint Ford 109 time” only drives these processes. The planet confronts the fourth danger, the most
concepts developed in these books,
violent and destructive of tendencies, characterized as a turning to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1987: 229). Deleuze
and Guattari make clear this fourth danger does not translate as a death
drive, because for them desire is “always assembled,” a creation and a composition; here the task
of thinking becomes to address the processes of composition. The current assemblage, then, has mutated from its
original organization of total war, which has been surpassed “toward a form of peace more terrifying still,” the “peace of Terror or Survival”
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 433). Accordingly, the worldwide war
machine has entered a post fascist phase, where
Clausewitz has been dislocated, and this war machine now targets the entire world, its peoples and economies. An “ unspecified
enemy”
becomes the continual feedback loop for this war machine, which had been originally constituted
by states, but which has now shifted into a planetary, and perhaps interstellar mode, with a
seemingly insatiable drive to organize insecurity, increase machinic enslavement, and produce a
“peace that technologically frees the unlimited material process of total war” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987:
467).7 Deleuze has analyzed these tendencies extensively in his own work, in particular with his dissection of active and reactive forces in his
book on Nietzsche but also in his work on Sade and Masoch, where he points to a type of sadism that seems capable of attempting a
“perpetually
effective crime,” to not only destroy (pro)creation but to prevent it from ever
happening again, a total and perpetual destruction, one produced by a pervasive odium fati, a hatred of fate that seeks
absolute revenge in destroying life and any possible recurrence. (Deleuze, 1989: 37). This tendency far outstrips what Robert Jay Lifton has
described as the “Armageddonists,” in their more commonly analyzed religious variant and in what he calls the secular type, both of which see
the possibility of a “world cleansing,” preparing the way for a new world order, be it religious or otherwise (Lifton, 1987: 5–9). Embedded within
the immanence of capitalism, then, one can find forces which would make fascism seem like “child precursors,” and Hitler’s infamous Telegram
71 would be applied to all of existence, perpetually. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 467). One final complication in terms of currently emerging
subjectivities, the well-known analysis in Anti-Oedipus where capitalism,
as basically driven by a certain fundamental
insanity, oscillates between “two poles of delirium, one as the molecular schizophrenic line of
escape, and the other as paranoiac molar investment” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983: 315).8 These two markers
offer dramatically different possibilities for the issues of subjectivities and agency, and questions
of consumption and the political can be posed within their dense and complex oscillations.
The neoliberal crisis described by the affirmative was precipitated by a high produced by
affect in its attempt to resolve depression - Affect is the cause of the depression and the
affirmative's attempt to use debate to offer ethcis will only magnify the impact.
Franco Bifo Berardi 2009 (Professor and Pirate, The Soul at Work, Semiotext(e), p. 166-67)
Advertising, reasserts at every street corner, at every moment, day and night, the freedom of
infinite consumption, the joys of property and of victory through competition. In the 1990s, capitalism
mobilized an immense intellectual, creative, and psychological energy in order to start the valorization process of the collective intellectual
network. But by imposing
an unlimited systematic exploitation on the human mind, the productive
acceleration created the conditions for an extraordinary psychological breakdown. “Prozac culture” was
another name for the emerging new economy. Hundreds of thousands of Western economic operators and managers
made innumerable decisions under conditions of chemical euphoria, while they were “high”
from their abuse of psychotropic drugs. But the human organism cannot take endless chemical euphoria and productive
fanaticism: at some point, it begins to surrender. As happens with patients affected by bipolar disorder, euphoria is
replaced by a long-term depression hitting the very source of one’s own motivations, entrepreneurship, self-esteem, desire, and
sex appeal. We cannot fully understand the crisis of the new economy without taking into account
the fact that it coincided with a Prozac-crash. The cognitive worker’s individual depression is
not a consequence of the economic crisis, but its very reason. It would be easy to imagine that
depression is a consequence of business going badly; after years happily spent working with
profit, stocks’ values collapse and the new brain workers fell into a deep depression. This is not the
case. Depression comes from the fact that our emotional, physical, and intellectual energy can’t bear the rhythm imposed by competition and
chemical-ideological euphoria inducers for long. The market is a psycho-semiotic space, where one can find signs and expectations for meaning,
desires, and projections. There
is an energetic crisis that affects mental and psychic energies. Once this
crisis exploded, a new effort was made to motivate the depressed Western psycology with a
powerful amphetamine therapy: war. But only a sick person would take amphetamines as a
reaction to a depressive crisis. The most likely result will be deeper and deeper relapses.
Our alternative is to exhaust debate
Bifo 2011 (Franco Berardi, Professor of Social History and Communication at the Academia di belle Arti in Milan and Founder of
A/Traverse, After the Future, ed. Genesko%26Thoburn, AKPress, p. 135-139)
Time is in the mind. The essential limit to growth is the mental impossibility to enhance time
(Cybertime) beyond a certain level. I think that we are here touching upon a crucial point. The process of re-composition, of
conscious and collective subjectivation, finds here a new – paradoxical – way. Modern radical
thought has always seen the process of subjectivation as an energetic process: mobilization,
social desire and political activism, expression, participation have been the modes of conscious
collective subjectivation in the age of the revolutions. But in our age energy is running out, and desire which has given soul to modern
social dynamics is absorbed in the black hole of virtualization and financial games, as Jean Baudrillard (1993a) argues in his book Symbolic
Exchange and Death, first published in 1976. In this book Baudrillard analyzes the hyper-realistic stage of capitalism, and the instauration of the
logic of simulation. Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive
medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense,
reinforced through its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object: no longer the object
of representation, but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal. […] The reality principle corresponds to a certain
stage of the law of value. Today the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and
simulation. The principle of simulation governs us now, rather that the outdated reality principle. We feed on those forms whose finalities have
disappeared. No more ideology, only simulacra. We
must therefore reconstruct the entire genealogy of the law of
value and its simulacra in order to grasp the hegemony and the enchantment of the current
system. A structural revolution of value. This genealogy must cover political economy, where it will appear as a second-order simulacrum,
just like all those that stake everything on the real: the real of production, the real of signification, whether conscious or unconscious. Capital no
longer belongs to the order of political economy: it operates with political economy as its simulated model. The entire apparatus of the
commodity law of value is absorbed and recycled in the larger apparatus of the structural law of value, this becoming part of the third order of
simulacra. Political economy is thus assured a second life, an eternity, within the confines of an apparatus in which it has lost all its strict
determinacy, but maintains an effective presence as a system of reference for simulation. (Baudrillard 1993a: 2) ¶ Simulation is the new plane of
consistency of capitalist growth: financial speculation, for instance, has displaced the process of exploitation from the sphere of material
production to the sphere of expectations, desire, and immaterial labor. The simulation process (Cyberspace) is proliferating without limits,
irradiating signs that go everywhere in the attention market. The
brain is the market, in semiocapitalist hyper-reality.
And the brain is not limitless, the brain cannot expand and accelerate indefinitely. The process of
collective subjectivation (i.e. social recomposition) implies the development of a common languageaffection which is essentially happening in the temporal dimension. The semiocapitalist acceleration of time has
destroyed the social possibility of sensitive elaboration of the semio-flow. The proliferation of simulacra in the info-sphere has saturated the
space of attention and imagination. Advertising
and stimulated hyper-expression (“just do it”), have submitted the
energies of the social psyche to permanent mobilization. Exhaustion follows, and exhaustion is the only way of
escape: ¶ Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that
the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. The system turns on itself, as a scorpion does when encircled by
the challenge of death. For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit suicide in
response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide. So hostages are taken. On the symbolic or sacrificial plane, from which every moral
consideration of the innocence of the victims is ruled out the hostage is the substitute, the alter-ego of the terrorist, the hostage’s death for the
terrorist. Hostage and terrorist may thereafter become confused in the same sacrificial act. (Baudrillard 1993a: 37) ¶ In these impressive pages
Baudrillard outlines the end of the modern dialectics of revolution against power, of the labor movement against capitalist domination, and
predicts the advent of a new form of action which will be marked by the sacrificial gift of death (and self-annihilation). After the destruction of
the World Trade Center in the most important terrorist act ever, Baudrillard wrote a short text titled The Spirit of Terrorism where he goes back to
his own predictions and recognizes the emergence of a catastrophic age. When the code becomes the enemy the only strategy can be catastrophic:
¶ all the counterphobic ravings about exorcizing evil: it is because it is there, everywhere, like an obscure object of desire. Without this deepseated complicity, the event would not have had the resonance it has, and in their symbolic strategy the terrorists doubtless know that they can
count on this unavowable complicity. (Baudrillard 2003: 6) ¶ This goes much further than hatred for the dominant global power by the
disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong side of global order. This
malignant desire is in the very heart of
those who share this order’s benefits. An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive power is
happily universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center embodied perfectly, in their
very double-ness (literally twin-ness), this definitive order: No need, then, for a death drive or a
destructive instinct, or even for perverse, unintended effects. Very logically – inexorably – the
increase in the power heightens the will to destroy it. And it was party to its own destruction. When the two towers
collapsed, you had the impression that they were responding to the suicide of the suicide-planes with their own suicides. It has been said that
“Even God cannot declare war on Himself.” Well, He can. The West, in position of God (divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy), has
become suicidal, and declared war on itself. (Baudrillard 2003: 6-7) ¶ In Baudrillard’s catastrophic vision I
see a new way of
thinking subjectivity: a reversal of the energetic subjectivation that animates the revolutionary
theories of the 20th century, and the opening of an implosive theory of subversion, based on
depression and exhaustion
***Links***
Link-Neolib
The affirmative’s economic presupposes a neoliberal form of subjectivity that they
superimpose upon the world in order to justify mass violence and homogenization.
This causes constant economic crisis, transition wars, and social death.
Bifo 2011 (Franco Berardi, Professor of Social History and Communication at the Academia di belle Arti in Milan and Founder of
A/Traverse, After the Future, ed. Genesko%26Thoburn, AKPress, p. 141-47)
The financial cycle is bleeding the social environment dry: sucking energies, resources, and the future. And giving
nothing back. Recovery of the financial process of valorization of capital is totally separated from the cycle of material production and social
demand. Financial capitalism has obtained autonomy from social life. Let’s consider the political side of the same problem: once upon a time
when society was suffering the blows of recession, workers reacted with strikes, struggle and political organization, and forced state intervention
What is impressive in the ongoing
crisis, on the contrary, is the widespread passivity of the workers, their inability to unionize. The political
in order to increase demand. Industrial growth needed mass consumption and social stability.
trend in Europe is the meltdown of leftist parties and the labor movement. In the US, Obama is daily attacked by racist and populist mobs, but no
progressive social movement is emerging. 1.2 million people have had their mortgages foreclosed upon and lost their houses following the subprime swindle, but no organized reaction has surfaced. People suffer and cry alone. In the old time of industrialed into billions of financial
segments, and disseminated into millions of financial agents scattered all around the world. The workers themselves are part of recombinant
financial capital. They are expecting future revenues from their pension fund investments. They own stock options in the enterprise exploiting
their labor. They are hooked up, like a fly in a spider web, and if they move, they get strangled, but if they don’t move, the
spider will suck their life from them. Society may rot, fall apart, agonize. It is not going to affect the political and economic stability of
So the recession is over, capitalism is
recovering. Nonetheless, unemployment is rising and misery is spreading. This means that financial
capitalism. What is called economic recovery is a new round of social devastation.
capitalism is autonomous from society. Capitalism doesn’t need workers: it just needs cellular fractals of labor, underpaid, precarious, depersonalised. Fragments of impersonal nervous energy, recombined by the network. The crisis is going to push forward technological change, and
The employment rate is not going to rise in the future, and
productivity will increase. A shrinking number of workers will be forced to produce more and more, and to work overtime. The real
the substitution of human labor with machines.
bubble is the work bubble. We have been working too much; we are still working too much. The human race does not need more goods, it needs
a redistribution of existing goods, an intelligent application of technology and a worldwide cut in the lifetime dedicated to labor. Social energies
have to be freed from labor dependence, and returned to the field of social affection, education, and therapy. We should take seriously the concept
of autonomy. In the present condition autonomy means exodus from the domain of economic law: Out-onomy, abandonment of the field of
economic exchange, self-organization of knowledge and of production in a sphere of social life which is no longer dependent on economic
culture and expectations – barter, free exchange of time and of competence, food self reliance, occupation of territories in the cities, organization
of self-defense. The fantastic collapse that has shaken the global economy since September 2008 has opened a new phase in the history of the
world. After some months of amazement and confusion, media, political institutions and economists have started to repeat the self-reassuring
mantra: recovery is coming soon. I do not know what will happen next, but I think that the word recovery means very little in the current
situation. What is sure, in my opinion, is that the workers will not recover if neoliberal ideology is not abandoned, and if the myth of growth is
not substituted with a new kind of narration. Unemployment is rising everywhere and salaries are falling. And the huge debt accumulated for the
economic rationality is at odds with social
rationality. Economic science is not part of the solution to the crisis: it is the source of the
problem. On July 18th 2009 the headline of The Economist read: “What went wrong with economics?” The text is an attempt to
downplay the crisis of the Economics profession, and of economic knowledge. For neoliberal
economists the central dogma of growth, profit and competition cannot be questioned, because it is
identified with the perfect mathematical rationality of the market. And belief in the intrinsic
rationality of the market is crucial in the economic theology of neoliberalism. But the reduction of
social life to the rational exchange of economic values is an obsession that has nothing to do with
science. It’s a political strategy aimed to identify humans as calculating machines, aimed to shape
rescue of the banks is weighing upon the future of society. More than ever,
behavior and perception in such a way that money becomes the only motivation of social action. But it is not accurate as a description of social
is an attempt at creating the
anthropological brand of homo calculans that Foucault (2008) has described in his seminar of 1979/80,
published with the title The Birth of Biopolitics. This attempt to identify human beings with
calculating devices has produced cultural devastation, and has finally been showed to have been based
dynamics, and the conflicts, pathologies, and irrationality of human relationships. Rather, it
upon flawed assumptions. Human beings do calculate, but their calculation is not perfectly rational, because the value of goods is
not determined by objective reasons, and because decisions are influenced by what Keynes named animal spirits. “We will never really
understand important economic events unless we confront the fact that their causes are largely mental in nature,” say Akerlof and Shiller (2009:
1) in their book Animal Spirits, echoing Keynes’s assumption that the rationality of the market is not perfect in itself. Akerlof and Shiller are
avowing the crisis of neoliberal thought, but their critique is not radical enough, and does not touch the legitimacy of the economic episteme.
Animal Spirits is the title of an other book, by Matteo Pasquinelli (2008). Pasquinelli’s book deals with bodies and digits, and parasites, and goes
much deeper in its understanding of the roots of the crisis than its eponymous publication: “Cognitive capitalism emerges in the form of a
parasite: it subjects social knowledge and inhibits its emancipatory potential” (Pasquinelli 2008: 93). “Beyond the computer screen, precarious
workers and freelancers experience how Free Labor and competition are increasingly devouring their everyday life” (Pasquinelli 2008: 15).
Pasquinelli goes to the core of the problem:
the virtualization of social production has acted as the proliferation
of a parasite, destroying the prerequisites of living relationships, absorbing and neutralizing the
living energies of cognitive workers. The economic recession is not only the effect of financial
craziness, but also the effect of the de-vitalization of the social field. This is why the collapse of the economic
system is also the collapse of economic epistemology that has guided the direction of politics in the last two centuries. Economics cannot
understand the depth of the crisis, because below the crisis of financial exchange there is the crisis of symbolic exchange. I mean the psychotic
boom of panic, depression, and suicide, the general decline of desire and social empathy. The question that rises from the collapse is so radical
that the answer cannot be found in the economic conceptual framework. Furthermore, one must ask if economics really is a science? If the word
“science” means the creation of concepts for the understanding and description of an object, economics is not a science. Its object does not exist.
The economic object (scarcity, salaried labor, and profit) is not an object that exists before and outside the performative action of the economic
Production, consumption, and daily life become part of the economic discourse when
labor is detached and opposed to human activity, when it falls under the domination of capitalist
rule. The economic object does not pre-exist conceptual activity, and economic description is in fact a normative action. In this sense
episteme.
Economics is a technique, a process of semiotization of the world, and also a mythology, a narration. Economics is a suggestion and a categorical
imperative: Money makes things happen. It is the source of action in the world and perhaps the only power we invest in. Life seems to depend on
it. Everything within us would like to say that it does not, that this cannot be. But the Almighty Dollar has taken command. The more it is denied
the more it shows itself as Almighty. Perhaps in every other respect, in every other value, bankruptcy has been declared, giving money the power
of some sacred deity, demanding to be recognized. Economics no longer persuades money to behave. Numbers cannot make the beast lie down
and be quiet or sit up and do tricks. At best, economics is a neurosis of money, a symptom contrived to hold the beast in abeyance…. Thus
economics shares the language of psychopathology – inflation, depression, lows and highs, slumps and peaks, investments and losses. (Sordello
1983) From the age of the enclosures in England the economic process has been a process of production of scarcity (scarcification). The
enclosures were intended to scarcify the land, and the basic means of survival, so that people who so far had been able to cultivate food for their
family were forced to become proletarians, then salaried industrial workers. Capitalism is based on the artificial creation of need, and economic
science is essentially a technique of scarcification of time, life and food. Inside the condition of scarcity human beings are subjected to
capitalism has scarcified time
itself, forcing people who don’t have property other than their own life and body, to lend their
life-time to capital. Now the capitalist obsession for growth is making scarce both water and air.
Economic science is not the science of prediction: it is the technique of producing, implementing, and pushing
scarcity and need. This is why Marx did not speak of economy, but of political economy. The
exploitation and to the domain of profit-oriented activity. After scarcifying the land (enclosures)
technique of economic scarcification is based on a mythology, a narration that identifies richness as property and acquisition, and subjugates the
possibility of living to the lending of time and to the transformation of human activity into salaried work. In recent decades, technological change
has slowly eroded the very foundations of economic science. Shifting from the sphere of production of material objects to the semiocapitalist
production of immaterial goods, the Economic concepts are losing their foundation and legitimacy. The basic categories of Economics are
becoming totally artificial. The theoretical justification of private property, as you read in the writings of John Locke, is based on the need of
exclusive consumption. An apple must be privatized, if you want to avoid the danger that someone else eats your apple. But what happens when
goods are immaterial, infinitely replicable without cost? Thanks to digitalization and immaterialization of the production process, the economic
nomos of private property loses its ground, its raison d’etre, and it can be imposed only by force. Furthermore, the very foundation of salary, the
relationship between time needed for production and value of the product, is vanishing. The immaterialization and cognitivization of production
makes it almost impossible to quantify the average time needed to produce value. Time and value become incommensurable, and violence
becomes the only law able to determine price and salary. The neoliberal school, which has opened the way to the worldwide deregulation of
social production, has fostered the mythology of rational expectations in economic exchange, and has touted the idea of a selfregulation of the
market, first of all the labor-market. But self-regulation is a lie. In
order to increase exploitation, and to destroy social welfare,
global capitalism has used political institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization,
not to mention the military enforcement of the political decisions of these institutions. Far from being
self-regulated, the market is militarily regulated. The mythology of free individuals loyally competing on the base of perfect knowledge of the
the myth of rational expectations has
finally crashed after the explosion of the real estate mortgage bubble. The theory of rational
expectation is crucial in neoliberal thought: the economic agents are supposed to be free to choose in a perfectly rational
market is a lie, too. Real human beings are not perfect rational calculating machines. And
way the best deal in selling and buying. The fraud perpetrated by the investment agencies has destroyed the lives of millions of Americans, and
has exposed the theoretical swindle. Economic exchange cannot be described as a rational game, because irrational factors play a crucial role in
social life in general. Trickery, misleading information, and psychic manipulation are not exceptions, but the professional tools of advertisers,
financial agents, and economic consultants. The idea that social relationships can be described in mathematical terms has the force of myth, but it
is not science, and it has nothing to do with natural law. Notwithstanding the failure of the theory, neoliberal politics are still in control of the
global machine, because the criminal class that has seized power has no intention of stepping down, and because the social brain is unable to
recompose and find the way of self-organization. I read in the New York Times on September 6th 2009: After the mortgage business imploded
last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one. The bankers
plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash, depending on the life expectancy of the insured
person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds of thousands together into bonds. They will
then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die. The earlier the
policyholder dies, the bigger the return, though if people live longer than expected investors could get poor returns or even lose money. Imagine
that I buy an insurance policy on my life (something I would absolutely not do). My insurer of course will wish me a long life, so I’ll pay the fee
for a long time, while he should pay lots of money to my family if I die. But some enlightened finance guru has the brilliant idea of insuring the
insurer. He buys the risk, and he invests on the hope that I die soon. You don’t need the imagination of Philip K. Dick to guess the follow up of
the story: financial agents will be motivated to kill me overnight. The talk of recovery is based on necronomy, the economy of death. It’s not new,
as capitalism has always profited from wars, slaughters and genocides. But now the equation becomes unequivocal. Death is the promise, death is
the investment and the hope. Death is the best future that capitalism may secure. The logic of speculation is different from the logic of spectacle
that was dominant in late-modern times. Spectacle is the mirrorization of life, the transfer of life in the mirror of spectacular accumulation.
Speculation is the subjugation of the future to its financial mirror, the substitution of present life with future money that will never come, because
death will come before. The lesson that we must learn from the first year of the global recession is sad: neoliberal folly is not going away, the
financial plungers will not stop their speculation, and corporations will not stop their exploitation, and the political class, largely controlled by the
corporate lobbies, is unwilling or unable to protect society from the final assault. In 1996 J. G. Ballard (1996: 188) wrote: “the most perfect crime
of all – when the victims are either willing, or aren’t aware that they are victims”. Democracy seems unable to stop the criminal class that has
seized control of the economy, because the decisions are no longer made in the sphere of political opinion, but in the inaccessible sphere of
The economy has been declared the basic standard of decision, and the
economists have systematically identified Economy with the capitalist obsession of growth. No
economic automatism.
room for political choice has been left, as the corporate principles have been embedded in the technical fabric of language and imagination.
Link-Knowledge econ
The 1AC is a typical investment in the thought cycle of capital. This type of investment
in academic spheres sustains the realm of capital. We must first resist capital at the
level of the symbolic
Bifo 2007 (Franco Berardi, Professor of Social History and Communication at the Academia di belle Arti in Milan and Founder of
A/Traverse “Schizo-Economy” Pg. 84-85 muse [NN])
as a social and, more precisely, a socio-communicative
epidemic. If you want to survive you have to be competitive; if you want to be competitive you have to be connected—
Today psychopathology reveals itself more and more clearly
you have to continually receive and process an immense and growing mass of data. This provokes constant attention stress and a reduction in the
Depression, panic,
anxiety, a sense of solitude, existential misery. But these individual symptoms cannot be isolated
indefinitely, as psychopathology has done until now, and as economic power wants them to be.
time available for affectivity. These two closely linked tendencies spell devastation for the individual psyche.
It’s not possible to say: “You’re exhausted, go take a vacation at Club Med, take a pill, go on a cure, get off my balls, recover in the psychiatric
hospital, kill yourself.” It’s no longer possible, for the simple reason that the issue is no longer a small minority of crazies or a marginal number
of depressives. t’s a question of a growing
mass of existential misery threatening to explode in the center of the
social system. It’s also necessary to consider this decisive fact: as long as capital needed to suck physical energy
from its exploited and from its slaves, psychopathology could remain relatively marginal. Your psychic suffering
didn’t matter much to capital when you only had to turn screws and handle a lathe. You could be as sad as a solitary fly in a bottle;
your productivity was hardly affected because your muscles still functioned. Today capital needs mental energies, psychic
energies. And they’re exactly what’s going to hell. That’s why psychopathology is exploding at the center of the social scene. The
economic crisis results largely from the spread of sadness, depression, panic, lack of motivation.
The crisis of the new economy was provoked in considerable part by a crisis of motivation, by a waning of the artificial euphoria of the 1990s.
This has led to disinvestment and, in part, to a fall in consumption. In general, unhappiness
functions as a stimulus to consumption; to purchase something is to suspend one’s anxiety, to
counteract one’s loneliness, but only up to a point. Beyond that point, suffering has a negative effect on
the desire to purchase. So conflicting strategies are developed. The masters of the world certainly don’t want
humanity to be happy, because a happy humanity would not let itself get caught up in
productivity, the discipline of work or hypermarkets. Nonetheless, techniques that can reduce happiness to a tolerable
level are being studied, in order to postpone or prevent a suicidal explosion, in order to induce
the desire to consume. What strategies will the collective organism follow in order to escape this factory of unhappiness? Is a strategy
of deceleration, of the reduction of complexity possible and conceivable? I don’t believe so. In human society, potentiality cannot be definitively
canceled out, even when it reveals itself to be lethal for the individual and, in all probability, for the species as well. Such potentiality is regulated
and kept under control for as long as possible, but in the end it is inevitably actualized, as happened (and will happen again) with the atomic
bomb. One possible strategy consists in the upgrading of the human organism, the mechanical adjustment of the human body and brain to a
a strategy of subtraction is possible, a
strategy of distancing oneself from the vortex—but only small communities will be able to
follow it, constituting spheres of existential, economic, and informational autonomy from the
world economy
hyper-fast infosphere. This is the strategy commonly defined as “post-human.” Finally,
***Impacts***
Depression
Not confronting Affect leads to deppression
Genosko and Thoburn 11—philosophers
(Gary and Nick, After the Future pg 6-7, dml)
Activism, Bifo argues, is the narcissistic response of the subject to the infinite and invasive power of capital, a
response that can only leave the activist frustrated, humiliated, and depressed. Bifo here locates this modern political
configuration with Lenin, and makes a most heretical statement: “I am convinced that the 20th century would have
been a better century had Lenin not existed”. He diagnoses this condition in these pages through a reading of
Lenin’s bouts of depression, but we would highlight that elsewhere Bifo also identifies the problem in Félix
Guattari, a most surprising move, given the sophistication of Guattari’s schizoanalytic critique of authoritarian
political subjectivation. Bifo developed his friendship with Guattari while in exile from Italy in the 1980s, a period
that Guattari characterized as his “winter years”, the coincidence of personal depression and neoliberal reaction.
Under these conditions, a certain political activism appeared central to Guattari, but not so to Bifo: “I remember that
in the 1980s Félix often scolded me because I was no longer involved in some kind of political militancy. … For me,
militant will and ideological action had become impotent” (Berardi 2008: 13). For Bifo, at times of reaction, of the
evacuation of political creativity from the social field, activism becomes a desperate attempt to ward off depression.
But it is doomed to fail, and, worse, to convert political innovation and sociality into its opposite, to “replace desire
with duty”: Félix knew this, I am sure, but he never said this much, not even to himself, and this is why he went to
all these meetings with people who didn’t appeal to him, talking about things that distracted him… And here again
is the root of depression, in this impotence of political will that we haven’t had the courage to admit. (Berardi 2008:
13) One can discern two aspects to Bifo’s analysis of depression. It is a product of the “panic” induced by the
sensory overload of digital capitalism, a condition of withdrawal, a disinvestment of energy from the competitive
and narcissistic structures of the enterprise. And it is also a result of the loss of political composition and
antagonism: “depression is born out of the dispersion of the community’s immediacy. Autonomous and desiring
politics was a proliferating community. When the proliferating power is lost, the social becomes the place of
depression” (Berardi 2008: 13). In both manifestations, depression is a real historical experience, something that
must be actively faced and engaged with – we cannot merely ward it off with appeals to militant voluntarism. We
need to assess its contours, conditions, products, to find an analytics of depression, and an adequate politics. And
that is the goal of this book, a first step toward a politics after the future, and after the redundant subjective forms of
which it was made.
***Alt***
Alt- Reject alt
The alternative is to vote negative to reject the 1AC. The economy and global capital
are crumbling around us - we should use the collapse as a site for organizing affective
singularity outside of the realm of economics
Bifo 2011 (Franco Berardi, Professor of Social History and Communication at the Academia di belle Arti in Milan and
Founder of A/Traverse, After the Future, ed. Genesko%26Thoburn, AKPress, p. 141-47)
Activism has generally conceived the process of subjectivation in terms of resistance. In his book
dedicated to Foucault, Gilles Deleuze speaks about subjectivity, and identifies processes of subjectivation
and resistance: “Is not life this capacity to resist force?” (Deleuze 1988: 77). I think that it is time to ask: what if
society can no more resist the destroying effects of unbounded capitalism? What if society can no more resist the devastating power of financial
accumulation? The identification of the subject with resistance is dangerous in a certain sense. Deleuze himself has written that when we escape
we are not only escaping, but also looking for a new weapon. We have to disentangle autonomy from resistance. And if
we want to do it we have to disentangle desire from energy. The prevailing focus of modern capitalism has been energy, the ability to produce, to
compete, to dominate. A sort of Energolatria has dominated the cultural scene of the West since Faust to the Futurists. The ever growing
availability of energy has been its dogma. Now we know that energy is not boundless. In the social psyche of the West, energy is fading away. I
we should reframe the concept and the practice of autonomy from this point of view. The
social body has become unable to reaffirm its rights against the wild assertiveness of capital,
because the pursuit of rights can never be dissociated from the exercise of force. When workers were strong in the 1960s and
’70s they did not restrict themselves to asking for their rights, to peaceful demonstrations of their will. They acted in solidarity,
think that
refusing to work, redistributing wealth, sharing things, services and spaces. Capitalists, on their side, do not merely ask or demonstrate, they do
They make things happen, they invest, disinvest, displace, they
destroy and they build. Only force makes autonomy possible in the relation between capital and
society. But what is force? What is force nowadays? The identification of desire with energy has produced the identification of force with
not simply declare their wish, they enact if.
violence that turned out so badly for the Italian movement in the 1970s and ’80s. We have to distinguish energy and desire. Energy is falling,
desire has to be saved nevertheless. Similarly, we have to distinguish force from violence. Fighting power with violence is suicidal or useless,
nowadays. How can we think of activists going against professional organizations of killers in the mold of Blackwater, Haliburton, secret
services, mafias? Only suicide has proved to be efficient in the struggle against power. And actually suicide has become decisive in the history of
our time. The dark side of the multitude meets here the loneliness of death. Activist culture should avoid the danger of becoming a culture of
Acknowledging the irreversibility of the catastrophic trends that capitalism has inscribed
in the history of society does not mean to renounce it. On the contrary, we have today a new cultural
task: to live the inevitable with a relaxed soul. To call forth a big wave of withdrawal, of massive dissociation,
of desertion from the scene of the economy, of non-participation in the fake show of politics. The
crucial focus of social transformation is creative singularity. The existence of singularities is not to be conceived as
resentment.
a personal way to salvation, they may become a contagious force. “Yes we can”, the headline of the campaign of Barack Obama, the three words
that mobilized the hope and political energies of the American people in 2008, have a disturbing echo just one year after the victory of the
democratic candidate. These words sound like an exorcism much more than like a promise. “Yes we can” may be read as a lapse in the Freudian
sense, a sign coming from the collective subconscious, a diversion from the hidden intuition that we can no more. The mantra of Barack Obama
has gathered the energies of the best part of the American people, and collected the best of the American cultural legacy. But what about the
results? So far Obama has been unable to deal with the global environmental threats, the effects of the geopolitical disaster produced by CheneyBush, the effects of the powerful lobbies imposing the interest of the corporations (for instance, of the private health insurers). When
we
think of the ecological catastrophe, of geopolitical threats, of economic collapse provoked by the
financial politics of neoliberalism, it’s hard to dispel the feeling that irreversible trends are
already at work inside the world machine. Political will seems paralyzed in the face of the
economic power of the criminal class. The age of modern social civilization seems on the brink of
dissolution, and it is hard to imagine how society will be able to react. Modern civilization was based on the convergence and integration of
the capitalist exploitation of labor force and the political regulation of social conflict. The regulator State, the heir of Enlightenment and
Socialism has been the guarantor of human rights and the negotiator of social balance. When, at the end of a ferocious class struggle between
work and capital – but also inside the capitalist class itself – the financial class has seized power by destroying the legal regulation and
Social Darwinist ideology has
legitimized the violent imposition of the law of the strongest, and the very foundations of
democracy have been reduced to rubble. This accelerated destruction of tolerance, culture and human feelings has given an
transforming the social composition, the entire edifice of modern civilization has begun to crumble.
unprecedented impulse to the process of accumulation and has increased the velocity and the extent of economic growth throughout the last two
The
war against society is waged at two different levels: at the economic level it is known under the
name of privatization, and it is based on the idea that every fragment and every cell of the
biological, affective linguistic spheres have to be turned into profit machines. The effect of this
decades of the 20th century. But all this has also created the premises of a war against human society that is underway in the new century.
privatization is the impoverishment of daily life, the loss of sensibility in the fields of sex, communication, and human relationships, and also the
increasing inequality between hyper-rich minority and a majority of dispossessed. At the social level this war is waged in terms of criminalization
and in-securization of the territory and of economic life. In large areas of the planet, that are growing and growing in extent, production and
exchange have become the ground of violent confrontation between military groups and criminal organization. Slavery, blackmail, extortion,
murder are integral parts of the lexicon of Economy. Scattered insurrections will take place in the coming years, but we should not expect much
from them. They’ll be unable to touch the real centers of power because of the militarization of metropolitan space, and they will not be able to
gain much in terms of material wealth or political power. As the long wave of counter-globalization moral protests could not destroy neoliberal
power, so the insurrections will not find a solution, not unless a new consciousness and a new sensibility surfaces and spreads, changing everyday
life, and creating Non-Temporary Autonomous Zones rooted in the culture and consciousness of the global network. Full employment is over.
The world does not need so much labor and so much exploitation. A radical reduction of labor-time is necessary. Basic income has to be affirmed
as a right to life independent of employment and disjoined from the lending of labor-time. Competence, knowledge, and skills have to be
We should not look at the
current recession only from an economic point of view. We must see it essentially as an
anthropological turning point that is going to change the distribution of world resources and
world power. Europe is doomed to lose its economic privilege, as 500 years of colonialism are ending. The debt that Western
people have accumulated is not only economic but also moral: the debt of oppression, violence
and genocide has to be paid now, and it’s not going to be easy. A large part of the European population is not
separated from the economic context of exchange value, and rethought in terms of free social activity.
prepared to accept the redistribution of wealth that the recession will impose. Europe, stormed by waves of migration, is going to face a growing
In the US, the victory of Barack Obama marks the beginning of
the end of the Western domination that was the premise of the modern capitalist system. A wave
of non-identitarian indigenous Renaissance is rising, especially in Latin America. The privatization of basic needs
racist threat. Ethnic war will be difficult to avoid.
(housing, transportation, food) and social services is based on the cultural identification of wealth and wellbeing with the amount of private
property owned. In the anthropology of modern capitalism, wellbeing has been equated with acquisition, never with enjoyment. In the course of
the social turmoil we are going to live through in the coming years, the identification of wellbeing with property has to be questioned. It’s a
political task, but above all it is a cultural task, and a psychotherapeutic one too. When it comes to semiotic products private property becomes
irrelevant, and in fact it is more and more difficult to enforce it. The campaigns against piracy are paradoxical because the real pirates are the
corporations that are desperately trying to privatize the product of the collective intelligence, and artificially trying to impose a tax on the
community of producers. The products of collective intelligence are immanently common because knowledge can neither be fragmented nor
privately owned. A new brand of communism was already springing from the technological transformations of digital networks, when the
collapse of the financial markets and neoliberal ideology exposed the frailty of the foundations of hyper-capitalism. Now we can predict a new
wave of transformation from the current collapse of growth and debt, and of private consumption as wellbeing. Because of these three forces –
commonality of knowledge, ideological crisis of private ownership, mandatory communalisation of need – a new horizon is visible and a new
landscape is going to surface. Communism is coming back. The
old face of communism, based on the Will and voluntarism of an
will not be resurrected.
A totally new brand of communism is going to surface as a form of necessity, the inevitable outcome
of the stormy collapse of the capitalist system. The communism of capital is a barbarian necessity. We must put
freedom in this necessity, we need to make of this necessity a conscious organised choice.
avantgarde, and on the paranoid expectations of a new totality was defeated at the end of the 20th century and
Communism is back, but we should name it in a different way because historical memory identified this particular form of social organization
The historical communism of the 20th century was based on the idea
of the primacy of totality over singularity. But the dialectical framework that defined the
communist movement of the 20th century has been completely abandoned and nobody will
resurrect it. The Hegelian ascendance played a major role in the formation of that kind of religious belief that was labeled “historicism”. The
with the political tyranny of a religion.
Aufhebung (abolition of the real in favor of the realization of the Idea) is the paranoid background of the whole conceptualization of communism.
Inside that dialectical framework, communism was viewed as an all encompassing totality expected to abolish and follow the capitalist all
encompassing totality. The subject (the will and action of the working class) was viewed as the instrument for the abolition of the old and the
instauration of the new. The industrial working class, being external to the production of concepts, could only identify with the mythology of
abolition and totalization, but the general intellect cannot do that. The general intellect does not need an expressive subject, such as was the
Leninist Party in the 20th century. The political expression of the general intellect is at one with its action of knowing, creating, and producing
signs.
We have abandoned the ground of dialectics in favour of the plural grounds of the dynamic
of singularization and the multilayered co-evolution of singularities. Capitalism is over, but it is
not going to disappear. The creation of Non-Temporary Autonomous Zones is not going to give birth to any totalization. We are not
going to witness a cathartic event of revolution, we’ll not see the sudden breakdown of state power. In the following years we’ll
witness a sort of revolution without a subject. In order to subjectivate this revolution we have to
proliferate singularities. This, in my humble opinion, is our cultural and political task. After abandoning the field of
the dialectics of abolition and totalization, we are now trying to build a theory of the dynamics of
recombination and singularization, a concept that is clearly drawn from the works of Félix
Guattari, particularly from his last book, Chaosmosis. By the word singularity I mean the expression of a never
seen before concatenation. The actor of this expression can be an individual, a collective but also
an event. We call it singularity if this actor recombines the multiple flows traversing its field of existence following a principle that is not
repetitive and referring to any preexisting form of subjected subjectivity. By the world singularity, I mean an agency that
does not follow any rule of conformity and repetition, and is not framed in any historical
necessity. Singularity is a process that is not necessary, because it is not implied in the consequentiality of history neither logically nor
materially. It is the emerging of a self-creative process. Rather than a swift change in the social
landscape, we should expect the slow surfacing of new trends: communities abandoning the field
the crumbling ruling economies, more and more individuals giving up their search for a job and
creating their own networks of services. The dismantling of industry is unstoppable for the simple reason that social life does
not need industrial labor anymore. The myth of growth is going to be abandoned and people will look for new modes of wealth distribution.
Singular communities will transform the very perception of wellbeing and wealth in the sense of frugality and freedom. The cultural revolution
that we need in this transition leads from the perception of wealth as the private ownership of a growing amount of goods that we cannot enjoy
because we are too busy purchasing the money needed for acquisition, to the perception of wealth as the enjoyment of an essential amount of
things that we can share with other people. The de-privatization of services and goods will be made possible by this much needed cultural
revolution. This will not happen in a planned and uniformed way, this will rather be the effect of the withdrawal of singular individuals and
communities, and the result of the creation of an economy of shared use of common goods and services and the liberation of time for culture,
pleasure and affection. While this process expands at the margins of society, the criminal class will hang on to its power and enforce more and
more repressive legislation, the majority of people will be increasingly aggressive and desperate. Ethnic civil war will spread all over Europe,
wrecking the very fabric of civil life. The proliferation of singularities (the withdrawal and building of NonTemporary Autonomous Zones) will
be a pacific process, but the conformist majority will react violently, and this is already happening. The conformist majority is frightened by the
fleeing away of intelligent energy and simultaneously is attacking the expression of intelligent activity. The situation can be described as a fight
between the mass ignorance produced by mediatotalitarianism and the shared intelligence of the general intellect. We cannot predict what the
outcome of this process will be. Our task is to extend and protect the field of autonomy, and to avoid as much as possible any violent contact with
the field of aggressive mass ignorance. This strategy of non-confrontational withdrawal will not always succeed. Sometimes confrontation will be
made inevitable by racism and fascism. It is impossible to predict what has to be done in the case of unwanted conflict. Non-violent reaction is
obviously the best choice, but it will not always be possible. The identification of wellbeing with private property is so deeply rooted that a
barbarization of the human environment cannot be completely ruled out. But the task of the general intellect is exactly this: fleeing from paranoia,
creating zones of human resistance, experimenting autonomous forms of production based on high-tech-low-energy production – whilst avoiding
confrontation with the criminal class and the conformist population. Politics and therapy will be one and the same activity in the coming time.
People will feel hopeless and depressed and panicking, because they are unable to deal with the post-growth economy, and because they will miss
the dissolving modern identity. Our cultural task will be attending to those people and taking care of their insanity, showing them the way of a
happy adaptation at hand. Our
task will be the creation of social zones of human resistance that act like
zones of therapeutic contagion. The process of autonomization has not to be seen as Aufhebung, but as therapy. In this
sense it is not totalizing and intended to destroy and abolish the past. Like psychoanalytic therapy it is rather to be
considered as an unending process.
*** 2nc Blocks ***
2nc Perm
Sequencing da- We’re in the new realm of capital. The semio-capital system has
hierarchized itself in the mind of the public. The fluidity of capital can never be
overcome without first destroying the business speed of thought
Bifo 2007 (Franco Berardi, Professor of Social History and Communication at the Academia di belle Arti in Milan and Founder of
A/Traverse “Schizo-Economy” Pg. 1-2 muse [NN])
Semio-capital is capital-flux that coagulates in semiotic artifacts without materializing itself. The
concepts forged by two centuries of economic thought seem to have disintegrated; they seem inoperative and incapable of
comprehending a great deal of the phenomena that have emerged in the sphere of social
production since the time when production became cognitive. Cognitive activity has always been at the basis of
human production, including production of a more mechanical variety. There is no human labor process that does not imply the exercise of
In the sphere of industrial labor, the
mind was put to work as a repetitive automatism, as the physiological support of muscular
movement. Today the mind is at work as innovation, as language and as a communicative relation. The subsumption of the mind under the
intelligence. But now cognitive capacity is becoming the essential productive resource.
process of capitalist valorization leads to a genuine mutation. The conscious and sensitive organism is submitted to competitive pressure, to an
acceleration of stimuli, to constant attentive stress. As a result, the mental environment, the info sphere in which the mind develops and enters
into relations with other minds, becomes a psychopathogenic environment. To understand semio-capital’s infinite game of mirrors, we must
outline a new disciplinary field delimited by three aspects: –the
critique of the political economy of connective
intelligence; –the semiology of linguistic-economic fluxes; –a psychochemistry of the infospheric environment that
studies the psycho pathogenic effects of economic exploitation on the human mind. The process of digital production is
tending to assume a biological form. It is becoming like an organism: the nervous system of an organization is analogous to the human nervous
Every industrial enterprise has “autonomic” systems, operational processes that must
function for its survival. What was lacking from organizations in the past were the links between pieces of information,
system.
corresponding to neurons interconnected in the brain. The networked digital business functions like an excellent artificial nervous system. In it,
information flows quickly and naturally, like thought in a human being, and we are able to use technology to govern and co-ordinate groups of
people with the same speed with which we can concentrate on a specific problem. According to Bill Gates (Business @ the Speed of Thought),
the realization of a new kind of economic system, centered on what
can be defined as “Business at the speed of thought.”
the conditions have now been created for
Bataille indicts- offensive
***CASE***
Neolib good- Freedom
Economic freedom is a necessary for political freedom-makes equality inevitable.
Friedman in ‘62
Milton Friedman: Capitalism and freedom, 1962, Page 7
Viewed as a means to the end of political freedom, economic arrangements
are important because of their
effect on the con- centration or dispersion of power. The kind of economic or- ganization that provides
economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it
separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the
other. Historical evidence speaks with a single voice on the relation between political
freedom and a free market. I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large
measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of
economic activity. Because we
live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span
of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political
freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. The nine- teenth
century and early twentieth century in the Western world stand out as striking exceptions to the
general trend of historical development. Political freedom in this instance clearly came along with
the free market and the development of capitalist institutions. So also did political freedom in the golden
age of Greece and in the early days of the Roman era. History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary
condition for political freedom.
Neolib good- Poverty
Neoliberalism key to solve poverty- prefer our analysis- their authors have an inventive to
exaggerate
Samuelson 8 (Robert J Samuelson, written a bi-weekly column for Newsweek since 1984. He also writes for The Washington
Post, “RX for Global Poverty,” http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/05/27/rx-for-global-poverty.html josh nabors)
The solution to being poor is getting rich. It's economic growth. We know this. The mystery is why all societies
have not adopted the obvious remedies. Just recently, the 21-member Commission on Growth and Development -- including two
Nobel-prize winning economists, former prime ministers of South Korea and Peru, and a
former president of Mexico -- examined the puzzle.¶ Since 1950, the panel found, 13 economies
have grown at an average annual rate of 7 percent for at least 25 years. These were:
Botswana, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Malta,
Oman, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand. Some gains are astonishing. From 1960 to 2005, per capita income in
South Korea rose from $1,100 to $13,200. Other societies started from such low levels that even rapid economic growth, combined
with larger populations, left sizable poverty. In 2005, Indonesia's per capita income averaged just $900, up from $200 in 1966. ¶ Still,
all these economies had advanced substantially. The panel identified five common elements of success: ¶ Of course, qualifications
abound. Some countries succeeded with high inflation rates of 15 to 30 percent. Led by Japan, Asian countries pursued export-led
growth with undervalued exchange rates that favored some industries over others. Good government is relative; some fast-growing
societies tolerated much corruption. Still, broad lessons are clear.¶ One is: Globalization
works. Countries don't
get rich by staying isolated. Those that embrace trade and foreign investment acquire
know-how and technologies, can buy advanced products abroad, and are forced to improve
their competitiveness. The transmission of new ideas and products is faster than ever. After its
invention, the telegraph took 90 years to spread to four-fifths of developing countries; for the cellphone, the comparable diffusion
was 16 years.¶ A second is: Outside
benevolence can't rescue countries from poverty. There is a
role for foreign aid, technical assistance and charity in relieving global poverty. But it is a
small role. It can improve health, alleviate suffering from natural disasters or wars, and
provide some types of skills. But it cannot single-handedly stimulate the policies and habits
that foster self-sustaining growth. Japan and China (to cite easy examples) have grown
rapidly not because they received foreign aid but because they pursued pro-growth policies
and embraced pro-growth values.¶ The hard question (which the panel ducks) is why all societies
haven't adopted them. One reason is politics; some regimes are more interested in preserving their power and
privileges than in promoting growth. But the larger answer, I think, is culture, as Lawrence Harrison of Tufts University
argues. Traditional values, social systems or religious views are often hostile to risk-taking, wealth accumulation and economic
growth. In his latest book, "The Central Liberal Truth," Harrison contends that politics can alter culture, but it isn't easy.¶
Globalization has moral as well as economic and political dimensions. The United States and other
wealthy countries are experiencing an anti-globalization backlash. Americans and others are entitled to defend themselves from
economic harm, but many
of the allegations against globalization are wildly exaggerated. Today, for
example, the biggest drag on the U.S. economy--the housing crisis--is mainly a domestic problem. By making
globalization an all-purpose scapegoat for economic complaints, many "progressives" are
actually undermining the most powerful force for eradicating global poverty.
Realism Inev
Evolutionary biology proves domination is inevitable- makes their strategy
inauthentic and vacuous
Thayer 4 (Bradley, Associate Professor for the Department of Defense & Strategic Studies and a former Fellow @ the Belfer Center for
Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Darwin and International Relations: On the
Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict, Josh nabors)
Evolutionary theory allows realists to advance offensive realist arguments without seeking
an ultimate cause in either the anarchic international state system or in theological or
metaphysical ideas. Realism based on evolutionary theory reaches the same conclusions, but the ultimate causal mechanism is
different: human evolution in the anarchic and perilous conditions of the late-Pliocene, Pleistocene, and most of the Holocene epochs. Specially,
evolutionary theory explains why humans are egoistic, strive to dominate others, and make
in-group/out-group distinctions. These adaptations in turn serve as a foundation for
offensive realism. The central issue here is what causes states to behave as offensive realists predict. Mearsheimer
advances a powerful argument that anarchy is the fundamental cause of such behavior.
The fact that there is no world government compels the leaders of states to take steps to
ensure their security, such as striving to have a powerful military, aggressing when forced
to do so, and forging and maintaining alliances. This is what neorealists call a self-help
system: leaders of states are forced to take these steps because nothing else can guarantee
their security in the anarchic world of international relations. I argue that evolutionary theory
also offers a fundamental cause for offensive realist behavior. Evolutionary theory explains why individuals
are motivated to act as offensive realism expects, whether an individual is a captain of industry or a conquistador. My argument is that anarchy is
even more important than most scholars of international relations recognize. The human
environment of evolutionary
adaptation was anarchic; our ancestors lived in a state of nature in which resources were
poor and dangers from other humans and the environment were great-so great that it is
truly remarkable that a mammal standing three feet high-without claws or strong teeth, not particularly strong or swiftsurvived and evolved to become what we consider human. Humans endured because natural selection gave them the
right behaviors to last in those conditions. The environment produced the behaviors examined here:
egoism, domination, and the in-group/out-group distinction. These specific traits are
sufficient to explain why leaders will behave, in the proper circumstances, as offensive
realists expect them to behave. That is, even if they must hurt other humans or risk injury to themselves, they will
strive to maximize their power, defined as either control over others (for example, through wealth or
leadership) or control over ecological circumstances (such as meeting their own and their family’s or tribe’s need for food, shelter, or other
resources). Evolutionary
theory explains why people seek control over environmental
circumstances-humans are egoistic and concerned about food-and why some, particularly
males, will seek to dominate others by maintaining a privileged position in a dominance
hierarchy. Clearly, as the leaders of states are human, they too will be influenced by
evolutionary theory as they respond to the actions of other states and as they make their
own decisions.
Realism Inev
Realism inevitable- multiple reasons
Toft 5 (Peter Tofta, Space aDepartment of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Østerfarimagsgade 5, DK 1019 Copenhagen K,
Denmark, “John J. Mearsheimer: an offensive realist between geopolitics and power” December 2005, Volume 8, Number 4, Pages 381-408, “John J. Mearsheimer: an offensive realist
between geopolitics and power”)
Dangerous security competition will inevitably re-emerge in postCold War Europe and Asia.1 International institutions cannot
produce peace. Germany and Japan are likely to pursue nuclear
deterrents. America is likely to end its continental commitments in
Europe and Asia. The United States (US) should curb China's rise. All great powers act as
aggressive power-maximizers despite embracing liberal democracy.
America was wrong to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. These statements roughly sum up the conclusions suggested by John
Mearsheimer in his numerous articles and books covering a range of subjects on international relations. The provocative
nature of Mearsheimer's work has spurred several major debates both within the sub-discipline of international relations
(IR) and beyond academia.2 As a consequence of this remarkable ability to inspire important debates, Mearsheimer
stands out as one on the most controversial and influential contributors to the contemporary realist tradition. In his
earlier writings, Mearsheimer was primarily concerned with strategic studies and produced a number of articles and
books on military strategy (Mearsheimer 1983, 1984, 1988, 1989). However, the underpinnings of his most debated
arguments are his particular version of structural realism, dubbed 'offensive realism', which is fully developed in the
book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (Mearsheimer 2001c) although his theoretical argument is present in earlier
works as well (e.g. Mearsheimer 1988: 225, 1995a, 1995b, 1998, 2001b).¶ In this article, I deal with Mearsheimer's
theoretical work with the purpose of appraising his specific contribution to the structural realist strand within the broad
realist tradition in the study of international relations. 3 This is an important task for two main reasons. First, the
accumulation of knowledge is probably the most celebrated scientific ideal and Mearsheimer explicitly builds on and
seeks to improve the insights of Kenneth Waltz's structural realism (neorealism) with its focus on the effects of the
international anarchic structure. Consequently, it is highly important to evaluate whether Mearsheimer succeeds in this
Mearsheimer has used his work as a platform for
launching strong criticisms against both competing IR theories and
as a vehicle for devising foreign policy prescriptions. And because the process
endeavour. Second,
of making national security policy is affected by the ideas and theories that shape the central debates of the day, it is
important to survey the quality of Mearsheimer's analyses as some theories obviously provide better answers than
others, and some are prescriptions for disaster. Consequently, I ask the following central question: To what degree has
John Mearsheimer improved our understanding of the effects of the international structure upon the workings of world
politics?¶ The remainder of this article is organized as follows: I begin with a presentation of offensive realism, outline its
dynamics, and position Mearsheimer's theoretical argument in the context of the realist tradition. In the main body of
the article, I discuss the thrust of Mearsheimer's analyses and scrutinize his considerations on contemporary world
politics and US foreign policy. Finally, I conclude by answering the central question of the article in the affirmative,
arguing that despite certain blemishes Mearsheimer's work constitutes an important extension of structural realism and
to our understanding of the role of the anarchic structure of international politics.
Offensive Realism¶ The aim of Mearsheimer's theory is to explain why
relations between the great powers of the modern state system are fraught
with conflict. Echoing Kenneth Waltz (1979), Mearsheimer argues that the
structure of international politics is key in understanding this state
of affairs. Specifically, Mearsheimer relies on five core assumptions
shared more or less by most contemporary realists,4 which characterize the
essential traits of international politics. First, international politics is
played out in an anarchical realm meaning that there is no
'government of governments' to enforce rules and punish
perpetrators. Second, no state can ever be absolutely sure of each
other's intentions nor be sure that other states will not use force
against them. Furthermore, states suffer from imperfect information
about each other's intentions and intentions are in constant flux ¾
benign intentions can quickly change into malignant ones and vice
versa. Third, survival is the primary motivation of all states in the
international system. Survival must have top priority since the autonomy
of the state is a prerequisite for the achievement of all other ends. Fourth,
states are rational entities in the instrumental sense of the word,
that is, they think strategically about their external situation and
choose the strategy that seems to maximize their basic aim of
survival. Finally, Mearsheimer (1995b, 2001c) states always possess some
military capacity enabling them to hurt and possibly to destroy each other.
Marrying together these assumptions, Mearsheimer infers that the states
soon realize that the most efficient way to guarantee survival in
anarchy is to maximize their relative power with the ultimate aim
of becoming the strongest power that is, a hegemon. However, not all
states can maximize their relative power simultaneously and, therefore, the
state system is destined to be an arena of relentless security competition as
long as it remains anarchic (Mearsheimer 2001c: Chapter 2).¶
Bataille=genocide
Bataille’s logic of excess justifies Stalinist terror and genocide
NB in ‘2(NotBored, anarchist journal, Trashing Georges Bataille “Accursed” Stalinist,
http://www.notbored.org/bataille.html, December 2002) JeremyA
In the chapter called "Soviet Industrialization," Bataille writes: The collectivization of lands is in theory
the most questionable part of the changes in economic structure. There is no doubt that it cost dearly;
indeed, it is regarded as the cruelest moment of an endeavour that was never mild. But if one judges
this development of Russian resources in a general way, one risks forgetting the conditions in which it
was begun and the necessity that compelled it [...] These considerations had all the more force since
industrialization always demands a large displacement of the population to the cities [...] But a sudden
[industrial] development creates a call for manpower to which the response cannot long be
delayed. Only agrarian "collectivism," coupled with mechanization, could ensure the
maintenance and growth of agricultural production; without them, the proliferation of
factories would have only led to disequilibrium [...] Situations arise in which, wrongly or
rightly, acts of cruelty, harming individuals, seem negligible in view of the misfortunes they
are meant to avoid [...] Today it is easy to see that the Soviets organizing production were replying in
advance to a question of life and death. I do not mean to justify, but to understand; given that purpose,
it seems superficial to me to dwell on horror [...] Apparently the Soviet Union, and, even, speaking
more generally, Russia -- owing to the czarist legacy -- would not have been able to survive without a
massive allocation of its resources to industrial equipment. Apparently, if this allocation had been even a
little less rigorous, even a little less hard to bear than Stalin made it, Russia could have foundered [...]
And we would rather die than establish a reign of terror; but a single man can die, and an
immense population is faced with no other possibility than life. The Russian world had to make
up for the backwardness of czarist society and this was necessarily so painful, it demanded an effort so
great, that the hard way -- in every sense the most costly way -- became its only solution. What's most
striking about this chilling passage -- aside from its monstrous cynicism -- is the fact that, despite the
passing reference to costliness in the last sentence, it has nothing to do with the discussions that
introduced them. Forced social displacement on a massive scale, systematic theft of land by the
State and mass murder ("terror") aren't "understood" here in scientific or empirical terms,
that is, in terms of the structural unavoidability of waste and the stark contrast between
"primitive" practices such as potlatch and the puritanical maintenance of accounts in modern
capitalist society. Ironically, these terms only come (back) into play when Bataille turns to the Marshal
Plan, which he asserts was a potlatch-like response -- not to the poverty created by the defeat of the
Nazi regime -- but to the success of the Russian Army at Stalingrad. No, Bataille justifies Stalinist
terror in the calculating, moralizing, ideological terms of political expediency . Despite the
radicality of some of Bataille's ideas, here he doesn't question anything of real
importance: neither the historical inevitability of Bolshevism, the political legitimacy of the
so-called Soviet Union itself (the Soviets themselves were forcibly suppressed in the early
1920s), the necessity of industrialization (both in general and in the specific case of the
Russian economy), nor the desirability of Russia's survival . As Bataille himself showed in a
preceding chapter, the Aztecs were conquered; Islam declined; Tibet was undermined. The United
States, Bataille says, is also doomed. Why shouldn't Russia meet the same (unavoidable) fate? It's also
striking that Bataille's argument includes the following remark: "But if one judges this
development of Russian resources in a general way, one risks forgetting the conditions in
which it was begun and the necessity that compelled it" (italics added). In other words, one must
concentrate on specific circumstances, not the general situation. This plainly contradicts two other
remarks made by Bataille -- "Situations arise in which, wrongly or rightly, acts of cruelty,
harming individuals, seem negligible in view of the misfortunes they are meant to avoid ," and
"[B]ut a single man can die, and an immense population is faced with no other possibility than life" -- as
well as the central premise of general economy. "Are there not causes and effects that will appear only
provided that the general data of the economy are studied?" Bataille had asked, rhetorically, in his
introductory remarks concerning "the meaning" of general economy. "Will we be able to make
ourselves the masters of such dangerous activity (and one that we could not abandon in any case)
without having grasped its general consequences? Should we not, given the constant development of
economic forces, pose the general problems that are linked to the movement of energy on the globe?"
Yes, Georges, we should, even when looking at a "special case" such as Stalinist Russia.
Non falsifiable
Bataille’s theories of sacrifice are based on non-falsifiable means
Olson, 94 – professor of philosophy at Allegheny College, masters in theological studies from the
University of Dallas, (Carl, “Eroticism, violence, and sacrifice: A postmodern theory of religion and
ritual,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, ProQuest)//JKahn
4. Eroticism and death Without giving any historical proof for his position, Bataille asserts that
the origin of eroticism can be traced prior to the division of humanity into those who were
free and those who were slaves. It's origins can be found m pre- historic signs of erotic life embodied
by figures with large breasts and erect penises, but its foundation is the sexual act itself (Bataille 1989a:
66). The knowledge of death plays an important role m the origin of eroticism. Al-though his claim
cannot be refuted or proven, Bataille asserts that prehistoric beings were aware of death, an
awareness that gave nse to an awareness of eroticism. The knowledge of death is essential
because it gives rise to a sensibility that m turn stimulates eroticism, an extreme emotion that separates the sexuality of humans from that of animals (Bataille 1989a: 31-32, 23).5 The difference between
humans and animals is more precisely defined when he states that "eroticism differs from the animal
sexual impulse m that it is, m principle, just as work is, the conscious searching for an end, for sensual
pleasure." (Bataille 1989a: 44) There is also an anticipation by the participants m erotic play that it will
culminate with sensual pleasure. In the pleasure of erotic play one does not gain anything or become
enriched, unlike [continues…] 6. Bataille's theory and the Sun Dance Bataille failed to test his theory
of sacrifice by applying it to actual examples of sacrifice m the religions of the world. Having
defined the nature of sacnfice for Bataille, it is therefore necessary to compare it to an actual
sacnfice. In order to demonstrate the shortcomings of Bataille's theory of sacrifice I have chosen to
apply it to the Sun Dance of the Sioux. Following this example, I suggest that, contrary to Bataille's
theory, a more reasonable interpretation of the Sun Dance can be attained by concentratmg on its
symbolism. This approach is suggested by the theoretical work of Clifford Geertz (1971) and Victor
Turner (1967; 1968; 1975), the latter of whom refers to a symbol as the smallest umt of ntual or as
storage umts of dynamic entities. My account of the Sun Dance relies on the work James R. Walker
(1980) because his information was gathered from several different sources, and it represents the most
authoritative account available to us of the rite in one period of its history My approach presupposes
that the nte and its meaning have continued to change m response to new circumstances for the Sioux.
By selectmg this nte, I am bemg eminently fair to Bataille, from one perspective, because the erotic and
violent features of the Sun Dance could be used to prove the validity of his theory The complexity of the
Sun Dance makes it difficult to interpret. Although he does not consider the Sun Dance of the Sioux,
Jorgensen (1972: 206, 236) interprets, for mstance, the Ute and Shoshone nte as an acquisition of power
that transforms the person and allows him to gain power, status, and autonomy From another
perspective, Melody (1976) interprets the Sun Dance of the Sioux as a commemoration of tribal virtues
expressed m the dance, a celebration of the people, an acknowledgment of the generative power of the
sun, and a celebration of renewal. The rejoicing over renewal of the world is close to Hultkrantz's
mterpretation (1981. 238) of the nte as a recreation of the cosmos. According to Hassnck (1967' 238,
248), the Sun Dance represents a socially umfymg activityactivity and a chance to resolve a conflict
between an individual ego and the adjustment to the physical and social forces. And Lewis (1972: 47)
mterprets the Sun Dance in terms of its various functions: umfymg force; maintaining tribal traditions;
insuring tribal well-bemg in huntmg and warfare; offering to the dancer perpetual prestige. I propose
offenng a different mterpretive approach for the Sun Dance that cntically reflects on Bataille's theory
According to this interpretation, the Sun Dance of the Sioux exhibits a threefold significance: existential,
social, and cosmic. In other words, if one examines the many symbols associated with the nte, one will
see that this sacnfice enables one to attain three levels of being. While the sacred pole was bemg
pamted, mstructors and students sat m a circle around the black painted figures of a buffalo and man,
each de- picted with exaggerated gemtals, m order to impart to the man the potency of Iya, patron-god
of libertmism, and to the buffalo the potency of Gnaski, the crazy buffalo and patron-god of
licentiousness (Walker 1980: 107-108). According to Black Elk's non-nsqué interpretation of the images,
the buffalo represented all the four-legged animals on the earth, and the figure of the man signified all
people (Brown 1979' 79). In contrast, Bataille would be quick to seize on the erotic connections of
the patron gods of libertinism and licentiousness. However, if the erotic is a quest for sensual
pleasure, repre- sents a realm of play, and reveals a foretaste of continuity, it cannot be used to
interpret the meaning of Iya and Gnaski because within the context of the Sun Dance they more
powerfully suggest the renewal and recreation motifs of the rite. Bataille's concept of eroticism also
would not fit into an insightful interpretation of the Sun Dance as a dominant theme of the rite because
of its anti-social character as a solitary activity accomplished m secret. The heterological method of
Bataille is intended to alleviate the contra- dictions of life and free the individual from the
homogeneity of the world. In contrast to Bataille's insistence on a search for radical difference, the
world- view of the Sioux, embodied m the symbolic aspects of the Sun Dance con-ceived as an offering
of body and soul to Wakan-Tanka (the Great Spmt), suggests a homogeneous view of the cosmos. The
umverse, for mstance, is represented by the round form of the ceremomal drum, whose steady beat is
the throbbmg at the centre of the cosmos (Brown 1979' 69). Within the context of the Sun Dance, the
cosmic pillar of the umverse is represented by the cottonwood tree, which further represents the
enemy who is symbolically killed and transported back to the centre of the campcamp by means of
sticks because human hands are not allowed to touch the body The ntual partic- ipants consecrate the
tree with the stem of the sacred pipe, another symbol of the earth, the buffalo, and everything that lives
and grows on the earth. Once the tree is trimmed of its branches and its sides and branch tips are
painted red, the rawhide effigies of a man and a buffalo are suspended from the crosspiece of the
sacred tree, which is then placed into a hole at the centre of the camp. The sacred tree not only suggests
a umversal pillar, but it also represents the wayway of the people (Brown 1979 69, 75-76). Other cosmic
symbols are the sun and earth signified by a red circle, symbolic of all that is sacred. In the centre of the
circle representing the sun is a blue circle which suggests Wakan-Tanka, the centre of the cosmos and all
existence (Brown 1979' 71-72). Moreover, the lodge of the Sun Dance is composed of twenty- eight
poles, each signifying an object of creation, and staked m a circle that represents the entire created
world (Brown 1979' 80). It is difficult to find anything excessive or transgressme in these cosmic symbols
of the Sioux that would support Bataille's position. Rather than achieving the differentiation that
Bataille's theory advocates, the sun dancer symbolically acquires the cosmos. According to the ethnological report of Walker (1980: 114), the candidate who dances the most excruciatingly painful form of
the dance with the intention of becoming a shaman is given a small hoop by his mentor. This hoop is
symbolic of the sky, the four winds, time, all things that grow, and all circular thmgs made by the tribe.
After his successful completion of the dance, the sun dancer is allowed to place this symbol on his tipi.
This privilege suggests that he attams all that the hoop symbolizes. Contrary to Bataille's theory, the
highest aspiring sun dancer does not find that the cosmos becomes other for him, and he
does not stand as an individual sovereign within the cosmos. He rather becomes part of the
whole, and he acquires the cosmos. Instead of perceiving the cosmic symbolism associated with the
most painful performance of the rite, Bataille's writings suggest that he would stress its sadistic and
masochistic aspects. Sadism, an excessive violation of modesty and a violent excretion, is not onlyonly
an eruption of excremental forces, but it also forms a limitation by subjugating whatever is opposed to
such an eruption (Bataille 1970-1988: II, 56). If masochism is an enjoyment of pain, the violence
exercised on the flesh of the sun dancers would be viewed by Bataille as a transgression and violation of
the participant's flesh, which also calls attention to the flesh itself and connects it to the erotic. Bataille
also mamtams (1984: 91) that violence agamst the flesh is an external manifestation of the internal
violence of the sacnficial participant, which is perceived as a loss of blood and vanous forms of
ejaculations. Moreover, for Bataille the cuttingcutting of the flesh would be suggestive of the
discontinuity of the self. Unlike the solitary activity of eroticism for Bataille, the sun dancer of the Sioux
rite does not distinguish or divorce himself from his society because he represents the people and
suffers on their behalf during the rite. After punfymg themselves, their clothing, and the equipment to
be used m the nte, the participants crycry at the centre of the campcamp and assume the suffering of
the people, which enables other tribal members to gain understanding and strength (Brown 1979' 72,
78). If there is present the discontinuity charac-tenstic of Bataille's profane human society among the
Sioux, the Sun Dance bridges any social divisions by uniting the social bonds of a particular tribe and
umtmg them with different Indian tribes. By means of an invitation from the tribe initiating the nte prior
to its begmnng, other Indian tribes are invited to participate m the nte, even though some of the visitors
may be hereditary enemies (Dorsey 1894: 452). This scenano enhances the social solidarity of the Indian
nation and builds a closer relationship with the things of the um- verse ; the sacred centre created by
the dancers is alleged always to be with them throughout the remainder of their existence. There is no
evidence of transgressme or excessive social behaviour by the sun dancers m Bataille's sense. Moreover,
the dancers have acquired a sacred power dunng the nte that they may later share with other members
of their societysociety According to Powers (1977' 100), the acquired power of the sun dancers may be
mvested m those who are sick by the placement of the dancers' hands on the less fortunate. Thereby
the sacred power is shared to cure the sick, and enter into communion with others. In comparison to
Bataille's theory, the sun dancers do not differentiate themselves from their society They
share a sacred power that can benefit every member of the tribe. Bataille's heterological
method and its stress on finding radical difference prevents him from seeing the socially
unifying possibilities of a rite such as the Sun Dance. According to Bataille, violence is
inevitable because human beings can- not totally reject it. In contrast to Bataille's theory, the Sun
Dance represents a threefold sacrifice of which the initial two sacrificial actions are symbolic: cutting
down the cottonwood tree which is symbolic of the enemy; shooting at the effigies of a man and buffalo
suspended from the crosspiece of the sacred tree, and the final action of the actual sacrifice of human
flesh on the fourth day of the rite. The second symbolic killing of the effigies of a man and buffalo, amid
much rejoicing by the participants, represents the hope for future success m hunting and victory in war
(Powers 1977' 98). These sym-bolic killings by the Sioux violates Bataille's assertion that violence cannot
be controlled. Rather, the symbolic nature of the Sioux killings suggests a limiting and eventual
termination of violence and not a promoting of any cycle of violence. Although Bataille is
right to emphasize the importance of violence m sacrifice, there does not appear to be any
danger that the con- tagious violence of the sacred will overflow and overwhelm the Sioux
and other tribes. There are certainly martial features to the Sun Dance, but their symbolic nature
suggests a containment of violence rather than any overflow- ing of it. Bataille's theory does make clear,
however, that the Sioux accept violence, even though they try to reject or control it. Within the drama
of the Sun Dance, there is a hint of an inherent prestige associated with victims who choose to perform
the sacrifice in the most painful and violent manner. The actual sacnficial victims, for instance, can
choose to dance m any of four ways-ways: gazing at the sun from dawn to dusk; having wooden
skewers, tied to rawhide ropes secured about half wayway up the sacred pole, mserted into their
breasts; having wooden skewers mserted mto the breasts and then being suspended about one foot off
the ground; or having wooden skewers inserted which then are attached with thongs to one or more
buffalo skull(s) that must be dragged along the dance area (Powers 1977' 98-99). The Sun Dance is not
completed until the flesh of the victim has been torn through, representing the death and rebirth of the
victim. It is permissible for others to assist by pulling on the ropes to end the victim,' agony As well, the
multiple number of sun dancers contradicts Bataille's assertion (1988a: 59) that a victim represents a
surplus of communal wealth and substitutes for other members of the commumty Neither is the victim
an accursed share destmed for violent destruction. Bataille is nght, however, to emphasize the
importance of death m sacnfice, which possesses the power to return one to continuity by means of
eroticism. What he fails to see is the connection between death and spintual rebirth. And due to his
notion of eroticism, which represents a disequilibrmm that stimulates a person consciously to call one's
being into question, Bataille is not able to recogmze that the sun dancer is actually actually able to find
his identity Although Bataille's theory of sacrifice does not account for the Sun Dance in its entirety, the
rite does adhere to his theory to some extent because it calls attention to the flesh and reveals external
violence and the internal violence of the subject. The violation and breaking of the sun dancer's flesh
does suggest the usefulness of Bataille's observation about the intimate connection between human
flesh and violence. However, by giving pieces of their flesh, the sun dancers impugn Bataille's claim that
the violation of the victim's flesh connotes a connection to a sexual act. At this point, Bataille's theory
is problematic because it lacks consistent sense m the context of the Sun Dance. Bataille's
need to reintroduce eroticism blinds him to the facts or drama of an actual sacrifice. The flesh
of the sacrificial victim m the Sun Dance represents ignorance (Brown 1979' 85) and not the
dispossession of the self, an anti-social aspect of eroticism for Bataille. From an existential
perspective, to be freed from the ropes tied to the skewers symbolizes freedom from the bonds of the
flesh and not some erotic urge. The lack of an erotic emotion is evident m the symbolism of donning
rabbit skins on the dancer's arms and legs. The rabbit is a symbol of humility, a virtue with which one
must approach Wakan-Tanka. The victim is also equated symbolically with the sacred pipe that stretches
from heaven to earth (Brown 1979. 74). In this context, the sacred pipe mdicates the transcending of
earthlyearthly flesh. The dancer becomes the centre of the world m which the four directions meet
when he is tied at the centre of the four poles, so that the four directions converge m his body (Brown
1979' 95). Within the drama of the Sun Dance, elements of eroticism, violence, and death are evident.
This does not mean, however, that these features of sacrifice necessarily involve stressing separation,
difference, transgression, and excess. Although it is possible to find these features in the Sun Dance to
some degree, the Sioux nte stresses finding one's identity within a religious and social tradition. By
successfully completmg the nte, a sun dancer does not separate himself from the group or become
distinct from other things; rather, he often assumes a position of leadership within the tribe. And, as
already noted, the sun dancer is intimately related to his mentor, ntual assistant or second, and other
members of the tribe who play various roles m the nte. All this suggests the socially unifying nature of
the nte. Moreover, within a tribal society such as the Sioux, the individual's identity is sociallysocially
defined, even though one's visions and dreams help one to define oneself and one's place within a wider
social context. Besides being a form of human sacnfice, the Sun Dance also functions as an initiation rite.
The dancer, having died to his former ignorant condition, attains a totally new existential status of
enlightenment and responsibility The ordeal that one endures is often accompanied by visions of the
divine; the successful completion of the nte is a prereqmsite if one aspires to become a shaman. Walker
(1980: 182) notes that after the successful completion of the Sun Dance the victim is eligible for
leadership of a war party or for chieftamship. The candidate receives new meamng and status which is
symbolized by the red design, drawn on his chest by the shaman as a symbol of all that is sacred.
Furthermore, the victim is equated throughout the nte with the moon, which waxes and wanes, lives
and dies, like all things (Brown 1979- 71). 7 Concluding remarks The significance of the Sun Dance
enables us to see that there is an alternative interpretation to Bataille's theory that is more faithful to
the actual evidence and is not simply imposed on the ritual activities by the creative imagination of a
theorist. This interpretive analysis of the Sun Dance is suggested by the patterns exhibited by the nte
itself and reflects more accurately the actual nte and its religious and symbolic context. Bataille,
however, includes a personal agenda because he wants to re-introduce the erotic into
religion. In other words, Bataille's theoretical speculation about eroticism shapes his theory
of religion and sacnfice. Thus, his theoretical world-view takes precedence over the religious
phenomena that he examines. With his involvement in the Surrealist movement, his emphasis on
em- bracing bodily waste, his anal and erotic obsessions, the role of the ambiguous pineal eye in his
works, and composition of excessively obscene novels, all suggest an explicit advocacy of decadence by
Bataille. In his work entitled My Mother, the socially excessive theme is mcest. His novel The Blue of
Noon, for mstance, focuses on the nauseous and squalid aspects of human life where its characters are
engaged m endless orgies, vomiting, and unnat- mg. The erotic and death are contmually united in his
Story of the Eye when, for example, the two leading libertmes of the novel have sexual mtercourse next
to the cadaver of a young girl they have driven to death. Two further dramatic examples are the rape of
a priest by the female protagomst and his death by strangulation and simultaneous sexual orgasm, and
the death of the distracted matador gorged through his eye by the hom of a bull as he is distracted and
blinded by the obscene antics of the female protagomst. Bataille's hermeneutical method of heterology
is designed to lead to ex- cess and decadence. Trymg to explain his mithode de meditataon used m his
book on religious expenence, Bataille wntes (1954: 216), "I think like a girl takes off her dress. At its
most extreme pomt, thought is immodesty, obscen- ity itself." This kind of statement seems to suggest
de Sade or Mephistopheles becommg Faust. In his work on heterology, Pefams summarily states (1991.
41) that the works of Bataille are "a theater of the excremental m whose scenes one may glimpse
golden threads." Frednc Jameson (1991. 382), a self-admitted Amencan adherent of postmodern literary
cnticism, affirms that decadence is a charactenstic of postmodermsm: "'Decadence' is thus in some
way the very premonition of the postmodern itself, but under condi- tions that make it
impossible to predict that aftermath with any sociological or cultural accuracy, thereby
divertmg the vague sense of a future into more fantastic forms, all borrowed from the misfits
and eccentrics, the perverts and the Others, or aliens, of the present (modem) system." And
if, as sug- gested by Rosen (1987' 142), this decadence originates in political despair, Bataille's
hermeneutical program is a political manifesto and not an apt tool for interpretmg religious
phenomena. From a more positive perspective, Bataille's theory of religion does call attention to
neglected elements in the study of religion in the form of bodily waste: excrement, saliva, tears, unne,
mucus, dirt, skin, and so forth. Al- though his distinction between the sacred and the profane cannot be
applied consistently as a useful hermeneutical device with the religious phenomena or world-view of
Native Amencan Indians, his emphasis on the difference within the sacred itself is suggestive. He is also
nght to stress the violent aspects of sacrifice and their sexual implications. Although violence is certainly
present m the Sun Dance, the Sioux rite appears to move in the direction of nonviolence - by
symbolically killing an enemy represented by a tree, for instance - that undermines Bataille's opinion
that violence cannot be contained. By offering his body and soul, the Sioux sun dancer points to a
renewal and continuance of cosmic generative forces. The Sun Dance also joins Indian societies together
and provides for social continuity by allowing others to share m the sacred power engendered by the
rituals. Moreover, the rite enables the sun dancer to become ontologically transformed by being reborn
and being set free of his mortal flesh. Although there is a sense in which the sun dancer is distinctive,
the emphasis of the nte is unity with society and social well-being rather than stressing the differences
between the sacrificial victim and society .
Greed Good
The aff misses a key distinction between selfishness and self-interest -- squo selfinterest solves for their impacts better – greed provides people the drive to
accomplish more
Brooks and Wehner ‘10(Brooks, Arthur, president of American Enterprise Institute, Ph.D in policy
analysis, professor at Syracuse University; Wehner, Peter, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy
Center, worked under Pres. Reagan, Pres. H.W. Bush, Pres. Bush, “Human Nature and Capitalism”,
http://www.american.com/archive/2010/december/human-nature-and-capitalism)
The American founders believed, and capitalism rests on the belief, that people are driven by
“self-interest” and the desire to better our condition. Self-interest is not necessarily bad; in
fact, Smith believed, and capitalism presupposes, that the general welfare depends on
allowing an individual to pursue his self-interest “as long as he does not violate the laws of
justice.” When a person acts in his own interest, “he frequently promotes [the interest] of
society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. ”7 Michel Guillaume Jean de
Crèvecœur, among the first writers who attempted to explain the American frontier and the concept of
the “American Dream” to a European audience, captured this view when he wrote: The American ought
therefore to love this country much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born.
Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded
on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement?8 Smith took for granted that
people are driven by self-interest, by the desire to better their condition. “It is not from the
benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” is how he
put it, “but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their
humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their
advantages.”9 Harnessed and channeled the right way, then, self-interest—when placed within certain
rules and boundaries—can be good, leading to a more prosperous and humane society. Here it is
important to distinguish between self-interest and selfishness. Self-interest—unlike
selfishness—will often lead one to commit acts of altruism; rightly understood, it knows that
no man is an island, that we are part of a larger community, and that what is good for others
is good for us. To put it another way: Pursuing our own good can advance the common good. Even
more, advancing the common good can advance our own good. Advocates of free enterprise believe
that creativity, enterprise, and ingenuity are essential parts of human nature. Capitalism aims to take
advantage of the self-interest of human nature, knowing that the collateral effects will be a
more decent and benevolent society. Capitalists believe that liberty is an inherent good and
should form the cornerstone not only of our political institutions but our economic ones as
well. Free-market advocates also insist that wealth and prosperity can mitigate envy and resentment,
which have acidic effects on human relations. Markets, precisely because they generate wealth, also end
up distributing wealth.
Cede the political
Bataille cedes the political
Johnson 3 (DAVID JOHNSON has a DPhil. in English and Related Literature (York University), an MA (Distinction) in Continental
Philosophy (Warwick University) and a BA (Hons) in Literature and Philosophy (Middlesex Polytechnic). Time & Society
copyright ©
2003 available via SAGE database
Bataille believes that an affirmation of transience is politically liberating, that transience is a vital force
that renders absurd the coercive, long-term projects of the bourgeoisie. Yet pro-transience takes away any
real consciousness of political stakes when it annihilates a sense of life’s rich duration. Indeed, a sense of
transience cannot authentically liberate people from coercive projects, since such projects are themselves generated
by a sense of transience. People want to gain lingering pleasure and freedom, and to avoid long periods of pain
and slavery. Bataille’s pro-transience view, on the other hand, evades any sense of these irreducible
durations; it therefore evades a sense of the world of time as a world of stakes, as involving elements to be either avoided at all costs or
seized! Through this evasion of real time, Bataille’s thought is politically neutered. Against Bataille, I insist that only an
affirmation of real time can be politically progressive. For Bataille, the full engagement with the truth of
transience generates a form of wild abandon (which unfetters forces that would otherwise be invested in conservative projects),
but if we see pro-transience as an end game, as a pointless act of looking through the wrong end of a
telescope, this view of time is shown to be about as exuberant as nostalgia TV. Pro-transience is in fact less
audacious than a priest’s remorse, a slave’s regret.
Squo solves
Bataille’s theory of expenditure doesn’t apply to postmodern consumer capitalism,
which is based on massive amounts of consumption and waste – exactly what Bataille
advocates.
Yang 2000 (Mayfair Mei-hui, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Santa Barbara,
has held fellowships at the Center for Chinese Studies of the University of Michigan, the Chicago
Humanities Institute, University of Chicago, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, “Putting
Global Capitalism in Its Place: Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure,” Current
Anthropology, University of Chicago Journals)
Scholars such as Jean‐Joseph Goux (1998) have pointed to a troubling overlap between Bataille’s views
on luxury and sacrificial expenditure and postmodern consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism is
also predicated on massive consumption and waste rather than on the thrift, asceticism, and
accumulation against which Bataille directed his theory of expenditure . It exhibits potlatch features in the
tendency for businesses to give goods away in the hope that “supply creates its own demand”; it collapses the distinction between luxury and
useful goods and between need and desire (Goux 1998). Unlike modernist capitalism, postmodern
consumer capitalism is
driven by consumption rather than production. Thus, Bataille’s vision of the ritual destruction of wealth as defying the
principles of accumulative and productive capitalism does not address this different phase of consumer
capitalism, whose contours have only become clear since his death in 1962. It seems to me that despite their overt similarities, the
principles of ritual consumption and those of consumer capitalism are basically incompatible.
If Bataille had addressed our consumer society today, he would have said that this sort of
consumption is still in the service of production and productive accumulation, since every act of
consumption in the world of leisure, entertainment, media, fashion, and home décor merely feeds back into the growth of the economy rather
Even much of modern warfare is no longer
truly destructive but tied into the furthering of military‐industrial production. Nor, despite its
than leading to the finality and loss of truly nonproductive expenditure.
economic excesses, does our consumer culture today challenge the basic economic logic of rational private accumulation as a self‐depleting
archaic sacrificial economy does.15 Furthermore, capitalist consumption is very much an individual consumption rather than one involving the
whole community or social order.